Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

“And the corn plants were trampled. Not all of them. But some.”

“But they didn’t eat everything, did they? Not in one visit…”

“No, not everything. But they’ll be back.”

She watched her father wipe his lips with his napkin, the cotton cloth already discolored with grease from past swipes. “Spencer will try to stop them-humanely, of course. But he’ll do something. That garden means an awful lot to him.”

“I know it does, and for the life of me I don’t understand why. He lives six hours away. If he liked gardening so much, he should have had a garden of his own when he lived in Connecticut. He and Catherine should never have moved back into the city if manure and fresh beets-”

“Endive,” her father said. “Endive and kohlrabi… and manure.”

“Whatever. If gardening was so important to him, he should have stayed in Long Ridge. Not bought that apartment on Eighty-fifth Street.”

“He tried, Mother. Remember how he lost that garden to the deer, too?”

“If he couldn’t stop them in Connecticut, how in the world will he stop them here?”

“Maybe he won’t,” her mother said. “But certainly he’ll make the effort. It’s not so much about the garden as it is about the house. The property. This place means an awful lot to him, Nan, you know that.”

“Sara’s right. I know my brother-in-law, and he will launch an absolute crusade to take back the peas.”

“Trust me, it’s too late for this year,” Nan said. “All we can do now is stop posting the land and keep our fingers crossed that the hunters scare the deer away in the autumn.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t give up yet,” her father said. “And you shouldn’t, either. In the meantime, Mother, do you want to play some tennis? I have to get limbered up for Catherine.”

Willow watched her brother try to wrap his hand under the strap of her bathing suit, but he couldn’t quite wedge his fingers between the elastic and her shoulder. Still he struggled, and his small nails were starting to tickle her.

“I’d love to,” Grandmother said. “I had a golf lesson this morning, but all we did was stand around with our putters. Boring.”

“Honey, do you want to join us?” her father asked her mother. “Willow, you wouldn’t mind watching Patrick, would you?”

She thought her parents were taking the news about the garden pretty well, and she felt another surge of that affection she’d experienced when she’d been preparing flower arrangements for their bedroom that morning and when she’d turned around at the pool and seen them approaching.

“Nope,” she said, pulling Patrick away from the strap of her Speedo and kissing him once on his nose. The baby gurgled and sighed. She realized, much to her surprise, how happy she was to see him, too.

Spencer McCullough had been watching the lakes with their impenetrable Native American names-Winnipesaukee, Sunapee, Squam-outside his plane window for almost ten minutes now, and so he knew they’d be on the ground any moment. Even in a fifteen-seat puddle jumper, the Friday afternoon flight from LaGuardia to West Lebanon was barely an hour. He glanced across the aisle at Catherine, saw she was focused on an article in her magazine, and turned back to the window. He thought of the garden. It wasn’t its size that excited him: Anyone with enough time on his hands could plant a third of an acre of carrots or beets or squash. It was the garden’s variety. Granted, he had appeased his mother-in-law and Sara and John-who, because they lived in Vermont, presumed they knew more than he did about growing vegetables in the faux tundra of northern New Hampshire-by planting rows and rows of the basics. But there were also yards of surprises interspersed in the dirt and clay, and he couldn’t wait to see them. White icicle radishes. Kohlrabi. The arugula and the endive that he understood his daughter, his niece, and his mother-in-law already were eating and the blue Hubbard squash that by the fall would look like the pods from which aliens always seemed to spring in the camp horror films of the 1950s.

He could never, of course, have a vegetable garden on West Eighty-fifth Street. They lived on the ninth floor of a building full of co-op apartments.

Even when they had lived in Connecticut in the first years after Charlotte had been born, however-their postpartum foray into suburbia-he couldn’t have had a garden like this. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been the time when he was home or that they hadn’t had the space-though that was more limited in the suburbs than it was in northern New Hampshire. It was the deer. Those beautiful animals with their big dark eyes, their white plumelike tails, and their ridiculous Vulcan-like ears. He had tried three times in the four years they had lived in Long Ridge to have a vegetable garden, and each time the deer had devoured it. Eaten whatever they wanted, despite his attempts to deter them. Eaten the lettuce, despite the tobacco-tea-chewing tobacco in water, really-that he had sprinkled on the grass that bordered the garden. Eaten the flowers on the string beans, despite the garlic and Tabasco concoction he had doused on the plants themselves (a remedy that proved as bad as the ailment, since the smell had made the few plants the deer hadn’t bothered to gobble completely inedible). Eaten the peas and the beet greens despite the old bathwater. The deer had ignored the mothballs he put in his yard (the nuclear option, in his mind, since mothballs contained naphthalene), and the myriad animal urines-bobcat, wolf, his own-that he showered along the perimeter. Alas, nothing could dissuade the deer that wandered contentedly in the night through those suburban backyards from eating whatever they wanted.

But, then, what did he expect? Sometimes he would ask himself if he honestly believed that he could outsmart an animal so perfect in terms of its evolution that its bone structure hadn’t changed in four million years. A mammal that-unlike so many others-didn’t become a mere fossil to study in the Ice Age but actually flourished in the midst of cataclysmic environmental transformation. Spencer understood that deer could eat virtually anything that grows up from the dirt-and, when pressed, had been known to stomp fish in shallow water to eat them-and were capable of living almost anywhere. Deep woods. Cleared farmland. The suburbs. Cities. The whitetail existed in the coldest reaches of northern Alberta, in the scorching heat of New Mexico, along the Pacific coastline of Peru. Its cousins, the blacktail and the mule deer, filled in those western corners of North America where the whitetail was absent-the Nevada desert, the California seaboard-with the result that there were few crevices on the continent where there weren’t deer of one kind or another.

Nevertheless, Spencer had convinced himself that New Hampshire would be different. In all the times that he had been to his mother-in-law’s-the summers when he’d been a college student, weeks at a time ever since-never once had he seen a deer on her property. Two decades ago he’d seen them occasionally from the highway when he was returning home from Echo Lake, but he guessed those sightings were ten miles from Sugar Hill, and he knew from his work that deer tended to live most of their life in a world no bigger than a couple square miles. If there was enough food, some whitetails would spend a whole season in a few hundred acres.

Moreover, he presumed he saw deer off the interstate near Echo Lake because there was no hunting allowed in the state park. And hunting was the key. Neither wolves nor foxes nor drought nor mountains of snow could diminish a region’s deer population for long. Only man could do that. All that hunting in the fall beyond the borders of the state park, Spencer guessed, kept the deer herd small and would prevent the creatures from sidling up to a Sugar Hill garden and eating the spinach. They knew the signs of a real predator when they saw one.