“Mama, why does Daddy get his name in the Bible twice, and mine’s in there just once?” I was five when I confronted my mother as she stood at the kitchen counter, barefoot in her sleeveless blouse and pedal pushers, dipping a wet chicken leg into flour.

My mother dropped the chicken back onto the plate and reached over to turn off the electric skillet, milk dripping from her hands and making the hot grease pop.

“Let me see.” She rinsed her hands under the faucet, dried them on a sackcloth towel, and joined me as I hoisted the family Bible with its white faux leather cover and gold-edged pages onto the table.

My mother sat down and I climbed onto her lap.

“See, Mama, it says Richard Lavon Evans at the top and again there.” I pointed to the family tree inside the back cover.

“That’s not your daddy, honey. That was your brother. See, there’s a ‘Jr.’ after his name.” The corners of her mouth turned up slightly but her lips stayed pressed together, refusing to reveal her gap-toothed smile. Her hazel eyes turned from their usual green to brown.

“Where is he?” There was nothing I wanted more than a brother.

“He was older than you, but he died right after he was born.” My mother rubbed my back gently, as I reached up to wind my fingers through her wavy black hair.

She expected me to take the news hard, but because she had two brothers and a sister, she was unaware that a dead brother was better than no brother at all. She was prepared for the questions about the color of his eyes and hair and what his life had been like in those few hours before he died, but I was more interested in what he might have become. Would he have preferred The Beverly Hillbillies or The Red Skelton Show? Where would he have sat at the dinner table? What kind of ice cream would he have gotten from the truck that rolled through our neighborhood every afternoon?

“I need to finish dinner before Daddy gets home.” She shooed me off her lap.

My mother never spoke of Richard Jr. again, but I often ran my finger over his name in the Bible and daydreamed about him as my defender and confidant.

I knew I wasn’t alone in wanting siblings.  One Christmas my aunt entertained all the adults sitting around the dinner table with a story about my cousin, Susie, going door to door on the Air Force base trying to trade toys for babies.  As I sat at the kids’ table eavesdropping, I then heard my mother regale the family with the story about my pediatrician saying I needed a little brother or sister and I had thought we were going to stop at the drug store on the way home to pick one up.

My mother and aunt laughed along with everyone else, but what I didn’t understand was that having only children wasn’t their choice. My mother’s one   desire in life was to be a mother, and if toys could have been traded for babies or if babies could have been bought in drug stores, she would have had a passel of children. Instead she had only one—me—and one was better than none, and so she did her best with what she was given.

My early childhood came straight out of a 1960s television show where the parents were infinitely patient and wise. My father worked as the manager of a grocery store, bringing home all the leftover holiday candy and stuffed animals from the potato chip displays. My mother was a homemaker who filled our kitchen with the smells of pot roast and peanut butter cookies and filled my closet with rickrack-trimmed rompers. Of course I got a spanking now and then for drawing a picture of a naked boy on the back of an offering envelope in church or stealing a keychain with a dangling skull at the dime store, but mostly I was indulged.

Just as it never occurred to me that my mother wanted more children, it also never occurred to me that my mother’s childhood might have been different from mine. On Mothers and Fathers days, she scoured the racks of greeting cards at the grocery store looking for those that said, “the world’s greatest,” and I never questioned whether they were deserved. I thought my grandparents must have indulged her just as they did me. Every time we visited, my grandmother took me to Kresge’s, gave me a dollar bill, and then waited patiently while I decided how to spend it. If it was summer my grandfather hand cranked ice cream in the back yard, and just as the cream began to thicken, he would ask if we wanted him to add anything.

“Strawberries,” pleaded my mother.

“No. Plain vanilla,” I insisted.

“Plain vanilla it is.” He finished the cranking and threw an old towel on top to hold in the cold air.

