I am older than the survey stakes that bit into my slopes and the cedar posts the first men hammered into my skin. I have watched fires rush across my ridges and starved deer punch their hooves through winter crust to lick the salt from old roads. I remember the summer the creek ran with blue dye from the laundry trucks, and the spring when the boy who never learned to swim slipped from the rock shelf and I put him to bed where the crawdads sleep. I am 10.54 acres on paper and a great deal larger in the hours after dark. There are spots I do not give back.
They arrive late on a bright Friday in a convoy of discount SUVs and company trucks with magnetic logos slapped on the doors. Managers first, like soft birds in fresh camouflage, bootlaces fat and white. Then the crew in a box truck with a latch that sticks and a ladder ratchet-strapped to the roof because nobody has time to fix things when the work is always due yesterday. There is a woman named Lorraine from HR who wears rubber boots that squeak when she walks on gravel and a silicone wedding band the color of straw. There is a man named Rick who has the square-short hands of a carpenter and is not one. There are blue collars, white collars, a few collars gone shiny with wear. Names that won't matter later. The one that might is Jimmy, who is not with them yet.
The brochure promised what brochures promise. Heavily wooded. Creek. Deer, turkey, the clean smell of cedar. The land had been logged light a decade earlier and now the young maples were crowding each other for the sun. Down along the creek, the alders leaned like eavesdroppers. Beside the old ATV trail, there is a rectangle of packed clay where a cabin ought to be, the pad poured and then abandoned when the money or marriage ran thin. There is a dead spot at the far boundary, a place where lightning struck an oak and the ants turned it into a cathedral. Nothing much grows there but nettles and old screws.
They set up camp with the sound of nylon shuddering and coolers dropping. One cooler has been scrubbed poorly and keeps a faint perfume of fish; another is new and still smells like the store. The air is the thin-cut smoke of a fire not yet committed. Somebody says, "This is what it's about," and somebody else says, "Team-building," and the joke is that the team is already split before a single tent pole snaps into place. Managers take the high ground by the pad because it's closer to the trucks and the porta-john. The crew drifts to the creek because water draws thirst, and because that's where the birds will come when they're spooked.
I feel the way they push into me—their footfall, the places their eyes cannot go without flinching. I show them deer runs and ignore the copper coil of a shed snake skin. I keep back, for now, the small bones. There is plenty of time.
They shoot cans the first evening and clap for each other. Lorraine from HR tries the rifle and the kick shocks her shoulder into a soft O of pain. She laughs and laughs harder when Rick tells her she did "real good, for a newbie." The crew—men and one woman with hair black as a crow's wing—drink domestic beers with mountains on the can that turn blue when the cans get cold; these mountains now are scabbed frost-bite blue. The managers drink IPAs that list the hops on the label like text messages from better lives. Everyone is on first name basis because the laminated schedule says "First Name Basis Hour."
Somebody asks where Jimmy is.
"Jimmy's on his own time," says the woman with crow-black hair, who knows him best. She says it neutral, like a bank teller saying the bank will be closing in ten minutes.
"Jimmy's always late," says Rick, and tries on a smile that fits badly. "But Jimmy always shows."
He will, though not the way any of them deserve.
Night is the open throat of a thing that might sing or might swallow. It takes a while to decide. The managers build the fire up and then smother it with too much wood. The crew builds another and feeds it slow. The crickets say what they always say: you were not here before me and you will not be here after. The owls call and the men with guns look up, thinking there might be something that listens back.
Saturday morning is the sound of zipper teeth and a man vomiting behind the cedar stand. Breath clouds the air. Lorraine's squeaky boots are quiet now, dampened with dew and ash. The first bird they shoot is a jake, proud beyond his years, who steps into a patch of sunlight where the ridge falls away to creek. The shot is clean, the collapse awkward and immediate. His feathers disturb the air in a slow-motion question mark before the ground answers.
"Hell of a start," says Rick.
They tag the first bird with a neon loop that clacks closed with a ratchet sound. The tags came in plastic packages with cardboard backing that said HELPS PREVENT POACHING in a font that might have been chosen by a teenager learning PowerPoint. The managers take pictures, thumbs-ups, gun barrels accidentally aimed at knees, wide stances like toddlers who haven't learned that the word "man" is not a posture. The crew does not take pictures. They look where the bird stopped moving and where the blood drank down into leaf duff and vanished. One of them says, "He gave himself to you," not as a joke.
