Kelly Dulaney
The Deer
My mother moves through my first memories under bitter oak, barefoot in spite of the strange, sharp thaw, walking the deer path to the creekhead. Her hair is loose and wild. Sweat pools at the bottom of her back, staining her shirt. Shh, she says. Birds shake the boughs. My mother watches the trees, their wallowheave, their low roll when the wind comes. She tilts her whole body backwards, skyscum swelling her eyes.
It must be noon.
We have been following a family of deer up the canyon. All morning my mother has shown us dropped dung. Now my brother bleats in the underbrush. I shout. We make our mother see what we see:
The creekwater rolls west.
The rut ends in flowering weeds and a barbwire fence.
Beyond it, indeterminate animals dip their heads and drink down the creek.
Clouds smother the sun. Cold air comes down into the canyon in glassy slabs. My mother shivers and pulls the bottommost barbwire up in a fist, making a passage. Let’s go, she says. Hurry.
The tight wire about to make a white scar in her skin.
The white light dripping down her wrist like milk.
That passed; this also may.
There’s a folktale about mothers and brothers and deer, told in three sets of three when winter was still a season. In it, a brother and a sister pick switches in a dark wood. Wind whips the wildgrass, scraping their shins and ankles. Trees sway. Sap sweetens the air. The sun is an old bruise in a battered sky.
We should run away, the brother says.
The sister straightens and stares into the wind’s root, hair in her lashes, hair slapping her shut mouth. The wind plucks at her eyes, her pale wrists. It’s warm, stinks of animal skin. The sister drops her switches and says, Then we need to go now.
They wander the dark wood, lit with a raw, lumped light. All the oaks have lost their summer color. Their leaves lay in limp, soft arcs, shaking like loose strips of fresh skin.
A river splits the trees, slipping by slow and thick. The brother and the sister pause there. The sister skims its surfacefilm with her fingers, shuts her eyes, and feels in her fingertips the way the water’s undercurrent weaves a magic trap: Black and brown animals drink down the river. They wade the shallows, scrape fat fishes from out the round rocks of the riverbed with long claws. They loll on the riverbank and chuff, suckling at fishmeat, at fermenting fruit. They crawl under soil and sleep out the snow. When they wake, they pull apart granite rocks, eat moths, catch deer, catch her—and open up her gut, pulling apart her organs like greased, wet weeds.
The brother cups his hands. He bends beside the river to drink. No, the sister says. She holds his body back, her hands on his shoulder. Pulling him away from the riverbank. Blinking back what only she has seen.
They wander the dark wood, breathless beneath the red rattle of dry leaves, licking windburnt lips. The air is absent of moisture. The trees fall apart: branches snap underfoot; leaves break like burned hides.
Here, a river runs like a cut vein, iceclots in its waters, at its edges. The sister will not touch it. She waves an open hand over it and again feels the inflexible threads of a magic trap: Gray animals drink down the river. They gather where the shore slopes, nipping at each others’ necks, skulking in shadows and tall tufts of sourgrass. Dusk sickens the sky and the gray animals growl, moan. When snow falls so thick that deer can’t run, they pull one apart, eat it, let other animals take the red remainder, take her, too, as a surplus kill—and open an artery in her neck, spilling her heartbeat across the snow.
Again, the brother cups his hands, bends beside the river.
Again, she holds his body back, her hands on his. Pulling him into the trees. Breathing hard at something only she has seen.
They wander the dark wood, shivering. Their feet sink into snowpelt; they pinch themselves pink against the cold. The branches, bare here, clack like antlers. Every oak is white with ice.
A river surfaces from the snow in a sudden rush of water, separating the sister from the brother. White light barbs its waters, exposing the silver needles of a magic trap: Deer drink down the river, then scatter at a sound. Their hooves make small marks in the snow; their ragged horns scrape the sky. They disappear between the bare trees—and the sister is left alone.
Again, the brother cups his hands, bends beside the river, too quick and too distant to catch. He drinks the river down, swallowing the magic trap. Stop, the sister says, but her voice is lost in the noise of the water. He drinks the river down. She gathers her skirts; she splashes across the ice and white waters, slipping over stones and up the opposite shore. He drinks the river down. Too late, too late, she holds his body back. My hands are heavy, he says, just before his fingers blacken. They curl, become hard masses. His limbs lengthen. His arms bend back. He falls forward into icepith and his body empties of all color.
A white deer.
The sister catches him before he can run, loops a leather belt around his neck and holds him in place, saying, Shh, shh. His wild eyes roving left and right; his wild heart beating back against her hands.
