maureen pendras / essay

The Hunting Party

I brought a photo in once to show my analyst. It was a hunting group—grubby, young, depression-era men—hunting for deer and elk. My young grandfather rests among these men, his brother to his right. They hold rifles and have gathered the three dead deer into poses, craning their necks forward as if they too were posing for the camera. Their soft bodies lie horizontally, connecting the clumps of upright men.

Why did I bring this to my analyst? This old photo of my grandfather and other random men, serious and hungry. I hoped he would tell me. Help me understand why I was carrying this, on this particular day, into his office? 

I never did hear what he thought. My own sense was he felt put off by these men. Scared. But of course, that’s my feeling. I found the men frightening. Their firm, serious faces, the men stand like rocks.  

I identified more with the deer. The prizes.  

I was trying to say something about myself and the places I come from. Not just one place—the many places. Where I’ve lived but also the landscapes of my father, my family, and those behind them. This photo, this way of being, there is something here that exists in me. I am in these shadows and ghosts, dirt and guns.

*

My grandmother told me a story once about my grandfather’s brother, her brother-in-law, the very one in the photo; he came knocking at the door late one night when my grandfather was away. She wouldn’t answer it, though he knocked and begged and yelled. She said, “I knew it was no good.” Something under-handed and secret he was looking for. She silently tip-toed to the door, slid the bolt and hid in the house. Quiet, quiet. 

She too was a deer.

When my dad was young, my grandfather was often out—days at a time—philandering.  One morning my grandmother heard him coming home through the front door, my dad and his younger sister were grade school age, sitting at the breakfast table eating oatmeal. My grandmother picked up my dad’s heavy bowl and threw it at my grandfather’s head. My dad said he’d never seen his mother so angry. The navy surplus bowl shattered across the wall and grey oatmeal dripped down to the floor. My dad would watch this scene—late nights turned into mornings—repeated over and over throughout his childhood. 

When my dad was fourteen, he said to his father, “We don’t need you around here anymore.” My grandfather had returned home after a few days out and had come bearing gifts. A new bike for my dad. My dad didn’t take the bait, “I’m the man of the house now.” My grandfather mocked him. He had always called my dad, “The little king,” jealous of the attention and love my father received. But my dad was unwavering. They wrestled in a way that would have been called wrestling in the past but was something serious and rough now. Tension, like a coiled spring. My grandfather stayed, but my dad sealed off a part of his heart to him. 

My father always wanted to treat my grandmother better than my grandfather did. To listen to her. To see her. 

As a grown man, one year my dad bought them ferry tickets to Alaska, car camping. It was my grandmother’s dream of a place. Wolves and the lonely, cold air. She wanted to hear something out there—stars, new thoughts, mysteries. Her own father had been hired to carry the gear for a gold miner up in Alaska. My great-grandfather, a big, red-headed Irishman, carried the man’s belongings up the Chilkoot Trail while this man, in turn, taught my great-grandfather to read. These stories filled her childhood of Alaska and that Chilkoot Trail. 

My grandmother would often repeat to me, “We don’t own our children.” I think she had often felt owned by her parents, especially her mother, and this was why she was in such a hurry to get out of the house. Two of her siblings never made it. They lived at home with their mother all their adult lives. Whereas my grandmother was pregnant at seventeen. She told me once, “We might have needed to get married.” A sideways smirk on her face. She didn’t dream of the Azores, where her mother was from, but of Alaska and her father’s adventures.

When she did visit Alaska—on that camping trip gifted by my dad, she loved it. Roaring around in their 1978 K5 Blazer, no seats in the back. The extremes of the place. The frightening, enormous mosquitos and bears. The bugs were so loud, she said. My grandfather was silent on the whole experience. He was a reluctant traveler. Whereas my grandmother longed for more. 

She was eighty-five years old when she traveled with her eighty-seven-year-old friend to Turkey. Busses and backpacks and not knowing where they’d sleep for the night. She did not want the sanctity of a tour group. Her friend said, “You’re our guide.” And my grandmother said, “Well, we’re done for.” But she navigated them through unfamiliar and exciting streets and rooms with sad little twin beds. Her favorite place: the shrine at Mary’s House, said to be Mary’s home located just outside the ruins of Ephesus—a devoted catholic to the end. 

Except for a stretch when my father died from a brain tumor. She begged God to switch places with him. When that didn’t work, she fell down a dark hole, hating god. 

When my grandmother died, she asked that her ashes be scattered in Yukon Territory where she said she could finally rest with wolves and unfettered nights.

*

That photo. The ghosts. What was I trying to say about myself? I can only reach my thoughts through other doors.

I remember fishing with my father. The excitement of pulling in something heavy and unknown. But when we caught dogfish—a small shark in these Pacific Northwest waters—there was a change in my dad’s face and demeanor. He lit into some other part of himself. A reservoir of hatred. I never knew what I was more afraid of, the dull saucer eyes of the dogfish, kicking its tail toward me, or my dad.

He was so angry at them, a waste of lure and line, “bad meat,” he said.  

When he saw their dark eyes kicking towards us, he’d grab The Club, used for swiftly killing the fish. But this was different. He’d say, “You want to go to school?” In a high-pitched, sing-song tone. Creepy. And then repeatedly bash them on the head. He’d cut out lure with a deft flick of the wrist. Throw them back, stunned and lipless, often dead.  A white stillness floating in those cold green waters. 

Every now and then they’d spring to life, but usually they floated there, white belly exposed, like someone’s underpants.  

I looked after those dogfish, asked my dad, Are they still alive? He’d assure me they were, as we drove away, “they don’t feel it.”

What was he beating and cutting, tossing out like it was garbage? What would need to 

be attacked like that? His own fears possibly—of everything that shark represented—the past kicking up to steal from him now. Occasionally he beat those dogfish like his life depended on it.

Maybe it did. 

Or maybe it had. That to survive his life he had to fight that hard. He was no longer in that

life but that life was in him.

I think that’s what I wanted to say to my analyst. There’s something hard—rock hard—about me. And yet I was never as hard as I needed to be. I worried about the dogfish and the unraveling coldness of my dad in those moments.  

I carry both sides of this legacy—his kindness and devotion as well as his ruthlessness. Like stars in the daytime, they’re still there—we just can’t see them in sunlight.

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Maureen Pendras is a writer and psychoanalyst living in Seattle, WA. Maureen's work can also be found in Under the Sun.