Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

“Good. Let’s go home, Mom,” she said, taking her mother’s long fingers in hers. With her free hand she gave the headmaster a small salute and then walked with her mother down the hall. Three words formed in her head in the almost old-fashioned courier font from her Secret Garden script, and the image in her mind made her smile:

Exit, stage right.

THAT EVENING Nan Seton had dinner alone with her dog in her dining room. Across the wide expanse of park the three McCulloughs ate with their new dog, the cats watching warily from different perches on a living room couch. Far to the north the Setons ate at an Italian restaurant near the airport in South Burlington: Sara and Willow and baby Patrick had met John there, and they all had agreed they were far too hungry to wait till they were home to dine. Patrick ate Cheerios one by one from a restaurant high chair and sucked on a bottle of milk.

None of the Setons or the McCulloughs was feeling particularly celebratory, but they all felt relieved.

Three hundred miles apart the grown men both brought up the missing casing, and each time their wives told them-gently-to drop it. Just shut up (please) and drop it.

The two girls thought of the vegetable garden in New Hampshire, and-again, similarly-hoped their parents would not get the notion into their midlife-addled brains that it could possibly be worth the effort to try once again next year. Charlotte liked the gardens the students were building for her stage play, especially the hedges. They were constructed entirely from green paper cocktail napkins and walls of mesh screen. They looked real enough, and they demanded no serious care.

But the girls also knew instinctively that they would never be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother again. It wasn’t that Grandmother couldn’t manage them: Good Lord, she probably managed them better than their own parents. Rather, it was their sense that their parents, pure and simple, were going to want them with them. Not because of their dalliance with underage drinking and dope, but because they loved them and did the best that they could.

This attention might grow tiring. Still, it was reassuring.

Some of the people ate meat that evening and some did not, but those who did were aware of the flesh on their plates. They told themselves, however, that there was enough in their small worlds about which they could feel guilty-myriad, endless failings and whole catalogs of disappointments they heaped on others-and so they chewed and smiled and swallowed.

And Spencer, at least for the moment, looked the other way. He looked only at his wife and his daughter, grateful, grasping his Good Grips easy-to-hold fork, and hoisted chickpeas and artichoke hearts across the great divide that separated his dinner plate from his mouth.

THE GIRLS WERE CORRECT when they surmised they would never again be alone in New Hampshire with their grandmother: That night the old woman died. Even so vigorous a heart was not immune to the unsubtle havoc wrought by time. Besides, some hearts are better than others, and though Nan’s was generous, it was weak. Had she not been so vigorous, she might have died a decade sooner. And though it would have been simpler for everyone if she had lived another five years-even five months-she lasted just long enough. She made it by hours. The boys had reconciled in the morning, and she passed away in her sleep a mere half spin of the Earth later. And so while John and Catherine and Spencer were devastated, they were devastated together. Sara helped them all, the therapist in her surprised by the depth of her own sadness, as did Nan’s granddaughters. The girls’ presence was comforting, because they seemed so very grown up.

Nan died dreaming of a woodpecker in one of the trees that ringed her house, the drumming in actuality the last beats of her heart before it spasmed, then stopped. The sudden spike of pain woke her body, but Nan was never conscious of what the pain was or that she was dying. Her eyes opened reflexively, then shut, and she was gone. It was all very similar to the way her friend Walter Durnip had died in the country that summer, except she had her dog with her at the end instead of her spouse.

The animal, much to everyone’s surprise, actually outlived her. He spent his last days with the Setons of Vermont.

Nan was buried in the cemetery in New Hampshire, with a service beforehand at the homestead. The afternoon was raw but bearable, and the family stood together with Nan’s friends near the dead stalks of the cutting garden, the rented trellis exactly the one Sara had seen in her mind when the days had been long in July. Then they all sang a hymn and went out-but they sang only one, and it was short.

The clouds were moving like whitewater, streaming in lines to the south. Occasionally the sun would appear, adding bright, fibrous stripes to the oyster-colored mass.

Each time the sun would emerge the crow would look up, his dark eyes attracted by the sparkle.

Still, it was chilly and there was less sunlight every day. Winters here were just cold enough and the hills just high enough that soon the crow would fly south, as would the female pecking now at something in the ground far below, and their offspring. Three smaller birds, each about half his size. Altogether, this extended family-this small series of nests atop the white pine-numbered fifteen, and together they would leave for a slightly warmer climate.

This particular crow was the biggest. He was just about a foot and a half long and he had a wingspan of thirty-five inches. He weighed almost exactly a pound.

At the edges of the distant woods the deer were starting their walk up the hill toward the garden. They used to come only at night, but lately they had grown considerably bolder and would venture here during the day. One of them, a male, had even begun to scrape at a thick maple tree beside the garden as the rutting season began to draw near. The animals were growing their winter coats, a grayish brown shell of hollow, kinky fur that insulated them against the cold.

The crow turned his head from the deer when he saw something moving on the ground near his mate. A raccoon, perhaps, was stalking her. He screeched and the other bird rose instantly into the air and landed on one of the lower branches of an apple tree. His eyes darted back now to the source of the motion, and he saw it was merely a twig from a rosebush scratching against the side of the gray house.

The place had been empty for a week. No longer was it a source of almost ceaseless activity, with humans constantly coming and going, their cars rumbling up and down the long driveway. The deer, of course, had noticed their absence, too, which was why they had extended the small world of their browse to the remains of the garden during the day as well as the night.

Humans didn’t seem dangerous to the crow, at least not this bunch. But they were noisy.

Especially that one night in the middle of the summer.

The bird no longer remembered the details of what he had seen from the top of the pine, and-entranced by the lights that flashed everywhere, the lights atop the cars and the lights waved by the people-he hadn’t even witnessed the precise moment after that nearly deafening blast when a woman had picked the rifle up off the ground and heaved it hysterically against an apple tree. He hadn’t seen the brass casing fly free of the chamber when it slammed into the trunk.

It was actually the next morning, while one of the little girls was curled up in the strawberries, that he first noticed the twinkle, the flash in the grass. It was irresistible. Whatever it was, it was glimmering in the high early August sun. And with the child absorbed in her strawberries, he had been able to swoop down and gather it up.