I told Greg, the boss of my landscaping job, that I had to take off a couple of days for Carlo’s mother’s funeral. His words were kind and supportive, but he left this lingering eye like an anchor of doubt on my decision.

We had been in the middle of constructing this wedding venue. This old farm in Saratoga County had been bought up by some millionaire and the guy wanted to convert the old barn into this outdoor area shaded by ancient maples and marble stone shipped in from India.

It was a beautiful design, but working that summer was like working in the Gobi Desert. Me and three Mexican migrant workers drove up into the place and saw this dust bowl before us. There was dust and dirt as far as the eye could see. The property was past this beautiful lake, up in the hill country, and the section of land which we were working on was bordered by this large green hill which had young grape vines burgeoning above the rich soil.

We spent days that summer feeling the hot breath of the sun, its heavy tongue, licking our necks. My neck went red and my coworkers began shouting “langosta” or  lobster at me and smiling. I smiled back, shrugged and put my head back down, My shovel a holy grail to scoop the next mound of sacramental grass from the property to prepare the land for its burial rights of black gravel.

My eyes glared at the grains of dust dancing in the soft air coughed up from the action of my shovelhead. I stared into the earth, preparing dust for stone. My bones quaked with death it seemed, as every lunch I ate softly screamed with the strain of a stiff neck and the taste of arid earth.

After two weeks in, one morning the shortest of my coworkers pointed at the top of the hill and told me through black sunglasses, “el valle de verde infinito.”

I had no comprehension of this, my Spanish was limited, but I nodded politely and stated, “Si, si.” 

He muttered some other fast sentence in his native tongue, but I was even more lost. I hung my head in the prayer to the eternal Gods of dust billowing up from my boots.

At lunch my coworker again came up to me and grabbed the cuff of my collar, smiling. He again shouted at me, “el valle de verde infinito.”

Frazzled, exhausted, I dragged my shovel behind me. I went limp and let this small, tough man lug me from the shaded trees near the brown, dusty barnyard, up into the dry, yellow grass of the hill, beyond the small reaching limbs of the grape vines. He brought me to the hill’s crest, and pointed out at a blue sky that splashed like an endless sea.

I looked out from that point and saw the valley of infinite green. From that crest we could  look out and see the rolling hills of farmland stretching onward like the colors of two facing mirrors. Eternity was there on that crevice, beyond the brown and gray dust I had grown to love and loathe. The green space was the pasture of heaven―every pasture― and I knew right then that this millionaire had been building in the wrong spot. Who would want to be married in the finite space of this small hill when they could be infinitely blessed with green at the top of this hill? 

My coworker let me be silent, and he harmonized with my quietness as the sun cast long shadows behind us as we stared onward with infinity. In his broken English he said, “I live forever. Here.” And I realized it wasn’t broken English but steel-forged truth.

The next morning we made Greg look out upon the vision. Unmoving he spoke from statue-lips, “You can have the rest of the week off.”

So I drove off the next morning headed south into the mountains of the Catskills towards the small towns clustered like pimples in the sprawling spine of mountains. My plan was to go out Thursday for the drive and to get settled in the room I was renting and then to go to the wake and services that Friday.

On the way down, I stopped at a rest stop for coffee and for gasoline. I looked for a hiking trail in the area approximate to where I was staying and found a nice ridge to hike through public and private land that seemed to have nice views. I decided that I would hike it that afternoon and then go to my rental.

After another hour and a half of driving, I pulled into the parking for the trail head. I put water and some snacks in my backpack, pulled on my hiking boots and took to the trail.

The day lived in this listless green buzz, and not a single tree seemed to dance in the humid air. But the sun had risen orange in the morning  and kept its mighty hue into the now early afternoon. The shade was bearable, but the lighted part of the trail was unguarded and heavy with heat. I ascended this switchback through a graveled path, thinking about the layers of earth, stone, and gravel beneath my crunching boots, and jogged up a stone step section.

I emerged into a clearing of white cliff face as it wore the orange glow of the silent sun like a mask. I went into the light and looked out upon the ridge. It was summer and not rainy, so I had expected to have a clear view of the world beyond, but my eyes looked out upon a thick haze of white. It was like a phantom stretching its skin across every green leaf and limb in the valley. It made the trees look yellow and jaundice, like a million faces of death bleeding into one another; it was the borrowed smoke of a New Jersey forest fire hundreds of miles away. I saw this phantom haze like the dead fog of all things hanging in plain sight. A million ghosts of the dead bundled together in the heat of the Catskills waiting for a Virgil to lead them astray or out of death, or perhaps more permanently into it.

