Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (20 page)

“Anybody ever see Charlie’s penis?” asked Mary Jo.

“Not me.”

“Ugh,” said Anne. “Spare me!”

I rarely went along with my father on his Sunday excursions down to the brook and never once in memory shot from the porch at all. At an age when most boys would shoot at most anything that moved with rifle, bow or slingshot I had no taste for bloodsports.

One afternoon in May he asked as he often did though and this time I accepted. I think I was angry with Anne for some reason and felt the need to get out of the house that day. Anne could be bossy or else she and Mary Jo would side together against me in an argument and that could make me furious. Whatever the reason, I went.

My father and I never talked much and didn’t that day either. I followed him through the tall fieldgrass into the woods and found his well-beaten trail down to the brook, both our .22s held at port arms. I had no intention of using mine. It was there because my father wanted it to be. I was a miserable shot and my father knew it but it was a formal thing with him. You didn’t go hunting unarmed. It simply wasn’t done.

His habit was to walk first to the brook and then approach the stand of oaks from there, the fast-running water masking whatever sounds we might make along the dirt embankment. It had rained the day before, the brook swollen with water the color of coffee with a dash of cream. I could never have found the exact spot to cut up to the trees from there amid the tangled foliage had I been alone but my father had no problem and I saw that he’d worn a path of sorts there too barely noticable amid the scrub. I could
see the six tall trees about forty yards away up a gentle slope.

We walked twenty of those yards and stopped at the edge of the clearing and knelt each of us on one knee and my father started firing, small sharp cracks in that wide open space that could have been branches breaking and the first squirrel slammed against the tree-trunk twenty feet up as though a hand had pushed it and then fell and my father worked the bolt and chambered another round and fired as another raced across the high branches of the same tree and tumbled bouncing from limb to limb. By then squirrels were racing barking across the ground and pouring down off the trees but my father took his time and squeezed off two more rounds. I saw one big grey somersault across the ground and another skitter and roll just as it reached the bushes. He missed with the fifth round but the sixth caught another where the bole met the root system of a second tree and flipped it on its back, the .22 round going through the squirrel entirely and chipping at the green wood behind him.

“Five’s enough,” my father said.

It had taken just moments.

We stood and he took the canvas sack off his belt and we went to harvest them.

“Good shooting.”

“Thanks.”

“Five out of six and they were really
moving
!”

“They were, weren’t they.”

I wasn’t nearly as excited as I was trying to sound but something told me my father expected it. The greys were still barking angrily at us yards away in the safety of heavy scrub. My father moved slowly and methodically, prodding them with a stick to make sure they were fully dead and wouldn’t bite and then picking them up by the scruff of the neck with one gloved hand and shoving them into the sack.

“Uh-oh. Damn.”

“What?”

We had four of them in the sack and were walking toward the scrub. My father suddenly picked up his pace considerably, the closest I ever saw him come to running.

“The one I shot at the edge here. I think he’s gone.”

We got to where the grey ought to have been and wasn’t.

“Maybe you missed him.”

“I didn’t miss him. Look here.”

He was looking at a cluster of ferns. I could see blood speckling the leaves, glistening in the sun. Behind them the scrub was all thick briers. The day was hot. Neither of us was wearing much. A short-sleeve shirt for my father, a teeshirt for me.

“We’ve got to find him. You can’t leave an animal like that. Come on. He couldn’t have gotten far.”

We plunged carefully into the scrub, my father plucking the stems away and holding them back for me with his gloved fingers while I did my best to keep them at a distance with the barrel and stock of my rifle.

The briers were thickest down low so we couldn’t try to follow a blood trail. We’d have cut ourselves to shreds trying. We might have had more luck splitting up but he knew I needed him to hold back the briers for me. We searched for well over an hour. By the time my father gave it up my skin felt like it was crawling with small biting insects and my arms and face were streaked with sweat and blood. I washed them in the brook and we headed home.

My mother and sisters had gone to town shopping so the car was gone and the yard was empty. We crossed the field of waving grass in silence. I remember glancing at my father and that his face was grim. He hated losing that squirrel.

I don’t know how it was that I should be the one who saw it first because only a year or so later I’d be wearing glasses and my father’s vision was 20-20 and we were walking side by side. We were about eight feet from the porch. I remember thinking he
should
have been the one and not
me. I don’t know why I felt that way but I still do. That somehow it wasn’t right.

I think I came close to falling then. I know I staggered, that it felt like somebody had pushed me suddenly hard in the chest and that was what had forced the gasp out of me like a silent call for help, my
body
calling for help where there was none.

“What?” my father said and then looked where I was looking at the blood-trail leading up the three porch steps to the landing, smeared across the landing as with a single long stroke of a half-dry paint-brush all the way to Charlie’s trap door, a direct and determined line to that door he’d painted with the very life of him.

I knew what we’d find in there, that it was impossible for him to have come this far bleeding this much and still be alive and when my father flung open the door and we saw him on the rug, lying on his side and shot in the very same shattered shoulder that once had housed a broken leg, I saw that I was right, though we’d missed him by a matter of minutes only. His body was still warm. I touched him and looked into his glazed open eyes and tried hard not to cry. We knelt there.

“He came home looking for us,” my father said quietly.

I don’t know why I said what I did. It wasn’t anger or accusation and it wasn’t just sadness either but it came out of me like a fleeing bird and it was true.

