The Moose

We hadn’t spoken since the funeral and the silence in the car was beginning to feel too big to undo.

I lowered my window to the mineral smell of the evening, to the small noise of the tires against wet roads. My father looked over at me, his hands low on the wheel.

“Mind putting that up?” he said.

I told him I was carsick and that the air helped. He nodded and reached forward to turn the heater knob to full blast and then let himself drop back against the driver’s seat.

What was true was that I liked the feeling of the wind on my fingers as I held them through the small opening I’d made. The moving air had a heft to it that was like a bolt of silk, like the nightgown my mother used to wear. One thing I never told him was how she’d be wrapped in it when I left for school and still wearing it when I returned. I’d see the bright blue blaze of her through the trees at the end of the driveway and hurry down the stairs of the bus, my ears hot as lanterns. I could feel the eyes on me from the bus windows until it rumbled away over the hill, its plume of diesel settling. Only then would I let her hug me and hug her back and feel the silk of the nightgown against my cheek, my forearms.

“Are you feeling all right?” he asked, after another long silence.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.” I wasn’t sure if he was asking about the carsickness.

“Because it’s OK if you’re not. Nobody would expect you to feel all right. Nobody expects you to feel any particular way.”

“OK,” I said.

“I was only a few years older than you are now when I lost my mom,” he said. “You’re fourteen now, yeah?”

I nodded. He loved to pretend to forget my age, as though it fit within some absent-minded persona he was trying to construct.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through,” he continued. “I’m telling you not to scare you but to show you, as living proof, that you can get through even the hardest, most unimaginable things. The world can be tough and sometimes we must be tougher. That’s what I’m telling you. And I know better than anyone what you’re going through. You can talk to me. Please. You can talk to me.”

Another long silence, only the shush of the road through the window slit. Then he started in again and it seemed as though he was speaking as much for himself as for me.

“Had I already told you about my mom?” he asked me. “She died during my senior year of high school and I was numb for a very long time. Eventually things started to feel normal again. Ever since, I’ve felt that you can separate the world into those who have lost their mother and those who haven’t. Had I told you about her? We’re the same in that way. In many ways but in that way, too.”

When he said the word numb I began to listen more carefully. Numb was exactly how I’d felt over the preceding ten days since her death, as though I were trapped at the bottom of a thick down sleeping bag. No sound. No air or light. “I know,” I said. “About your mom. You’d told me about her before.”

“OK,” he said. He leaned forward and adjusted the heat again.

We were once more in silence and I could feel its weight. The only bright thing was the narrow tunnel of headlights before the car, lighting up the road and the edges of the forest close on both sides.

After some time, he said, “There’s the matter of where you’ll live. I would be thrilled to have you. I hope you know that.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

I hadn’t lived with him since I was seven. My mother and I remained in the town where I had been born and where my grandparents lived. My father moved an hour away, closer to the coast. I’d visit him every other weekend. Usually we’d go to the movies on Friday when I arrived. I suspected it was because we didn’t have to face each other and could only talk in whispers. There in the darkness, we’d be side by side and I could hear him crunching popcorn and sipping Diet Coke through a straw and even though he was my father he seemed a stranger. So the idea of living with him now was disorienting. Weekends had been another thing because they had a beginning and an end. On Saturdays, we’d go to the diner near his house and he’d let me gorge myself on pancakes and bacon and milkshakes, all things my mother had never allowed because she was a health nut. He’d drink black coffee and watch me eat as though he were in some stage of disbelief, either at the amount I was able to put down or else the basic fact of me across the table.

If the weather cooperated on my visits, he’d take me to the driving range. I’d never learned the proper mechanics of the swing he seemed to produce so naturally. One after another he’d send the white balls high into the air and off down the practice range, the sound of his shots a solid repeatable thwock. Sometimes I’d miss altogether or else send them limping only a few yards from the astroturf mat where we’d be hitting. Trying harder only seemed to make my efforts worse. He’d offer small pointers—keep my head down, finish at the target—but I never understood why the advice was always about my body in relation to the ball rather than the ball itself and where it was going or not going. Secretly, I had always hoped for bad weather during my visits, for that would mean an afternoon in his condominium playing gin rummy and watching whatever sporting event was on television rather than suffering through the driving range. I knew that if I were to move in with him permanently, I’d be hoping for an endless string of rainy Saturdays.

“It’s not anything you need to decide today,” he said, continuing on about my living arrangements. “The law would sort of dictate that you move in with me. Being a minor and all that. That’s the way, as I understand it, that it would work. When my mother died there was no father and so I moved in with my aunt and uncle, my cousins. But I’m here and so it would be the natural thing.”

