Читать книгу The Blessing - Gregory Orr - Страница 13

3

The Accident

What were Jonathan and Peter doing up at this hour? It was only six in the morning, still dark out. They should be asleep; they didn’t have to get ready for school for another hour yet. Bill and I wouldn’t be going to school today—the first pleasure of a day that promised many more. Already, the two of us were bundled up in sweaters, coats, and hats, with flashlights stuffed in our pockets. Padded like that, we looked fat as snowmen in the small front hall. But why were Jon and Peter standing there in their pajamas, getting in the way? As Dad came down the stairs with his own rifle, Peter yelled out:

“Why can’t we go? It’s not fair.”

“What do you mean it’s not fair?” Bill snapped.

“Go away.”

I did my best to bat one of them away as if he were a small, yapping dog, but the room was too crowded for anyone to move easily. Mom was there, too, retying Bill’s bootlaces. “Why can’t we go?” they both howled at once. “Because this is for grown-ups, and you’re just kids,” I said with utter contempt. And as if to prove my point, they both began crying.

By now, Bill and I were both shouting that they were just crybabies and should shut up and get out of our way. Dad had stopped on a lower step of the stairs and surveyed the chaotic room as if it were a puddle he’d meant to cross, but suddenly had the thought that it was deeper than he’d anticipated and maybe wading in wasn’t such a good idea. Bill’s and my screams weren’t having the desired effect of silencing Peter and Jon, and it looked as if they might go on indefinitely, when Mom looked up at Dad and said: “Jim, maybe they could go just this one time.”

At that suggestion, Bill and I were even more furious. As if there would be a “next time”—wasn’t this our only chance to have a first day of deer-hunting season? Wasn’t it something so special that Dad, who never took a day off from morning house calls to be with us, had done so today? Why should we share it with them? They didn’t belong and we said so.

But we could sense that shift taking place that so often resulted when Mom entered into our childish bickering with her reasonable justice that tended toward compassion for the weaker party. Bill and I had no choice but to start whining ourselves, as if we were the more righteous and injured. But Dad cut it all short from the stairs: “OK, they can go. But everyone pipe down. And the two of you—get dressed pronto.”

They whooped their way up the stairs, while Bill and I muttered and shared one of our rare moments of communion and agreement: the kids, we were certain, were bound to ruin the trip. With them along, we might as well invite Mom, too, and even Nancy, who was only four. Why not bring the dog and the cats, too? Why not have a picnic?

It had been a clear night and was still dark as the five of us started our march along the dirt road and then out over the frosted field grass that made a crunching sound underfoot. To keep my ears from the bitter cold, I’d pulled my hood down so that I had no more than a small, fur-bordered porthole through which to view the world. I kept my eyes on Dad’s boots silhouetted in his wavering flashlight beam and tried my best to ignore the frigid air that fit like a thin mask of ice over the exposed parts of my face.

A faint gray light was just seeping up from the eastern horizon as we arrived at our trench. Our whole group paused there as Bill, Dad, and I removed our gloves and each loaded a single shell into his rifle. My hands trembled with cold and excitement as I slid the hollow-point bullet into the chamber of my .22 and clicked on the safety catch that would prevent any accidental firing until I was ready to shoot. We set the rifles on the ground beside us and began the awkward clambering down into our hillside excavation that had been dug by two somewhat lazy workers to hold three and was now being asked to accommodate five. It did so somehow and packed us in so tight that what we lost in mobility we gained in body heat.

Now, all was silence broken only by whispers and the occasional distant caw of crows. As the gray light grew, I watched the frost flowers scattered across the dirt mound a few inches from my face melt like the stars going out overhead. I watched my breath rise up in wisps like the mist off the dew-drenched reeds. I waited as patiently as I could. And then we saw it: a deer slowly working its way along the trail through the powerline swamp and out into the field below us, where it paused to browse the short grass. An antlered buck! Dad whispered that Bill would shoot first. This order, if a whispered statement could be called an order, stunned me. What could he possibly mean? Was this another one of those “you’ll have your chance when you’re older” routines? Did he mean that if Bill missed, I could shoot? Or did he imagine that our luck would be so extraordinary that if Bill killed this deer, a second one would appear this same morning? Surely he couldn’t imagine that I would wait for another day. There was no time to explain to Dad how wrongheaded he was being. No time to tell him I had to take part, that it would be impossible for me not to shoot at this deer, too. As Bill put his rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the deer, I, too, lifted my .22 with the one bullet in the chamber and sighted along the barrel. And when Bill fired, I fired, too, at the exact same instant, so that our two rifles made a single harsh sound that echoed off the woods as the deer collapsed in the green field.

Whooping and yelling, the five of us scrambled down the brush-grown slope and raced to where the deer lay dead in the low grass of the field. We stood around it in a loose circle of awe. By now, my father had calmed down.

“Check your chambers,” he said.

At this command, each of us was supposed to point his rifle straight down at the ground and pull the trigger to make sure the gun was empty. If, by some mischance, the bullet had misfired, then the gun would discharge harmlessly into the dirt at our feet. But I was still delirious with glee at what I had accomplished, since it was obvious to me that I, too, not just Bill, had brought down our quarry. I knew my pulling the trigger now would only produce the dull mechanical click of a firing pin in an empty chamber.

