Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“She won’t be happy,” he told Spencer simply.

“No, but she has a good heart. Really, she does. She’ll understand that I’m doing this for my family.”

He was surprised: He hadn’t realized that Paige Sutherland had a heart, much less one a person might argue was good.

“Anyway,” Spencer continued. “I thought you should know.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for telling me about… everything.”

The dog was returning now, and-as he did always when Spencer was present-the animal went directly to him.

“You’re welcome. And John?”

“Yes?”

“I forgive you. Really and truly: I forgive you.”

John thanked him for this, too: for pardoning him, for letting him off a hook that by all rights could have left him dangling for life. Then he climbed from his chair and went to the dog at his brother-in-law’s feet and stroked the animal, trying to see nothing more than the gray that dappled the old animal’s snout and feel nothing other than the luxuriant softness of his mane.

This was bad news. Unutterably bad news.

Nevertheless, Dominique had learned that sometimes with bad news it was best to do nothing. Now was one of those moments. Spencer had left to tell Paige his decision, and she was alone in her office with her erotically charged paintings of tropical birds, and for a moment she pushed her chair away from her desk and simply tried to sit quietly. So: Spencer was calling off the press conference. And dropping the lawsuit.

She sipped her tea, the mug grasped tightly in both her hands, and allowed the warm porcelain rim to rest a long moment against her lower lip. She guessed the main reason she was doing nothing was because there was absolutely nothing she could do. It was over. There would be no surprise broadside on the hunting industry, at least not this week. Or this month. Or, barring some unforeseen accident or tragedy in the hunting season, this year.

One of the things she had learned from Spencer’s injury was that it helped to have a human casualty to point out the horrors that hunting inflicted on animals. Spencer had put a human face on a bullet wound. On what it felt like to be mistaken for a deer and then shot.

In theory, it didn’t require so very much imagination to understand that sort of pain, now did it? As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country, an uncompromising extremist without any patience. Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn’t accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

The press conference would have been a real eye-opener.

Still, the story would get out. Maybe not with the orgiastic fanfare she once had contemplated. But already the word was traveling among their friends in the animal rights community that Spencer McCullough had been shot. The story had been on the street ever since Spencer had returned to work in the middle of the month and begun to return people’s calls. We are a litigious society, she thought with bemusement, and there is little we like more than a good courtroom drama.

And Charlotte, apparently, was a wondrous little drama queen. She would have been sensational. Nevertheless, Dominique had to admit that she was relieved for the girl. She was disappointed for her group and the animals they represented, but she was sincerely happy for the girl.

She stood up, stretched, and went to try to cheer up Spencer’s young minions-an admittedly uncharacteristic gesture, but one that she told herself she had to consider more frequently-reassuring them that although this press conference was off, there would be others.

There would always, alas, be others.

THAT AFTERNOON Adirondack’s lawyer had sounded predictably mulish when he’d first taken Paige’s call, presuming-with cause, Paige readily admitted to herself-that she was phoning to torment him with still more conjecture about how a jury would respond to the presence of a traumatized thirteen-year-old girl on a witness stand.

But once he understood why she was actually calling, she could hear in his voice the way his eyes must have widened and how he couldn’t wait to finish their conversation-as if this good news might evaporate if he stayed on the line a second longer than necessary, or feared he might say the wrong thing and somehow cause this great gift to be taken back. He wanted to tell his boss. And his boss’s boss. And anyone in the manufacturing headquarters of the Adirondack Rifle Company who would listen.

Perhaps he would take credit for this change of heart on the part of Spencer McCullough and his counsel. Perhaps he would concoct a reason why Spencer McCullough and his animal rights nutballs had decided suddenly to slink silently into the night.

She really didn’t care.

She felt sunken, deflated, a little sick with sadness. It wasn’t just about the money, though lately whenever she had pondered the money that might have been theirs, she had had to breathe in slowly and deeply through her nose to calm herself, as if she were a… a hunter. A hunter about to squeeze a trigger. Now, the money that seemed once to demand nothing but patience and journeyman competence had vanished. Vanished completely.

And, yes, she felt bad for Keenan and Randy and Dominique.

But mostly the sorrow that tugged at her now was the result of those claws and paws and hooves, all abused, that surrounded her. That surrounded them all.

So tomorrow it wouldn’t be deer. It might be dolphins or whales, elephants-the ones who were shot in the wild or the ones who were beaten in the circus-or mink. It might be the hogs who were driven up the chutes to be clubbed to their death. It might be cattle. It might be the monkeys with their wondrous brains-gray matter perhaps fully conscious of the fact that the virus these humans had injected into their blood was slowly killing them-or the rabbits blinded by cosmetic companies. It might be the whole arks of creatures we were either endangering with our gluttony for trophies or breeding for no other reason than our insatiable desire for meat.

The litany was endless.

So what if it wasn’t the deer’s turn? It was inevitable their day would come. Somewhere out there was another John Seton. Good God, the woods were full of them.

Suddenly, her eyes were watering and she was unable to blink back her tears.

CHARLOTTE GUESSED instantly that the person leaning against the lockers twenty or twenty-five yards down the corridor was a reporter. She was her mother’s age but Charlotte knew that she wasn’t a teacher and nothing about her signaled parent. She was wearing khaki pants and a windbreaker, and she had an attaché strapped over her shoulder. Her hair was the color of honey and it fell to her shoulders.

Given the kind of day that she’d had-a day that had begun ten hours ago with her parents trying to separate and then (much to her own astonishment) her fessing up to the marijuana-Charlotte briefly considered turning tail and running back into the auditorium, where a couple of kids from rehearsal and her drama teacher were still hanging out. She was supposed to meet her mom in her mom’s classroom, but this woman was a roadblock between the two of them.

Before she could do anything, however, before she could either retreat or plow ahead, the woman saw her. The reporter, assuming that was indeed what she was, offered a small wave and then started to march down the hall toward her.