The Meaning of Always in the Absence of Forever

Molly O’Callaghan  

Dr. Peckham  

ENG 210  

March 15, 2021  

I have always hated hunting. I can say “always” with some certainty at twenty, but ten years ago such a word was still too big. What can you use this word for as a child, knowing that “always” meant so little against the backdrop of so few years?  

 I always wanted to be a daddy’s girl. 

When I was ten years old, my father gifted me a child-sized compound bow and a set of baby pink arrows to go with it. This was to be my practice weapon to prepare me for the day when he’d take me on my first hunt. I loved shooting it even though I missed the target almost every time. As angry as my unsuccess made me, I would keep shooting a hundred more times and miss a hundred more times only to hear Dad say “Thatta girl!” when I finally hit somewhere near the bull’s eye. It was the “thatta girl” I was aiming for anyway, not the target.  

I don’t think Dad wanted to take me hunting because he thought I’d be good at it. He was a man who spoke in moments, spoke through moments, more clearly than with words. When he took his sons hunting, boys who felt like men wielding rifles, he did so to share the experience with them. When he took me hunting, his tiniest child who could hardly hold a weapon upright, he did so to say, “I love you”. To say, “I want to spend time with you, even if you lose every arrow and step on too many crunchy twigs when I tell you to be quiet.” 

I always knew that I was loved, even when these words were not said aloud. 

The day came when my father and I would go on the real hunt, forsaking my tiny bow and pink arrows for a crossbow that was half as big as my own body. It was the first time and the last time I’d ever go hunting, and I can feel this memory as if it were standing before me with a hand outstretched, tugging on my own. As a child, I was exhilarated by the idea of waking up before the rest of my family. Excitement coaxed goosebumps to the top of my skin as I stepped out into the sunless morning, into a different world where it was only me and Dad. When you are the fifth child of your mother and the ninth child of your father, it is almost never “only me and dad”. It is because of this that I am so greedy with the ownership of this memory. It is only mine and not my sisters’, or my brothers’, or even my mother’s. It is a story I can tell my family where all they can be is an audience; I offer it proudly as material for the portrait of him that we are collectively reconstructing all the time. That morning my dad was calm and kind, he had patience that was uncharacteristic of him. He only loved—loved me and loved the vast woods lying at the edge of our home, the woods which were perhaps more of a home to him than any house could ever be. 

I thought my father would always be around. Always is too big a word for such a small child. 

The tent we sat in crumpled noisily beneath my knees as I crawled inside and sat myself in the corner. Every scrunch of the canvas floor made me cringe in fear of being shushed, but no reprimand came. My dad showed me how to use the crossbow he’d brought along, pointing to the sight and explaining how all of it worked. I pretended to know just what he was talking about.  

“Thatta girl,” He said, or something like this. Even if he said it only with a nod, I know he said it. 

Then it was quiet, the kind of quiet that most children spend their energy trying to fill, but which I was glad for both then and now. It is in this silence that I can best reimagine my father, sitting there in his most natural, stoic state. I could only see his profile from where I sat, his green eyes fixed on the open field outside the meshy tent window, his shoulders hunched up to the lobes of his ears as he adjusted the sight on his weapon. He’d smile at me every now and then with his distinctly him smile, a top row of teeth half-covered by a sloping lip. My father had many good things, funny things, wise things to say, but I always preferred the quietness that we had in common.  

Much of the actual experience is lost on me now. I spent half of the morning sleeping and spent the other half praying all the deer away. I prayed for their absence to protect them, but also so that my father would never have to know that I didn’t want to kill anything. Death would have ruined that day for me, though somehow not as much as if Dad had realized I hated something he loved so much. He was a born outdoorsman, a skilled hunter, and here was one of his own children who would rather capture the image of a deer with pencil and paper than steal their bodies with a bow and arrow.  

I always wanted to be my father’s favorite child. I would have pulled the trigger to earn that title. 

We walked home with nothing, emerging from the woods as failures, as bird watchers, as nappers. We were everything but hunters. None of that mattered to me then. I posed happily for “first time hunting” photos snapped by my mother, watching my father look on with a certain, bright expression that said he was proud of me for something. 

I have always hated hunting, yet I love the way it hushes a moment until all you are left with is the way someone made you feel. 

*Written by a friend of mine, Molly ("O'Callaghan") Salmons [the "g" is silent, and the "l" in "Salmons" is also silent]