I was wrong. In my excitement after the deer fell, I must have clicked the safety off again and now, instead of pointing my rifle barrel at the ground, I casually directed it back over my right shoulder toward the woods and never even looked as I pulled the trigger. And Peter was there, a little behind me, not more than two feet from where I stood. In that instant in which the sound of my gun firing made me startle and look around, Peter was already lying motionless on the ground at my feet. I never saw his face—only his small figure lying there, the hood up over his head, a dark stain of blood already seeping across the fabric toward the fringe of fur riffling in the breeze. I never saw his face again.

I screamed. We were all screaming. I don’t know what the others were screaming, but I was screaming “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to!” My father was yelling that we must run for help. I started off across the field toward the house as fast as I could. I ran straight across the swampy stream that split the field and scrambled up the bank and through the barbed-wire fence. I felt Bill and Jon running behind me. I was trying to get to the house first, as if somehow that could help, but what I had done and seen was racing behind me and I couldn’t outrun it. That’s what I wanted to do: run so fast that I could somehow outrun the horror itself and reach some place where it had never happened, where the world was still innocent of this deed and word of it might never arrive. But I knew that wasn’t possible and that even now I was desperately running toward more horror, toward the moment when I would reach the house and when, no matter how exhausted and out of breath I was, I would still have to tell my mother that I had shot Peter.

I hid in my room, hysterical with horror and terror. I lay on my bed, curled up in a ball, howling and crying. I never saw Dad cross the lawn carrying Peter in his arms. An hour later, dizzy with sobbing, I did get up and go to my window at the sound of the siren and the sight of the pale green ambulance backing up to our front door. I did glimpse the stretcher being slid inside, but Peter’s body was hidden by blankets and the white-coated backs of the ambulance people.

I couldn’t leave my room. I kept returning to the bed and curling up, clutching my pillow and sobbing into it or crying and biting it. I kept my eyes closed as much as I could, as if by doing that I could hide from my family and the horrible new reality I had brought into the world. It was as if I thought that by keeping my eyes shut and staying curled up on my bed, I could cancel out the world and the people around me. But with my eyes closed I kept seeing Peter’s body on the ground and I found myself pleading with my parents in my imagination, begging them to forgive me for what I had done. It was an indescribably painful ordeal, but at least it was taking place inside the privacy of my own mind. I thought I would die if I had to actually look at my parents or anyone in my family. And so I lay in a ball of agony on my bed and hoped no one would enter my room.

But eventually, several hours after the ambulance left, someone did. It was my mother.

“Greg,” she began.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, go away,” I begged.

“Greg, it was an accident. It was a terrible accident. It wasn’t your fault.”

I started sobbing all over again. What she said made no sense. Of course it was my fault. Did she think I was stupid—that I didn’t know what I had done, didn’t know that I had done it? You could say that spilling soda was an accident, but you couldn’t say that killing your brother was an accident. That was something far more horrible than an accident. Nothing in the word “accident” offered me any hope. But what she said next was even worse:

“Something very much like this happened to your father when he was your age.”

“What do you mean?”

“He killed a friend of his in a hunting accident.”

She said it that simply, though it couldn’t have been easy for her to say, any more than it could have been easy for her to visit my room. She had been standing all this time by my desk, about five feet from my bed. Her deep-set eyes were red from her own sobbing, and she stood with her arms crossed on her chest as if she were trying to hold herself together, to keep from bursting apart with grief. She was speaking to me about this strange and awful coincidence, but her voice was numb and distant, as if she were repeating it to herself simply to hear it spoken aloud, to see if it sounded believable. It didn’t. Not to me. That is, it sounded unbelievable and terrible, but this was exactly the world I had now entered with my stupid mistake: the world of the terrible and unbelievable. I had killed my own brother. Why not learn this also—that my father had once killed someone, too? I heard what she said. I wanted to ask what she meant, but I couldn’t speak. I just lay there moaning. She stood for a while by my bed and then she left the room, closing the door behind her.

I had wanted her to hold me, but I couldn’t say that. I had wanted her to forgive me, but I couldn’t ask. I felt as if I had lost her love forever.

Hours later, early in the afternoon, there was a knock on the door of my room. It was Bethany, my father’s receptionist, with a tray of soup. I was so hungry that my hunger overcame my shame, and I sat on the edge of the bed with the tray on my lap, slurping it down but unable to look up or say anything. She must have brought the soup from her home, because it had a taste I didn’t recognize. While I ate, she stood far back by the door and waited.

“This is an awful thing, Greg, but you should know that right now Peter is in heaven with Jesus.”

I stopped eating. I just sat there waiting, unable to believe I had heard her say that. I covered my face with both hands, but I was too exhausted or dehydrated to cry anymore. Still, when I closed my eyes I saw Peter and he was not sitting on Jesus’s lap and gazing up into Christ’s mild countenance as the lamb did in the stained glass window in our church. Instead, Peter was lying facedown on the cold ground in the field. I knew she was only trying to comfort me and to tell me what she believed, but it had the opposite effect. I thought she was crazy. I wanted to say: “What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you see his body? Don’t you know what happened? Don’t you know he’s dead?” I wanted to scream at her: “This isn’t Sunday school! My brother was just killed by a bullet and I fired it. What kind of nonsense are you saying?”

