Poor Deer

by Claire Oshetsky

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss—and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life—from PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Claire Oshetsky

Margaret Murphy is a weaver of fantastic tales, growing up in a world where the truth is too much for one little girl to endure. Her first memory is of the day her friend Agnes died.

No one blames Margaret. Not in so many words. Her mother insists to everyone who will listen that her daughter never even left the house that day. Left alone to make sense of tragedy, Margaret wills herself to forget these unbearable memories, replacing them with imagined stories full of faith and magic—that always end happily.

Enter Poor Deer: a strange and formidable creature who winds her way uninvited into Margaret’s made-up tales. Poor Deer will not rest until Margaret faces the truth about her past and atones for her role in Agnes’s death.

Heartrending, hopeful, and boldly imagined, Poor Deer explores the journey toward understanding the children we once were and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life’s most difficult moments.

 

Release date: January 9, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 240

Sample

One

AT DUSK SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD MARGARET MURPHY SITS DOWN at a narrow rickety desk in room 127 at Little Ida’s Motor Lodge, eleven miles east of Niagara Falls, and begins to write her confession.

Poor Deer crouches in a corner and weeps.

Enough of your pretty lies, Poor Deer says. It’s time to tell the truth.

Her voice is raspy and insistent, like the drilling of a tooth.

All right, Margaret says. The truth.

This is a story about two little girls on the day of the schoolyard flood.

It begins like this: Paint me a mill town nestled in a bend of a river called Penobscot—

* * *

Paint me a mill town nestled in a bend of a river called Penobscot, about as far east as you can imagine and three hours north of anywhere you’ve ever heard of. A big mill broods over the town, like a castle made of brick. Its smokestacks rise up like turrets. The smoke churning out the tops settles over the houses like a soft sulfurous gauze. The sky is perpetual yellow. The houses are all the same. The streets are mostly unpaved. There are many churches. There are many believers. The boundary between the practical and the supernatural is razor-thin, and the air is filled with indistinguishable flying things: snow flurries, low-throated planes, buckshot, chaotic flocks of birds.

The town is bordered by a ring of sad small farms, with milk cows, and hogs, and sheep and lambs and chickens, and maybe a few acres of mealy potato fields. Beyond the fields come the untended woods. Children play in those woods. They come home with mysterious rashes. Wild men live in there. It’s easy to get lost in there for good. It’s easy for a child to wander in there and be mistaken for a deer and shot dead. Once a boy teased a moose in there and the moose trampled him nearly to death but he didn’t die.

Now imagine a mother, Florence—big, angry, good. Florence is a war widow, and a romantic. She longs for gentility. She loves to dust. She loves her next-door neighbor, Ruby Bickford, and doesn’t know it, because such a love lies just outside the window of Florence’s imagination. Florence lives with her sister, Dolores, in the house where they were born. She works at the downtown lunch counter, where she gives free pie slices to all the single men, because she still has ambition. Dolores is a spinster who works night shift at the mill, packaging paper napkins and throwaway menus for the restaurant business. When Dolly was twelve a boy tried to teach her the game of golf and accidentally smacked her in the jaw with the club, so hard that it misaligned her jaw for good. That’s why Dolly’s mouth has a turned-down look, like Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.

The sisters smoke Chesterfields. They are Roman Catholic. They are raising Florence’s daughter, Margaret, in the Old Testament traditions in which they themselves were raised, and the girl takes their teachings to heart: by the time she is four, she can see angels in the blades of grass, and on the backs of silverplate spoons.

Now imagine the next-door neighbor, Ruby Bickford—delicate, tragic, doomed. Dolly calls Ruby the divorcée. Florence calls Ruby my dearest friend. Ruby smokes Salems. She loves to garden. She loves her tulips. Ruby’s ex-husband owns the only hardware store in town. When Ruby needs a new pair of garden gloves she travels thirty miles south, by bus, to avoid running into the bastard, and buys her gloves at the next-closest hardware store, owned by a man named Grubb. Lately Ruby has been feeling overwhelmed by life. Everyone says she is a drinker but they’re wrong—it’s just her nerves. She always meant to be a dancer.

As for Ruby’s daughter, Agnes, that girl’s hair is the color of curdled milk. For such a small girl she moves boldly, stomping her feet along like a steadfast tin soldier. Even the thought of Agnes Bickford is like lightning. Not beautiful. No one would ever call Agnes beautiful. She is more like an arrow, aimed in a magnificent direction.

