by Tobias Wolff
“Sniper?” Ellen said. “What sniper?”
“He means poacher,” Wharton said. “George, I’m at the end of my patience. A wolf belongs with other wolves, not with people. I don’t approve of this habit of turning wild animals into pets. Now please drop the subject. And stop playing with your food.”
“What poacher?” Ellen asked.
“I’m not hungry,” George said.
“Then leave the table.”
George went to his room and slammed the door.
“What poacher?”
“Someone has been doing some shooting on the property. It’s nothing serious.”
“There’s someone running around out there with a gun and you say it isn’t serious?”
“This used to be public land. I want people to feel like they can use it.”
“But this is your home!”
“Ellen—”
“What have you done about it? You haven’t done anything at all, have you?”
“No,” Wharton said, and got up and left the room. On his way outside he stopped to talk to George. The boy was sitting on the floor, sorting through some junk he kept in a cigar box. “Son,” Wharton said, “I’m sorry if I was short with you at dinner.”
“It’s okay,” George said.
“I’m not just being mean,” Wharton said. “A mature wolf can weigh over a hundred and fifty pounds. Think what would happen if it turned on you.”
“He wouldn’t turn on me. He would protect me.” George shook the box. “He would love me.”
Wharton had intended to go for a walk but decided it was too slippery underfoot. He sat on the front steps instead, hunched down in his coat. The moon was racing through filmy clouds, melting at the edges. The wind had picked up considerably, and Wharton could hear trees creaking in the woods beyond. Gradually the sky lowered and it began to rain. Ellen came out and told Wharton that he had a phone call.
It was the woman from the commune. She was going to be leaving the next day and wanted to come up to say good-bye. Wharton told her that this was not possible just now. The woman was obviously hurt. She had once accused Wharton of not valuing her as a person and he wanted to show that this was not true. “Look,” he said, “let me take you to the station tomorrow.”
“Forget it.”
Wharton insisted and finally she agreed. Only after he hung up did Wharton realize that he might have Ellen along as well. There was just one bus out on Sunday.
Ellen and George were lying on the floor, reading the book together. Ellen patted the place beside her. “Join us?” Wharton shook his head. They were getting on fine without him; he had no wish to break up such a cozy picture. Anyway it would hardly be appropriate for him to go flopping all over the floor after scolding George for the same thing. Still restless, he went up to the loft and worked. It was very late when he finished. He took off his boots at the foot of the ladder and moved as quietly as he could past George’s bedroom. When he turned on the light in his own room he saw that Ellen was in his bed. She covered her eyes with her forearm. The soft flesh at the base of her throat fluttered gently with her breathing.
“Did you really want me to stay with George?”
“No,” Wharton said. He dropped his clothes on top of the chest that served as dresser and chair. Ellen drew the covers back for him and he slid in beside her.
“Who was that on the phone?” she asked. “Have you got a little something going?”
“We saw each other a few times. The lady is leaving tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry. I hate to think of you all alone out here.”
Wharton almost said, “Then stay!” but he caught himself.
“There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” Ellen said, raising herself on an elbow. “Jesus, what a look.”
“What have you got to tell me?”
“It isn’t what you’re thinking.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“The hell I don’t.” She sank back onto her side. “I’m leaving Vancouver,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to take George this summer. That’s why I wanted to see him now.”
Ellen explained that she did not feel comfortable living alone in the city. She hated her job and the apartment was too small. She was going back to Victoria to see if she couldn’t find something better there. She hated to let George down, but this was a bad time for her.
“Victoria? Why Victoria?” Ellen had never spoken well of the place. According to her the people were all stuffed shirts and there was nothing to do there. Wharton could not understand her and said so.
“Right now I need to be someplace I feel at home.” That brought Ellen to another point. She was going to need money for travel and to keep body and soul together until she found another job.
“Whatever I can do,” Wharton said.
“I knew you’d help.”
“I guess this means you don’t have to go back tomorrow.”
“No. I guess not.”
“Why don’t you stay for a week? It would mean a lot to George.”
“We’ll see.”
Wharton turned off the light, but he could not sleep for the longest time. Neither could Ellen; she kept turning and arranging herself. Wharton wanted to reach out to her but he wouldn’t have felt right about it, so soon after lending her money.
George woke them in the morning. He sat on the edge of the bed, pale and trembling.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” Ellen asked, and then they heard a shot from the woods. She looked at Wharton. Wharton got out of bed, dressed quickly, and went outside.
He knew it was Jeff Gill, had known so the moment he heard the man’s name. It sounded familiar, as things to come often did. He even knew what Jeff Gill would look like: short and wiry, with yellow teeth and close-set, porcine eyes. He did not know why Jeff Gill hated him but he surely did, and Wharton felt that in some way the hatred was justified.
It was raining, not hard but drearily. The air had a chill on it and as he circled the house Wharton walked into the mist of his own breathing. Two swallows skimmed the meadow behind the house, dipping and wheeling through the high grass. They did not break their pattern as he walked by them, yellow rubber boots glistening, and passed into the shadow of the tall trees.
