A Man and His Moon (Part 3 of 3)
Illumination
One late winter afternoon, as Lewen warmed his hands over a dwindling fire, he heard a noise in the nearby brush. Concerned, he peered through a grove of trees and saw a deer—a broad-shouldered doe with a mottled, tawny coat. He stepped out of the shack and approached the animal, expecting it to flee as soon as she saw him. But as he approached, twigs and snow crunching under his feet, the deer froze in position. And when Lewen was no more than five feet away, he realized that she had been wounded, that a hunter’s arrow was stuck in her right flank.
The doe looked at him, her eyes wet, her nose twitching. She leaned close and rubbed her snout against his stomach, then turned her bloody flesh to him. Lewen looked around for the hunter who had wounded this creature, and the rage of his once powerful days resurfaced, his desire, his ability to punish those whom he believed should be punished. The deer cried, prompting the man to rub her throat.
After a few more tender strokes of the deer’s neck, he led her to the shack. He poured a pot of cold salt water over the wound, which caused the doe to leap up on her rear hooves and squeal. Once she calmed down, he pressed his palm on her flank, the arrow between his thumb and forefinger. With his right hand, he grasped the arrow’s shaft and slowly pulled the arrow. He struggled to remove it from her flesh, indicating a broadhead tip designed to kill, to maim. Seething with rage, he again looked around the woods for the hunter: seeing nothing, he returned to the deer.
He pushed down hard with his left hand, felt her sweaty skin. He counted down from three, twisted his shoulder, pulled and tore the arrowhead from her side. The deer cried, but did not move. He then held the arrow up to the sky, its tip covered with a dollop of bloody tissue. Quickly, he pressed an old shirt against the wound and held it tight until the bleeding slowed to a trickle.
That night, the deer lay down on the floor of his shack, and Lewen fed her rain water and blades of sea grass until she fell asleep. For the first three days of her convalescence, she rarely left the shack, choosing instead to sleep on the floor and stand only when the man brought her water and vegetation. She soon felt well enough to leave the shack and take long walks through the forest, through the tidal pools, along the beach. And so comfortable was she around this man that she returned to the hut each evening.
Several weeks passed, during which time the doe would stay close, and Lewen would read, watch distant boats slice through the bay, and make minor repairs to the shack. On one sunny spring day, when dense layers of winter ice began to melt, when water dripped from snow-covered branches, when optimistic sprigs surged forth, Lewen heard voices in the distance. He climbed up to the roof and looked west, where he saw a group of men in camouflage, rifles in their hands. Terrified not for himself but for the deer, he scanned the woods and saw her standing in the tidal pool, kicking her legs in the water as if she were dancing. As the hunters approached, he whistled, intending to alert her to danger.
When the deer heard his call, she looked up to the shack and ran toward Lewen. He turned back to the men and saw that they had spotted her, that they had split up into two groups to prevent her escape. Terrified, he jumped from the roof, twisting his ankle when he landed. No, no! he yelled to the hunters, as they raised their rifles. Lewen limped to the deer, prepared to sacrifice his life for hers—as he would have done on the corner of 72nd and Columbus if he’d had the chance to save his family. But before he could position his body between the deer and the men, gunfire split the cool air—and he watched as her body jerked in spasm and dropped to the ground.
The doe was dead. As the sunlight reflected off her still, glassy eyes, Lewen felt weak. He felt the urge to vomit. As he did when he received the call that his wife and boys were dead, he blacked, out—this time awakening hours later in a somber twilight. He looked around—streaks of amethyst and umber striated the pearl-grey sky; an osprey circled above, its predatory eyes on a listing bluefish; a pool of blood—the deer’s blood—stained an empty patch of melting ice. The deer was gone, taken.
As he looked around the quiet wood, he had a dissociative moment, one in which he could not tell which parts of his life were real and which were dreams. Had he ever lived in the city? he wondered. Had he been rich? Were his wife and children dead? Did he now live in a remote shack on Shelter Island? Did he subsist on rain water and oysters? With some effort, he was able to recapture every fact in perfect detail, and he concluded that his life—these two distinct lives—had been no dream. (Fantasy in, fantasy out.)
Lewen remained in the shack and returned to a solitary life. He collected rain water and pulled oysters from the bay’s muddy bed. Over and over, he read the few books that he brought with him: The Brothers Karamazov, The Last Gentleman, A Canticle for Leibowitz. He took simple pleasure in anticipating the rise and fall of the tidal pools, in the sensation of a mucousy oyster sliding down his throat, in the tymbal songs of the cicadas—and he tried to repress all memories of his wife, his children, the doe.
After the spring thaw erased the last patches of snow, and after the sodden ground devoured the last drops of the deer’s blood, the summer brought wicked winds and a relentless drought. Weeks of cloudless skies revealed a pulsating sun that battered the damp soil into hard brick. At first, Lewen was scared that he would suffer from the lack of rain, that he would have nothing to drink. But as he thought about the possibility of death—he would under no circumstances return to civilization—he realized that he had nothing to fear, for he had become attached to nothing.
One Sunday evening in the middle of August, dark clouds moved in from the west and settled over the island. Lewen was relieved that rain appeared imminent, and he sat in the shack and awaited the sound of raindrops on the tin roof. But instead of rain, the storm clouds brought lightning—a wicked bolt that shattered a cluster of pitch pines and triggered a fire that started in the low brush and quickly consumed the surrounding pines, sweet birches and white oaks.
Lewen sat in his shack, protected by the tidal pools on either side, and wondered if the flames would leap the water. He felt the great heat penetrate the hut and watched as the fire’s glow illuminated the sky. No longer afraid of death, he closed his eyes and pictured the faces of those he had loved and lost. He wondered if he would wake in the morning, and he experienced a feeling of indifference to life, to death, that was more liberating than tragic.
When he awoke the next morning, he looked outside to see that the fire still raged, that the sky was so filled with thick clouds of smoke that he could not see the treetops. He walked to the water’s edge, just yards from the fire, and saw that a fireboat was anchored close to shore, shooting streams of water onto the flames. But the fire was so intense, so thick and wicked, that the stream of water had little effect on the flames.
Night came, the fire continued to glow, and smoke filled the sky, hiding the moon’s orb and its halo of light. Lewen could not see the moon, and he waved his hand in the air, as if to clear the smoke from the sky—and where the sight of the moon once caused him to recall his wife and two boys with agony, its absence now evoked in him an even more painful feeling: disconnection.
The firefighters battled the blaze for six days, and his despair grew with each moonless night. But on the seventh night, the fireboat’s water doused the final cluster of flames, and gusts of hard wind pushed the last wisps of smoke north-east, toward Orient Point.
He looked up to the clear sky and once again saw the moon—marigold orange, bountiful, swollen, replete. Reminiscent. And as the fireboat pulled anchor and puttered away, Lewen smiled, for someone else—and not he—had illuminated the moon.
❤️