Sit Beside Me, My Only Son

Prologue & Chapter 1 Excerpt

Prologue: A Final Letter

To My Only Son,

This is the fourth and final letter I have written in the shadow of my impending death. The first was taken by the wind. The second, by flame. Both are long gone, now only echoes within the story that I’m about to tell. The third lies hidden, an offering in plain sight, waiting for you to recognize where it rests. Its existence is not what matters. The reason for keeping it is.

I kept it only because it was written on the reverse side of a single, rare photograph, and because your mother’s words—set upon on a separate and equally sacred canvas—came to rest in the same pocket beside it. Some things refuse to be destroyed. Others shouldn’t be forgotten.

This fourth, and final one, is about what passes from father to son. About what we carry whether we mean to or not. Among these lessons, small legends, and the figures who have crossed our paths, I now place myself, not as hero, but as context. Do not mistake this as our story alone. Never underestimate the thread that binds us to our mothers. They are the architects of our breaths, our bones, and our becoming as men. Your mother’s own telling will come in time. I hope you learn much from her in her remaining years and must wait a long time to read her parting words.

I’m asking you, in the pages that follow, to indulge these ramblings of an old man, one last time. I hope you keep them fondly and forgive my meandering through memory. I carry the weight of loss for the stories of my parents which were abridged too soon. I would have surrendered anything for one more account of their lives, no matter how worn or repeated. Names, habits, even mistakes pass through generations like worn tools—nicked and scarred, but still useful. Remember this also: what was passed to you is not a sentence, but a starting place to make a choice.

I have turned Heaven and Hell over in my mind until their edges dulled. I have found no certainty there. You have heard me say, “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see.” when you pressed me about where our choices lead, whether in this life and beyond it. All I can say is that most truths arrive between words and that actions dictate where we go and what remains.

What I am about to tell you was not learned gently. It was forged in a crucible I did not invite and did not leave unchanged. There may come a night when your path narrows like mine. When the woods hush quiet. When you are certain there is no way forward. When that hour comes, please recall this: the ground beneath your feet has carried men long before you. It carries them long after they are gone. It holds dearly forever those who fell upon it and chose to stand again.

That being saif, if you must find me, do not look upward. Do not look upon a headstone. Look at your feet—on this earth where we spilled our tears, our sweat, our blood into this farm’s dirt. Look along the field edge at dusk where we counted stars. Look In the bark of familiar trees and brush piles and the turning leaves where I was taught—and taught you about the hunt of life. I will always be here or there. I am ever-present in the moments before you decide to pull the trigger or lower the barrel.

And when the nights come when you need me most—as the fire burns low and the wind cools—you may find me leaning back in one of those old Adirondacks, nudging a stubborn coal to life with the toe of my boot. You may find me there. At all times. Sitting beside my father, and waiting, for you to sit beside me.

With Love, Forever and Always,

Dad

Chapter 1

I had convinced myself there was no way forward. Only one ending I could choose.

The December air bit through the denim of my jeans and into the fingers that rolled the brass casing in my pocket. The same near hollow urn I’d spun for seven years, holding nothing but the ash of my father inside. Each turn of it felt heavier than a cannonball. Colder, too.

“This is it,” I muttered, low enough so the trees couldn’t hear me and offer an argument in response. Snow swallowed my boots as I stepped off the trail and into the timber. I was alone—no houses, no road noise, no evidence of anyone within two miles. Just that pretty patch of forest centered by that old red oak. The same hulking trunk I had leaned against a hundred times before, both awake and in dreams. I pressed my back into its bark and let the cold soak through my coat.

“Be sittin’ alongside you again soon, old man.” The words sounded more gutty than I felt.

The forest held still in that way it does in the early stages of winter dusk—like something older and wiser with a keener ear had paused to listen to my intrusion. A slow cold moved up my spine and settled there. My pulse tapped against my ears, rapid and restless. I closed my eyes and took the deepest breath I could and let the place come back to me as it looked the first time I’d experienced it.

. . .

“Ready to get them hands bloody, bud?” He looked down at me past his left shoulder with a confident and proud smile and I returned in kind an eager nod. Our backs rested against the thick trunk of that hallowed tree. As it stretched upward, its branches contorted and splintered into a web of indecipherable tendrils. They bloomed into a canopy of bronze and fiery gradients, an autumn parasol stretching toward the heavens that sealed us, and the forest floor, from the rest of the universe.