That passed; this also may.
I got an old word in my mouth.
I shut my eyes. I say it and see:
A white sun circles the sky.
Vapors slither behind it.
Oaks bend their branches and grow against the ground.
My earliest forefathers walk in a steep wintersnow, stalking prey animals into exhaustion. They nock arrows on sinew and drag back the string. Dheusom, they say without inflection, meaning any one animal and meaning many. Their children follow on foot, humming with the effort of holding the bow. Deuzam, they say, meaning any one animal and meaning many. And their children’s children, too, follow on foot, making ironsharp sounds. Deurz, their children’s children say, meaning any one animal and meaning many. Deor. Dier. Deer.
That animal with three rivers running from its rib.
That animal coughing out clouds when shot.
So the brother was always an indeterminate animal.
So the brother was always a deer.
But who wove the river magic?
In some stories, a witch casts burnt bones and webs into riverbeds. She was a secondmother once—was the woman who would spoon milk into the brother’s mouth, the sister’s mouth. But she has her own daughter now, a girl with only one eye, and she wants the brother and the sister dead, reduced to a red smear in snow. But their dead mother murmurs from riverbottoms, working against the witch’s magic, cracking open her own hipbones and snipping her own stitches. She becomes particulate: her marrow and meal rise to meet her daughter’s fingers and then she sighs, drifting downriver into the sea.
In other stories, there are no mothers. The rivers, pocked with animal tracks, weave their own traps. And in others still, there is no sister. There is only an unlucky man, crouching beside a river, and a naked goddess, washing out her hair in a cold eddy.
I know no rivers.
I have never watched water run in purple circles.
I was born to drought: only ice creeks and rocky springs claw canyons across that waste.
But my mother knows rivers.
My mother moves through her first memories in rivermud, watching black snakes slip through slow-moving water like split tongues. She holds her stinging fingers over the river’s shivering drift. She has hit her brother; her hands are red with slaps. She waits for the wind to rise and the water flashes with images of what will come:
My brother born a deer.
Her brother becoming one.
And village dogs dragging a deer’s head through the yard.
That passed; this also may.
The sister learns to hate the hard scrape of winter. Nothing grows in the garden. There is never enough to eat. Still, she makes a hovel a home deep in the dark wood, where the thatch is thick with butcherbirds. She weaves rushes into fishtraps. She burns broken boughs in a hearth. She goes outside and throws black ashes up into the air to see in what ways the wind will rise, and the butcherbirds scold her, snapping their black beaks.
Their oily eyes everywhere. The wood alive with their noise.
The deer brother in his animal instinct roams far from home.
Sometimes the sister follows after him and sees:
That white sun in the hogbacks.
That white snow in the mountain flowers.
That white deer brother, dancing in that cold kind of light.
A king comes through the dark wood, looking for late season deersign in the snow. His men measure tracks. His men bring him the deer brother’s droppings. Oaks rock their bare branches back and forth across the sun and shadows fall into his hands. A goodsize deer, his men say. Heavy. In its fat. We’ll do a midday drive and he’ll retreat along the ridge, where the trees run up against the sun.
The king nods, closes his fists.
They nearly catch the deer brother in a stand of small oak, eating acorns. He springs past them, snaring sunlight in his coat, flashing through bright snow. The king’s men cannot breathe—their eyes burn with white light and they blink it back, blink it back, and release the relay dogs too late. The deer brother dances and lopes away.
The sister watches through the trees. She sees the scarred face of the king; she sees his dumbstruck confusion. When her deer brother runs by, she steps across his path and stares down the relay dogs until they turn back, baying about lost prey.
The deer brother shaking snow from his back.
The sister leading him home on a leather loop.
A king comes through the dark wood, sober and slow over the rut where the deer brother was first found. The deer brother’s tracks hatch like empty eggs in the freshmud—opening over and under a woman’s small shoeprint. The king frowns. He holds his hand over the print and sees in it something he cannot name. Late tracks, his men say behind him. He’s come back. The same plan will still hold and this time we won’t be stunned—we’ll know to release the relay dogs; we’ll know to throw rocks to make a racket, so that he goes where we want him to go.
The king consents, stamps out the shoeprint.
They fill the hills with horn noise, blowing their breath at each other across the distance. The deer brother, asleep in leeside snow, wakes and retreats along the ridgetop. The king’s men drop rocks downhill and climb up with the wind. The king waits and watches for white movement where the ridge doglegs, ready to call down the dogs one team after another. But the deer brother is too quick to catch: he springs up and over the king, bounds between the trees, disappears down the other hillside, kicking up ice or snowclot.
