Before You Know Kindness

by Chris Bohjalian

  He wondered what the ancient Stoics did to protect their produce--or the Essenes or the Manicheans. Actually, he had a dispiriting feeling he knew what the Manicheans did: They probably posted their slaves in their gardens. Clearly that wasn't an option here.

  Nevertheless, it infuriated him that the only thing even the owner of the nursery himself could suggest was a fence.

  "Make it six and a half to ten feet high, and you should be in business," the guy had said. "You'll be safe from most deer if you make it six and a half feet tall, but you'll be safe to the max if you go for a ten-footer. No deer is going to jump three yards and change to get a little Swiss chard."

  The owner had long, jet black hair that he tied back in a ponytail, and the reddest eyes Spencer had ever seen at ten thirty in the morning. Or, at least, the reddest eyes he had seen at ten thirty in the morning since college. He was so thin that he looked almost gaunt, and he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with a silkscreen of a massive, fully open crimson peony on the front. Spencer could almost see real ants attempting to climb among the two-dimensional petals. The owner had a smaller, less vibrant tattoo of a flower on each of his biceps. One looked to be a faded purple pansy, but Spencer couldn't quite tell what the other one was. Monkshood, maybe. Foxglove, perhaps. Maybe it wasn't even a flower at all: Maybe it was a biker's helmet of some sort. Either way, it was rough-looking--both the tattoos were--and nothing like the delicate, almost genteel bit of latticework that his own sister-in-law had had needled into the skin around her ankle when she was eighteen.

  "I don't want a fence," Spencer had told him.

  "Then get a great big thorny thing."

  "A great big thorny thing?" Spencer asked. He expected more precision from the owner of the nursery than "a great big thorny thing."

  "Rows of them. Build walls and walls of big thorny things. Deer hate thorns. Me, too. Don't carry a whole lot that has thorns--other than roses, of course. No one likes thorns, you know?"

  "I do know. Certainly I don't like them."

  "Evergreens, then? How about evergreens? I got two or three Fat Alberts you could take with you. Three seventy-five apiece," he said, and Spencer knew enough about trees to know that he meant $375.

  "I doubt three would be enough."

  "Oh, you got that right. I just meant to get you started. How big is your garden?"

  "Maybe a third of an acre."

  The man whistled, shook his head, and then allowed himself a laugh that sounded a bit like a snort. "You'd need a hell of a lot more than two or three trees. You got to build a fortress with them, you know!"

  "It was your idea."

  "I didn't realize your garden was . . . was a farm."

  "It's not a farm."

  "You hunt?"

  "No."

  "I was going to say if you started--"

  "I don't hunt. I don't even eat meat. I work for FERAL."

  He nodded. "Oh, yeah, I've heard of FERAL. You're the folks who hate dairy farmers, right?"

  "We don't hate dairy farmers. Why would you think such a thing?"

  "My nephew's in college, and one year he and his roommate had this poster on their wall. It said something like 'You don't have to milk barley and hops.' It was a picture of a giant hop, and it had all these suction tubes and--"

  "I know the poster. The point wasn't to say that anyone hates dairy farmers--"

  "And wasn't there some farmer in a leather mask? One of those creepy executioner's S-and-M hoods you see in . . . well, you know, you see some places?"

  "No!"

  "Oh."

  "There was one very stylized photograph of some natural barley being treated like a dairy cow," Spencer told him, struggling to keep his voice even. He remembered well the fallout from the "Milk Is Cruel Food" disaster. It had kicked off late summer, almost two years ago now, and its purpose was to educate college students--huge milk drinkers--about the inhumanity of the corporate dairy industry. The vacuum pumps that were attached to the cows' udders, the male calves that were sent away to be slaughtered. The shadowy growth hormones that increased production.

  "Because you wanted the college kids to drink beer instead of milk, right?" the nursery's owner asked.

  "The point was simply to educate them that cows are mistreated, and when they drink milk--which is actually so bad for you that if I had my way my own daughter wouldn't drink it--they're supporting animal torture," he answered. The result of the campaign had been angry letters from practically every mother and father who had ever lost a son or daughter to a drunk college-aged driver, as well as mountains--no, mountain ranges--of bad publicity for FERAL. Spencer had wound up on Nightline, enduring a withering battery of statistics from a representative from MADD about the numbers of people in this country who were killed or maimed every year by drunk drivers. On one syndicated radio talk show a woman had called him the Antichrist, and (her voice breaking) informed him that her beautiful vegan, non-milk-drinking FERAL member daughter had drowned diving amid the coral reefs of Grand Cayman when the girl's boyfriend (drunk on beer) had improperly attached her regulator to her oxygen tank.

  "Anyway," Spencer continued now, drawing a long breath, "I'm not about to shoot a deer."

