I ask myself again, as I sit in my own truck, was Mr. Harding a “good “man? Am I one, for that matter? I realize these are childish questions for a man my age to ask. I am now, inexplicably, older than Mr. Harding was when he died.
Do I think of him today as a straw man to thrash? To make myself feel better for my own parental failings? Or do I consider him in this very moment in a spirit of attrition, now that I better understand his base impulses, and with the sad acknowledgment that I too have grown up to be an imperfect father.
But Dan didn’t deserve how he was treated; he wasn’t off stealing bubblegum from a 7-11 with some buddies. He was just trying to live. To survive like some lichen above the tree line.
Enough. I must remind myself to stick to the facts and to resist my impulses to interpret them. I need to get on with the telling.
The next morning Mr. Harding got a late start. He didn’t leave his bedroom until quarter past eleven. When he emerged he looked disheveled, his face grimacing at the light flooding into the cabin house. I now know he was hungover, but at the time I wasn’t familiar with the signs. Dan was familiar with the affliction, so he kept his distance from his father.
“I’ll make us some eggs,” Dan said.
“And coffee,” Mr. Harding answered. “Today we hunt,” he added with an attempt at spirit.
After breakfast we went outside to an archery range set aback from the property.
“You ever shoot an arrow before?” he asked me.
“A couple of times in scouts,” I said.
Mr. Harding pulled a few bows out of hard-shell cases. He handed me an orange one. “This is pretty lightweight,” he said. “Good for beginners.” I fumbled trying to get the bow out of the case, and I caught Mr. Harding sort of wince at my fumbling manner, but he did so in a good-natured way.
I held the bow in my hand and he handed me an arrow. Then he demonstrated how to stand, how to aim, and how to draw the weapon. He gently encouraged me to place my feet further apart when I attempted to parrot his position.
“Go on, let it fly,” he said.
I let the arrow loose, but I had too much of an upwards trajectory and the arrow sailed into the woods behind the target.
“Shoot,” I said, embarrassed by slicing the arrow.
“No worries,” he said. “In fact, congratulations—I think you just killed your first deer!” He laughed and shook his head. “Why, that poor bastard had no idea what hit him.”
Throughout the bow and arrow shooting Mr. Harding took great care to instruct me on proper form. Regardless, I kept flinging the arrows all over the place. Looking back now I’m certain it wasn’t safe. Nevertheless, Mr. Harding had nothing but patience for me, completely inept though I was.
“Keep it on the steady,” he kept repeating. “Just keep your weight back and follow through.” Or: “make sure you don’t trail off with your right hand.” He was sweating and cajoling, but on the whole seemed to enjoy trying to bring me toward some sort of basic archery skill. It seemed like so long as I didn’t kill anyone, I was doing just fine as far as Mr. Harding was concerned.
With Dan, however, Mr. Harding had no patience. Even though Dan was a really good archer, it seemed that in Mr. Harding’s eyes his own son could do nothing right. If Dan struck the golden target Mr. Harding told him he just got lucky, because his form was all wrong. If he missed a bullseye, Mr. Harding would shoot dead center onto the same target in an act of one-upmanship.
Dan started shooting more intermittently, taking longer water breaks. Twice he excused himself to go inside to use the bathroom. I knew Dan well enough to know that when he got upset, he got quiet, almost faded away into a mist. By the end of that morning he barely spoke at all, not even to me. I tried to joke with him, but his smile was forced, abortive.
Toward the end, Dan was about to shoot his bow when Mr. Harding came behind him and straightened out Dan’s elbow. Dan turned the bow and arrow on his father and screamed, a solid, echoing note.
“Get off me!” he said, and in that moment brown, rat-like creatures fell from the sky, pelting us and exploding on impact into a thick, green goo.
“Christ almighty,” Mr. Harding said. “Apocalypse…” He was so stunned from the rodent rain, that he didn’t even seem to process that his son had pulled a bow and arrow on him. “Let’s take it inside,” he said. “I always knew this was a wild country, but this is something else altogether.”
But none of these strange events stopped Mr. Harding from packing the truck with supplies and driving us to his family’s deer stand. I had never before hunted anything, so I had no concept of what a deer stand was. I had envisioned some kind of trap that caught deer in a webbing, and perhaps pulled them up into a tree like a Saturday morning cartoon booby trap, or something from the Goonies.
Mr. Harding parked his truck along a private road and then we trudged into the autumnal brown of the woods. We slushed through a heavy layer of leaves, the detritus of the fall. At one point we passed a dead black bear, with flies and maggots poking out of its large snout. “By tomorrow, he’ll be picked clean,” Mr. Harding said. “Nature’s got one hell of a recycling program.”
