Free Yule Tidings by Savannah Dawn Page B

he thought to himself, climbing in the cab of his truck.  He drove up the road a short way and then turned around to drive back down the road, spotting a trail of blood about thirty feet adjacent to where her car had been.  Merle got out of the truck and followed the tracks down the steep slope of the ditch and into the trees about five yards before he found the deer, unconscious, but alive.  It wouldn’t survive the night, he knew.  If it didn’t die naturally, the wolves would take after it.  He grabbed his knife from his truck.  He’d have preferred to shoot the thing; safer and quicker, but he didn’t have a gun on him, so he came around behind it, slitting its throat cleanly in one deft motion.  He waited while it bled in the trees before he hauled it up the ditch to his truck.  He would rather clean it at home, where he could take his time and dispose of the waste properly.  It took some effort, but eventually he managed to load the carcass into the bed of the truck.
                  The cab of his truck was warm compared to the bitter wind of the open road.  Merle had taken a chill while he searched for the deer.   His pants were wet from hooking the tow cables up to the woman’s car, and his legs ached, his pant legs frosted over ever so slightly, making them stiff.  He was getting too old for this.  Traipsing about at all hours of the night, helping strange women on the side of the road at his age was ridiculous.  It was a young man’s job.  He shook his head at himself.  He should retire and move back to Virginia.  He’d left this town the day he turned eighteen, and he never planned on returning.  He only came back because Martha insisted.  They’d gone to college together, not even friends, but united in their insecurity.  They both grew up in this small northern town, and Virginia was alien to them.  Before long, they fell so deeply in love that it consumed them. 
    They married, had two beautiful children, and then, after the kids were grown and he was nearly ready to retire, Martha was diagnosed with cancer. She wanted to come home, where she was raised, to die in peace.  She wanted to be buried in Holy Mary Catholic cemetery and to spend what was left of her life visiting old haunts and sitting on the porch looking out at the laurel trees.  Merle couldn’t deny her.  She’d followed him across the country and back, supporting him when he started his first construction company, and then again when he started his second.  She had been more than just his wife, and the mother of his children.  She’d acted as his secretary when he couldn’t afford to pay one, his friend when he needed someone to talk to, his confidant when he thought he was a failure, and his strength when he was weak. He moved without complaint, because it was the first thing Martha had ever really asked of him, and he knew it would probably be the last. He couldn’t deny her when she’d devoted her entire life to helping him achieve his goals and aspirations.
    He didn’t want to be back in this small town with all the memories of his childhood.  His father’s drinking and wasting all the money.  His mother, desperate to provide for them, did whatever she could to put food on the table.  She worked at the grocery store, sold clothes at the JC Penny’s, and even walked the streets begging when she couldn’t make due.  Merle had been mortified, not that his family was poor, but that his family was poor because his father was such a dead beat.  His beautiful mother, aged much more than her years, died a year after he left.  His sister, also away at college, never came back, not even for the funeral, and Merle, though he returned to see his mother laid to rest, would never have come back again without Martha’s request.
    It wasn’t long after they came back that he realized that he couldn’t just sit at home and watch Martha die.  He started his third construction company to keep him