Red Fox Tail

RED FOX TAIL (For Pete Ventrella, d. 1958) 1 Yesterday, hunting through a pile of bric-a-brac, faded photos, dusty icons, I found it again, the plumed tail of a Red Fox I tried to skin years ago, and gave back to the uncle whose name I took at Confirmation. 2 At the old barn behind his house, its door heaved shut under a tangled growth of wild grape, I kicked in the last gray shard of glass from one window, and entered, right leg first, groping for leverage against the webbed and viney darkness. 3 Some things hadn't changed in twenty years: four dog boxes strung taut with chicken wire; on a rafter, spooled like nooses from pole barn nails, leather leads and collars, only their brass name plates gone green and barely legible in the moldy light. But behind a shelf of medicines, leg traps, yellowed sporting magazines, one crammed wooden box I'd never seen or had forgotten .... 4 Red Fox tail — I paid it through my fingers like the rosary he swore he'd never learn. It was all I salvaged from a bad taxidermy job, the mangy flag of a death that kept us up all night, impatient under buckshot stars for that looping son of a bitch to pivot wrong toward my uncle's waiting gun. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW63 RED FOX TAIL 5 Forty minutes later, the dogs came in where the fox lay, cooling in the pentecostal dawn. I was kneeling, stroking its plush robed body, trembling to rehearse this kill with my uncle, as if it were nothing more or less than the time he stood for me at Confirmation, his gravel voice larger than the hand he laid on my shoulder when the priest served the brittle host. 6 Alone, bent close in the dank sacristy of my father's wine cellar, my knife whispered its secrets to the flesh — the fox opened like a crimson vestment. From the clustered mesh of blood and bone, a sickening odor choked the air. Hours later, I returned and cut off its tail. The fox went down, almost whole, its jaw creased with a smile, into the galvanized drum of trash, and in its burning, rose again, wicked as the left wing of God on judgment day. 7 Pete, Peter, Pietro: once I said I'd rather be like you than my own father. I was wrong, though I still think of you, the furious conceit of your passion, the final thrashing when death drew you down for a lick and a promise. Red Fox tail — the devious flag of memory — unfurled, dust shakes loose, then settles, thickening the blood to sacrament. ROBERT DEMOTT· •ROBERT DEMOTT is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio University in Athens. His poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Hiram Poetry Review, Four Quarters, and Windsor Review. He is the author of about fifty articles on literature and the editor of three books on American Romanticism and another on Hart Crane. 64VOL. 33, NO. 2 (SPRING 1979) ...