Before You Know Kindness (9 page)

Seven

T
here was chaos in the kitchen Saturday morning, the very last day in July. Some of it was a simple result of the reality that the household had swollen from three people to eight, two of whom were planning on attending a funeral that day before going to the club. But part of it was due as well to the nature of Nan Seton: The woman had the vigor of a cruise director when it came to outdoor activities and organizing her brood, but her energy level deflated like a blood pressure cuff—you could almost hear the hiss of escaping air—when she was faced with a task that demanded long-term coordination, concentration, and planning. It was one thing to get her granddaughters into age-appropriate swimwear (though Nan was confident that Charlotte’s choices in swimwear were inappropriate for any age) and then to the club; it was quite another to redo her kitchen. As a result, the room was in serious need of a makeover. The oven door that summer didn’t quite close (which meant that the plastic dials for the burners on the stove had started to melt like images from a Salvador Dali painting); the dishwasher door did close but it demanded two hands and a back that was sturdy; and Nan insisted on keeping the electric skillet in a section of the counter that meant she had to wind the long cord around a blender with chunks of calcified water clinging to the rotor blades like barnacles, a toaster with sufficient bread crumbs in its base to stuff a turkey, and the baby bottles that had appeared in the night with the speed of button mushrooms in a wet summer. And, of course, because the telephone in the kitchen still had a receiver that was tethered to the wall unit with a plastic-coated wire, it was not uncommon when two Setons or McCulloughs were trying to cook for one inadvertently to trip or tie up the other.

This morning, moreover, Spencer was making waffles. Consequently, the waffle iron—an antique that looked more like a device the secret police in a third world nation might use to extract a confession from a political prisoner than a kitchen appliance—was taking up space on the counter as well. The batter, made with soy milk and without eggs, was runnier than regular batter, and so the waffle iron had glacierlike daggers of camel-colored globules running down three of its four sides.

Spencer suspected this morning might not be the best time to be making waffles because his mother-in-law and John were trying to get out the door for a nine thirty funeral. But he told himself he was making the waffles for Charlotte and Willow. He understood this justification wasn’t quite true—he guessed he probably would be making waffles now even if he was the only person in the house who was going to eat them—but he felt like waffles, and wasn’t this his vacation, too? Besides, he had checked the vegetable garden as soon as he had woken up, and he’d seen that the deer had returned to continue the job they had begun Thursday night. Worse, they had discovered the strawberries, which had arrived weeks late but now, finally, were just about ripe for the picking, and then ravaged the leaves on the raspberry bushes. This meant there would be no strawberry shortcake—or strawberry soup or strawberry smoothies or strawberry pasta—made with their very own strawberries while he was here this week, and there might be no raspberries ever this summer.

Spencer hadn’t anticipated a huge crop from the transplants this season, but he had expected enough for the family. And so now he was repressing his profound disappointment with food. With waffles.

Around him there was chaos: Mrs. Seton was telling her daughter that the girls’ suits had to be hanging outside on the line, but still no one could find Charlotte’s suitable Speedo (including Charlotte); John was emptying day-old coffee grounds from the stovetop percolator his mother had used since the Eisenhower administration into the paper grocery bag (already tearing at the bottom from something gooey and wet that had been deposited there the night before after dinner); and his nephew was howling like a police siren while Sara, reduced almost to despair, walked the baby back and forth in the living room. Willow, according to fast-developing family lore the only antidote in the world to a full-blown Patrick Seton tirade, was outside somewhere, searching with Charlotte for the missing swimsuit.

Spencer knew that if he focused on anything other than the physical act of cooking, he would become involved in the bedlam around him and grow angry. Angrier, actually: Already he was exasperated, maddened by the sheer disorganization, by the annoying way everyone was speaking at cross purposes, and (most certainly) by the mess.

Finally Willow appeared, rescuing her mother from her younger brother—a child who had been sobbing for so long with Sara that although he had stopped crying, he now had hiccups that were heart-wrenching—and Spencer was able to concentrate on breakfast. With a decided effort to be serene, he pulled up the top of the press, trimmed away the half-cooked stalactites of batter from the sides, and deposited onto an antique china plate a waffle at once so perfectly square, evenly browned, and supernaturally fluffy that it looked like it belonged in a gourmet cooking magazine. There was not a corner of this house that did not hold for him a memory of what it was like to be a teenager, away from home and college for the first time in his life, making real money—or what seemed like real money at the time—and spending his days hiking and swimming and hitting tennis balls with the lovely young woman he knew even then he would marry. Why, he told himself as he savored the sight of this oh-so-perfect waffle, should a little chaos here trouble him now?

Willow brought Patrick over to the plate on the counter and said to her brother, “This, little man, is what a waffle is supposed to look like. Pretty good, huh?”

The baby hiccupped then gurgled.

“Then this one has to be yours,” Spencer said. “I picked up some Soy-garine at the health food store on the way home from the club yesterday afternoon.”

“The waffles my parents make always pop out of the toaster, and they look like burnt toast,” she said.

“Please, enjoy it. Ask Charlotte if she’s ready for one, too, okay?”

The girl nodded, stepped around the dishwasher door that hung open like a shin-level metal shelf—a bruise-inducing ledge from another era—scooted past her grandmother, who was saying something about everyone’s lack of time if they wanted to get to the club at a decent hour, and called out the front door to her cousin.

JOHN STOOD
in the lambent sun of the morning before the vegetable garden in his wing tips, holding a paisley necktie in his hands. He was relieved that he and Sara had planned on his going straight to work after breakfast on Monday, because it meant that he actually had a decent pair of shoes with him this weekend and therefore would not have to attend Walter Durnip’s funeral in either golf cleats or sneakers.

He really wasn’t surprised that the urine he and Spencer had showered around the edge of the garden last night had done so little to prevent the deer from dining at Chez Seton. Nevertheless, it struck him as a bit of an irony that a little human pee near your tree stand in the woods during rifle season was a way to make absolutely certain that you came home without a buck. When he was out with Howard Mansfield last year and his friend took him up on the U.S. Forest Service’s land high on the mountain, they sat for hours in the primitive tree stand Howard’s brother had built the year before. They finally moved for the simple reason that they both had to urinate, and rather than hoofing a quarter or half mile away through the snow and then wandering all the way back, they just decided to keep on walking until they found some fresh tracks.

Which they did. Actually, they came across something even better: They found the beds where only moments before deer had been resting, two ovals each the rough size of an automobile tire, the snow melted in the shape of eggs and the newly exposed oak and maple leaves on the forest floor still warm to their touch. Nearby were the piles of small pellets the deer had deposited before settling in. Howard had explained these had been left by a doe and her fawn, and they’d probably been watching the two of them before leaving. A few minutes later they found the tracks where the deer had actually crossed their own path—small divots in the snow and the spongy mud, some in the much larger prints from their own boots—and then they discovered what Howard really was after: the scrapes on the ground left by a buck in full rut and fresh hooking on the bark of a small beech tree. The exposed pulp was moist and almost as bright as the snow.

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.