WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER: Steamed squash and rice.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: I really could be a vegetarian. We would all be better off if we were. Who needs meat?
WHAT I SAID: All those dogs on the meat wagons.
WHAT I THOUGHT: I am one of those dogs.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID AFTER DINNER: Whose sneakers are these on the floor? Who left the butter out? Whose books are these? Whose sweater? Whose crumbs? Can’t you clean up after yourselves? Don’t leave a wet towel on your bed. Flush the toilet. Can’t anyone flush the toilet? These papers will get ruined on the table in the kitchen. Do you want your papers ruined?
WHAT THE CHILDREN DID: Ran outside.
WHAT I DID: Ran outside. We went and looked for trees that would be good for raising my deer stand. There’s a hill and ridge below where a stream runs through. There are game trails going down the ridge. There is already a wooden deer stand there someone put up long ago where Sam could hunt from while I hunted from my tree stand at the same time. This would be a good place for my stand. I thought I could use my stand for other things than hunting, too. I could stand in my stand at night and call to the owls. I could stand in my stand at night and look for the bright lights in the sky, the object moving quickly back and forth, but then I remembered there was a warning that came with my stand. The warning said never to strap yourself into the harness in darkness because you may make a mistake, you may not be able to see where your leg should be going through a loop. You could be strapped into nothing. Also, you may not see a rung as you’re climbing up to the stand. Your footing will have no purchase. You will fall like a shot bird from a branch, head over heels to the forest floor heavily strewn with needles of pine.
WHAT SAM DID: Imitated me standing in the stand and falling out and landing with my head on a rock.
WHAT MY DAUGHTERS DID: Jumped on top of him as he lay with his head on the rock being me.
WHAT I SAID: Shhh, if you want to see something in the woods you have to be quiet.
WHAT THE KIDS SAID ON THE WALK HOME: Tell us about when you were young. Tell us about the time you hit that kid with a pipe by accident and he had to get five stitches. Tell us about the boy who died after a hard rain in the culvert. Tell it to us again, they said, how he drowned, how the mother stood on the grass, holding her hand to her mouth, her legs giving way, her skirt darkening as she fell to the wet grass, as if she had peed herself, after hearing the news.
WHAT I SAID: Tell me instead what you did in school today.
WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID: Oh, today, some bad kids. Some older kids, they changed the words on the sign outside the school last night. You know the sign that says COME TO THE FALL BREAKFAST, that sign, well they changed the letters and they made the school sign say COME TO THE FALL BOOB FEST.
WHAT I SAID: I would like to go to that Fest.
WHAT THE CHILDREN SAID: Oh, Poppy.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID THE NEXT MORNING WHEN THE KIDS WERE AT SCHOOL: David, have you scheduled your next exam?
WHAT I SAID: Not yet, Jen.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: You should schedule it soon. What if your levels are high again? Then what will you do?
WHAT I SAID: Cut it out.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Cut it out.
WHAT I SAID: I like living. I’ll cut it out to get rid of it all.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: I knew we should have had more sex.
WHAT I SAID: Want to have sex?
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Now?
WHAT I SAID: It could cure me. It can’t hurt.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Pleased to oblige.
WHAT THE KITCHEN ISLAND SAID: This is not the usual pounding of dough being kneaded.
WHAT FELT GOOD: Her breasts. The sex.
WHAT HURT AFTERWARD: My dick.
WHAT I SAID TO MY WIFE: That was a bad angle.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: I should have worn heels.
WHAT I SAID: I made it to the boob fest after all.
WHAT THE WIFE DID: Laughed, hit my shoulder.
WHAT THE HOUSE SMELLED LIKE: Anadama bread the wife was baking.
WHAT WE ATE FOR LUNCH: Anadama bread, butter, and jelly.
WHAT WE ALL SAW FROM THE KITCHEN WINDOW WHEN THE CHILDREN CAME HOME: A spikehorn, too young a buck for me to shoot, behind the house, eating apples fallen to the ground beneath the apple tree. The children were noisy, too noisy, fighting over binoculars. They almost scared the buck away. Sam pretended he was holding his rifle. Bam-bam, he said excitedly, shooting multiple times. I hit him in the chest hard with the back of my hand. Be quiet, I said. I didn’t want him to act this way when we would really go out to hunt. It wasn’t safe. He ran upstairs, starting to cry, and the moment he ran up, I was sorry, and I wished he’d come back down. I almost ran up after him, but just then the buck scraped the dirt on the hillside with his front hoof, then he turned and stood over where he had scraped and shook his tail, releasing secretions from his glands. He hardly chewed the apples. He mostly swallowed them whole. I could hear Sam upstairs. He was watching the buck from the bathroom window. He had stopped crying now, and I could see the buck lifting his head, listening to sounds coming from our house, from my son above me who shifted his weight on the slate tiled floor of the bathroom, who rested an arm on the top of the clothes washer, who wiped his nose, runny from crying, on his shirtsleeve. Tell no one at school that we have a buck on our land, I told the children. Other hunters will want our buck if they hear, I said. The children nodded their heads.
WHAT THE CHILDREN DON’T KNOW: That their father may or may not need surgery.
WHAT I DID INSTEAD OF MAKING A DOCTOR’S APPOINTMENT: Cleared land by the stream. If the banks of the stream are cleared, the children can run to the stream, they can lay their bodies down beside it, watching the small trout as small as their hands swimming.
CALL: A colicking horse.
ACTION: Drove to farm during snow flurries. Directions from owner were to keep driving down a dirt road, and when you feel as if you’ve missed it and that you’re in the middle of nowhere, then keep driving. Finally found the farm. Gave horse Buscopan, a new tranquilizer I had just ordered, to ease his pain. Decided to oil horse to relieve colic. Inserted tube inside his nostril and pumped the oil in. Stood talking to owner. She told me to guess what she had seen on her front lawn. I thought she would say the flying object with the bright lights. I thought I had found someone else who had seen what I had seen. Instead she said that one day her husband and her sons took their rifles and went hunting up on the hill behind the house. She could see them hiking up the hill through the window. But in the front yard, through the picture window, she noticed a huge twelve-point buck just standing and nibbling grass in the yard. She knew that if she opened a window to yell at her husband and her two sons to come back down the hill and shoot the buck, then the buck would take off and bound through the woods. She just sat in her chair in the living room and watched him through the picture window. He had a broad chest and a handsome head and when he lifted it every once in a while it seemed to her as if he could see her watching him from her easy chair.
It was then that the owner stopped talking and pointed to the floor of the barn by the horse’s feet and said, Look at all that oil on the floor.