And as for Margaret—the one who is writing this confession, a dozen years after the day of the schoolyard flood—her hair is no particular color. She moves like a blind bear, knocking into things and lumbering off in unlikely directions. Margaret can never decide if the shapes moving toward her are people, or angels, or dogs or deer or wolves, but she has other skills. By the age of four she has taught herself to read, a skill that came to her after hours spent sitting in her aunt Dolly’s lap while Dolly read aloud from The Confession of Saint Patrick and moved her finger across the page. Margaret’s preferred reading isn’t hagiographical, though. It’s a compendium of fairy tales, the size and weight of an unabridged dictionary. Dolly hauled that book home from a tag sale one day. She keeps it alongside the cookbooks in the kitchen. Margaret likes to sit under the table with the book in her lap. She turns the pages while supper boils on the stove. Margaret’s mother thinks the girl is looking at the pictures, but what Margaret likes even better than the pictures are the happy endings. After the day of the schoolyard flood, Margaret begins to write happy endings of her own. Her made-up endings help her forget that singular moment in her life when everything went so wrong. No one teaches Margaret how to write—why should they, when she is four years old and can’t even recite the alphabet correctly?—and so she writes her stories down in her own, made-up, secret ciphers. She keeps her stories hidden in a shoebox under her bed, along with her clothespin family; and if Margaret ever told her mother she could read and write, and make up stories, and write them down in an alphabet she invented on her own, then her mother would have slapped her for lying—because her girl is slow, and can barely speak, and when she does speak it’s nothing but random words strung out like unmatched beads on a wire: Testify. Glorious. Stuttering—

Poor Deer has crept out of her corner. She’s standing so close to me that I can feel her boggy breath on the back of my neck. She nips at my hair. Her teeth are yellow nubs of teeth, with bits of green between.

Stop stalling—it’s time to confess what you did on the day of the schoolyard flood—

All right.

Now I’m ready to confess.

I think I’m ready.

* * *

Spring came all at once on the day of the schoolyard flood. The snow melted overnight and ran down the sledding hill and into the schoolyard, where it pooled. From an upstairs window, Margaret could see what looked like a giant mirror at the end of the street. She went downstairs and pulled on her rubber boots and ran next door and rang the bell. Agnes’s mother answered the door in her blue robe and slippers, even though it was past noon,

and said: “Margaret Murphy! Out so early, and without a coat?” and before Margaret could answer, Agnes came slipping out through the open doorway, without finishing her lunch or saying good-bye—and now two little girls were running down the gravel street together, holding hands.

“Don’t go far!” Ruby called after them.

She stood in the doorway and watched the girls running down the street on their sweet tubby legs. There was no traffic on that small gravel street. There was no danger. The sky was crowded with sudden birds clattering and the air was warm. Ruby thought about checking on her tulip beds to see if there were any fresh shoots poking up from the dirt. But then she remembered she was still in her robe and slippers, and after that she began to think of other things, besides the tulips—the bills, the familiar pain behind her eyes—and went back inside.

Agnes and Margaret were four years old. They were the same size exactly. They liked to press their foreheads together and to stare into each other’s eyes and make the same faces and same gestures synchronously. Who moved first? Which was the reflection? They adored this game and could play it forever. Margaret had just discovered a new word that morning, or maybe she had just invented it—sideways, sideways, sideways—and she warbled the word many times in a row as she went along and mixed it in with other fine words, made up or real: applesauce, peppermint, hot-diggity-dog.

It wasn’t far to the end of the street—just two houses down—but to the girls it felt far because it lay at the very edge of their map of the world. When they got to the end of their world they climbed through the rail fence to the other side, where the schoolyard began. What a wonder! Just the day before there had been nothing to see but dirty old snow and frozen dog turds, and now there was a mysterious lake stretching all the way to the school building. They could see the children far across the waters, inside their dim classrooms. The children in the school kept leaping up from their desks and running to the windows to stare out at the uncanny lake where their schoolyard used to be. They kept pointing out the windows at Agnes and Margaret, and asking their teachers: Who are those girls over there across the waters? Why aren’t they in school like us?

A chaotic flock of flapping birds flew over. Agnes waded in.

Margaret stayed where she was, with her feet on dry land. That’s how it was between them.

