When We Were Civil

by Anna Villegas

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

conclusion

The crack of the Winchester startles me. I did not expect Clement to make the shot, not with a visitor sleeping at our hearth. After what happened to the family at Lilith Meadows, we had agreed no callers would ever learn of our guns; we had carpentered the cavity beneath the window sill for the 30.06, the slender priest hole in our bedroom closet for the .22. For a stranger who has filled us with longing for our Ross, we have violated a secret of survival.

One shell fired; one shell remains in my husband’s pocket. If he had to, if it came to that, a shell thrown into the forest duff would take a week to find.

In the minutes I’ve been in the storeroom, the temperature has fallen. I leave the cup in the rice barrel. Clement will need my help, whether or not the doe is down. The rain is turning to snow, big wet flakes that fleck my poncho sleeves like some deluded decoration. With the snow comes quiet, the dampening of raindrops as our forest seems to eavesdrop on a message from the heavens. From downhill, closer to the creek bed, Clement calls to me.

I answer. My husband’s name hangs low in the air, weighted by the falling snow.

“Good shot.” Clement calls back. His voice fades, as though the snow is intent on suppressing the sound of human interference. “I’m above the bridge. Below the hollow oak.”

“That a big gun?” Travis is so close to me he doesn’t have to lift his voice.

If I were not an old woman standing on a steep forest floor, a woman with faltering hips and a darkening cast of mind, I would turn on Travis in a second, reproaching him for failing to alert me of his near presence. I could have had a heart attack, I would shout at him, he scared me so badly.

Instead, I reach for the trunk of a pine and shift my weight, turning to look uphill.

“Clement needs our help. To drag the deer up.”

“Sure thing.” Travis steps around me and begins to slide as if he will fall face forward, then rights himself. His heels leave tracks of scored mud on the trail. Thick snowflakes are falling.

I cannot keep pace with him, so I shout: “Clement! Travis is here!”

Travis disappears down the trail, slipping and sliding on the clay slicked by rain.

“Clement! Clement!”

Then I am sliding too, full tilt forward without a young man’s balance, and I stop my fall by going heavily to my knees.

“Clement.” My warning is breathless, hardly more than a whisper. “Clement.”

It is my husband who pulls me from the forest floor where I have settled, keening. “El,” he says, lowering the Winchester, pressing me to his chest.

“She okay?” huffs Travis, climbing the trail behind Clement.

The doe is laced around his shoulders. Her eyes are closed, her beautiful muzzle bumping against Travis’s chest with the jerk of every stair step he takes up the trail. Once upon a time, Clement could carry a deer like that. Now, holding me tight against him, he takes my chilled hand and clasps the remaining cartridge into my palm. “My darling.”

* * *

“He was more than useless dressing it out,” Clement tells me, an extraordinary taint of scorn in his words. “I sent him to fill the water buckets.”

He is slicing thin strips of meat at the kitchen counter with a butter knife. He pauses to work his fingers, one hand massaging the other. Gripping and pressing sets off his arthritis; on an ordinary day, it would be my hands cutting the meat. “He showed an interest in knives.”

“And guns,” I say, quickly. “We’ll have the rice and the meat. Enough?”

“Fit for a king.”

“Where are the knives?”

“Somewhere nobody will find them,” Clement says. He raises the butter knife. “Somewhere good and safe.”

Outside the cabin, night is falling. The new snow softens the landscape so we cannot discern driveway from meadow or rock outcrops from daylily leaves. Inside the cabin, the lit candles cast orbs of light on the kitchen counter, the table.

“Will he find his way up the hill?” I ask Clement.

The rice is bubbling on the cook top of the woodstove. When it’s finished, we will heat kettles of water Travis is hauling for before-bed sponge baths. Maybe I’ll suggest to Travis that soaking his hands might release the grime from beneath his nails. Maybe I won’t. He’s not, after all, my son.

Clement studies my face. “If he can’t, well...”

“Do you think it will blow over by tomorrow, the storm?” I pull off my sweater and hang it over a chair back. Our cabin is warm, our supper a-cooking, my husband well. We have so much in so little.

Clement lowers the cast-iron pan holding the venison next to the rice. “When it blows over, he’ll go, El. I promise you.”

“See my table?” I gesture to the place settings, the napkins, the silver and china. “For one dinner,” I tell Clement, and he nods.

I expect Travis to eat more than he does. I ladle the drippings from the meat pan onto the rice, but Travis declines more. I take a third serving of rice. I salt it heavily with the shaker Travis has given us. Throughout the meal, Travis’s napkin rests, untouched, next to his plate. He wipes his hands against his pants and swallows an entire glass of water in one movement. There is no conversation, just the click of our knives against china, the thunk of a water glass set down too hard.

