Poor Deer came to me when I was small, and scared, and alone, and in need of hope, however fragile, that one day I would find a way to make up for what I’d done. Her hooves kick out at my shins. She nips and hurts. She clings and sighs. She demands justice. She never forgives. A tooth for a tooth, and a claw for a claw, she always says. A life for a life, she always says. She leaves scat on the rug, and cries easily. She is my oldest friend.
Margaret “Bunny” Murphy was four years old when she was responsible for a terrible deed, and although she has carried that burden ever since — a burden which manifests as a blue-robed, yellow-nub-toothed doe that clings to her back, hissing in the girl’s ear that she is a liar — no one in the girl’s life has ever noticed her pain or thought to discuss with her the limited responsibility a four-year-old should bear for her actions (indeed, with an overlay of Catholic guilt, the shame that Margaret is steeped in threatens punishment in the next life, too). I come to this having viscerally loved Claire Oshetsky’s last novel, Chouette, and while Poor Deer is something different — more quiet, less intensely bizarre — Oshetsky’s writing is still lovely and contemplative and digs deep into the human psyche. So, while my personal taste runs more to the bizarre, this was still a very worthwhile read; recommended!
I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical and the facts feel like borrowed broken things picked out at random from a jumble of hearsay and old gossip. Once I tried to tell my mother the truth about the day of the schoolyard flood and she slapped me and said: “MARGARET MURPHY, YOU WILL NEVER REPEAT THAT AWFUL LIE AGAIN!” and I never did.
When she was little, Margaret loved reading her aunt’s big book of fairy tales and making up her own — written in a cryptic language and stored in a shoe box — and always, Margaret’s stories had the happy endings that real life rarely sees. Now sixteen and having driven to a motel near Niagara Falls — in the company of a young mother and her little girl that Margaret picked up along the way — Margaret is ready to write out her “confession” on motel stationery, with Poor Deer piping up from her corner every time Margaret attempts to steer her story onto a happier path (I did like that I felt surprised every time that Poor Deer interrupts and Margaret would need to retread an earlier passage and branch it out into a different, truer, direction). Through her confession we learn how little support Margaret got from her single mother (her father having died “in the war”; the setting seems to be the 1950s), how everyone in her small hometown continued blaming her for what happened “on the day of the schoolyard flood”, and while she didn’t really have any friends (except, sometimes, heart-filling interactions with other outsiders), her aunt did try to be there for the girl — when she wasn’t working night shift at the mill and sleeping all day. It’s unclear whether Margaret had some kind of developmental delays, or whether that’s something her mother said to put her down, but the girl didn’t succeed at school, didn’t succeed socially, and couldn’t bring herself to participate at Church; unwilling to make a confession to the priest, unwilling to take communion. All because of the burden of guilt she felt for something that happened when she was four. As an examination of repressed childhood trauma (and the burdens, big and small, we all carry on our backs), and the cleansing power of shining a light in the dark recesses of the mind (we might not all need to pen an actual confession, but self-knowledge and -reflection are integral to mental health), Poor Deer brings forth ideas that aren’t talked about nearly enough, and I could appreciate the message.
I feel an ominous turn in this story coming. It’s looming over my future. I’m running out of time to find my happy ending. Poor Deer is giving me no guidance. She no longer interrupts my progress with caustic interjections or snide objections. At the moment my musty nemesis is nodding off in the corner. Her soft exhalations fill room 127 of Little Ida’s Motor Lodge with a pastoral peacefulness. She mumbles something incoherent in her sleep and sticks her long slow tongue out and licks her black nose and then she snuffles and sighs and tucks her head back under one hoof. Penny and Glo are sleeping the way they always do, all tangle-legged and a-tumble with their hair flung across the pillows. I’m rubbing the tip of my missing finger. I’m remembering the smell of bacon grease. I’m remembering a time when my mother loved me.
Much like the owl baby in Chouette, the deer riding Margaret’s back is a wonderful metaphor for a fact of human existence that might be otherwise hard to describe, and Oshetsky proves themselves, once again, a master of such metaphors. Lovely, touching — ultimately important — book.