That first bird would have satisfied dignities once—meat enough for a family, feathers enough for a story. They do not stop. The turkeys come easy. Too easy. They are where men are not supposed to be lucky: at the bend of the old fence line where the honeysuckle draws yellow hornets, along the firebreak scar that is still bare in the center, up by the dead oak where my roots hit rock and circle back. It is as if something rounded the birds up and pushed them like fat raindrops down the roofline of the morning, each to a waiting palm.
By noon they have nine. By three, fourteen. The stack of bodies behind the trucks makes a new smell, a sweetness undercut by iron. They open the birds with knives that were sharpened for this or never sharpened at all. The split skin is like wet paper; the organs dim and surprising. Lungs like soaked bread. Heart the exact size of a mouthful you should never take. I have seen men cut, and seen them look at their own insides the same way. Always the two steps: shock, and then naming. Kidneys. Intestines. Gizzard. They say it as if the words will make them good. I let them believe that, as I let them believe the creek runs only one direction.
"Where the hell's Jimmy?" somebody asks when the sun mists into late.
"Coming," says the woman with crow hair. She is skinning a bird with motions so practiced they've slipped below thinking. Her name is Rena but most of them say "hey" when they need her.
Rick says, "Texted him the location again." He puts his phone away like a man sheathing a blade; slick, satisfied. There was talk a week ago about promotions, about who would get the driver slots for the out-of-town jobs that pay per diem. The talk happened in a conference room with glass walls that showed the parking lot and the hill beyond. The talk was not about Jimmy because Jimmy was not the sort of man who gets talked about in that room. He is talked about here, now, in the open. It is not kinder.
They bag twenty by dusk.
"Lucky," says Lorraine, eyes a little flat now, empathy burned down to coals.
"It's the land," says Rena, and she means me. "She's letting us."
"You gonna thank Mother Nature, Rena?" Rick says. "You send her a 1099 for the birds?"
Rena doesn't answer. She doesn't say that she thanked me already, quietly, in a way I've always understood. She doesn't say that some debt can't be bought off with a donation or a pound of meat wrapped in freezer paper. She looks towards the dead spot where the big oak used to be, feels the room go cold in her back teeth, and keeps her knife steady.
The men clean their hands with bottled water and paper towels and wipe pink threads across their jeans. The feathers end up everywhere: combed into the grass, swirling in the creek, stuck to the Velcro of a manager's brand-new hunting jacket by a hook that will never let go. The generator coughs and catches, and then the little speakers bleat out music that was popular when the oldest manager still had hair on the crown of his head. Someone forces a laugh. The sun goes down suddenly, as it does when clouds lie in wait just below the horizon.
Night stretches again. It is longer this time, or it uses itself more efficiently. The fire throws an arch of orange onto the cedar trunks and turns them into the gray bellies of whales. The creek sounds like whispering. The men do not tell ghost stories because ghost stories are for children. They tell safety incident stories. The man who reached into a drain and pulled back a stump. The woman who swallowed her tongue when the compressor jumped. The kid in Ohio—it's always Ohio—who stuck his hand into a machine that was supposed to be off. They attend to these stories like believers at a vigil, each adding a candle of detail until the air is thick with wax and the heat becomes its own weather.
At some point around one in the morning, Rena stands and stretches and walks away from the light. She follows the old ATV trail as it spools out underfoot like a hose. The coyotes are quiet tonight; the foxes talk low. She passes the place where two pines lean against each other and make a shape like a doorway. She does not step through it because she is not a fool. She turns once on the trail and looks back at the tents and the cudgel-dark of the tree line. "Jimmy," she says to the darkness, as if summoning or excusing him. I take his name the way I take a leaf.
Jimmy arrives when the sky is the color of breath. He comes not by road but slantwise, out of the timber. His boots are wrong for hiking but cut for hills nonetheless, nicked by shale and old fence. He isn't drunk, not yet, and won't be. His face is the kind of pale you get when you work under lights more than sun. He is fifty and thirty-five at once; this is a trick I have seen men learn by necessity. He carries an old pump gun with a nick in the stock where it once fell from the tailgate and landed on gravel. He could tell you the face of each gravel tooth where it bit the wood.