It was something I didn’t want to talk about and so I simply nodded again and mumbled an assent and hoped it would suffice. Any permanent arrangements seemed to emphasize the fact of her death and it was something I couldn’t take. To move in with him would mean a new school and a new universe of relationships to navigate, new teachers, new ways of meanness. It evoked a particular Sunday-evening sadness. I could feel myself begin to cry again in the darkness of the car.

I shut my eyes tight so he wouldn’t see and conjured the large picture of my mother that had rested in the easel at the front of the meeting house. It was from when she was much younger, before I’d been born. Her smile was wide and bright and she appeared happier than I’d ever seen her. There was a sense of hopefulness in her eyes. I wondered if they’d selected the picture because it was beautiful or because there weren’t any other photographs of her. Perhaps both. She was always the one behind the camera. I doubted my father knew when the picture had been taken and felt that was another thing I could not ask.

As the jag of crying subsided, I opened my eyes again to the lighter darkness of the car and looked to the outline of my father. His straight nose and the craggy ledge of his chin beneath rounded lips. A ladykiller. That was how my mother had once described him. I hadn’t been old enough to understand what she meant and so for a time it had made me afraid of him. She also had told me I’d gotten the best parts of my father but I hadn’t known what that meant either and hadn’t asked and now of course could never ask. What were the best parts? What, even, were the good parts?

*     *     *     

It was never clear which one of us saw the moose first. In truth, neither of us knew what it was initially. I choked back a scream as my father hissed a fuckfuckfuck and the brakes began to screech. Then came the sickening crunch of metal against long leg bone and soft tissue, drowning out other sounds until the long squawk of tire rubber overtook all noise and we swung sideways across the road and the moose lay broken and dead against the windshield. All my thoughts were gone and everything moved very slowly and clearly, the way it seemed in certain moments in basketball games when, amid great chaos, there was a slow silence and everything happened frame by jerky frame.

When we came to a rest, the car was at the edge of the road, its nose pointing toward the woods. My father had both hands on the wheel and was staring blankly at the windshield. Cracks spidered the glass. Through the opening in the window I could already smell the moose, a relic of old forest and musk and shit. I felt as if I might vomit into my lap. I tried to take deep breaths through my mouth the way my mother had coached me when I was sick but could feel the sudden watering there and the icy skin of sweat across my back and stomach.

“A moose,” my father said, after prolonged silence. “I’ve . . .” He trailed off.

“Where did it come from?” I asked, to fill the silence.

My father looked at me, surprised, as though he’d forgotten I were in the car. He looked ahead to where the moose was draped across the windshield and lifted his right hand from the wheel and pointed his finger toward the forest beyond the road, perhaps as an answer to my question. Then he shook his head from side to side and closed his eyes and gripped the wheel again as if he were steering into some horrific dream.

After a moment he opened his eyes and unhooked his seat belt and opened the car door without a word. He closed the door behind him. I waited for a moment and felt the darkness as though it were some heavy weighted apron and then undid my own belt and followed him into the damp evening.

We stood side by side in silence. The moose’s four legs were splayed over the hood. My father’s hands were on his hips and he was standing in what seemed like deep reverence.

“I’ve never seen one up close,” he said, after a moment.

“Me neither.”

He pushed one of his hands through his hair and then cupped the hand around his mouth, as if he were trying to silence himself.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” I said.

The evening was cold and still and damp. Heavy fog shrouded the road and settled between the trees of the old forest.

“We’ll have to move it,” he said. “Off the car and off the road.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be heavier ’n hell.” When he cursed I sensed he’d forgotten his company. It made me feel older, conspiratorial.

He stood back, tilted his head as though he were eyeing a flat tire, then walked to the other side of the hood to inspect where the moose’s head hung at an uncanny angle from its neck.

He murmured as if to himself, “Probably pull from the legs. Use the slope of the hood. Once it’s off the car, we can keep dragging it to the edge. It’ll be heavy.”

I looked from my father to the ruined hood and back again. I thought he would have been irate about the state of the car, but it seemed only to be the problem of the moose that drew his full attention, as if it were a thing to be solved and unrelated to all other things.

*     *     *     

At the funeral, I’d been seated between my father and my mother’s parents and it had reminded me of the earliest days of my memory, when we’d still been a family. Every Sunday, my mother’s parents would join us for dinner and we’d sit together at the dining table, which went unused every other day of the week. My mother would light the candles and my grandfather would lead us in a silent Quaker grace and I could see my father squirming in his chair as if my grandfather’s silent reflection were some physical affront. The adults—mostly my mother and her parents—would then speak about the news of our town and the world and about families they knew from long ago, before my father and before me. Sometimes my father would continue his silence throughout dinner as if in some unnoticed protest and it wouldn’t be until my grandparents had left and I was tucked into bed for the night that I’d finally hear him speak and though I couldn’t hear the words through the wall I knew that they wore the uniform of argument. I would know it from the crescendo of volume, the halting stops and starts, the diminishing force of my mother’s voice until it disappeared into a whisper.