The sister watches from a higher rim. She sees the king’s rough turning through the snow; she sees his gaping shock. And he sees her: his eyes widen, his body stills. He watches her. She holds his gaze in her own until his men gather around him, and then she withdraws into the wood where her deer brother waits.
The deer brother again shaking snow from his back.
The sister again leading him home on a leather loop.
A king comes through the dark wood, alone. He rides beyond the original rut, beyond the black shriek of butcherbirds, caressing his yew bow, strung with silk. There is something strange in this white deer, he has said to his men. There is an enchantment in it. We will not kill it in the usual way. So wait for me—come only when I call.
He finds the deer brother in open timber, sauntering in a sunlit stream. The deer brother’s coat shines with caught light; his tall tines glow like lit glass.
The deer brother dips his head to drink down the stream.
The king shoots.
The arrow moves as smooth as smoke and the deer brother staggers. blood running in three rivers from his hindmost thigh. He turns to the king, makes a rawsound, and then he slips into the brush oak. The king dismounts, following on foot. He walks for hours, the deer brother always just ahead of him, until he comes to a small hovel where no hopes roost. The deer brother flits through its open door. The king follows it and finds:
Unwashed walls and old straw.
The white deer brother, bleating alarm and bright with blood.
The sister in all animal furs, smeared with black ash and dirt.
Why are you in this wood? she asks, her face feverish with rage.
The king can barely breathe, the sister is so beautiful—words hang fogheavy in his chest. This is no wood, he finally says. This is my forest. Why are you in it?
The sister strikes at him. The king catches her hands and presses her to the wall where he holds her in place, saying nothing. Her wild heart beating back against his hands. His wild heart beating back against hers.
That passed; this also may.
I got an old name in my mind.
I shut my eyes. I say it and see:
Oaks waver in a white winterlight.
Rivers run thick with red foam.
Black smoke splits the sky.
William the Bastard comes across the land, slinging arrows into his enemies’ eyes. He walks through a wood where animal hides hang, buttoning and unbuttoning his coat. He walks through sparse settlements where freemen farm and sleep. Æt þæm ac, the freemen say. Atten akes. Atte noakes. This is the place of the oak trees; these are the people of the oak trees. But William cuts their tongues in two and takes the trees for himself. He loves deer more than his own sons, his chroniclers write. All day shooting arrows through harts and hindquarters.
Those slit tongues making an animal named Nokes.
Those slit tongues still moving in my mother, my brother, and me.
And now a new man has come to cut our tongues.
Perhaps he has already. Hopes have gone out of my mouth: I will have no children, will have no daughter, no son. I will spoon no milk into small mouths. My neverborn son will know no transformation. My neverborn daughter will know no brothers. She will never stare into the wind. She will never see some horned portion of her brother dragged across the dirt.
The world wilts in a pool of white light. Birds spear themselves on branches. Rivers run dry in their banks. Heat bleeds through the barren trees and I hike the winterwood without a coat, follow an animal’s spoor.
The rut ends in flowering weeds and a bloody bullet fragment.
It will be too late for you, my mother says. If you wait.
But my winter will not come.
The sister’s winter will not end. The king’s kingdom is a construct of flat stones and crude lichens in the dim cold. The sun rolls itself raw in the idlesky and its light touches nothing. Still, the king wraps her wrists with white silver, her shoulders with white fur. They walk out into the western gardens, where white flowers grow, and the deer brother follows after them, dancing across the ice.
Be my wife, the king says.
The sister lets a silence lengthen in her throat. She considers the scar that cuts across his cheek. Then she says, What about my deer brother?
With you as long as you live, the king says. It will want for nothing.
That night, she wakes to a sky gone sour with snow and watches candlewax drip onto a plate. It’s warm, stinks of animal fats. Shadows toss themselves from wall to wall. The sister shivers. She snuffs the candle, piles grainstraw in the corner and falls again into undreaming sleep, her hair strewn across her deer brother’s white back.
That passed; this also may.
The folktale does not end in marriage—it was never about that.
So why must the sister marry the king?
It is the way of things.
In some stories, the sister is an animal bride, webbed with fur. She does not wear furskin out of necessity. There was a reason my deer brother told me to run away, she says cryptically to the king. I was once a king’s dear daughter, my deer brother a dear son. The king peels furs in layer after layer from her shoulders, her bending back. Precious metals fall from the furs and clack across the floor. Broken rings and glassy rocks roll away from her feet. I lived like that for years in the wild, the sister says. In the cold. In the winterwreck. And even when the wind rose up against me, I kept myself warm.