Dan and I carried coolers with food and drinks and Mr. Harding looked like a pack mule with duffel bags and weapons hanging off his broad shoulders and back.
“There she is,” Mr. Harding said, pointing a ways ahead.
“Is that a treehouse?” I asked.
Mr. Harding belly-laughed. “It’s a deer stand, Pete. My, my, you really needed this trip, son.”
There wasn’t much to the stand. There was no real structure to it, just a wooden platform at the top and a cascade of heavy planks bolted into two trees so you could climb up to the platform. Mr. Harding commanded us to keep our voices down and when we reached the top he draped some camouflage around the sides of us in the tree. None of us had bathed that morning and we were all wearing the same clothes as the day before. I wondered if the deer could smell us from miles away. Mr. Harding’s breath smelled of sour candy.
He pulled a flask from somewhere and took a few draws. “The air smells nice, don’t it,” he said. His eyes darted around the woods and he took it all in as though it were a return to Eden. “Whether we get ourselves a buck or not,” he said, “ain’t it kind of nice just being out here? Just to be away from it all? Even for a bit?” He fumbled in the cooler and dispensed cans of Coke to us boys. Then he took out a large rifle of some sort and cradled it in his arms. He offered me a smaller gun, but I told him I didn’t feel comfortable handling one. Daniel unlocked his gun and prepared it for discharge.
Mr. Harding smiled as Dan loaded the gun without assistance. “Good work,” he told Dan. “That’s my apprentice,” he said to me, his voice earnest and not without some pride. “My little buddy.”
“What do we do now?” I asked, after a few minutes of silence.
“Now,” Mr. Harding said. “We keep our eyes peeled and we wait.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“As long as it takes,” he replied. “With the patience of a Christian awaiting the Second Coming.”
So we waited, and waited, and we didn’t see any deer. After a while I started to regret not bringing my winter coat, although when I packed for the trip I hadn’t anticipated we would be squatting all day in a hunter’s blind. It was colder up there in the hills, 3,000 feet further above sea level than I was accustomed to. I felt exposed in the bareness of that autumn tree line. I started to shiver, but didn’t want to say anything to Mr. Harding, as I knew he’d consider it “unmanly.” Moreover, despite all his talk about not caring about whether he got a buck or not, it was evident from the stern look on his face that he badly wanted one.
I tried to warm myself up by placing my hands in my pockets and thinking of a beach trip I took with my family that year during Labor Day weekend. Just a one day trip, as my parents couldn’t afford to stay anywhere overnight.
Every so often I would look out into that vast, anfractuous forest, and observe movement. Each time the movement belonged to a chipmunk or a squirrel. I had half-expected to see one of those uncanny, rat-like creatures, but it was just normal forest fare at that time.
“It’s fucking cold,” I whispered to Dan. He shot me a dirty look, but I understood he only did so on account of his proximity to his father.
“It takes a lot of patience to bag a buck,” Mr. Harding said while finishing off a six-pack. “It’s like finding the right woman. They don’t come around very often, but when they do you better act. You better act straight away or miss out forever. The way of man is action,” he said. “If you don’t act there will always be a better man around who will.” He leaned back for a moment, looking vaguely self-satisfied.
A few minutes later Mr. Harding placed his gun down onto the floor of the stand. “Dammit, I got to take a piss,” he grumbled. Then he lumbered down from the tree stand, once again resembling a bear, although an unsteady one. The forest was still and silent, as it always is when an apex predator is present. Not even a bird dared to sing. Only that day Mr. Harding learned he wasn’t quite the apex predator he thought he was. But that part of the story’s still to come.
Once Mr. Harding was out of earshot I turned to Dan. “Dude, how much longer is this going to go on?” I asked.
“A few more hours maybe,” Dan said.
I said, “In another thirty minutes I’ll either be frozen to death or bored to death. Probably both!”
“This is what we’re doing,” Dan said. “You see how he is.”
“But I didn’t sign up for this,” I protested. “You knew that I’m no hunter.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Dan said, his eyes growing large and burdened. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t have placed that on him. But if we could go back in time, there’s plenty I would change otherwise. Simple fact is, we can’t.
When Mr. Harding returned, he slid off the third plank while climbing the tree stand and fell right on his rear.
“Son of a bitch,” he groused. “Son of a bitch and daughter of one too.”
When he finally made his way back to the platform his face was red and his eyes were glassy.
“Did I miss any action?” he asked.
“No, still nothing,” Dan reported.
“Hundred mile drive to watch some squirrels,” Mr. Harding said. “Hell, I can see squirrels in my front yard.”
“Can we shoot one?” Dan asked.
“What the hell would you want to shoot a squirrel for?” Mr. Harding asked. His face grew quizzical, an expression I hadn’t observed on it before.