“It may not make sense now,” she continued, “but it’s all part of God’s plan.”

I hadn’t thought much about God, hadn’t yet had much reason to, but when Bethany dredged up out of her rural heart the strongest consolations she could find to set against my obvious suffering and terror, she inadvertently ended forever any hope I had of conventional religious belief. What she said seemed like a simpleminded mockery of what I had seen and done. Maybe if she hadn’t spoken so soon after Peter’s death, I could have found the intended comfort in what she said. Maybe if my mother had held me when she visited, had given me some reassurance that I was not a monster, I would have been more receptive to Bethany’s story of supernatural resurrection and a benevolent though mysterious plan that governed the universe. Instead, I felt rage and despair. Either this was a meaningless and horrible universe and this woman’s ideas were a lollipop she sucked in the dark, or else there was a divine plan, but it was not benevolent. What had my mother meant about my father having killed someone, too? How could my father and I have done the same horrible thing at the same age? Certainly that coincidence represented some mysterious, even supernatural pattern, but who could imagine it being a happy pattern, a pattern that showed there was a God and he cared about us humans?

I had one last unwelcome visitor that day. A state trooper arrived to complete the investigation into Peter’s death. My father appeared at my door:

“You should know that he died in the ambulance and that he never recovered consciousness. That means he didn’t suffer.” He asked me to come down to his office. It was part of a three-room complex at the back of the house that included a waiting room and a small examining room. The office was an interior room. Its only light came from a brass table lamp with a green glass shade that cast a small pool at its base. As we entered the shadowy room, my father moved to a place in a corner, where he stood without saying anything. The trooper was seated awkwardly at my father’s desk, which was far too small for him. Even his hat was outsized and out of place, flopped down on the desktop like a giant, brooding spider. The trooper was a young man with a blond crew cut and an open, beefy face. He was awkward and embarrassed, and except for a brief glance when I first entered and sat down, he never looked at me again. Instead, he sat with his forehead propped on one hand and his face bowed over the forms. He looked like a schoolkid unsure of his handwriting and so concentrating entirely on the act of moving his pen across the paper.

“What happened, son?”

“I don’t know.”

When I said this, it seemed as close to the truth as I could come, but I wasn’t going to be allowed to stop there.

“Start at the beginning. How did it happen?”

“We were hunting.”

“Who is we?”

I sat hunched in the chair by the desk. My eyes kept blurring. The neat row of bullets wedged into their individual loops on his gunbelt became a centipede crawling across his belly. The mahogany swivel chair he sat in had belonged to my father’s father, a man who died when I was a baby. There was a brass plaque mounted on its back that said it was the chair he’d sat in when he served as superintendent of prisons for New York State from 1915 to 1919. Now it seemed to foretell my own fate as I stared at the trooper’s handcuffs dangling over the edge of the seat.

“Tell me what happened, son.”

He was here to investigate and file a report on Peter’s death—to me, Peter’s murder. He was here to investigate a crime that I had committed. All afternoon I had struggled to believe that what had happened had not happened, could not happen, was too horrible to have happened. Every time I had closed my eyes I had seen Peter’s body on the ground, had felt the rifle in my hands. That moment had stopped forever, frozen in my brain. But that suspended moment seemed a private horror. Now this trooper, who represented society and the world of other people, was asking me to publicly acknowledge with my own words that it had happened. He was asking me to confess, to admit to the whole world that I had done the inconceivable: I had killed my own brother.

For the first time I saw that I was trapped forever. Once I had spoken the words of the narrative that linked me to my brother’s death, once they had been written down in an official report, my guilt and shame would be absolute and ineradicable. I had destroyed my family with my careless act, and now I would stand before the world and my monstrosity would be revealed by my own words. I wanted to be silent, to never speak again, just as I wanted to hide in my room forever. But this trooper, with his embarrassed patience, was forcing me to say the words that would make Peter’s death real to everyone.

“Try again, son. I know it’s not easy. What do you remember?”

“We were hunting. We shot a deer …”

Each word I spoke was innocent. Each sentence seemed harmless in itself. Yet each one moved me closer to my brother’s corpse and there was no escape. If I could lie! If I could shout: “It wasn’t loaded! My gun was empty!” or “I didn’t pull the trigger. It must have been someone else.” Would that have saved me? Or if I said nothing at all? If I simply sat there in silence and refused to speak, would someone else have been blamed?

No, I was going to be destroyed for my crime. Revenge was swift and self-inflicted. I would convict myself with my own words. There would be no trial, no need for a trial: here was judge and jury, here was my father who stood for our family, and the trooper who stood for the world outside my family—our neighbors, the town, the county, all those who had a right to know a monster lived among them.

And so I spoke the words of my story, confused as it was. I was sick to my stomach with the horror of what I had done, and sick, too, with the shame of confessing it aloud, and with fear of the punishment that must follow.