Fear of Death

Timor Mortis conturbat me.
– William Dunbar

I don’t know where to begin…

I watched the people file into the church. They arrived in a startling variety of cars– old and new. The hearse was large and black, parked directly in line with the center aisle of the church. I watched the beginning of the funeral mass in my mind, where everyone was standing quietly and the lights were glowing a dull yellow compared to the brilliant light outside. I watched the priest sitting alone in the rear vestry, composing himself. He hadn’t been a personal friend of the deceased, only the immediate caretaker of his soul. That was responsibility enough. I could have gone on to imagine the specific looks of the casket and the flower arrangements, with help from tv and movies. At 25, I had never been to a funeral myself.

Yes, I had seen death, felt its presence in my own life, but I had never faced it in a person that I had loved. This was unusual, I suppose, but my family was young and more or less lucky. My grandfather died maybe five years ago, but he was separated from my grandmother for two decades, so I never saw him when he was alive. In all my life, nobody close to me had died. One of my high school buddies died, two years after graduation, in a spectacular fashion, but I lived far away and was not able to attend his services.

That left me on shaky ground for the future. I was afraid of death,
in a way, because it was the event that would prove my life a waste. My ideas have always been grandiose, beyond myself, and I wanted to make my mark, to prove my existence, to shed light upon the human condition. Lofty goals. Death would end these desires, and, I was afraid, do it before I could do anything.

It may be human nature and human nature alone to reach for immortality. All species attain a variety of immortality through reproduction, but it is uniquely human to desire individual immortality. The sciences have failed us, there are no fountains of youth; eventually our bodies just give up. Sixty, seventy, eighty years and that’s it. If you’re lucky.

So I was 25, watching a funeral gathering outside a church and reflecting.
Every child meets death, usually by losing a family member or a favored pet. I had always had dogs– we lived in the country where they could run. Sometimes they didn’t come back.

But again, that is distant death, unreal, and, like the death of Jim Morrison or Elvis, you are allowed to harbor the thought that they are still alive. Final death, confirmed and undeniable, is much different.

It is a nice day, about 7am, maybe Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, the wind harbors fresh smells, the green grass, freshly plowed earth, the smells of spring. Your dogs, two of them, one beautiful mutt and one black lab, play with you as you wait for the school bus. You are in fifth grade and get to ride the early bus, with the high-schoolers, and you feel suitably grownup. You have not yet learned premonition, so everything is fine. You haven’t even learned foreshadowing in English class, so you don’t really expect anything to happen. But happen it does, of course.

Up the road from you is a large, open gravel pit. You play there on the sandy cliffs all the time until the old man who owns the land chases you away. You play on the big old frontloader that the town uses to dig sand with. You slide down the hills in the winter, sometimes off sheer cliffs into the soft snow below, never realizing the risk, just having innocent fun. But you stay away when the men work in there, and all day long the huge dumptrucks roar by– full, empty, full empty full. A couple of years ago, before your road was paved, they kicked up clouds of dust like smoke from a roaring brushfire, and you imagined them to be huge monsters obscured by clouds, enemies to be fought and feared. Now, the pavement has tamed the beasts and you even wave to the drivers, trying to get them to sound their fearsome horns as they pass.

Your dogs, on the other hand, have newly seen the trucks as beasts, to be driven from your (and their) territory. They run to the road and bark ferociously, snapping at the tires, just as they snap at the heels of deer struggling through the deep winter snow. Occasionally, a paw gets in the way and run over and your dog yelps a blood-curdling scream of pain and limps into the yard and the trucks have again become your enemy.
It is on this type of day that you hear a truck roaring down the road, through the woods. You think it is the schoolbus, a little early. You go outside to wit patiently at the end of your driveway. Your dogs are running circles around you. At the same time, you see that it is not your bus, but a truck. The dogs break for it and you yell after them.
“Patches!”
“Sam!”