“For practice,” Dan answered.
“Son,” Mr. Harding said. “What I’m about to tell you isn’t even about hunting. It’s about life. So listen up, the both of you.” He stretched out his large hands and placed one on each of our shoulders, as though we were huddling up in football. I felt both awkward and expectant in that moment; I couldn’t help but be charmed by a philosophy so different from my own father’s.
“If you go through life settling for squirrels, you ain’t never gonna bag a buck,” he said. “You’ll chase all the bucks away wasting your bullets on something meaningless. Always aim for something worthy of your bullet,” he said. “And by bullet I mean life energy. Life itself. A squirrel is a rodent, beneath our collective life energy. There’s plenty of squirrels in this sick world but exceedingly few bucks,” he said. “And don’t the either of you two forget it.”
Another fifteen minutes passed, and I became convinced I would succumb to hypothermia. We had just learned all about it at scouts. I thought about the symptoms and signs. I knew I’d eventually feel exceedingly hot; then I would slowly lose my mind and start stripping off my clothes in a fit of paradox. It was all but certain to happen, how embarrassing.
I gave Dan a look. A look that said: Get us the hell down from this tree stand.
Dan ignored me, but a few minutes later he said, “Hey dad, do you think we can head back to the cabin now?”
Mr. Harding met Dan’s comment with a sharp expression, a quick flash of anger.
“What, you ain’t having fun?” he said.
“I’m getting bored and it’s cold up here,” Dan replied. I knew Dan was taking the fall for me and I respected the hell out of him for it. In hindsight, I only wish I could have found my own words.
“Never happy unless you’re lost in the glaze of a video game screen,” Mr. Harding said. “I bet if we was playing that duck hunting video game you wouldn’t be bitching like this. You could go on for days…”
“We’ve been up here for hours,” Dan said. “I hate it,” and then Dan started to cry. He was a sensitive child born to an insensitive father. He didn’t have Mr. Harding’s killer instinct, even though I’ve always wondered if he was somehow behind what was to come. As though, in that strange country, he could somehow bind with nature.
Mr. Harding turned on Dan and grabbed him by the collar.
“You little princess!” Mr. Harding screamed. “You’re no son of mine.” He appeared to be holding himself back from backhanding Dan. “Get the fuck down off my blind,” Mr. Harding said, finally releasing Dan. “We might as well get heading back now, your blubbering has sure as hell scared all the deer away.”
Dan and I slinked off the tree stand and found ourselves back on firm terra forma. We squelched through the leaves back to the truck, which had been left unlocked. We didn’t carry a single thing with us.
Dan hopped into the middle seat and then I raised my light body into the passenger side. It took some effort on my part to get up into the truck because I was short for my age. Still am.
Once inside the truck Dan struggled to plug up his tears. We sat there in silence for a good five minutes until Dan said, as if to himself, “I hate him. I wish he were dead.” Then Mr. Harding approached from the woods, stumbling a bit and carrying perhaps two hundred pounds of gear.
“Thanks so much for your help in lightening my load!” Mr. Harding shouted. “A big help the two of you are!”
He scoured through the bed of the truck, dislodging duffel bags and making room for coolers and supplies. When he returned to the truck cab he looked raw and windburned.
“You got anything to say for yourself, son?” He asked.
“Yeah—I fucking hate you,” Dan said.
For perhaps five seconds Mr. Harding didn’t say anything at all, didn’t even let on that he’d heard what Dan said. My heart was racing, perhaps for the first time in its life absent athletic exertion. I grew petrified—not just for Dan, mind you, but for both of us.
“Go on boy, get mad,” Mr. Harding finally said. He started clapping his large paws together in a mock enthusiastic fashion. “Get really mad, Daniel. Hell, go on, scream and shout—maybe we’ll make a man of you yet. Go ahead and yell at the mountains themselves.” He laughed for a couple of seconds but it was a false note of a laugh. Then he gripped Dan by the throat and hovered over him, and I was certain I was about to witness a filicide.
“But I assure you Daniel,” Mr. Harding said. “That those mountains care about as much as I do about your whining.” Then Mr. Harding released his son but as he drove forward the truck suddenly became inundated with large, furry, rodent-like creatures. They looked like funhouse parodies of rats. They had eyes that extended beyond their skulls, and thick rows of tiny, razor-sharp teeth. I looked at Dan, whose eyes were back in his head as though in a trance.
“Dan,” I said, poking at him.
“Holy hell,” Mr. Harding said, twisting the truck this way and that to try and free himself of the creatures. By then, one had crawled in through his window and was ripping into his neck. The truck slid across wet leaves and crashed head-first into a grove of old pine. We were in desolate country there. Unless there were other hunters about, or the odd hiker, there wouldn’t be anyone else around for miles.
