For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

by David Adams Richards

  “He’s been after me for years,” he said.

  “Who?” Alvin said.

  “Petrie – I done nothin to him.”

  “I know, I know,” Alvin said, but he smiled slightly.

  It was the smile of someone who is happy that misfortune has happened to someone else. In fact, Jerry had suspected Alvin of informing Petrie on him more than once.

  “Lucy,” Jerry said, just as Lucy was going out the door. Lucy turned to him. Her hat was pulled down over her eyes, her hair was tossed up under it. She had three studs in each ear. “Tell Nevin not to bother me no more,” he said simply. “No more.” And this immediately erased Alvin’s annoying smile.

  Jerry went out to his truck, as the first snow fell against the flat grey windows on the street. A week passed before anyone saw him again.

  5

  By June the air was still and great fields of hay lay hot in the sun near the stream that smelled of small fish and flat rocks and the bittersweet longing scent of shale gravel under the bridge.

  Andrew did not know how close he was to the centre of the conflagration until his mother’s boyfriend – that is, the man who had taken him to the camp last September – told him.

  “Oh, he lived right over there,” the man said.

  “He did?”

  “Right across the river in that white house.”

  There was nothing about the house one way or the other that looked unusual or spectacular. There were some flat boards out back lying in the small triangle between the shed and the back door. There was a back porch, where Bines supposedly unwrapped his eyes at 3:00 on the morning he came from the hospital.

  “And that’s where Rils came in to shoot him,” the boy said excitedly.

  “No – that wasn’t here – that was at his wife’s house.”

  The heat made the air soundless and sweet and the branches were filled with new leaves. The boy’s mother had just bought him a fishing rod, so the man could take him out fishing, and he felt sorry for them both – felt sympathy for his mother for buying him this rod and sorry too for the man.

  Andrew’s uncle had come with them today. And the two men began to discuss Bines.

  The boy looked over at the house. Its back window was closed. Some shrubs sat in the warm air, and under the blue sky they could see a bird-feeder on a stick.

  “How long was Mr. Rils in town?” the boy asked, trying to bait a hook, and sound grown up, and watching as the worm dangled into the water and then was swept into the eddies a few feet away.

  “Oh, a week or two.”

  “Last December.”

  “And Vera found out and became angry with Bines.”

  “No, Vera never knew much about what was going on,” the uncle maintained.

  The whole idea the two men spoke about was that Bines had somehow reached toward another world, Vera’s world, and had for a moment tried to divorce himself from the world he was in. Now one of the men countered that that too was a falsehood. And Vera knew this.

  And they went over point by point what Jerry gave and what he would want for it. If he gave kindness he would want devotion.

  The boy had not seen Bines much at all.

  Last fall Bines had come into the camp again to help them retrieve a moose. There was sleet in the air and the trees were dark. The men had searched for the moose all afternoon and then one of them had gone to get Jerry to help. He arrived at about 10:00 that night.

  “Who shot it?” Bines had said.

  “I did,” the boy’s uncle said.

  “How many?”

  “How many what?”

  “How many times did you hit it?”

  “Only once.”

  “What were you using?”

  “A .308.”

  “Well, that would bring it down – bring it down,” Jerry said. “Anyway,” he said, “we’ll go find the calf – because the calf won’t leave it.”

  The men hadn’t thought about the calf, and when they got into the trucks for the long ride back to the chopdown everyone was silent.

  Jerry took a light from his truck and went into the woods and walked for about fifteen minutes about the perimeter.

  “It’s over here,” he said, and then he told the boy’s uncle to bring him the gun.

  Now, as the boy thought back to that night, and how it had stormed later on, he thought about how the talk centred on Jerry’s wife, Loretta Bines.

  “He brought her down a long way,” someone said, as the boy lay in his bunk. “What a kind, sweet little girl she was –”

  “His first wife – no one hears of her anymore – he took them both down.”

  And again the boy felt uneasy lying there in his bunk safe and warm, and he felt that Jerry Bines was outside of life.

  When he asked about this now the man told him that no one was outside of life.

  “Some people just have more of a chance than others, and some just have to take the chances that they have. I know a lot of people who were more unfortunate than Jerry Bines, who turned out much better –”

  The day was warm and filled with new life, and it was only June, which meant he had the whole summer to go.

  6

  When Bines went to Vera’s house he often stared at the little girl with her curly hair as if he was questioning something. He would smile at Hadley, take a quarter out of his pocket, and flip it along the back of his hand, controlling it magically along the top of his knuckles. Then he would pretend to hide it behind his head and find it in her ear.

  This act of the quarter along his knuckle brought laughter into the house.

  What he was questioning he wasn’t sure about. But it had something to do with Hadley’s empty world. This is what he came to think of as he did these tricks for her, and made her and Vera laugh. It didn’t matter usually what type of world other people had. But he thought Vera was a very unhappy person, and that this showed in the little girl’s sudden tantrums, and most of all in the drawings she brought from school. It was a world that had nothing because Vera was too conscientious to be a consumer. What people took for granted in their homes, Vera herself agonized over buying. So there was no cable TV, no VCR, and in the end no happiness either. And all of this was considered diligent, and practical.

