I.
1.
Advocates for Animal Rights planted a spy in the slaughterhouse operated by Mr. Hermann’s client. Disturbing images were captured by cell-phone and, then, published. The United States Department of Agriculture investigated cruelty allegations as well as claims that diseased meat had been approved for sale to the public. When the USDA found these accusations unwarranted, the packing plant’s in-house corporate counsel asked that Cornelius (“Corny”) Hermann file an action for defamation against the spy and the animal advocacy organization for whom she was working. The meat packing company was a long-time client. Indeed, Mr. Hermann’s father had represented that firm for almost 40 years before passing the business to his son, Cornelius. Although Corny Hermann was skeptical about the lawsuit and argued against making defamation claims, at last, he succumbed to his client’s demands and initiated the case.
“It’s counter-intuitive,” Mr. Hermann said, “to start a case in which you have to recite word-by-word, pro haec verba, the offensive claims made against you. All that happens is that you end up repeating in court over and over again, the lies told about you.”
The in-house lawyer was a fine athlete, suntanned and sleek, and he excelled at tennis and golf. Mr. Hermann had never been successful with sports. The corporate attorney, a Catholic with a parochial-school background, grimaced at the Latin. (Mr. Hermann had been careful to pronounce verba with a “v” and not the “w” sound that was, as he knew, proper. It wouldn’t help his cause if the Latin formula sounded vaguely comical.)
“We need to send a strong deterrent message here,” the corporate attorney said.
Mr. Hermann was not in favor of using lawsuits to send messages, but he merely nodded.
“So you’ll take a shot at it?”
Corny Hermann nodded reluctantly and, then, rubbed his chin to show that he was pondering the situation. He thought: it’s all a game to him. But he will never have to see the inside of a courtroom on this case – this sportsman is not a litigator. With a slightly acrid sensation of dread, Mr. Hermann knew that it wouldn’t be a game to him, but rather a kind of desperate wager of the kind that he no longer enjoyed.
Mr. Hermann said that he would prepare a draft complaint for corporate counsel’s approval. He sighed ever so slightly but was certain that the other attorney wasn’t sufficiently observant to notice the whisper of his breath released into the vast, unfeeling universe.
2.
The lawsuit was vigorously defended. The pandemic intervened and proceedings were stalled for 18 months. Mr. Hermann took several depositions remotely by ZOOM and, because there was a technical malfunction, lost his camera image of the witness whom he was questioning. The animal rights spy was a Hispanic woman, overweight with slogans tattooed on her forearms and facial piercings – but Corny saw her only for a moment before the picture failed. It was hard to interrogate a shadowy presence and Mr. Hermann felt that his questions were cast into a remote, echoing darkness. She had worked in the plant for almost 18 months, solely for the purpose of gathering evidence of animal cruelty and food impurity. In that time, she had bid on jobs, working her way onto the killing floor from the packaging department into which she had first been hired. Although he couldn’t see her, the woman wept when she described the filthy pigs, their abscesses and ulcerated skins and the stench of their fear as they were slaughtered. Corny couldn’t but admire her commitment to her cause, however misguided it seemed to him. She had intentionally put herself right at the center of an enterprise that she abhorred.
Mr. Hermann made motions for dismissal but they were denied. The case was scheduled for trial after the Court cleared its backlog of criminal cases that had built up during the pandemic. Weeks and months passed. Settlement efforts were unsuccessful – indeed, neither party wanted to compromise. The case had been commenced on principle and was being defended on that basis as well. At last, trial was imminent.
3.
Advancing age didn’t bring wisdom, let alone serenity. Corny had always been high-strung and nervous and, as he became older, his anxiety increased. The thought of the approaching trial oppressed him and he had difficulty sleeping, awaking hours before dawn with a sudden snap in his mind like a whiplash or concussive impact. Catastrophe, he thought, was looming. Corny tried to train his mind to think of something less dire, but, for the most part, was unsuccessful.