My first inkling that things might not be as perfect as they seemed came shortly after my grandfather died. I was in my mid-20s, and we were gathered at my mother’s house for Christmas. My mother was only in her forties, but already her wavy black hair had turned to fine gray curls, and her body had grown soft despite vigilant exercise and constant dieting. On the day before Christmas, my mother was stirring chocolate pie filling on the stove while I played dominoes with my grandmother at the kitchen table, already covered with a tablecloth decorated with bright red poinsettias.

“Granny, remember when you used to take us to Kresge’s and give us a dollar to buy anything we wanted?” I was already fondly recalling some of the things I’d bought: a Slinky, a magic card trick, a fake Barbie.

“I just did that to get you kids out of the house so you wouldn’t drive Pa nuts.” She played the double-five.

I glanced at my mother.  She stirred faster but never looked up from the pan.

I laid the three-four on the table.

“Did you mark my ten points?” My grandmother stared at the notebook paper where I was keeping score, waiting for me to add another x to her column.

“Pa couldn’t stand all the noise, and it was the cheapest way to entertain you kids. Every one of you would take an hour trying to decide how to spend a dollar.” She laughed as she looked down at the row of dominoes in front of her.

“I thought you did it because you loved us so much.” I was genuinely hurt.

“That’s another fifteen.” She played the three-five.

A few years later, in the toy aisles of a Wal-Mart, the inkling that my family was not as perfect as I imagined became irrefutably clear.

My mother was visiting for the weekend and had insisted on taking my four-year-old son, Mitch, to buy a toy. As we wandered through the store, I closely followed Mitch up and down the toy aisles until he found the Thomas the Tank Engine section. As he rummaged through the packages, I realized my mother was no longer behind us.  When Mitch finally found the train he was looking for, we doubled back through the aisles until we found my mother standing frozen in the middle of the baby dolls.

“Where did you go?” Her breathing was quick and shallow, and tears rolled down her cheeks, dripping on her t-shirt.

“We were in the boys’ toys.”

“I couldn’t find you.” She began shaking.

“We’re right here.”

Fortunately Mitch was focused on his one-way conversation with Percy the train and never noticed his grandmother’s panic.

Later that night, after dinner, my husband took Mitch upstairs for a bath and bedtime reading, and my mother and I burrowed into the ruffled pillows on the living room couch.

“Did I ever tell you I had scarlet fever as a kid?” she asked.

“Don’t think so.”

And then she told me how she had come down with scarlet fever and when the doctor in Snyder had been unsuccessful in treating her, he told Both of her parents worked, so her father put her in his patrol car and drove her to Dallas where he checked her into the hospital and then told her he’d come back to pick her up when she was better. She spent six weeks in the hospital alone. She was seven.

“Are you kidding me?”

I couldn’t imagine leaving my son alone for even one night.

“I’ve been afraid of being left behind. That’s why I got so upset when I lost you in the store.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t know.”

A year later my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Maybe it was the fact that she’d let the genie out of the bottle by telling me about the hospital or maybe she was afraid that if she didn’t share her stories, they would be lost, but time and time again, she would ask, “Did I ever tell you…”

And my answer was always. “No,” as she knew it would be.

Her stories became increasingly painful until she reached the last one.

“Did I ever tell you about the night Jim attacked me?” Jim was her older brother, disabled not only by an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck but also from the excuses my grandparents made for him.

“No.” I held my breath.

“You were a baby. Your daddy had an overnight work thing, and we were spending the night at Aunt Betty’s.”

I nodded for her to go on even though I didn’t want to hear anymore.

“Granny and Pawpaw and Jim were there too, and it was the middle of the night when I woke up because someone was touching me.” She paused.  “When I realized it was Jim, I started screaming. It woke everybody up.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well the next morning, Daddy took Jim to Big Springs.” We both understood that by “Big Springs,” she didn’t mean the dusty West Texas town but instead the mental hospital there.

“I was so surprised. I didn’t think Daddy’d do that for me.”

I started to cry, and my mother rubbed my back, just as she had done when I was a child.

My mother died a few months later. Along with her most painful memories, she also left me a box of photos. They document my mother’s life as she wanted it to be, but I see the reality.