He stands at the edge of their light and watches. There's no drama to it. He is the sort of man who learned young to be his own witness. Lorraine says "Hey!" in a voice that means there you are, we've been worried but not enough to stop the party. Rick says, "Bout time, buddy," and claps him on the shoulder and makes it a little harder than necessary. Rena crosses the space between them like there was never space at all and presses two fingers to his wrist the way you might check a pulse without making a point of it.
"You made it," she says.
"Couldn't let y'all bag 'em all." He says it light and smiles around the edges. The smile touches his eyes only halfway and that's not new either.
"Still got some luck left," Rick says. "Turkey luck."
Jimmy looks at the neat rows of bodies, the tags, the tidy blood river that's dried brown and stuck grains of grit to itself. He looks at the managers in their new jackets, the crew with hands raw from gut strings. He looks at Rena like a man who wants to say I wish you weren't here or I'm glad you are and can't pick one.
"Luck," he says, like a man tasting a word that might be poison. "Huh."
The morning hunt is ridiculous. Birds step into the open like they're answering their names for roll call. The creek holds its breath. Twice a tom struts broadside and turns his fan so perfect that even the oldest men feel a youthful greedy little jump inside, that tickle of take. They do not miss. The pile behind the trucks grows, the feathers thicken, the air gets that sweet-iron tang again, the kind that coats the tongue. Thirty birds by noon, then thirty-four by two. They joke about the freezer space in the office breakroom and then realize they've made the same joke three times and let it go.
"Team-building," Lorraine says around one, quiet now. It is the kind of joke you make when you are aware of being watched by something you cannot name without changing your life.
"I'm not sure they're hunting," Rena says to Jimmy when the two of them are standing down by the creek, just inside the long shadow of ironweed. "Feels like harvest."
"Hunting's just the name for it when you tell it in town," he says, and Rena looks at him because that line is smarter than he usually lets them have. She wonders what he heard in the woods that he's folding into language now because that's the only way to carry it without bleeding.
There is a small argument around three. The details aren't much: a manager says something about how the crew will handle the cleaning while the "leaders" discuss "transport logistics." The crew hears you clean the birds, we'll drink and decide which route won't make our wives mad about the smell. It isn't the worst thing that's been said in these woods this year, or this hour. But it's the sort of thing that makes a place shift weight under you. A dead limb creeps into a position, a rock roll eases, a root waits for a foot. People think I do these things out of spite. I do them because everything leans on everything else.
"Keep your logistics in your pants," Rena says to Rick, which is not the kind of thing she usually says in front of company. Rick laughs like it's very funny, and then like it's sort of funny, and then like he can't remember if he is allowed to laugh.
"Easy," Jimmy says, to no one and everyone. "Easy now."
The last bird falls at four-thirty. Thirty-nine. I have been counting too. Numbers shape a kind of door; walk through enough of them and you come somewhere you didn't mean to go. They lay the birds out behind the trucks and the grass is striped with blood and the creek is ticking loudly to itself like an old clock. Lorraine sits on the tailgate and picks a feather out of her hair and laughs in a little sundered way. The managers talk about making a charitable donation of meat to the shelter, and the crew does not remind them that shelters here do not have freezers for such donations, that what they have is need, not capacity.
In the late light, Jimmy goes missing.
Nobody notices for ten minutes because nobody notices the absence of a man who is careful with his movements. Then Rena says, "Where's Jimmy?" in a voice like a tuning fork. Silence answers for a second, that fat, obvious silence that peels back and shows you your own mouth. They split up, poorly at first, managers calling his name like you call a dog and crewmates not calling, because the woods hears the shape of a voice and remembers it later. Rena walks, again, along the ATV trail that unwinds like a shed skin. Rick shoulders his new jacket and fumbles the zipper and swears under breath. Lorraine's boots squeak again. A man named Kyle who has said nothing all weekend says "I'll check the fence line," and jogs like it's a job he could get right.
I do not lift the fog. I do not lower it either. There are things that happen because many small things have agreed for them to be possible.