In others, there are no furs. The sister combs out her hair while still in the wildwood and accepts the king’s offer with an immediacy, saying, Oh yes, oh yes! But you must let my little deer come, too. And in others still, there is no deer brother. There is only a woman asleep in a tree, and a sweating, swearing god, pawing at her long, numb limbs.
My mother moves through my first memories in the mountains, in the immature oak, foraging for rosehips at the side of a stream. Her feet sink in slow mud. The stream is greasy with light. There are no birds; there is no wind. Only a strange silence swells there. Ma, my brother says, but my mother does not tarry. Shh, she says. Let’s go.
It must be close to dusk.
We have gone further afield than before. All day we have driven the backroads, walking where they finally end. Now we wander in icy weeds close to our car. Now my mother calls out our names. She makes us see what she sees:
Vapors veil the sky.
Tire tracks overlap our own.
Cut strips of animal skin make raw shapes in between the trees.
We find one indeterminate animal and we find many. We find sharp shears, coughed froth. I examine a split strip of skin in old snow and begin to shiver.
The low light spilling across my eyelids in white lumps.
The strip of skin like a line of blood in a bowl of milk.
That passed; this also may.
The sister grows thick with child and delivers in darkness, laboring alone in the night. The infant arrives just before the squalling dawn, drops down into the sister’s palms. Midwives lift the infant away and peel back her bedclothes. You’ve bloodied the bed, they say. You must bathe, build your strength. You must scrub yourself raw and come back clean. They set her over silk satchels filled with dryherb and smallage and build up a bath, boiling water in cast iron cauldrons and pouring it over her shoulders. The sister, weak with her hours of labor, sinks into immediate sleep. She does not feel the way the water’s boil spins under her skin; she does not feel its bubbling silver barbs.
The bath boils and boils in a new kind of magic trap. The room fills with fire and smoke. No one knows to look in on the suffocating sister to see:
That white sun in the window.
That white steam in the raised rafters.
That white deer brother at the bath door, kicking at handles and hinges.
The suffocated sister comes out of her dark grave, stinking of soil long under snow, of oak wilt. She lifts her dead, burnt body from its trench and twists into the open air, blinking like a woman come out of a coma. Her hair is loose and wild. Fluid pools at the naked bottom of her back, where her white shroud dips low. The world around her is frore and flat—a place where scrub oak grows in irregular angles and stars eject out all their light. She stands alone in the deluge, cups her hands to catch it, and attempts to exhale.
Cold clots the night, promising snow.
She walks the frozen roads, raising a white frost in her wake, until the king’s castle comes into view. Its shape is black, its gate shut against the night. She shouts and shouts but the sentries never see her. She whiles away the whole night at the castle’s shut gate, placing footprints in the rotting sawgrass, making marks in the mud. Calling always for her white deer brother, her justborn baby.
At last, the morning sun rises and the suffocated sister evaporates in the dim light of the pale, pink morning.
The suffocated sister comes out of her dark grave in a stream of smoke and fatty oil. The sky is runny with scuddy cloud, with starlight; it drifts in a slow arc and the suffocated sister drifts with it, bypassing cold roads and shut gates until she settles amidst the white flowers and scant lanternlight of the western gardens.
The white deer brother is waiting for her.
He begins to bleat and dance, kicking over potted herbs and plants. The suffocated sister catches him in her dead arms and silently weeps against his withers, his neck, his nose, and he kisses her sunken eyes, eating up her salt. The baby, she says, and the deer brother leads her to a locked door.
They try the door again and again but cannot open it, cannot kick it down. The suffocated sister lays her dead body over the earth and a hoarfrost collects on her exposed skin like cold condensing on a glass. She cannot feel it. She scratches her name in the wet, cold soil and her deer brother scrapes his antlers through the sky, splitting it into scabbed sections. Then the sun begins to rise, tearing the sky in two.
I’ll come back, the suffocated sister says, stroking her deer brother’s back. Shh, shh. And she evaporates again in the dim light of the pale, pink morning.
The suffocated sister comes out of her dark grave thin with late stage decay. Her sinews are stiff; she moves as if snagged in barbwire, lifting her dead eyes up to see the low, black loops of sky. The starlight stagnates there, falls sallow in the hard snow. No wind rises. The suffocated sister slithers into the still air and drifts through the first cold hours of the night, moaning. She passes over the roads and the western gardens and the castle walls where on-edge sentries walk, raising lanterns; she slips through a slat window and spills strings of rot and ruin across the stonefloor.