One photo shows my mother as a freckle-faced little girl with barrettes holding back her wild hair, and I imagine her lying under the white sheets of a hospital bed, her face buried in the pillow as she cries, believing no one will ever return for her.

In another, she is a young woman with porcelain skin—her freckles now so faint, they’re barely noticeable—and she holds me as a swaddled newborn. I imagine her holding another swaddled baby, once again in a cold and antiseptic hospital room, and she sings softly to my baby brother who has only hours to live.

Then there’s the photo of my mother standing in the front yard of my grandparents’ house with her adult siblings. They mug for the camera, but I see my mother’s unease, and I know this was taken shortly after my uncle was released from Big Springs.  I leave this photo at the bottom of the box because it reminds me of my mother’s final story, the one that haunts me less because my mother was attacked by her own brother and more because she was surprised that her father chose to protect her. Her father, my grandfather who made me vanilla ice cream.

I wish, just once, he had made strawberry.

Winner of the Fall 2017 Non-Fiction Contest

There’s no cutesy way of saying this: yesterday, just as our daily walk in the hills was nearing its bucolic climax, Hazel murdered a deer. As luck would have it, the bloody harvest happened across the street. What would the neighbors think?

I was about to throw her best ball into a cherished grove of live oaks when she spotted him. We were standing on the dilapidated tennis court where my kid learned how to ride a bike. The land was acquired by a developer. In a year or so, there will be a cluster of three-story houses glaring down at us. But for now, the abandoned tennis court is still a pitted, slumping stretch of macadam surrounded by trees. Lots of trees. A genuine wildlife corridor, as I preached to the City Council, using my most impassioned vibrato.

“Time’s up, Thoreau,” the head of the Zoning Board wisecracked.

It’s my fault. I tolerated these little games, which seemed so harmless. Keep dreaming Hazel. But Hazel is no visionary. She’s calculating, and predatory.  “A perfect machine,” a rocket scientist remarked the other day, as we hurled tennis balls for our respective pooches near Lawrence Livermore Lab, where Oppenheimer built the first cyclotron. Her yellow lab was left in the dust. But I never imagined that Hazel could outgun a mule deer. They’re big, agile—designed for scampering up and down the Sierras. Fawns may fall to bobcats and eagles, but the bucks? They’re armed and dangerous. Their only predator, until the wolves recolonize, is the mountain lion. Five years ago, a stag gored a neighbor’s Irish deerhound. The hound’s owner, the head of the History Department, made a big stink out of it because it happened right in his backyard, and he figured the ungulate for a kind of Mongol invader, an avant-garde for sharp-horned legions ready to take over our elevated redoubt, chomping contentedly on “deer-resistant” hydrangeas and eviscerating our pets.

But Hazel is something else. An OBD, or Oakland Brown Dog. She’s all bizness, dawg. I’ve coined another term for our hybrid, because OBD doesn’t quite capture her bushwhacker’s soul: ridgebull. In Rhodesia, ridgebacks were used to battle lions, and they climb trees. Pits have a bite-force that beats most carnivores in their weight class, and those infamous locking jaws. As the Raiders were to the rest of the NFL, circa 1984, so ridgebulls are to the rest of the canine realm: stronger, faster, badder. When Hazel was still an adorable, pudgy puppy, she was found roped to a tree in West Oakland. The Post Office worker who untied her asked my partner for directions to the pound. Gaby didn’t lose any time texting me a close-up of Hazel. I responded “No Way. Really.” We already had Banshee, a.k.a. The Great White Dope. We had cats. Rabbits—all of them rescues from a neighbor’s cottage breeding facility, but it was beginning to look like Watership Down. What would I do with Hazel, besides, when I went back to France to enjoy my mother’s rural recipes? I had always taken Banshee along with me (he was practically an Air France mascot, and they allowed him to travel on the plane despite his large size), but pitbulls, or anything pit-like, or pitish, are banned. The anti-pitbull hysteria reached a paroxysm around the turn of the century. Today, following a nation-wide eradication program, the only thing that can elicit more Jacobin indignation than a woman wearing a hijab in public is a pit. Modernité be damned. That evening, the Post Office worker delivered Hazel to our doorstep. Resistance was futile.

