David Vann: Legend of a Suicide

“She wasn’t like this before,” my father said. “This isn’t the woman I married.”

I looked at him then.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said.

I sat beside my father on the porch until the sun fell lower and my being there with him didn’t seem to mean anything anymore. Then I walked through the orchard to Rhoda.

The air was still hot. There were small, clear drops of perspiration where Rhoda’s dark hair had been pulled back from her forehead, moisture also along the top of her upper lip and along the curving lines of her neck.

“You’re watching me, Roy.”

If I had touched her neck, what would she have done? Pushed my hand away, laughed at me, smiled? That afternoon, I knew Rhoda could do anything. She could vanish. Just walk down toward the creek in her long dress, follow it, and not return, her history known to us then only in postcards or in dreams. Nothing was holding her.

“Is your father also watching me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is he on the porch steps, with his hands hanging off his knees?”

“Yes,” I said. “Are you going to leave us?”

Rhoda looked up at me then and smiled. She looked young, much younger than my father. “Of course not,” she said. “Don’t think that.”

All Sunday morning, Rhoda followed at a distance. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, but I imagined she was still wearing her great-grandmother’s dress, her face hidden by her sun hat as she climbed the narrow ribbon of fire road along each ridge.

My father walked beside me carrying his.22 for quail. I could hear the shells in his pocket. Uneasy, he kept looking back at Rhoda, a quarter of a mile behind us, and soon began muttering.

“I don’t know about all this,” he said to himself over and over in his many ways as we rose past the calls of gray squirrels and flickers. There had been a light rain overnight. I remember how strong the dove grass smelled, bitter in my nostrils and throat. I looked up suddenly from the bright ground and everything pulled together, all the strands of cloud and blue air, as if there were a huge drain in the center of the sky that sucked it all up.

“About what?” I finally asked.

“Everything,” he said, shaking his head.

“She’s not going to leave,” I said.

My father squinted, looking out over the brush on either side distrustfully. “I wish I could believe that.”

“You can,” I said. “She told me she wouldn’t.”

My father stopped hiking and looked at me then as if I were someone entirely new to him. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I asked her.”

My father gazed back at Rhoda. She was holding the front of her dress to keep it from the ground, clutching her book in one hand, floating gradually up toward us.

“Rhoda,” my father said. He was reminding himself, perhaps.

After the next rise, the brush thinned out and we entered the valleys at the top, where the mountains joined. Pin-striped white oak and clearings of pearly, blue-green dove grass. We could hear the feathers of kestrels as they slanted past on the wind.

“Have you ever seen one of those up close?” my father asked.

“No,” I said.

He stared into the sky for a long time, then took aim with the.22 at one that was hovering a few hundred feet away. When he fired, the slim wings seemed to falter a moment, but I could have simply imagined it, because there was no fall.

Rhoda coming toward us, clear of the brush, had taken off her sun hat and with her one clear eye was staring up at the bird.

My father put another shell in the chamber and waited for the kestrel to slide by at closer range. Rhoda walked up behind him and put her white fingers on the back of his neck. When the bird did come, its head to the side, beak open and feathers ruffling, I saw Rhoda close her one eye that would. I saw her neck arch back, whipping through the air, and wings rise from her. I heard the shot and screamed.

My father jumped sideways from me and swung the barrel around until it pointed at my chest. This was only instinct, he would explain later. I had startled him.

But Rhoda came toward me, held my face in her hands and pulled it close to her own, wanting to know. “What’s going on in there?” she asked. She pulled me so close I saw into her shuttered eye, the light-brown edge curving and perfect against the white, its landscape bottomless, its center blocked from view.

I ONCE STOOD in a grove of trees along one end of a lake and heard a hundred tiny pellets tap through the leaves around me like rain, so gently I could have caught one on my tongue. Then the boom over the water, John’s cry, my mother’s cry, and their arms waving. I spread my hands and waited for another. The air had so thinned out there seemed to be no distance, as if all things — the leaves, a waterline, red flannel, fields, and horizon — could be plucked by my own two fingers. The whine and squeak of mallards’ wings grew stronger, then fainter. Though I wasn’t hit, I stumbled backward in a half circle, made sure I was in full view of my running mother, and toppled into the mud. This was the first time I knew gunshot from the other end.

John Laine had not meant to shoot me. He was dating my mother and was trying to win my favor. He had posted me farther to the side, behind some tules, but I had crawled over on my hands and knees, through mud and the stubble of wheat, then risen up when I heard the muffled explosion of duck wings against water. John could not have seen me until his finger was already easing back on the trigger.

From where I lay, the yells and splashing seemed to come from every direction. Then the mud oozed in around my ears. I stared vacantly into a gray sky. I’ll remember this, I thought. Today is Saturday, November eighth. I’m thirteen. Even my ankles are sinking.

My mother’s hands ripping me out of the mud made me smile, and that gave me away. I landed with a wet smacking sound.

“You little shit,” my mother said. Then she laughed. Then John laughed, relieved that he hadn’t killed me. He was a police officer, so it wouldn’t have looked good.

My mother grabbed a handful of mud and threw it at him; it spread across the front of his red flannel shirt like a wound. She launched herself backward into the mud beside me and began to cry. That was the beginning of the end for John. He didn’t know it as he stood there smiling nervously, unsure whether my mother was really crying or not, but he was on his way out. I squinted at him with one eye and could almost see him vanishing.

Although my mother had dated one man steadily for several years after the divorce, she didn’t keep any man around for long after my father killed himself. The men she dated then were a lot like the circuses that passed through our town. They’d move in quickly and unpack everything they owned, as if they had come to stay. They’d tempt us with brightly colored objects — flowers, balloons, remote-controlled race cars — perform tricks with their beards and hands, call us funny names like snip, my little squash plant, ding-dong, and apple pie, and yell their stories at us day and night. Then they’d vanish, and we’d find no sign left, no mention even, as if we’d simply imagined them.

John was only one in a series. Angel was the most important of the ones who came before. When my mother told me Angel’s name, I thought she was saying “on hell.” I thought that was a wonderful idea, that one could be on hell without being in it, like “Just Visiting” on the Monopoly board. With Angel we went skiing in the Sierras, dozed in front of fireplaces, “experienced” the opera, and generally dressed more nicely. Beneath all the glitz, however, my mother was still the same. She dumped Angel in under two and a half months, with no advance warning that I could detect, late on a Tuesday afternoon. She did it over the phone. The difference was that this time she cried. I did, too, though not because I missed Angel.