I felt the sick white heat like a pinching of my marrow and had to look away. Here, so far away from that infinite valley of green, there were the eternal ghosts of the white haze. This death mask in the valley. It made me think of Carlo’s mother again and of course that dream that had risen from the muck of my subconscious; the rain, the dark, the brick walls, the inkling of poetry on my tongue…

So I turned from the cliff face and walked onward back into the shadow of trees into the private land of the trail. I wondered if that mask of death was my own doing. Was I chasing death? Its importance? Or its definition? Or its existence? Is death a thing that lives and breathes and eats? Or is it an absence? A biopsy of a soul from the eternal mustering of humanity?

Or even smaller than that: what is Death for Carlo? Is this Death a heavy weight for him to carry; or a stone among stones in the vastness of the mountains? It all seemed too much. Like a question that shouldn’t be asked, or a stupid off-track statement any wise teacher would disavow to refocus on the core of his lecture. I think I came down here to show my love for Carlo of course, but also, I was chasing the mask of Death, and though I looked upon its white hazing ghost, I knew there was more.

So I tried to listen to the robins of the woods. The chickadees and the cardinals casting off their songs into the silent timbers. Even the cackling blackness of the crow would bring me comfort. I breathed out for four seconds and in for four. I wanted to be here, here in the forest,  not staring at the white mask of Death on the edge of some cliff thinking about the eternities we all carry around. The Death we carry around. Another robin sang out its chorus and I heard the distant trickling of a creek splashing in the shaded glen of the quiet forest. A thought came to me, a thought of Death, as every thought you try to push away comes charging back in like the silver trumpets of cavalry:

Death is a stone you carry in your pocket, turning it over and over waiting for the perfect lake to throw it in.

And it is true, I think. I think I feel it in my pocket sometimes driving to work or home from it. I think I feel its slight weight and bulge when I chew a peanut butter sandwich, caked in the mud of the earth below oaks that date back to an age before my own family tree began. I feel it sway in my pocket as I rise from bed in the morning and measure the strength of the day’s light with worn irises.

I heard a branch break and a chewing of leaves. I stopped walking and looked over to my left. Ten feet from me, ten feet from the trail there was a doe in a small clearing. Her dark eyes looked into mine, and we held a quiet gaze. The distant stream pursed its lips and went quiet. The world was still and the doe looked upon me like the creator of worlds and like its destroyer. I had never been so close to one in my entire life. I saw its skin quake. I watched its dark eyes blink. Its fur swayed ever so slightly as it reared its head. I think I heard it swallow a mouthful of grass. Its hooves clinked upon loose stones in the clearing. Maybe it was the light or maybe I was making it up, but the longer I looked into the doe’s eyes, the bluer they became. This dark shade of blue sky as it kisses away into midnight. A blue that holstered the brightness of the day before the sun emerged from its slumber.

Fffffttt. The air wooshed by me like a slur. Those blue eyes fell into coal blackness, and the doe’s head ripped upwards towards the sky in a soundless plea and then arched forward into the ruin of death. Rise and collapse of creation in the exhale of one breath.

A black arrow was dug into the thick neck of this creature. Neon yellow feathers glittered with dark red flecks like a second head the deer never wanted.

A gasp of a choir, like the inhale before the psalm began, and the deer was laying upon the brown pine needles of the forest floor. Somewhere in the distance, the stream began whispering again and the coughing of a crow cackled in the hidden limbs of pine trees, and I felt the weight of a stone in my pocket.

I stared, squirming in my silence. Somehow the death of this beast was my fault, in the locking of eyes or in the pausing of time. I was to blame.

Footsteps, short and proud, began behind me and into my vantage point came a small woman. On her one shoulder was a metallic black bow. Her hands were clasped together in what I first thought was a prayer but ended up being the calm lighting and flickering of a Bic lighter and the crisp smell of Marlboro tobacco. She was covered in a dark green camouflage cloak. Her dark hair was in a tight bun and the top of her head was covered in an old army cap.

She strode right past me and walked right to the dead deer. Her black boots clomped into the dark pool beside the deer and she slid a knife from her belt like a small sword. The smell of the tobacco took away any reality of the forest, it followed her and robbed my nose of the endless smell of evergreen.

“Who…what are…” I began to say but I was tongue tied. I had no idea what to say. Sweat tickled the pores of my scalp and drips of it ran loosely down my nose and chin.