The thing is, Hazel isn’t some vicious beast—she’s the ultimate nanny dog. She’ll frolic with the kids for hours, and more than tolerates the repeated attempts to ride her like a carnival pony. She cleans Baby Elwynn’s ears, which makes the little one shriek with delight. Zoe will dress her up as a princess, and stage elaborate wedding rituals with our cat, whom Hazel worships. She defers to Banshee, who’s getting on in years and behaves like a perfect curmudgeon whenever she strikes a playful pose. Hazel will stalk the rabbits, but once they are cornered she will lie down and whimper, lamenting her fate but ever-conscious of the constraints and responsibilities of her station.

Of course, there’s another side to her. In the three years since Hazel graduated from puppydom, the spate of car burglaries that plagued our street has ceased. Any suspect noise at night sends her careening to the front door, where she releases a thunderous rumble (“the death growl,” as Gaby calls it) that evokes a lioness making the case for her newborn cub. The nocturnal marauders have grown scarce. If anything, we are rather in awe of her Jeckyll-and-Hyde routine. It only makes her more endearing.

I should have known better. Squirrels send her bolting over the high fence at the dog run. I’ve witnessed a few other dogs give it a shot, but those other pooches invariably flounder and fall back down in an ungainly heap. Hazel is the only regular who can take flight. On the Cal campus, tempted by a sashaying tail a few dozen feet up a redwood, she tried channeling a mountain lion, and propelled herself a respectable distance up the hulking trunk. She ended up hanging off a low branch as the squirrel admonished her from the safety of an upper limb, and I had to break her fall as best I could—an act of interspecies empathy that has cost me the ability to raise my left arm above my shoulder. She captured a field mouse up at Tilden Park, dispatching it before I could extricate it from those heavyset jaws.

In what wildlife biologists call the urban interface, there is a case to be made for dogs of a certain caliber. Not long after our new neighbors moved in, their tomcat picked a fight with an industrious raccoon cub who was pilfering the kibble. It was a reckless gamble on the cat’s part, though not as reckless as putting the cat chow out on the deck in the first place. Within moments, Ace, a big bruiser who liked nothing more than to torture our own wimpy feline, was being swarmed by the entire banded brigade. I heard Gaby’s screams from the driveway, where she’d been putting out the trash. As the neighbor watched his cat being savaged from behind the safety of a screen door, I stomped up to the raccoons, bellowing and shaking my arms. Perfectly oblivious to my clownish antics, they continued their assault, a fanatical mass of surgical claws and gnashing teeth. “They’re killing him. Get Hazel!” Gaby wailed. The plaintive caterwauls coming from our neighbor’s hapless tomcat were agonizing, but I was torn about sending Hazel into the fray. The raccoons are a brazen bunch. In addition to cantankerous housecats, they will not hesitate to face off with canines that don’t adhere to their Fourierist belief system. Gaby could tell I was conflicted, so she took matters into her own hands, dashing nimbly to the front door, dreadlocks slapping down on whipcord shoulders like a sassy cat o’ nine tails. Hazel surged, her spring-loaded frame gathering momentum as she catapulted across our yard. Dispensing with formalities, she bounded over the half-open craftsman gate rather than squander an extra second navigating the narrow breach. As she neared the scrimmage line, my heart lodged in my neckline. Something terrible was about to go down, no doubt—bloody carnage and five-figure vet bills. But the raccoons must have sensed there was something different about Hazel. An undercurrent of savannah, of dusty rangeland and bushmeat. They scampered the moment they heard her distinctive roar, clambering up the tall wooden fence against which Ace lay, gasping. All but one. The kingpin himself, in his striped zoot suit, paraded atop the high boundary for a moment, growling (the sound resembled a pair of electric shears having a meltdown). Hazel, as was her wont, blasted off, landing squarely on the railing. The scowling kingpin scurried off to a nearby redwood, where the rest of his posse had retreated. They peered down at Hazel from a high bough. The wooden fence swayed under her bulk. On that promontory she maintained her balance, leopard-like. Hazel had treed the raccoons, and she spent the rest of the night patrolling the garden. Ace vanished in the confusion, and was never seen again. Cats prefer to die alone, when they can.