They find him where my boundary kisses the neighbor's, near the dead oak. He is on his back with his arms slightly away from his body as if he was arranging himself to make a point and then forgot what the point was. His skin has gone the incomprehensible gray-blue of a turkey that has been an hour away from life. His mouth is open in a shape that would make a gobble if he had anything to gobble with. His eyes are half-lidded and full of leaves. His boots are planted and his heels have dug two clean lines as if he was dragged, except there are no drag marks leading to his shoulders. There is a purple necklace of bruising around his throat like a drunk man's attempt at a gift.
"Oh God," says Lorraine.
"Jesus," says Rick, and makes it sound like a warning.
Rena kneels and touches his wrist, then his neck, then his breastbone. She does this quickly and without hope because you are obligated to do both. She looks at the bruises and then at the fence wire three feet away and then at the low limb that reaches out like the arm of a mother you left behind at the store. She looks at the hands of the men with her, at their knuckles and fingernails, the tiny half-moons of turkey gore that could be anything, could be nothing. She remembers the argument and chooses to forget it in this way: she sets it aside like a hot pan.
"CPR?" Lorraine says, and Rena looks at her as if she has spoken a poem in a language that would have saved someone if only it had been uttered earlier.
"It's done," Rena says. She says it with a certainty that sounds cruel until you hear the mercy in it. "We're done."
They call it in on a phone that trembles in Rick's heavy hand. "Safety incident," he says out of an old habit. "Medical." He gives wrong directions first and then corrects them and then offers to meet the responders at the road and guide them in. He offers this like a gift and also like penance. The sirens take their time, because time is a thing sirens like to play with. The men stand in a circle and do not look at each other. The creek says the same thing it always says and no one hears it because they are too busy listening for something else.
One manager says, "Okay, nobody touches nothing," and the double negative gives him a strange moral authority. Another says, "Was he drinking?" and then realizes how it sounds and tries to soften it by adding a story about a cousin who died young and unexpectedly. Lorraine says, "Jimmy," like a prayer. Rena says nothing. She is going through the last few hours, stacking them in threes, testing weight.
I could tell them what the fence remembers: how the wire vibrated against itself and chimed, how a limb leaned and then snapped back, how a boot toe caught the white root of a cedar. I could tell them what the old oak remembers, which is mostly the way men talked to it when they were boys and how they stopped. I could tell them what I remember, which is Jimmy walking with his eyes on the ground like the answers were printed there, and something above him breathing out, relieved, and how relief can be the worst part of a thing.
But if I told them, what would they do with it? People like a culprit because a culprit is a shape you can put into a car and take away. Sometimes the culprit is a man, and sometimes it is the land, and sometimes it is the agreement between the two that neither will say what they did.
The EMTs come with their bags and their briskness. They look at the bruises and measure the temperature and shine a light into eyes that are already looking elsewhere. One of them asks if there was a fight. Another asks if there was a fall. Rick says no to both and sounds like a liar to himself. Lorraine says "we were hunting" and the EMT nods as if that explains all the small red constellations on clothing and the feathers glued to the Velcro. Rena stands slightly apart and examines the low limb. There is a shag of bark rubbed raw where a rope might have bit, except there is no rope and there are no fibers. There is a knot polished white by the heat of a very recent moment. She touches it and then wipes her fingers on her jeans in a way that is almost tender.
The sheriff's deputy who arrives is young with a belly that declares contentment or early despair; hard to say which from the outside. He asks the questions. He notes the answers. He notices the bruising and then notices the fence wire and then notices the low limb and then notices that he has noticed these in an order that makes a story whether or not the story is true. He says words like "asphyxiation" and "ligature" because there is a pleasure in naming, even here. He looks at the pile of birds and counts them and stops at thirty-nine because the number is a hand that grabs your wrist.
"Hell of a lot of luck," he says.
"Land gave 'em," Rena says, and then looks at the deputy like she's dared him to argue with the weather.
He does not. He puts a little circle of blue chalk near Jimmy's heel as if he is tracing a doorway for him to walk through. He asks Jimmy's friend to ride along to the station later and answer questions. Everyone assumes he means Rick. He doesn't. He means Rena. She nods.
Back at camp, someone suggests they start packing up. The suggestion hangs in the air awhile, then lands. There are decisions you cannot make in public. You must take them into a tent, into the dark, and make them there, where nothing you say is recorded except by what you carry out on your skin. The managers begin to fold chairs, the crew breaks down the table made from two sawhorses and a sheet of plywood that has BEEN HERE scratched into it with the tip of a screw. Lorraine picks up a feather and then puts it back down and then picks it up again as if fearing that this is how curses stick, by polite persistence.
