The Sounds of the Dead
My father was a hunter who prided himself on killing for sustenance, never sport. His favorite game was deer, and any time he killed one, he would bring it home, remove its hide and hang it up to let the blood drain from its body. This would be a fine way of preparing an animal for food if he didn’t use my jump ropes, and even that wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t also hang the deer from the basketball goal at the edge of our driveway.
The sight, as an eight-year-old girl, of deer carcasses hanging up in my backyard gave me nightmares, their limbs all twisted and contorted to the point that it seemed the animal could never have been alive to begin with. Instead, the carcass looked like a deerskin rug stitched together and stuffed with ground beef, like some morbid birthday piñata. By day, I played with my dolls on the back porch and listened to the deer’s blood dripping on our driveway. By night, I imagined blood whenever I heard rain or the slender fingers of a tree branch tap my window. The tapping of blood on concrete, however, was not the worst sound that came from this ritual.
Growing up, I always thought that the screeching came from the deer, that they had somehow survived and were squalling for help, begging me to sever the jump ropes that bound their broken bodies to the basketball goal. The screeching continued throughout the night, and I imagined the deer placing a curse upon our household, bellowing out to its fellow deer brethren to exact revenge upon my family. That noise and these thoughts kept me from sleeping on the nights my father prepared deer meat. I learned, as a teenager, the tension the deer carcass applied to the basketball goal caused the screeching. The weight made the rusty metal supporting the net creak as it swung back and forth, back and forth, constantly producing the sound of my nightmares.
In time, I forgot the noise. I married a man who did not hunt, and we moved into a house that didn’t have a basketball net. In the expansive New Mexico desert, I enjoyed peaceful silence at night and slept without the interruption of nightmares.
The year following my marriage, my brother Esteban and I arranged for my husband and me to meet up with his family in Ruidoso so I could meet his newborn son. During our stay, we hiked, swam in lakes, rode horses, and cooked paella for the whole neighborhood. All my silly childhood nightmares seemed far behind me, until Esteban cracked a joke about how I used to sit up at night shivering with fright in our childhood bedroom. I was riding in the passenger seat of his car as he drove us to the grocery store; we’d thrown all the food in his house into the paella. “You know, we could go hunting tomorrow if you weren’t such a sacón. Remember how you used to think the deer that dad killed were calling out to the other deer to exact revenge?” he asked, chuckling.
“Yes, yes, it was a long time ago. Historia antigua,” I murmured, staring out the window at the woods crowding either side of the curving road.
“Oh no, not that long ago. I distinctly remember a thirteen-year-old version of yourself crawling into bed with Mom because you worried the deer were out to get you.” Esteban laughed. “Imagine, deer having any kind of power. They’re prey, menso.” Now, he was laughing so hard his eyes clenched shut.
“I get it. Hijole. Lay off,” I grumbled, just as I saw something dash through the tree line, and heard the screeching and groaning of rusted metal just like the strained basketball goal from my youth. Before I could make sense of the figure, Esteban’s car jerked to a sudden halt, and a deer came flying through the windshield.
I tried to make sense of the world spinning around me and shook my head to get rid of the ringing in my ears. No, not a ringing, screeching and a rusted, metallic groan.
Esteban was no longer pressing on the brakes, the car was slowly rolling forward, and I had to pull on the emergency brake to bring it to a full stop. I looked to my left at the humongous deer folded over Esteban’s body, as if they were embracing. The deer stared right at me, eyes wide and pained, a sharp whining sound coming from its throat as it struggled to suck in air. We stared at each other for a long time, locked in each other’s gaze as I forgot the cuts on my skin from the broken glass and the whiplash in my neck. I wished for the deer to forget its pain as its strained breaths became shallower and finally ceased.
Only then did I tear my gaze from the deer to look at my brother’s face. “Esteban?” I asked shakily, but there was no reply. In that hanging silence, the screeching still resounding from the depths of memory, I noticed my brother slumped back in the driver’s seat, completely still, his eyes wide open and one antler piercing his throat.
At Esteban’s wake, a family friend told me about how her father, a man who occasionally hunted with my father, died in a plane crash. The plane went down due to engine failure after a flock of geese flew into the turbines. No one survived. “I just thought it was so ironic,” said the family friend, looking right through me, “since Dad used to hunt waterfowl and all. You know, sometimes, I think nature knows we humans are the cause for its gradual death. I mean, over 150,000 species have gone extinct since 1500, and we humans are still chugging along, infatuated with our own progress. Perhaps these disasters are the animal kingdom’s own radical acts of eco-terrorism. Or…” she paused, her attention returning to my face again, “perhaps I’m just insane with grief; today isn’t about my father anyway. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Those words lingered in my mind for months, as my father and I worked together to bury Esteban, comfort his widow, and settle his affairs. When we finally enjoyed our first quiet moment since the car wreck, after my brother’s credit cards were canceled and his possessions auctioned or donated, my father and I shared a rare drink in my childhood home. As we stared at the muted television depicting some survivalist show, the phrase, “The deer finally got their revenge after all,” slipped from my lips unbidden.
My father froze, rim of his glass barely kissing his bottom lip, and his eyebrows furrowed as he turned to me. “Qué?”
“The deer. Once upon a time, you killed them by the dozens. Now, Esteban’s dead of an antler wound to the throat,” I explained, refusing to look at him.
“Don’t be stupid, mija,” my father snapped. “My hunting deer had nothing to do with Esteban’s death; don’t you dare try to blame me. Besides, that venison kept you fed, and it was healthier than all that sugary, salty, processed cagada sold in las bodegas. Moreover, the deer start to overpopulate the forests if you don’t thin the herd a little.”
“You hung the deer up with jump ropes on our basketball hoop. That’s just outright disrespectful. I wouldn’t blame the deer if they did curse us,” I growled, finally turning my attention to him.
“We. Had. To. EAT!” My father yelled, slamming his glass down on the coffee table and standing up. “If you’re going to be ungrateful and talk crazy, claiming that your brother’s death is my fault, then leave my house!” I didn’t dare disobey him, not when his face was so red it seemed his head might burst. I slammed the door on my way out and typed the address for Esteban’s gravesite into my GPS.
As I drove along the road adjacent to the cemetery, I stared through the tall, thick bars of the fence enclosing the graves. Through the bars I saw a six-point buck running along the fence and snorting, frantically searching for an exit, stuck among the graves. Along the tree line beyond the fence stood a doe and a fawn, the buck’s family, unable to reach him.
I had the sudden thought that the buck may very well die in that cemetery, either of starvation or exposure. Perhaps a hunter would come along and take aim through the fence. Who would kill on hallowed ground though? Then, I thought of the more than 150,000 species across this beautiful Earth that had gone extinct in the past 500 years and realized, maybe we’ve been hunting on hallowed ground this entire time.
