Ertha Bates continued. “I remember at the time you were keen to have this boy for your own. Very keen. As if you had always expected it would go just that way. And maybe even as though you assumed it would be a good thing, to have this young person in your life. You might have dodged a rude awakening on that score. Unless you’re really brave enough to be wanting a second chance.
“So, tell me, Mr. McCann, do you still feel that same way now? Because I am at my wits’ end. I’ve had it, that’s all I can say. That’s all there is to it. I’ve had it. Each person has just a certain store of patience, and he has snapped mine in half. Just broken clean through it. And I will not live like this any more. This situation is completely outside my ability to cope. I raised five children on what I thought to be normal discipline, but if there’s something this boy responds to, I haven’t stumbled across it yet.
“You still want this boy, Mr. McCann? You’d be doing me a great favor. And you’d be doing him a favor as well. I figure he’d be better off here than as a ward of the state, and that’s his next stop, believe me.
“I was on my way to the police station right now to turn him over. Give up custody and let him be someone else’s problem for a change. And then partway through the drive I thought of you. And first I thought, well, if I’m going to give up custody I have to at least keep that promise I made to you fifteen years ago. To bring him around to meet you. And then a voice in my head said, ‘Ask him if he still feels that same way now.’ Even though I really couldn’t imagine why anyone would. How anyone could be that foolish. But the voice said to ask. So I’m asking. Because I’m sure he’d be better off here. That is, if you still feel that same way now.”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “I still feel that same way now.”
The boy’s eyes came up briefly when he said this, then flicked away again.
“Good. I have his things out in the car.”
“We’ll help you carry them in,” Nathan said. “Won’t we, Nathan?”
Ertha Bates didn’t linger. She did not appear to wish to discuss the issue further. There were no longing looks of regret. There was no sentimental goodbye. If she felt she would miss the boy she had raised as her own for fifteen years, she betrayed none of it.
As soon as they had unloaded the three suitcases and one laundry bag out on to the curb, she climbed back into her ancient brown sedan, accelerated with a faint screech of tires and drove away.
• • •
On the trips into the house with the boy’s belongings, Nathan felt a pang of regret that Flora had not lived to see the day.
She’d teased him unmercifully for feeling it was meant to be.
• • •
“You can sleep in my wife’s old room,” he said to the boy. “What do you go by?”
“What?”
“What do they call you?”
“Oh. Nat.”
“Good,” Nathan said. “That will avoid some confusion. Gradually we’ll take my late wife’s things out to the garage. You can make this room entirely yours.”
In the background, Nathan could hear Maggie barking sharply from the back yard. She could hear and smell that someone new was in the house, and would likely continue to bark until given the opportunity to investigate.
Nat stood with his shoulder on the doorjamb. “You two didn’t even sleep together?”
Nathan dropped a suitcase and stood upright, his back poker-straight. He regarded the boy for a moment; the boy met his gaze unswervingly. Nathan felt the weight of importance of these early tests.
“It’s not something I’d expect you to understand,” he said. “But we loved each other in our way. Maybe it wasn’t always the best way, but it was what we could manage.”
He purposely did not look to Nat’s face for a reaction, because no reaction was welcome. He had said his piece, and it was nobody’s business to question the matter further.
Instead he went around to the back door and let his dog come into the house. It was a luxury he’d allowed himself, and Maggie, often since Flora’s death.
They walked together to Nat’s new room.
Nat looked up, seeming stunned. “Is that the dog?”
Maggie approached the boy with broad swings of her tail. She sniffed his offered hand for a moment, then gave it one good, enthusiastic lick. From the look on Nat’s face, Nathan gathered the boy was not accustomed to warm greetings.
“No, it’s not,” Nathan said, sorry to break the bad news to Nat, and also sorry, for his own sake, that it was not.
“No, Sadie is long gone. This is Maggie.”
“Oh, OK,” Nat said, and brushed the stunned look away.
Just as Nathan was leaving the room, the boy said, “That’s a coincidence. Huh? How we both have the same name.”
Nathan turned and studied the boy’s face briefly. As far as he could see, there was no hint of teasing or sarcasm. At least, none that the boy made evident. Did he really believe it was coincidental? Had no one told him otherwise?
“It’s not a coincidence. You were named after me.”
He watched the boy’s face for some reaction. But apparently Nat knew the basics of assuming a poker face. He appeared to feel nothing, register nothing at all times. Though Nathan was not inclined to believe such an unlikely display. Not from this young man. Not from anyone.
“I was? Why?”
“Because I’m the man who found you in the woods,” Nathan said, not imagining that the situation could possibly need any more explaining than that.
“Oh,” Nat said. Then, just as Nathan turned to leave again, he added, “I don’t think you did me such a big favor, you know.”
Nathan stopped. Turned. More tests, he supposed. More histrionics of the type he didn’t suffer lightly.
“Oh, don’t you?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Your life is not a big favor?”
“How do you know I even want it?”
“Every sane person wants his life.”
“Oh. So you think I’m insane?”
