Before You Know Kindness (2004)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Nope," she said, pulling Patrick away from the strap of her Speedo and kissing him once on his nose. The baby gurgled and sighed. She realized, much to her surprise, how happy she was to see him, too.

  Chapter Five.

  Spencer McCullough had been watching the lakes with their impenetrable Native American names--Winnipesaukee, Sunapee, Squam--outside his plane window for almost ten minutes now, and so he knew they'd be on the ground any moment. Even in a fifteen-seat puddle jumper, the Friday afternoon flight from LaGuardia to West Lebanon was barely an hour. He glanced across the aisle at Catherine, saw she was focused on an article in her magazine, and turned back to the window. He thought of the garden. It wasn't its size that excited him: Anyone with enough time on his hands could plant a third of an acre of carrots or beets or squash. It was the garden's variety. Granted, he had appeased his mother-in-law and Sara and John--who, because they lived in Vermont, presumed they knew more than he did about growing vegetables in the faux tundra of northern New Hampshire--by planting rows and rows of the basics. But there were also yards of surprises interspersed in the dirt and clay, and he couldn't wait to see them. White icicle radishes. Kohlrabi. The arugula and the endive that he understood his daughter, his niece, and his mother-in-law already were eating and the blue Hubbard squash that by the fall would look like the pods from which aliens always seemed to spring in the camp horror films of the 1950s.

  He could never, of course, have a vegetable garden on West Eighty-fifth Street. They lived on the ninth floor of a building full of co-op apartments.

  Even when they had lived in Connecticut in the first years after Charlotte had been born, however--their postpartum foray into suburbia--he couldn't have had a garden like this. It wasn't that there hadn't been the time when he was home or that they hadn't had the space--though that was more limited in the suburbs than it was in northern New Hampshire. It was the deer. Those beautiful animals with their big dark eyes, their white plumelike tails, and their ridiculous Vulcan-like ears. He had tried three times in the four years they had lived in Long Ridge to have a vegetable garden, and each time the deer had devoured it. Eaten whatever they wanted, despite his attempts to deter them. Eaten the lettuce, despite the tobacco-tea--chewing tobacco in water, really--that he had sprinkled on the grass that bordered the garden. Eaten the flowers on the string beans, despite the garlic and Tabasco concoction he had doused on the plants themselves (a remedy that proved as bad as the ailment, since the smell had made the few plants the deer hadn't bothered to gobble completely inedible). Eaten the peas and the beet greens despite the old bathwater. The deer had ignored the mothballs he put in his yard (the nuclear option, in his mind, since mothballs contained naphthalene), and the myriad animal urines--bobcat, wolf, his own--that he showered along the perimeter. Alas, nothing could dissuade the deer that wandered contentedly in the night through those suburban backyards from eating whatever they wanted.

  But, then, what did he expect? Sometimes he would ask himself if he honestly believed that he could outsmart an animal so perfect in terms of its evolution that its bone structure hadn't changed in four million years. A mammal that--unlike so many others--didn't become a mere fossil to study in the Ice Age but actually flourished in the midst of cataclysmic environmental transformation. Spencer understood that deer could eat virtually anything that grows up from the dirt--and, when pressed, had been known to stomp fish in shallow water to eat them--and were capable of living almost anywhere. Deep woods. Cleared farmland. The suburbs. Cities. The whitetail existed in the coldest reaches of northern Alberta, in the scorching heat of New Mexico, along the Pacific coastline of Peru. Its cousins, the blacktail and the mule deer, filled in those western corners of North America where the whitetail was absent--the Nevada desert, the California seaboard--with the result that there were few crevices on the continent where there weren't deer of one kind or another.

  Nevertheless, Spencer had convinced himself that New Hampshire would be different. In all the times that he had been to his mother-in-law's--the summers when he'd been a college student, weeks at a time ever since--never once had he seen a deer on her property. Two decades ago he'd seen them occasionally from the highway when he was returning home from Echo Lake, but he guessed those sightings were ten miles from Sugar Hill, and he knew from his work that deer tended to live most of their life in a world no bigger than a couple square miles. If there was enough food, some whitetails would spend a whole season in a few hundred acres.

