Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

He gazed now at the cylinder in his nest. It was bigger than the other items: the thin, crinkled piece of aluminum foil that he could actually bite through with his beak if he wasn’t careful and the perfectly round bead that had come off the wrist of one of the girls. The casing was a bit heavier than his galvanized carpenter’s nail, but the tube was hollow and so it hadn’t been particularly difficult for him to lift it off the ground and deposit it here in the nest. It was lovely to look at, and he treasured it. So did his mate. It wasn’t as flawlessly shaped as, for example, that bead: There was a dimple near the opening where he had lifted it off the ground, and a section of the rim-that lip at one end-had an ugly flat patch. But, still, the crow thought it was beautiful. The bird wouldn’t take it south with him-he took nothing with him when he flew south-but this summer and autumn it had given him a pleasurable sensation that, in his small mind, was rather like being full.

Now his mate lifted off the apple tree and flew up to their nest in the pine. Below them the deer started to dig at the weedy dirt. A squirrel scampered abruptly across the gravel driveway. A rabbit crouched behind the lowest branches of the hydrangea, his ears high, his nostrils twitching as he sniffed the crisp, autumnal air.

And behind them all, the house sat perfectly still.

M y cousin was eighteen the autumn her father finally had his arm amputated. She was a freshman at Yale, and even in southern Connecticut the leaves had mostly turned. It was a Wednesday, a detail I recall because I was a junior in high school and I had a double block of organic chemistry that day. Uncle Spencer checked himself into a hospital in Manhattan shortly before breakfast, and the dangling appendage was gone before lunch. It was, by then, as thin and frail-looking as a very old man’s. I don’t believe he ever missed it.

The following summer, my cousin’s and my family convened in Sugar Hill the very last week in July. We knew we would be there for the anniversary of the accident, but we were no longer fixated on the date and certainly those of us from Vermont didn’t discuss it. We had returned there any number of times since that long and awful night when my cousin had shot my uncle, and the principal strangeness we experienced inevitably was due to my grandmother’s absence-not to any awkwardness that we were vacationing at the scene of the crime. The big old house just never seemed quite the same without her.

The summer after my uncle had his arm amputated, however, my father, my cousin, and my now one-armed uncle did have a commemoration of sorts. A short triathlon is held in Franconia every summer, usually on the first Saturday in August. It’s called the Race to the Face, because the route winds its way to a spot at the peak of a mountain not far from the ledge where the Old Man of the Mountain once had resided. And though a fair number of serious triathletes compete, a lot of athletic dilettantes participate as well. After all, the biking portion is only about seven miles long (though, in all fairness, it is uphill and almost half of it follows a deer path in the woods), the swim is a mere three-quarter-mile sprint across Echo Lake, and the final segment is a two-mile run up the ski slopes on Cannon Mountain. These are not intimidating lengths. Moreover, many people participate in teams of three-which is where my father, my cousin, and my uncle fit in.

Years earlier my father had sold his hunting gear, bought a mountain bike with the proceeds, and become a pretty avid cyclist. He was going to handle the first third of the triathlon, the ride from Franconia to Echo Lake. There my cousin would take over, wearing (for a change) a completely suitable Speedo. My uncle would be waiting for her at the other side, where, as soon as she had emerged from the water, he would start his one-armed run up the mountain.

The rest of us-my mother, Aunt Catherine, Patrick, and I-waited for the athletes at the finish line high atop Cannon.

I don’t recall precisely where they placed among the sixty or seventy teams that had signed up that summer, but I know they managed to sneak into the top half. This wasn’t bad for two middle-aged men who had only three arms between them and a young woman who rarely swam in the university pool more than twice a week. They attributed their success either to being directly related to the impressively energetic Nan Seton or, in my uncle’s case, to coming of age on her watch.

Nevertheless, what I remember best about that day isn’t an image of my father leaving in a heat of almost two hundred bicyclists, or my beautiful cousin racing down the beach at Echo Lake and diving gracefully into the water, or my uncle starting his trek up a ski slope with grass so green that the sun made it look almost neon. When I think about that morning I envision instead the moment when my uncle finally reached the summit. He was greeted there by my father and my cousin, who, upon finishing their portions of the race, had taken the tram to the top. The three of them threw themselves together into the sort of ecstatically loopy embrace that had never marked the conclusion of any previous tennis match, golf game, or badminton contest in Seton or McCullough family history, jumping up and down and laughing with an exuberance rarely manifested by any of us. And when they posed for a photograph-the two men surrounding my cousin-you wouldn’t have known that my uncle had lost his arm or that once, a long time ago, he had almost lost his family.

I am enormously grateful to a long list of doctors, lawyers, hunters, animal rights activists, physical therapists, EMTs, and firearms experts. I am particularly indebted to Paul Bonzani; Lauren Bowerman; Armand Compagna; Richard Gaun; Dr. Mark Healy; Reverend Gary Kowalski; Carter Lord; Jonathan Lowy; Kevin McFarland; John Monahan; Dr. Turner Osler; Bob Patterson; and Whitney Taylor. You are exceedingly patient and I thank you all.

Among the small library of books that I read while researching this novel, two were especially helpful: Richard Nelson’s Heart and Blood and Matthew Scully’s Dominion. Both Nelson and Scully are thoughtful, candid, and wise.

Finally, once again I am deeply appreciative of a great many people at Random House, including Marty Asher, Jenny Frost, and Shaye Areheart. Shaye is a great editor-and an even greater friend.

In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to reveal important aspects of the plot of this book-as well as the ending.

If you have not finished Before You Know Kindness,we respectfully suggest that you may want to wait before reviewing this guide.

1. Before You Know Kindness opens with a blunt, clinical description of Spencer’s injuries. Is the preface a purely objective report or does it begin to develop some of the general themes of the novel? What does it convey about the Setons and their way of life?

2. Spencer’s speech and Nan’s descriptions of his behavior offer varying insights into his personality. Does the tone of the writing influence your impression of him? What specific details bring out the differences between Spencer’s self-perceptions and the way others might view him?