“No. I think you really do want it, and you’re only saying you don’t for effect.”
“What I’m saying,” he said, rising to a bit more anger now, his cheeks flushing slightly, “is that I’d like to know what good my life is to me.”
“The value of your life is your own choosing,” Nathan said.
The boy stood with his chin held high, his back against the closet door. He said nothing for a brief moment, but Nathan could feel the words bounce off him unabsorbed. “Is that even English, what you just said?”
Nathan pulled a deep breath. “Were there any words in the sentence you don’t understand?”
“Um. Let me see. The. Value. Life. Choosing. No, I guess I know them all. It’s just what it’s all supposed to add up to that I don’t understand.”
“But you do recognize it as the English language.”
“Maybe one word at a time.”
“You know it’s English.”
“English is supposed to mean something. That sentence didn’t mean anything.”
“The fact that you don’t grasp the meaning of something doesn’t mean it has none.”
“So what am I supposed to do with a sentence like that? That means nothing to me?”
“Try filing it away for possible later use.”
“All right,” Nat said. “But I’m telling you right now … that one’s going to be in there waiting for a long time.”
• • •
At bedtime, Nathan rapped lightly before letting himself into the boy’s room.
“What?” Nat said as Nathan pulled a chair to his bedside.
“I just came in to say goodnight.”
“Oh.”
Nathan took the photograph out of the pocket of his sweater and laid it on the edge of the boy’s bed. “That was Sadie,” he said. “She was a curly-coated retriever. She was a remarkable animal. I miss her terribly. Maggie is a good dog, too. But that doesn’t spare me from m
issing Sadie.”
Nat picked up the photo, studied it briefly.
Then he said, as if he had never registered the image on the old photograph, “Why do I have to go to bed so early? It’s barely eight o’clock. I can’t go to sleep this early. I’m not a child, you know.”
But he looked like one. Very much so. He was small for nearly fifteen, and looked a bit helpless and lost, smothered in Flora’s old bed sheets and flowered quilt. Nathan wondered if the boy could acknowledge his own terror. Even to himself.
“Because in the morning I’m going to wake you up very early and we’re going to go hunting.”
“Hunting?”
“Yes. Duck-hunting. With Maggie.”
“I don’t hunt.”
“Well, I’m suggesting you give it a try.”
“What time would I have to get up?”
“About four thirty.”
“No way. Forget it.”
“I’ll be in to wake you. I’d like you to try it with me this one time.”
A medium-length, sulky silence. Then the boy’s face changed. Only slightly. But perceptibly.
“Do you always go to that same place?”
He didn’t have to elaborate. He didn’t have to specify what same place. They both knew what he meant.
“Yes.”
“Could you show me the exact spot?”
“Yes.”
“OK. I’ll go with you, then. This one time.”
Nathan picked up his photograph. Patted Nat on the knee through the covers. Reached for the light switch on his way out of the room.
Nat asked, as though not anxious to see him leave, “Aren’t you even going to ask me what I did to get thrown out of the house?”
“No. I thought it best to start fresh with each other. You’ll have a birthday coming up next week. We’ll celebrate.”
“Why do you remember my birthday after all this time?”
“How can I not remember your birthday? I found you in the woods on October second, 1960. How could I forget a date like that? You were born the day before, October first. You’ll be fifteen.”
“How am I supposed to live here? I don’t even know you.” It seemed out of context with what Nathan had just told him, which Nathan supposed was why the boy said it. “I don’t even know this place. This is all completely strange to me. How am I even supposed to live here?”
Nathan sighed. “A few minutes at a time, I suppose, at first. I won’t pretend it’s not a problem for you.”
“And you?” the boy asked, even more agitated. “This is not a problem for you?”
“Not at all,” Nathan said. “I’m happy to have you here with me.”
He turned out the light on his way out of the room.
24 September 1975
He is Willing to Die to Make It Happen
“I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to give me a gun,” the boy said, trying to pull the huge flowered quilt back over his head. But Nathan had a good, tight hold of it. “You certainly don’t know me very well. I don’t want to go duck-hunting. It’s four o’clock in the goddamn morning. I want to go back to sleep.”
“There will be no swearing in this house,” Nathan said. “And it’s actually four forty-five. And I’m only asking that you try it with me this one time. If you don’t like it I won’t ask you to go again.”
“I shouldn’t be forced to do things against my will.”
“You agreed last night that you would do this. I’m only asking you to remain true to your word.”
“Well, I don’t remember why I said I’d do it.”
“Because you wanted me to show you the exact spot.”
“Oh.”
Nat sat up. Swung his legs over the side of the bed. Sat rubbing his eyes. Wearing only a short-sleeved tee shirt and faded boxers. Looking somewhat resigned, but a full measure short of cooperative.
Maggie, who had been spinning in circles around Nathan’s knees, suddenly reared up on to her hind legs and kissed Nat on the nose. As if to say, why on earth would you want to stall at a time like this?
“What’s she all wound up about?” the boy asked Nathan.
“She loves to go hunting.”
“Oh,” Nat said. “Well. That makes one of us.”
