Robert Stone: Bay of Souls

"BY GAD, SIR," Michael Ahearn said to his son, Paul, "you present a distressing spectacle."

A few nights earlier they had watched The Maltese Falcon together. Paul, who had never seen it before, was delighted by his father's rendering of Sydney Greenstreet. Sometimes he would even try doing Greenstreet himself.

"By gad, sir!"

Paul's attempts at movie voices were not subtle but commanded inflections normally beyond the comic repertory of a twelve-year-old boy from a small town on the northern plains. His voice and manner were coming to resemble his father's.

The boy was lying in bed with a copy of The Hobbit open across his counterpane. This time he was not amused at Michael's old-movie impressions. He looked up with resentment, his beautiful long-lashed eyes angry. Michael easily met the reproach there. He took any opportunity to look at his son. There was something new every day, a different ray, an unexpected facet reflected in the aspects of this creature enduring his twelvedness.

"I want to go, Dad," Paul said evenly, attempting to exercise his powers of persuasion to best effect.

He had been literally praying to go. Michael knew that because he had been spying on Paul while the boy knelt beside the bed to say his evening prayers. He had lurked in the hallway outside the boy's room, watching and listening to his careful recitation of the Our Father and the Hail Mary and the Gloria — rote prayers, courtesy of the Catholic school to which the Ahearns, with misgivings, regularly dispatched him. Michael and his wife had been raised in religion and they were warily trying it on again as parents. Sending Paul to St. Emmerich's meant laughing away the horror stories they liked to tell about their own religious education in the hope of winning a few wholesome apparent certainties for the next generation.

"I was fourteen before my father took me hunting," Michael said. "I think that's the right age."

"You said kids do everything sooner."

"I didn't say I thought kids doing everything sooner was a good idea."

"You don't even like to hunt," Paul said. "You don't believe in it."

"Really? And what makes us think that?"

"Well, I've heard you with Mom. You, like, agree with her it's cruel and stuff."

"I don't agree with her. I understand her position. Anyway, if I didn't believe in it why should I take a tender runt like you?"

Paul was immune to his father's goading. He went for the substance.

"Because I really believe in it."

"Oh yes? You believe in whacking innocent creatures?"

"You know what?" Paul asked. "This was a Christian Ethics topic. Hunting was. And I was like pro — in favor. Because Genesis says 'dominion over beasts.' If you eat the meat it's OK. And we do."

"You don't."

"Yes I do," Paul said. "I eat venison kielbasa."

Michael loomed over him and with his left hand put out the lamp on the bed table.

"'Tis blasphemy to vent thy rage against a dumb brute," he informed Paul. He had been teaching Moby-Dick with his favorite assistant, a very pretty South Dakota girl named Phyllis Strom. "Now good night. I don't want you to read too late."

"Why? I'm not going anywhere."

"Maybe next year," Michael said.

"Sure, Dad," said Paul.

He left the bedroom door its customary inch ajar and went downstairs to the study where his wife was grading Chaucer papers.

"Did he beg and plead?" she asked, looking up.

"I don't think he's absolutely sure if he wants to go or not. He takes a pro-hunting position."

She laughed. Her son's eyes. "A what?"

"In Christian Ethics," Michael pronounced solemnly. "Dominion over the beasts. He argues from Genesis. Christian Ethics," he repeated when she looked at him blankly. "At school."

"Oh, that," she said. "Well, it doesn't say kill the poor beasts. Or does it? Maybe one of those teachers is a gun nut."

Kristin had been raised in a Lutheran family. Although religiously inclined, she was a practical person who worked at maintaining her critical distance from dogmatic instruction, especially of the Roman variety. She concurred in Paul's attendance at the Catholic school because, to her own rather conservative but independent thinking, the position of the Catholics of their college town had incorporated Luther's reforms. Many Sundays she went to Mass with them. At Christmas they went to both churches.

"It's him," Michael said. "It's his funny little mind."

Kristin frowned and put her finger to her lips.

"His funny little mind," Michael whispered, chastened. "He thought it up."

"He always sees you going. Not that you ever get much."

"I get birds. But deer season…"

"Right," she said.

The circle of unspoken thought she closed was that Michael used the pheasant season as an excuse to walk the autumn fields around their house. With the dog and a shotgun borrowed from a colleague he would set out over the frosted brown prairie, scrambling under wire where the land was not posted, past thinly frozen ponds and rutted pastures, making his way from one wooded hill to another. It was a pleasure to walk the short autumn days, each knoll bright with yellowed alder, red-brown ash and flaming maple. And if the dog startled a pheasant into a headlong, clucking sacrificial dash, he might have a shot. Or not. Then, if he brought a bird down, he would have to pluck it, trying to soften the skin by heating it on the stove without quite letting it cook, picking out the shot with tweezers. Kristin refused to do it. Michael disliked the job and did not much care for pheasant. But you had to eat them.

And in deer season, certain years, Michael would go out with a couple of friends from the university who were good shots and the kind of avid hunters he was not. He went for the canoe trip into the half-frozen swamp and the November woods under their first covering of snow. The silence there, in the deep woods they prowled, was broken by nothing but crows and stay-behind chanting sparrows and the occasional distant echo of firing. If they got lucky, there might be the call of an errant Canadian wolf at night. And there were the winter birds, grosbeaks, juncos, eagles gliding silent above the tree line. And the savor of a good whiskey around the potbellied stove of the cabin they used as field headquarters. Killing deer was not the object for him.

Kristin, though she had grown up on her family's farm, forever borrowing her male relations' jackets with pockets full of jerky, tobacco plugs and bright red shotgun shells, mildly disapproved of hunting. At first, she had objected to Michael's going. He was nearsighted, a daydreamer.

"You shouldn't carry a weapon if you don't intend to take a deer."

"I don't shoot seriously."

"But you shouldn't shoot at all. It's worse if you wound one."

"I hardly ever discharge the piece, Kristin."

But a man had to carry one, in the deep woods, in winter. It was sinister, suspicious to encounter someone in the forest without a gun. Farmers who welcomed hunters on their land in season looked fearfully on unarmed strollers, trespassing. And sometimes, if he was standing with the others and a band of deer came in view and everyone let go, he would take his shot with the rest of them. He had never claimed one.

From the living room next to Kristin's study, their black Labrador gave up his place beside the fire and trotted over for attention. Olaf had been Paul's Christmas puppy six years before and served as Michael's shooting companion every fall. Michael bent to scratch his neck.