The white deer brother is again waiting for her. He leads her up past the blackened keep where her body boiled and burned, up into the tower rooms where the justborn baby sleeps in an oakcarved cradle beside the king.
The suffocated sister bends beside the cradle, plucks apart the handspun blankets until she can see the whole body of the baby. It’s a boy. His brown eyes are like the deer brother’s brown eyes. His hair is all his own, a pale crown of sweet curls. The suffocated sister touches his knuckles, his toes. She strokes his back to still his shivers and lifts his little body out from the cradle, bringing him to her bare breast.
The king wakes.
He blinks at the white deer brother, at the blackened body holding his baby. And then he sees the suffocated sister for what she is: his eyes widen, his body stills.
You are my wife, the king says.
Cold particulate spikes through the air when the suffocated sister speaks. I was burned alive, she says, her voice dry and strange. I felt myself fill with white smoke. But you can bring me back.
The king kicks out of bed and presses her to the wall, the baby between them. He peels her shroud from her shoulders, scrapes away old dirt and faded flowers. He presses his palms to her heart. The suffocated sister shuts her dead eyes and the king’s pulse echoes inside of her. She opens her mouth; curdled clouds of smoke spill out. She coughs and begins to breathe again. Her heart begins to beat back against the king’s flat hands.
The suffocated sister returns to life.
That passed; this also may.
I got an old weight in my words.
But I am not so sure that matters, now.
Pale water runs through every iteration of the folktale, dripping from the deer brother’s tongue, the suffocated sister’s soft shoulder. It pools beneath their bruised bodies; it flows slow from their fingers, their eyes. It enters their mouths and the sky turns black or white, sprouting stars or swollen suns from granular storms of snow.
It binds them even when their blood does not.
In some stories, the suffocated sister’s return to life complicates her original kinship. The king calls her wife and strips her sisterhood away. Her dead skin falls to the floor in dirty flakes; she steps out from it rosy and white, her hair falling like a river down her back. The baby and the deer brother bleat in sudden shock but the suffocated sister tends only to the infant, kissing him all over and asking the king, Is he well? Is he well? She never turns to her brother, never holds her hands over his grateful, wild heart. Only later does she realize that the king has kept his promise after her first death: the deer brother was with her as long as she lived—and beyond.
In others, the suffocated sister collapses over her deer brother’s back, weeping in relief. She runs her fingertips through his fur; she says that she will never again go away from his side. In others still, there are no deer, there is no snow. The brother and the sister wander a dark wood in hardwon happiness and emerge from the trees to shoot arrows into an inland sea.
My mother moves through my earliest memories in a cold creekwater that courses like broken glass over crayfish and old, green stones. She does not stumble. Sure of her footing, she picks out a short path to the creekbank where oak trees roll with the wind, dipping bare branches into the wildgrass, waving away birds.
It must be midafternoon.
We collapse on the creekbank and my mother opens jam jars, juice packets. For once we are alone, my mother and me. She eats, watching the trees. I pick at flower petals. All around us, the creekwater sings.
Do you know what your maiden name means? I ask my mother.
She says, No oaks, I thought. No more oaks.
We lapse into silence and clouds cross over the sky, the creekwater. They break its shifting surface into barbs of bright light and the canyon flashes with images of what will come:
My deer uncle drowned in a pool.
My deer brother hacked down to his heart.
The way that deer die out.
See that? my mother says. A river is like a mirror.
That passed; this also may.
The white deer brother never sheds his deerskin. He does not need enchanted rivers to give him back his body—he can take any white and indeterminate shape, can live as any animal does in the wild residue of the wood. But he prefers to remain a deer. Out of his sister’s sight he dances, kicks up snowclot, drinks rivers down. All day he drags his antlers down tree trunks, filling the forest with his deerstink.
He lives again and again in this way. He does not know how to die.
The light caught in his white coat like milk and syrup.
The sun hanging in the distance like a bladder full of blood.
That passed; this also may.
I for a while was once like a deer.
In my memories, I move through small, white flowers and wet weeds, over rockslope, climbing alone into a canyon to walk along the oakcreek. I move like a root wanting water—barefoot, bent low against slip and soil. My hair hangs over my shoulders. My shirt is soaked in sweat. Ground animals run up into trees; birds make their song soft, strip it of color. The sun rolls over in the settled sky, dripping with white light.
For many winters I slept in the sun. I shut my eyes only to open them on endless troubles.
A heat passes over the world, empties it of potable rivers.
A new man erects black castles, counts out his coins.
A queen eats a deerheart, thinks it her daughter’s.
That passed; this also may.