  "Or have much of a garden, I just guess." The owner was grinning mischievously when he spoke, and Spencer could see that the moment he had told the man he worked for FERAL, the fellow had written him off as a fanatic. This happened all the time, and it drove him crazy. He was an activist, he believed, but he wasn't an extremist. And if anyone wanted to talk about killing animals, the reality was that for better or worse he had finished off a great many more animals than most people you met on the street. One December evening when he was driving home from college with a friend for the winter break, he had tried to calculate in his mind the number of lobsters he had cleavered the previous summer by multiplying the average figure he killed in a night by the number of nights he had been the second chef at the Steer by the Shore. The bus tours, he understood, were what made him a statistical killing machine, and he guessed there were two of those each week. Those evenings he might have baked and stuffed as many as seventy lobsters. The other nights he presumed he killed about five an hour, and maybe twenty all told.

  Still, he was able to come up with a figure that he supposed was a pretty good ballpark: 2,200.

  That same car ride he had also calculated the pounds of ground beef he had consumed as a freshman, since he had eaten two cheeseburgers a day for lunch seven days a week and at least another six or seven either at dinner or at the snack bar when he was tired of the library late at night. At the time he didn't know exactly how much a cow weighed, but he guessed at a quarter pound per burger he'd eaten all the meat off at least one steer that school year.

  As he sped from the garden center's parking lot, it didn't seem fair that it was actually animals that were keeping him from his vegetables. It was as if the deer had known the exact day he was coming and descended on the garden literally hours before he arrived. He was quite sure that his family--John and Sara and his mother-in-law, perhaps even Catherine--was secretly laughing at him.

  He decided the first thing he would do when he got to the club was grab a swim with his daughter. Spend some time with Charlotte and Willow, the two people who would be least likely to see any humor in the way a couple of deer had undone his big plans. He knew he wouldn't dare say a word to Catherine, because although she had absolutely nothing to do with this debacle, he would be unable to speak of his experience at the nursery just now without sounding as if he were furious with her. Taking his disappointment out on her. Which, obviously, he wasn't. But, still, Catherine would get defensive. And he would grow sarcastic. And either they would stew separately or they would squabble together. He didn't want that, not here.

  Maybe when he'd calmed down he would see if John wanted to play nine holes of golf.

  Then, when he was more serene at the end of the day, perhaps he could get in a game of doubles with Catherine and Sara
and John. He'd be so tired by nightfall that he wouldn't care--or, at least, he wouldn't care quite so much--that the greens he would eat this coming week wouldn't come from the seeds he had planted back in May.

  As he drove past Gerta's Edelweiss Garden (the Steer by the Shore was long gone, replaced by a store that sold home medical equipment), he decided that what he actually found most disturbing was the notion that even a guy with tattoos of flowers on his arms thought he was a kook because he didn't want to bring down a couple of deer--in season or out--with an assault rifle.

  Chapter Nine.

  Walter Durnip's funeral was worse than Nan Seton had expected. At least a dozen people with absolutely no background in public speaking had felt compelled to share stories, most of which were so pointless and dull that not even a seasoned orator could have brought them to life. The man's principal legacies were the meaningless facts that he loathed golf carts but enjoyed his tractor; that he disapproved of modern antilock brakes on automobiles and remained till the day he died a firm proponent of pumping ("No one could drive on snow like Walter," said Lida Barnum with great solemnity); and that for the last half century of his life he had used the putter that had been given to him by Phillip Cole Jr., the president of the Contour Club from 1947 to 1963 and the son of one of the revered institution's founders.

  When she and John reached their car, when she was safely settled in the passenger seat and her son was behind the wheel, she turned to him and said, "In the name of God, John, no funeral for me. At least no unscripted recollections. If you have any respect for your mother's memory at all, you will not allow those people to babble over my dead body."

  "You really don't like these things, do you?"

  "No. They remind me of how little we do with our lives."

  "I thought some of the stories were rather nice. Revealing."

  "Yes. They revealed just how boring Walter Durnip really was. Now, drive, please. I want to go by the Grangers' and get some string beans and early zucchini. And then I can't wait to get to the club and go for a swim. If I thought you had your suit--"

  "I do, Mother. It's in the trunk."

  "Oh, good. In that case, let's go to Echo Lake before the club. A brisk swim will clear our heads."

  She looked over the couch into the backseat of her car to make sure she had an extra beach towel back there and was relieved to see that she did. She was impressed that her son had remembered his bathing suit, but she knew there wasn't a prayer in the world that he would have remembered to grab a towel, too.

  "How cold is Echo Lake this summer?" he asked her.

  "It's warm as toast. Sixty-three degrees the other day. I'm sure it's up to sixty-five by now."

  "Sara calls Echo Lake a big frozen slushie."

  "Are you tattling?"

  "No, I agree with her. I think it's funny."