“Group of does been comin’ down along that path every night and feedin’ on the acorns from that patch of oaks over that-aways. Just up from the blowed-down hemlock.” I followed his pointed direction and my impatient juvenile eyes surveyed the gaps between trees and judged the distances of prospective shooting lanes. The rifle in my hands was iron cool and leaden heavy. “C’mon, sit left of me. Clear them leaves away by your feet so you don’t crunch when you move.”

We sat in silence briefly, but my impatient pre-teen brain burned with wonder and aroused a question I had pondered incessantly in the months following my grandmother’s death. I turned over my right shoulder and whispered out, “Dad?”

“Yeah, Son.”

“Where do you think we go when we die?” He did not turn over his shoulder to speak, and I couldn’t see his face, but his soft, annoyed sigh vibrated the air that brushed my cheek.

“I don’t know, bud.”

“I didn’t ask if you knew. I asked what you thunk.” He pondered and paused, then accepted my probe and nodded his head before he hissed back.

“I heard what you asked, smartass.”

“Well? What do you think?”

“I think...” He stuttered, paused, and rewrote the lesson he planned to teach then cleared his throat gently, “I think the luckiest of us don’t go nowhere, bud.”

“Don’t go nowhere?” I mouthed faintly in a questioning tone auguring for more context.

“Yeah.” He stopped and thought more and added to his words, gesturing at our surroundings calmly with his hands as he spoke. “I don’t think there’s a Heaven better than this.”

“So, you don’t think Heaven and Hell are real?”

“Maybe, son. Maybe not. I reckon we’ll see one day.”

“What about grandma?” He coiled up tightly at the mention of her and took a full breath in through his teeth before he spoke.

“Son, I don’t know if there is a truer Heaven other’n the one we’re in, but if there is, she’s there. I’d bet whatever’s left of my soul on it.” In his whisper, I could hear his voice shake and crack at the thought of her.

“What about all the deer we kill? You think they got a place they go when they die?”

His tense worry dissipated across our back-to-back connection through the tree as his shoulders released and his smile widened. “Son, the only place they go when they die is into our freezers and then our bellies.”

. . .

My eyes opened to snow instead of leaves. The oak was stripped bare now. The warmth gone. The world reduced to white and bark and my stale breath. I rolled the casing again and felt the fine grit of ash shift inside.

I scanned left to right, the way I learned here. Through my father, hunting taught me to read my surroundings. Life, as it took its course cruelly, taught me to distrust it. What began as instinct hardened into vigilance. Vigilance into fear. A propensity that began as a useful, predatory wisdom, which became a curse. A knife-like skill that I sharpened religiously along with my family in good times and bad. A worn-out tool that I now wielded only defensively and anxiously. Always searching for the next wicked thing that was bound to happen to me.

The fear now settled low in my gut, hard and narrow. It worked its way upward, slow as a blade being drawn, until it pressed beneath my sternum and held there in vibration. I came to yield to that fear for the last time. I came to this place to end that pain. I came to find some semblance of final peace and resolve, and end, the only way I knew how, to the chaotic and directionless mess I had made of my life.

I slammed my eyes shut tightly and searched the boxes of my compartmentalized memories for anything to quell it. Memories of my father, the only person who was ever capable of doing so, rushed through and around like the icy winter breath that enveloped me. Various thoughts of him grazed and whipped past and slipped beyond just out of reach until the moments of my first kill resurfaced.

. . .

“Just breathe deep, bud.” He whispered assuringly as the barrel of my thirty-ought-six wobbled fretfully. “Find her front shoulders and relax.” The instruction continued in the proudest and simplest of manners. The rifle lost its coldness and became featherweighted in my twelve-year-old hands as my adrenaline pulsed to a level I had never felt. “Easy,” he sighed. “You got her.” My aim steadied as his words calmed me at a molecular level. “Just squeeze her softly.” He coached coolly as my forefinger followed his guidance until the trigger worked its magic.

Click.

Boom.

. . .

The stillness of the forest shattered as quickly as that bullet leaving the barrel of my rifle on that Autumn morning twenty-five years before.

