Chapter 10 #2
“Hard to tell. I’ve seen worse come through, so it’s possible. I’ll do the best I can, but I can’t promise anything.”
“Okay.” He was still holding the front of his shirt awkwardly in his hands, and he finally dropped it and smoothed it self-consciously. He glanced around the room. “This isn’t exactly what I thought a wildlife sanctuary would look like.”
“Oh, this is just the nursery. There are more squirrel babies in here”—I tapped the other bin—“but the rest of the animals are out in the barn. Do you want to see them?”
“Yeah, absolutely.”
I led him back out and suddenly became conscious of the state of the kitchen—the pile of apple peels I’d forgotten to dump in the compost, the collection of dirty coffee mugs in the sink, the bundle of rattling nigella pods whose seeds I needed to harvest. From the living room, the fawn watched us with bright eyes.
“Don’t mind the mess,” I said.
“Is that the fawn Chief Broder was talking about?”
“Almost certainly.”
“She doesn’t look rabid to me.”
I laughed. “Is that the line now? That’s pretty bad, even for him.”
He seemed to want to go over to the fawn, but something in me warned against it. “It’s not quite time for her to eat yet,” I said. “We can go see the animals in the barn.”
With one last glance over his shoulder for the fawn, he followed me outside. He trailed behind me to the barn door, and even though I’d seen nothing but gentleness from this boy, the back of my neck prickled. I hurried to the door and swung it open for him.
“Go ahead.”
Despite the warmth of the morning, the barn was still cool and dim, and he breathed a sigh of relief. “It feels nice in here.”
“It’s a good barn,” I said. “Cool in the summer, warm in the winter. But don’t try to pet anyone in here, okay? I don’t want you to get bit.”
“Okay.”
I took him slowly down the row, pointing out the tips of ears or the ends of tails within the enclosures; only one of the raccoons was out of bed and active, washing grapes in his water bowl. David bent down, keeping a safe distance from the mesh, and laughed in delight.
“I didn’t know they really did that. I thought that was just something they put in kids’ books.”
“Nope, they really do it. He’s being very thorough; some of them will only dunk it once.”
As we got to the back of the barn, which was open to create a cross breeze, he paused and looked out at the meadow and the woods beyond.
“That’s all yours?”
“That’s the real sanctuary. This is just the hospital, as it were.”
“Do you go out there?”
“Well, sure. I have to—to release animals, and just to make sure everything’s as it should be.”
“And there are real wild animals out there?”
I cocked my head. “What’s a ‘real’ wild animal?”
“Like bears and coyotes and stuff. Deer.”
“Yeah, those are out there. But these guys are wild too. In fact, lots of these are ‘wilder’ than coyotes; coyotes are adapting to urban environments fast.”
“Have you ever had to rescue one?”
“Quite a few. Had an old girl who stayed with me until the end.”
“Like a pet?”
“No, she was never that. She was pretty tolerant of me, but she stayed out here. I kept giving her the option to leave, but she didn’t.
She was tired, I think. It’s hard out there.
People think they’re just running through the grass with the wind in their ears, but they spend their entire lives looking for food or defending themselves or their young.
I was glad she stayed and could rest before the end. ”
David looked away from me, and I caught the quick movement of his hand across his eyes. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, I can see that,” he said, his voice a little rough. “It doesn’t look peaceful out there. It looks wild.”
I found myself smiling. “It is. That’s exactly what it is.”
I turned and went back down the aisle a little ways, giving him a moment to himself. He followed me again after a minute, his hands still tangling in his shirt. “So you really don’t need any volunteers?”
“It’s not exactly that I don’t need them. You’re the first person to ask about it in years.”
“Really? Don’t people want to come here all the time?”
“Not so much. People in Burrsville don’t really care what I’m doing up here as long as I’m keeping the possums out of their garages. I’m used to doing it all myself, and I’ve kind of gotten it down to a science.”
“Well, what if I was your first volunteer?”
I smiled again. “Look, I think that would be great, but I kind of got the feeling that your dad wouldn’t be too happy about it. He probably wants you to focus on school. You’ve got to be a senior, right?”
“Yeah, I’m eighteen, which means I’m old enough to do my own volunteer work. Besides, I’ll need that for college.”
