The Axe And The Pellet Gun

My mother cried when she saw my hands— torn, and bleeding, and quivering, the way that baby rabbit had shaken with fear after I’d wrestled it from the teeth of the family labrador. For she had warned me of the cold, as I went out in the morning, and gave me my father’s old brown coat. She told me to be vigilant of the axe, and gave me a sip of her richly black coffee, which had been obsidian in the halflight of the kitchen. I had sighed, and tried to refuse, but she was my mother, so it was futile. Throughout that day, until I came in with the flesh of my palms marred with splinters, and ripped about so that it had the same hollow color of white seashells, I smiled at the thought of my mother tilting that mug to my lips, and holding my nape, though I was nearly a man, in the way she had with soup when I was sick, as a little kid.

When she warned me to wear gloves, so that I “wouldn’t cut my hands,” I had not said a word, so that I wouldn’t lie to her. I had put the gloves in my back pocket, and smiled with a “sentimentality which was beyond my years,” as she referred to it, when she mentioned me to her sister.

She treated me with cordiality that morning, when I was to go out and take down the dead, decrepit oak. Once, the tree had been proud, and vibrant, and verdant, and all. A storm in the summer had broken a branch off of the sycamore, which was so grand in the patch of forest behind the house. It split that poor oak, so that no sagacity of nature or rare nutrient of the soil could have saved it from the fate I was to deliver. My mother would wonder, out the window above the sink, while she was cleaning plates, and rinsing silverware, at that oak’s crooked silhouette, so that it became an effigy of all of the goodness she had seen become diseased. For it was not a matter of mere aesthetics, that I was sent out into the yard with my mother’s stern expression, as though it were to war. Nor was it an obsession, as that of Captain Ahab, in which she would address abstraction with a direct rage she otherwise could not. The woman, for all her kindness and sensitivity, truly believed that that poor bare rampike was poisoning the morality of our family, but slowly, so that she alone was aware of it. But I did not take all of it nearly as seriously, as I sat tying my boots on the porch. Nor did I think my mother’s emotionality regarding that tree to be peculiar, as I traced the roof of my mouth with my tongue, savoring my sour breath of coffee.

The padlock of the shed was slick, and so frigid in my nervous hands that I breathed into them, to keep my knuckles from being sore. I brushed a cobweb from my sleeve, and smelled the gasoline and the nests of the mice. A faint veil of dust was set upon the sunbeam, coming through that little window, and the gravel softly crackled as I shifted my feet. The sky was pink and orange, and blue where the sun had not yet touched. As I closed the shed door behind me, with the axe leaned on my thigh, I looked over my shoulder at the broad blue hills which cast their penumbra over that little valley, in southern Connecticut.

I smiled, as I rested the axe on my shoulder, and a breeze rushed into my pores. I soothed my irritated skin with my warm palm, because it was scarcely spring. I adjusted my wool watchman’s cap to cover my ears which were raw with the cold, and tightened my jacket against my throat. As I went down that hill, I felt I was disappearing, as if I were Holden Caulfield crossing the street. When finally I was there, below that stark canopy of naked branches, and covered in its languid shade, I looked about myself, through the corridors of the trees, and the great mess of scarlet prickers and dry brush.

The first hack I took into the tree reverberated deeply, through the bones of my fingers, hands, wrists, and arms into my chest, where it stilled my heart. I grimaced, and loosened my grip.

I preferred to work without unnecessary breaks, so I swung moderately, and at a pace which would not put me out of breath. But, I would involuntarily grow more malicious with each swing, and my biceps become impossibly tense. Then, I would lean against another tree, smiling at myself for being so foolish, and relaxing my shoulders. Once, when I went reclining on a birch, I noticed a barn owl was set upon a branch across the little clearing, studying me with its eyes of black glass which seemed so disparately blank. I joked with myself that it was a visitation of Dante, as he was visited by Virgil before venturing in the Inferno. I asked the owl with my eyes whether or not he was to guide me throughout hell.

But my smile faded, and I wondered if I had gone insane. I returned to sinking the wedge of the axe into the bark, rather than be scorned by that owl which sat so proudly on its branch.

The next breath I took singed all of the nervous endings of my lungs, as I turned back to the rotten brown, yellow, and white of the stalk I had begun to sever. It was a sip of an ingenious air, which cleansed me of a decade, so that I was, again, a child. Although I could not see that owl, its figure stood before my eyes. For it had been branded there. And, in the grooves of the scar of that etching upon my brain was an indelible and profound melancholy, intrinsic to the owl.

I brushed my mouth, to render it the supple warmth of my palm.

I tried to tear the miserable flesh of that dead tree, but the axe stung my hand, so I stayed, standing another moment in my tense repose.

