What is it? Milo’s face was ashy gray. His lips, normally petal pink—so pink that boys from school joked that he wore lipstick—had thinned into a pale slit.
Deer tumor. Our father carved out the lump until it began to separate from the fatty flesh and veins that surrounded it. Pretty good size. Maybe four inches across. He hefted the mass in his hand, the vibrant blue of his glove clashing with the dark, clotted red of the tumor. He dug into it with the fleshing blade, testing the resistance of the growth. Hardly ever see any this big. Mostly just warty stuff around the neck. Sometimes the groin.
Milo covered his mouth with both hands. A deep noise rumbled in his chest, a sound like gears grinding together, and then he turned and puked. We’d had tomato soup and grilled cheese an hour earlier. Most of it went in the big plastic bucket, but some of it splattered onto the concrete floor, with a few bits landing on our father’s shoe.
The buck’s eyes were open, surfaces glazed and beginning to harden into wrinkles along the corners from where the water had leached. Milo continued to vomit into the bucket as our father stalked from the table. He brought wet rags from the corner sink. He waited until Milo was done, still slumped over on the floor, before thrusting one at him. Get the mop from your mother out front and clean all this up. Everything.
The tumor sat on the metal table, my father’s knife still stuck in it. He took the blade by the handle and pressed on either side of the mass with his fingers until it pulled free. Wiping it against the other rag, he turned and offered it to me. Overhead, the air-conditioning hummed to life again. The breeze was cool against my neck as I took the knife. It was solid in my palm, the curvature of the handle fitting just inside the crease where my hand closed. He beckoned me around the table and I stood in front of him, contemplating the buck’s substantial bulk.
See there? He held my wrist, gently pointing the knife toward the open wound, now taking on oxygen and darkening. We’ll have to work around that. Can you get below the leg and take the seam around the back?
Being this close, I was enveloped in the odor of his aftershave. It reminded me of Christmas trees: piney and musky, a smell that wouldn’t scare off a deer. Behind us, Milo dragged in the yellow mop bucket. Some of the water splashed over the lip and onto the floor as he struggled through the doorway. Our mother called to him from the front of the shop. My father turned away from my brother and leaned down to whisper in my ear.
You’re a natural. Just like your dad.
It felt right; it felt like I’d been doing it forever. I could see the exact place I would set the blade and strip the animal, knew how we’d replicate the skeleton with trusses and padding and ruffed forms. I could see where the tanned hide would fit over the preparation: a strong, hardy deer, head uplifted, sniffing the wind. Inserting the tip of the blade into the opening, I pulled forward carefully. I let myself love the buck on the table. I caressed its soft, sweet body.
My father put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed lightly. Leaning forward, I braced my arm against the cool metal of the table and looked into the cavity where the flesh separated from the skin. In the dark heart of its carcass, I saw my future mapped out in gristle.
I was my father’s daughter and I loved him fiercely. We had identical hands and neither of us could roll our tongues. Both of us snapped using our ring fingers, which we thought was very funny. There were permanent frown lines etched between our eyes. We liked the crusts off pizza and the tartness of lemons squeezed in water. There was a security in seeing myself mirrored back. Our shared love of the animals; the way we could be in a room and stay silent, comfortable in our skins as long as we were together. No one knew me like him. No one understood him like his daughter.
Not so different from us, Jessa. He tugged my braid. Just guts and blood.
We were a family of taxidermists.
We were collectors, dismantlers, and artisans. We pieced together life from the remnants of death. Animals that might have weathered into nothing got to live on indefinitely through our care. Our heart was in the curve of a well-rendered lip smoothed over painted teeth. I saw my father’s hand in the ears of the rabbit he created for my brother the one that rode on a small doll’s bicycle. It was in the glass eyes of an albino ferret whose lids my father sculpted with the utmost tenderness. We created better than anyone because we loved it more, because we knew those animals better than anyone else ever could. It was ours because we fashioned it to be ours. My father molded me to assist him; to be the one who helped shoulder the load. He was the lynchpin that held our family’s world together, but I was the one who supported him. I could always bear the burden because he told me I was strong. Because he told me I was the only one who could.
I tried to tell myself this as I stared down at the blood and matter congealed on the concrete floor of our workshop. As I assessed the droplets that dotted the white cinder-block walls in a Rorschach pattern that my eyes identified as a butterfly, as two men shaking hands, as the entrance to a well that opened into something infinite. Let my eyes follow the sight line of the red mess, which had originated from the soft place in my father’s skull. Somewhere near the temple, but I couldn’t be sure. It was hard to look at for longer than a few seconds. Hard to believe it was real.
Behind me, softly, the radio played Randy Jackson.
He was in his chair, slumped over the metal counter where he’d spent so much of his life. Face down, head turned to the side so that I could make out the bristle of his mustache. The eye I could see was closed. His wire-framed glasses had slipped halfway down his nose the moment he’d fallen, one side bent crookedly behind his ear so his hair fluffed up to a graying point. He wore his apron over the plaid button-down my mother had gotten him for his birthday so many years earlier; the one I said made him look like the Brawny paper towel man. I could almost make myself believe he’d dropped off to sleep midproject, which he sometimes did. Working into the small hours of the morning, painstakingly stitching hide beneath the light of a gooseneck lamp. If he just woke up and grouched at me for staring at him. If he smiled at me so I could feel okay. If he were breathing. If there weren’t so much blood.
It was the whole animal laid out in front of me again; unnatural and unknown. That was the first collaboration with my father. This would be the last.
It hurt to see him that way, wounded and opened up to the elements. I allowed myself a moment to marvel at his face. It sometimes looked much older than its sixty-six years, but death had made him young again: his cheeks soft and loose, lips tender and partially open. His hands, always in motion, finally still.
Though I knew I shouldn’t, I took off his glasses and smoothed down the cowlick in his wiry hair. I moved his hands from the table and set them in his lap, one propped on either thigh, how he always liked to sit at the dinner table while my mother prepped the meal. I unbuckled the watch from his wrist with trembling fingers, the watch that had been my grandfather’s before it had belonged to him. The one I’d coveted because it was my father’s favorite and he cherished it. Things that were his that I wanted to be mine. His watch. All the best knives. The shop. His pride.
I picked up the handgun from where it lay on the floor. I set it on the counter next to the letter he’d left with my name spelled out in all capital letters. He’d taught me how to shoot with that gun. Taken me out to the backyard, just the two of us, and helped me pull the trigger. I was scared, but I wanted to look tough, because my father couldn’t stomach crybabies. He smiled and told me how impressed he was with my aim and my confidence. Put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, how he always did when he was proud of me. He was always proudest when I refused to show weakness.