Chris Bohjalian: Before You Know Kindness

“What’s in the paper?” he asked.

“Dickie Ames was busted last night. It was another DUI-”

“Oh, Jesus, he didn’t hurt anyone, did he?”

“No. But he took out a fire hydrant. And because it was the zillionth time-”

“It was not the zillionth time,” John corrected her. Sally was an excellent secretary, but she was twenty-three and her tendency to speak with adolescent hyperbole sometimes annoyed him. “It was, I believe, the third.”

“Well, he blew a mighty impressive point-one. And, oh by the way, he was driving with a suspended license: He wasn’t due to get it back until the week after next.”

John wasn’t defending Dickie Ames, but he needed the man to be a credible witness in a misdemeanor assault in a bar. Ames was a drinking and deer-hunting pal of Andre Nadeau and was supposed to explain to the judge at a bail review on Monday that Nadeau was acting in self-defense when he’d broken a heavy glass beer mug against the side of Cameron Gerrity’s face in a fight-which, John believed, was exactly the truth. It was self-defense. Gerrity may have been the one to wind up with the thirty-four stitches in his cheek and a nose that would look forever like a boxer’s, but John was quite confident that Nadeau had been provoked. Ames saw it all and he said so. Besides, there were extenuating circumstances John hoped the judge would consider. Nadeau was a single dad. John had seen him with his boys, and although Nadeau may have had a problem with drinking (yes, like his pal, Dickie Ames) he certainly didn’t have one with aggression. He had no history of pummeling people in bars. He had no history of pummeling people anywhere.

If given the chance, Dickie Ames was also going to tell the judge what a fine father Nadeau was to those two boys and that whenever he had been together with the family at deer camp, the man was loving, gentle, and preternaturally responsible-especially when it came to teaching a couple of junior high school kids not to kill themselves with the family arsenal the grown men used to kill deer and moose and bears and any other mammals they happened to stumble across in the woods. John liked Nadeau-and not simply in the protective, fatherly way he liked all the pathetic drinkers and substance abusers and petty thieves who wound up at the office of the public defender. He liked Nadeau because the guy was raising his boys pretty much on his own since his wife had left him. The man had offered to take him deer hunting at his family’s camp this November-help him track and kill a 250-pounder, perhaps-and John had readily agreed. Nadeau liked him, too, and respected what he did as a lawyer: He wouldn’t mind that John was a complete moron in the woods and was still learning to hold a rifle and hunt. Nadeau had even told him about a friend of his in Essex Junction, a gunsmith, who would be able to remove the bullet-cartridge, to be precise-that seemed to be stuck in the chamber of John’s rifle. It had been there since last November, since the last day of John’s first hunting season. Periodically he’d tried to extract it since then, retrieving the gun from the locked cabinet in the guest bedroom and cycling the bolt over and over, but the bullet had never popped out. His older friend, the justice Howard Mansfield, had suggested he simply shove a ramrod down the barrel and force the live round from the chamber, but there was no way in the world John was going to try that little maneuver. That was exactly how newcomers to the sport-especially newcomer flatlanders-blew off their fingers or hands. He’d considered simply driving to the edge of the forest and discharging the weapon into the sky, but he feared that perhaps whatever was causing the bullet to lodge in the chamber would prevent it from leaving the barrel as well. The thing just might explode in his face. He understood he’d have to deal with the bullet before hunting season, but since he only used the rifle during those two weeks in November he hadn’t seriously focused on the problem until Nadeau suggested his buddy, the gunsmith.

He sighed now so loudly at the reality that Dickie Ames had spent the night behind bars that Patrick turned his little boy eyes on his father’s face. At least, John told himself, he wasn’t Dickie Ames’s lawyer, and he took some comfort in this.

“Anything else I should know about?” he asked Sally. “Sara and I were about to leave.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, thank you.”

“I guess you didn’t need to know about Dickie Ames. I guess it could have waited.”

“No, you were right to call. I appreciate it.”

“Tell you what: For the rest of today I’ll only call you if I have good news.”

“You have the number at my mother’s house, right? The cell phone never works over there.”

“I do.”

He thanked her once again, pulled his nose from between Patrick’s viselike fingers, and then continued on his way to the bathroom on the first floor of the house. After he had changed his son’s diaper, he decided, he would toss the gun bag with his Adirondack rifle into the trunk of the car. On Monday they would be driving through Essex Junction on their way home from his mother’s, and he could drop the weapon off with that gunsmith.

JOHN’S WIFE, SARA, hadn’t spoken to Catherine and Spencer since Memorial Day Weekend, when they had all met at the Seton summer home to plant the vegetable garden, the cutting garden, and the beds and beds of berries: strawberries in a western field, blueberries along the house’s southern foundation, and raspberries to the east. John and his sister, Catherine, seemed to speak weekly, however, and the two siblings spoke at least that often with their mother.

At first Sara had taken it as a compliment that she was allowed to call the family matriarch Nan while Spencer, Catherine’s husband, had to call her Mrs. Seton. It was almost comic: Spencer had known the woman since he was eighteen, and still he was required to address her with Victorian courtesy and old-money solemnity. He and her husband each received Valentine’s cards from Nan in February, and even after all these years the one to Spencer was signed “Sincerely, Mrs. Seton.” It was only after she and John had been married for a couple of years that it dawned on Sara why she might be allowed to refer to her mother-in-law as Nan and Spencer was not: Perhaps it made Nan feel younger-as if the two of them were girlfriends-if they called each other by their first names.

As she and John and their baby drove now to New Hampshire, Sara decided that although she wasn’t dreading the weekend before her, she wasn’t looking forward to it, either. She was beginning to feel that her own house was getting back into some kind of order for the first time since before Patrick was born and she would have enjoyed a weekend at home. Moreover, the child was cutting a tooth-though he was sleeping right now in his infant car seat in the back-and poor John was exhausted. Could barely keep his eyes open at the dinner table last night and had spent most of the morning lying on the floor with the baby.

She was also troubled by the sheer amount she had felt compelled to pack. They’d be in New Hampshire a whopping sixty-eight to seventy hours, but between the excessive athleticism her mother-in-law cheerfully inflicted on the family (she had to remember tennis rackets and golf clubs and bathing suits, though she wanted to play neither golf nor tennis nor swim in that frigid alpine slush that Nan called a lake or that club pool that reeked of chlorine) and the accrual of health and beauty aids-sunscreens and powders and shampoos and lotions and teething gel and ointment and hair glitter and, alas, even lipstick for Willow because Nan had them all going to the club on Saturday night for a soiree of some sort and Willow had said on the phone that Charlotte would be wearing lipstick and so she wanted to wear some now, too-it felt to her as if she were packing for a monthlong expedition into a lost world without drugstores and shopping malls.