Deleted Scene: Straight Through the Heart

My first kill

Today, in honor of my 29th birthday—I’m sharing a deleted scene from Home of the Happy. This short “chapter” of sorts didn’t make it into the final manuscript, but it was one of the first that I wrote as I contemplated my relationships to Angola, to my father, and to violence.

It’s also one of my favorite memories.

My husband is taking me away to celebrate this year with fabulous meals and cocktails and urban adventures. But my dad called last night and, only half-joking, asked if I wanted to bail on it all and come hunting—just like we did all those years ago. I’ll admit, I was tempted.

Straight Through the Heart

January, 2012

It’s a few days before my sixteenth birthday, and I want to get as far away from Evangeline Parish as possible. It’s not the first time my heart’s been broken, but it’s the first time it feels like this.

My dad sees it in my face, in my sulk. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t have to—my mom will tell him later. But he holds me in the way that dads hold their daughters when they don’t know what they’re meant to say. And then he invites me to skip school for a few days, to come hunting with him.

He and his brothers had been leasing some property out in Mississippi for deer hunting, just over the border. Just over it. When he brings me, he turns off the highway onto the last few miles of twisty, bumpy Feliciana road, climbing what feels like rolling mountains to us prairie folk. About half a mile before we’d reach the bunk-bedded lean-to of a camp, a small, dirty sign hidden behind sprawling foliage announces: Mississippi-Louisiana Border. He has to get out of the truck, opening a rust-orange gate to cross the state line.

This is not the first time I’ve gone hunting with my father. When I was small, he’d bring me “camera hunting”. Squeamish around blood and fully subscribed to the idea that “guns were for boys,” I had never had an interest in shooting anything, in killing anything. But Dad would take me, before the sun rose, into the treehouse-like box stand, carrying a bagful of powdered donuts and beef jerky and hand warmers. We’d listen as the world awakened. I’d focus so hard, ears pricked and ready for any rustle through the leaves, any squeak or squawk. The birds would emerge first, announcing morning. Squirrels would jump from tree to tree, landing on the roof of our tiny box for two. A rabbit would sniff its way across the green. Focus, aim, shoot. In the photos, you can just make out the shape of its ears pointing through the turnip tops.

We’d spend the morning in the quiet, each of us alternating our focuses between the shuffles and scruffles of the waking world and whichever world we happened to be reading about. My dad has often admitted that his favorite part about deer season isn’t necessarily the thrill of the kill. It’s the excuse to escape, to abandon the responsibilities and distractions of modern life in exchange for nature’s absolute silence, just for a few hours.

This time, though, when he asks me to join him in the deer stand, I’m filled with a new angst. Rejection, in all its biting injustice, had stung me steely, straightened my spine. With all the drama of youthful indignance, I decide that on this hunt, I’m ready to kill.

Just after we cross the border on the evening we arrive, my dad stops the truck in the middle of the road and points to a massive clearing in the trees, reaching all the way to the forest’s end—on the Louisiana side of things. In the darkening distance, from a yellow-orange haze, I make out a glowing peak, tiny squares of windows glowing from a rising triangle.

Pointing, he says, “See that there? That’s Angola, the state prison.”

“The big one?” I ask.

“Oh yeah. Yeah the big one.” He points to the turret. “I think that’s one of their churches.”

We drive on.

The next morning, I turn sixteen. Against the backdrop of the Angola property, I shoot my first deer, my dad whispering soft encouragement as I pull the trigger. The gun’s kick leaves a bruise above my eyebrow. Before the young buck falls, he runs, and then he falls further—fifty feet down a nearby ridge. When we finally get down to him, my dad thoroughly prepared to finish him off, we can see that he is already dead. I’d shot well and true, straight through the heart. Dad sticks his finger into the hole, then gently wipes the thick, clotty blood on my cheeks.

“Now, you’re a killer.”

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