French Creek Coon

Excerpted from French Creek

copyright 2011

I used to try my hand at snaring.  It wasn’t too hard catching coyotes and rabbits and such on account of they were dumber than me.  But coons were another thing.  They were smart and they were strong and they usually found a way to take what they wanted and get out without tripping the snare, which was probably why I wanted to catch me one so bad.

So just imagine my surprise when, one morning as I checked my traps, I found a big daddy coon caught just above both back legs.  His pelt was thick and full with winter growth and it would bring a good price if I could get it off him in one piece.  Already, he’d chewed half way through one leg trying to get free.  If I waited much longer, he’d chew through the other one and then he’d bleed to death and solve my problem for me, except there wasn’t much I could do with half a pelt. 

I had to kill him.  But how?

The best way to do it would be to knock him in the head, but I hadn’t figured out how to get close enough to do that without him getting in a few good licks of his own and I didn’t fancy tangling with those teeth.  Besides, who knew but what he had the rabies, or something worse?  As I was pondering on the situation, an idea came upon me and I dug around until I found a sturdy stick with a fork in one end, which I wedged beneath his chin.  I held him there, pinned to the ground.  He growled and hissed at first, and then he went still and just stared back at me. 

His eyes glowed like one of my marbles in the jar over the cook stove.  Gold and brown and swirly like, they were cat-eyes, flashing fire and looking deep and thoughtful at the same time.  He knew he was trapped. Being as how I was the one had trapped him, for that reason he hated me.  He also feared me, on account of I had him pinned to the ground with a stick around his neck.  I knew as soon as I let him go it’d be nine hands round—with him coming after me all claws and wild fury. But I couldn’t get enough leverage to whack him if I didn’t let him go. I had myself a predicament.

And then another thought come upon me and I frowned.  Maybe, I didn’t have him trapped after all.  Maybe he was the one that had me.

I remember a time when my sister and me loved each other, but we were younger then and had no reason not to.  I suppose as time passed and we both changed, it was only natural we’d grow apart.  Trees do that too, you know.  They have to.  They can only grow up next to each other for so long and then there comes a time they have to push away or they end up twisted together forever and you can’t separate them because they share the same roots, wear the same rings in their flesh, have the same scars from growing and then not being able to grow and then growing again. 

I couldn’t do that.  I couldn’t be like her.  So I guess that means it was me that pushed away first, but I don’t remember it.  I think I was scared of being lost in her shadow.  Of becoming not like her, but part of her.  I don’t know.  Maybe it was just that we were too different in all the ways that mattered and I don’t just say that on account of the years that separated us.  It was other things.  It was Father.

When me and Ma came apart, it was her that pushed first.  I think she thought I was the strong one out of her two children, and since she wasn’t able bodied enough for the three of us, she cut me loose, like a doe will do when she can’t make enough milk for both her babies.  And once she figured out she’d made the wrong choice, that I wasn’t the strong one after all, she couldn’t go back and change it.  We can’t go back.  I learned that.  Still, I couldn’t help wondering how it made her feel, or if she even let herself feel anything at all.  I didn’t.  I taught myself not to.  But then, that’s just how I remember it and there’s a chance I’m not remembering right.  It could be I didn’t teach myself not to feel after all.  Could be I learned it from her.

When she died, a part of me died with her. 

I stayed in the barn more.  Even started sleeping out there, in the hay above the mules.

I wanted to leave French Creek—God knows I wanted to—but I couldn’t.  My roots had grown into the soil, gotten wedged in between the red brown rocks of the canyon so that I couldn’t leave without tearing up the very thing that gave me life.  Sometimes I felt like that coon, one leg caught in a trap, chewing away on my own flesh to be free. Suppose with all that anger inside, it’s natural I turned out bad. 

Because, really, I never had much of a chance to be any other way.