One
night, when I was eleven or so,
my father and I went to his office
after dark.
I do not
remember why.
As we left, I thought of
home
and the places my father goes
when he is not there.
His office was full of signs of a
life secret to me.
The
headlamps played on
landscaped
corporate gardens
as we drove home.
I saw two men by the side of the road.
They knelt in the too-bright light
before their
pickup truck,
and they held a
fawn by its head and legs.
I did not know
why.
The fawn was kicking in terrified
agony and
the faces of those men were
grim
with
intent.
And we stopped at a
red light.
I rose in my seat to look some more and
shivered,
thinking of the fawn and its head and its hooves:
tearing at the
pavement.
One of the men brought his arm in an
arc over the head of the
deer
(like a shaman like a healer)
and crushed its skull with a hammer.
The fawn stopped suddenly.
It did not revel in
death.
I was filled with terrible fascination by the
spectacle
and I asked my father why they had done
what they had done.
He turned to me and
half-smiled through his beard.
they had to because they hit it with their truck
says my father-
memory now,
and they could not let it suffer.
It was years before I really learned that
compassion
wears
masks and
sometimes travels under different names.