In the lee of the slaughterhouse, where the wind often carried the scent of death, the Company had acquired several farms and, then, let them go fallow. After a couple decades, the shelterbelts were wild and unkempt and the abandoned building sites, where barns and houses had been razed, had grown into tangled jungles hedged with squat sumac and thorns. Some of the farmland was untillable, marshes with oval ponds like blue-green targets encircled by concentric rings of cattails, then, tufts of matted grass and, at last, where the ground was less wet, fragile-looking willow trees. Along the edge of the Company’s land, an old forest covered some knolls of glacial debris, extending to the edge of the freeway where a tall chain-link fence was supposed to keep deer from being smashed by the blunt metal of passing cars and trucks. The forest had been a wooded preserve kept by a monastery that had once occupied a hillside now obliterated by the freeway. When he was a young man, walking paths in these woods, Corny had come upon decaying hutches displaying the Stations of the Cross. But those relics were long since gone. Trails ambled across the patchwork of woods and prairie and, when he needed to clear his mind, Corny parked his car in the small park next to the meat-packing plant and strolled along the nature center trails.
His favorite place in the woods was a stretch of path that branched from an old cartway parallel to one of the ancient shelter belts. The pioneers had planted the hedgerow with fir trees and, now, they were old and tall, bedded on soft-looking red drifts of pine needles. In the summer, the trees smelled of resin and the dark needles glistened and, on the footpath, roots extruded through the russet litter like gnarled, writhing pythons. In the green shadow, the trail curved slightly, assuming the mathematical shape of an integral sign – it was, Corny recognized, the “line of beauty”, the gentle curve that mimics a woman’s hip or a musical instrument perfectly attuned to the harmonies of breeze sighing in the tree-tops. On this serpentine path, Corny advanced through the dappled shade and the evergreens stood around him, noble custodians of the wood growing so densely here that there was no undergrowth except for a few delicate fiddle-head ferns. The trail bent toward some sort of discovery that was always deferred, the path exploring the edge of the forest that sprawled over the hills, for the most part deciduous beyond the pine grove, with trees uprooted by storms leaning this way and that in crazy disorder, a couple lightning-blasted columns pointed like white bone into the sky, densely fringed clearings opening onto little water meadows where one stream or another paused for a moment before making its way further through the woods.
Corny had been many places but this was his favorite spot in the world. He was tired of thinking of the trial that was billowing toward him like a brutish thunderstorm. He walked slowly along the cartway. The prairie was yellow and, on the edge of the trail, there was milkweed that oozed white if you crushed its stalks. An old wind-ravaged oak stood against the horizon where the field opened between corridors of overgrown shelter-belt. Dragonflies with strange emblems marking the bulge of muscles between their diaphanous wings spurted and zigzagged ahead of him. He came to the tall grass next to the pine forest and the tamped-down trail between the golden-rod and blue columbine that led onto the byway amidst the fir trees. Some burly onyx-colored ants scouted the trail. Then, he was among the green darkness and the air smelled of oozing sap and the pine-needles were faintly mint-scented and the meanders of the trail were a mental landscape that promised nothing but blessings to him.
4.
Mr. Hermann learned later that the trails in the woods and fields behind the slaughterhouse were infested with wood-ticks. He found the tiny dark-brown creatures crawling on his forearms and calves. The ticks were flattened discs with crooked legs and an almost indiscernible head that was nothing more than a knob of jaw. Once he discovered ticks on him, Mr. Hermann thought that he could sense their feathery touch, the tickle of their legs coursing over his skin. But this was fantasy. The ticks were subtle and cunning and made no impression of their presence at all. Standing by his car, Mr. Hermann groped in his armpits and used a finger to explore the folds in his crotch. The arachnids hadn’t reached any sensitive areas. The three that he found on forearms and calf, he pinched between his thumb and forefinger, one after another. The spindly legs on the creatures paddled in the air and Mr. Hermann, if he squinted could see a yellow-cream pattern, symmetrical marbling on the back of the ticks’ flat abdomens. Ticks carried diseases. Mr. Hermann cast the three ticks aside but they were so tiny, scarcely larger than the point of dull lead pencil, that it was impossible to see where he had flung them. In fact, he had to examine his fingers to make certain that each tick was gone and hadn’t somehow adhered to his skin.
5.