She waved her cigarette away from her lips like a torch in the black of night. “Private property here except the exact path of the trail. I appreciate you staying where you belong,” she said in a stern, mumbling tone. She brought the white cigarette back to her mouth and I saw her pink lips stained yellow like the eyes of a cat. She broke away from me and focused on the once-deer now-carcass. She pinched the cigarette with nimble indifference in her lips and then grabbed the legs of the kill with two gloved hands and wrestled it with knowing force to the position she wanted. She plunged the cold knife into the hot body and I heard the wriggling of metal within the hot intestines of the dead deer. Ashes leapt from the tobacco and fell like soft rain into the open body of the animal.

I looked into the beast’s eyes and saw only the slightest trace of that momentary blue. It was blackness now. Blank blackness, void of anything, no iris dancing with curiosity at the forest before it and the sun above it. Black abyss bubbled in the shade of the clearing.

“What if you had hit me?” I said softly, too shocked to speak.

“Did I?” she asked in a lilt of a voice, her eyes still not even glancing upon me.

“You killed a deer.” Silence in the forest.

“Well spotted. She’ll be a nice summertime treat. My land, my kill.”

“You’re a savage. You’re a brute. I came here to hike and…”

Her knife stopped its intricate carving and slid from the red pools it splashed in. She lifted her head and plucked the cigarette from her lips like one picks an apple from an orchard. On her neck, I saw a glimpse of a black tattoo, like a figure in a black cloak.

“That, dear hiker, is a matter of perspective. I would argue I brought death to this deer in the most honorable way possible, I…”
“You shot it down in the woods in the middle of a beautiful day,” I cut her off. “You stole it from the forest… you’re a thief and a killer.” I was so angry for some reason, I felt red hot and began to sweat more but my boots were cement blocks on the path, I was a statue of movement.

“The state might not be perfectly okay with this, but this deer is on my lands. My family has owned these lands since they bought them centuries ago. They belonged to us beyond time, beyond anything really. We have hunted deer in this region long before complainers like you criticized us for it.”

“It’s brutal.”

“Is it now?” The huntress now brought the cigarette back to her lips and took a long drag. I could feel the smoke collect in the pit of her lungs. She glared at me and I saw that splash of blue in those eyes; the sky which peaks in through the black clouds of a storm. She was short but powerful, strong and divine in her fluorescent anger. I was sweating because of her heat, not the sun’s. “Because I would bet when you eat meat you think of it as pork loins and t-bone steak, not as sweet little pigs and dough-eyes cows. I would bet you don’t stop your car to pray when you see a dead deer on the highway, plastered like confetti all over the road.” she said all this in a soft accusation of cowardice. That’s how I took it anyhow, that I was less of a man because I trudged in the forest to enjoy it, to seek questions rolling around in my skull and not to kill something for sustenance.

“I…I don’t.”

“I took this deer after tracking it for three hours. I have pulled ticks from my skin and mosquitos from my scalp. I trudged through creeks and thrashed through thorns. I held my breath and I stared into its eyes. I pulled the bow back with all the power of my chest. I exhaled and watched the arrow fly true. For years I have trained and practiced. I killed this deer while it enjoyed one last meal. I killed it with honor and time and grace. I earned its death. Can you say the same about that pile of cut meat you stack in your grocery cart? Can you say I am the savage for what I have done, when you get your meat when it is convenient. You let someone else kill the thing you devour. You let its death hide in plastic sheeting. You scan your meat by the pound. I slice it from the very marrow, I eat the muscle of my labor. I chase its death and earn it.”

She slowly placed the cigarette back into her tight, yellow lips. Her dark hair like the mud grimed on my boots. She was done with me. She looked back at the deer half gutted before her and began to cut and slice it open. The smell of hot blood mixed with the Marlboro, and the hazy white of the distant sky seemed to congeal and clog right there in front of me. I closed my eyes and walked onward. 

All I could envision was Carlo in that muddy, rainy field, the darkness swallowed us whole as the brick walls clambered higher and thicker all around us. The white lightning flashed like flint upon the steel of my mind and in the stands I saw a huntress lighting a cigarette seated next to a hooded figure.

I wandered towards that splashing of the brook and finally found its clear, cold waters. I got on my knees and vomited into the stream, breathless and red. The water washed the filth onward into the small waterfall. I looked into the streambed and looked at the blue river stones round and dense like eyes gleaming back into me. I closed my eyes and sank my hot cheeks into the chill wet and held my breath. My ears heard the silence of the forest and its powerful absence of noise made my ears ring with blunt pain. I covered them in the waters too until the silence was all encompassing. Until silence was the wet cold lingering all around me. And still I saw those blue eyes, and through the clear coppery water, I smelt the ash of Marlboro cigarettes and hot, spilt blood.