"Do we… take these?" Kyle asks, and points at the birds with a face like a boy asking if he must finish his plate.
"Meat's meat," Rick says, because practical evil is easier to carry than impractical grief.
"Some of 'em," Rena says. She does not explain how she will choose. She does not explain that the choosing is not hers, really. She will take the ones that feel cool beneath her palm in the way that means not for you. She will leave the others. She has always known to do this. If she doesn't bother to teach the managers, it is because their lives are already full.
They haul the bodies into the bed of the trucks. The tags clack. The feathers lift and settle, lift and settle, like the breath of a sleeper. At the edge of camp, by my dead spot, a single feather stands upright for a moment in a trick of breeze and refuses to fall. No one sees it except me. I remember a winter when a man who stole cattle hanged himself here because his own rope knew how. I remember a girl who cut her hair and left it in a pile and walked out and never came back and how sometimes in spring raccoons use a curl of that hair as padding in their nests. I remember Jimmy, who once found a doe caught in a rope of turned-up wire and cut the wire and stepped back and let her go, and how grateful she had been to nobody in particular.
At the station, the deputy does not say much and asks Rena the kinds of questions that sound like they're about facts and are actually about alliances.
"Any trouble with him?" he asks.
"Jimmy?" she says. "Not from me."
"He have trouble with anybody?"
"Trouble's a story," she says, not unkindly. "We been working long hours and some folks talk like they forgot we all die. That kind of trouble."
"That sounds like everybody," he says, and she smiles a little comfortless smile that says now you're getting it.
"Any reason someone would want to hurt him?" the deputy asks.
"Any reason why the land would want him?" she asks back. He looks at her like she's a map he can't fold back right.
They let her go because letting her go is easier than not. Back on my 10.54 acres, the men in the box truck slam the doors. The managers in their SUVs check their mirrors twice. The feather in the cedar stand finally falls. I keep the low limb and the skid of heels and the purple necklace like souvenirs I did not ask for.
"You think it was…?" Lorraine starts, and leaves the verb off because she has learned something: that verbs can be crimes when they show up insisted upon.
"I think we ought to stop saying team-building," Rick says. He doesn't say the rest: and start saying luck took too much from us because luck has a memory. He doesn't say it because if he did, he'd have to change the when and how of his life. He will change anyway, but slowly and with a lot of pretending not to.
Rena takes two birds and throws them in the back of her car and drives home on roads that have been driven enough to memorize ruts. She will pluck them on her porch while her cat watches from the rail like a small judge. She will freeze one and cook one with onions and a splash of vinegar because meat from a day like this shouldn't taste like triumph. She will sit down and put her head in her hands and for the first time in a ten-year run of hard days she will cry, not because Jimmy is dead—though that is the engine of it—but because of the thing that came before and will come again. The thing that says: you didn't deserve it and you did anyway.
I am indifferent to class, to collars, to job titles that rise and fall like roads in spring. I am not indifferent to balance. You call it Mother Nature when you want to lull yourselves with a lullaby that ends in a kiss. You call it the land when you want to feel rugged next to something older than your hope. You call it superstition when the price feels unfair. I call it counting.
The creek carries feathers down to where a pipe crosses and drips rust. A boy with a stick finds one and tucks it behind his ear and shows it to a girl who has never seen a turkey up close and says, "See? They glow green in the sun if you hold 'em like this," and she does, and they do. A stray dog noses something that was hidden by leaves and brings it out, and it's only a zipper pull from a jacket but for a moment the dog seems to think it is a heart that used to beat. The coyotes slip along the edges, leaving notes that only other coyotes can read. Rena stands on her porch and the cat winds around her ankles and she says, "We'll be all right," without specifying who "we" includes.
At the office on Monday, somebody writes an email about safety protocols and somebody else writes an email about grief counseling resources and the subject lines are more similar than anyone notices. They print a black-and-white picture of Jimmy and pin it to the corkboard by the time sheets with a pushpin that has a red head like a drop of paint. The managers meet behind the glass and say phrases like "mitigate risk on off-site events" and "branding around sustainability" and "optics on the game meat thing." The crew meets in the loading bay and says phrases like "Who's got his dog?" and "Who's taking his shift?" and "He had a good hat." The hat is on Rena's kitchen table and she is looking at it like it might teach her a word she doesn't know yet.