For good luck, Mr. Hermann went to the beauty salon that his wife patronized to have his hair cut. The shop was mostly deserted, a row of vinyl-upholstered swivel chairs, nine out of ten unoccupied, with wall mirrors aimed at them in a vaguely menacing manner. Blades and razors glinted in the afternoon sunlight that ricocheted around the salon. The chemical smell was soporific and Mr. Hermann’s eyes watered. A girl with barbed wire tattoooed on her bicep was shaving the sides of a handsome Hispanic man’s head. A stiff plume of blonde hair ran in a seam over the top of the man’s head.
The woman that greeted Mr. Hermann was pregnant. A tiny bright stud glistened on the side of the woman’s nostril. She looked exhausted with dark rings around her eyes.
“My name is Krystyl,” the young woman said. Mr. Hermann noted the spelling on her name-badge.
“Corny,” Mr. Hermann replied.
“Corny?”
“For Cornelius.”
He sat down and the reclining chair seemed to seize him. Mr. Hermann removed his eyeglasses so that he would not have to peer into the face of the haggard man who confronted him in the mirror.
He declined her offer of a shampoo. The less time spent grooming the better. Their discussion about how his remaining hair should be cut had something of the quality of a dispirited negotiation that he was doomed to lose.
A grandmother came into the salon with a boy chattering at her. Another beauty operator appeared from behind a curtained recess.
“Is she working on a Mohawk?” the beauty operator asked Krystyl, evidently referring to the hair stylist with the barb wire tattoo who was shaving the sides of the pretty Hispanic man’s head.
“A modified Mohawk,” Krystyl said.
“Cool,” the other beauty operator said. She went to the front desk to meet the grandmother with the little boy.
Scissors clicked over Mr. Hermann’s ears and skull. Then, Krystyl gasped and dropped the scissors on the counter under the mirror.
“Oh my god!” she said.
“What is it?” Mr. Hermann asked.
“A wood tick,” Krystyl said. “There is a big wood tick dug into your scalp.”
Mr. Hermann’s ears reddened and he blushed.
“What is that?” the beauty operator with the grandmother and boy asked.
“A wood tick,” Krystyl cried.
Suddenly, both the hair stylist with the barb wire tattoo and the other beauty operator were standing beside Mr. Hermann’s chair. The mirror was full of alarmed women.
“What should I do?” Krystyl asked.
“Well, we can’t remove things like that,” the woman working on the modified Mohawk said. “The head will come off and he’ll end up infected.”
“It’s gross,” the other beauty operator said.
For a few moments, the women discussed the wood tick, speaking avidly as if Mr. Hermann was unconscious or not even present.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Mr. Hermann said.
“Oh, it’s not your fault,” the hair stylist with the tattoo on her bicep said.
The handsome Hispanic man entered the frame of the mirror facing Mr. Hermann. He had big brown eyes and he looked very concerned, even saddened by this turn of events.
“We can’t pick it out,” the beauty operator said.
The grandmother and the little boy had now come to inspect Mr. Hermann’s head as well. Suddenly, the empty interior of the hair salon no longer seemed drowsy and deserted. It was now teeming with action.
“I’ll have to work around it,” Krystyl said. “Then, you’ll have to go to the emergency room or something.”
“It’s just a wood tick,” Mr. Hermann said.
“But it’s dug in deep and you can see that the thing’s full of your blood,” Krystyl told him.
“My blood?”
“Yes,” Krystyl said.
“Terrible,” the grandmother said. The little boy was excited: “Will the man die?” he asked his grandmother.
“You can get sick from those things,” the girl with the tattoo said.
“Gross!” the other beauty operator explained. But there was nothing to do and so they dispersed and went back to work.
Krystyl finished with the hair cut in record time. She spritzed some cool water on his forehead and ears which seemed to be on fire.
The hair cut cost 26 dollars. Mr. Hermann supposed he should give the girl a handsome tip for her encounter with the wood tick. He handed her two twenties and said she should keep the change.
Krystyl thanked him and said: “Make sure you get that thing looked at.”
In the parking lot, Mr. Hermann tore the tick out of his scalp. The creature was fat and livid and felt greasy between his fingertips. He threw the bug on the asphalt and ground it under his heel as if it were a cigarette butt.
6.
A couple days before the libel trial, Mr. Hermann walked his dog on the sidewalks and alleys near his house. It was humid with dark clouds with elaborate scrolls gathered overhead. Rabbits were out, grazing on the damp lawns and the dog tugged against her leash.
