ONE SATURDAY, about two in the morning, I woke up to this scratching sound outside. Below the bedroom window and a little ways off, but not far. I sat up in bed and listened. Lindsay, still asleep next to me, evidently hadn’t heard it. The sound filtered through her puttered breathing, and through all the middle-of-the-night sounds in the house. The furnace, the clock. Those sounds came the way they always did, in almost apologetic intervals. But not the sound outside. It came in flurries with long pauses between, some so long I’d think it was over with, but then it’d suddenly start up again in a rush, like wind bursting through a dead tree.

We were new to the house. Our first as a couple. We’d been living in a condo on the North Shore, a place I’d had for a couple years, a place that became ours when we got married. But now it belonged to another couple, themselves newly married and up from Atlanta. I’d hated to let the condo go. I never said it to Lindsay while we were house hunting, but leaving the condo, and downtown in general, was a kind of resignation. A surrender, even. Life, it turns out, is indeed unbeatable. The new place, bordered in back by acres of woods, was a kind of confirmation of this. Goodbye Tremont, goodbye Sushi Nabe, goodbye good times all around. But the new house was a nice place, no doubt, a good house with good bones, as they say, and ready for us to grow into it. And we would. Lindsay was three months along with our first.

I listened a while longer, drifting in and out of the darkness of our bedroom, and in and out of the utter darkness of dreamless sleep. I skimmed along between consciousness and sensory death, above and below the boundary. I was the lure of some eternal fisherman, who was cranking me in while, behind me, something enormous followed, something with teeth.

The next day, Lindsay was up before I was. I managed to fight off full wakefulness for half an hour. Eventually, I rolled out of bed and, still in my pyjama pants, padded into the hallway, through the sunlight in the living room, out to the kitchen. Plenty of natural light in this place, our realtor had said. What they all say, what they’d say about a dungeon, but in our case, it was nice that it was true. I poured coffee and sat across from Lindsay at the kitchen table. I sensed we could be lazy that morning. No places to go, no old friends in town, no family expected. I rubbed my eyes and slurped my coffee and let the sun, through the big kitchen window, crawl up and down my bare back.

Lindsay stared at her book, eyes wide with blue intensity. It isn’t always easy to capture her attention, but, man, when something captures it . . . whew.

“Coffee’s good,” I said.

She didn’t answer, but hooked the handle of her own mug and slid it toward her, lifted it, sipped, and set it down again, eyes on the page for that entire bit of table choreography.

“Must be a hell of a book.” I said it more for myself. It reminded me that there I sat, at our table, across from a woman who loved me.

“What?” she said. She lifted her gaze and it was on me now, fully. Back in grad school, I used to skitter wadded napkins at her, down the long library table, during our study sessions. She looked at me then like she was looking at me now – eyes half-squinted, jaw set. A smile barely hidden. It was the same thing.

“I said the coffee’s good,” I said.

“Oh. Good. I got a couple of bags of beans from that new place. That’s what this is.” She lifted her mug.

“Which place?”

“They have the roastery on Main.”

“Which roastery?”

She rolled her eyes.

I stood, popped bread into the toaster, found a t-shirt and threw it on, washed my face, and by the time I got back to the kitchen, the toast had popped and sat cooling in the toaster slots. Still, I dragged butter across it, jam too, and sat back down. Lindsay was still reading.

“Last night, did you hear anything?” I asked.

She held up a finger, one stab toward heaven, a gesture that froze us both. Several seconds passed. Then, in a flurry, she dog-eared the page, closed the book, and set it aside.

“You heard something?” she asked.

“Well, yes. But did you?”

“No. I slept all the way until the sun came up.”

“Did you dream any funny sounds?”

“What kind of funny sounds?”

“I woke up last night because I heard this, I don’t know, this scratching sound.”

“Scratching? Like what, like mice?”

“Outside. It sounded like it was coming from the edge of the woods.”

“Well.” She ran her hands over the tablecloth in opposite directions, along the edge of the table, slowly, then slowly brought them back together. “Probably a bigfoot.”

“A bigfoot.”

“We live by the woods, Jeff. Probably, I don’t know, a raccoon or a groundhog or a skunk. Digging, you know?” She made her hands into cupped little paws and bit down on her bottom lip so her top teeth stuck out, and then she pretended to dig.

“That’s cute,” I said.

“You’re cute,” she said.

“I’m handsome. You’re beautiful.”

---

SO, I FORGOT ABOUT THE SOUND. And made some real progress on the baby’s room that afternoon. I turned it from the drab grey it had been when we moved in, a colour you might find on the swatches at Lowes with a name like ‘raincloud’ or ‘wandering mist.’ Now, the room was a warm off-white called ‘cotton puff,’ trimmed in ‘lychee,’ a colour which featured, so it said on Lowes’ website, ‘a wink of peach.’