Margaret watched her friend slosh straight to the middle where the water was up to Agnes’s knees. She saw her friend’s boots fill up from the tops. She heard the sound of the water shushing around Agnes’s legs and she smelled fresh new shoots of living things growing up from the ground. The sunlight shattered on the surface of the water and rose up in tiny pieces. It seemed to Margaret that she could follow those tiny pieces of light wherever they would go: up into a cloud or straight into the day after next.

Now there was an old woman standing on the other side of the waters.

She began to bellow and shout.

“Come out of that water! Come out at once!” she said.

“Come to me!” Agnes said.

“Insouciant little girl!” the old woman said, and went away.

Come-to-me, insouciant-little-girl, Margaret said, under her breath and many times in a row, until it felt like a prayer to her, incantatory, and she wasn’t surprised when Agnes began running toward her in big, splashy leaps, so sudden and so happy that Margaret knew her friend was about to pull her in—but just as Agnes came into the shallows she slipped and landed hard on her bottom. Margaret yelped. She thought Agnes was hurt.

Agnes looked dazedly down at herself.

“I’m so dirty?” Agnes said—and, seeing there was no other option, she threw herself back into the muck.

Margaret felt a wave of shame on behalf of her friend. Shame was a new feeling for her. She had learned it from her mother. She frowned on purpose, a look she had also lately learned from her mother.

“You’re so dirty!” she said.

Agnes had yet to learn shame. She could barely hear her friend’s scoldings, because her ears were under the shallow water. She was busy exploring a new, underwater way of listening. Bits of sludge were gathering between her fingers like frogspawn in rivergrass. Her long hair was floating on the surface. The slow soft pull and tug of the water on her hair made her feel unusual, and weightless, and particular, and for the first time in her life she understood that she was an individuated person, in possession of her own body and apart from all other living things. When she stood, she was delighted to see she was covered in soft gray silt, as smooth and fresh against her skin as a brand-new pelt.

“Girls!” said a voice.

Now there was a man standing on the other side of the waters.

“Girls?” the man said again.

The girls had nothing to say to that. They watched him wend his way along the edge of the schoolyard flood, stepping and jumping, and mincing, and trying and failing to avoid the muddy places, until he was standing right next to them.

First the man looked at the girl standing in the puddle, all covered in silt.

“Come out of that mud, little girl,” he said.

To his relief, she did.

“Girls,” he said. “My name is Mr. Blunt. I teach the third-grade class at the school over there. The principal has sent me. You girls are not allowed to play on school property when school is in session.”

“We’re four years old!” the filthy one shouted. “We don’t go to that school!”

The man thought: This girl’s hair is so muddy that it’s sticking out in solid shapes behind her ears like modeling clay. She isn’t scared of me. She isn’t scared of anything. No doubt she is going to grow up

 to be someone interesting.

“Just wait until your mother sees you,” he said.

He looked at the other girl and thought: This girl is spotlessly clean. She’s an ordinary, forgettable, very mediocre sort of girl who will never take a single risk in life. When she grows up she will work in the mill. She will never leave town. She will die alone in her bed, in the house where she was born. This first girl, though? The one with the mud in her hair? This girl is going places—

“Where do you girls live?” he said.

They pointed.

“Are your mothers at home?”

They nodded.

“Do they know where you are?”

They nodded. The clean one had begun to cry.

“Don’t cry,” the man said. “There is no need to cry. It’s just that you girls can’t be playing on school property when school is in session.”

They looked up at him blankly. All around the birds were screaming. He thought about walking them home but they were practically home as it was.

“Very good,” he said. “Time for you to go home, then.”

He watched them climb through the split-rail fence. They began to make their way down the gravel street together, holding hands. After they were safely on their way, he traveled back through the sodden schoolyard, stepping and hopping, and failing to keep from getting mud splashed all over his shoes and his trouser bottoms. The principal had not wanted to come herself to reprimand those girls. Naturally not. She preferred keeping watch over his class and sending him out here on this muddy errand. It felt obvious to her that he was the one for the job because he was the only man on the staff. When he got back to his class, he thanked the principal, and she went away—but not without glancing down at his unkempt, muddy shoes. Never mind. He began to lead the class in reciting the eight-times table. He thought it was the end of his part in this story. He thought he’d never need to concern himself with those two little girls again. Strange how his third-grade students suddenly looked like wizened giants to him, compared with those two little girls. And he thought of his two sons, ages fourteen and eleven, and wondered why he and his wife had never tried for a daughter.

* * *

Once the man went away those girls changed their minds and decided not to go home after all, ...