My mother was not a hunter.
She did not own a rifle. She did not wear orange. She did not sit in a tree stand before sunrise whispering to other men named Sal and Junior.
But in our family, we called her The Deer Hunter.
Because when the deer came home, my mother was the one who knew exactly what to do.
The Business
My father came home from Tinian after the war in the Pacific, and like a lot of men from that generation, he did not come home looking for rest. He came home looking for work.
So, he opened a garage and towing business. In our house, that meant the phone could ring at any hour, and when it rang, somebody was leaving the table.
At first, it was one tow truck. Then another. Then a bigger one. Then a bigger one than the bigger one.
My father loved tow trucks the way some men love racehorses. He would walk around a new truck with his hands on his hips like he was admiring the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
He would say, 'Look at this one. Heavy duty.'
My mother, whose nickname was Tree, would look at it and say, 'Beautiful. Can it take out the garbage?'
That was Tree. Very practical. Very Sicilian. In our family, a nickname did not need an explanation. A man could be called Tiny and weigh 290 pounds. A woman could be called Baby and have grandchildren in high school. My mother was Tree, and that was that.
The Expressway
Then, in 1964, the Atlantic City Expressway opened. It was a new, modern road from the Philadelphia area toward Atlantic City. Fast. Smooth. Safety engineered. Four lanes cutting through South Jersey like somebody drew a line across the pines with a ruler.
The posted speed limit was 70 miles an hour, which meant that half of New Jersey immediately decided 80 was a reasonable suggestion.
The Expressway Authority needed a company to handle emergency road service and accidents, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
My father bid on the contract and won it.
This was a big deal. It meant steady work. It meant pride. It meant responsibility.
It also meant that no meal in our house was safe ever again.
Christmas Eve? Phone rings. Sunday dinner? Phone rings. Somebody just put the macaroni on the table? Phone rings.
In our family, grace before meals was basically, 'Lord, please let us finish before the State Police call.'
The Deer Problem
What nobody warned us about was the deer.
The State of New Jersey had built this beautiful, high-speed road. But nobody had explained it to the deer.
The deer continued to behave like deer, which is to say they stepped into traffic with the confidence of a person crossing a church parking lot after Mass.
So, a car would be coming down the Expressway at 80 miles an hour, headlights on, radio playing, family inside arguing about whether they missed the exit, and suddenly here comes Bambi's cousin from the pine trees making the worst decision of his life.
Then the phone would ring.
'Accident on the Expressway. Car hit a deer. Need a tow.'
So, my father, or one of the men, or me, or my twin brother, would take the tow truck out there. The State Police would have flares going. The driver would be shaken up. The front of the car would look like it had argued with a freight train and lost.
And nearby would be the deer, now promoted against its will from wildlife to road hazard.
We would hook up the car. Then the trooper would look at us and say, very casually, 'While you're here, can you take the deer too?'
This is how government works. First, they give you a contract. Then they give you a deer.
Bringing It Home To Tree
So, we took the deer.
We put it on the back of the tow truck next to the smashed-up automobile. Somewhere in New Jersey there was probably a man trying to explain to his insurance company that yes, the Cadillac was damaged by a deer, and yes, the same deer was last seen leaving the scene on a Holmes wrecker.
Then we brought it home.
Not to the dump. Not to the highway department. Home.
To Tree.
Now, in a normal family, if a tow truck pulls into the driveway with a wrecked car and a dead deer, the mother screams.
In our house, my mother looked out the window and said, 'Put it downstairs.'
Downstairs meant the basement. And not a modern finished basement with carpet, a television, and a little refrigerator with soda. I mean a real basement. Concrete floor. Pipes. Freezer. Tools. The kind of basement where practical things happened.
And when a deer came home, practical things happened fast.
The Basement Operation
My brother and I would help carry it in, trying not to think too deeply about the fact that our family had somehow become the final stop on the Atlantic County food chain.
Tree would already be ready.
She had this calmness about her. No drama. No squeamishness. She was like a surgeon before an operation, except the operating room was our basement and the patient had arrived by tow truck.
She would say, 'Hang it over there.'
Over there meant from the pipes.
Not fancy butcher hooks. Not a hunting lodge. Pipes.
Because Sicilians do not need special equipment. They need a knife, a basement, and absolute confidence.
Tree would string that deer up, drain it, skin it, butcher it, and wrap it into packages like she had been trained by the Department of Agriculture, the United States Army, and three old women from Palermo.
Nobody knew where she learned it. Maybe it was growing up during the Depression. She was born in 1922, and people from that era knew things nobody teaches anymore.
They could stretch a dollar, sew a dress, feed twenty people on almost nothing, and look at a dead deer in the basement without turning it into a family meeting.
Tree did not waste anything.
To her, venison was not strange. It was food. Good food. Free food. Food that had arrived with a police escort.
The Freezer And The Sauce
Soon the freezer was full.
Packages and packages of venison. Steaks. Chops. Ground meat. Mystery cuts wrapped in white butcher paper. Sometimes the label just said, 'Deer.'
That was the entire inventory system.
But in a Sicilian house, all meat has one final destination.
Tomato sauce.
Every Sunday morning, Tree made sauce. Not marinara. Not red sauce. Sauce. The house would fill with tomatoes, garlic, onions, basil, and meat simmering slowly until even the wallpaper started speaking Italian.
Meatballs went in. Sausage went in. Braciole went in. And then, depending on the week's Expressway report, deer went in.
Tree's venison in tomato sauce became famous.
Not restaurant famous. Better than that.
State Police famous.
The troopers would come by pretending they were just checking on things.
'Everything okay over here?'
My father would say, 'Tree made sauce.'
Suddenly, everybody had time.
Men who had been directing traffic five minutes earlier were sitting at our table with Italian bread in their hands, dragging it through the sauce like they were performing a religious ceremony.
One of them might say, 'This deer from mile marker 22?'
And Tree would look at him and say, 'You gonna eat, or you gonna investigate?'
He ate.
The Real Hunter
Now, hunters like to make a big thing of hunting.
They get the boots, the jackets, the licenses, the rifles. They go out before dawn. They sit in the cold. They track. They wait. Then, if they are lucky, they shoot a deer, field dress it, and bring the meat home.
My mother skipped several steps.
She did not go into the woods. She did not climb a tree. She did not carry a rifle.
Her deer came delivered.
By tow truck.
Some hunters had pickup trucks. Tree had an entire fleet.
But here's the thing: she did the hard part. Anybody can tell a hunting story. My mother stood in a basement with a knife and turned an accident into dinner.
She turned a road hazard into Sunday sauce. She turned a smashed-up night on the Expressway into twenty-seven packages of venison and a kitchen full of people.
That was her gift. She took whatever showed up at the door and made it useful. Made it feed somebody. Made it part of the family story.
What I Remember
Looking back, the whole thing sounds crazy.
A dead deer on the back of a tow truck. Two boys carrying it into the basement. My mother hanging it from pipes like this was the most normal thing in the world. State Police eating venison in tomato sauce at the kitchen table.
But that was our life.
It was hard work. Strange work. Funny work. Family work.
And Tree was at the center of it, calm as ever, with her Depression-era skills, her Sicilian sauce, and her belief that nothing good should be wasted.
Some mothers baked cookies.
Some mothers canned peaches.
Some mothers knitted sweaters.
My mother butchered deer from the Atlantic City Expressway and served them in Sunday sauce.
And let me tell you something.
Nobody ever left hungry.