  Moreover, he presumed he saw deer off the interstate near Echo Lake because there was no hunting allowed in the state park. And hunting was the key. Neither wolves nor foxes nor drought nor mountains of snow could diminish a region's deer population for long. Only man could do that. All that hunting in the fall beyond the borders of the state park, Spencer guessed, kept the deer herd small and would prevent the creatures from sidling up to a Sugar Hill garden and eating the spinach. They knew the signs of a real predator when they saw one.

  An irony, of course, was that Spencer himself would never kill a deer. Nor would he ever eat one. He hadn't touched meat since he was nineteen years old. He'd never hunted (and he knew he never would), and he positively did not approve of someone else taking a Savage 99 or a Browning A-Bolt or whatever it was that they used, and firing a bullet into a deer: Like the lobsters he'd slaughtered--like the hogs and the chickens in their minuscule cages in those deplorable factory farms, the air itself an unbreathable miasma of excrement, like the mink who were electrocuted or clubbed for a coat--they felt pain. They felt pleasure. They had parents.

  But if two centuries of deer hunting in New Hampshire had diminished the herd to the point where he could plant the vegetable garden of his dreams--and have the satisfaction of knowing that his daughter, his mother-in-law, and his niece were savoring its bounty--so be it.

  His family had never had vegetable gardens when he'd been growing up, not on any small (or large) square of land beside any of the houses in which they'd lived in a variety of suburban neighborhoods north of Manhattan. Not in Hastings or Rye, not in Stamford or Scarsdale. Not in either of the smaller houses in Hartsdale or the large Tudor one his mother had loved in New Canaan. They moved a lot, it seemed, for a family in which Dad never once relocated cities for work or even changed corporations. Bill McCullough worked, in fact, between the eleventh and the eighteenth floor of the same building on Madison and Twenty-third Street for forty years--working every single day for the very same insurance company--until his wife was diagnosed with lung cancer at sixty-two and he retired at sixty-three to help care for her. She died after a gloomy, febrile, excruciating seven-month battle--more with the chemotherapy and the radiation than with the disease itself--and he, well aware of the life expectancy for a now sixty-four-year-old widower, followed her quickly. A series of strokes at weekly intervals beginning nine months after her funeral. He spent a month in the hospital, unable to speak, then move, then breathe. Charlotte had been in kindergarten at the time. They returned from Long Ridge to Manhattan soon after that, though Spencer didn't really believe there was a connection.

  As a child Spencer hadn't understood why his family moved so often and why he went to so many schools. Why he had to figure out so many unspoken dress codes--each one more subtle than the one that preceded it--between the seventh and twelfth grade. Obviously his father wasn't wanted by the law, and he traveled almost not at all for business. Still, Spencer didn't spend a whole lot of time with him growing up. And when he did, his memories were mostly about silence: His dad appearing once in a while--almost like a vision--in the small bleachers at the baseball field when his Little League team had a game. His dad tying a necktie in the mirror in the front hall of the house in . . . in either Rye or that first one in Hartsdale, Spencer couldn't be sure . . . before leaving unusually early for work one morning and whispering conspiratorially that they shouldn't wake his mother. His father falling asleep at nine thirty at night in front of the television set in the family room, a
lone, an unfinished scotch and water (mostly scotch, despite the ice cube that had melted) on the table beside him.

  Sometimes Spencer and his sister, a girl only eighteen months younger than he, would water down the bottles of Cutty Sark and J&B Rare. They'd measure where on the schooner's sails the scotch was on the Cutty Sark label, pour out between half an inch and an inch, and then replace it with exactly as much water and--if they had noticeably diluted the color--a drop or two of their mother's dark apple cider vinegar.

  He had few memories, he realized, of his father and his mother ever chatting with each other when he was a child. On some level, they loved each other: He saw just how much when his mother was dying. But other than he and his sister--and a shared tendency to drink way too much and then grow acrimonious--they really had very little in common. They never divorced, and it was only in college that he decided they probably should have. After all, he had an abundance of recollections of the two of them squabbling in six or seven different houses, and he wondered if everyone would have been happier if the two of them had separated.