He realized that he had not been in these woods for almost a month. He had been afraid to walk in his own land. He still was. “Go away!” he shouted, walking among the straight wet trunks of trees: “Go away!”
There were still clumps of snow lying everywhere, gray and crystalline and impacted with brown needles. The branches of pine and fir and spruce were tipped with sweet new growth. Stirred by the rain, the soil gave off an acid smell, like a compost heap. Wharton stepped under a sugar pine to catch his breath and scrape some of the mud off his boots. They were so heavy he could hardly lift them.
He heard another shot; it came from the direction of the pond and seemed to crash beside him. “Listen!” Wharton yelled. “I’ve got a rifle too and I’ll use it! Go away!” Wharton thought that he was capable of doing what he said, if he had brought the weapon and had known how to work it. He had felt foolish and afraid for so long that he was becoming dangerous.
He walked toward the pond. The banks were ringed with silver birches and he leaned against one of these. The brown water bristled with splashing raindrops. He caught a motion on the surface of the pond, a rippling triangle like an arrowhead with a dark spot at its point. Wharton assumed that it was a duck and stepped out on a small jetty to get a better look.
Suddenly the creature raised its head and stared at Wharton. It was a beaver, swimming on its back. Its gaze was level and unblinking. Its short front legs were folded over its gently rounded belly, reminding Wharton of a Hogarth engraving of an English clubman after a meal. The beaver lowered its head into the pond and then its belly disappeared and its paddle-like tail swung in a wide arc and cracked flat against the surface of the water. The birches around the pond squeezed the sound
and made it sharp and loud, like a rifle going off.
Wharton turned and went back to the house and explained everything to Ellen and George. He made breakfast while they dressed, and afterwards they all walked down to the pond to look at the beaver. Along the way Wharton slipped and fell and when he tried to stand he fell again. The mud was on his face and even in his hair. Ellen told him that he ought to take a roll in the mud every day, that it would be the making of him.
George reached the bank first and shouted, “I see him! I see him!”
The beaver was old and out of place. A younger beaver had driven him away from his lodge, and during the thaw he had followed a seasonal stream, now gone dry, up to the pond.
When Vernon heard about the beaver he took his rifle back and went to the pond and shot him. Wharton was outraged, but Vernon insisted that the animal would have destroyed the birches and fouled the bottom of the pond, killing the plants and turning the water stagnant. George’s biology teacher agreed.
Ellen left at the end of the week. She and Wharton wrote letters, and sometimes, late at night, she called him. They had good talks but they never lived together again. A few days after she left, George’s friend Rory turned on him and threw his books and one of his shoes out the schoolbus window, with the help of another boy more to his liking.
But Wharton, standing in the warm rain with his family that morning, did not know that these things would come to pass. Nor did he know that the dog Ulysses would someday free him from the odious Trapper Pierre, or that George would soon—too soon—put on muscle and learn to take care of himself. The wind raised small waves and sent them slapping up against the jetty, so that it appeared to be sliding forward like the hull of a boat. Out in the pond the beaver dove and surfaced again. It seemed to Wharton, watching him move in wide circles upon the water, that the creature had been sent to them, that they had been offered an olive branch and were not far from home.
The Liar
My mother read everything except books. Advertisements on buses, entire menus as we ate, billboards; if it had no cover it interested her. So when she found a letter in my drawer that was not addressed to her she read it. “What difference does it make if James has nothing to hide?”—that was her thought. She stuffed the letter in the drawer when she finished it and walked from room to room in the big empty house, talking to herself. She took the letter out and read it again to get the facts straight. Then, without putting on her coat or locking the door, she went down the steps and headed for the church at the end of the street. No matter how angry and confused she might be, she always went to four o’clock Mass and now it was four o’clock.
It was a fine day, blue and cold and still, but Mother walked as though into a strong wind, bent forward at the waist with her feet hurrying behind in short, busy steps. My brother and sisters and I considered this walk of hers funny and we smirked at one another when she crossed in front of us to stir the fire, or water a plant. We didn’t let her catch us at it. It would have puzzled her to think that there might be anything amusing about her. Her one concession to the fact of humor was an insincere, startling laugh. Strangers often stared at her.
While Mother waited for the priest, who was late, she prayed. She prayed in a familiar, orderly, firm way: first for her late husband, my father, then for her parents—also dead. She said a quick prayer for my father’s parents (just touching base; she had disliked them) and finally for her children in order of their ages, ending with me. Mother did not consider originality a virtue and until my name came up her prayers were exactly the same as on any other day.