I suspected it would all come to nothing even if I agreed—most people were all good intentions and no follow-through when it came to volunteer work—but I didn’t want to risk drawing Zeke’s attention any more than I already had, so I changed the subject. “Where do you want to go to college?”
He blushed a little, cracked a grin that made him look so much like Norman, my head swam. “Had to call my bluff, huh? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m even going. But it would be good experience either way.”
I sensed this was bravado, that he just didn’t want to talk about his father. I didn’t push, instead motioning for him to follow me to the feed room. I pointed to the sink. “Fair enough. Ready to wash some dishes?”
He mimed rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s do it.”
The bowls left over from breakfast were sticky with saliva, the guts of berries, the ends of mealworms, and the occasional string of flesh.
David kept a pretty straight face until it came to the fox dish, which still contained half a rat tail and a few organs that looked like they’d been thoroughly chewed, then rejected.
“Yeah, it can get pretty gross,” I said. “Although I usually prefer washing up to preparing it.”
“What do you have to do for that?”
“You really want to know?”
He paused, looking a little apprehensive. “Uh, do I?”
“Well, if you don’t, don’t open the freezer.”
He seemed to take that as a dare, shaking the excess water and soap from his hands to open the freezer door. He slammed it shut again quickly. “Holy shit!”
“Told you.”
“Where do you get all of that?”
“Roadkill, mostly. There are places that supply whole rats to rehabbers, and sometimes I have to get those if I have a lot of predators in.”
“But what do you need the heads for?”
“Predators need the whole shebang—ears, eyes, fur, brain.”
He went back to washing dishes, and I occupied myself doling out meds and vitamins into the pill dispenser I almost never used—usually I didn’t have time to fill them, and instead spent twice as long getting individual tablets from a dozen different bottles at mealtime.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked after a few minutes. “Like you have a live deer in your living room, but there’s a frozen head in there.”
I mulled over my answer, rattling vitamin D in the pill counter.
“Sometimes it does,” I said. “Sometimes I wish I could keep them all with me and never have to turn them loose. But they’re not pets, and dealing with the predator meals—well, it’s a good reminder.
It’s not like buying a steak at the grocery store, where you can just pretend it’s a thing that showed up in the package. ”
“Do you eat meat?”
“Not anymore,” I said, then added, “not if I can help it.”
We went on for a while in companionable silence after that.
I sensed his eyes moving over the space, taking in the bundles of plants and the little collection of polaroids—undated—I stuck in the battered metal cabinet where I kept the vitamins.
I didn’t take photographs of the animals anymore, resisting the modern world’s urge to document everything, committing it to social media rather than memory.
“What are these plants for?” he asked finally.
“Lots of things—healing, pain relief, sleep. There’s a plant for almost everything. Whether or not it’s as effective as the modern medical equivalent can be a toss-up, but sometimes it’s just what the animals need.”
“So you really are kind of like a pioneer woman.”
“That’s not what I would call myself.”
“What would you call yourself?”
Ah-ah, I thought. Nice try. I didn’t really believe Zeke sent his son to spy on me, but his questions were tinged with a fascination that suggested he found me exotic, strange, maybe taboo. I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t spill his guts out of guilt later.
“Self-sufficient,” I answered instead.
“I think it’s cool. It must be—I mean, it seems hard. But it must be sort of freeing. I wish I could do that.”
“You could. Just have to buy some land and get used to the idea of working every day and almost never buying anything new.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t buy a whole lot of new stuff anyway.”
I paused, unsure how to tread this delicate ground. “I’ve heard being a pastor doesn’t pay all that well—unless you’ve got a megachurch or something.”
“It’s not that. Pretty sure they have plenty of money. Mom gives me the whole ‘earthly riches’ thing, but I think Dad—” He broke off abruptly. “Never mind.”
I glanced over my shoulder from counting vitamins, trying not to appear too interested. “Hey, it’s not like I’m going to tattle. Sanctuary, remember?”
He laughed. “I think you’re thinking of confessional.”
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Same idea, close enough.”
He laughed again and went back to the dishes. For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t continue, but he finally did.
“I think my dad just wants to make sure we don’t look like we have money.
If I had a new iPhone or a new car, people might think he doesn’t practice what he preaches.
When I was in sixth grade one of my friend’s moms bought me a new bike because she felt bad about mine.
Dad made me sell it at the church yard sale and I had to tell her I lost it. Worst conversation of my life.”