Before You Know Kindness

by Chris Bohjalian

  Deer were one of the few things that Mansfield, a justice a decade and change older than John who had been a partner in John's firm when he first moved to Vermont, found more interesting than law. It wasn't merely that he thought they were beautiful (though he often said that he did) or that he was awed by their instincts and reflexes and speed (though he would talk at length if you didn't stop him about particular deer he had witnessed race uphill through boulders and brush with a grace and agility that seemed to put a bullet to shame). It wasn't the grand racks on the bucks he had killed or the deep eyes of the does he had spared. It wasn't the meat, though he did love venison. It was their work ethic. Mansfield was among the most disciplined lawyers John had ever known, and now that he was on the Vermont Supreme Court he was one of the most well-prepared justices. The amount of effort that a deer put into eating--into surviving--awed him. "Imagine," he had said to John that time he had taken the younger man hunting with him, his voice barely more than a whisper as they rested on a small outcropping of stone with a good view of a deer path, "a 150-pound animal has to consume six to eight pounds of food a day to survive." Then he pulled off one of his hunting gloves and ripped the end of a twig off one of the maple saplings beside them, and showed John the tiny, quiescent bud. "How much do you think that weighs? A couple milligrams? A tenth of an ounce? Just think of how much sweat it takes a deer to find his six or eight pounds of food. Especially in the winter."

  John knew that a big part of the reason why Mansfield shot a deer every year in Vermont--and, if his schedule permitted, another in New York and then a third in Maine--was because he believed it was the most merciful way humans had to manage the herd. The reality was that in much of America, the only predator left to keep the deer population at a number the habitat could support was man. Without hunting, the thousands of deer that hunters killed pretty close to instantly would overpopulate and then either die slowly of starvation when the heavy northern winter set in, or weakened by malnutrition they would be eaten alive--their haunches and legs and their bellies consumed first--by coyotes.

  John watched Mansfield track the deer for the rest of the day, following the animal's rubs and scrapes and his prints, but they never saw him. There was no doubt that he saw them, but he always kept just enough distance that neither of the men even flipped off the safeties on their rifles or brought their Redfield scopes to their eyes.

  Still, it had been a wonderful day and John understood why Howard loved hunting. With the exception of the occasional squeals from the blue jays, the woods were completely silent when they stood still or were sitting in Mansfield's brother's tree stand. They were hunting in a part of the forest where there didn't seem to be signs of any other hunters--no gunshots in the distance, no spots where leaves had been cleared so a hunter could move his body without making a sound if he saw a buck he wanted to shoot--and John couldn't imagine a setting more peaceful. His mind wandered, but then he would watch Mansfield running his dry fingers over a beech leaf or he himself would catch a glimpse of the peak of the mountain behind them through the trees, and he would remember why he was there, his focus would return, and he would experience an almost trancelike contentment.

  He'd tried to describe it to Sara that first night, and she observed that a part of the sensation probably had just been fatigue. For nine-plus hours he had either been hoofing around in the snow or sitting on a rock or a tree stand in the cold, and he was exhausted. He thought she might have been right, but that didn't change the fact that the sensation had been pleasurable. And that night, just as Mansfield had promised, he had eaten like he had a hollow leg and slept more deeply than he could remember.

  The next day, when John was back in his office, Howard Mansfield went back up on the mountain and bagged a 195-pound eight-pointer. John was not exactly envious, but he was disappointed. The day before he had lugged his eight pounds of rifle through the woods and hadn't fired it once. Those brassy missiles he'd loaded so carefully into his rifle when they first exited Mansfield's truck--and then unloaded with equal caution when they returned at the end of the day--had never once exploded down the barrel and brought down a deer or even taken a little bark off a tree. Twice more that season he'd ventured into the woods, and though he enjoyed his time slogging through the wet leaves and the thin crusts of snow, he still hadn't gotten his buck. It was on that last excursion, when he'd been alone, that for some reason he'd been unable to eject the bullet from the gun.

  "Are you ready, John?"

  He turned and saw his mother was beside him. "Yes. Absolutely."

  "After the funeral, let's stop by the Grangers' farm stand on the way to the club," she said. "They have wonderful zucchini and string beans right now, and we don't."

  He nodded and pulled his tie through the collar of his shirt. It saddened him that their vegetables that night wouldn't come from their own tilled bit of earth.

  INSIDE THE HOUSE Willow pushed a small square of Soy-garine off the top of her waffle, having decided that the butter substitute tasted even worse than it looked. There was a reason this stuff didn't have people at Land O Lakes quaking in their boots. Her younger brother sat watching her in his blue canvas baby seat, occasionally plugging his small mouth with parts of his fist. The seat was in the middle of the table, as if Patrick were a centerpiece.

  Through the dining room window she and Charlotte saw John and Nan leaving for Walter Durnip's funeral in Grandmother's antique gray Chevrolet. Willow wasn't sure how old the vehicle was, but she knew that Grandmother had bought it well before her own parents had gotten married. It wasn't simply pre-air bag; it was pre-CD player, pre-cassette player, pre-seat belts with a strap across the chest. It didn't even have an FM radio.

