A Dodge Ram 2500 weights 6 or 7 thousand pounds. It is a heavy duty pickup that is made for towing cargo that weighs 10 thousand pounds to 15 thousand pounds give or take. Her Ram was a marroon color. It was covered in a a layer of white dust which must have come from a caliche road or driveway unpaved. Not uncommon in that part of the prairie.
Why did god make it happen?
She was sobbing. The Ram was in the right lane and blocking it and the dead deer was in the other lane well in front of the pickup. She must have backed up and was parked behind the dead dear as if she had not hit it yet. As if time was frozen before impact. Except the deer was sprawled in broken and permanent stillness.
She had killed a deer on the farm to market.
She was in her fifties. Alone in the Ram. Tears falling, she said she was going to church. I don’t see any damage on the truck she said. That is what her husband had told her to look for. Damage. Then she saw it. It looked as if someone had taken a paper towel and roughly cleared a 2 foot area just before the rear wheel well. Then a mix of metal denting and undamaged plastic. It was not terrible damage. More than the deductible though. Maybe fifteen hundred- two thousand to repair.
It hit me! It ran out and hit me! I didn’t hit it!
She was still sobbing. Still distraught.
Why did god make it happen she said again?
Texas. Miles of farm to markets. Deer. Lots of deer. Dodge rams 2500 with towing packages. Lots of them. They go fast.
Somewhere there is an intersection of all things. An intersection of everything. The unification of everything. Sometimes visible and sometimes not. Sometimes the intersections seem like magic. Mystical. Un-explainable. Some need faith for context. Some don’t.
She was unconsolable. I have never hit a deer she said.
But it hit me!
Life and death are always so at hand. So mysterious. Sometimes so unexpected. And sometimes so expected. If one could see all possibilities, all outcomes, all inputs, all forces counter forces, maybe the mystery, the unkowning would diminish. But even at its most diminished there would still the element of what was the Ram doing here on earth. What was the deer doing here on earth. Why a road?
That brings in the element of chance. Fortune. fate.
It makes my head hurt.
Lots of deer moving lots of directions and sometimes they don’t see the big Rams rolling 60 miles an hour down narrow roads with Johnson grass clogged high on each side like a hedge row closing off sight lines. The Ram is a new predator. Not hardwired into deer DNA yet.
Maybe some day it will be. That time may come where parent deer teach their fawns to watch for Ram 2500's. The move fast the parent will say. Listen for a roar. A whine. They are very fast they will say.
It all takes. time. Something we have so little of.
Tick Tock.
The lady seemed to take comfort that the deer hit her. That she did not drive into it. Just ran into me she said again.
Cause and effect. She was sobbing. The deer was dead.
It was a Saturday late afternoon in June. A few hours before sunset.
Across the prairie, long planned June weddings had begun at event centers and bar g q joints and would continue long into the night with dj's and country bands and exhausted but relieved families shuffling on and off dance floors.
Couples would wake to a new Sunday morning. Married. To have and to hold. In sickness and in health.
eye of bunting