Nat seemed quite content to walk away leaving the bed an unkempt mess. But Nathan ran through it with him, and they worked on it together. Nathan taught him to make hospital corners, he working on one side and Nat working on the other.
Nathan made a point to ignore the rolling of Nat’s eyes.
Then Nathan attempted to bounce a quarter off the bed, with less than remarkable success.
• • •
The boy was sulky and quiet on the drive to the lake, but he showed something of himself by reaching back to scratch Maggie’s head. At least, Nathan felt he was showing something from the inside of his recalcitrant bad-boy shell.
Maybe Nat didn’t realize that he was allowing, and displaying, a certain vulnerability by openly bonding with Nathan’s dog.
Nathan made a mental notation: Ertha Bates had said if there was something this boy responded to she had not stumbled across it. But Nathan had discovered a chink in his armor already. Nat responded to dogs. He wondered if the Bates home had ever included pets. He didn’t suppose it had.
He looked briefly over at Nat, who met his eyes defensively.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Nat took his hand back from Maggie’s head, sat facing forward, and sulked with his hands in his lap all the way to the lake.
Maggie leaned into the front seat, as far as she could get without breaking the rules, and even went so far as to let out a few quiet, thin whimpers in Nat’s direction. But Nat stared out the window as if he hadn’t heard.
• • •
“Check to see that the safety is on,” Nathan said as they unloaded the car in the dark. “And then carry the weapon so it points at nothing. Up across your shoulder, or in the crook of your arm pointing forward and toward the ground.”
“But the safety is on.”
“With guns it’s best to be double-safe.”
They began the hike to the lake, side by side, Maggie bounding ahead.
Nathan charted a path for them by flashlight.
The sky had just begun to lighten. In five or ten minutes they would be able to see their own steps, unaided, in the fallen leaves. It was the perfect time to go hunting. By the time they reached the lake the flashlight could be stowed away, and they could set up behind the blind using only available light. But it would not yet be dawn.
It was the time of morning that always made Nathan grateful for his own life.
“I wish you wouldn’t make me ask,” the boy said after a short walk. “I wish you would just tell me, and not put me through having to ask.”
“When we get there,” Nathan said, “I’ll show you the place.”
About a tenth of a mile later, Nathan said, pointing, “Right over there. Under that tree.”
The boy walked over and stood looking down at a fresh blanket of the new season’s leaves in the near-dark.
Nathan and Maggie waited, respectfully, until he was done. Nathan even resisted the temptation to feel impatient as the sky lightened. The experience was like that of watching a mourner at a funeral approach the open casket in dark silence.
It was not a moment one could rush.
Several minutes later, Nat turned and walked back to Nathan and the dog. Maggie jumped up and hit Nat in the chest with her paws. It was strictly outside of the rules and she knew it, but just in that moment she had been unable to contain her own exuberance. Nat said nothing. Nathan chose to let it go by.
Nathan expected the boy to renege on his hunting commitment. Now that he had gotten what he wanted. Nathan expected him to flip his middle finger and head back to the car.
Instead he followed Nathan and Maggie toward the lake, head slightly drooping. As if he were suddenly too tired to argue the ma
tter further.
• • •
The lesson in hunting did not go well. In fact in time it broke down completely, with Nat leaping up in the air and waving his arms to purposely scare the ducks away.
“Fly away,” he shouted. “Fly away, you idiots, or you’re going to get shot.”
They did fly away, the reflection of their collective wings beating across the water.
Then he sat down behind the blind and waited to see what Nathan would do.
“The acting-out you’ve been used to doing,” Nathan said, “will not be acceptable with me. While you’re with me you will behave like a civilized person.”
“Great. You want me to shoot things. Very civilized.”
“Do you eat fowl?” Nathan asked.
“Do I eat what?”
“Are you a vegetarian?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Then, yes. It’s civilized. What a man eats, he should be willing to kill. It’s not absolutely necessary that he do so, but he should at least be willing to face the reality of it. To eat a chicken only if it comes from the market is the height of cowardice and denial. Someone still had to kill it.”
Nat rose and walked a few feet away. Kicked at the grass for a moment.
When Nathan looked up again, he found himself looking down the barrel of the boy’s gun.
The gun was, of course, filled with light birdshot. And the boy was an inexperienced shooter. But still, it’s hard to miss a substantial target with a shotgun. Plus the kick would raise the muzzle some, and a pellet through the eye could certainly prove fatal. So it was conceivable, though unlikely, that Nathan could be killed.
He weighed and juggled these factors as the boy spoke his piece.
“You can’t civilize me,” Nat said. “You can’t make me stop swearing. Or learn to hunt. Or act like a gentleman, or be double-safe. I’ll shoot you down before I let you make me into something I’m not.”
“I want you to be what you are,” Nathan said, “only civilized. And the only way you can stop me is to shoot me dead, so if you’re set on stopping me, then I suppose you’d best go ahead with that now.”
The boy’s hands trembled on the shotgun for another moment before he let the muzzle drift slightly downward.
When I Found You Page 9