Neither hears you as they intercept the truck maybe twenty yards from you. Deep growls and nasty barks as they attack the tires valiantly. Patches, the older, wiser, dog teaching Sam how to defend his territory. Patches darting quickly in and out of the way of the massive tires. Sam following gingerly. Your heart pounding, the schoolbus coming down the road, the sun shining early in the sky, you have to pee.

Suddenly, a yelp, the dreaded response, your heart explodes as Sam hits the road, slides to the shoulder and is still. The truck slows and stops; only in response to you, as you run and scream, arms flailing, tears welling up.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t see him.”

Your mother comes running to the screams. The schoolbus is now only seconds away as the man picks up your dog and offers to bury him. Patches is gone, his ghost back in an unmarked grave, he was one of the ones that never came home. Your bus is here and you are on; you stare out the window, numb, tears streaming down your face. Debbie, a girl from your class, but not really a friend, tries to comfort you. “What’s wrong?” but there is no comfort.

The clouds threatened rain as the funeral ended and people walked slowly out of the church. On Sundays, they walked quickly, newsletter in hand, eager to catch the Bills game on tv; but now the pace was somber, respectful, uncomfortably so. I could see the faces of the people who wanted to run to get away from the death and ashes and dust and run, just break away into the sunlight, run free, diving for immortality. Never would they turn and peer over their shoulders– they keep their blinders on, run forward only forward. But run they did not. They stood in quiet groups, loitering, exchanging small griefs and concerns for the widow as they opened their umbrellas. Then the casket back into the hearse. The widow, steered into her Cadillac, chauffeured away. The groups disperse. To the cemetery for burial.

The first time I went deer hunting with a gun was when I was 16. Sixteen is the age that you can get a big-game license that allows you one buck per season. It was strange to me, this entire hunting procedure, for several reasons. For one, I was old enough to hunt, but I had little interest in it. My younger brother Jimmy would have killed to trade places with me. But I had the privilege. I was given a shotgun to use by my father. I already had my own gun, since I was 14, but it was a .22 caliber rifle. If you shot a deer with a .22, it was said by my friends, the bullet would bounce off and the deer would stop and laugh at you before waving goodbye with its snow-white tail.

I could believe this because I had seen many deer in our woods, and heard stories of cars hitting deer and being totaled, but the deer kept going, bounding into the woods as if it had been shot by a .22. Big bucks had legendary strength and stamina and everyone knew of at least one huge stag that eluded even the best hunters’ attempts to bag it.

We lived in the country near a river that surrounded an island. The Island was a State Game Preserve, full of deer and canadian geese and mallard ducks. I think my dog Patches is there somewhere.

My father and I, we drove down to a neighbor’s house and parked our small pickup in the cornfield behind their house. Today’s hunt was special because it was the one day a year that deer hunting was allowed on the Island. The State accepted applications for bow-hunters and gave out a limited number of special permits. Bow-hunters are allowed to take either bucks or does, so it’s like a field-day for them, shooting at anything that moves. The funny thing is that the way the State’s process worked, all the hunters were from out of town, from the big cities downstate where there’s a dearth of native deer. Anywhere else in New York has plenty of deer, so the hunters didn’t need to travel so far to try and get one. The other funny thing is, because of the Island’s protections, almost every bow-hunter went home with a deer.
We locals knew that the best place to be, with a gun, was on our side of the river across from the Island. The city people crashing through the woods and underbrush drove the deer into a frenzy and many would swim across to our side to escape. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My father and I walked in silence through the cornfield to the woods.It was cold and dark but there was no snow on the ground. Usually, it would have been a poor deer-hunting day because of that, but today was the exception.

We made our way down the hill, into the woods, down quietly until we reached the riverbank. We followed it south until we found a good spot. My father hid behind a tree near to the water’s edge and directed me to do the same about 35 yards away. I found a relatively dry spot and kneeled and waited.

We had invaded Nature and not allowed nature to assimilate us. Slowly, though, the birds resumed chirping in the trees above us, and I saw a small red squirrel run down a tree and scurry around for food. With a .22 I could peg it, but with a slug from a shotgun, all I’d get was a blood-soaked piece of tail. So, I sat there and my thoughts drifted.