On an afternoon, that decade prior to my Hamletian indecision, I’d been a kid by my father’s side, in his old friend’s backyard. And it had been the mere three of us. We were sitting on plastic chairs, by a plastic table, having lemonade and hamburgers. My father was displaying to his friend, with the beard and paunch which were so grotesque in retrospect, the new pellet rifle he had found for me at a pawn shop. I recall that the wood of that little rifle was flecked with faint green at its edges, and that the bronze of its hinges were sallow here, and worn to orange there. They’d sat, speaking without discretion, though I remembered only my discomfort at their checking my face, to see my understanding. And the old fat man was drunk, having made my father likewise.

Then they had seen an owl in the crook of a tree, across the yard, which was so vast and vibrant green, to my recollection.

My father put the gun into my hands, and poised it against my chest. The two of them, with overripe red faces howled for my aim— rose, and screamed, and lifted me when that owl fell, as slowly as my father’s hand to my behind.

And they ran me over to a patch of leaves, where blood was gently curdling from that owl’s beak, which was wide with anguish, and from the black pit where I had pierced. When the owl ceased its writhing, I began clutching at myself with bitter sobs, all underscored by rage to which I could not, even now, relate. And though I was interior to myself, in memory I watched that child’s face illuminate with the red of savagery. I watched the owl, lain, its dignity crumpled, dead, and colder than the corpse itself— the red faces of those filthy drunkards, lifting me away, the red of the beard of that thick stain upon the white breast, and the blushing of my stricken face, flinging the wetness of my tears, and still baby fat.

My father held me on his lap, to quell my violence.

“Y’know, I cried when I killed my first crow,” began my father’s old, bloated friend, after a few moments’ listening to the rustling of the leaves. And though I did not submit to the meaning of that filthy man’s words, he had seemed so strangely sincere. It was as though I were a rare opportunity of his, to impart the sliver of wisdom which was singular to him. “I cried because I figured I had done wrong, and that wrong had been done to me. I cried because I had never known, nor had I been capable of knowing, such powerlessness. Because I feared I could not tread in such a realm of meaningless life, and purposeless death, into which I had been conceived, at my birth, and born, at my shooting of that crow.” He then studied the horizon, to imply a melancholy, and I pitied him dearly as I recalled him, in that clearing. “I don’t believe I recovered from that day, and I do not believe I was meant to recuperate the innocence of which I was stripped,” this he considered quintessential, and said without hesitation, or the reproach of my father. Perhaps I did not seem comprehending; “oh, kid, it’s not all so serious. There are so many birds to kill, but so few to cry over,” he patted my knee, punctually, and proud of himself, going into his house for beer. And I saw him, as I leaned on that tree in that clearing, so starkly vivid, retreating from me in my father’s lap into the house which was as distant from me as the pure gray clouds which had been darkening, as a blackbear into the unclear mouth of its cave, upon a hillside.

I swung, and stuck the axe in the tree. I sat down in the leaves, and did not weep, but grimaced horribly. There was no consolation in the vague pink and orange which made the heavens so austere. They felt especially cold to me. I smiled at myself for such a sentiment. “If I endeavor to think so deeply, I must be more truthful with myself,” I considered, toward no conclusion.

“Perhaps I should only strive to think more clearly.”

I looked back over at the owl, with its Alighierian nose. I was not aware of my slightly bowing towards the animal. Nor was I aware of the wounds I had begun in my palms. That owl’s breast was darker, but its wings lighter than that which I had killed. Such is the grief which follows such a climactic Proustian moment.

I wondered whether I or the owl was responsible for the thrall between us. I lifted myself by a branch, and leveled the axe, again. It was all such foolishness, in that clearing. The scornful eyes of the owl, the leaves shifting below me, the motions of my swing. I grinned, but could not force myself to any feeling.

Now, the tree began to bend. With each swing, the sparse breadth of those few, rusted leaves which remained rattled, and the dry wind would scratch my tired skin.

When next I sat the axe upon the ground, and leaned against a tree, I did not think first of the owl, but of how near I was to having downed that poor ruined tree.

And the owl had gone, and I had not watched it go. Perhaps it had become bored with watching me swing. Perhaps it had been foolish of me to be so inspired by the owl. Perhaps none of my considerations had been worth considering— perhaps it was out of pure weakness I had cried at the corpse of that owl.

I had made good time, and would have the tree down with a few more swings, and turn the whole of it to firewood by dinner. Now I moved the axe with great deliberation, so that the tree would go down as I wanted. The crack was sudden, but expected, and I stepped far aside as the rampike went with urgency to the ground. I surveyed the clearing, daring another tree to die. I smiled at myself for such fury.

I did not notice the blood I put onto the padlock when I went for the saw, or that which I left on the kitchen door. I did not perceive the red plush or the hinges of skin— as it was put by Sylvia Plath.

But I went into the house, still gentle with orange halflight, and I so full of pity for myself and for the poor owl, and the decrepit tree, and for the loss of sanctity of it all— and my mother cried, because of the rips in the flesh of my soft, trembling palms.