Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

His hobby was a family secret of which only she and Sara and Willow were aware. John Seton owned some kind of Adirondack brand rifle, a scope (and she’d held the little spyglass in her hands before he had attached it to the rifle barrel) that made things hundreds of yards distant look like they were a mere arm’s length away, and camouflage clothing from some company with the frightening name of Predator that was crafted from a material with the equally disturbing moniker of Stealthtex. The fabric was wind and rain resistant, and when John was wearing it in the woods he was, supposedly, invisible if the conditions were right.

Well, not completely invisible. He also wore an orange cap with earflaps for safety, and the color was such an ill-advised shade-and so visible-that it looked at first as if he had wrapped his head in police tape when he modeled it for her.

She and her daughter-in-law both hoped this was a temporary fixation, triggered largely by Sara’s amnio. When Sara and John had learned their little baby was going to be a boy, John had started babbling about how in years to come he and his son might do some real north country male bonding and bag themselves a buck. She’d presumed he was kidding, and Sara-who was on the phone with them when he called with the news-said that she wished that he were. No such luck. By the time hunting season rolled around the second Saturday in November, he had taken his Hunter Education and Safety course and gotten his hunting license for the sixteen-day rifle season.

Nan knew that her vegetarian daughter and son-in-law in Manhattan-oh, God, especially her son-in-law-could never be privy to the reality that John Seton owned a gun and hoped to use it someday to kill a deer. They would be appalled. Spencer would be particularly furious, and there was nothing more unendurable than Spencer McCullough’s self-righteous indignation. At her sixty-fifth birthday party at the Colony Club, she had overheard David Linton, a retired bank economist and the husband of one of her bridge pals, Marisa Linton, admonishing Spencer very good-naturedly about some of FERAL’s stunts, the realities of supply and demand in a free market, and how nowhere in the world was good meat more affordable than in the United States. And so when it was his turn to stand and raise his champagne flute, Spencer had toasted her warmly but then gone on to rebuke everyone who was eating the Colony Club’s beef Wellington-one of the two entrees she had chosen for the party, the other being a pasta primavera specifically for Catherine and Spencer and Charlotte-while insisting that FERAL did nothing ever but point out the obvious, and no one in the room would be eating that beef if they’d seen a cow emerge onto a slaughterhouse kill floor or been forced to witness a steel bolt being blasted into its forehead to stun it before it was butchered. She vaguely recalled him saying something next about the animal’s tongue sticking out from between its teeth in shock and incredulity, but he was (once again) becoming such a spoilsport that by then she was trying hard to tune him out.

Which brought her back to posting. John and Sara wouldn’t care if she chose to stop posting her land. If there was going to be any resistance to the idea, it was going to come from her daughter and her son-in-law. They were both not merely vegetarians, they were animal rights activists-Spencer professionally, Catherine as a reasonably enthusiastic amateur. Spencer, in fact, was something even worse than a vegetarian: He was a vegan, a word that sounded vaguely anatomic in Nan’s mind and therefore caused her a slight, unpleasant shudder whenever she heard it. Spencer’s peculiarity meant that she couldn’t even serve something as comfortably plebian as macaroni and cheese when he was visiting, because one of its two signature ingredients was made with milk and milk came from cows. It was ridiculous, in her opinion, completely ridiculous. Thank God Catherine still allowed milk and yogurt and cheese to be part of her and Charlotte’s diet.

Nevertheless, Spencer was the communications director for FERAL, a lobbying group that championed animal causes, and when he wasn’t jetting to Washington to argue against things that seemed harmless to normal people-state dairy compacts and pet stores that sold tropical birds-he was meeting with magazine editors and appearing on TV shows defending positions that more times than not completely befuddled her. Why in heaven’s name was it better for college students to drink beer than milk? Who really cared if wing tips or a wallet were made of leather: What were people supposed to do, wear plastic dress shoes? Keep their credit cards packed together in their pockets or purses with elastic bands?

And while Nan thought chimpanzees were cute and she understood that they were considerably smarter than, say, squirrels, she found her eyes glazing when Spencer would go on and on about the need to extend legal rights to chimps and gorillas and dolphins.

She knew that the A and the L in FERAL stood for animal liberation, and that FER stood for Federation. The group’s official name was the Federation for Animal Liberation. This meant, in her opinion, that the acronym should more properly be FEDAL, since the first three letters of federation were FED. Or, perhaps, they could use the first five letters of federation and call themselves FEDERAL. She thought that had a nice historical ring to it. But FERAL? It made them sound like they were a bunch of wild animals, and what could possibly be the point of that? Still, she did like the way their letterhead and their magazine and even some of their T-shirts had a portion of some poem by Ovid-though she did wish they’d chosen one that wasn’t quite so judgmental about “feasting on meat.”

Spencer was not a particularly handsome man, even if, as Nan recalled, he had been a rather good-looking college boy. But he carried himself with the confidence of someone who was striking and tall and who knew it. You could see it (as she certainly had) when he was speaking before groups of people in libraries, local YMCAs, and even the larger, more urban Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. Moreover, he was so indefatigably self-assured about his positions on… well, on everything… and so facile with statistics and stories and seemingly relevant anecdotes that it was futile to argue with him. Nevertheless, Nan was often left wondering: Did anyone really care that Pythagoras was a vegetarian? Who, other than Spencer, even knew who the Manicheans were? The only reason the family even had this ridiculous vegetable garden was because it was easier to put the effort into the earth than into trying to talk Spencer out of it: Nan and her granddaughters were now weeding and watering more for his sake than for their own. Here in the country they accommodated his diet-his family’s diet-even if it put desperate strains on Nan’s admittedly limited creativity in the kitchen, they endured his monologues at dinner, and (yes) they gardened.

But then, of course, there was that other Spencer-the gentle and loving and almost farcically good-natured man whose sincere consideration of animals made him such an impassioned and (in small doses) charismatic champion of their rights. How he had loved Catherine when he was courting her here in the country at nineteen and twenty! It was so obvious and genuine and touchingly over the top. Breakfast in bed. Bouquets of lupine and wildflowers. Enduring hours of defeat at her hands on the Contour Club tennis courts. Nan had heard stories from Spencer’s parents of the lengths to which he had gone to rescue raccoons as a child, to shelter birds with broken wings, to nurse ailing dogs and cats and (once) a neighbor’s ugly ferret. Nan needed only to recall Julys past and how Spencer would read to Charlotte and Willow for hours before the children would go to bed to be reminded of her son-in-law’s strengths. He would use voices so rambunctious and theatric that Nan would be left wondering why he hadn’t wound up an actor. Moreover, as busy as he was-he seemed to be traveling all the time-when Willow and her family would visit New York, it was invariably Spencer who would take the girls to a Broadway musical or a children’s ballet. He didn’t always make time for the small things, Nan knew, such as teaching his daughter the names of the trees that grew in Central Park or showing her how to press a fallen leaf between wax paper in the fall, but then her husband, Richard, had rarely done those sorts of things with his children, either.