“He came home looking for
you
, dad.” I said. “Not us. You.”

I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face that day.

I remember it better than the look on any face I’ve ever seen before or since except maybe this one here on the pillow in front of me, sleeping now but only hours ago curled in on itself and nearly unrecognizable in anger and hurt which is the face I’ll remember when she leaves tomorrow, not this familiar face but that one. She told me early on even before we were married that the one thing
she couldn’t handle was if I were unfaithful because that’s what her father was and that was what I was and what I was again and since she knows it now she
will
leave. She’s as good as her word.

My father never hunted again. The rifle went into the basement to rust away. Something in him changed after Charlie. He went out with my mother more on Sundays for one thing. We were old enough to fend for ourselves by then. And then later he began to drink more.

And later still, once we were in college, stopped drinking. And when he was old and sick became a bitter man.

We’re many things, all of us, blown by so many unexpected winds.

And I have to wonder, who am I now and what will I be tomorrow?

What have I done?

And what will I do with my own Sundays once she’s gone?

For Anush and Misty

For June and me since our earliest rememberings and except for our years in New York City the world’s always been a hostile place.

So this is nothing new, really.

We were born fraternal twins at three minutes past midnight and ten past midnight respectively on October 31, 1956 in the first windy minutes of Halloween. Mischief Night as it was called then. While we two were screaming our first tiny outrage at being thrust out of someplace wholly warm and secure—that single place on earth I believe in which there’s never any need or any good reason to scream—much older kids were out soaping windows or letting air out of tires or setting fire to brown paper sacks full of dogshit on their neighbors’ porches.

There’s a Scots belief that when a woman bares a boy-child and girl-child together she’ll never have another. Our mother never did.

But that was okay with both our parents. My mother Hanna didn’t care much for sex in the first place. She had
us and that was all she wanted. Sex was kids. Period. The act itself was ugly, slippery and revolting. Hanna’s feeling was that enough was enough. And now that my father Willie had satisfied her in the only way she was capable of being satisfied he was happy too. He could fuck around all he wanted on the side. He had a sporting-goods store right down by the lake. A prime location both for business and for poaching because there were more and more tourists coming in every year and all those ladies in sundresses needed all that good advice on bait and rod and tackle.

I suspect my father died happy.

That summer we were six years old. For some reason unknown to us Hanna decided to visit my father at the shop around lunch-time and brought along June and me and I remember seeing a big ruddy-faced man in a cowboy hat standing at the counter with Pete Miller the hired help, the big man sighting down an over-and-under shotgun while Pete placed upon the counter a yellow box of shells, Pete looking worried at my mother as we passed through the store and saying something to her and she just waving back at him and marching us down the aisle to the back storage room where my father would be taking his lunch. Which he sort of was.

She was a long lean brunette with the biggest breasts I’ve seen in all the years since and my father Willie had one of them in his mouth, or a part of one, his face buried in her flesh and her legs wrapped around his butt which was naked and slamming her back against the wall with the
Playboy
calendar hung from it and the drapes pulled to and my mother and June and I just stopped and stood there looking, June and I thinking it was funny, smiling, because there was my father naked with this strange naked woman doing
something
to one another, the two of us starting to giggle and I don’t know what my mother would have done if she’d had the time but whatever it might have been she didn’t because the big man in the cowboy hat pushed past
her striding into the room, little Pete behind him pulling on his arm and the big man just shrugging him off and raising the shotgun and I remember my father turning at the sudden commotion and the scared open-mouthed look the brunette was wearing like she’d seen a view of the world that was intolerable just before the man screamed
son-of-a-BITCH
and fired. One barrel was all it took at that range and both their heads were blood and bone and scrap against the wall.

The man later said that he wished he’d aimed slightly to the left.

She was a whore but he’d known worse.

My mother took over the store and kept it running well enough to put us both through college but she was never the same after that.

Neither were we.

We’d always been special, June and I. Somehow we were aware of that from the beginning. Like old married people we’d finish each other’s sentences. Even before we were old enough to fully
form
decent sentences. We’d be out playing in the woods by the lake.
Henry
, she’d say,
I wanna
. . .

. . .
go pee
, I’d say. Me
first
, I’d say and we would.

There’s another belief that twins possess such uncommon bonds of sympathy that each will know immediately when danger or misfortune threatens the other even when separated over long distances. Likewise that any particularly special state of happiness or wellbeing in the one will be reflected in the other. Until college we were separated for hardly moments but both beliefs were certainly true of us as kids. My mother said that as infants we would quit squalling and fall asleep in our cribs at exactly the same moment, then wake together mornings and begin wailing for the breast as though our internal clocks were precisely one. We learned to walk the same day. June’s first word was
mama
and mine was
papa
but they came out of our mouths within fifteen minutes of one another one Sunday
afternoon while we were playing on the living room floor, my father in front of the TV set and my mother ironing and my mother’s somewhat sexist explanation for why the words were not the very
same
word was that it was natural each gender should gravitate toward its own and her reasoning on the order of the words was that like a good boy I was just being polite.

Until the hour my father was shot naked in the back room we had little curiosity about our bodies. We bathed together of course and knew full well we weren’t made the same. It wasn’t a problem for us. In most other ways we felt
exactly
the same.