A set of sharp, slender antlers flared out from the top of the buck’s bony brow, narrowing near their extremity. Not an impressive trophy spread, but trident-like and deadly, if it came to that. Hazel did not balk. I called out to her, using my most commanding voice, but I was no match for her primal bloodlust. The buck bumped up against a tall chain-link fence on a grassy knoll north of the tennis court. He turned, springing back down the hillside, displaying his full girth. He was a force of nature, a coiled mass of muscles and bony protuberances. Hazel intercepted him. She grabbed a shank, but the buck gave a kick and she let go. Good boy, I thought. But in his panic, he collided with one of the oaks and lost his footing on the muddy slope. Hazel was on him in a flash of auburn, hackles raised high. She latched onto the nape, just behind that fairy-tale crown. Having achieved a good anchorage, she shook herself back and forth, trying to generate lethal leverage. By then I was running toward the scene and baying hysterically. “LEAVE-IT, DAMNIT, LEAVE-IT!” Within seconds, she dropped the fallen buck and came strutting toward me, satisfied that she had accomplished what she had set out to do. The stag attempt to stand, but there was something awry about the way he carried himself. His head seemed far too heavy. Listing like a sailboat that has hit a shoal and sprung a bad leak, he finally keeled over. One of his hind legs twitched feebly. He just needs to shake it off, I told myself. He will get up, he must get up.

I brought Hazel and my ancient husky back home. Banshee hadn’t even noticed the chase. It happened too fast, in less time than it had taken him to position his hindquarters favorably and drench the manzanita bush.

A few minutes later I walked out of the garage, sliding along the carriage doors and casting stealthy glances left and right before crossing the street. I jogged up the steep, curving access road that led to the decaying tennis court. Halfway up, I cut to the left, through the grove of live oaks. Beyond the oaks lay the remains of a large acacia grove, which the developer hadn’t wasted any time cutting down (there was a city ordinance protecting the native oaks, at least). Where the ground had been cleared of trees the sodden earth was already beginning to slump ominously. I thought about geotechnical questions not to dwell on the deer, and by the time I reached the area where Hazel had felled the buck, I was almost buoyant. Obviously, she could not have dispatched such a behemoth. This was no field mouse, and even a lion can’t kill a zebra with a single bite. Don’t the wildlife docs always showcase the desperate struggle between prey and predator? The buck would be long gone, how could I have doubted it?

He wasn’t. There was blood trickling from his wide muzzle, which had colored the damp leaves an autumnal red. I grazed one of the long, donkey ears. It was already cold. I cupped that cartoonish ear and gave it a little tug, just to make sure he wasn’t about to resurrect, Lazarus-like. Something inside his neck made a muffled sound. A vertebra letting go of its tenuous hold on the spinal column. Great. Now what?

A few months earlier, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I had stumbled upon an abandoned cabin in the redwood forest. In it I found a worn green fascicule entitled Feral Forager: a Guide to Living off Nature’s Bounty in Urban, Rural and Wilderness Areas. “Our future vision,” it stated, “is one of a horticultural, village-scale, community located near a wild area, but as we are still landless, our current dietary habits combine backyard-scale gardening and bulk organic staples, along with wild edibles and scavenged roadkill.”

A “scavenger-forager lifestyle” (to avoid contributing to the military-industrial complex) constituted the practical and philosophical underpinning of this intriguing, primitivist society. “The highly sought-after roadkill deer” was a prime target, but the authors (it was an collective work) didn’t hesitate to harvest dead raccoons, foxes, opossums, birds, and just about anything that could provide “untainted meat.” They called themselves roadkill vegans. “Although some die-hards may want to leave civilization behind, set out for the wilderness and practice primitive hunting and gathering techniques, we are more interested in bringing wild food gathering and roadkill scavenging into our daily lifestyle.”