Causing my return to reality was the crashing over my left shoulder and behind in the thick underbrush. The cadence and volume seemed of a large animal, or multiple slighter animals moving quickly in an area where humans wouldn’t traffic. Leaning with my back against the oak I twisted my neck quickly, tilted forward a bit, and rotated my spine to gain the best vantage point of this raucous intruder of that fleeting warm daydream. My heart rose into my lower throat and my eyes quickly bounced back and forth through the tangled thicket below. In certain areas, it was too thick to even see the backdrop of purely white snow behind it. The noise evaded my sight until a flash of fur and legs broke from the left of the brush into a patch of hemlock trees. A young rabbit at full speed dashed into the opening and no sooner did it make its appearance than it was snapped up swiftly into the jaws of the coyote that was in chase. A brief cry from the rabbit was muted immediately and definitivel. As quickly as it began it was over, and within seconds, the coyote was gone. Her tail bounced happily as she slipped back into the depths of the forest.

What a way to go. The thought formed upon my chapped and cracking lips at the idea of the rabbit’s last moments but did not leave. One second she was all muscle and direction. The next, she was gone so completely. It felt rude to keep thinking of words that I would never say. No heaven or hell was awaiting her. No above, no below. Only this space in between where she would become pieces of everything else.

Rabbits don’t wrestle with meaning. They run. They breed. They die. They become something else. Life was simple, and death was swift. Her death as instantaneous as the deer that autumn evening when I was twelve. Its final breath was taken only feet away on the same patch of earth. Its blood spilled into the same ground and with the same crimson color.

Untouched over these hard years except by the hands of time, that patch of woods and that very same oak tree was where my old man was whispering into my ear as dusk beckoned. “You got her, just squeeze her softly.” The words echoed through my head again as my vision tunneled onto that spot just off to the right of the now severely decayed three-foot stump where I took my first deer. For a moment I saw that spot not in its current form but with the colors and warmth and love of that Autumn evening. I could see it as it was then, not in its current cold and unforgiving state. The warmth of the sun on the back of my neck was present along with the reassurance of his hand on my shoulder as I pulled the trigger. For another blurring moment it was the fall of 1999, and I wasn’t alone in this frigid Hell.

Back then life was simple. It was for most kids my age—or at least it was supposed to be. It was the last time I remembered the freedom of being truly unburdened by the overpowering pushes and pulls of life. Before the awkwardness of teenage years that brought with them the relentless weight of responsibility of learning to care for myself. Before I was forced to become cynical about the unfolding of the universe. Just a kid with no other goal than to connect with and make his father proud and be a good son to his mother. To emulate him in all that I did at a time when he still had traits worth attaining willfully.

I tried to remember that time, but my mind would not open those boxes. The world then was changing so fast and so was I. The world began to tilt somewhere along the way. The farm held on, but the edges cracked. Chemicals in the fields that cried for rain. Debt in the mailbox that there were no coupons to pay it with. Screens in every hand. The old virtues—work hard, keep quiet, carry your weight—started to feel antique and rotted like the carrion of a carcass left to vultures.

My father’s people were a crooked but resourceful breed. Drunken philosophers. Honest liars. Men who could rebuild a John Deere engine blindfolded but couldn’t write a clean paragraph if you spotted them the first two sentences. They told stories instead of reading them. The nights of my youth were spent sitting rapt in attention in the cigarette smoke around the table, or the woodsmoke around the fire. I inhaled their words and ethos, instilling into my fibers and cells a sense of romanticism for the struggle of a simple life. They smoked too much. Drank too much. Worked until their knuckles split. Swore like sailors. Hunted like it was a self-reliant religion.

We called it “The Farm,” like it was something larger than eighty acres of shale and stubborn soil with twenty head of cattle and an old barn. Corn and hay grown mostly for the labor of saying we did it. A simple garden for us. A pond that had no business existing at the top of a hill. Deer and squirrel and turkey thicker than church on Easter morning. And woods that felt like the only honest place of worship left. That was enough.

And there I sat, in the furthest and most secluded corner of it, a place I once considered Heaven because my father said it was. A place so pure that it could harbor and cleanse the most troubled spirits like mine. A place where honesty and effort and attention to surroundings ranked before all other things in the hierarchy of survival. A place untouched by the intrusions or exploitations of men with cruel intentions. I sat and planned to erase the pain of two decades in the time it takes a gunshot to echo through the woods; the place I desired to be the final resting of my soul and the last location I could remember having one. I sat knowing that if it was not welcome there, then there was no point in looking further.

“I should have never left.” My apology was intended for none other than myself as I reached into my inner jacket pocket to retrieve the flask within. I spun the cap off with one flick of my thumb and took another swig of the pungent, cinnamon-flavored liqueur. I shivered as the wind picked up and swirled. The liquor burned clean and fast, like it was late for something.

