inquire about my son? Has he come to tell me he’s sorry? But these men have not just come from hunting. They are only wearing fashionable camo-patterned pants that are more the weight of jeans than the heavy cloth of real hunting pants that are double-lined and meant to walk through sharp briar and meddlesome branches of pine. The men are wearing sneakers and short sleeves and in the brief moment they walk by me I can smell cigarette smoke on them. They have come from someplace inside and not from the woods. The man who shot my son is not here. The man who shot my son is probably home by now, removing his boots, the dirt from my land falling from the soles to his mudroom floor, his wife inquiring about his luck with game bird. The man who shot my son probably just up the road from where I live and too afraid to come to my door and tell me what he’s done.
CALL: An owner needs a health certificate for his horse to travel to North Carolina. I do not respond to the call.
CALL: An owner’s horse has a spot of fungus on the pastern. I do not respond to the call.
CALL: An owner’s horse has a navicular cyst. I do not respond to the call.
CALL: Jen wants to know where we are. Why is there blood on the table? she says in the same breath and in the background I can hear her pacing in our kitchen, walking across the loose floorboard that squeaks by the kitchen sink. It is a floorboard that is turning black from water sliding off the counter when dishes are washed, and pooling on the floor.
ACTION: There wasn’t much blood, I tell her. The hunter was a bad shot, he only hit Sam’s shoulder. Thank God, Jen says. I can hear her sigh over the phone and I almost feel the warm breath of it coming through, or is that just my own breath coming back to me that I breathed into the phone? She is on her way, of course, even after I have told her I would stay with him. Even after I told her he would be fine. I go down to the lower level. It is more like a mall. There are shops where I can hear the coffee machines at work, spraying lattes into cups. There are shops that sell baby clothes and there are shops sporting holiday decorations early, white ceramic polar bears hanging by ribbons on the branches of fake trees. The polar bears look smooth and polished, as if they had been tumbled by waves for years at an ocean’s pebbly shore. I have an urge to buy something for Sam. I could buy him a Rapidograph. There is one in a stationery store’s window. I’d like to see the fine lines he could draw with it. I can see him drawing a submarine, the periscope bending like a goose’s neck, observing all there is to see across the sketchbook page.
WHO I SEE IN THE LOWER LEVEL: My own doctor wearing a breast cancer pin buying a Jamba Juice.
WHO DOESN’T SEE ME: My own doctor buying a Jamba Juice.
RESULT: Jen has come and she is with me by his bed now and she is yelling at me. She is telling me she will never forgive me for having done this to our son, our only son. How could you? She’s holding my son’s hand while she is yelling and I think maybe she is like Arthur the farmhand and all she has to do is put her hand on my son and he will talk through her and my son is yelling at me now. How could you? she yells. I am sorry I said that, she then says and she goes to me so that I can hold her. I am so sorry, I say. I can smell the scent of our Newfoundlands in her hair, and I think how before she saw the blood on the table she must have greeted the dogs and bent down low and hugged Bruce or Nelly, and her hair must have fallen across the dogs’ fur. I tell her what the doctor said, that sometimes, not always, the coma can be not such a bad thing. I tell her about the Glasgow scale, how high he’s scoring on it and how good that is. Oh, really? she says. She shakes her head. She looks down at our son. She puts her hand on his forehead, as if he were sick with the flu and she was feeling for a fever. She bends closer to him, breathing in different places on his face. It wasn’t enough to get shot? she says, and it’s to our son she is talking.
WHAT I DON’T TELL HER: That I will find a way to get the hunter who shot our son.
WHAT THE DOCTOR SAYS AFTER WE HAVE STAYED THERE TWO NIGHTS: Go home and sleep. Think of your son as sleeping, too. Go home to your other children. Explain to them what has happened. It’s the best you can do.
WHAT SARAH SAYS: Sam likes to sleep. I bet he’s happy.
WHAT THE SHERIFF WHO IS ON THE CASE SAYS AFTER HE HAS COME BACK FROM SEARCHING OUR WOODS: Traces of the man are not to be found.
WHAT MY WIFE DOES: Sits up in bed all night with the light on, not even reading.
WHAT I DO: Read the paper.
WHAT THE WIFE ASKS: How can you read the paper?
WHAT I SAY: I can’t do anything else. You could so, she says. You’re right, I could go out, I say. I get my clothes on and grab a flashlight. I tell her I want to find my rifle that I dropped beneath my store- bought tree stand. What I really want to do is find traces of the man who shot my son that the sheriff, when he came back from his investigation in our woods, said were not to be found. I want to run through the night hitting every branch as I go, kicking up every leaf, punching my fist into the stone-hard bark of all the fifty-foot pines that bore witness, that all saw the man who shot my son, but that cannot speak to tell me his name.
WHAT THE NIGHT SAYS: Go home. There are no clues here, no flattened leaves holding the shape of a boot of a hunter. No evidence, even, of the plate-sized footprints of the half-ton moose that has traveled here before. Your rifle will still be on the ground in the morning.
WHAT THE COYOTES SAY: You have crossed over to where we live and now our howls could be the howls of your own heart you are hearing, or just us, our coats slightly ruffed from the November chill.
WHAT I DO WITH THE FLASHLIGHT: Point it on my son’s tree stand, point it on the plastic milk crate, point it at the ground where I found him, point it on the ground where the hunter probably stood who shot him but there is nothing to see, no telltale impression of a hunter’s boot in the fallen leaves. I turn and walk to my own tree stand and find my rifle that I only notice because the tip of the barrel is not completely covered in leaves, and it is as if in the time since my son had been shot the leaves were trying to cover up some kind of disgrace, as if it were my rifle that was responsible for the harm done to my son, and the leaves like so many hands of creatures or fairies that live on our land would make the earth swallow it down. I pick up my rifle and head home, the howls of the coyotes flanking either side of me as if they were providing some kind of corridor leading me straight to my home and back to my bed.
CALL: In the morning, a bread machine that needs the belt reattached.
ACTION: Told the wife I could do it. Set bread machine on kitchen table. Unscrewed all the screws in the bread machine. (Number of screws: 62.)
RESULT: Reattached the belt. Screwed back in 60 screws. Two disappeared.
THOUGHTS WHILE WALKING WITH BREAD MACHINE FROM TABLE TO COUNTER TO PLUG IN BREAD MACHINE: It’s winter. Snow is falling outside the window. We are living in a snow globe. If there had been snow on the ground at the time my son was shot, the footprints of the hunter who shot him would still be in the snow, but there was no snow and the ground did not hold a man’s boot print.
WHAT THE GIRLS SAID WHEN THEY CAME HOME: What’s that burning smell?
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Look at the floor! Take off your boots!
WHAT SMELLED LIKE SOMETHING BURNING WHEN IT SHOULD HAVE SMELLED LIKE BREAD BAKING: The bread machine, whose paddles were not turning because the rubber belt had once again slipped.
WHAT THE RADIO SAID: Beep-de-dah-beep-de-dah-beep-beep-beep.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID TO THE GIRLS: I am getting a transmission.
WHAT I THOUGHT: My wife can save us all. She can save me. She can save our son. She can take us up in her spacecraft. Our son will awaken in the spacecraft and my wife will rub a window clear for him to see down below to our fields covered in frost. She will point out how places in the field hit with morning sun have already melted, and the dead grass showing through is as tawny as the hides of lions on African land.
Part Two
