Chapter Five

He told Mary they were all taking a trip – a final send-off for Gene and a chance to rebuild their friendship. It was a lie, but it seemed to give her hope and relief, as if she might finally be unburdened of the tension that radiated within her husband and darkened the nice home she was struggling to build. Mary was, of course, supportive. She always said the right things to him, but that was all she said, and the words rang empty. For the past several years she spoke to him the way a stranger with a modicum of social awareness would converse with a new acquaintance. But he could see the relief in her eyes, the way her body somehow relaxed upon hearing the news that he would be gone for a few days, that he would be gathering with his old friends. He saw her hope that maybe a piece of the man she fell in love with would be revitalized. More than once, Jonathan had thought of divorcing Mary so she would no longer be infected by the sins of his past, and he was sure the thought had crossed her mind at some point, that she had wondered how her life had gone from such hope and joy to a morass of quiet desperation. But then he would look at Jacob and know he couldn’t actually do it. He was responsible for Jacob. His boy was the only chance he had at redemption. He may have buried one boy in the mountains, but he could endure anything to be sure Jacob survived, was loved and cared for.

Jacob’s birth was not an easy one. He became stuck in the birth canal, sending the doctor and the nurses scrambling to be sure he didn’t suffocate. They tried forceps at first, plunging this crude metal device into Mary’s soft, fleshy body in an attempt to pull the boy by his face into the world. It all seemed very medieval at the time, the wonders of medicine given way to harsh instruments. Then they attempted a suction tube. As there was only one doctor and two nurses, Jonathan was co-opted to hold one of Mary’s heavy, swollen legs on his shoulder while they attempted to extract Jacob from his mother. The vacuum inserted inside his wife could not keep hold of Jacob’s head. It pulled loose and sprayed them all with blood and afterbirth. It spotted his shirt and face. It was a messy affair, filled with images and smells he associated more with hunting and gutting a deer than with the miraculous beauty of birth. But even hunting was cleaner than the day his son was born. Cleaning a kill was not rushed. There was no scramble to save the animal. It all went smooth as clockwork. Jacob’s birth was entirely different. Life was messier and more traumatic than death.

But when the boy was actually birthed, in the open air, trembling with his mouth open, eyes shut as he screamed for comfort, Jonathan felt something so much bigger. He couldn’t get his head around it, couldn’t fathom it. It was like standing before God, and he cried for hours afterward, Mary having to soothe him. It just kept coming – pieces of unthinkable realization, little births in his soul that testified to the terrifying reality of life and death and whatever lay between.

Since Jacob’s birth, Jonathan worried over him like an old grandmother. Mary would tell him to let the boy be, let him grow up and learn the hard way on occasion. “You have to let him explore and get hurt,” she said. “You have to let him be a boy on his own.” Part of him wondered whether it was that exact line of reasoning that allowed a ten-year-old boy to end up in Coombs’ Gulch in the middle of the night. The thought of any tragedy befalling Jacob was enough to send Jonathan’s mind spiraling back to that moment of birth, that massive, overwhelming power he’d felt that day. He did his best to suppress it, but it stayed with him all the same. Mary, on the other hand, seemed to accept that tragedy was a part of life, at peace with the prospect of cancer and car crashes, kidnappers and boys accidentally shot by hunters in the dead of night. But, of course, it was easy to be at peace with the prospect when you had never experienced the reality. Her peace was built on innocence and, for that, he resented her.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem so distant and…” She paused for a moment, like she was considering her words. “Angry.”

“I’m not angry,” Jonathan said. “I just have a lot on my mind.” He anticipated her follow-up question and answered it before she could ask. “You know, just with Gene and everything.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” she said.

“Well, then I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.

“You’re using Gene to hide something else. It’s like a ghost haunting this place. Or maybe it’s just haunting you. There are only three people in this family, Jonathan, but I swear the house feels crowded.”

She was right. The house was crowded and they were haunted. It was suffocating. Mary could take Jacob and leave, but he had to live with it. He hoped that if they could all just tough it out for a few more weeks, it could finally be over. That somehow returning to Coombs’ Gulch and confronting the past, burying it forever, would stop the decay because it was seeping poison into the rest of them. It was infecting Jacob.

It began with the night terrors. The doctors said it was normal for children, but there was nothing that could convince Jonathan that what he saw and heard when his son was in the throes of this nightmare was normal. He and Mary would be seated on the couch, watching a television program, and suddenly a scream would burst forth from his son’s bedroom. A scream in the dark and then more screaming and crying, and by the time they reached his room he was up wandering around his room, completely unconscious, but his eyes looking everywhere as if he were lost. Jacob never actually saw his parents standing in front of him. Instead, he looked through them, seeing whatever terrors existed in his mind. No amount of consoling and hugging and petting made the crying and trembling stop. Nothing about that seemed normal to Jonathan. What could a child possibly dream that would cause such terror? Jacob’s life was devoid of anything frightening. He knew only his small, sheltered life, his parents and his school.

Perhaps some vestigial memories from his time in the womb, Jonathan thought. Or maybe his memories were even older.

One night Jonathan yelled at the boy more than he should have, more than would otherwise be acceptable. Mary wasn’t home. She was out with one of her girlfriends. They went to a gym together at night sometimes, after the friend’s children had gone to bed, though he believed she was just trying to escape him for a time, to limit the one-on-one time they spent together between Jacob falling asleep and him retiring to bed after a couple of tumblers of scotch. Mary had always been in fair shape, although she never exercised much. But she found solace in this new friend and Jonathan pretended he was unaware of her true motives.

Jacob woke screaming and crying earlier than usual, but Jonathan was exhausted after the day and just wanted some quiet time to himself. Jonathan dragged himself up the stairs toward Jacob’s room, cursing that he couldn’t have a single moment of peace.

