The Long Accomplishment by Rick Moody

Author:Rick Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

April

I mean, in the thick of 2013–14, in which Laurel and I were trying to be newlyweds, and human frailty was everywhere happening around us, it was easy on occasion to feel like we were in a Kleist story, in which nothing caused anything exactly, but there was poignancy at every turn, all of it obscure, hard to interpret, explosive. There were explosions of poignancy. It was an explosions-of-poignancy life. There was a deer carcass in the yard of our house upstate, for example, when the snow melted, and Hazel and I were out walking in the backyard, when she said, What is that over there? Meaning what was that thing protruding from the lawn over there in the corner of the yard by where the scrub stretched out luxuriously for a bit. What is that? Well, it turned out to be the upended rib cage of a deer in the yard, which had probably been taken out by some larger predator, but which larger predator in our neighborhood could do something like that?

We had seen coyote in the yard, we had seen fox in the yard, we had seen eagles in the yard, even the occasional turkey vulture in the yard. We had even seen a bobcat on two occasions. You’re not supposed to see bobcat, at least not often, and in the spirit of Heinrich von Kleist it would be possible to see one and simply to wonder at its appearance without interpreting it or believing it emblematic. I would estimate that our bobcat was in the forty to fifty pound range, with big substantial paws. So different, in terms of the volume of menace, and chutzpah, from its distant relative: the domestic shorthair. It loped across the lawn in a way that did not quite say, for example, I will disembowel you and not think twice, it wasn’t quite that brazen, but neither was it in any way afraid. I suppose only a bear or a mountain lion would cause the bobcat to feel afraid. Did the bobcat make piecemeal of the yearling?

And there had been a bear in the neighborhood. Our just-over-the-ridge neighbor, who had a single cow on the property, until the cow got made into a bunch of cuts of beef in the freezer, and who also had pigs, and bees, that neighbor had seen the bear, and I use the singular here to describe the bear though I am powerless to evaluate whether or not it is multiple. The neighbor even noted that the bear pushed over the beehive and helped her- or himself to all the honey to be found there. We might imagine that the bear didn’t quite come over the hill and down closer to Route 22, because that would be unwise for the bear, and yet there was something large enough to bend our birdfeeder out back of the kitchen like it was a sapling, emptying all the seed out on the lawn and then pawing through it.

My point

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