Before You Know Kindness (48 page)

Lorelea looked at her and seemed to be considering this. Then she nodded and clicked off the recorder.

“Good. Let’s go home, Mom,” she said, taking her mother’s long fingers in hers. With her free hand she gave the headmaster a small salute and then walked with her mother down the hall. Three words formed in her head in the almost old-fashioned courier font from her
Secret Garden
script, and the image in her mind made her smile:

Exit, stage right.

THAT EVENING
Nan Seton had dinner alone with her dog in her dining room. Across the wide expanse of park the three McCulloughs ate with their new dog, the cats watching warily from different perches on a living room couch. Far to the north the Setons ate at an Italian restaurant near the airport in South Burlington: Sara and Willow and baby Patrick had met John there, and they all had agreed they were far too hungry to wait till they were home to dine. Patrick ate Cheerios one by one from a restaurant high chair and sucked on a bottle of milk.

None of the Setons or the McCulloughs was feeling particularly celebratory, but they all felt relieved.

Three hundred miles apart the grown men both brought up the missing casing, and each time their wives told them—gently—to drop it. Just shut up (please) and drop it.

The two girls thought of the vegetable garden in New Hampshire, and—again, similarly—hoped their parents would not get the notion into their midlife-addled brains that it could possibly be worth the effort to try once again next year. Charlotte liked the gardens the students were building for her stage play, especially the hedges. They were constructed entirely from green paper cocktail napkins and walls of mesh screen. They looked real enough, and they demanded no serious care.

But the girls also knew instinctively that they would never be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother again. It wasn’t that Grandmother couldn’t manage them: Good Lord, she probably managed them better than their own parents. Rather, it was their sense that their parents, pure and simple, were going to want them with them. Not because of their dalliance with underage drinking and dope, but because they loved them and did the best that they could.

This attention might grow tiring. Still, it was reassuring.

Some of the people ate meat that evening and some did not, but those who did were aware of the flesh on their plates. They told themselves, however, that there was enough in their small worlds about which they could feel guilty—myriad, endless failings and whole catalogs of disappointments they heaped on others—and so they chewed and smiled and swallowed.

And Spencer, at least for the moment, looked the other way. He looked only at his wife and his daughter, grateful, grasping his Good Grips easy-to-hold fork, and hoisted chickpeas and artichoke hearts across the great divide that separated his dinner plate from his mouth.

THE GIRLS WERE CORRECT
when they surmised they would never again be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother: That night the old woman died. Even so vigorous a heart was not immune to the unsubtle havoc wrought by time. Besides, some hearts are better than others, and though Nan’s was generous, it was weak. Had she not been so vigorous, she might have died a decade sooner. And though it would have been simpler for everyone if she had lived another five years—even five months—she lasted just long enough. She made it by hours. The boys had reconciled in the morning, and she passed away in her sleep a mere half spin of the Earth later. And so while John and Catherine and Spencer were devastated, they were devastated together. Sara helped them all, the therapist in her surprised by the depth of her own sadness, as did Nan’s granddaughters. The girls’ presence was comforting, because they seemed so very grown up.

Nan died dreaming of a woodpecker in one of the trees that ringed her house, the drumming in actuality the last beats of her heart before it spasmed, then stopped. The sudden spike of pain woke her body, but Nan was never conscious of what the pain was or that she was dying. Her eyes opened reflexively, then shut, and she was gone. It was all very similar to the way her friend Walter Durnip had died in the country that summer, except she had her dog with her at the end instead of her spouse.

The animal, much to everyone’s surprise, actually outlived her. He spent his last days with the Setons of Vermont.

Nan was buried in the cemetery in New Hampshire, with a service beforehand at the homestead. The afternoon was raw but bearable, and the family stood together with Nan’s friends near the dead stalks of the cutting garden, the rented trellis exactly the one Sara had seen in her mind when the days had been long in July. Then they all sang a hymn and went out—but they sang only one, and it was short.

Thirty-five

T
he clouds were moving like whitewater, streaming in lines to the south. Occasionally the sun would appear, adding bright, fibrous stripes to the oyster-colored mass.

Each time the sun would emerge the crow would look up, his dark eyes attracted by the sparkle.

Still, it was chilly and there was less sunlight every day. Winters here were just cold enough and the hills just high enough that soon the crow would fly south, as would the female pecking now at something in the ground far below, and their offspring. Three smaller birds, each about half his size. Altogether, this extended family—this small series of nests atop the white pine—numbered fifteen, and together they would leave for a slightly warmer climate.

This particular crow was the biggest. He was just about a foot and a half long and he had a wingspan of thirty-five inches. He weighed almost exactly a pound.

At the edges of the distant woods the deer were starting their walk up the hill toward the garden. They used to come only at night, but lately they had grown considerably bolder and would venture here during the day. One of them, a male, had even begun to scrape at a thick maple tree beside the garden as the rutting season began to draw near. The animals were growing their winter coats, a grayish brown shell of hollow, kinky fur that insulated them against the cold.

The crow turned his head from the deer when he saw something moving on the ground near his mate. A raccoon, perhaps, was stalking her. He screeched and the other bird rose instantly into the air and landed on one of the lower branches of an apple tree. His eyes darted back now to the source of the motion, and he saw it was merely a twig from a rosebush scratching against the side of the gray house.

The place had been empty for a week. No longer was it a source of almost ceaseless activity, with humans constantly coming and going, their cars rumbling up and down the long driveway. The deer, of course, had noticed their absence, too, which was why they had extended the small world of their browse to the remains of the garden during the day as well as the night.