By the time he reached Jacob’s room, the boy had already sleepwalked into his closet and peed all over his clothes and shoes.

Jonathan snapped. He screamed and cursed at the small, terrified boy and threw the wet clothes out of his closet into the center of the room. Jonathan’s initial roar shocked Jacob from his sleep, and suddenly he was looking at his father – truly looking at him – his eyes wet in sheer terror, his small body trembling, newly awoken to a raging, giant figure in his room.

Jonathan saw it all happening. Somewhere in his mind, in another part of his consciousness that makes calm, compassionate decisions, he saw Jacob’s fear and terror and knew it was an accident, that it wasn’t the boy’s fault, that he had been sleepwalking, and Jonathan felt so desperately sorry for his son, that this awful moment should become one of those earliest memories of his father, never forgotten.

Jonathan knew all this. But still some other part of himself – a more violent and frightening part – moved forward with his verbal abuse until he had run himself hoarse and breathless. Jonathan turned around in the room, now strewn with urine-soaked clothes, and looked down at Jacob, who was still trembling in shock. He took Jacob, put him back to bed and shut off the light. Jonathan went downstairs and took a long, long pull from a bottle of scotch. He hoped with all his heart that his son would not remember any of it in the morning. He took another drink, hoping it would erase the memory from his own mind. It was another terrible moment of his life, the number of which kept racking up, but he felt it inextricably tied to the other mortal guilt on his soul.

It was all a darkness, raging, reaching fingers out to affect his boy, his wife, everything he saw or felt or touched or thought. He would do anything and everything to end it. Somewhere in his mind he suspected that returning to Coombs’ Gulch and sending the boy’s body to the bottom of a lost lake would not ease his soul. But any chance, no matter how slim, was worth it to avoid this blooming disaster in his small family. He would move forward, just like Conner and Michael. It was worth the risk.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Mary, but he was fresh out of ideas and there was a wall that would never let the truth out. “I’ll work on it. I’m trying to be a good person, I really am.”

She touched the side of his face. “You are a good person, Jonathan. I don’t know why you would ever think otherwise.”

“Yeah,” he said and buried his face into her hand, “we’re all good people.”

“I hope you find what you’re looking for up there,” she said.

Late that night, under the guise of preparing for his trip, Jonathan went to the basement, moved aside an old, cheap room divider and unlocked a dull green metal safe with a key. His rifles and a shotgun stood upright and dusty in the dark of that thin locker; the top shelf held two handguns. He hadn’t opened the safe in more than a year, and the smell of old oil and steel touched his nostrils. Staring at them after so long a time, Jonathan thought the firearms looked dull, inert, like a hammer forgotten at the bottom of a toolbox. For all the political mileage guns made for politicians, for all the anger and sorrow that surrounded them, they were underwhelming – pieces of metal and wood, narrow and devoid of the life given them. They leaned dumbly against the side of the safe and looked like toys. He took out his Remington .30-06 and felt its quiet heft. He slid open the bolt and checked the breach. Dust clung to oily remnants. The last time he’d held this rifle they’d buried a boy in the woods.

Jonathan took a long drink from a glass of whiskey and waited until the liquor dulled his brain. In the dim light of his concrete basement, he wiped down the barrel with an oil cloth. He shined the wood stock, wiped out the interior of the breech and ran a long, snakelike brush through the spiraled rifling of the bore. He sprayed new oil onto the bolt and action. He ran a couple of dry fires, the firing pin clicking home with each cycle. He took another drink and thought about Gene.

He took down the nine-millimeter handgun he carried for finishing off deer who were not yet dead but unable to run any farther. It happened more often than not. Even with a solidly placed kill shot, the deer still takes off running. They’re dead but still going, running deeper and deeper into the woods. Then you find it still hanging on, curled up in a bed of leaves, blood pumping from a hole in its side, tongue peeking from its black snout as the breath comes shorter and shallower. The nine millimeter puts them out of their misery.

Unlike humans – unlike Gene – an animal never admits death; they never quit. A deer could have its organs blown to bits and a hole the size of a human head in its side, excruciating pain strangling every breath, and still it would never conceive of ending its own existence. It was up to the hunter to ensure the animal ceased to live. It was the hunter who set it all in motion and who had to see it through to the end. Once the shot was fired the hunter and deer were wed, bound to each other until the end. Sometimes that marriage between hunter and hunted resembled a child’s game of hide-and-seek after the deer bounded into the forest; other times it was a quick, silent process. Once the shot is fired the game is set. You see yourself in their dark eyes and die just a little with the final shot.

It was a strange facet of human existence, he thought. Human consciousness is like a curse – a dull, never-ending pain that finally kills its host. An animal can endure any amount of physical pain and never conceive of death as the answer. People, on the other hand, look to it, seek it out. What physical pain cannot do – namely, drive a creature to desire its own death – human rationale can do over mere feelings spurred by memory, morality and society. It was not pain that pushed Gene toward death but anguish coupled with pure rationality. He just did an easy equation: history plus growing day-to-day misery with no chance of change equals death as the best option.

Gene had run like a gut-shot buck. They all had. Their injury wasn’t physical; the pain wasn’t from severed nerves or blunt-force trauma. The pain, the anguish, was invisible. The shot was fired; their lives and their minds were the exit wounds. Gene was both hunter and hunted – wed to his own death from the moment he squeezed the trigger. Like a decent hunter, he did the right thing and put himself out of his misery.

The liquor swirled in Jonathan’s mind. He turned the nine millimeter over in his hand. Somewhere upstairs Jacob screamed; his mind saw terrors the world couldn’t imagine.