As they went down to the lower meadow, Wylie started to tell him about the pageant this coming year, and Grizz let him chatter, grateful for the distraction. “The real Hiawatha is nothing like the one in the play.”
“Yeah?” The tall meadow grasses heaved and tossed like a green sea in the wind. There would be enough wind to keep off the mosquitoes, a fine fall evening. If their parents were still at it when they went home, “making up” noisily in the bedroom, Grizz would walk with his little brother into town and buy them a burger and shake at the pool hall.
“The real Hiawatha was a Mahican, not Ojibwa. He was a warrior, a cannibal. He would have eaten a poet like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for breakfast.”
“I bet it would have given him indigestion.”
“What would?”
“Eating a poet with a name like that.” Grizz burped to prove his point.
Wylie laughed. The play wasn’t until spring, but the kids from the middle school auditioned for it in fall. It was the biggest event of the year. Everyone in town gathered on picnic blankets on the grassy hill above the amphitheater at the start of summer. People drove all the way out here from the Cities to see it. There would be beer for the adults, popcorn and Cokes for the kids. Longfellow’s famous Song of Hiawatha broadcast in an abbreviated monologue from grainy speakers while actors pantomimed the drama on the stage below. This year, Wylie had been selected for the lead part and couldn’t stop talking about it. At the finale, Hiawatha lit a flaming arrow that he shot in a beautiful arc into the black waters below before diving off a steep rock into the waiting pool. His little brother, the hunter in white doeskin. He was going to redeem the family name. They would no longer be the son of a poacher and drunkard, the children of a broken woman, whom people whispered about in the streets. Wylie, his lucky, good-natured little brother, was going to be a hero.
A FEW DAYS LATER the boys went deer hunting with their father. The only time they did not need to fear Dermot Fallon was during hunting season. The ritual of blood and violence calmed him. For days afterward he didn’t need to drink. He didn’t lay a hand on any of them.
It was still dark outside when they stepped toward the mountain. Their father had warned them about staying away from the road. Deer-hunting season didn’t technically start until the next weekend, but their father was not above poaching when it suited him. “What’s on this land belongs to me,” he often told them.
They positioned themselves at the edge of the woods, the father choosing one tree and the sons choosing another on the opposite sides of the meadow. These were old outposts; lumber handholds nailed into a tree trunk led up to a shelf of plywood amid the lower branches. The brothers climbed up and waited for the deer to come down to the meadow and feed at first light. Grizz loved it, the crisp October air, the flashlight carving a wispy trail through the dark. He loved the stillness and the cold and the creepy primeval screech of night birds making one last sweep through the woods.
Together in their tree house, the boys watched and waited. When first light came and went and nothing stirred, they whispered back and forth. Grizz taught Wylie what he knew about the world, which wasn’t much. Hang your coveralls in the barn the night before a hunt so the deer can’t smell you coming. You got to walk like this, on the balls of your feet, so the branches don’t crackle. Injuns don’t drink no water when they hunt; water makes a body weak. Crush a leaf in your fist and let it go so you know which way the wind blows. Don’t kiss any girls French style because it makes you go cross-eyed. Not even pretty Jean Fletcher; I seen how you look at her in church. Sure you say that now. What? The French style is when people get down on all fours like a dog. Sh! Quit your jibbering. Didn’t you hear that? A crow only caws twice like that when there’s something near.
They waited all day and didn’t see much more than a few squirrels scampering in the woods. A couple of times their father came over, and they walked the stretch