They will say, if asked, that Jimmy's death looked like murder. The bruises knew their shapes too well; the world is full of hands, and some of them don't love what they touch. But the fence wire has a story and the limb has a story and the boots know something about where heels catch. The body says one thing, and the rest of me says another, and between the two there is a place where all your talk has to stand and wait.
You like endings. I have noticed that about you. You like the line where we say it stops. You stand there like tourists taking pictures in front of a state sign. But the boundary of these 10.54 acres is where a surveyor dropped his chain and then picked it up and said, "Good enough." Beyond it the cedars continue, and the creek keeps its idea of direction, and the dead spot is the same shape under different stars. The feather that Lorraine pocketed will work its way out of the lining of her jacket on a day in November when she reaches for a lipstick she never wears and pop up in the mirror like a magician's trick. She'll laugh and then she won't. Rick will wake up one night with his hands around his own throat and shove them away and then laugh and then he won't. The deputy will drive by the property slow on his day off and not tell his wife why. The boy with the stick will show another boy how the green comes out of the feathers and the second boy will nod like he believes in chemistry instead of ghosts and will be wrong and also right.
There will be other company retreats. Some will choose photo scavenger hunts and trust falls, and some will choose fishing in stocked ponds. Some will come here. I will take them the way I take wind and rain. I will show them footprints where no prints should be and I will let them get away with foolishness until I don't. Some of you will say curse. Some of you will say accident. Some of you will say that luck is just another word for the stories we tell to keep from screaming. You will all say "mother" when you talk about nature if you are very frightened or very sentimental. I will answer to any of these if it gets you home quiet and slow.
If you come, step light. When you cut, name what you take and mean it. When you divide yourselves into teams, remember that the creek does not care which side you shout your slogans from; it takes the feathers alike. There are dead spots. There are living ones. Sometimes they trade places when you aren't looking. Sometimes they wait for a number to be reached and then they open.
Thirty-nine turkeys. One man. The math doesn't need you to agree with it to be true.
I am heavier after. Not with ghosts; I am not a collector. With knowledge. You think the past sits down and behaves, but it is always standing at the boundary, one heel dug in, waiting to be called. The boundary here is a fence and a fallen oak and a line on a paper and a place where a man lay with his mouth open to the last thing he ever had to say. It is a place boys will dare each other to touch. It is a place women will sit and listen and decide whether to bring their daughters this way or not. It is a place where feathers snag on wire and spin like dowsing rods pointed at something you cannot have.
You will hear it sometimes if you live near. On a windless night, a sound like a gobble cut short, like a man trying to say "hey" and failing. You will decide it is a fox. You will decide it is a joke. You will decide it is nothing. This will help.
If I had hands, I would place the hat back on the table and smooth it and leave it there until dust softened its lines. Since I don't, I will do what I can: keep the grass from growing where the heels dug in, let the nettles stand thick in the dead spot, hold the low limb just so, and send the creek along with its white backs and brown shoulders and a ribbon of feathers that looks like a message in a language nobody living can read.
Something is wrong, unresolved. It has the patience of a cedar root in clay. It knows roads and follows creeks like ribs. It is coming downstream, bumping and spinning and catching and starting again. If you meet it at a culvert or where your children throw pebbles, do what Rena did: touch it and then wipe your hand on your jeans and let your heart make the shape of a door. When you dream, do not be surprised if your mouth is open and your hands are light and your feet are dug in and there is nothing pulling on you but the past. Do not be surprised if you wake holding a feather.
The brochure said perfect for a weekend retreat. It did not say perfect for a lesson, or perfect for a debt. That is not a flaw in the brochure. It is just the way words duck under when the water is cold.
You will come again anyway. You always do. And I will be here, the exact size you imagined me, and much larger, counting softly while you load your coolers, while you argue about routes, while someone looks back one extra time at the fence line and thinks: We bagged a lot. We got lucky. We got away with it.
You did not. But never mind. The creek is moving. The turkeys' iridescence doesn't care about your names. Somewhere on a kitchen table there is a hat and a woman looking at it until the cat taps it with one paw and blinks as if to say: see? There. It isn't going anywhere.
Neither am I.