A woman walking a small white dog approached on the sidewalk and Corny crossed the street to avoid an encounter with that animal. A squirrel flung itself against a tree trunk, caught hold, and, defying gravity, climbed vertically into the green nimbus of leaves. When he looked up, Corny saw that the squirrel was glowing with a dull orange light. He paused to watch the squirrel and the animal, within its globe of flaring, muted orange, cast its gaze back at him.
Ahead of him, three rabbits bounded across the asphalt street, a single file that seemed curiously flattened against the boulevard trees and the parked cars and the scuffed-looking front lawns. The rabbits moved within an amber radiance that seemed to pulse from within them. A crow perched on a power line crowed and, as he looked in the bird’s direction, its feathers glinted as if obsidian, a black mirror-like substance that caught the sunlight and reflected it. The ants on the sidewalk patrolled their dragon-world within orbs of shining emerald light, a radiance glowing like sunshine infusing a dewdrop perched on a green stalk of grass. Every creeping thing suddenly was invested with light and the lawns sparkled as if gems were embedded in them. A cat radiated sulphur-yellow light and his dog was glistening like an agate. On a gate, spider in her web twinkled like a star.
Perhaps, it was some poison in his blood from the wood tick bite. The world around him was all jointed together with living beings and each of them spilled light up into the air. His eyes throbbed and, then, the radiance became too bright and he closed them. Then, when he opened his eyes again, the brilliance around him had subsided and things returned to their customary colors, exhausted, it seemed, and now dim.
7.
The trial began and didn’t go well. The courtroom was hot and the judge seemed irritable. Mr. Hermann lost his way in his opening statement, said something foolish, and drew an objection from opposing counsel. The objection was overruled after a short bench conference, but the interruption to his presentation had achieved its affect: Mr. Hermann stuttered and stammered through the rest of his opening. Witness testimony lagged and the exhibits, carefully organized before the case began, were now suddenly unorganized and difficult to access. It was too early to predict an outcome, but Mr. Hermann felt an ominous sense of gloom about the case.
The animal rights advocate had sacrificed 18 months of her life to infiltrate the packing plant and report on its activities. She was heavy-set, a burly woman with tattoos on her forearm and an icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe needled into her left biceps. She wore a ring through the septum of her nose, a bit of adornment that reminded Mr. Hermann of farm animals that he had seen when he was a boy. The woman had dark eyebrows and a double-chin. She was articulate and argumentative and Mr. Hermann found it difficult to cross-examine her because he admired her commitment to her cause, however misguided, and her zealous spirit. True believers are dangerous witnesses. Mr. Hermann knew that none of the evidence that he intended to present had anything like the force of her testimony.
In the middle of the night, Mr. Hermann was knocked awake by an invasive thought. There was an objection he should have made and, now, the case was irrevocably distorted – the wrong evidence was before the jury. The proof was draining down into a funnel to nowhere, at least, as far as the points that his client needed to make. Obviously, there was a solution but he couldn’t find it and, so, he lay open-eyed in the darkness, listening to his wife snoring, and dreaded the dawn. The window over his bed was still dark, impermeable blue. A flare of headlights slid over the glass. Maybe, it was a passing bat, bright with the radiance he had glimpsed in all creatures a couple days earlier.
Something was moving on his upper thigh. He groped at the point of the irritation and found tiny legs squirming against his fingers. It was another wood tick latched onto his flesh. He ripped the tick off his thigh and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. After flushing the tick down the toilet, he scratched at the little wound in his flesh. Poison was spreading, he thought, in concentric circles away from the tick’s jaws still embedded in his flesh and pulsing there.
8.
By the end of the next day’s trial, Mr. Hermann’s tick bite was inflamed, a hard reddened patch the size of a quarter and encircled with a dusky mark like one of the rings of Saturn.
The case continued for several days. There were setbacks and Mr. Hermann’s clients expressed disbelief that the jurors seemed sympathetic to the animal rights activist. “Don’t they like bacon?” Mr. Hermann’s company representative said as they stood in the warm corridor during the morning bathroom break. The manager from the company was wearing a blazer that was slightly too small for him and sweat beaded his forehead above his black-rimmed glasses.
