WHAT ARLO SAID: Justin Ays.
WHAT I SAID: Justin Ays?, thinking it was the name of a man.
WHAT ARLO SAID: No, just guys, I said. Any guys. Clean your ears out, Doc, he said.
THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING OUT OF ARLO’S PAST HIS FIELDS: There are no happier cows I know of.
WHAT I HOPED TO SEE WHEN I DROVE UP THE DRIVEWAY: Another car, the one that belonged to the hunter who had shot my son, the man coming out to tell me he was sorry. Where was that man?
WHAT I SAW INSTEAD: The lights on in the house. Jen at the stove.
WHAT WAS NOT IN THE PHONE BOOK: Anyone by the name of Justin Ays.
WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID: We saw Arlo’s name up at Phil’s. We didn’t want to tell you he was one of the eighty-two who had shot a buck in our town. Don’t worry, Poppy, you will get a buck someday. Go on, Poppy, practice your bow in the house. It is almost bow season again. We will go upstairs and out of your way.
WHAT I DID: I shot the bow in the house at a target I set up fifty feet away because bow season was coming again and I wanted to be ready. One arrow hit the twelve-inch hemlock post. I could unscrew the arrow shaft but I could not remove the tip. It remains embedded in the post.
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: Well, the deer aren’t going to be nervous with you in the woods, but the trees might be quaking.
WHAT THE HOUSE SAID: Don’t worry about the tip. I will close up around it and swallow it in oh, about one hundred years.
WHAT I REENACTED FOR SAM AT THE HOSPITAL: The arrow’s flight into the post. Thwack, I said, jabbing my finger into the pastel yellow hospital room wall, beside the metal door, showing him how it was at our house, an arrow tip embedded in the hemlock and my wife now leery of my peephole, my arm pull, my overall aim. Sam, I could have sworn, moved his foot. I wanted to open the metal door, call down the hall for the night nurse. I have seen his foot move, I wanted to yell, but I didn’t, because maybe it was a trick of the eye. Instead I knelt down beside the bed and pulled back his covers and stared at his foot.
His foot was huge for a twelve-year-old boy. There was dirt in his toenails that was dirt from our house from where he had always walked barefoot even on days of winter’s most frigid cold, and I looked at the dirt and thought how because of it he belonged now at home, and not here, surrounded by the yellow pastel walls. The dirt under his huge big toenail was dirt from our house, where he rightfully belonged. His foot, for a moment, looked like it was moving, but it was not, I realized. It was just me leaning on his bed and the beating of my own heart and the workings of my own lungs that was making the mattress move up and down, ever so slightly, making him move in turn. I breathed harder then, I willed my heart a faster beat, there was the possibility I could jump-start his foot into motion. My wife walked in the room and I jumped instead. I covered my son’s foot up again, I did not want her to see the dirt beneath his big toenail, if she had seen it she would have gone after it with a clipper, with a file’s curved point, somehow ashamed of dirt on her own son, and I wanted to keep that dirt there. As long as it remained, it somehow meant there was a possibility of my son coming home.
She did not talk. She sat on the end of the bed drinking tea, the bag’s small postage stamp-sized tag and its thread-like string twirling in some slight breeze by the Styrofoam cup’s side. She held the cup with one hand and rested her other hand on his ankle, her hand some kind of cuff, some kind of shackle to keep him prone, laid out flat, on his hospital bed so he would never rise. Look at this, I said, to get her away from him. I wanted her to see the first heavy snow in our region, the flakes fat, falling heavily, on the ledge of the window that could not be opened.
She stood from the bed, letting go her grasp on him, and joined me at the window. I looked in the reflection. Maybe my son, thinking we weren’t looking, would turn his head, would smile, would raise his hands in the air and look at them. He had done this as an infant, turning his hands in the air while he lay in his crib, mesmerized by the motions he made, the thumbs that could rotate, the wrists that could turn, they were his first toys. My wife’s breath steamed the window glass. My son did not wake. “Snow now makes it seem like he’s been here so long. He came here in late fall, and now it’s winter weather already,” she said, and then turned back to our son.
The door handle turned and a tall man came in. I’m sorry, wrong room, he said shaking his head and leaving, letting the door shut.
MY FIRST THOUGHT: Could he be the hunter who shot my son, who has come to my son’s bedside to tell us he’s sorry it has taken him so long to come?
WHAT THE WIFE DOES: Puts her tea on the tray table, gets under the covers, and lies next to our son.
WHAT I SAY: What are you doing?
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: He’s my son. I nod my head. I wanted to do it earlier, too. I wanted to crawl in beside my son and hold him. The wife closes her eyes.
CALL: A standardbred that has a cut on his neck. Owner says it definitely needs stitches.
ACTION: Drove to the man’s house. His name was Brody. His property bordered mine.
RESULT: Brody was wrong. Standardbred did not need stitches. The cut was only a scratch. Brody invited me into the house while he found his checkbook to write me a check for coming to his house to do nothing to his standardbred but shine a flashlight on its neck while standing in the freezing-cold barn. Brody had books on his shelves that looked like they had never been opened. Brody’s house was so clean. Brody had pictures of his grown children on the shelves. His wife, he said, had died. Brody said, Stay for dinner. No thank you, I said. I’m sure my wife is waiting at home, keeping a meal warm for me. But then I thought maybe this is the man who shot Sam. He has called me here for no reason because it’s a ruse and he wants to confess. I touch a wooden duck decoy he has on his mantel.
WHAT I SAY: You hunt? Brody laughs. He says his wife bought him the decoy in a gift shop when they visited Cape Cod. The decoy was signed by the artist, and Brody flipped the body of the duck, showing me the letters painted on the wood. I am afraid of guns. I have heard too many stories, he says.
WHAT I THINK: Brody is pulling my chain. Brody really did shoot Sam and now he thinks he can toy with me.
WHAT I SAY: Oh, come on, surely living here where we live you have an understanding of guns. You must hear them go off all the time the way your woods back up onto mine. There is game all around us, I say. Brody shakes his head. No, I just don’t hunt, he says.
WHAT I DO: I start to leave, but really I want to stand in Brody’s mudroom. I look at the hooks on the wall and see if there are any camo-patterned coats or hunting pants. I see old dark-colored cardigans with holes in the weave and looping bits of yarn. You’re hell on sweaters, I say. Is that from walking in the woods, all the branches? I say. Brody laughs and points down to a skinny cat sidling between his legs. No, it’s from her darn claws, he says. I think about the word darn. I think how either he said it and knew he said it in place of damn because he wanted me to think he wasn’t the one who shot my son, or he said it because he really is the type of man who could never shoot a gun.
WHAT GISELA SAID IN GERMAN THAT SHE NEEDS FOR HER DORMITORY ROOM ON THE DRIVE HOME: Gisela needs a new desk. Gisela needs a new lamp. Gisela needs a new bed. Gisela needs new curtains. Gisela, maybe, is shy, and cannot have all the boys on campus peering up at her through her dormitory window while her Kopf is hurting her so, because, as of yet, she still feels krank and has not found the apothecary to buy her aspirin.