The Ruined Corn: Winter Memories, Southern Illinois

When it snowed I knew it was time to go to the barn, because my father would come home from work early and want to shoot rabbits in the cornfield, and I would have to carry them home, hanging bloody from my belt. My mother would look at me and pour hot water into an old galvanized washtub on the back porch, and I would sit in it until she had scrubbed blood, dirt, and hide and I was fit, as she said, to come inside like a human being.

My father sat in the corner of the kitchen, curling and uncurling his hand around the hot tea my mother brought him, and watched her clean the rabbits, making a slit at the back of their heads before peeling the warm fur down their pink bodies. It was a ritual I tried not to watch, but I always watched it because no one spoke as she cleaned them under the faucet and laid them on a clean towel on the sink, then swirled clean water around and around the sink. Once, when he went hunting on a winter's night, I remember the moon floating in the blood at the bottom of the sink. It was more than a memory. But I didn't know what to call it then, nor can I articulate it now. But it's still there, as fresh in my memory as the feel of the rabbits hitting against my side as we walked through the ruined corn, our boots crunching the thin layer of new ice in the furrows.

My father never talked much, and even less out in the fields. He would touch my shoulder and point to crows rising out of the fields into the winter moon, and we would stop and listen to their cries falling into Turley's Woods as they became a dark V on the horizon. Sometimes he would not fire a shot, and we would hunker down on a dry log and watch rabbits poke their noses out from their den beneath the rotting stocks and hop cautiously around, nibbling the stiff grass sticking out of the snow. He never tried to shoot them then, and I wondered what the difference was. I think he had a code he followed: if he was walking through the fields and looking for game, then it was all right to blow them into eternity and bits and pieces with his shotgun, but if we were sitting down, just waiting there in the cold, he would not shoot them. I didn't understand his code entirely, but I never questioned it.

There was something in the way he would stand outside my door at night, listening, that made me afraid. I knew it was my father out there on the cold landing, but I did not know why he was there, why he didn't come in and say goodnight, or tuck me under the cold covers. And I would lie there, the moon in the window, waiting for his footsteps down the hall to their bedroom so I could hear the night sounds my mother told me were good sounds, sounds I needn't be afraid of. But when you're eight years old, sounds at night are not good sounds, and when I heard the horses stamp their feet in the barn, it could only mean something or someone was in there with them, walking in the darkness, watching the house, or when the wind whisked snow across the cellar door, I waited to hear the creak that would mean someone was opening the doors and closing them behind him as he made his way among the potatoes and onions on the clean shelves, past the cold room where milk was kept, and up the stairs into the kitchen. Nothing she could have said would have made it any different, and I never asked her if she heard the noises. I kept most things to myself, the way children do, for fear of ridicule from the adult world that children inhabit from time to time...