But when she came to me she spoke up boldly. “I thought he wasn’t going to do it any more. Murphy said he was cured. What am I supposed to do now?” There was reproach in her tone. Mother put great hope in her notion that I was cured. She regarded my cure as an answer to her prayers and by way of thanksgiving sent a lot of money to the Thomasite Indian Mission, money she had been saving for a trip to Rome. She felt cheated and she let her feelings be known. When the priest came in Mother slid back on the seat and followed the Mass with concentration. After communion she began to worry again and went straight home without stopping to talk to Frances, the woman who always cornered Mother after Mass to tell about the awful things done to her by Communists, devil-worshipers, and Rosicrucians. Frances watched her go with narrowed eyes.
Once in the house, Mother took the letter from my drawer and brought it into the kitchen. She held it over the stove with her fingernails, looking away so that she would not be drawn into it again, and set it on fire. When it began to burn her fingers she dropped it in the sink and watched it blacken and flutter and close upon itself like a fist. Then she washed it down the drain and called Dr. Murphy.
The letter was to my friend Ralphy in Arizona. He used to live across the street from us but he had moved. Most of the letter was about a tour we, the junior class, had taken of Alcatraz. That was all right. What got Mother was the last paragraph where I said that she had been coughing up blood and the doctors weren’t sure what was wrong with her, but that we were hoping for the best.
This wasn’t true. Mother took pride in her physical condition, considered herself a horse: “I’m a regular horse,” she would reply when people asked about her health. For several years now I had been saying unpleasant things that weren’t true and this habit of mine irked Mother greatly, enough to persuade her to send me to Dr. Murphy, in whose office I was sitting when she burned the letter. Dr. Murphy was our family physician and had no training in psychoanalysis but he took an interest in “things of the mind,” as he put it. He had treated me for appendicitis and tonsilitis and Mother thought that he could put the truth into me as easily as he took things out of me, a hope Dr. Murphy did not share. He was basically interested in getting me to understand what I did, and lately he had been moving toward the conclusion that I understood what I did as well as I ever would.
Dr. Murphy listened to Mother’s account of the letter, and what she had done with it. He was curious about the wording I had used and became irritated when Mother told him she had burned it. “The point is,” she said, “he was supposed to be cured and he’s not.”
“Margaret, I never said he was cured.”
“You certainly did. Why else would I have sent over a thousand dollars to the Thomasite mission?”
“I said that he was responsible. That means that James knows what he’s doing, not that he’s going to stop doing it.”
“I’m sure you said he was cured.”
“Never. To say that someone is cured you have to know what health is. With this kind of thing that’s impossible. What do you mean by curing James, anyway?”
“You know.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Getting him back to reality, what else?”
“Whose reality? Mine or yours?”
“Murphy, what are you talking about? James isn’t crazy, he’s a liar.”
“Well, you have a point there.”
“What am I going to do with him?”
“I don’t think there’s much you can do. Be patient.”
“I’ve been patient.”
“If I were you, Margaret, I wouldn’t make too much of this. James doesn’t steal, does he?”
“Of course not.”
“Or beat people up or talk back.”
“No.”
“Then you have a lot to be thankful for.”
“I don’t think I can take any more of it. That business about leukemia last summer. And now this.”
“Eventually he’ll outgrow it, I think.”
“Murphy, he’s sixteen years old. What if he doesn’t outgrow it? What if he just gets better at it?”
Finally Mother saw that she wasn’t going to get any satisfaction from Dr. Murphy, who kept reminding her of her blessings. She said something cutting to him and he said something pompous back and she hung up. Dr. Murphy stared at the receiver. “Hello,” he said, then replaced it on the cradle. He ran his
hand over his head, a habit remaining from a time when he had hair. To show that he was a good sport he often joked about his baldness, but I had the feeling that he regretted it deeply. Looking at me across the desk, he must have wished that he hadn’t taken me on. Treating a friend’s child was like investing a friend’s money.
“I don’t have to tell you who that was.”
I nodded.
Dr. Murphy pushed his chair back and swiveled it around so he could look out the window behind him, which took up most of the wall. There were still a few sailboats out on the Bay, but they were all making for shore. A woolly gray fog had covered the bridge and was moving in fast. The water seemed calm from this far up, but when I looked closely I could see white flecks everywhere, so it must have been pretty choppy.
“I’m surprised at you,” he said. “Leaving something like that lying around for her to find. If you really have to do these things you could at least be kind and do them discreetly. It’s not easy for your mother, what with your father dead and all the others somewhere else.”
“I know. I didn’t mean for her to find it.”
“Well.” He tapped his pencil against his teeth. He was not convinced professionally, but personally he may have been. “I think you ought to go home now and straighten things out.”
“I guess I’d better.”
“Tell your mother I might stop by, either tonight or tomorrow. And James—don’t underestimate her.”
While my father was alive we usually went to Yosemite for three or four days during the summer. My mother would drive and Father would point out places of interest, meadows where boom towns once stood, hanging trees, rivers that were said to flow upstream at certain times. Or he read to us; he had that grownups’ idea that children love Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. The four of us sat in the back seat with our faces composed, attentive, while our hands and feet pushed, pinched, stomped, goosed, prodded, dug, and kicked.
