After running into each other on a Vermont trout river and falling into conversation one evening, Ted and I became fast friends. Like a lot of old-fashioned upcountry people, he was one who decided within ten minutes or so of meeting a stranger–on evidence clear to nobody but himself–whether he needed to know that person or not. Worthless. I heard Ted use that term a lot, sometimes applying it to people I considered perfectly worthy, in some cases even estimable.
Everything about Ted and me was different: he was a logger and I a novice college professor with a doctorate. Yet I always thought of him as every bit as bright as I could claim to be. For reasons I can’t identify, I made the grade with him, and he with me, though he did now and then display a flintiness, even rudeness, toward others that galled me.
On the afternoon I remember, he’d brought along his fifteen-year-old son Tommy, whom I liked a lot. I was happy in that pair’s company, as much as I’d be in anyone’s. Ted had decided I must get my mind off some things, if only for a spell. So he didn’t suggest a hike up a local peak; he announced it.
The trail rose steeply enough to keep our blood pumping, but it was short enough as not to be too taxing. Its summit provided a fabulous western prospect beyond our smaller Green Mountains to the Adirondacks. Once up there, though, I didn’t want to linger and admire the view. I felt an urgency. I belonged elsewhere. The distraction, that is, had worked so long as we kept ascending; it started to wane at the top, then failed completely on the trail down, my mental condition reverting entirely well before we reached the base.
We were most of the way down as dusk started to settle. Suddenly, we were startled by a doe that came rattling out of the woods into a small clearing and passed closely enough that I ran my hiking staff along her back. Why? Just to say I did it, I guess. To someone. Later. But no sooner had I done that than the animal cut a tight semi-circle and came racing back right at us. We all shouted to keep her from running us over.
Ted assessed things immediately: ever the laconic Yankee, he breathed, She’s blind.
The doe showed almost as pale as a winter hare, which seemed odd to me, but then so did everything just then–and it had for quite a while before. Nearly a month after she’d flipped our car and cracked her skull on the blacktop, my wife still lay comatose, full of tubes and wires, in the local intensive care unit.
The deer looked strangely fit and well fed, but how would she possibly survive the coming cold and snow? Tommy pled, Let me go for a gun! He wanted to save the doe from starving or from being ripped apart by coyotes, which was what the ravens perched low in the gray birches and alders were waiting for.
My wife and I had had some petty argument. About what? I can’t recall, but she sped away, flush with uncharacteristic anger, which I did my best to ignore until the trooper called at the house to report that our car had landed roof-down on Route 11 and my wife had been taken off by ambulance, unconscious.
I couldn’t respond to him. I sat speechless, robbed of everything I’d thought made me who I was. A woman friend who was visiting took note of such details as the officer provided. I don’t know how long I waited, stunned, unmoving. And now, these weeks after that disastrous moment, some poor deer was thrashing around right in front of us.
Ted understood what I couldn’t: Ain’t up to us to save her, he drawled. Can’t anyways. My every fiber ached to disagree with that judgment, but as I looked up at those harsh, dark birds, I stayed as dumb as when the police officer came through the door with his news.
The deer kept bouncing off slim trunks, plowing through berry canes, stumbling over an old rock wall; then she’d hurtle back into the clearing. At her every pass, it was if I could look clear through her ghastly hide, streaked red from those scrambles.
My uselessness in the scene transfixed me. I’d been dubbed a literary man by famous mentors, I had my fancy degree, but I’d never read fiction or poetry or whatever else that prepared me for this–or, as I thought in that moment, for anything. The hell with belles lettres, I concluded in a flash. I needed to look at the world from an entirely new angle. But what other calling would provide that? I felt as blind and helpless as the suffering doe, though of course it wasn’t the wretched animal’s plight alone that had undone me.
I’d always imagined, had been led by those mentors to imagine, the redeeming power of language, but I’d recently witnessed living beings to and for whom words were utterly worthless. Mute, stripped clean, and visionless as I was, what would I have to teach a student now, let alone a daughter or son, assuming my wife recovered? There was scarcely a guarantee of that. What could restore order to the world? I had no idea, but I felt desperate to start all over, to erase some categorical, unspeakable things, as my more rational mind knew I’d never do again.
Above us, those birds sat, patient, some even preening, waiting for a desolate creature to die. In a couple of months, storm and frost would tear the leaves off the scavengers’ perches. I shivered, as if in anticipation of full winter, which would soon enough be coming.
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