“I wish we had chocolate,” says Clement when our plates are emptied.

“Snicker bars,” says Travis.

“Brownies,” I say, “with butter cream frosting.”

“Tollhouse cookies.”

“Ice cream.”

“Fudge. With walnuts.”

“And marshmallows.”

“Stop!” Clement pleads, just short of laughing. “This is torture.”

“Thank you for the food,” Travis tells him. He turns to me. “Thank you for the dinner.” He looks out at the snowy forest and back at me. “I don’t need no chocolate.”

He pushes himself back from the table and rocks his chair. “How long you let that deer hang there?” The candle light barely touches the planes of his face. His eyes are unreadable.

“Depends on the weather,” Clement answers. “As long as it stays cold, it’ll keep. Then we’ll smoke it. Two days, Ellen?”

I nod. “I have raisins,” I say brightly to our guest. “Our own raisins. For a sweet?” I stand slowly, then gather the plates and stack them. I center the salt shaker on the table.

“No. I’m not much for sweets.”

“Not even Snickers?”

“No.” Travis shrugs.

“But I’ll bet you’d like a bath?” I point to the kettles on the wood stove, to our bedroom. “Not really a bath, but a cloth and hot water and some privacy?”

“No,” Travis says, shaking his head. “I’m fine. You go on—”

“Might be your last chance to wash up for a while,” I interrupt him. Clement watches me, willing me to silence. “Because,” I continue, “we’re going to pack you a bundle of that meat tomorrow. As soon as the weather clears.”

“Oh, I know,” Travis smiles his gap-toothed smile and winks at me. “I know. I don’t need no bath.”

* * *

Despite myself, I fall deeply asleep in my husband’s arms. We’d settled Travis with extra blankets in front of the glowing wood stove. He’d fussed with his backpack — I was hoping he’d changed his mind about washing — but whatever occupied him there eluded us, and we’d said our good nights.

Clement whispered in my ear, just as I was fading off, to tell me he’d hidden the knives in the owl box. “Owls have vacated the premises, anyway,” he said, tightening his arms around me. “Flown the coop.”

In midnight dark, I awaken. Clement has turned away from me. I pull the down blankets over our shoulders, rest my hand on my husband’s grizzled cheek. I can’t capture the sound which lured me back to consciousness, a dish clinking? In the dark frame of our bedroom doorway — we’d never bothered with hanging a door, what sense was there in it? — a darker figure moves, comes close to our bed. I shut my eyes, feigning the sleep of the fearless. Travis stands over us. I can smell him, this unwanted guest to whom we’ve opened our home. I can smell the travel on him, the long-unwashed clothes, the tang of his skin and his hair. I breathe in. I breathe out.

Travis moves to our closet. I can feel the gears grinding in his head, the calculations he is making. He steps into the closet; our meager wardrobe rustles as he pushes hangers aside. He must be running his hands up and down the walls, searching. A rifle hung high protects it from only a child’s reach, and I bless my gentle husband’s foresight in designing our caches.

Travis leaves our bedroom on stocking feet. I concentrate on his movement through the front room, the scuffle of his feet slipping into shoes. Clement snores and shifts. I tighten my arms around him, willing him to keep sleeping. After the door opens and closes and a waft of tattle-tale air reaches my face, I count to ten.

I slip from the covers and slide along the wall into the front room. The moonlight reflecting off the new snow has lightened the cabin. The Osprey stands upright, zippered tight. Our guest has not gone for good.

We’ve not been bad people, I tell myself as I steady myself on a chair in front of the hutch and reach for the cut-glass vase. We’ve never intentionally wronged anyone. We’ve tried to keep our footprint small, our wants smaller. We’ve suffered what so many others have suffered: the loss of our own dear boy.

The vase is empty, our shells gone.

It can’t be wrong to hope that Clement and I will die of old age in our own home, I think, as I tiptoe to the window sill and slide open the board on the Winchester’s hiding place. It can’t be wrong to imagine we’ll reach that end in peace, letting the world shrink around us until it holds space enough for only the two of us.

I ease myself into a kitchen chair. From its worn cushion — after Ross’s rough-and-tumble childhood, we always said we’d recover the set in burgundy felt — I work out the single cartridge Clement had palmed into my hand, and I load the rifle.

I rest my elbows on the table where, tomorrow, I will set places of china and silver for my husband and me and our morning meal.

I raise the rifle and settle it against my shoulder, sighting chest-high onto the front door.

The bruise from the recoil, its ugly stain, will not fade until our mountain turns the corner into spring.