To Bleed Out

TO BLEED OUT

My grandfather took me out hunting for the first time when I was fourteen years old. He was a smiling man, that’s the best way I could describe him. Tall and crooked, even a crooked smile but the purest of hearts. Seemed odd that he should be the first person to put a gun in my hands, but I didn’t mind. If I was going to learn cruelty, I wanted to learn it from someone pleasant. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t look down on hunting, but to kill is cruel. Cruelty, however, is not always wrong, certainly not in a cruel world, or an indifferent one. I won’t say that I’ve felt a great deal of malice in my life, but I have encountered a weighty indifference. Perhaps, that’s why I felt so at home as we passed into the jaws of the forest. There was no intent in the apathetic gaze of the trees which surrounded me, whatever might come to pass simply would.

The rifle in my hands felt heavy, heavier than I expected. It was nothing special, just an old hunting rifle. But I was scrawny, shaggy-haired and bespectacled so it must have been quite a sight. My grandfather was a bespectacled man himself, only his shaggy hair curled and snarled its way out from his nose while he looked down at me with the warmest of smiles. His hand on my shoulder as we ventured deep into the Massachusetts wilderness.

It wasn’t long before my grandfather assured me we were on the trail of a deer. In my mental preparation beforehand, I had assumed it would be difficult to get close, but grandfather told me otherwise. During hunting season they were jumpy and cautious, but years of being dulled by the sounds of the freeway and the bustling suburbia to which their woodland world bordered, many deer had grown lame. He was proven right as we carefully tracked a young doe which had recently crossed our path.

Crossing through the brush, we found her. She stood there, ears flicking, and head bowed. Humble and beautiful, an almost regal quality to the smooth sheen of her brown coat. My jaju placed his hand on my shoulder and aided me with raising my rifle. I was trembling, but I don’t think Jaju noticed. I didn’t want to shoot her, but even before I fired, I knew I would. Nothing can grow if nothing dies. In the final moment she raised her head and turned toward me.

Crack!

The animal’s body rippled and jerked but did not fall over. Instead, it galloped off into the trees with humbling resilience. My grandfather sucked the wind in through his teeth. I had hit it, but the hit was not fatal, not yet. It was called a bad shot. Not bad because I missed, but bad because of what I had hit. It was bad for the deer, a belly wound. The animal was dead but hardly knew it, it would be slow and painful as it bled out.

“That was a bad shot.”

My grandfather’s words made me shiver with disappointment. I felt myself crumble beneath the weight of those words. I had not wanted to cause harm, no more than was necessary to make my grandfather proud. He wasn’t disappointed with me, only concerned about the deer. We were here to take its life, not to deliver it pain. There was a smear of blood against the brush over by where it had been shot. The blood left patches which led us eastward. My grandfather and I followed the patches, which only increased in regularity as we marched methodically through the forest.

A couple of hours passed, my feet were sore and my legs were tired. The gun and supplies were heavy and only grew heavier as my breath grew shallow. I never viewed myself as a quitter by nature, I rarely if ever uttered the words; ‘I quit.’ Yet I felt a desire to turn away and leave. If my grandfather was right, and judging by the blood, he was, then the animal was already dead. Were we to turn back now it would no doubt be claimed by the coyotes come nightfall. Even if I were to beat the scavengers to it and find it in its weakened state, laboring breaths and wandering eyes, the only help I could offer it is another bullet. My vigor had left me, and I was finished. However, I could not bring myself to tell the tall bespectacled man beside me, that I had had enough. What was not put into words was evident in my body language. I dragged my feet and wiped my brow; my heavy sighs and shuffling boots were enough for him to at last turn toward me.

“It’s getting a bit late. Your mom will be expecting you home.” He wore a reassuring smile. “We’ve done all we can do. Maybe next time we’ll bring something home.”

He winked, but next time never came.

            Since he sobered up, my jaju and I had an excellent relationship. Rarely did I go more than a few days without seeing him or, at least, hearing from him. He was a good man, a kind man, it was hard not to notice just how kind he had become. He did not exactly age with grace, but he did develop a jovial kindness which many would say carried with it a grace of its own. It seemed that every ounce of cruelty which once existed in him had been wrung out with the liquor. That blood, which wreaked with the translucent venom found in every glass of gin, had been bled out of him. Off the advice of a doctor who gave him a month to live, Jaju kicked the habit cold turkey. That decision bought him seven more years, seven years that did not go to waste. In those seven years I gained a great many memories of my jaju, but not a single one of them was of hunting.

