WILD KINGDOM

It was a Sunday afternoon and I was four, riding between my parents in the front seat of the wood-paneled Chevy station wagon as my father guided us westward along Interstate 80. The world outside the windows was hot and bright, caught up in a gasoline shortage and a hostage crisis; on TV each night, we watched the angry bearded faces chanting in faraway streets, shouting things against Americans like us. Everything was suddenly costlier, more precious, cause to put on the brakes, to creep along at a measly 55 mph. My two sisters shared the backseat and seemed to be mirror opposites of one another in every way: they both had bobbed hair, but Wanda’s was curled so that the ends flipped up exuberantly, while Jean’s tucked shyly underneath. My brothers, Michael, who wore a string of puka shells that accentuated the big permanent teeth he’d still not quite fully grown into, and Conrad, with his large, wise eyes and his afro that always, despite his efforts, came to a slight point on the top of his head, shared the space we referred to as the “far-far-back.”

It must have been late summer, because we were on our way to the Gustafssons’ ranch to pick up ripe fruit for my mother’s homemade preserves. Mr. and Mrs. Gus were friends from a place called the Hospitality House, where military families spent occasional evenings together in a thing called fellowship, which meant people arrived near sundown to hold hands in a circle and pray. Afterward, everyone ate lemon cream sandwich cookies, and the kids drank punch out of the same small paper cups I used when I brushed my teeth at home. The adults would stand around with coffee, paid out like slot machine winnings from the giant percolator on the table. There must have been a lot of gatherings like this over the years, because the whole room had taken on the smell of stale coffee—a smell I’d forever associate with Jesus.

We were heading to Mr. Gus’s ranch, because my father loved to eat two pieces of toast with his breakfast and to fold each slice around pears cooked to an impossible sweetness and spiced with cinnamon and cloves or two figs swimming in thick amber syrup. My father’s love of breakfast had turned the morning meal, for all of us, into a ritual, a rite we enacted with joy every single day. To that end, every summer, I helped my mother stir vast pots of the summer’s harvest into the thick magic we’d later ladle into the glass canning jars. And every morning, practically, I’d spoon some of the stuff from summers past onto my own toast or biscuit, hardly thinking that so much of what the jams and preserves were made of was her.

The Gustafssons lived in a modest red ranch house just over the hill on the other side of the interstate, but they had a whole hillside’s worth of fig trees and orchards of pears, peaches, apricots (which we called “ape-ricots,” though just about everyone I met later in life would say “app”), and bitter black walnuts, along with a few old work mules and some chickens and cows. And there were cats and dogs that wandered the acres in obedience to their own sense of purpose, barely interested in stopping to let you pat their thistle-ridden fur. When they got to be a little older, my brothers helped out at the Gustafssons’ place to earn spending money in the summer months. Once, they watched in anxious disbelief as a bull scratched the dirt with his front legs and blew out a cloud of hot steam before charging straight for where they stood filling his water trough. They hopped the fence to safety in time, but even when they told the story years later, there remained the shadow of terror just beneath their laughter.

At the top of the Gustafssons’ drive, there were bags of picked fruit waiting for us on the porch, but Mr. Gus took us on a tour of the ranch before packing them into our car. We’d just come from church. I was wearing one of my favorite outfits, a blue-and-white dress with a white cardigan and socks and brown Buster Brown shoes. Our ankles and feet got dusty following Mr. Gus through the parched grass and sun-baked dirt, but no one seemed bothered by it. Even my sisters and mother walking in high heels and pantyhose didn’t seem to mind.

As we came to each different variety of tree, Mr. Gus would pull down a bough and offer everyone a piece of fruit. My mother split open an apricot with her thumbs and handed it to me. The flesh was warm and sweet, with a bright tang that reminded me of sunlight. Later, she gave me a bite of a small peach and bits of a walnut Mr. Gus had cracked between his bare hands. Mischief flashed on her face as she tore a fig in two and put half of it into my father’s mouth. When she offered some to me, I said, “No, thank you,” and shook my head, repulsed by the white pith and the pulpy flesh. It looked like a venomous sea creature, but when she lifted the fruit to her own lips, she practically swooned, like a woman on television who had just lowered herself into a bathtub full of bubbles.

When we approached a hen and her cluster of chicks, I instinctively began to reach out toward the downy babies, but Mr. Gus stopped me. Without speaking, he placed his hand near the chicks and held it there a moment. Immediately, the mother began to flap her wings in agitation and moved in angrily to peck him. She bobbed up and down, driving her beak into his bare hand like the needle in my mother’s sewing machine. He didn’t recoil right away, but when he finally did and gave me his hand to examine, there was a purpled and bloody patch of skin the diameter of a gobstopper. I pulled the sleeves of my cardigan down over my own hands and walked on.

We came to a clearing where a few cows and one calf stood grazing. The cows were unbothered and slow, larger than any other living thing I’d seen up close. Mr. Gus laid a hand on one, who didn’t stop her jaws from their slow grind of a clump of grass, though her head swung around to face him. Her eyes were deep and kindly, rimmed in black and shaded by thick long lashes, like a lady’s. I couldn’t help it; her placid femininity backed by quiet strength—not like the frantic hen whose love had made her nervous but rather calm, grounded in a steadfast, sturdy certainty—reminded me of my mother. Instantly, I trusted her, would have lifted my own hand to the thick mottled wall of fur were it not for her calf, which was watching us from farther away. Small and brown, with new fur I could already imagine the plush of against my cheek, the calf saw me, too, and she (I decided it was a she) stood still, having also just grasped our shared affinity (at least it seemed that she had), eyeing me in a way I took to mean that my own feelings were mirrored in hers. I forgot all about the wicked chicken as I ran toward the calf, who took a few lively steps away, but coyly, as if to suggest we play a game of tag.

This is for me, I remember telling myself, meaning the sweet young calf and the strong, serene mother. I knew that I knew them, understood their bond, and that they knew me, too. I knew that I could slip in among them for a moment and revel in the love that spread out around them. It was all I knew, and so I dashed after the calf, laughing, wanting to show her, to step into their version of the language my mother and I spoke, and to carry that joy, that giddy out-of-breath knowing, back over into the human.

Then, before I could tell myself what had happened, the calf was lowering her two hind legs back to the ground and casting a quick look over her shoulder as she pranced off. And I was doubled into myself, clutching my stomach, which throbbed and burned where the calf’s hooves had struck me, ashamed for the sobs that any second, I knew, would begin to issue from my throat.

I felt betrayed, stunned by this first taste of cruelty. It was my first collision with the world’s solid fist.

On the ride home, my father said, “That calf wasn’t being mean,” looking down from the road. “It was only protecting itself.” The straw-colored hills off to the side were dotted with cows and unsaddled horses that whirred past in what felt like a taunt.

“From what?” I asked, as another knot of tears inched higher in my throat.

“From you!” My father let out a quick laugh, and his laughter jostled loose the tears I had been struggling to swallow. I felt as though I’d been wronged, but I also knew that my father was right. How many times had we sat together after Sunday dinner watching one or another episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlon Perkins, in which a pride of lions or hyenas tore into the side of an unlucky zebra? And how many times had my father sought to silence my disapproval with some variation of the phrase “It’s a necessary part of nature”? We’d go on to do the same thing that evening at home, except this time as I watched, I would feel myself implicated, as though I had stepped irreversibly into a strange and fearsome dominion. One in which I was capable of inciting panicked flight but vulnerable, too. Fragile as the creature that might soon feel the flash of contact.