Rather than squirming in his seat at the funeral like he had done over so many family dinners, my father had instead been as still as death. At one point, while one of the Friends urged us to not let our hearts be troubled and assured us that God’s house had many rooms and that there would be a place for all, I’d pushed my finger against my father’s thigh to be sure he was still awake, still alive. He’d looked down at me and removed a hand from his lap and held mine within it. It was the only time I could remember holding hands with him. I made a point while the speaker’s words drifted softly from the front of the meeting house to remember the feeling of the hand, larger than I’d expected and smooth and cool, like some piece of polished marble made animate.

*     *     *     

It was with these same hands I’d held only hours before that my father gestured to the body of the moose through the white beam of headlights and asked if I was ready. “It’ll take both of us,” he said. “I need everything you’ve got.”

I could feel the acceleration of my heart and a wave of nausea rolling ever closer. In the still night not even the tufted, clotted fur of the moose stirred. Steam from its cooling body rose vertically like a spirit rendered in vapor.

My father pushed up his sleeves and tucked his tie into the front of his dress shirt. “Grab a leg.”

My hands were in my pockets against the cold. I felt unable to remove them to take hold of the moose. One of the badly broken legs was on the side I was positioned to grip and from the fracture line a reddish liquid seeped. I’d never seen something dead up close and such proximity was jarring. They’d not allowed me into my mother’s hospice room at the end, and there was nobody at the small Quaker service. Only the photograph from long ago.

My father moved his gaze across the hood and landed at the very spot on the fractured leg that had seemed like some distilled nightmare. “How about we switch ends?” he said without hesitation, as casually as if we were changing seats at a lunch counter. Gratitude for my father washed over me then. Perhaps this was the good part my mother had spoken of. Perhaps there was deep goodness to him and he had been misunderstood. I took my place on the other side of the hood, where both legs of the moose appeared intact, alive even. From beside me, my father said “Ready?”

I nodded and pulled my hands from my pockets, though I hesitated to wrap them around the leg.

“C’mon,” said my father, a growing impatience to his voice. “Let’s get it over with.”

I gripped one leg in each hand, narrowing my eyes as if to distance the sight of the alien thing I held. The thinness of it struck me. It was like a child’s arm, too spindly to be able to hold the weight of such a massive thing. The tufted fur that ran nearly all the way to the hoof exaggerated the girth of the leg it shrouded. My encircling fingers nearly touched. Ready, I awaited my father’s next command but when it didn’t come I looked at him. He had turned and was seated awkwardly on the bumper, his pants riding high against his shins so that not only his dark socks were visible but also the private-seeming band of pale skin above them. His face was in his hands and it appeared that he was crying.

I looked away, embarrassed for both of us. I had never seen him cry. He’d remained stony at the service. It wasn’t that his crying bothered me. But I sensed he wouldn’t have wanted me to see it and so I stared instead at the moose leg still gripped in my hand and waited.

In the presence of such immediate death I longed again for my mother, certain she’d know what to say to him and how to go about dealing with the moose. She had a way of explaining my father to himself. Perhaps that was why they hadn’t been able to stay together. Perhaps it was too difficult to remain with someone you knew better than they knew themselves. It obliterated mystery and without mystery all became transactional. I’d overheard my mother on the phone saying it to a friend—the word transactional, which I had never heard before but that sounded officious and stale. Thinking of her again, the way she’d sit and sit on the stool beside the telephone in the kitchen and talk endlessly with friends, my sadness redoubled with the awareness that I’d never again hear the soft music of her chatter from the next room. Never again—such a disorientingly long time.

*     *     *     

My hands were growing cold in the silent white glare of the headlights. From behind me, I finally heard him speak. “Let’s pull,” he said, simply and without wavering.

Together, we pulled the moose from the hood of the car. It inched slowly and with great difficulty at first. The slick soles of my dress shoes slid against the gravel of the road and I readjusted my feet for purchase. My father was taking care to avoid the broken leg and its dripping wound, gripping in one place and then stepping backward, one foot behind the other, rather than pulling hand over hand. Once the body had cleared the windshield it was easier going, as if some hidden resistance had given up. The moose neared the front of the hood and seemed to gather momentum. I jumped back, still holding on, as the weight of it slumped from the car and onto the edge of the road with a sick dull thud. The car leapt, freed of the enormous weight. I had a vague sense of not wanting to hurt the moose, but of course that was foolish and deep down I knew one could not hurt what was already dead.