            Getting to know my jaju was an interesting experience. When he was healthy and alert, I learned his personality through his actions. He detested being late, but refused to drive a single tick over the speed limit. He was a ferociously loving man, calling as many as six times a day to run through his same checklist of questions. ‘How’s it going?’ ‘How’s your mother?’ ‘What’s the plan?’ We would, regrettably, grow tired of his calls, my mom included. We would wrestle and jockey, not for the opportunity to speak to him but to avoid doing so. Second oldest in the house among my brothers and an agreeable enough individual to play the perpetual emotional buffer I would accept the bulk of the calls. A smile on my face and a cheer in my voice, I would efficiently run through the questions until he was emotionally satisfied or too defeated by everyone else’s transparent excuses to avoid him. He would end every conversation with the same question. ‘When you stopping by?’

            “Soon.”

            Please don’t get the wrong idea. I saw my jaju frequently. Every morning, like clockwork, he would bring my mom a coffee. His joints even clicked and popped with the rhythm of a ticking clock. He was reliable. Of course, that was not always the case. He was once a drunk, and it’s a rare thing indeed to find a reliable drunk. At one time in my jaju’s life there was little you could count on him for, little that one could say of him without a shudder of doubt. The only reliable aspect of his life, which one could have predicted day in and day out, was that he would drink. Bouncing me on his lap as a child, I remember the empty green bottles on his television stand as vividly as I remember his smiling face and yellowed eyes. No fewer than six bottles rested there at a time.

            All of the regrettable things I heard him say in those early days, all of the things he did, were washed away in seven years. That bitter old man had died and my jaju had taken his place. However, it wasn’t until another affliction greeted him that I would come to know him for the man he was on the inside. Cancer had come to claim him, the great collector of souls. It was colon cancer to be specific, and it was late set. We knew that, no matter how hard he fought, this battle would be his last. He would not bleed this out and come out the other side stronger as he had done with the alcohol; this was cancer, it would bleed him out. No longer did me and my brothers battle with one another to hand the phone over, we came willingly, and we came often. He had given us seven years to atone for his sins, now it was our turn.

            While he was cheery faced and jolly, his usual self, when the whole family was present; the best conversations occurred when you got him alone. When we came as a unit, he would recite the same speech over and over in an attempt to calm us.

“It’s my time.” He would say. “And if it’s my time then that’s okay. The Lord is gonna take me up to Heaven. I only hope you boys look back and say ‘I had a good Jaju.’”

“Of course, we did, Jaju.” We would all reply.

While his brave face held up amidst the hectic drone of a family of six (my mom and her five sons) he was more forthcoming one on one. He had told my mom in private that he was afraid to die, that he didn’t want to. I wasn’t sure if he feared the judgment of his God, being a devout man near death, or if it was the fear that his faith may have been misplaced, but I knew he was scared either way. Who could blame him? It looked a harsh way to go. Slowly his strength and color left him. His body grew frail and his cheeks drooped from his face. One might have felt obligated to inspect his body for wounds, try to find what it was that was killing him. Once, during one of those morbidly comedic moments of false hope that only those who have been in a cancer ward can ever know, Jaju had been permitted to return home. They believed he was recovering, but he would still require the colostomy bag and constant attention. I helped clean the colostomy bag for him, rinsing his waste out of it and helping him reattach it. He was a proud man and didn’t often ask for help, thus I could read the shame on his face as clear as day and as somber as twilight. He tried to draw attention away from the hole in his stomach, the belly wound from which it appeared he was slowly dying.

The shame in his eyes was crushing. My jaju, while not successful, had lived his life a confident man. Flirting with any woman, regardless of age or race, that still sported a full set of teeth. Though he wasn’t picky, dentures or a few missing here and there would do just fine too. Once they put the bag on him, he wasn’t the same. He didn’t flirt, didn’t tell tired old jokes which predated even himself. Cancer had not only killed him; it had crushed his spirit and shattered his confidence. It took all that made him feel human until death was no longer something to be feared, but welcomed.

When the cancer inevitably relapsed, he told my mother between sobs that he wanted ‘No more.’ He didn’t need to elaborate; he was a broken man speaking to his daughter. She understood.

The last day I saw him alive he was no longer conscious. His eyes darted and rattled behind closed lids. His only replies came in soft whines and gestures with his brow. My mom kissed him and held him. She stroked his thin gray hair and spoke between sobs, “I’m here dad. I’m here.” Without his usual point of telling me that he saw me with the wrestling team in the paper, his thick Boston accent flowing from his lips, I simply watched in silence. The nurses darted in and out, hooking up an assortment of machines and adorning him with different wires and tubes. He reminded me, at least what little remained of him, of a man dying of a gut shot beneath the Sahara sun. Only dully aware of the vultures which pulled and tugged on his rapidly decaying flesh.