I gazed up to the clouds and, by the slowly dimming light, calculated that I had fifteen minutes before the bell would need to toll. Enough time to smoke the joint tucked behind my ear and polish off the final gulp in the flask. Enough time to come to terms with all the wrongs over those last twenty years. However, I knew deep within my heart that I would have a supremely inadequate amount of time for that, so I resigned myself to settle for the former and let the rest of the cards fall where they may.

I sparked the hand-rolled cigarette and I exhaled the first cloud of smoke directly upwards and took notice of the wind’s strength and its easterly direction. The same direction the sun was falling, and the same as the coyote went off with its kill. The wind was twirling a little bit with the second cloud but quickly followed the path of the first. Confirming the wind caused me to intuitively shift the focus of my eyes that way. An old superstition instilled in my gut by my father. Deer, along with other animals, often like to travel into the wind, and I had just released a smoke bomb into the forest. A counterintuitive method to hunting that my father had seemed to master.

. . .

“Some deer are dumb, boy,” he’d say, cigarette pinned to his lip. “Ain’t out to kill just the smart ones.”

He claimed half his biggest bucks came into range right after he finished a smoke.

“Well you chain-smoke like a motherfucker,” I’d mutter.

“Shut up and get me another beer.”

“You want me to drink it for you, too? Maybe if you got up and got your own damn beers you wouldn’t need me to drag out all the fucking deer your old, drunk-ass shoots.”

“Yep, welp, that’s just part of growing up, kiddo. One day you’ll do the same. If you can ever get your dick wet.”

He let out a raspy chuckle then quickly threw a couple of playful left jabs into my shoulder and ribs as I drifted by him on the way to the fridge to grab the beers. On the way back I held his behind my back and gave it a quick shake for the previous remark. A trick he should have learned by then.

“Here ya go dickhead.” I grumpily obliged as I handed the explosive, twelve-ounce, Genessee beer can to him. Taking my seat adjacent to him at the island bar countertop, I waited patiently for him to continue the same story I’d heard twenty times before, and to watch a shaken beer blow up all over him.

“See as I was sayin’ a lot of the deer we see are just dumb. Maybe curious even. They don’t see or smell humans that much. Hell, I betcha a nickel there’s a ton a deer back there on Bonnie’s land that die of old age and ain’t never seen a person. Those deer aren’t used to identifying our smell as dangerous” … I burst into laughter as the craaaaack of his beer unleashed a fountain of foam into his beard

. . .

With that moment of simple happiness ricocheting in thought I peered eastward, and a smile crept across my face for the first time in days. “Let’s see if you’re right tonight, you crazy old bastard. I still got a few minutes to watch. Could use an audience anyway.”

As I took in the scene, an old sensation returned—one cutting through the dying light as the last threads of smoke withered into the trees. It had been absent for nearly a decade. Now it moved through me again, quick and electric.

My vision sharpened. The wind shifted north and I felt its direction in my gut.

Gooseflesh rose along my arms. The hair at the base of my neck lifted. Something older than thought, wired into the spiraling ladders of my bone and blood, began to hum. It wasn’t panic. It was readiness. An alacrity I hadn’t felt without the aid of substances in a long damn time. A feeling that terrified me. It was the feeling of being alive again.

And I had come here to kill it.

After my father died, I buried it. Drowned it. Ran from it as my life unraveled. There was no running from it here. Not in this patch of quiet Appalachian forest. Whatever I’d swallowed or poured into myself wasn’t enough to quiet it. There isn’t a drug I’ve ever heard of that could. I let out a thin laugh at the collision of it all. The place I had chosen to put a bullet into my brain was the same place that had first taught me how to live. I squeezed my eyes shut and steadied myself. I was here to complete a task. A few goosebumps weren’t going to stop me.

“I still got a couple more minutes to spare. A little elk blood left to drink.” I offered myself the encouragement and I reached into my pocket for the flask. The folded note came with it. My hands shook as I opened it and read the words I’d written hours earlier:

“All I’ve lost or left behind. I now know how it feels to be the lone crow left of the murder. If it is possible and my bones are not dragged off by the bears or coyotes, please leave them here. They have no home to go to and no one to care for them. I feel there is no better place for them to lie than here.”

I leaned my head back against the tree and pressed the note to my chest with my left hand. With my right hand, I reached down to the rifle resting across my thighs and clicked the safety off.