“Look at that,” Laurie says, low.
He looks at her instead. But without even glancing his way she knows he’s going to stay fixed on her instead of following her gaze — she likes that he will do this and he likes the elegance of the next gesture: she simply lowers her face, just a little, to discreetly point toward what she wants him to see.
“It’s so sweet,” Laurie says. He looks. The personal injury lawyer and his wife are sitting at one of the dinner tables, the only couple not milling with the drinks and the music on the terrace. They have pulled out two chairs and are facing each other and he has reached around her neck and is clasping a necklace.
“Remember?” Laurie says. “It’s their anniversary.”
Michael doesn’t remark on the scene, but he can hear the sentimental ooze of Laurie’s tone, and he waits a couple of beats before turning away so she won’t think he’s being critical of her feelings about this.
Laurie pitches her voice even lower, and the ooze morphs into a firmer tone of downright admiration. “I think he’s got tears in his eyes.”
Michael cannot avoid looking back at this.
Madison Murray is indeed wiping at Jason Murray’s tears, and she is beaming. She leans forward to give him a kiss.
“That’s so sweet,” Laurie says, and Michael turns away again, sharply.
Laurie looks at him. She smiles and nudges him with her elbow. “My tough guy doesn’t approve.”
Michael shrugs.
Laurie says, “Haven’t you ever shed a tear for the love of a woman?”
“I should try that call again,” Michael says.
“Not for her you haven’t,” Laurie says. “Of course not.”
Michael starts to move away but Laurie puts her hand on his arm to stop him. “I don’t like being left here alone,” she says.
“Do you like my staying married?”
Laurie nods once, firmly. “Okay. I get it.”
Michael shifts his arm to disengage from her hand, but she holds tighter.
“Not so fast,” she says. “Give me a kiss first. A good one.”
He takes her into his arms. “This isn’t exactly an antebellum public act,” he says.
“I don’t care,” she says. “Kiss me right and I’ll even let you flash your cell phone all you want.”
And he does kiss her right, and for longer than she expected under the circumstances, which she understands to mean that she is crucially important to him, that she has nothing to fear from this wife who did not know how to love this man that Laurie adores. She lets his lips go and he turns and she watches him move away, and she just knows for sure — without it ever having needed to be mentioned — that it was a bona fide act of love for him to put on that swallowtail coat for her.
Michael passes Madison and Jason and he does not look at them directly, but in his periphery he can see them leaning into each other. Laurie was right that he doesn’t approve, and he holds on for a moment to a little surge of fellow-male disgust. This is part of a deep reflex in him. And briefly maintaining a low-grade distaste for Jason Murray allows him to pass on down the allée without a flare up of any conscious image at all of a day and a night long ago in an open canopy forest along the Blackwater River near the Alabama border. However, Michael’s passage now into the gathering night shadows of the trees of Oak Alley does make a deep sandbottom current of the river run in him. And in that current is a Remington.243 Youth Rifle and he holds onto it tight for a long panicky while and then he’s not even aware he’s carrying it and he drives forward through the wire grass and gallberry and all about him are the pine and the oak and the sycamore, and the trees huddle up and they crowd into him and he no longer has any idea what direction he’s going in. He’s eleven years old and he is lost and he hears a thrash and he stops and he wants to see his dad coming out of the forest to him but instead it’s the back-flash of a whitetail deer and Michael doesn’t even think of the rifle in his hand, he only wishes he knew where to run, like this animal, and he pushes on and on and then he emerges into a tight little clearing. He must have been calling out for his father but he’s not sure — he can’t remember his voice — but he does call now. “Dad!” he cries. And again, “Dad!”
And his father’s voice comes to him in return, from somewhere behind him in the forest. “Michael! Stay put!”
Michael does not move. He stands very still, as if he and his father have read the deer rubs and the tracks and they are ready to hold still and wait. Michael will wait as still as his dad has taught him to wait. And Henry Hays comes out of the woods and Michael is not even aware that with his first step toward his father he has dropped his rifle and he takes that step and another and he is running and he opens his arms — he yearns to throw himself upon his father and hold close to him — and now his father looms above him blocking out the forest but something comes upon Michael’s shoulders and blocks him to a stop and thrusts him back and he is thrashing from his father’s hands.
“Pull yourself together,” his father says. “What’s got into you boy?”
“I was up ahead of you …”
“I mean now,” his father says. “Are those tears? Are you actually crying? And you drop your rifle? I can’t believe this is my own son. Pull yourself together.”
And Michael seizes up, stiffens and goes dead cold, perhaps as a whitetail would feel raising its head and seeing a muzzle flash. There are indeed tears in Michael’s eyes and his rifle is not in his hands and in this first deer hunting trip with his father he has failed utterly and he cannot make anything about his body work, he cannot speak or move or breathe, and his father’s deep-forest-dark eyes are wide with something that Michael cannot bear to look at. But he cannot look away.
Henry Hays releases his son. “Stand straight now,” he says sharply.
Michael struggles to do this.
“Listen to me,” Michael’s father says. “We come into the woods and we take the lives of animals, like men have done since the beginning of time. You have to honor who you are and your responsibility in the world. You can’t do that with these tremblings and hugs and these disgusting tears. God put you on the earth to be a man. So be one.”
And in spite of how he has strayed and panicked and cried and even abandoned his nascent manhood in this forest today, Michael suddenly grows quiet inside. He can still do this. For all but one of the several times in his coming adult life when Michael will remember pieces of this day, this will be his primary impression: his father made perfect sense; his father was surpassingly reasonable.
Though once, late at night in his law office, soon after Sam had been born, after a good day in court when he knew what questions to ask and when to push them and when to turn and walk away and dismiss the lying son of a bitch in the witness box, Michael finds his father in his mind and he has the impulse to turn his lawyerly skills on his old man, to see if his reasonableness will hold up under cross-examination: so he and Michael are standing in that clearing, and his father has just finished his little speech about manhood, and Michael says, “How did I get lost?”
“You are a child still,” his father says. “No man. You wandered off like a child.”
“I was walking ahead of you as you told me to do.”
“You need to learn to stalk a deer.”
“I was moving slowly,” Michael says, “watching for rubs and scrapes and tracks.”
“Like I taught you.”
“If I was moving slowly ahead of you, where you’d put me, following only the spoor of our prey, how was I responsible for wandering off?”