It was clear by the pathetic movements and his frail physical form that what little of Jaju still remained was steadily slipping into the dark nothing of his mind.

He died the next day. There was nothing left to say which hadn’t been said already. The death was a relief, as much for us as it was for him. Dying was the hard part, at least he was past that now.

“I had a good Jaju.”

I made sure to say those words everyday for weeks after he passed and still make sure to remind myself of them from time to time. However, it was not merely his death that inspired me to write this story nor simply his life. It was a brief conversation we had in the hospital on the rare opportunity to speak with each other alone.

Greeting him with false smiles and a numb heart, I sat by the window while he lay in bed. I was still in high school, but I had never any doubt about who and what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a writer. That was both the who and the what as far as I was concerned. Of course, it’s not an easy thing to accomplish your dreams and nothing good comes easy just as nothing easy can truly be profound. There must be sacrifice. Thus far, the sacrifice had been my happiness and my security. There were times when I wanted to simply give up. Give up and curl into a ball. It felt like maybe I was dying slowly myself, succumbing to some unseen wound or undefined disease. In a moment of honesty, I expressed my doubts to Jaju. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could do it, that maybe I should do something else “ya know…in the meantime.”

In response, my jaju told me many things about himself that he had never told me before. I’m not sure if he meant it as the prophetic warning in which I took it, but he told me all the same. Outlining his many missteps and struggles. His broken promises and dead dreams. I came to a realization which had eluded me until that day. My jaju had never really been anything, not until the day he sobered up and became Jaju. He had tried out lives as one does hats. A lifetime of perusing without purchase left him with no identity, no life, to speak of. He was almost a lounge singer, almost a pro bowler, almost a good father and almost a good husband. He lived so many half-lives and abandoned so many responsibilities that his life became as crooked and misshapen as the well-meaning man himself. Without anything to define him, he stepped outside and collapsed in the cold with nothing but his drink to warm him. In his final years, some might say his best, he wore the hat of a good grandfather. But by then it was a haggard, tired old thing. Tattered and splitting at the seams, it managed to hold long enough that it became what we most remembered him by.

At last, after a lengthy conversation he arrived at the point around which he had been circling since the beginning. I still don’t believe he meant it, or maybe he didn’t know what he meant by it, but his words shook me. A simple man by nature, he was never one for metaphors or philosophy.

“That day in the woods…” He began, his throat dry and croaking. “When we went into the woods. I know we followed, and I know we searched but…” I leaned forward, scarcely understanding what it was he was talking about. “I think we could have found her. I think we could have helped her. We gave up too easily. I think we do that, sometimes. We give up too easily. We leave things in the woods, things that don’t need to be there.”

He turned toward me as if returning from far away, a place deep within himself.

“You understand?” He asked.

“Sure, Jaju.”

I left that day feeling cold, feeling insulted. Pride blinded me from the wisdom of his dying words. I loved my jaju but I had no intention of being him, of being like him. I wore my identity proudly, I had made up my mind and I would never live a fractured life like his, but a whole existence. Concentrated and dedicated in a way that Jaju had never been, not until it was too late. It wasn’t until long after he had passed that I finally understood, truly.

I had been turned down by a few publishers, the first one hurt and the next less so. But the numb was not a good thing, not a calming thing. It was more like dying. I felt like I was slipping away, as if everything I had ever believed was being pressed against the coals and slowly being consumed by the embers. I wanted to quit. Then I remembered my grandfather, my Jaju. I remembered what it was he told me. “We give up too easily, we leave things in the woods that don’t need to be there.”

My jaju was not calling me a quitter, he was calling himself one. My Jaju was a good man because he wanted me to be the better man.

I can’t go back to that day in the woods and spare the deer I shot from the cruel fate it no doubt endured. The brutal death with which I doomed it. For all I know it’s still lurching in the wilderness, its wound infected and puss filled, a feeding ground for parasites, refusing to die, refusing to leave its life of perpetual suffering. That guilt, as it ought to, will remain with me always. But I swear, from this day on, so long as my fingers can dance along the keys and my lungs can draw breath; I will venture into that forest and I will leave nothing behind, until the job is done.

I love you Jaju.

Dedicated to Chester Milosh.