The Devil Went Down to Austin - By Rick Riordan Page 0,35
winter light. Today she is not fashionable.
She is wearing a pair of boys' Wranglers, a longsleeve Tshirt, hiking boots, an orange down vest. She is not worried about how she looks now. She is with the one man she is not afraid of.
The air is cold enough to let steam escape from the cavity of the whitetail deer she and her father are field dressing.
She thinks of it as a joint effort. In fact, she does all the work, while her father stands nearby, drinking from a thermos, watching the lake.
He has green eyes, like hers, but they are cloudy, troubled. His hair has thinned over the years to a weak shade of pumpkin. His features are angular, like the eroded ridges of a chewed cuttlebone. She thinks of him as tall and strong, but he has already started his decline. The smoking and drinking, the bouts of depression - all this has begun to take its toll.
She cuts the connecting tissue from the liver of the deer, holds the organ in her gloved hands - a heavy thing, milky black like petroleum, quivering as if it still held life. She checks for disease spots. Finding none, she sets the liver on ice along with the heart.
Her father always insists on this - save the heart. Save the liver.
She tells him that the liver is healthy, hoping this will please him, but he just stares at the lake. She wishes his thermos held coffee, but she knows it is whiskey with lemon and sugar.
Her job done - the entrails scooped out, the carcass cleaned with fresh water - she wedges a stick into the deer's empty chest to keep the rib cage apart.
Her gloves are sticky with blood, but she doesn't mind the work - the cutting, the cleaning. There is something satisfying about seeing the mess, the chaos of organs - and slowly cleaning it out, tying off the tubes, avoiding spills that could spoil the meat, sorting the innards, leaving a clean and empty shell, neatly framed by the symmetry of ribs.
"Would you like me to clean your doe?" she volunteers.
Her smile is sincere. She hopes for a smile in return. She has been so efficient - learned everything he taught her, done everything to make him proud.
She recalls the time when she was about eight, going with her father to Crumley's Store. He had ruffled her hair, told his friends that he needed no son, that he had his best hunting buddy right here. She protects that memory - drinks from it when she's thirsty, keeps her hands cupped around it like an exposed pilot light.
Now, her father is not five feet away from her - wearing the hunting parka she bought him for his birthday, tattered jeans, the deer rifle he has had as long as she can remember, even before her mother died.
It takes him several minutes just to remember she is there. He has been watching the waterline, as if suspecting that even now, so many years later, the lake is rising, eroding what is left of his inheritance. Only recently, a third business failed on his property - another lessee defaulting on their contract. What little money he has invested in stocks is doing poorly. He doesn't share the worst of this with his daughter - not yet - but she knows something is wrong. She knows the lake is sapping his life.
At last he says, "I'm sorry, sweetheart."
And he looks as if he wishes to say something more, but his voice dissipates as quickly as the steam from his mouth.
She remembers that brief moment of clarity in his eyes, twenty minutes before, when he aimed the gun, brought down the doe with a single wellplaced shot. She wishes there were another whitetail deer to kill.
Her buck is a much greater trophy, but she is willing to field dress his doe as well. She wants to be shoulder to shoulder with her father in the work, touch his hands, smell his breath, even if it reeks of whiskey.
Instead, he sets his gun against the tree. He kneels, grasps a handful of dry leaves and cedar nettles, lets them slip through his fingers. There, at the highest point of their property, at a place where the food can never touch, he seems to be praying, and she knows instinctively that whatever his prayer, it will not be answered. Fourteen years on the lake have taught her to expect that.