  Later, as a grown-up, he conjectured they might have moved so many times when he was a child because it gave his mother--a woman much smarter than his father--a way to fill her days. She could pack and unpack and redecorate, and perhaps she wanted something to do more than she wanted a divorce.

  What Spencer lacked in close friends, he had tried to make up for in pets. He was never a brooding child or even a churlish one. But he did keep his emotional distance, because eventually that distance would become geographic and--to an eight- or a ten- or a twelve-year-old boy--prohibitive.

  Thus there were, invariably, the dogs and the cats. He had both as a boy. In every neighborhood there was a golden lab that was pregnant or a stray cat with a litter of kittens in someone's garage. Only rarely did his parents deny him one. It actually became a part of the family lore, the stories his parents would tell their new acquaintances at cocktail parties in their new towns: The boy and his dogs. And cats. The boy who would rescue a raccoon. His mother regaled his mother-in-law with that tale the day they were introduced.

  In New Canaan the menagerie peaked at three dogs and four cats. Then his father accidentally backed the Impala over the sleeping mutt that looked a lot like a springer spaniel. His parents fought and soon (once again) they had moved. In truth, Spencer knew, it had nothing to do with that dog.

  It was odd, but he was convinced that one of the things that had led him to stay at Sugar Hill for entire summers in college after Catherine had first drawn him north was the reality that Catherine's father had passed away, which meant that her parents would never be squabbling there. Sometimes he thought this was an even more visceral part of the property's attraction than the fact that the house had been built by Catherine's great-grandfather and had been a stable part of the Setons' family life for four generations.

  He gazed once more at Catherine, and once again she didn't look up. Her mouth was open just the tiniest bit and curled into a barely perceptible smile--as it was often when she daydreamed or read--an expression that always had held for him the power of an erotic summons: It seemed to suggest pleasures that were libidinous, secret, and wanton. Her hair, the russet red of an apple in fall, was hiding her eyes like drapes as she flipped through the pages in her lap, and he was torn between the desires to touch her and to leave her at peace. He wanted to murmur aloud that they were almost there, but the engines on these small planes were so noisy that he would have to shout, and somehow that would wreck the intimacy of the moment. Besides, so often this month with Charlotte away in the country, whenever either of them had opened their mouths to discuss anything that wasn't of the most prosaic nature (dinner, the location of the joint checkbook, whether he should bring an umbrella to work), for reasons he couldn't quite understand they wound up fighting.

  Sometimes Spencer feared he was growing into a middle-aged bully--a verbose version of his occasionally sullen father--and he couldn't figure out why his simple desires for competence and order so often seemed to transmogrify into anger. Packing this morning had been a perfect example. Catherine had placed her empty suitcase on the bed beside his without noticing that his flat travel alarm had been there in a curl in the bedspread, and he had wound up spending twenty-five minutes searching for the clock before discovering it underneath her bag. Then, his mood fouled by the unplanned scavenger hunt, he heated up the last dregs of the coffee in a mug in the microwave, only to discover that Catherine had already dumped the dregs of his organic soy milk down the drain so the refrigerator wouldn't reek upon their return. And though he certainly appreciated her foresight, he wished she had asked him first because he absolutely loathed his coffee black. Finally, just when he had all of his clothing folded perfectly flat in his suitcase, Catherine asked him if he could squeeze into his bag bottles of their shampoo and conditioner and a few items Charlotte had asked them to bring north--including her riding helmet and boots because it sounded like the girls would have a chance to go on a trail ride in the next week or two.

  "I can't fit her riding helmet in my suitcase," he'd said, and the iciness in his voice had surprised him. Where had that come from?

  "The helmet's hollow. Stuff it with your socks and underwear. Then it'll fit."

  "And the boots?"

  "The boots are small."

  "And covered with dirt and manure."

  "They aren't."

  "I took her last. Remember?"

  "Of course I do. You do it so rarely."

  Suddenly they sounded like his parents in one of their habitual, second-scotch skirmishes. Except it was the morning and he and Catherine hadn't been drinking. "My point is that I know exactly the condition of the stable in the park. It's filthy. And so the boots are filthy," he told her.

