Free Big Cherry Holler by Adriana Trigiani Page A

as he looks into the window. (He’s tall enough to see over all the heads.)
    “What is it?”
    “You ain’t gonna believe it.” Spec pushes me to the front of the group so I can see in the window. There in the living room is Naomi, in a long pale green flannel nightgown, standing completely still and staring into the eyes of a six-point buck. The buck seems twice as big as any horse I’ve ever seen, and he doesn’t seem agitated, he just looks deeply into Naomi’s eyes. Naomi does not move; she stares the buck down.
    “It’s been pert’ near an hour we been waitin’. But the buck ain’t flinched, and neither has Naomi,” a man holding a stun gun tells me.
    “What are you gonna do?” I whisper back.
    “I got ten bucks on Naomi,” he whispers back.
    “Boys, we’d better make a move,” Spec warns the group. But no one can make a move; we’re in that strange place where awe and fear intersect, and it has paralyzed us.
    Naomi takes a step back without breaking her stare. As she shifts, the deer cocks his head. We hold our breath outside the window. Naomi holds up her finger.
    “I’m a-gonna go, Ben,” she says to the buck. “Now, you go when I go. Go on. Git.” Naomi disappears down a hallway and we hear a door close.
    “Who the hell is Ben?” Tozz whispers.
    Then the six-point buck rears up. For a second, it looks as though he, like Naomi, may back out the open front door. Instead, in a panic, he charges the bay window at the far side of the living room and jumps through the window, tearing away the wood frame with his antlers. We hear a small yelp from deep within him as he breaksthrough the glass, which shatters onto the wood floor like crushed ice. In what seems like a long time but is only a few seconds, Tozz leads the charge around the side of the house to the front, to see where the buck went. As we get to the front porch steps, we see his silvery-brown rump as he leaps majestically back into the dark woods.
    Spec and I run into the house to Naomi. The bay window is destroyed. The simple voile sheers are torn where the buck’s antlers caught; there is fresh blood on the sash, where the glass pierced his underside. This makes my stomach turn. Spec opens the door to the bedroom for me.
    “Naomi, honey, are you all right?” I ask her.
    She sits on the edge of her bed in a state of calm with her hands folded neatly on her lap.
    “Naomi?”
    “Check her breathin’,” Spec barks.
    “What happened?”
    “Oh, Ava Marie,” Naomi says and sighs. Naomi’s pale skin has a pink sheen to it; there is a little dew on her forehead (from the standoff, no doubt). Her long hair, which I have never seen outside a braided bun, is loose and hanging around her shoulders in shiny ropes. Her bedroom is small, with a bed with a red and white Irish chain quilt, a small lamp, and a table. She looks like a doll in a simple cradle as she sits. “He come to me. I dreamt it, and he done come.”
    “Who?”
    “Ben.”
    “Ben?”
    “My husband, Ben. Ye know.”
    “Naomi, we always called your husband Mule. Mule Mullins.”
    “His Christian name was Ben.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “Benjamin Ezra Mullins. That was his name in full. I had a dream a while back where he was a buck and I was a doe and we was talkin’ to each other like we was human.” I make Naomi cough three timesas I listen to her heart. “I been restless, thinkin’ about him here lately. And I prayed that I could talk to him dye-rectly as I was feelin’ his presence here. I been thinkin’ ’bout selling this farm, and I couldn’t decide on nothin’ on my own, so I called on Jesus and then, o’ course, my Ben.”
    “How did the buck, I mean Ben, get into the house?”
    “He just walked right in. I had left the door open for air.”
    “How do you know it was him?”
    “The eyes.” Naomi smiles.
    “What did he tell you?”
    “To stay.”
    “Well, if that was his message, he tore up the window in the living room pretty