  In the kind of world Vera had constructed – the kind of statistical world – there were concepts Bines thought were false.

  He had no notion why these things bothered him, but the air was cool and winter was coming, and Vera’s questions were now more and more personal.

  She asked questions that should not be asked. And he did not know why he had agreed to all of this. (He had agreed perhaps because he thought he would become famous.)

  “How often did your father beat you? Can this be attributable to your fear of men – I mean did it engender a sense of powerlessness? And did you beat your boy?”

  He did not know how to answer this and smiled.

  “I assume you know your problem is you fear men – this is the constant in male violence.”

  But Bines said nothing. He shrugged and looked at her a second, so that she looked away quickly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  And she actually did seem to be sorry. He smiled.

  “It don’t matter – don’t matter,” he said. He scratched his ear. “Don’t know – don’t know – the old lad hit me when he was drunk –”

  All of these questions bothered him, and yet still he cared for her.

  “Nevin hits children. I know he hit Hadley once.” She whispered this.

  “I don’t want to know,” he said. And he stood up. “Don’t want to know.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  He felt strangely disheartened that she would say this about his son – as if nothing he said seemed to get through to her, and he resolved to introduce his son to them at the earliest opportunity.

  “That’ll straighten things out,” he thought as he left the house.

  By now he knew very well that she
was using him. He did not know why. But he was too smart not to know. Perhaps to get back at Nevin – perhaps to prove to her friends how wild she was – or how bored she was – perhaps to become famous herself.

  Whatever it was she was using him.

  He moved the quarter along his hand, and flipped it with his thumb, unseen, into the air.

  The man told this story:

  Jerry had never known truth, but he had conceived it himself like some great men conceive of truth and chisel it into the world. And it was his and no one else’s.

  He was like some great soul cast out and trying to find shelter in the storm.

  His mother used to sing to him. He had never admitted he was afraid. He remembered those songs when he was a little boy and went to church wearing the suit his mother had bought him, and his father was at the picnic. His father had a plate in his head and would want to fight. And the Matheson boys would always try to get him home.

  His father would stand with his shirt out weaving back and forth, his right fist cocked a little, back against the wall, and the dry earth, the smell of hay, tumbling with the crickets and smell of summer and all the world jostling in trumpets of song – a mentally unfit melancholy man along a road with a little boy by the hand.

  Then you know truth.

  You don’t know it before then. (This is what he could not tell Vera, of course.) You don’t know it before then.

  And the Matheson boys go home, you see, thinking his father would be all right, now that the picnic is over and the thumb wedge of darkness is over the trees, and it is going to rain.

  Down by the brook with tall delicate sweet grass along the borders, the flies flick out at the last of an August evening.

  A cow bellows somewhere off aways. I love you all I love you all.

  And the small sifting sand of passing cars blown up as the man walks home in his squalid suit jacket, with a small boy by the hand.

  But the men he was going to fight, who had all tormented him, are there on the road. The men, one of whom was married three days before and is on his honeymoon, a man named Gary Percy Rils, is drinking wine with the boys behind the barn near where your father was pitching horseshoes in the dust.

  At first it is not an argument and you are still sitting there watching your dad, who at one time was a fine fellow – a long time ago. But then it is arguing. It is always arguing and arguing. And you watch carefully – the man who is just married is wanting to fight – you know him from before.

  And your father is frightened. You see that. And the Matheson boys intervene. No one pretends he is frightened. None pretend he is. But he is all alone, and has his little boy.

  And your father smiles at you as if it is a joke and everyone is friends and whips his mouth with his hand and takes a bolt of dark whisky.

  You don’t know when they are there exactly – it is August and you are going home with your father and it is starting to rain.

  I love you all I love you all.

  And then the car plays with you on the road.

  And you want to help.

  Your father picks up a rock and you stand behind him and his leg is shaking. And you never forget how he tries to protect you, this hobbled, mentally unbalanced, melancholy man.

  “Grrr,” he says, with the rock in his hand, and the headlights flicking on and off, the grill mashed with flies, the wilted carnation from the wedding sitting on the dash.

  “I have my little boy,” your father pleads. “I have my little boy – Jerry – is just a little boy.”

  In the dark, by the ditch, with the crooked brook, going home.

  I love you all I love you all.

  7

  Ralphie now felt himself lucky – a privileged part of the town. At first he did not admit that he felt this. But after a while it became evident that he did feel this way, and that he could no longer hide this feeling from himself.

  It was good to know Jerry Bines because Jerry Bines was either liked or feared. And it was evident that people now looked upon Ralphie this way also. That is, that if Jerry Bines liked him then no one would bother him.