  "Why didn't you clean them off then? Or ask her to?"

  "I did clean them. I didn't disinfect them. It never crossed my mind they'd have to share close quarters with my clothes."

  "Fine, I'll put them in a plastic bag in my suitcase. You take the helmet."

  And so he had removed his shirts and his pants--khakis and shorts and even a pair of golf slacks--from his suitcase, stuffed the helmet with his underwear and socks, and then wedged everything back inside his very well-traveled American Tourister twenty-inch Cabin Carry-On. It wasn't nearly as neat as it had been, and so he'd spent the rest of the morning seething--more at himself than at her because he knew he had overreacted. But the end result was the same: a tense and wearisome silence. He retreated into the quiet of their two cats, pulling a dining room chair over to the living room couch on which they were dozing in the sun and noiselessly running his fingers over their fur. Then he reread for the third time the note they would be leaving for the teenage girl on their floor who was going to feed the animals and change their litter box. It was a complicated set of instructions, because it wasn't easy to keep a cat vegan.

  There was no dog in their life and he wished that there were. Unfortunately, once in a mood of self-righteous obstinacy, he'd proclaimed their apartment was too small for one. He'd insisted it would be cruel to coop one up for a whole day there. He no longer believed that (had he ever?), but he was, he knew, disablingly--perhaps self-destructively--stubborn.

  Now on the plane he resolved he would behave better. He reached across the aisle to feel (at once so like and unlike that of a cat) the soft down on Catherine's wrist and her arm, bare even in the chill of this claustrophobic passenger cabin. Lightly he stroked the skin just above her thumb and along the back of her hand. Though the house in New Hampshire belonged to Mrs. Seton, he had been coming here for two decades, and it was as close to a familial motherland as he had: a place with memories and roots that transcended the itinerant nature of his own suburban upbringing. He loved the house, he believed, more than did his wife and his brother-in-law, who had known it their entire lives and now took it for granted, and at least as much as his mother-in-law, who slipped into a life there each summer with the
same blissful sigh she'd exhale when she'd plunge into the crisp waters of Echo Lake.

  He gave Catherine's hand a small squeeze, but she continued to read. She was still angry with him. Once they were on the ground and he wouldn't have to shout, he would apologize to her for being a . . . a jerk. Yes, that was right. A jerk.

  From the intercom speaker above them he heard a series of scratchy, incomprehensible prerecorded syllables--there was no flight attendant on this route--and he knew it was the message reminding them to have their tray tables locked in their upright positions and their seats fully forward, because they were about to land.

  AT THE RENT-A-CAR COUNTER, while a good-natured wisp of a teen girl printed out the forms for the vehicle they were taking for the next week and a half--a minivan almost (but not quite) large enough for the extended family and their golf clubs--Catherine Seton-McCullough used her cell phone to leave a message on her mother's answering machine. She wanted to let her know that they had landed and would be at the house in about ninety minutes. Five o'clock at the latest. No doubt everyone was still at the club, taking whatever lessons Mother had lined up.

  Spencer had apologized and she was grateful. But only to an extent. She still wasn't exactly sure what she should say because she was filled with a nauseating, almost debilitating sense of dread that her marriage was . . . winding down. And she was scared. She could no longer see anything behind Spencer's eyes but annoyance--and Lord knows how she hated this word--issues. She taught English and literature to high school girls at the Brearley School on the Upper East Side, and this spring the headmaster had brought in a consultant who called herself a corporate interdependence trainer and the woman had used that word--issues--as a euphemism for both actual crises and petty discontents. Instead of challenge, a word that Catherine knew other consultants depended upon as their substitute for weakness--as in "We have myriad strengths and a couple of small challenges to address"--this trainer savored the businesslike spitefulness of issue. Like agenda, it was a word that purported to sound neutral, but in truth was two syllables with inherently negative connotations: There really was no such thing as a good issue. It gave the woman the conversational upper hand with the school's teachers and administrators, implying at once that the faculty and staff had problems, while suggesting that she would never approach them in a manner that was overtly condescending. Patronizing? Yes. Condescending? Only if you thought for a moment about what the doctrinaire pedant really was saying.