Humans didn’t seem dangerous to the crow, at least not this bunch. But they were noisy.

Especially that one night in the middle of the summer.

The bird no longer remembered the details of what he had seen from the top of the pine, and—entranced by the lights that flashed everywhere, the lights atop the cars and the lights waved by the people—he hadn’t even witnessed the precise moment after that nearly deafening blast when a woman had picked the rifle up off the ground and heaved it hysterically against an apple tree. He hadn’t seen the brass casing fly free of the chamber when it slammed into the trunk.

It was actually the next morning, while one of the little girls was curled up in the strawberries, that he first noticed the twinkle, the flash in the grass. It was irresistible. Whatever it was, it was glimmering in the high early August sun. And with the child absorbed in her strawberries, he had been able to swoop down and gather it up.

He gazed now at the cylinder in his nest. It was bigger than the other items: the thin, crinkled piece of aluminum foil that he could actually bite through with his beak if he wasn’t careful and the perfectly round bead that had come off the wrist of one of the girls. The casing was a bit heavier than his galvanized carpenter’s nail, but the tube was hollow and so it hadn’t been particularly difficult for him to lift it off the ground and deposit it here in the nest. It was lovely to look at, and he treasured it. So did his mate. It wasn’t as flawlessly shaped as, for example, that bead: There was a dimple near the opening where he had lifted it off the ground, and a section of the rim—that lip at one end—had an ugly flat patch. But, still, the crow thought it was beautiful. The bird wouldn’t take it south with him—he took nothing with him when he flew south—but this summer and autumn it had given him a pleasurable sensation that, in his small mind, was rather like being full.

Now his mate lifted off the apple tree and flew up to their nest in the pine. Below them the deer started to dig at the weedy dirt. A squirrel scampered abruptly across the gravel driveway. A rabbit crouched behind the lowest branches of the hydrangea, his ears high, his nostrils twitching as he sniffed the crisp, autumnal air.

And behind them all, the house sat perfectly still.

Epilogue

The Race to the Face

M
y cousin was eighteen the autumn her father finally had his arm amputated. She was a freshman at Yale, and even in southern Connecticut the leaves had mostly turned. It was a Wednesday, a detail I recall because I was a junior in high school and I had a double block of organic chemistry that day. Uncle Spencer checked himself into a hospital in Manhattan shortly before breakfast, and the dangling appendage was gone before lunch. It was, by then, as thin and frail-looking as a very old man’s. I don’t believe he ever missed it.

The following summer, my cousin’s and my family convened in Sugar Hill the very last week in July. We knew we would be there for the anniversary of the accident, but we were no longer fixated on the date and certainly those of us from Vermont didn’t discuss it. We had returned there any number of times since that long and awful night when my cousin had shot my uncle, and the principal strangeness we experienced inevitably was due to my grandmother’s absence
—
not to any awkwardness that we were vacationing at the scene of the crime. The big old house just never seemed quite the same without her.

The summer after my uncle had his arm amputated, however, my father, my cousin, and my now one-armed uncle did have a commemoration of sorts. A short triathlon is held in Franconia every summer, usually on the first Saturday in August. It’s called the Race to the Face, because the route winds its way to a spot at the peak of a mountain not far from the ledge where the Old Man of the Mountain once had resided. And though a fair number of serious triathletes compete, a lot of athletic dilettantes participate as well. After all, the biking portion is only about seven miles long (though, in all fairness, it is uphill and almost half of it follows a deer path in the woods), the swim is a mere three-quarter-mile sprint across Echo Lake, and the final segment is a two-mile run up the ski slopes on Cannon Mountain. These are not intimidating lengths. Moreover, many people participate in teams of three
—
which is where my father, my cousin, and my uncle fit in.

Years earlier my father had sold his hunting gear, bought a mountain bike with the proceeds, and become a pretty avid cyclist. He was going to handle the first third of the triathlon, the ride from Franconia to Echo Lake. There my cousin would take over, wearing (for a change) a completely suitable Speedo. My uncle would be waiting for her at the other side, where, as soon as she had emerged from the water, he would start his one-armed run up the mountain.

The rest of us
—
my mother, Aunt Catherine, Patrick, and I
—
waited for the athletes at the finish line high atop Cannon.

I don’t recall precisely where they placed among the sixty or seventy teams that had signed up that summer, but I know they managed to sneak into the top half. This wasn’t bad for two middle-aged men who had only three arms between them and a young woman who rarely swam in the university pool more than twice a week. They attributed their success either to being directly related to the impressively energetic Nan Seton or, in my uncle’s case, to coming of age on her watch.

Nevertheless, what I remember best about that day isn’t an image of my father leaving in a heat of almost two hundred bicyclists, or my beautiful cousin racing down the beach at Echo Lake and diving gracefully into the water, or my uncle starting his trek up a ski slope with grass so green that the sun made it look almost neon. When I think about that morning I envision instead the moment when my uncle finally reached the summit. He was greeted there by my father and my cousin, who, upon finishing their portions of the race, had taken the tram to the top. The three of them threw themselves together into the sort of ecstatically loopy embrace that had never marked the conclusion of any previous tennis match, golf game, or badminton contest in Seton or McCullough family history, jumping up and down and laughing with an exuberance rarely manifested by any of us. And when they posed for a photograph
—
the two men surrounding my cousin
—
you wouldn’t have known that my uncle had lost his arm or that once, a long time ago, he had almost lost his family.