Elvis: A Story of Love and Loss

Della wished to die at home surrounded by her husband, family, and friends. In those days, Della and Tom gazed proudly on their five daughters. But every once in a while, they would remind each other of their one son, Elvis. And there would not have been Elvis if it wasn’t for Aspen, the youngest of the five.

May was the picture perfect time of year in North Idaho. Purple lupines blanketed the high canyon walls. Grass, lemon green, sprouted lush from last year’s dead growth. The sun rode high in a bright, azure sky, and spring fever lodged in young hearts like the log jams of long ago. After school, Aspen and her friends vanished into the great outdoors. They waded barefoot in the roaring creek, swollen with snow melt, far down below. They scrambled up the banks to pick flowers and scoured the ground under the ponderosa pines for deer sheds. They concocted nests and play houses out of grass and sticks. They lit campfires and cooked popcorn in old black pots. They burned potatoes wrapped in tinfoil and poked them out with sticks. They romped in the cavernous barn tying rope swings to rafters and emerged with hay poking out of their hair and socks. They popped wheelies on their bikes, chased cats, and romped with their dogs.

“Have you seen Aspen?” Della called me around dinner time.

“She was in the barn a while ago,” I said. Aspen was never in one place long, and her zest for living attracted friends like bees to watermelon.

We all knew those calls because Aspen made herself at home in anyone’s house. But that went both ways. No one needed to knock on Della’s door either. She had pies baking at all hours, sourdough in the making, homemade soap setting, or bear fat rendering for the next batch of biscuits. For our cluster of families living in trailers and cabins along Carrot Ridge Road, Della was the heart of the party. And if Della was the heart, Aspen was the left ventricle. Hospitality poured from their small trailer like newly oxygenated blood pumped through the body. No one within miles of their home ever felt lost or friendless.

It was a Saturday morning when Aspen showed up on my front doorstep clutching a bundle in her two skinny arms. She stood pigeon-toed, toes peeking out from the two little holes in her floral keds. As she lifted a corner of the towel, a nose wiggled and two elegant ears swiveled. As I looked from the bundle to Aspen’s sweet face, I couldn’t tell whose eyes were wider, darker, or more beautiful. I sucked in my breath.

“It’s a little boy,” she said. “A truck killed its mother. I saw it.” Her eyes were swimming.

I knew right there, that neither heaven nor hell would separate Aspen from this newborn fawn. “You’ll have to talk to your mom, Aspen. I can’t have it in my house.” Deer were in superfluity in these parts, and it wasn’t unusual for neighbors to have wild deer around their houses almost as pets. Plenty of old timers offered advice: Only feed it goats’ milk. (No problem, we were milking two goats.) Wipe its bottom with a warm wet rag several times a day to help it poop. Don’t keep it in the house or in a fenced enclosure; it’s not legal.

Aspen named her fawn Elvis. An apt name as it kicked up its dainty hoofs and pranced with the family dog, Whitney. Often it curled up on the lawn for a sunny nap, its sleek nose tucked under a spotted haunch. It guzzled bottles, and trip-trapped into the house for a hand-out of old bread whenever the door was left ajar. Aspen fell into hysterics when its clicking hoofs slid on the hard floor. She scooped him up playfully and cuddled it on the old couch.  

It grew fat and strong, and when fall came, it simply disappeared. As the canyons filled with snow, we spotted cougar and bear tracks. Howls and screams punctuated the brumal nights as animals fought the eternal battle of survival--eat or be eaten. Was Elvis still alive? Animals grew bolder with hunger. Even the huge, magnificent elk crowded into the barn at night and ate the hay meant for the cattle.  

It was a Saturday and Della invited us over for dinner. She had worked her kitchen magic, and as we washed the dishes, our husbands hobnobbed by the woodstove. The girls read or watched T.V. Aspen sat at the window bench, hands and face cupped to the dark glass. Outside the picture window, in the gathering gloom of evening, a herd of deer pawed for grass beneath the snow. Aspen, tired of sitting, scrambled into her snow boots. As she exited the entry, the deer scattered. All but one. Its nose twitched; its ears cupped forward. All eyes from within the trailer’s warm glow, turned. The talking ceased. Through the glass, we watched nine-year-old Aspen step, step, step. The snow was deep. The solitary deer did not move. Could this be Elvis? Aspen stopped, observing every whisker, every reaction. Then another light tread, then another. She reached out a bare hand and stroked its now brown-gray nose speckled in snowflakes. It had survived!

As spring returned, Elvis came occasionally. Aspen kept us updated like a proud mother. Little button antlers were forming. It now had a girlfriend. Aspen’s summer looked to be another summer made in paradise.

But things changed all at once.  

One afternoon after work, I bumped into Aspen’s mother and father on the road. Their faces were ashen. Della had found a lump in her right breast. She stuttered out the dreaded word: cancer.

“It’s bad,” she told me. “But I’m not going down easy.”

Over the next year, Della fought battle after battle as she rode the cancer treatment rollercoaster. “I may lose, but I’m not a quitter,” she said. Often I looked at the little whip of a girl, Aspen, snuggled on the couch by her mother, now weak from the chemo. Aspen was a spitting image of her mother, and both lived life with gusto.

There were few things Della hadn’t tried, tried just for the fun of trying. She tended an enormous garden where she experimented with everything from flowers to vegetables, enough to feed a village. She backpacked and hiked with her family, photographing the best the Pacific Northwest had to offer. She took courses in art and started a business selling her canvases, original paintings of her photography. Things simply flourished under her fingers; Aspen would be the same.

Elvis, the deer Aspen had saved, continued to visit the backyard although increasingly wary. It survived a second winter and returned that summer with forked antlers, velvet-coated and knobbly. Della stepped out in her slippers and handed it bread. They say animals are wiser than people, and I believe this is true. Did the young buck sense the savoring of every borrowed day? It appeared, shrouded in early morning mist, majestic and dreamlike, then vanished as the sun blazed pink over the mountains.

Aspen always knew when she rescued the orphan fawn, that it wasn’t for keeps. Deer are wild things, and she knew it wouldn’t stay. Just like she loved her mother with the overflowing love of a child, knowing way too early that it wouldn’t be forever.

Della did not want to die in hospital. She died at home. Aspen lost her mother and I lost my best friend. No words could fill the void. My little friend, the house-hopper, friend to all, heart of the heart of the home, was now motherless. She had the same eyes as her fawn did three years earlier.

Today I try to care for her like her mother would have, try to love her as she once loved her lost, forsaken fawn. When I promised Della I would, she had told me, “Just like you do all the other kids, nothing special.” I am not only Aspen’s neighbor, but also her teacher.

What is lost is never truly lost. They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Della, like her daughter, had a heart of gold, and although she was turned over to the earth, I know full well-- gold does not decompose.