When I Found You (13 page)

Nat picked up the photo, studied it briefly.

Then he said, as if he had never registered the image on the old photograph, “Why do I have to go to bed so early? It’s barely eight o’clock. I can’t go to sleep this early. I’m not a child, you know.”

But he looked like one. Very much so. He was small for nearly fifteen, and looked a bit helpless and lost, smothered in Flora’s old bed sheets and flowered quilt. Nathan wondered if the boy could acknowledge his own terror. Even to himself.

“Because in the morning I’m going to wake you up very early and we’re going to go hunting.”

“Hunting?”

“Yes. Duck-hunting. With Maggie.”

“I don’t hunt.”

“Well, I’m suggesting you give it a try.”

“What time would I have to get up?”

“About four thirty.”

“No way. Forget it.”

“I’ll be in to wake you. I’d like you to try it with me this one time.”

A medium-length, sulky silence. Then the boy’s face changed. Only slightly. But perceptibly.

“Do you always go to that same place?”

He didn’t have to elaborate. He didn’t have to specify what same place. They both knew what he meant.

“Yes.”

“Could you show me the exact spot?”

“Yes.”

“OK. I’ll go with you, then. This one time.”

Nathan picked up his photograph. Patted Nat on the knee through the covers. Reached for the light switch on his way out of the room.

Nat asked, as though not anxious to see him leave, “Aren’t you even going to ask me what I did to get thrown out of the house?”

“No. I thought it best to start fresh with each other. You’ll have a birthday coming up next week. We’ll celebrate.”

“Why do you remember my birthday after all this time?”

“How can I not remember your birthday? I found you in the woods on October second, 1960. How could I forget a date like that? You were born the day before, October first. You’ll be fifteen.”

“How am I supposed to live here? I don’t even know you.” It seemed out of context with what Nathan had just told him, which Nathan supposed was why the boy said it. “I don’t even know this place. This is all completely strange to me. How am I even supposed to live here?”

Nathan sighed. “A few minutes at a time, I suppose, at first. I won’t pretend it’s not a problem for you.”

“And you?” the boy asked, even more agitated. “This is not a problem for you?”

“Not at all,” Nathan said. “I’m happy to have you here with me.”

He turned out the light on his way out of the room.

24 September 1975   

“I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to give me a gun,” the boy said, trying to pull the huge flowered quilt back over his head. But Nathan had a good, tight hold of it. “You certainly don’t know me very well. I don’t want to go duck-hunting. It’s four o’clock in the goddamn morning. I want to go back to sleep.”

“There will be no swearing in this house,” Nathan said. “And it’s actually four forty-five. And I’m only asking that you try it with me this one time. If you don’t like it I won’t ask you to go again.”

“I shouldn’t be forced to do things against my will.”

“You agreed last night that you would do this. I’m only asking you to remain true to your word.”

“Well, I don’t remember
why
I said I’d do it.”

“Because you wanted me to show you the exact spot.”

“Oh.”

Nat sat up. Swung his legs over the side of the bed. Sat rubbing his eyes. Wearing only a short-sleeved tee shirt and faded boxers. Looking somewhat resigned, but a full measure short of cooperative.

Maggie, who had been spinning in circles around Nathan’s knees, suddenly reared up on to her hind legs and kissed Nat on the nose. As if to say, why on earth would you want to stall at a time like this?

“What’s she all wound up about?” the boy asked Nathan.

“She loves to go hunting.”

“Oh,” Nat said. “Well. That makes one of us.”

Nat seemed quite content to walk away leaving the bed an unkempt mess. But Nathan ran through it with him, and they worked on it together. Nathan taught him to make hospital corners, he working on one side and Nat working on the other.

Nathan made a point to ignore the rolling of Nat’s eyes.

Then Nathan attempted to bounce a quarter off the bed, with less than remarkable success.

•  •  •

The boy was sulky and quiet on the drive to the lake, but he showed something of himself by reaching back to scratch Maggie’s head. At least, Nathan felt he was showing something from the inside of his recalcitrant bad-boy shell.

Maybe Nat didn’t realize that he was allowing, and displaying, a certain vulnerability by openly bonding with Nathan’s dog.

Nathan made a mental notation: Ertha Bates had said if there was something this boy responded to she had not stumbled across it. But Nathan had discovered a chink in his armor already. Nat responded to dogs. He wondered if the Bates home had ever included pets. He didn’t suppose it had.

He looked briefly over at Nat, who met his eyes defensively.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Nat took his hand back from Maggie’s head, sat facing forward, and sulked with his hands in his lap all the way to the lake.

Maggie leaned into the front seat, as far as she could get without breaking the rules, and even went so far as to let out a few quiet, thin whimpers in Nat’s direction. But Nat stared out the window as if he hadn’t heard.

•  •  •

“Check to see that the safety is on,” Nathan said as they unloaded the car in the dark. “And then carry the weapon so it points at nothing. Up across your shoulder, or in the crook of your arm pointing forward and toward the ground.”

“But the safety is on.”

“With guns it’s best to be double-safe.”

They began the hike to the lake, side by side, Maggie bounding ahead.

Nathan charted a path for them by flashlight.

The sky had just begun to lighten. In five or ten minutes they would be able to see their own steps, unaided, in the fallen leaves. It was the perfect time to go hunting. By the time they reached the lake the flashlight could be stowed away, and they could set up behind the blind using only available light. But it would not yet be dawn.

It was the time of morning that always made Nathan grateful for his own life.

“I wish you wouldn’t make me ask,” the boy said after a short walk. “I wish you would just tell me, and not put me through having to ask.”