  "And to think she grew up in Vermont," Nan said with a sigh. Sometimes she couldn't believe how soft this next generation was. "Really, now, John: It's lovely. Invigorating."

  Though the two-lane road to the highway was little wider than a cow path and filled with the sorts of switchbacks that made her granddaughters nauseous (Nan honestly didn't believe it was her driving that was the cause, because she reasoned then she would be nauseous, too), a beaten-up sports car appeared out of nowhere behind them and--ignoring the double yellow line--passed them. Its engine roared like a jet, and she noted inside the vehicle the mangy young men with their sleeveless muscle shirts and cigarettes dangling from their mouths.

  "If we were in Vermont, I would guess they were your clients," she said.

  He smiled. "If we were in Vermont--in Chittenden County, anyway--they probably would be."

  She wasn't sure how to show it (and so she never did), but she was proud of her son. When he had chosen to leave that tony law firm in Burlington to become a public defender, he had demonstrated to her that he understood the importance of service. A responsibility he shouldered for no other reason than the simple reality that his family had advantages. Nan didn't focus much attention on the nuances of Democratic or Republican policy toward the urban poor she saw in Manhattan or the rural poor she saw here in the country, but she did have the sense that policy in both cases revolved largely around throwing money at the problem: In the case of the Democrats it was tax money and in the case of the Republicans it was tax-deductible contributions. But it was never, in Nan's opinion, about time. It was never about giving what she deemed a human being's most precious commodity: the hours and days one had on this planet. It was especially important to be generous with your life if you had one as cushy as she had, which was why she had volunteered for years and years to help children learn to read at public schools in Harlem and Chinatown and the South Bronx. When her privileged son had realized he had certain responsibilities in his early thirties and moved his career in a different direction, she had been pleased.

  "Have you had a busy summer?" she asked John. "At the office?"

  "No worse than usual. But it seems more out of control since Patrick was born. Everything does. These days I'm constantly treading water and still getting waves and waves up my nose."

  "Do you ever regret leaving private practice?" she asked him--a reflex she couldn't restrain.

  He turned briefly from the road to her: Clearly he was as shocked as she that she had asked such a personal question, one so rife with the possibility for honesty and confession and delicate revelation. Then his eyes went back to the road and he answered, "Not a bit. These people need me. Sometimes they have no one else in the world looking out for them."

  She found herself smiling because her son was happy and doing good work, but also because he hadn't allowed their conversation to grow intimate with the sort of disclosure that just might have made them both uncomfortable.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, Willow listened as the grown-ups sat on the porch at the house on the hill sipping iced tea and talking about the deer and Walter Durnip's funeral, or teasing Aunt Catherine for playing tennis with a hunky teenage lifeguard half her age. She listened as they talked about golf and tennis and swimming in Echo Lake and as they made jokes at her and her cousin's expense about how tough the Seton New England Boot Camp really was--and how difficult it must be for them to keep up with their grandmother. And while Charlotte defended herself with enthusiasm, Willow was content to sit on the outdoor rug on the wood beside Patrick, painting her toenails and watching the baby loll on his back and pedal his small feet in the air. She was happy because soon they would be going back to the club, where she would be only briefly on parade for Grandmother's friends. Then she and Charlotte would be allowed to join the older kids--teenagers, really--at their own barbecue and bonfire at the edge of the golf course. She was still nervous, but in the course of the day she had also grown excited.

  She thought her uncle's rant about his visit to the garden center was unintentionally funny, especially the way he would seethe when he would bring up the nursery owner's suggestion that he hunt the deer down. She didn't know if the owner meant now or during deer season, but the whole idea of her uncle even holding a rifle was laughable.

  "There must be something you can do--something we can do," Charlotte said at one point, and Willow was touched by her cousin's uncharacteristic solicitude--her desire to help her father with his cause. Charlotte rarely volunteered to help anyone with anything, and Willow attributed the girl's longing to be of assistance to the reality that before yesterday she hadn't seen her parents in almost two weeks.

  "Sure there is," John Seton told his niece. "Replant the garden and turn the property into a petting zoo. If you can't beat 'em, feed 'em."

  Willow knew it was a family secret that her father had taken up hunting. When he'd started to speak, for a brief second Willow had presumed with no small amount of astonishment that he was about to admit to the McCulloughs that he owned a gun and bullets and those water-repellent army fatigues. The whole deal. She had never told Charlotte about her father's new hobby, and a couple
of times when deer had come up in the last twenty-four hours, her mother had looked at her with raised eyebrows, a gentle reminder that Uncle Spencer and his family did not need to know that Dad now owned a gun.

  "Anyway, I think we should all have dinner tomorrow night at Gerta's," her father was saying. "See if the busboys are still wearing lederhosen and the waitresses still have to wear those bib things with the push-up bras. You just loved that costume, didn't you, Sis?"

  "We did not wear push-up bras," her aunt Catherine said.