  Charlotte, Willow observed, didn't seem to mind her father's butter substitute, or even the fact that although Uncle Spencer's waffle looked perfect, it had a strangely bitter aftertaste that Willow presumed had something to do with the soy milk. Her cousin sat in her skimpy white shorts with her bare legs underneath her in one of the antique ladder-back chairs around the dining room table, happily cutting the waffle apart with her fork, occasionally reaching down to peel a bit of burned skin off her thigh.

  Abruptly she looked up at Willow and said, "Some teenagers are going to have a bonfire and their own party tonight at the club." That evening they were all going to the annual midsummer blowout at the Contour Club, which was one of the reasons why Grandmother wanted everyone here this particular weekend: She liked to show off her family.

  "Are you going to go?"

  "I might. Connor told me about it," she said. Connor, Willow knew, was a fifteen-year-old who came to the club under duress, but when he was there Charlotte didn't take her eyes off him. He never went near the pool, had no interest in golf, but twice in the last week the two girls had watched him play tennis. It was clear he was one of the few members of the Contour Club who might have been able to give Aunt Catherine a little competition. He had green eyes--though the girls had only seen them one time, because he almost always wore sunglasses--a little dark fuzz above his lip, and hair as black as Charlotte's string bikini.

  "When were you talking to Connor?"

  "He called."

  "Really?"

  "Well, he called across the grass."

  "To you?"

  Charlotte shrugged, and Willow guessed that small shoulder spasm meant that Connor had yelled across the grass by the Contour Club's terrace to some other teenager about the bonfire on Saturday night, and Charlotte had overheard him.

  "Anyway, I think I might go," Charlotte murmured.

  "You can't have a bonfire until it's dark out, and Grandmother will want us to go home by eight or eight thirty."

  "My dad will pick me up in that case," she said, and then she called into the kitchen where her father was still at work beside the waffle iron, "Right, Dad?"

  "Right what, honey?"

  "Some of the kids are having a bonfire tonight. Can I go?"

  "You mean at the club
?"

  "Uh-huh."

  He strolled into the dining room with a dishtowel slung over his shoulder. "I think a bonfire sounds nice. Can grown-ups go, too?"

  "Nope. Just kids."

  "Too bad. How old will the kids be?"

  "Oh, my age--and some older kids, too, of course, so the adults don't need to worry."

  He smiled. "The presence of teenagers is supposed to make me worry less?"

  "Well, you know, in terms of the fire. There will be older kids there so you don't need to fear we'll, like, burn down the woods."

  "Gotcha."

  "So we can go?"

  "I don't see why not."

  "The thing is, it might go on a little later than the cocktail party you and Mom will be at," she said.

  "I understand. We'll obviously have a couple of cars. I don't mind hanging around so I can drive you girls home."

  "Thank you, Dad."

  Willow watched her uncle, and she thought that he might have been about to lean over and kiss his daughter on her forehead, but then he seemed to think better of the idea. Maybe he thought he'd embarrass her. Instead he bent down and kissed his nephew on the boy's cheek, oblivious to the long tendrils of drool that were hanging off the infant's chin or that linked his mouth and his hand like filaments from a spider's web. Then Uncle Spencer returned to the kitchen, where Willow heard the waffle iron scrape along the counter as he lifted the metal lid.

  "See how easy that was?" Charlotte said. "My dad usually says yes to the things that don't involve any work, so he can say no to the things that do. We can go."

  "You can go. I'm not sure I want to hang around with a bunch of teenagers."

  "Suit yourself."

  "Won't you be nervous?"

  "I'm sure there will be thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds there, too."

  "And sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds."

  "Doubt it. Anyone around here old enough to drive has better places to go on a Saturday night than the Contour Club."

  Willow heard her mother pad lightly down the steps from the second floor. She had been upstairs showering and getting dressed.

  "Ask your mom if you can go," Charlotte said to her now. "Tell her my dad said it was okay with him, and he'd drive us home."

  Reminding herself that she could change her mind that afternoon if she didn't want to tag along with Charlotte while her cousin lied about her age to a bunch of tenth- and eleventh-graders, she nodded, and when her mother wandered into the dining room--her hair in a towel because it was wet, but her eyes more refreshed than they'd been before she had climbed into the shower--she asked if she, too, could go to the bonfire.

  Chapter Eight.

  Catherine stood at the baseline of the northernmost of the four courts at the Contour Club Saturday morning, a wire basket of yellow tennis balls at her feet. The sun was behind her, and she allowed herself a hearty grunt with each serve into the ether on the other side of the net, the exhalations conjuring like a faint breeze across her tongue the dim but pleasurable memory of that single slice of her mother's bologna she'd eaten surreptitiously before leaving with Sara and the girls for the club. She could feel sweat trickling down her shoulder blades and puddling in the small of her back. The grunts, she knew, were making the older men on the court beside her uncomfortable. At the Contour Club, people did not grunt--especially when they were practicing their serve all alone. Even those few members who actually lived in New Hampshire year-round knew enough not to grunt. Grunting, as her mother would say with a sniff, was awfully animalistic. And though Nan was preternaturally athletic for someone her age, she also believed it was inappropriate--unseemly, she would have said--to be too competitive. Grunters, it was clear, were people who tried way too hard.