“It’s nice,” Lindsay said.

We squeezed ourselves shoulder to shoulder into the doorway to gaze, to wonder. I liked the way a freshly painted room smelled. It meant newness, and maybe predicted something great was on its way. The stern, invisible drift of fresh paint was a kind of foretaste. Greatness lurks, I thought, and here, in this room, is where it will arise.

“We’ll give this a couple of days and then we can slide everything in. Let it all dry and really cure,” I said.

All the nursery furniture sat in the third bedroom, which had so far functioned as a kind of dumping ground. Besides the baby’s furniture, the third room held all the boxes we’d still not yet opened and which, I guessed, would hibernate in the attic or a corner of the garage for the next twenty years.

“You,” Lindsay said.

“You.” She was beautiful.

“No, you. You will be sliding everything in. I will be carrying our child, thank you very much.”

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THE NEXT DAY, Monday, Lindsay went to her parents’ house while I was at work. She texted me to meet them there so we could all drive to the restaurant together. This was a deviation from our original plan, only slightly, where I’d meet them at the restaurant and Lindsay would order for me, in the likely event I’d be running late. As it turned out, an afternoon meeting, one I was sure would drag on and on, was cancelled and I could leave early. I texted Lindsay, saying I’d stop at home first, change clothes, freshen up, and then head their way.

“Okay,” she said, which I took to mean just that. Everything was okay. Had been, and would be. “See you in a bit. Love you.”

But, locking up and shutting the garage, I remembered the sound. And I saw, or heard rather, as I brought it to mind, that it had morphed in my memory. It went from the scratching I was sure I’d actually heard, to a ripping sound, like when you yank thistles and weeds from the garden. Quick, I ran around the house to the back and stood beneath our bedroom window. The woods butted our property thirty feet or so from the house. There, the overgrown blackberry bushes grew in and up and through the hardwoods and scraggly pines and everything was knitted together with kudzu. I’d tromped around back there a few times since we’d moved in, but it was mostly impossible to enter the woods from our property without a pair of hedge clippers.

I stepped closer and, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, stepped closer still, and when I was close enough to reach and touch the first five-lobed, low-hanging blackberry leaf, there was a sudden smell, an ugly touch in the back of my throat. I switched to breathing through my mouth, but even then, the smell was so dense, so heavy that I could taste it. I held my breath, parted the leaves.

And was this even possible? Seven or eight more feet in, but fully in so that it couldn’t be seen at all from the yard, was a dead deer. A buck with a small set of antlers. Its right hind leg jutted up from its crumpled body and angled backward and the upended hoof was wrapped around with kudzu – the vines, leaves, and thorns – and blackberry vines too, and other leaves and sticks had been tied into the snarl and stuck out all over. Just in front of the carcass the dirt had been scraped into deep, crescent-shaped furrows, and little plants – all these tiny green beginnings – lay shredded along the edges of the furrows. I thought he had been trying to get away from something. Even just the sound of something. A prowling coyote or maybe even a bobcat might’ve accidentally snagged its fur on some dead, dried-out twigs. That would’ve been enough to drive the buck into such thick growth. Or maybe something deeper, low and raw-throated and everywhere, some sound that predicted the inevitable incursion of a greater and much more violent thing.

The animal’s eyes, still open, had gone white. A long, flat, grey band – part of the intestines, I realized – extended out of a rip in the deer’s right side, the side of the caught leg. The band was stretched thin in some places, almost translucent, and it puckered and bulged in others. It wound through the brambles and the end of it, ten yards or so from the body, was shredded. What looked like a pouch, maroon and brown, bulged through a smile-shaped tear in the hide. I could see two full paw prints in dried blood up the deer’s neck from its shoulder, and a partial paw print on the upturned side of the head, behind the eye.

I stared for what must’ve been a full minute. Then I scrambled, back around the house to the garage, and grabbed a pair of hedge clippers. Silver and black blades, heavy and barely used. Halfway back to the animal, though, I stopped, spun, ran back to the garage, and dropped – literally dropped – the trimmers on the cement floor.

A few years ago at Christmas, Lindsay’s father had given me a mini-chainsaw. I think he thought I needed some more items of that nature in the garage, even as a kind of dressing, something to accentuate the kind of manliness he may have thought I had. Or needed. The chainsaw sat under the Christmas tree unwrapped, with an index card taped to the handle: ‘To: Son-In-Law. From: Dale.’ I’d only ever used it once, and that was just to test it, to hear the amplified grinding, to watch the chained blade melt something out of its way. I’d grabbed a two-by-four I had lying around, took it out back, pressed the running saw blade to it, and, while it sliced the wood immediately, I’d also lopped off a corner of our picnic table.