“When we get there,” Nathan said, “I’ll show you the place.”

About a tenth of a mile later, Nathan said, pointing, “Right over there. Under that tree.”

The boy walked over and stood looking down at a fresh blanket of the new season’s leaves in the near-dark.

Nathan and Maggie waited, respectfully, until he was done. Nathan even resisted the temptation to feel impatient as the sky lightened. The experience was like that of watching a mourner at a funeral approach the open casket in dark silence.

It was not a moment one could rush.

Several minutes later, Nat turned and walked back to Nathan and the dog. Maggie jumped up and hit Nat in the chest with her paws. It was strictly outside of the rules and she knew it, but just in that moment she had been unable to contain her own exuberance. Nat said nothing. Nathan chose to let it go by.

Nathan expected the boy to renege on his hunting commitment. Now that he had gotten what he wanted. Nathan expected him to flip his middle finger and head back to the car.

Instead he followed Nathan and Maggie toward the lake, head slightly drooping. As if he were suddenly too tired to argue the matter further.

•  •  •

The lesson in hunting did not go well. In fact in time it broke down completely, with Nat leaping up in the air and waving his arms to purposely scare the ducks away.

“Fly away,” he shouted. “Fly away, you idiots, or you’re going to get shot.”

They did fly away, the reflection of their collective wings beating across the water.

Then he sat down behind the blind and waited to see what Nathan would do.

“The acting-out you’ve been used to doing,” Nathan said, “will not be acceptable with me. While you’re with me you will behave like a civilized person.”

“Great. You want me to shoot things. Very civilized.”

“Do you eat fowl?” Nathan asked.

“Do I eat what?”

“Are you a vegetarian?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Then, yes. It’s civilized. What a man eats, he should be willing to kill. It’s not absolutely necessary that he do so, but he should at least be willing to face the reality of it. To eat a chicken only if it comes from the market is the height of cowardice and denial. Someone still had to kill it.”

Nat rose and walked a few feet away. Kicked at the grass for a moment.

When Nathan looked up again, he found himself looking down the barrel of the boy’s gun.

The gun was, of course, filled with light birdshot. And the boy was an inexperienced shooter. But still, it’s hard to miss a substantial target with a shotgun. Plus the kick would raise the muzzle some, and a pellet through the eye could certainly prove fatal. So it was conceivable, though unlikely, that Nathan could be killed.

He weighed and juggled these factors as the boy spoke his piece.

“You can’t civilize me,” Nat said. “You can’t make me stop swearing. Or learn to hunt. Or act like a gentleman, or be double-safe. I’ll shoot you down before I let you make me into something I’m not.”

“I want you to be what you are,” Nathan said, “only civilized. And the only way you can stop me is to shoot me dead, so if you’re set on stopping me, then I suppose you’d best go ahead with that now.”

The boy’s hands trembled on the shotgun for another moment before he let the muzzle drift slightly downward.

Nathan said, “All you’ve probably needed all this time was someone who cared enough to insist you behave.”

And perhaps willing to die to make that happen, he thought.

The boy dropped the shotgun and ran away.

•  •  •

When Nathan and Maggie arrived back at the station wagon about two hours later, the boy was waiting for him inside. It pleased Nathan to see this, but he didn’t make a fuss.

He placed his four ducks up front, in canvas sacks, two on the bench seat between them, two on the passenger floor near Nat’s feet.

“I won’t insist on this,” Nathan said, “but it’s a lot of work to clean and dress four ducks. I’d appreciate it if you’d help me.”

“Why did she do it?” Nat asked.

“I don’t know,” Nathan said. “I can’t imagine.”

“Think how it makes me feel.”

“I have. Many times.”

“Then my grandmother abandons me.”

“Cry for yourself for the first of those two events,” Nathan said. “You have that due you. But look hard at yourself about the second one. You did something to cause your grandmother to wash her hands of you. I just don’t care to know what it was.”

“What do I have to do to make
you
wash your hands of me?”

“There’s nothing you could do. I will never wash my hands of you.”

They rode the rest of the way home in silence.

•  •  •

Nat joined him in the garage for the cleaning and dressing. He wasn’t willing to gut, but seemed able to pluck out the feathers.

“We’ll put three in the freezer, and I’ll roast one for our supper tonight. Have you ever had roast duck?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re in for a treat.”

They worked in silence a few minutes, then the boy asked, “Do you know whatever happened to my mother, after they let her out of prison?”

Nathan froze in his movements, standing stock-still with a handful of entrails.

He remembered his promise to Mrs. Bates. He had agreed not to raise any issues she might deem inappropriate. But Nathan hadn’t raised this issue. The young man had raised it for him.

Besides, it struck him suddenly, Mrs. Bates was out of the picture. She was no longer raising this boy as she saw fit; she had abdicated that position. Now it was all about how Nathan saw fit to raise a boy.

“What did your grandmother tell you on that score?”

“First she wouldn’t tell me anything at all. And besides, if I asked she would start to cry. But last week I asked anyway, and she said my mother went off to California. That she was really busy trying to get some big career together, and so she never had time to write.” Then, with his hands still full of feathers, he looked up at Nathan. “Are you just going to hold those disgusting guts for ever? I’d let go of that mess really quick if it was me.”

“Oh,” Nathan said. And put them on the newspapers he had arranged to wrap them in. “In my opinion, she was wrong to tell you that.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not true.”

Nat looked up, quickly. Sharply. He dropped his half-feathered duck back on to its makeshift table with an audible thud.

Another chink in his armor, Nathan observed. He cares very much about the truth of this matter. And he is afraid to hear it. And also afraid not to hear it.