  The first time her mother had watched her play in a tournament in college--just after Catherine had discovered the power grunting added to her game--she had pulled her aside after the match and asked her what sort of unladylike gremlin had taken over her mouth. Catherine knew instantly what her mother was referring to, but she had won that morning against a high-seeded girl who was two years older than she was, and so she wasn't about to stop grunting.

  "UNNHH!" she cried out now, as she felt the wind from her swing on her legs.

  She wasn't exactly sure why she was taking such pleasure this morning in her grunts--each sharp, abbreviated syllable sounded downright melodious in her ear, and she loved the feel of her teeth against her tongue as she finished--but she understood that on some level this was (as her sister-in-law the therapist would say) a hostile gesture. Still, why she should be feeling hostile here and now was not entirely clear to her. After all, Charlotte and her niece seemed happy enough at the pool, her brother was holding up their generation's honor at old Walter Durnip's funeral, Sara was dozing on a blanket in the shade with Patrick, and Spencer was off at some garden nursery, seeing if there was anything at all the experts there could suggest to buffer the sad remains of the garden from the deer.

  The deer. She paused with the tennis ball in her hand and rolled her thumb over the fuzz. She wondered if she was actually angry right now at the deer for devouring the garden. Her husband's garden. It was possible, she decided. But it wasn't likely: She viewed the garden with the same benign distance that she tolerated Charlotte's glitter cosmetics. It demanded a tad more of her attention than she cared to invest, but it was essentially harmless.

  And despite the ruination brought about by the deer, Spencer had seemed happy enough this morning when he'd made the girls all those waffles. (She had been relieved to see that for all her daughter's neuroses and burgeoning adolescent angst, it was highly unlikely the kid was ever going to have an eating disorder. She'd wolfed down three of her dad's waffles before leaving for the club.) On the other hand, those waffles had annoyed her. The last thing her mother needed this morning was more commotion in the kitchen. Sara, of course, would probably remind her that her anger had nothing to do with the way Spencer's cooking had added to the Saturday morning confusion; rather, her sister-in-law would speculate--gently--that perhaps she was jealous because the waffles had allowed Spencer to further endear himself to the girls. There she was trying to appease her mother and organize the children, while her husband was (uncharacteristically) the anarchist who was reaping the children's approval.

  She tossed the ball high over her head, and with the loudest, most atavistic grunt yet sent the orb in a clothesline-straight stripe into the far court. "UNNHH!"

  No, she decided firmly, as the ball bounced against the chain-link fence in the corner, whatever pebble was wedged inside her soul right now had nothing at all to do with either those waffles or the deer in the garden. It was something else: her frustration with Spencer throughout the spring and summer, perhaps, or the way they hadn't found time for each other while Charlotte had been here in the country. That's what it was.

  Maybe this afternoon they would have some time alone together to talk and she would tell him. Something's wrong between us, she heard herself murmuring to the man in her head. We can't go on as we are. They'd go for a long walk like they did when they were younger, when they were in college, and she would tell him, We've grown apart. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. We've grown apart. If not today, then maybe tomorrow. Maybe she'd tell him on Sunday.

  Or, perhaps, the week after next. When they were home in Manhattan.

  And maybe she needed to begin with something softer in any case: Something is troubling you. Something is troubling us. We need counseling. Counseling was a reasonable step, wasn't it? They had almost seventeen years of marriage and a daughter who would turn thirteen in a month.

  Maybe they'd simply married too young. Certainly everyone had said so at the time. They'd married a mere seven months after finishing college, convinced there was no reason to wait because they'd been dating since they were freshmen. And less than four years after that she'd gotten pregnant, and she had been thrilled because she loved children--it was why she became a teacher--and he was thril
led because he seemed to love everything. Monkeys. Cats. Babies.

  But they never did have another child, did they? They talked about it. And they thought they would. They assumed they would, especially when they were planning their brief, failed foray into Connecticut. But that experiment had left them all miserable, and so they'd moved back to the city and, somehow, the idea of another child was left behind in the suburbs. The timing, they told themselves, just hadn't been right.

  Same with the dog that Charlotte had wanted. It just didn't seem to make sense to get one--at least not to Spencer--once they returned to Manhattan. He worried that the apartment wasn't big enough for the kind of dog their young daughter desired (one, naturally enough, like Grandmother's), and, besides, they already had a pair of cats.

  "You have one hell of a serve."

  She turned and wiped her brow. There on the grass stood a young man in sneakers and baggy khaki shorts--one of the lifeguards, she believed--with a tennis racket and a can of balls in his hand. Something was sparkling on his left earlobe, and she couldn't tell from this distance whether it was a stud or a legitimate rock of some sort.