The Root Cellar

In November, while the rest of the Midwest dressed itself in blaze orange, she found her mind traveling further West, thinking about not the trophies,  not the stories men told around the stove after a successful season. Not even the deer.

She remembered the truck.

Three young men in the cab. The rest of them crowded into the open bed beneath a sky that hadn't yet decided whether it was night or morning.

Coffee sloshed from battered Stanley thermoses into Styrofoam cups that burned frozen hands. Every rut in the two-track road drove steel through layers of flannel and denim until everyone's bones knew they were awake.

They hunted because freezers did not fill themselves.

The mountains were still black when they scattered into the draws, each person alone with sagebrush, breath, and the possibility that winter might be hanging just over the next rise in the shape of a mule deer.

She learned quickly that death was more theatrical than she had imagined.

The knife's long zipper sound as it opened the hide. The body releasing what it had held, wet and final. Steam rising into the cold air. Dust settling into the blood beneath her fingernails. She was in awe.

And she loved skinning deer.

No one ever understood that. She couldn't explain the satisfaction of peeling hide away in one unbroken sheet, as though the animal were quietly becoming something else beneath her hands.

Later the carcass would hang in the root cellar, dripping patiently into a pan while the old beams groaned overhead.

Years afterward she would remember that cellar more clearly than any mountain.

The deer swung gently from its rope while another young man cornered her against the packed-earth wall. She can no longer remember exactly what he said, only the taste of stale beer, the cold mud pressing through the back of her sweater, and the absurd rhythm of the hanging deer bumping against his back, again and again, as though the dead animal objected where the living did not. 

She had a hunting knife in one hand.

She let it fall.

"Get off me."

Eventually he did.

Upstairs the family laughed, sharpened knives, talked about steaks and stew meat and how far one deer would stretch through the winter. She climbed the dirt steps carrying only herself.

The venison fed everyone.

The liver spoiled, as it always seemed to. 

The story stayed buried.

Until she was old enough to discover that memory is less like a photograph than a root cellar. It keeps everything that matters. It preserves what nourishes, what wounds, and what waits in darkness. Even after decades, nothing inside truly dies.

Somewhere beneath all that earth, the dirt still breathes, holds secrets, let's loose, silently screams.

Enough!

 The Root Cellar by Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
--Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.