Gutted By Cindy Cain

Martin Cathrae CC




GUTTED

    Most mornings, I walk about three or four miles on Whitehall Road. Not the one in London, although who knows whether that was on the mind of whoever named these winding rural byways long before they were paved or trafficked by automobiles? Even now, most vehicles are old farm trucks, tractors, and Amish buggies. I can do my miles without seeing a human or a car. Our small farm sits a half-mile off Whitehall, at the end of a gravel drive, so my walk begins with the lane, and at our mailboxes I decide whether to go left or right.
   Little changes. The seasons roll on with their indifferent regularity, their inexorable unspooling toward our individual demise and, it seems lately, our collective extinction. 
    I pass the two other homes on our lane. We are somewhat of a small village, and we’re friendly but not friends. We buy eggs and beef from Donna; we pay Jay’s kids to feed our chickens and dogs when we’re away. Tornadoes come through central Kentucky in season, and if one ever strikes directly, we know Donna and Victor have a basement we can go to. We do not, and our small modular home is vulnerable.
    It's the last week of summer and some leaves have begun to fall on the lane, fluttering down with their balletic grace, then lying helplessly to be mashed by feet or vehicles. Most are brown, but here and there a bright vermillion one reclines as if showing off amongst the others. These red and orange leaves will soon adorn all the trees. The first ones I see, in late August, make me sad. Another summer gone, and time will not stop. Its disregard of us mortals who, aware of our death, want to grab and hold onto youth, to the sap flowing through us, just a bit longer, seems cruel. 
   We live in a part of Kentucky where rolling hills are interspersed with cedar and oak forests. Just outside the Bluegrass with its thoroughbreds and millionaires. The soil here has been stripped by tobacco farming and is mostly good for grazing cattle and sheep. Along the lane, the neighbors’ goats cavort, the dogs bark as if I don’t walk by every day, and the long row of sunflowers that just a week ago nodded against the blue sky now hang their heads, their stalks bent over as if they’ve carried their burdens too long and are ready to decompose. As if they accept the inevitable end of their sun-saluting prime.
    I turn left at the end of the lane and head up a steep incline toward the farmer lady’s house. We know her name; it’s Mrs. Hardin, but we’ve called her the farmer lady for fifteen years. Mr. Hardin died on the lane when his tractor rolled onto him, a few years after we moved to our farm. He was a crusty, unsmiling man who asked for my husband when he came by with a question, as if only men could talk about anything that mattered.
    Sometimes now, her little terrier runs out barking and tries to follow me, but I turn and tell him to go home and he does. He looks like Toto. Whitehall is barely a road; about ten feet wide, so when two vehicles pass, one has to pull into the weeds along the side; there is no shoulder. When I’m walking and a truck comes along, I step right to the edge of the pavement, because the weeds are full of poison ivy. Today the tall grasses along the road have grown back and are leaning toward one another from each side as if they are spectators at a parade craning to see when the bands will start to arrive. They swish against the sides of a car coming through like brushes at the carwash.
     Just at the top of the hill, I see a carcass of something, smaller than a deer, and hope it’s not the little dog. But, no, it’s bigger. Could it be a fox? Then I realize, it is a deer, just a very small one. A baby. It’s lying on its side, legs spread out as if asleep, its eyes wide open. I gather it was hit overnight since there’s no odor of decay. But its torso has been ripped open, and all that remains are the ribs of the tiny creature, picked clean by the turkey buzzards that hover around the farms, cluster in the dead branches of trees like morticians or Halloween decorations, mocking us for thinking anything will last.
     “Gutted.” The word forms in my consciousness. After I pass, the vultures will be back, devouring the eyes, the brain, the delicate legs. Was it following its mother as the fawns do, hesitating before crossing so that a car speeding along clipped it and left it, not smashed but mortally wounded? Did the doe come back? Or did she continue on, leaving the baby on the road?
    People say they’re “gutted” when something bad happens to them, when someone dies, when they get shocking news. Just like for several years, they’d say, “I have no words,” and then just “no words.” How can that be comforting? The reality is that when tragedy comes, most people have too many words, or the wrong ones.
      But have these people who say they are gutted ever seen something like this? Freshly cleaned of all its organs, its heart, its intestines, its liver, its lungs? No doubt these are the most tasty bits. Hollow and bereft of anything but bones between its neck and its hindquarters? This is gutted.
     And when have I ever felt like that? Felt as if my core has been violently plucked and twisted out of me by hungry devouring beaks and claws? Felt as if the wind would blow right through me? Never. Never yet.
     Was I gutted when my mother died in her sleep and I was only five? When my brother and sister became alcoholics? When my sons did? When my marriage ended? When my best friends died, one and then another? 
     Castenada wrote that Don Juan told him that having children tore a hole in your side that broke your connection with the luminosity of the world. Paul Simon sang that losing love is “like a window in your heart, everybody sees you’re blown apart,” and there was a time when that metaphor appealed to me.
      But most of my grief has stayed in my head. My viscera remain intact.
     I am so sheltered from the forces that annihilate that I can barely imagine the suffering in most of the world. The baby deer, I think, or hope, didn’t suffer. It’s been spared from the merciless aim of the hunters that live all around me. 
      I walk on. Everything is as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow, with small exceptions that I note, sometimes with awe and other times with grief. The wooly mullein plant has grown huge, its olive-green fuzzy leaves like rabbit ears coiling neatly around its roseate core. I love the symmetry of nature and I love the randomness equally. The chicory has flowered in the September sunshine, its small purple blossoms a flag of protest against the waning season. Goldenrod waves in clusters, its beauty belying its menace, a harbinger of fall allergies. 
     A red-tailed hawk mocks the horror of the buzzards with its grace and nut-brown beauty. A woodpecker hammers away just out of sight. Always I have come back from grief and loss, turned from death’s menacing jaws to the world around me. Always I have dragged myself back to life with the small reassurance that although I will lose or leave everyone I love, life itself will go on. These fenceposts erected a hundred years ago, now weathered and hollow, will pass into the earth, these saplings will one day shade the roadside for other walkers. The offspring of these birds and butterflies and creatures that outnumber us a thousand-fold will still be here, most likely even after humans have carved ourselves and one another out of existence. 

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Cindy is a retired Unitarian minister. She has an MFA in Fiction from Spalding University in Louisville, KY. A native of New Jersey, sometimes she wakes up and wonders what she's doing on a farm in rural Kentucky! She has four grown children, two boys who have been in recovery for ten and fifteen years, a daughter, and a bonus son whose mother, her niece, overdosed when Seth, now 21, was starting college. She and her husband have raised Seth, who is autistic,  since he was three. She likes to read, write, walk, dance, and cook... not all at the same time.
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