Only one time before had she not recovered the animal, a two-point buck. And sometimes even now she let herself wonder how her life might have worked itself out had she and her grandfather found the animal on that October afternoon and made the hike back down to the farm before supper, before darkness fell and bad things happened. She was just shy of thirteen.
Both her parents worked on the weekends—her mother as a librarian assistant, and her father as a state patrolman. Every Saturday he would drop Amy Raye off for the weekend at her grandparents’ farm, about three miles south from the downtown of Lynchburg, Tennessee, where they lived. She would help with the chores, anything that needed getting done, from shoveling out the manure in the barn to pulling weeds in the driveway and gardens. She’d hike the game trails on the Highland Rim, swim in the pond. And on a lot of those weekends, her cousins Nan and Lionel would be there. Nan was a year older than Amy Raye. Lionel, Nan’s brother, was two years older than Nan. These three had grown up together, working hard in the heat, skinny-dipping at the end of the day, riding bareback and laughing about the way it made them feel between the legs. Behind the barn was a basketball hoop. When the girls were too small to make a basket on their own, they’d take turns climbing onto Lionel’s shoulders, and would see which one could make the most hoops. Lionel was always a foot taller than Nan. By the time Nan was fourteen, Lionel was well over six feet and playing varsity.
It was a Saturday afternoon. Amy Raye’s grandfather had said he’d been watching a young buck feeding up on the plateau. “He’s just the right size for you,” her grandfather had told her. Amy Raye had been given a .243 Winchester that past Christmas, enough caliber for her to take down a small deer. With her rifle slung over her shoulder, she and her grandfather hiked up to the plateau to settle into their blind, a small shelter made with plywood and two-by-four posts and painted brown and green.
By four thirty, they’d spotted the buck, and Amy Raye took the shot. But she’d gotten nervous and had jerked the rifle. She’d hit the buck at close range, about sixty yards, but he didn’t fall. She’d missed his vitals. Instead of hauling the deer down the hill and hanging him in the barn to process, she and her grandfather tracked the animal well into the night with high-beam flashlights her grandfather had carried in. It was close to midnight by the time they got back to the farm.
“Is he going to die?” Amy Raye wanted to know. “Is he going to rot out there?”
“You learned a hard lesson,” her grandfather said.
He was tired, ready to turn in. “Could be that he’s crippled up, that’s all. Take this stuff into the barn. Maybe we’ll have another go of it in the morning.”
He handed her his flashlight and his pack.
“I’m sorry,” Amy Raye said.
Her grandfather nodded in that deliberate way of his, holding his chin down over his chest and looking at her for a second or two. “Get some sleep,” he said.
He was a tall man, big-boned. He carried the weight of himself into the house. Amy Raye didn’t move. She wanted him to make her feel better. She wanted to cry. She imagined her own fists pushing down the ache that was rising up in her throat. He left the kitchen light on for her. After a few more minutes, the light to the bathroom turned on. Amy Raye could see it from the small window to the left of the bathroom sink. Then the light turned out. Amy Raye was fully awake.
Amy Raye turned away from the house and began walking toward the barn. Heat still cloaked the air, heavy in her lungs and on her shoulders. The barn doors were open, as they always were. At the back of the barn were a tack room and a large stall where a handful of sheep stayed. To the right were bales of hay, stacked ten to twelve feet high. To the left were four stalls. Van Gogh and Princeton were in the first two stalls. In the third stall was a Clydesdale that Grandpa Tomlin was keeping for a neighbor. Amy Raye had thought of Van Gogh, a light brown paint with white ankles and markings on his torso, as hers. She was seven when her grandfather had bought him, and she’d been the first to ride him.
Amy Raye hung the pack on a peg just inside the barn and leaned the rifle alongside the wall. Van Gogh pushed against his stall door and whinnied. He knows it’s me, she thought. “Hey, boy,” she said, walking over to him. She wanted to cry into his mane, and tell him how sorry she was for shooting the buck. Van Gogh nuzzled her shoulder, whinnied again. She climbed the stall door and wrapped her arms around his neck, her face pressed into his warm hide, and that was when she saw them, in the fourth stall.
Though the barn was dark, she could make out their shadows, Lionel’s long legs and broad torso, Nan’s thick red hair that bunched in curls down her back. She gasped, and as she did, Nan giggled.
“Hey, cousin,” Lionel said.