Tender
When I first pointed out the blood dotting the forest trail, my father said nothing—though not for lack of interest, as he soon followed the ruby droplets off the demarcated path and into the newly naked trees.
And, of course, I followed.
We didn’t go far. After several crunchy steps, my father’s arm reached across my chest, preventing further progress. He nodded to the forest floor. At first I saw nothing, but then, to my utter amazement, there was a small deer before me, curled up on the ground! It was as if it had appeared out of the very earth—some act of legerdemain. It sat perfectly still amongst the fallen leaves, and it was this stillness that had made it nearly indistinguishable from the trees that encircled it. The deer’s head was cocked to the side, its dark eyes open but glassy. A quick survey of its body revealed the source of the blood: A hunting arrow was imbedded in the deer’s hind leg—dead center of its right thigh.
While I remained at a distance, my father inched slowly forward. Upon his approach, the deer tensed, but it did not move. Maybe it was in shock, I realized. Or, maybe, it remained motionless because it sensed in my father a man who inhabited gentleness the same way energy inhabits the sun.
After an anxious minute, my father arrived at the deer. He proceeded to place one hand on the deer’s injured leg and the other on the arrow’s front end, just where it had entered the panicked animal. Surprisingly, the deer seemed okay with the contact—it barely reacted to my father’s touch. My father took a deep intake of breath, then exhaled slowly.
“This will hurt,” he told the deer, without irony, his voice soft but firm, and at that moment I swear I saw understanding in the deer’s tawny eyes.
All of a sudden, within the span of a single moment, three things happened: There was a flash of movement at my father’s wrist, the deer jumped up, and my father fell backwards, his hand still gripping the offending arrow.
“I think it will be okay once it heals,” said my father as we reengaged the path and after the deer had limped off. “So long as it can avoid being shot in the interim.”
“I don’t understand why it’s considered a sport,” I said indignantly, motioning to the arrow that was still in my father’s bloodied hand. “Sports are supposed to be fair, but hunters have arrows, and the deer have nothing.”
My father smiled and mussed my hair with his free hand. “Looks like you’re gonna be a pacifist, just like your old man.”
“What’s a pacifist?” I asked.
“Someone who pulls arrows out of deer.”
Just then a butterfly landed on my father’s nose. While charming, the butterfly’s antics were hardly surprising. You see, butterflies were always landing on my father. And he didn’t have to be amid nature for it to happen: They would find him in parking lots, on jogs, while sitting in the car at stoplights. Moreover, it wasn’t just butterflies who delighted in my father’s company: When mowing the yard, he always left patches of clover for the honeybees, and he had once used a wine glass to transport a cockroach from our kitchen into the garden. While my mother often scoffed at his softhearted antics, he was quick to remind her that they had never seen another cockroach.
“Are you implying that your actions resulted in a cockroach détente?” my mother once asked with a bemused smile.
“Didn’t hurt,” he replied.
That summer—the summer of the wounded deer, the summer of 1986—I was eleven years old. And even at eleven, I remember thinking my father to be an aberration. We had studied evolution in science class the previous year, and it struck me that a man such as my father—a man as decent as my father—could never have existed prior to the past few hundred years. The world before modernity was simply too cruel for such goodness to conquer. Or even endure.
*
The phone call came as we were gathered around our quickly cooling dinners—my mother, my younger brother, and me. My father was late. First by ten minutes, then twenty minutes, then half an hour.
My father was never late.
When at last the phone rang, it was a tender mercy—as if the bubble of anxiety that enveloped our table was finally permitted to burst.
My mother listened to the other end of the line for about a minute, then hung up the phone. Her face remained composed, but I could tell it was taking great effort to keep it as such.
“Boys, please put your dinners in the fridge,” said my mother. “We need to head to the hospital.”
I felt the words deep in the pit of my stomach and stood there frozen with dread, not unlike the deer my father and I had seen earlier that week.