Your ear picks up at the sound of the mail deliverer pulling away in his station wagon. As you step out the door, his dust still hovers in the air.
You hike down the long drive to the box. There won't be much. There never is. A while ago you grew accustomed to receiving the unwanted, the supermarket circular, the mimeo school district report, the pink slip of the utility bill exposed at the envelope window.
There is a sister in Kansas City, but never word any more. You understand. Everyone has his life to live, everyone's gone off to live it. After a while you are no longer disappointed. Low expectations are easily fulfilled. The wonder is that after all these days you still make this long hike, every day, before the postman's dust dies down.
Up the road: you notice, not for the first time, how it narrows, looping over the neighbor's hilltop, dwindles, meets at a point and vanishes. Like a flame it flickers over that hill. And like a triangle it makes its point. On one side of the triangle is half the world, and on the other, the other.
It cuts the world, it is like a swath of desert surrounded by oasis. A bridge of beige light. A wedge hewn from rock.
A yo-yo. Every day you rise on its string; and every night descend again.
Well, you say. Well. It's your road, this rural route. And your wasted morning dream.
It's your road, did you say, speeding across the gravel. Uncle helped build it when he was in his twenties and one of eight who lived in the township. A road every mile, north and south, checkering the prairie. It had no name, it was simply the road, or, more simply, your road. Your people made it, your race maintains it, your kind stake claim to it day after day. Every time the key turns in the ignition and the wheels roll out onto it. Like a signature.
The only disputants are those who will never get it right. And they are all beasts, meadow beasts, marsh beasts, ditch beasts. Each year becomes a long and tedious inquiry. You wonder why they need to cross the road and they wonder why you need to steer between its shoulders.
A thousand times in the blank dark night that pair of eyes has frozen in the headlights like a thief at the silver drawer. And the being never moves, disbelieving or blinded or both, buoyed by an animal, other logic. This is a bafflement to the soft-hearted driver, the cheer of his day soured by the sight of this body diving under wheel. He could have stepped aside. Why didn't he?
Whump. Another innocent life broken by the road. Counting their bones is like cruising into Rome, crucifixions lining the highway.
An ancient dream: peeling apart the venetian blinds, the sight of men at work in the dark. Spotlight. The stag, tied tight at the hooves, hoisted on a pulley on the big limb of the old apple tree. Grandfather stepping forward, butcher's knife raised. The great heart tumbling onto the black grass.
In the summer we mow the ditches every six weeks to keep down the insect and milkweed populations. In the spring the township men come by and spray with herbicides. And in the last weeks of fall the farmers douse the roadsides with gasoline and burn them back to the shouts of the cattle, fearful of the smoke.
It does no good. Winter comes and the snow settles where the wind decides, some of the roads block off for the season, some take on the trappings of trench warfare, one lane wide, eight or ten feet of snow piled high on either side. To see sunlight you look straight up. But beware of oncoming traffic: when two cars meet in a five-mile trench, one backs down, shifts into reverse.
Now in the cold season you stand by the window, watching the snow pass over the road like stampeding spirits. At night you dream of a record snow, your lifeline to town, to shelter and food, cut off for weeks. After a time, the deck of cards gets tired of solitaire. By day you move in the tension of ice. One false move will lay you low. One guest from a passing truck and you shoot off the road.
In the month of suicides no word comes. The mailbox licks your moist fingertips.
Did you think spring would come? Still its coming is a surprise. One day you step out the door in shirt sleeves, blinking. You survived the season behind you; but could anything else?
The road is streaked with the skid of tires veering this way and that through the slime. A corpse of ashen snow lies coruscating in the ditch. Gray puddles reflect the gray spring sky, like columns of obituaries in a weekly newspaper's March editions. You think this ragged road will never be repaired, but the township grader passes through that afternoon and makes its way straight again. What a sensation it is today to smell the smells of the melting earth you thought unresurrectably dead escaping once again!
Arrayed on every loop of telephone line the dozen grackles screech their screech. Every grackle faces east, like beads on an abacus. On a rosary.
All winter you doubted. Today now, as you stand by the mailbox, a letter in your hand, you see something, a sign, pressed into the mud at your feet. You kneel there, in the glistening clay, and with the tips of two fingers you enter the print of the improbable deer.
March, 1979
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