“I don’t think they see the case about their right to eat meat,” Mr. Hermann said. “They’re focused on animal cruelty.”
“It’s a cruel world,” the company rep said.
The trial ended in a compromise verdict. Some of jury’s findings were acceptable to Mr. Hermann’s client, but other determinations were adverse and, even, damning. Upper management implied that the case had been mishandled. Another law firm was retained to explore appeal.
Mr. Hermann went to Acute Care and asked the nurse practitioner to look at the tick bite. The nurse-practitioner was stationed at a grocery store in a small annex near the pharmacy and the feminine hygiene products.
“I can’t have you undress here,” the nurse-practitioner said.
“I can show you without exposing myself,” Mr. Hermann told her. He dropped his trousers. There was nothing for her to see anyway. During the trial, Mr. Hermann’s penis had shrunk and retreated into his belly. The tick bite was reddish purple, a livid sun with several orbits inscribed in scarlet around it.
“Oh yes,” the nurse-practitioner said. “That is infected.”
She tapped at the hard pustule with her cool finger tip. Then, she prescribed an antibiotic. Mr. Hermann walked around the supermarket perimeter: the meats in their plastic shrouds seemed particularly grey and lifeless. The freezers were bright with microwaveable packages. Mr. Hermann picked up some toothpaste and a candy bar, paying for those items along with the antibiotic at the pharmacy counter. The pharmacist said: “You look exhausted.”
“I think I am exhausted,” Mr. Hermann said.
9.
Before dawn one morning, Mr. Hermann found himself awake and unable to sleep. He had been shocked awake by the memory of some error or dereliction, a mistake that he couldn’t remember well enough to remedy, although he was haunted by a strong sense that the problem was, in fact, insoluble. His breathing was a little sharp and distressed and, although he turned over in bed several times, he couldn’t find any position in which he was comfortable. He was too much present to himself, filling up every nook and cranny of his mind with sour regrets and memories of long-ago misfortunes.
Mr. Hermann summoned to mind the trail in the wood, but he took no comfort from visualizing the place. Dark trees crowded around the path, gashed and bleeding strong-smelling sap. Flies were attracted to the sap and trapped in the resinous stuff and Mr. Hermann saw them darkening the places where the pine trunks were wounded. An irritating sound of buzzing filled the air and flies swarmed up from the litter of needles under the trees. Ankle-fracturing roots clutched at his feet and the curves in the path concealed what was before him so that he took each step with ever-increasing apprehension. The sun was bright but hidden and the contrast between light and dark in the pines was intense, flickering relentlessly like a strobe – the flicker make his eyes hurt. Mr. Hermann knew that at the end of the trail there was a slaughterhouse or, perhaps, a hut made from gingerbread where a wicked witch lived.
I’ve become a burden to myself, Mr. Hermann thought.
10.
Mr. Hermann walked his dog on a sidewalk at the edge of a small park. A skating rink surrounded by chest-high wooden walls stood in one corner of the park. The wall boards outlined a little meadow sprinkled with white clover. In the park’s other quadrant, some iron bars and metal chutes were installed in sand all patterned with tennis shoe prints. Children were swinging, pushed by older kids. “Underdog!”one of the little girls squealed, “do an underdog please!”
Mr. Hermann paused as his dog squatted to urinate. He scanned the park and the trees and the lawns across the street but there was nothing shining in those places. A dull-looking black bird soared overhead. The bird’s feathers looked slightly dusty.
A bright green caterpillar with black bristles on its back inched across the pavement. A few years earlier, Mr. Hermann had read a book to his granddaughter that was called What if you were born a Kitten? He thought that it was a sheer accident that he had born a human being. There were innumerable other fates in the world. Maybe, souls sloshed back and forth between different types of creatures. The caterpillar blindly bunched up and, then, extended itself, creeping across the old pitted sidewalk. “Underdog!” the little girl cried.
What if you were born a caterpillar? Or hatched as a caterpillar? What was it like to be a caterpillar? Or a dog or pig – swine were supposed to be smarter than dogs? Or a deer?
The little girl got what she wished. The kid pushing her gave a mighty lunge and, as the swing soared upward, the kid propelling the little girl darted forward to stand in front of the swing set. The child on the swing lost her grip and flew out of the saddle, crumpling up in the trampled sand. The flopping swing-seat wobbled back and forth over her like a pendulum. The child cried for a moment but then was all better.
