The Whispering Wind

Papa handed me my first gun when I was three, or at least that’s what Mama always told me. “He always wanted a boy to hunt with, you know, but he saw you and he just knew that you would be his little country girl,” she would say with a laugh. “I remember him dressing you in camo the day we took you home!” 

I can hear her speaking them, her words echoing with the wind against the trees surrounding me, her Kentucky twang murmuring with the rifle in my hands. Though Papa always tried to get her to join us in our voyages for deer or squirrels or rabbits, she always said no. 

The summer breeze carries her response back to me, all the times I had heard it growing up, her voice like honey as she sips on sweet tea and laughs a laugh even sweeter. “Richard, you know how I feel about shooting those deer. They have done nothing to me.” Then, she’d look to me and speak over Papa: “Mary Dean, you don’t have to follow your father on everything. You can always leave the deer alone, allow them to enjoy a nice day of their own.” 

“Not today, Mama,” I would reply, a gun slung over my shoulder as I followed Papa through our backyard, acres and acres back, weaving through tree after tree. 

An old scene, the one I had lived through time and time again, played in front of my eyes in a continuous loop. It wasn’t until a deer approached me, a female, larger than any I had seen yet this season, was in range in front of me, that I snapped from my loop and focused on the task at hand.

My hand moves towards my trigger as I take aim, and a familiar sensation of butterflies against tidal waves arises in my stomach. A feeling of power against helplessness, the knowledge of what comes next, while the target in front of me has no idea. Power and weakness, known and unknown. 

Mama’s voice comes again, though now it is her loud weeps and muffled sobs through her closed bedroom door. Regardless of their differences in hunting, Mama and Papa were soulmates. When she got the call of his driving accident, she was more shocked than anything. They called her from the station, told her Richard had been struck by a pickup truck in which the driver had been intoxicated in the middle of the day. She dropped the phone and fell to the floor, leaving me to put together the shards of her heart that fell to the ground with her. It’s a tricky thing, helping another through grief while working through your own. However, for Mama I would have gone through my own grief a hundred times more. She struggled without Papa there to balance out her peaceful demeanor. 

As if the deer could hear the memories playing in my head, she glanced up to me, causing my finger to falter. She saw me, saw my gun, and continued munching the plant in front of her. The animal wanted no harm to me or herself. Mama’s words came again, heavy like the pickup truck that had struck my papa: “They have done nothing to me”. 

It was a tranquil feeling that washed over me - not one of power or knowledge, but one of peace and overwhelming calm. What had the deer done to me? What had Papa done to the man in the driver's seat of the forest green truck? What had Mama done to the world to have her soulmate taken from her? What had I done to God to have my Papa taken from me? What has the deer done to me? 

Some nights, I can hear Mama praying behind closed doors. She prayed for comfort, strength, and a mask to wear in front of me. A facade of okay-ness that neither of us had but both wore, strong for the other. Eventually, we didn’t need it. But the masks sat, in the back of my mind, just in case. 

Whether it be a gift from God or her own intricate person, Mama was given great strength. In her grief she found the courage to look Papa’s killer in the eyes, and say words foreign on my tongue: 

“I forgive you.” 

She had asked me if I wished to do the same, but I could not. 

The deer stares at me, and I stare back. A hole sits in my stomach, heavy and all consuming, demanding my attention as it weighs down the rest of my being. Mama’s words slam against my gun that is now heavier in my arms: They have done nothing to me. 

Instead of my mother’s words, I hear Papa’s. All the things he would whisper to me as we ducked behind trees or bushes, looking for creatures to fall into our traps and become our targets. His voice was louder now, the new wind blowing my hair and causing the deer to look up. A dead man’s voice still clear in my mind - I could only pray that the murmurs heard right now never faded from memory. 

The peace inside my body, the unfamiliar calmness and tranquility, pushes me to drop my weapon and step closer to the wide eyed animal. “I won’t hurt you,” I whisper, betraying my papa and all of his teachings. Mama will be proud of this inner calmness, relieved I have found it through such tragedy, relieved that a single deer that could have been our supper has gotten me to the point of utter peace. 

“I forgive you,” I murmur, my speech directed at the creature, but dedicated to the man in the forest green pickup truck that struck my dad after getting wasted at three in the afternoon. A silent tear falls, and I hear Mama’s voice, clear as day, ricocheting off each tree and branch and leaf: “I forgive you.” 

We say it together in harmony, hers in my head, but mine out loud, growing in volume. The deer runs, and, for the first time, I am okay with her escaping my gun point. I wouldn’t kill the animal that has done nothing to me. 

“I’m sorry, Papa,” I whisper, falling to the leafy ground beneath me. “I won’t hunt anymore. Not without you. I have to be with Mama now.” 

And I believed that somewhere, somehow, he was looking at me. Maybe he was frustrated by my giving up his hobby, throwing away the fifteen years he had put into making me a hunter. But if I knew my papa, and by God I did, he was smiling at my peace and happiness. I was moving on, and doing so with Mama. 

Emptying the bullets in my hand, I lay them against the large tree, the trunk too wide to fully wrap your arms around, that he loved to duck behind when a target was spotted. I look to the trunk, the bullets sitting at the base, and I smile a glassy eyed, crooked grin. “For you, Papa. Shoot a deer, wherever you are.” 

The breeze as I walked home sounded like a whisper just to me: 

“Are you sure you don’t want to get back out there and hunt, Mary Dean?” 

A resemblance of a laugh escaped my lips as I trudged back through the woods, an unloaded gun in hand, ready to return to Mama.