John Everett Millais, JOAN OF ARC (1865)  /
The Mountain Goats, GENESIS 30:3

(via @mountaingoats on tumblr)

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HUNTING SEASON

THE NIGHT HE DIES, the boy begs Father for forgiveness—but to which Father he pleads to, he doesn't know. Was it the God-with-a-capital-G, the inevitable, the almighty, the one of eternal life and eternal love?

Or was it the man that stood before the boy, tangible, the man crudely fashioned of things so decidedly human? The boy can recite these follies like verse. Off-white smiles and skin stretched thin, like a pair of leather gloves well-worn from years of God's good, honest work. Bones burdened with five decades of too much vice and far too little virtue. A voice so hoarse from preaching and proclaiming that, twelve years since the founding of the Slaves to the Heart of Christ Anew, it sounds less like a man's and more like an animal's, one wounded and limping and bleeding. Begging.

Begging for death. The irony is not lost on the boy. Some things deserve to die, the boy thinks.

          But not you, he reassures himself. Not yet. Not for good.

          Focus, now.

Yes, focus. The devotion is in the ritual, the ritual is in the faith, the faith is in him. He knows what to do—this is his path, and he has walked it before. He will walk it again.

Again and again and again.

          Keep your head up. Don't drop what you carry. You won't be able to pick it back up.

          You won't be able to take it with you.

Off-white smiles. Skin stretched thin. The burden of bones. An animal's dying whine.

          What do you sound like when you die? he wonders, though he knows the answer. He knows the answer to his next question, too. What do you sound like when you live?

          Focus.

There are a few men in the town, who began with the Church but ended up here; it doesn't really matter what church, whether it's Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox. (When you come to the Heart, you become the Heart—the landscape of love is not a graveyard, and anyone can be buried here.) The men spend the better part of the year in quiet worship, their heads down and their hands clasped. But when the world turns the colour of a flickering flame in the first month of fall, a door is opened. A door is opened, a room is lit, and a lust is remembered. Shedding their piety, they enter with bright eyes, big stomachs, and hungry hearts.

It is a literal room, in the attic of the big house beside the town's church. It is sparsely furnished but these men, they find what they're looking for. In one box they put their faith and from another they take their guns and their bows and their knives.

The boy is not typically welcome, but he has accompanied them before. Followed them, more like, a sickly-thin sapling amongst the trees, a child among no fathers. He can see it now, return to it, as he treads that same forest, passes those same trees—the men, as they muscle over roots, duck under branches, weave between trunks. There is something artful to the hunt, and something disorderly.

It is too late in the year now for deer, and too dark in the night, but still the boy sees one, conjures it from the depths of his memory. It peeks through the trees and it's beautiful, too perfect for reality, a mass of gleaming fur, wreathed bone, innocent eyes. If the burden he carried was not so heavy already, the boy would have brought a bow and arrow.

         It is fall again. One of the men, David, spots a deer. David came to the Heart with sins that no prayer could absolve: there are places you cannot come back from, things you cannot untouch. Acts you cannot undo. This is one of them, or so you would think.

          David takes aim with his hunting rifle. The boy can hear his heartbeat. The boy can hear the deer's.

          David pulls the trigger. The bullet pierces through the eye.

          The men rush forward, a blur. Their knives gleam bright. Their desires gleam brighter still.

          The deer bleeds, but it is still alive. For now. Left alone in the trees, the boy follows its heartbeat.

          Some things are meant to die. But not you.

          Not yet.

Off-white smiles. Skin stretched thin. The burden of bones. An animal's dying whine. A boy's living cry.

What else?

The blood in his mouth. The flesh torn between his teeth.

The boy stops, losing focus, losing momentum. The night is cold and dark, and so is the ground. It is no place for a burial, but the boy knows nowhere in these parts he would want to call his final resting place. The forest forgets too quickly, but the town is all soil and trees and sin: it does not serve him, either.

Off-white smiles. Skin stretched thin. The burden of bones. An animal's dying whine. A boy's living cry. The blood in his mouth. The flesh between his teeth.

He reaches the clearing, as he has twelve times before. This, coincidentally, is where that deer fell down so many seasons ago. The boy puts down his burden—the one he has carried the whole way—and others come forward to fix it in its place. A cross looks wrong here, a perversion of root, leaf and tree, but when all is said and done he imagines a cross will be the last thing on anyone's mind. Standing in the clearing, surrounded by the trees but not protected, he watches the knives come out like they do every fall. What do the men call it? Oh, yes. Hunting season.

The night he dies, the boy begs Father for forgiveness—but to which Father he pleads to, he doesn't know. He supposes it doesn't matter. Both sent their sons to their deaths, and only one brought him back.

In a sick sort of way this comforts the boy as he waits for death. He plays with his hands, stares at the scars upon them. Warped and wending, they look like the roots of the trees around him, thick, dark, forcing themselves up and out of the earth. Again, the irony is not lost on him. Nor is the shape of these scars, circular like narrative, like life.

          Go on. Kill me, Father.

Off-white smiles. Skin stretched thin. The burden of bones. An animal's dying whine. A boy's living cry. The blood in his mouth. The flesh between his teeth.

The holes in his hands.

          Don't bother bringing me back.

An innocent animal. A heart that won't stop beating.

          I'll do it myself.