II.
1.
During his closing argument, Mr. Hermann lost his way. He had stepped aside from the podium, taking two strides toward the jurors in order to make eye-contact, to fix them in his gaze. The jurors sat in two rows in their assigned seats within the jury-box. They watched him with skeptical, quizzical expressions that suggested that they had questions about the case that could never be answered to their satisfaction. A couple of the women smiled tentatively. One young man was defiant and puffed up his chest and squared his shoulders. The other jurors looked faintly worried. It was best not to look too closely at the jurors and, immediately after approaching, Mr. Hermann’s train of thought scattered and he paused. There wasn’t anything useful to say to the jurors without practicing deceit upon them and Mr. Hermann didn’t want to lie and, in any effect, doubted the efficacy of further argument. He edged to the side, returning to the podium, but now he was off-script and couldn’t find his place in his notes. Corny Hermann looked up from his papers with watery eyes. The jurors shifted uncomfortably in their seats, some of them clutching small notepads.
“I’m afraid, I’ve lost my way,” Mr. Hermann said. “But you’ve got the gist. I’m convinced of that. I’m sorry, very sorry...”
He nodded slightly and turned away, returning to counsel table where he sat down next to his client’s manager. The man shrugged and looked away from Mr. Hermann.
Later, in the hall, the company rep, sweating in his navy-blue blazer, beckoned Mr. Hermann aside. The two men stood in an empty stairwell to confer.
“That was a bold move,” the company rep said. He took off his heavy-looking glasses and rotated them in his big, moist hands.
“What do you mean?”
“Humanizing our case like that,” the man said. “Pretending to forget your lines...”
“Sometimes, it’s best to acknowledge the obvious,” Mr. Hermann said.
“You bet,” the company man replied.
2.
A couple days after the verdict, Mr. Hermann went for another walk, alone, at the Nature Center. It was warm and threatening rain and so the paths were deserted. Mr. Hermann followed the trail past the small marsh with its turbid lagoons. In late Spring, he had seen a duck skimming over the water leading three much smaller ducklings. Now, the ducklings seemed mostly grown, although they still followed their mother as they glided over the still pond. A turtle sat on a black bend of wood poking out of the water. Dragonflies like marionettes on invisible strings hovered, twitched from side to side, and, then, seemed yanked up into the air where they cast vague, fluttering shadows on the brown-green surface of the water.
The path skirted the woods, became a cartway with wheel ruts, and, then, branched off into the pine forest. It was cool in the pines, the trail soft underfoot with rust-colored fallen needles. A breeze stirred in the branches and made the woods glitter. The gentle curves in the path carried him forward. Mr. Hermann was distracted and padded forward without taking account of his progress down the trail. The air smelled slightly of carrion, impossible to determine whether it was the scent of the slaughterhouse or, perhaps, an animal that had died in one of the spiky thickets at the edge of the evergreens. He had lost his bearings and the trail seemed longer than he recalled with several additional bends that he must have forgotten, the path drawn toward the edge of the pine grove as if asymptotic to some invisible boundary. To his right, a trail deeply incised in the pine needle litter led Mr. Hermann across a clearing in the forest. People had walked this path in their dreams so many times that it was engraved in the ground beneath his feet.
A bird cried out. The path twisted along the ragged border of the deciduous forest and, then, brought him to water. A tiny seep oozed droplets that trickled in glistening braids down a muddy hillside. The water glistened on some rocks and, then, dripped (like water drops from a stalactite deep underground) into a creek. Some deep pools caught the light spilling through the tree-tops and drowned it in the peat-colored tubs of stagnant water. A column of gnats twisted like a tiny tornado in the sun’s rays falling into the gloom. A deer, as still as a statue, watched Mr. Hermann from within a glade of coral-colored sumac. The deer was either very large or tiny. Mr. Hermann couldn’t exactly determine scale or distance in the trembling green shadow.
