Living Blue in the Red States

6. Trapping

6. Trapping Jonis Agee It’s Christmas Eve, 4:00 a.m., and my brother is dead. In some terrible way, it has taken his entire family. They will never think of December without that shiver of dread, like a pulled thread in a very expensive , rare cloth. It is a month, a holiday, that has been ruined forever, stained with the white ring of loss. His two grown boys in the military struggling like small children against the blizzard of the future, lean like the good soldiers they are—and are borne into the waste by the war in Iraq, which now seems like time without end. My visiting daughter believes that politics do not matter—a distasteful subject avoided at the dinner table by polite company, but politics are all that matter now. Without the discussion, we lose everything —soon, even his two children who actually believe in all that warrior fineness, a gesture so beautifully nostalgic that it leaves me howling in the bitter night cold. At my desk, I open Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, The Nature of Things, looking for some ancient truth, some words to take me past the end of the night here.“Men generally fall toward their wound,”he writes, speaking of both love and war. Tonight the moon is so bright, rising to fullness, that it lights the room and seems to heat it, though I know that even the new comet in the southeastern sky trails an icy tail. The coldest night of the year. Seven below at 8:00 p.m. and dropping, when the furnace’s specific pitch, more a yowl than a grumble or hum, comes on it’s so loud that it rattles the floor grates and we have to speak louder. 92 Trapping | 93 The land is down, quiet in this kind of cold, even the rabbit, usually scattering across the driveway, this evening stopped and blinked uncertainly, brown fur rumpled as if it had been tumbled from bed. It’s been a week since the deer were around, when the coyotes’ joyful chaos visited, howling and singing outside my bedroom window, just the other side of the fence, then chased down along the creek until they faded with the kill of the night. The cold has pressed them to the ground also. The hawk that waits in the trees hunting the fields for mice on the other side of the driveway hasn’t been disturbed of late by our departures, rising pensively into the sky above us, massive wings in slow motion touching the invisible currents with the assurance of a boatman easing into a river. The redtail a spot behind the belly that has turned white in the past weeks to no avail. We are waterless, snowless, without winter except for the arctic cold that has made my eyelids sting the past two mornings walking the dogs. Two weeks ago the furnace man came for the annual checkup and asked if he could trap the creek for raccoons. He seemed a nice young fellow, and something in his manner suggested that this supplement to his income was necessary for a young family. He was kind to the dogs who couldn’t stop jumping on him, licking and nipping the toes of his boots, half in love and half protective. He said that he had dogs of his own at home, and so I said yes with that reasoning that occurs just a step ahead of your brain. “I’ll order some more dog-proof traps,” he promised, his face devoid of guile, honest, open, almost handsome, just enough to have been trusted by the generation before him. Black hair and slightly amused eyes is all I can remember. Genial. His manner said you have nothing to fear from me, I fixed your furnace, for god’s sake. He appeared the following Saturday afternoon to survey the creek and confirm permission.Again, I said yes as he eyed the dogs, offering a hand to the youngest, who was using every ounce of will in his small taut body to keep from chomping down on the fingertips. Don’t do it, I urged silently. This time he drove a late model pickup truck, shiny maroon, fourdoor , and parked it in front of the yard gate as if he were visiting us. At first it only mildly bothered me. I kept thinking he would be [3.145.186.173] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 10...