The battery was at full charge and I snapped it into the saw and toted it, dangling by my knee, back to the carcass. Squeezing my eyes shut, I gunned it and let it whine, then carved a lopsided oval out of the twists and barbs, sticks, leaves, green branches, and saplings all around the deer. The idea was to give myself some space so I could then step in and move it further from the house. But I knew it was only the shell of an idea, that I was telling myself something untrue.

I touched the running saw blade to the deer’s side and the hide peeled away in skinny strands, jumping from the blade in stiff ribbons and thick black blood and indistinguishable viscera too, and I held my breath and my eyes watered and brimmed and dripped so it would’ve looked, to anybody watching – thank God nobody was – like I was weeping over what I was doing. That I, what, grieved over my own mindless curiosity? I pressed the blade in further until the sound of the little saw’s motor changed from its high whine to a burbling, coughing grind. More black stuff shot up the blade in globs and the deer’s entire body quivered like a current was passing through it. The saw quit when it touched the loamy, saturated forest floor beneath the animal. And that was all.

---

I DRAGGED THE THING 50 FEET or so back into the woods as best I could, yanking it by the hind legs, jolting it up and over and through the cover that kept the sun from the ground even in winter when the leaves were gone and the roof of the woods seemed like the rafters of a burned barn. My jeans ripped and my shirt ripped and when I got the carcass to a little clearing, I dropped the legs and left it for the coyotes to finish. We’d hear sounds again that night as they scattered the bones. One last thing: I stomped the upturned antler where it met the head, kicked at it, jumped and came down on it, and stomped again until it finally snapped off. I picked it up and stumbled out of the woods, back into the yard, faced our bedroom window, and wondered if it was the first time I’d ever taken a serious look at our room from the outside. I was panting.

In the garage, I stripped and left my clothes in a pile and entered the house totally naked. Lindsay had texted twice and called too. No voicemail. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Splotched with pellets of dirt and pieces of leaves and the deer’s black slime. My hands, my forearms. Up my neck and under my chin in fine speckles, then up my cheeks and up my chin and even my lips. It looked like I’d caught the spray off a dark water wave curling in the wind. In the shower, I washed my hair twice, then made the water as hot as I could stand it and stood there until it started to cool on its own. While I towelled off, I called her.

“Where the hell are you? God, Jeff. Are you okay?” Lindsay said.

“I’m okay. I’m still at home. Something came up.”

“What? What came up?”

“Just work stuff.”

“You said your meeting was cancelled.”

“It was. Something else. I’m about to jump in the car, though. I’ll see you –”

“Don’t bother. We’re halfway done with our food.”

“You are? God. I’m sorry, Linds.”

She was quiet.

“I’m really sorry.”

“I have to get back to the table. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

“No. No, that’s okay. Thanks, babe. Just tell your folks I’m sorry.”

We hung up. Back in the garage, I stuffed the filthy clothes, along with my towel and washcloth from the shower, into a garbage bag and crossed the street and dropped the bag into my neighbour’s rollout trash bin. Inside, I scrubbed the shower with Lysol. Then, the sink too. Then I ran the scrubby over the walls. I changed my clothes one more time, then took all the laundry in the hamper to the washing machine. I dumped in detergent, much more than it’d normally need, and turned it on to the heaviest setting. It hit me, then, that I should’ve shaved, a thought that appeared the instant Lindsay got home. I saw her car coming down the drive and beat her to the front door and opened it for her. There she stood on the porch, key in hand.

“I’m really sorry,” I started.

She angled past me into the hall, turned, took off her coat, and stared at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, “Were your parents pissed?”

“No, they weren’t. I told them what you told me.”

“Work. Yeah. I’m sorry, babe.”

I followed her down the hall to our room, thinking I’d explain more, thinking even to tell her what I’d actually – what was it that I’d actually done? I stopped just before our doorway, and leaned on the wall.

Well, I’d moved a dead animal away from our house. That will, for one thing, keep other more dangerous animals, like coyotes, away. Plus, the rotten reek would stay in the woods and not – goddammit, the chainsaw. The chainsaw. Probably in the garage. Was it?

“Hey.”

I stepped into our bedroom.

“What’s that?” She was looking at herself in the mirror above her dresser. She was taking out her earrings. When she saw me in the mirror, she pointed to the antler. I didn’t even remember carrying it inside.

“Oh. I found it out there.” I waved toward the window. “In the yard by the woods. When I got home. It was just sitting out there. It’s an antler from a deer.”

“Right,” she said, “I know what it is. Why is it sitting in the middle of the bed?”

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