It was an unfamiliar trail, offering strange vistas with each turn. A ravine lined with pale, chalky rocks ran alongside the path. The bottom of the ravine was dry and its seam clogged with primeval-looking ferns. The path dipped to a small footbridge that crossed the ravine, an arch of field stone built over a metal culvert with an extruding edge that looked like a steel plow. Mr. Hermann walked for several hundred yards on the forest trail. He seemed to be very far from any of the places in the woods that he knew, but, of course, this wasn’t possible. The Nature Center’s tracts of trees and restored prairie were bounded by the freeway and cultivated fields of row-crops and, even, some new houses on one side. The wilderness was little and squeezed into only a few acres.
A gravel driveway branched to one side of the path and Mr. Hermann decided to explore in that direction. The driveway was level, evidently intended as access to something hidden in the forest. A fire had burned here, although years before the underbrush was dense where the flames had cleared the woods, sparing only a few old oak trees with mighty gnarled branches. Dead trees as white as ghosts leaned against one another in the haze of green, flowering saplings. At the end of the driveway, a square building with concrete block walls stood next to an empty enigmatic trench. The building was capped with a metal roof. Mr. Hermann made a circuit of its walls. The structure was windowless and its single door, a big iron plate flush to the wall, seemed welded in place. There were no signs, not even a warning not to trespass. What was this place? The woods stretched away from the sealed building, a tangle of tightly entwined branches green and impenetrable in all directions.
III.
1.
Corny felt that the jury verdict against his client was a sign that he should change his life. He went to church and, when the pastor was preaching, he prayed for guidance. It seemed very late in his life to make the kinds of changes that he expected from himself.
2.
Corny hoped that changing his life would bring him peace. It didn’t, but, maybe, this was because the changes that he made weren’t sufficiently radical or true. He tried to become a vegetarian and ate meat only once a week. When he made a stir-fry, Corny substituted tofu for chicken. Eating in this way made Corny feel that he was a low, creeping thing, a particularly abject form of life.
3.
One Saturday afternoon, after he had been tramping about in the Nature Center, Corny drove his car out into the country. It was September and the corn in the fields stood tall as a house, a green palisade along the highway. One of Corny’s grandfathers had lived on a farm in this part of the county and he went to the tangled wood-lot where the old home-place had been. Nothing remained of the L-shaped white farmhouse that he remembered from his boyhood and big wooden barn full of mice and cats and spiders was completely gone. Storms had broken the back of the silo made from smooth fired brick with a texture almost like crockery used at the dinner-table. It wasn’t worth getting out of his car to inspect the ruins of the silo. On the horizon, a storm loitered over its blue columns of falling rain.
On the county blacktop, Corny hit a deer. The animal propelled itself like a shot from the green corridors of a corn field and slammed into the side of his car, striking the vehicle on the front driver’s door. The mirror next to his door must have gouged the animal because a ragged tuft of fur, brown on the top but very white beneath, clung to the chrome. Just before the deer struck his car, Corny glimpsed the animal: it was sprinting low to the ground, stretched out with hooves extended parallel to the ground. Some nameless horror must have driven the deer to flee its covert in the corn. Etched in his mind was the image of deer’s wild, bright eye, big as a plate, as it crashed against his vehicle.
Corny stopped the car, put it in park, and walked back along the shoulder of the road to where the animal was resting in the weeds and gravel. Broken glass sparkled in the pebbles.
The deer was large and its barrel-shaped torso expanded and contracted with the animal’s breath. An injured deer was dangerous – at least, so he had heard. Deer had powerful legs and sharp hooves like tomahawks and a kick could disembowel you. But the animal seemed to be stunned, possibly dying.
Corny knelt next to the deer. He saw two glowing embers embedded in its fur. The deer’s head was turned away from him, twisted awkwardly on its neck. The animal’s breast was snow-white and it smelled like an old rug, dusty with a faint scent of mildew.
Corny put his hand on the deer. It warm to the touch. The animal made a little huffing sound. He stroked the deer’s flank with the intention that it be healed. The two fiery specks in the deer’s fur glowed as if they were flaming cinders boring into the animal’s hide. Corny saw that the embers were wood ticks feeding on the deer’s blood, bright as burning roses. Wind stirred in the corn and the deer shuddered, stretched out its legs, and, then, rose unsteadily. It took a few moments for the animal to regain its composure and it lowered its head toward Corny as if about to charge him. Then, the deer reared up and vanished into the tall corn.