“Boys,” Mr. Harding said between gasps, trying to apply pressure to his neck. “Get me my rifle.” Dan was still in his trance-like state, so I reached back into the bed, fighting off a few of the rodents, and pulled in the duffel bag. He tried to slip his truck in reverse, but the wheels spun, and he couldn’t get it dislodged from the trees. A thick cloud of smoke poked out from under its hood.
“Take a gun each and then we’ll make a run for the blind,” Mr. Harding said. The creatures were starting to climb up in through the truck’s exhaust pipes, were starting to scratch and claw through the metal of the truck itself.
“Okay,” I said, still shaking Dan. Mr. Harding unsheathed his rifle. “I’ve heard tell of these types of creatures,” he said. “But I always thought it was local lure to scare away us outsiders. They’re called groundlings.”
“Dan,” I said, and he finally jostled back to reality. “Come on, bro.” I screamed. “We’re fucked!”
We all hopped out of the trunk at once, the little bastards nipping at our ankles. More like tearing and ripping at them. Mr. Harding took the lead, every so often stopping to blast another groundling that was at our feet.
“Use that football speed, boys,” Mr. Harding said, suddenly scared sober. We went in a loose, single-file line until we approached the hunting blind.
“You two get up there,” Mr. Harding said, “and I’ll keep running to see if I can draw them away.” His neck and jacket were now soaked with blood.
We did as we were told and, kicking away the little demons, rushed to the top of the blind. From up in the blind, I could see Mr. Harding running, the monsters gaining on him in a ravenous pack. He tripped over a mound of thick glacier rock. I took aim and shot, hoping to reduce their numbers. But my second shot pierced through Mr. Hardin’s chest, and he fell like a beaten piñata. All the while, Dan sat back and watched with the detached coldness of somebody watching television.
Shortly thereafter, every ounce of meat had been picked clean from Mr. Harding’s body. The creatures had devoured him like the land piranhas they were. All that was left of Mr. Harding was a large, bear-like skeleton. They sniffed around the base of our platform for a while, but soon scurried off toward a nearby reservoir.
Dan and I waited up in the blind until the next morning’s light. Neither of us saying a word. There was nothing that could be done and no help to be had. This was all before cell phones, mind you. And then, as though I had awoken from a nightmare, I was back home.
I told my parents some of what happened but not all. The authorities, of which there weren’t many in those parts, chalked it up as a wild animal attack. Coyotes, maybe, they had said. The odd thing was, they didn’t seem too surprised. Perhaps Mr. Harding hadn’t been the first to be made a meal by the groundlings.
In time things returned to relative normal and I didn’t think much of the trip, or of Mr. Harding. Dan and I never spoke much after that, and he left for a Catholic high school the next year. The last time I saw him, was when I was home burying my own father, who suffered the more natural scourge of unchecked diabetes.
When I came across Dan, while stopped at a stop sign a few blocks from the funeral home, he was watching a little league game, loaded, drinking beer out of some ratty old cooler. Just a face I recognized grown older, as I drove past the local park to visit my mother. He looked like a more weary version of his own father. I haven’t seen him since.
But that isn’t the whole truth. Sometimes, I see young Dan’s face in that of my own boy, and it scares the hell out of me. When I get upset that he failed a test, that he seems intent on returning to the blue collar world I worked so hard to try and leave behind. When I drink too much and lose my temper, which already drove his mother away a long time ago.
I wonder what kind of a father Dan is today? I hope he’s broken the cycle, but I don’t have great hope in that regard. There’s been talk from mutual friends that Dan drinks too much; that he’s a regular at the state store. If someone like me, with a relatively clean childhood has a hard time resisting my baser impulses, I’ve got to wonder about what sort of chance Dan or his sons have.
How many nights have I sat in my own truck, looking out through its steamed windows at some crowded watering hole. Saying to myself: it’s time to head home, head home or just admit it’s going to be one of those nights and go and join them.
My son is twelve now, and I get to see him on alternate weekends, as denoted in my divorce settlement agreement. As I said, sometimes I’m too hard on the boy. I suppose I have more of Mr. Harding in me than I care to admit. Or more likely the same poison that felled my maternal grandfather.
I see it in my boy’s eyes, more often than I’d care to: hatred. The same way Dan hated his own father. Wished him dead, until his prayers were answered by corrupted nature itself.
I’ve got it all planned out, a nostalgic weekend. I’m going to take my own son out to that special part of Appalachia. It’s time to see if I need to learn my lesson the hard way, as Mr. Harding did. It’s time to visit my hungry little friends, the groundlings.
Past, present, or future: it’s always the same old forks in the road.