Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

Trussed and displayed, our bird seemed to have been sitting on the table for ages, waiting for a banquet to begin. On either side of it, tall white candles flickered in a crosscurrent of the cabin’s many drafts, sending uncertain shadows over the table and lending a layer of depth to the setting. McIntosh apples were mounded in a bowl lined with yellow and brown satin leaves, and a wicker cornucopia at the opposite end of the table had been filled with Indian corn, along with acorns and walnuts and filberts, gourds, sprigs of dried sweet william, figs, a pomegranate — the open mouth of it overflowing with the stuff of harvest. A basket of warm glazed buns was wrapped in a white cloth, and a rich, earthy stuffing, steaming like a bog, was kept hot in a glass-lidded serving dish. China and silver settings had been brought north from Detroit, and there were goblets for both wine and water. With the pipes broken, water was the scarcer commodity. But there was wine. Two bottles had been uncorked and were breathing on the table, and six more sat on a sideboard, above which, on the wall, a large ornately framed mirror, slightly canted, held the whole scene like a still life.

Mr. Jansen poured wine for everyone, and then, as people settled into their seats, stood at the head of the table, flipping open the brass latches of a wooden box and pulling his carving knife and fork from a bed of red crushed velvet. He scraped the knife against a hone, crossing them above his head like a swashbuckler, and then, asking for silence, cleanly cut a first slice of white meat and placed it ceremoniously on my plate. The others clapped and cheered and stomped their feet, and I felt that my face must have reddened. I looked into the mirror and was able to see, as if I were hovering above the table, everyone but myself.

“To Daly, after all these years,” Lucy said.

“Hear! Hear!” Steve and Lindy and Mr. Jansen all said together.

The toast’s concluding ring of crystal rang dully in my right ear, still numb from the shotgun blast. We all drank in my honor, and then drank again when Steve, winking my way, rose to salute the turkey I’d shot.

“I’m surprised,” Caroline said. “It doesn’t seem like you, Daly.”

A gravy boat came down the line, and I ladled a thick, brown, floury paste over everything.

“Yeah,” Lucy said.

“Well. .” I didn’t know what to say.

Mr. Jansen jumped in. “Why not, Lucille? What, may I ask, is your idea of him?”

“I don’t know.”

Sandy answered. “More passive — not passive but, like, more a pacifist, I mean, a pacifist, not a killer.”

“Oh, no,” Lindy said. “Not the killer conversation again.”

“Hunting,” Steve said, cluing me in, somewhat vaguely, as he had with his politics. His assumption that we shared something unspoken only sharpened my resentment of him.

“You eat, you can’t complain,” Mr. Jansen said.

“But it’s true,” my wife said. “He’s a major bird-watcher. He keeps this stupid little book— I’m sorry, I don’t mean stupid. I mean. . you know what I mean.” She paused, patting my forearm, and then, covering the awkward silence, continued. “You should have seen how excited he was the day he saw a pileated woodpecker in Central Park.”

“I’ll show you a pileated woodpecker,” Steve said.

“Oh, God, not that pecker conversation again,” Sandy yelled.

“What’s the point of that, anyway, Daly?” Mr. Jansen asked, steering the conversation off the subject of sex. For a pleasure-loving, hard-drinking barfly, my wife’s father was surprisingly prudish. His face was flushed. He’d tucked a corner of his napkin into his shirtfront, like a little boy. As the discussion jumped around, he swiveled his head from side to side, slashing his knife and fork in the air, as if he were trying to stab a word out of the conversation and eat it. “And what’s a pileated? That needs to be cleared up.”

“What’s the point of what?” I asked stiffly. I was seated at the far end of the table, with everyone to my right, and I couldn’t keep pace with the conversation. I was beginning to think my eardrum was punctured. A warm fluid seemed to be leaking from it.

“Watching birds.” Between the sound of his booming voice and my comprehension, there was a distracting lag, and the only replies I could make were serious and plodding, out of sync with the rising hilarity.

“A pileum,” I said, “is the top of a bird’s head.”

“Don’t all birds have tops to their heads?”

“Some birds are topless,” Lindy said.

All this badinage was just crashing and piling up in front of me. It seemed really cornball and canned, but I couldn’t quite catch the tone and join in. I reached for my water and held the glass in my palm, cool against my skin.

“Come again,” I said.

“What?” Lindy said. “Huh?”

“What—” I began, and then everyone at the table started in.

“What? What?”

“What? What? What?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t hear.”

“Ah,” Steve said, “from the shotgun.”

“Just in my right,” I said.

Steve stood beside me with his plate and utensils in hand.

“Trade places,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“No, come on. You still got one good ear, right? Let’s switch. It’s no problem.”

Stubbornly insisting on my seat would only have caused a scene at this point.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to hear,” Lindy said.

Sandy laughed. “Lord knows, he’s better off.”

“Switch over,” Mr. Jansen said with a preemptive wave of his knife. By the time I was seated again, the entire conversation had moved on. Caroline was playing with her food, and I wondered what she was thinking. The silver earrings SJ had given her caught the firelight and flickered as she brought her hand to her lips. Something dropped on her plate, tinging loudly enough for all of us to hear.

Her mother said, “I got one, too.”

“Lead?” Mr. Jansen asked.

“Me, too. That’s lead?” Sandy turned to her husband. “Isn’t lead illegal? That’s what you told me.”

“Baiting turkey itself is illegal,” Steve said. “So whether or not we used a little lead didn’t seem to matter much.” Sandy looked at me, and I made an exaggerated shrug, absolving myself of any accessory role in the crime.

“There’s nothing really wrong with it,” Steve said.

“Except it causes brain damage,” Lucy said.

“Well, don’t swallow any,” Steve said.

Lucy said, “But won’t it taint the meat around it, too?”

Sandy said, “The whole bird is poisoned!”

“Goddam,” Steve said.

“I don’t like being reminded of this dead thing that was alive,” Sandy said. “That’s my other point. I for sure don’t like biting into the bullets that killed it during dinner.”

“Those aren’t bullets, for fuck’s sake,” her husband said. “It’s just shot, number-six shot.”

Sandy said, “I like to make believe my turkey was grown on a tree or bush.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t,” Mr. Jansen said.

“You liked that fancy squab in Paris plenty,” Steve said to his wife, working the hypocrisy angle that always seemed to crop up at the end of these discussions. It was as if the interminable debate — men on one side, women on the other — would end only when it swallowed its own tail.

“You owed me that squab,” Sandy said. She was drunker than the rest of us, or less capable of hiding it. “You owed me that squab for fucking Katrina.”

“Sandy,” my wife’s mother said.

“Ten years. Ten goddamn years.”

Sandy reached for one of the bottles of wine that had been left to breathe on the sideboard. She rose from her chair and said, “You all just go out and hunt and sit around and swap stories. You all think it’s funny.” She walked unsteadily around the table. “And no one’s ever hurt and it’s all just stories. Ha ha. Oh, yeah.” She bent as if to kiss her husband on the ear. “I hate guns,” she said. “I hate guns. I hate guns.” She straightened up and looked over the table as if waiting for applause, and when none came she filled her glass, and then poured the rest of the bottle of wine over her husband’s head. His knife and fork were poised above his plate, and he smiled patiently as the wine dripped down his face. When the bottle was empty, he put a piece of meat in his mouth and chewed it slowly, then swallowed.