I tiptoe down the stairs, anxious for fresh air. Outside, the morning still holds its chill. I haven’t seen the farm in daylight, and it is beautiful. Brambles of wild roses climb up and over split rail fences. In the kitchen garden, rows and rows of zucchini blossoms, sugar snap peas on stilts, a tangle of orange nasturtiums licking at their ankles. Three rabbits are feeding in the lettuces.
Past the garden, the cornfields stretch all the way to the base of the hills, where dark forests pitch toward a pinking sky. I pull my sweater on and head out through a potato field that borders the corn—its musky-sweet smell rises, hovers a few feet above the ground.
I follow a wide tractor path that slices through the center of the fields, parting the sea of corn. Cornstalks like hedgerows flank me on either side. I listen to their swish, their whispers. I wish I could unhear my mother.
I’ve been walking for almost an hour when I come around a sharp bend and stop short. Ten yards ahead of me, an enormous buck stands in the middle of the track. A Bambi’s-father buck, his proud, towering antlers like bare trees in winter. He looks directly at me and I look back, willing him not to spring away. And then the crack of a gunshot. His eyes open wide in surprise, and he falls. Blood pours from a hole in his neck. He lies there in soft, sad silence. There’s a movement in the corn, the barrel of a gun. I step back into the thick green, hidden from the hunters. Tyson emerges onto the track. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are blank, dull, the eyes of a sleepwalker. He lowers himself to the ground and lies down beside the dying animal. He looks so small next it, childlike. He stares into the buck’s eyes, watches, unblinking, until its life slips away to nothingness. He gets to his knees and in a gesture somehow both beautiful and sickening, he leans down and kisses the dead deer gently on its mouth. Tyson hears my sharp intake of breath. He leaps to his feet, gun cocked.
“Tyson, wait!” I step out onto the track.
He looks at me for a moment and then, before I can say another word, he is gone. I watch the tops of the corn snaking behind him in his path.
* * *
—
When I get back to the farm, Conrad is in the vegetable garden with Whitman. He stirs a water bucket as Whitman pours dark brown powder into it. Tyson stands nearby, a small bloodstain on the tip of his boot.
“Morning, Elle,” Whitman calls out when he sees me. “We wondered where you’d gotten to.”
“I walked out through the cornfields.”
Tyson watches me intently. The entire walk home, I’ve tried to process what I witnessed, to understand why he would do such a cruel thing. I imagine the kind of agony he must still feel, the rage at his mother’s killer still out there, unpunished. And yet what I saw seemed more an act of love than of misplaced revenge.
Whitman hands me a bucket. “Come on and give us a hand spreading this.”
“It stinks,” I say. “What is it?”
“Dried cow blood. Keeps the deer and the rabbits away. They can’t stand the smell, either. Just a trickle around each plant. It doesn’t take much. Hope you kids are hungry. There’s a whole load of bacon in the oven. Eggs from the henhouse were still warm to the touch when I collected them.”
Conrad and I help Whitman pour blood on his crops while Tyson watches us from the sidelines of baby lettuces and cucumbers. By the time we have finished, all the life in Whitman’s garden smells like death to me.
11
4:00 P.M.
“Drink?” Peter squeezes a lime around the cobalt-blue edge of a Mexican glass, then dips it rim side down onto a plate of kosher salt.
“Are we legal yet?” My mother wanders in, looking at her watch.
“Definitely not.” Peter pours a hefty slug of tequila into a martini shaker.
“Well, in that case, I can’t resist.”
God, it annoys me—the banter of WASPs around alcohol. “Where on earth are they?” I say. Jonas and Gina still haven’t appeared with the kids, and with every minute that passes, I’m becoming more agitated. Since Peter and I got back from Black Pond, I’ve spent the entire time waiting for Jonas to appear. Not playing backgammon with Jack, not giving myself a much-needed manicure, but rereading an old issue of The New Yorker, biting my fingernails. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours and already, when I’m not with him, I’m marking time until I am—as if my own life has ceased to exist and is only the time in between him and him. It angers me, this endless jangling. I picture my stomach cavity filled to the brim with little pieces of bitten fingernails. A lifetime’s worth of pain that never got digested. When they cut me open, that’s what they will find. Strange deposits, sharp and brittle.