The last time I had been near this part of the river was a couple of winters ago. I was with my brothers and the neighborhood kids, exploring, playing and venturing bravely out onto the ice. We had aspirations of clearing a skating rink or even crossing all the way and running around the Island looking for deer. Late in the afternoon, I reached this spot and saw a trail down to the water’s edge and across the ice. I was drawn close and looked at the marks in the ice. Hundreds of hoof prints walked back and forth, embedded in the snow and slush during the day and frozen hard at night. It was a veritable deer highway and I was impressed and saddened at the same time. Impressed by the sheer magnitude of prints, when you might normally see one or two. Saddened because I remembered Patches.

Patches was the first dog I had. I got him when we were still living in Syracuse, just before we moved to Port Byron. He was my dog, I used to walk him in the morning and feed him. When we moved, he and I would wander around the countryside, wandering, flushing out pheasants, running through the gravelpits and cornfields.

One winter day, he went out and didn’t come back. I was frantic. So was my mother. She used to go out at night and drive around, looking. She never found him. She explained to me how dogs pack together and chase deer. He could’ve been shot by a hunter or gone across to the Island and been shot by a game warden.

But he was gone and when I saw the deer trail across the ice, I could only think of him, chasing happily after, just like he chased the trucks. Only the trucks didn’t get him like Sam. He could still be alive, I thought, looking at the ice, running free, eluding the wardens, more wild than not, I fantasized a meeting between us, somewhere, perhaps at the foot of a hill. I was climbing and there he was, sitting, watching. I would call out “Patches!” and he would turn to run at the sight of man, but hear his name and remember. He would remember the walks and runs and my arms around his neck as he nursed his tire-injured paw, He would sit and shake his tail and offer me his paw to shake. We would meet, both of us older, not as innocent, perhaps wiser. Then there would be a sound, a car or low-flying plane, and he would turn and be off, knowing that a gunshot may be close behind. But then I would know, I could stop worrying that he died for no reason, or, worse, that he just abandoned me.

I heard the men across the river before I saw the deer. They were off to my left, moving right. Then I saw the little buck. It was obviously injured, a razor-sharp arrow through a front leg, and maybe one in the rump. It skittered and crashed through the underbrush, still more graceful than the hunters in their fluorescent orange would ever be. There were three of them, closing in on all sides. The deer would run, then stumble, fall, panting for its life. Whoosh. An arrow, whoosh. Hit a tree with an aluminum-clank. In desperation, the deer bolted, crashed, stumbled and splashed.

It hit the water moments before the closest hunter would have killed it.
“Shit!” Echoed loudly through the trees.

It swam bravely straight for us. My father stood and watched. I watched also, transfixed, its head barely above the water, breathing furiously. It split the distance between my father and I and stumbled onto land. It ran jerkily for some few seconds then collapsed. I didn’t know if it was dead or not, but it lay there. My father walked over calmly and shot a single slug into its skull. The downstate hunters shouted their derision over the echoing gunshot, but this fell upon stony ears– mine were still numb from the gun. I walked over to the steaming deer as my father pulled out his knife. It was a tiny buck, no trophy, with one leg crippled by an errant arrow. My father quickly gutted him and we dragged the carcass to our truck. It was a difficult task, as I was small, and my father had a bad back. The deadweight refused to cooperate.

I don’t remember us talking much, but I do remember those hunters taunting us. I felt hatred then, against their stupidity, their citiness, their downstatedness. I did not feel the deer’s death was our fault or even our victory. I did not feel proud that we were forced to clean up after their sloppiness and I could only hope that they went home frustrated and, against the odds, empty-handed.

The funeral mass was over and everyone was home. I lost a few more dogs after Patches and Sam, but I was older and more able to distance myself. The Island has become unprotected since I moved to Buffalo, open to all hunters. I could only hope that Patches still wandered those woods, old and wise, as fearful of Death as I, making his mark with other dogs, teaching them as he did Sam.

And it began to rain fearfully, falling straight down, washing the steps of the church, cleansing the streets, falling onto my face as I walked