Beside me, my father released his grip and seemed to stagger backward a few steps, his face distorted and ghostly in the car’s high beams. I felt fixed in place, still gripping the legs and uncertain of what to do next. My father looked upward in the direction of the low, dark sky, then turned his gaze upon me. He wore a soft smile that was like resignation and apology both.

“You’re strong,” he said. “This isn’t easy. We’re not done. We need to move it a bit further off the road.”

But he didn’t make a move to regrip the moose’s legs he’d been holding. He stood instead with his hands hanging limply at his sides. I had kept my grip on the legs and could feel the clammy heat of the fur against my hands. I wanted to let go as my father had but was unsure I’d be able to take hold again.

“It’s a young male,” he said, still standing with his hands at his sides. Then he gestured vaguely to the head, where nubs of velveteen antlers protruded in front of a pair of donkey-like ears. “We’re lucky,” he continued. “Moose crashes can be bad on account of the height of them. They’re perfectly set up to fold over the bumper and then the whole body comes crashing through the windshield. We are lucky.”

I hadn’t wanted to think about whether the moose was male or female and nothing about it felt lucky, though perhaps an adult’s sense of luck was a different thing. The fact that it was a young male did seem to make some sense. In school, we’d been studying the Civil War and had talked about the hundreds of thousands of young men who died at the hands of other young men. And in other wars, too. And car accidents. In our town alone we’d lost two high school boys to wrecks in two years. It seemed always to be young men. As strange as it was, I made a vow to myself in that moment that I would live a long, long time.

I looked at the nubs of antlers and then shuffled my feet against the gravel. This seemed to shake my father back into awareness. He leaned over the body and took hold of two of the legs and together we pulled in heaving bouts and were able to edge the moose off the verge of the road, where it lay like some hulking golem of matted fur amid shreds of cloth and paper cups and plastic bottles and dried spears of grass. I looked at my father and he met my eyes and looked down again at the moose, then slid his hands into his pockets as if to obscure the grim work with which they’d been encumbered.

We were silent for a long time standing in the cold damp night.

“She was a Quaker, your mother,” my father said. He was still looking down at the moose.

I nodded. It was something I’d understood for as long as I’d been in school, when young classmates began to ask about religion and wondered aloud why they’d never seen me in the big white Congregational church in the center of town. I’d told those who asked that my family was Quaker and a snot-faced boy in jeans with dark patches at the knees had said You mean like the oatmeal and that had made everyone laugh and for a time they’d simply called me Oatmeal. I had laughed along even though it felt like some betrayal but I’d never told my mother. I was worried she would march into school in her blue nightgown and pull my classmate to the principal’s office by his ear.

“What did you know about it?” he continued.

Unsure, I told him I went to meetings with her sometimes.

“What were they like?” he asked. “I never went and you probably know more than I do.”

Though recalling it made the lump in my throat swell, I tried for his sake. “There was a lot of silence,” I said. “Every once in a while someone would stand up and say something. It was supposed to be that God was talking through the person speaking.” It sounded crazy when I said it aloud, into the quiet night as we stood beside the wreckage of the moose. For the first time I had the sense that my father was regretful of all the things he had never done with my mother, all the things he’d forgotten or only half-remembered.

“Were you ever with her when she spoke?” he asked. When he mentioned her it was as if he were wincing slightly.

I had never heard her speak and told him so.

“Maybe she never felt moved to speak. But I do know she was filled with deep love.”

It was a strange thing for me to hear him say and I wondered why he hadn’t said it at the service. Instead, he’d sat unmoving and silent throughout. I wished he hadn’t saved such words to be wasted over the body of the dead moose.

We stood in silence for a long time. At one point I looked over at him and his eyes were closed and his lips were moving the way they worked when he was reading something to himself. I wanted to know what he was saying but couldn’t ask for fear of breaking the spell that had settled over us.

After a moment, he crossed his hands in front of him and opened his eyes. In the headlights, they were the color of soap.

I looked once more at the moose, which lay in the scraggly grass like some forgotten overcoat. I was hoping with everything I had that it would be the last dead thing I ever saw but knew that was a silly hope, given the world. I shut my eyes and felt myself descend into a greater darkness, my own private distant night. I could still see the moose outlined by the headlights of the car as its fading image danced in the darkness behind my eyelids.

Together, we stood in silence, waiting for the spirit of the divine to move one of us to speak.

TRENT NUTTING

Trent Nutting is a writer and high school educator living in California with his wife and four daughters. His work has appeared in Linebreak, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. His poetry manuscript was named a semi-finalist in the Crab Orchard Review First Book Series.