I found this neo-Neolithic perspective persuasive. I had become a pescatarian because I was sickened by the plight of stockyard animals, from industrial feedlots to mechanized slaughter. Yet, despite years of deprivation, I wasn’t quite cured. I wasn’t using, but the craving for a juicy flank steak, properly aged and lightly seared over a bed of mesquite coals, had never dissipated.

Abandoning so much prime meat to rot on the hillside felt like an insult to this magnificent stag. Daunting as I found the prospect of cutting into the fresh carcass at my feet, I resolved to harvest the meat. I was no stranger to dead deer, mangled deer even. Most of the mountain lion studies I had joined up with use roadkill obtained from National Parks or Forest Service personnel to lure the big cats into cage traps so they can be sedated and outfitted with GPS collars. I did my share of dirty work, lugging bloody deer carcasses up remote mountain ranges. But this was different. The line between life and death feels so extreme, so unyielding, and yet nothing had really prepared me for the precarious nature of that divide. Just minutes ago, the buck had been prancing blissfully, browsing on the abundant fresh grass and sedges the rain had brought up. Spring was finally here, and apple blossoms were alight in the neighbor’s manicured orchard, beyond the tall chain-link fence that had created a death-trap for the luckless ungulate, courtesy of our devoted dog. Maybe we should finally re-baptize our ridgebull, I reflected. Artemis, goddess of the hunt, would be more fitting.

I selected the sharpest knife I could find in our kitchen, but it wasn’t quite sharp enough to slice through the thick mule deer hide. Not easily that is, and it was getting dark. Working quickly, which isn’t a good idea when you are field-dressing your first deer, I reached inside the body cavity to cut the windpipe, which allows the guts and organs to spill out of the carcass if you do it the right way, on a slope with the head facing uphill. But in my haste I grabbed hold of something else, not the trachea, and cut through that instead. Immediately, I smelled the stench of decomposing vegetable matter. At least, when I pulled out the guts, everything came, the way it ought. There was a cupful of brown fluid inside the empty body cavity, not enough to taint the meat if I flushed it out. I moved the organs off to the side—the scavengers would make quick work of them. I saved the liver, for Hazel and Banshee. Then I skinned the deer, which took a long time in the deepening dusk with my dull blade, and finally managed to hack out the haunches and the ribcage.

I grew faint at one point, and I must have swooned because I opened my eyes with a start and saw that my knife had fallen inside the bloody, gaping cavity. It was an ordeal, cutting into another sentient being, but I was hopeful that even Gaby (who hasn’t tasted any meat since she was Zoe’s age) might try some haunch of venison. The argument for veganism is societal and ethical (as they’ll tell you at Farm Sanctuary benefits), not gastronomical. This musky flesh would represent the sum total of my carnivorous passion for this season and in all likelihood for many seasons to come. My flash syncope was merely a symptom of my own depleted nature. Harvesting the slain deer wasn’t just the proper thing to do, in theory, it also felt right—far less dislocating than buying a slab of meat whose existential framework, from birth to the processing plant, was a study in degradation. I felt more human afterward, not less.

I left a bit more than the innards for the hardcore cleaning crew, those masked banditos and the over-communicative crows that woke me up at the brink of dawn most days of the week. All the scavengers deserved their fair share after all, not just me. Before Hazel entered our life, I’d spotted a bobcat sitting calmly on his haunches on the game trail that winds along the edge of our neighbor’s house. He was unfazed, and we locked gazes. All of a sudden, the mystery of our fish basin’s dwindling koi population was resolved. The remains of the dead buck would serve to sustain more than the local carrion-feeders, it would nourish the entire carnivore guild. Our friendly neighborhood apex predator, otherwise known as Hazel, was providing for the entire food chain.

The End