  It was strange, because all of his life Ralphie had reacted with aversion to this kind of manipulation. But now, within the sanctuary of it, it all seemed different. It seemed possible that the things Jerry did were misconstrued, were even wonderful – (the story about him escaping from prison one time now seemed a wonderful story). And Ralphie also knew that within the government, within academic circles, the same kind of manipulation happened. But complementing this was another bothersome feeling that perhaps no one, not even Adele, knew. At first it wasn’t noticeable but lately it had become prevalent.

  Last week Constable Petrie had come to tell him and Vera that Gary Percy Rils had escaped from prison. Ralphie had not thought of him in years, even though Gary had made death threats personally toward him.

  And Ralphie’s feeling now was – in the most secret part of his being – that he did not want this man in his life and hoped Jerry would help him – even if Jerry had to go to prison or die. It would make him and Vera safe from someone who had plagued their family for twenty-odd years. He tried not to let on he felt this, just as a man tries to let on he does not feel pleasure at an accident on the road.

  But how could he ask for help? He worried about this constantly. Of course Constable Petrie told him that Gary Percy Rils would never get here to bother him. But still and all there was this edge on things, and Ralphie would think, “If only my father had not been the judge who heard the case.”

  The case was in 1960. Gary Percy Rils had beat up a young man and left him for dead. The man had three small children. He was an average man who had opened up a small store in Millerton. A good, kind-hearted man. The fight had started over cigarettes.

  After he was beaten up he suffered from a punctured kidney, a damaged hand, and was blind in one eye. He was tormented by painful fluid and was frightened, and yelled at the children if they made noise.

  He refused to stay in the store unless his wife was there, and could no longer play the pipe organ in the church. Gary Percy was given three years in prison.

  “So it is me who is going to suffer,” Ralphie thought after Petrie told him about Rils, and he disliked himself for thinking this, yet he also suddenly disliked the idea that the man had played the pipe organ.

  “Everyone must suffer – one for the other,” came the answer.

  And this idea that everyone must suffer one for the other – which had been extracted from Ralphie’s thoughts on calculus more than from his study of St. Paul – made no difference once you yourself began to suffer. Once you yourself began to suffer you wanted the suffering to stop, and you would allow someone else to take it and bear it for you. (That this was the parable of Christ made no serious imprint on Ralphie, who disliked religion.)

  He wanted to ask Jerry for help in this matter. But how do you do this? Straightforwardly or stumbling? And what were you doing if you did ask for help?

  Ralphie had a map in his office upstairs. Besides doing tests on water samples taken from the river for his independent study on effluents from the mill, and a more serious study on groundwater that he was engaged in, he was also engaged in a kind of detective work.

  He was plotting Gary Percy Rils’ imaginary course back home, from various police reports, and wondering if he would ever make his way, and then the feeling came over him that he was quite willing to have someone else suffer instead of himself.

  To Jerry it would be nothing. And he had heard rumours that Jerry didn’t like Rils anyway. (Ralphie in his innocence never bothered to wonder why this might be.) But this feeling, this other feeling that he would be willing to have someone else suffer instead of himself, plagued him.

  One night he got up late and went into his office. The naked tree branches were tapping the window. He was standing in bare feet and long underwear looking at the map. There was a tiny bit of snow on the ground and everyone was sleeping. He believed Rils to be
somewhere in Quebec – it was only an intuition, a feeling.

  “No, I can’t ask Jerry – I’m his friend,” Ralphie thought. “I’m his friend.”

  And at that moment a feeling of peace descended upon him.

  The peace lingered a long time in the cool night air. And yet he shivered as he went back to bed.

  He only knew that if something terrible happened to his life, it would be because he had been born. In this he was only the same as everyone else, like the poor man who played the organ at the church.

  On November 3, Ralphie promised Bines he’d go to see him.

  All day he was worried about it. He didn’t know why Jerry would want him to go, though he pretended to himself that this was not worrying him.

  There was a fresh load of wood piled at the back of Bines’ house, and when he got out of the car there was the smell of the silt of deep fall in the air. The river gurgled down below and turned away at the wide bend towards dark heavy trees.

  He went to the door but suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “’Lo,” Bines said. He was wearing his toque and his army parka, with its attached fur hood sitting down on his shoulders. The toque made his head look small. His eyes seemed mildly annoyed. “Come on way in,” he said.

  And he swung the door open to let Ralphie pass.

  “Got someone for ya to meet – ta meet here,” he said. “Come here,” he said.

  Ralphie looked at the kitchen door that was only half open – it didn’t open any wider – and a young boy of about three or four squeezed through it.

  His hair was blond and his face was pale. He had a small mole on his neck. He was clutching a small wheel in his hand.

  “This is William – William – this is Mr. Pillar – he’s a friend of mine.”

  And William came over with his hand out to shake Ralphie’s hand. It was as if, and Ralphie was certain of this, Jerry had rehearsed this with him all day.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Pillar,” the boy said, and then looked at his father worried and flushed.