The Fawn

My grandfather bought an old farm the summer when I was ten. It was on Jim Lane Road, a dirt lane just wide enough for one car that climbed a mountain past meadows, pastures, and maple woods. The farmhouse stood near the road. White paint was peeling from gray clapboards. Its windows were old, wavy glass. The porch roof sagged.

Inside, floors tilted. Plaster was cracked. A wooden workbench, dark with age, was against the wall in a room to the left of the door. I couldn’t count all of the wooden drawers. Each one was carefully labeled with a recipe card taped above its handle listing bolts, washers, nuts, and other hardware it contained. Pulleys hung on walls. There were wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, planes, and tools of every kind piled on every horizontal surface.

Mrs. Henderson, the seller, had wispy, white hair. She wore a formless floral print house dress and a white cardigan sweater despite early summer heat. She looked as old and fragile as the house. She bent over a drawer and opened it.

“Jim labelled everything so I would know where things were,” she said. “Now he’s gone and I don’t know what to do with it.”

A stone foundation was all that was left of the barn. Thistles and weeds had grown up around it. Stone walls of a bridgeway to the haymow rose to nothing. Ancient cast iron hit-and-miss engines with heavy spoked flywheels were parked in rows on what had been the barn floor. One was very large and painted orange. It was on steel wheels.

A hand-painted white sign in the yard with uneven black letters read, “Auction.” Cars and old pickup trucks began to arrive, parking on sides of the road. I played in dirt under an apple tree in the front yard as the crowd gathered. My grandfather mingled with the men. Smoke from their cigarettes, pipes, and cigars filled the air.

When the auctioneer began his patter, Mrs. Henderson bent over sobbing. My grandmother touched her shoulder and gave her a handkerchief. She brought her a chair.

“I’m so sorry about your husband,” Grandma said. “Sit down.”

“Once Jim broke his arm,” Mrs. Henderson sniffled. “It took a long time to heal. He would carry a bucket in that arm up to the spring. He started with it empty. He added a little water every day. It took a long time, but he didn’t quit. He kept on until he could carry a full bucket. That’s what kind of man he was.” 

The farm had not been worked in a long time. Fields were overgrown with goldenrod, milkweed, hardhack, and blackberry briars. Poplar and maple seedlings had sprouted, advancing the edge of the woods beyond stonewalls and rusty strands of barbed wire on leaning fenceposts. 

My grandfather had sold his herd of Holstein cows in 1965. He raised heifers for a while, but in the late 1960s, people from New York City, Long Island, and New Jersey were coming to the Catskill Mountains looking for land to build weekend cabins. He saw that there was more money in real estate than cows. He hired David Williams, a white-haired surveyor, to measure out lots and draw blueprint maps. Grandpa made “Land for Sale” signs and staked them into the ground.

He bought a bush hog, a red rotary mower with a single wheel on back that was powered by the PTO shaft of his Allis Chalmers WD-45 tractor to clear weeds and brush in the fields. Dad drove the tractor slowly. The bush hog moaned, snapped and growled, leaving short stubble behind. Little by little, stonewalls became visible. One could walk across the fields without pushing through hardhack or briars.

I’m thinking about this now, fifty-two years later, while I lie on the futon in our living room. Streetlights glow faintly through drawn curtains. Spider plants hanging in each window are shades of gray as if they are in a black-and-white photograph. Our black pug Pepper is warm, pressed against my shoulder.

I have just read “So We Must Meet Apart,” a series of epistolary poems in uneven free-verse stanzas by Gabrielle Bates and Jennifer S. Cheng in the November, 2021 issue of Poetry. Moments of clarity are written between wide spaces where time has been forgotten, like consciousness itself.

The line that riveted me was, “…tenderness is a point somewhere in the vast space between grief and hope.”

One morning, Dad left to clear the field below the Henderson house. The brush was thick. The field was rough. He came home much earlier than expected. He looked stricken as he came into our trailer kitchen.

“I ran over a fawn!” he said. “It’s still alive, but its back legs are all broke! I don’t think the mother is going to take care of it!”

Mom found a box and a couple of blankets. We left for Jim Lane Road in our six-cylinder Ford. Dad drove fast. He stopped by an opening in the stone wall. He ran out to where the tractor was parked. He scooped up the fawn in his arms and laid it on a folded blanket in the box. He carried it gently back and put it on the floor of our car.

I had never been so close to a fawn. The perfection of her spots and the size of her ears were astonishing. Her liquid brown eyes seemed to see into my soul. Dad drove slowly now. When we hit a pothole, she bleated. Mom put a blanket over her. The fawn put her head down and was quiet.

Dad parked the car on the bridgeway of my grandfather’s barn and slid open the creaking door. Sun streamed through gaps in the weathered vertical hemlock siding, drawing lines of light and shadow across stacks of hay bales. Dad made a bed of loose hay. He laid the fawn on it and put bales around her.

“Maybe that will help her to feel secure.”

Mom brought a bowl of water and a baby bottle with warm milk. She tried to make her drink, but the fawn wouldn’t. I pulled up some green grass and left it for her. That night, I lay on the narrow bed in my wood-paneled room in our trailer. I cranked open the window so I could hear the fawn if she bleated.

I knew she was badly hurt. I hoped she would heal. I imagined her grown up, following me through fields and woods. I wanted that more than anything. I thought maybe if I prayed and hoped hard enough, she would be able to stand and run again.

In the morning, I ran to the haymow. I slid the big door just enough to go in. The fawn was lying in the same place. Her head was up. She gazed at me. I petted her, feeling her soft warmth. Mom brought a baby bottle again. She tried to put the nipple into the fawn’s mouth. She still wouldn’t drink.

Mom spent hours trying to get her to drink from the bottle. I wanted to try, too. The fawn didn’t seem to know how.

“Please suck on it,” I pleaded.

A couple of days later, I woke early. I dressed and was ready to run to the haymow.

“Don’t go there,” Mom said. “The fawn died.”

I burst into tears. “Nooo! Nooo!”

Why couldn’t she live?! I loved that fawn.

Now, lying on the futon in the dark, I think about how the vast space between hope and grief can be traveled at blinding speed, and the hot, stinging helplessness we feel when our tenderness toward another being can’t relieve their suffering. I think about the ways hope can betray us and how we live at the edge of loss.

I went to the haymow that morning, anyway. I sat in silent light and shadow next to the fawn’s bed. Her water bowl and the grass I had brought were still there.

I could see her imprint in the hay.