A Garden of Earthly Delights (46 page)

“You didn't?”

“Hell, no. Shooting rabbits, defenseless birds—deer—even if you eat the meat. There's plenty of other things to eat.” Judd wasn't smiling now. “Frankly, I don't like spilling blood. For ‘sport.' Hunters should be on the receiving end of their own bullets, see what it's like.”

Clara thought this over. She liked a man to speak emphatically, and she liked Judd when he seemed to be criticizing, however indirectly, Revere. “Swan talks to you sometimes, doesn't he? Has he ever said anything about hunting? Or—food he eats?”

“What d'you mean?”

“Oh, that Swan! He's so smart, I tell him he's too smart for his own good. Too smart for Eden Valley.” Clara paused, smiling without parting her lips. She liked Judd watching her, listening to her. And he was listening now, she could see. “Swan thinks that eating meat is ‘wrong.' He eats meat, because he has to, in this house; but he feels sickish, he says, sometimes. ‘When you pull the meat from the bone you can see how it was put together.' ‘When you chew beef it's the muscles you feel with your tongue.' ”

“Well. You can't say that your son is mistaken, can you?”

Clara heard, or thought she heard, another gunshot. But when she listened there was only a sound of starlings, raucous and excited in the trees outside the window. “I'm worried sometimes, Swan has such ideas. Like nobody else. Nobody else here. His teacher says he's ‘highly intelligent'—‘with an analytic mind'—or maybe it was ‘analytical mind'? He's more intelligent now than Jonathan, I think. And Jonathan is almost sixteen. See, it used to be that Jonathan was the one who read a lot, adventure books about places like Alaska, Africa, he was interested in Indians, but now it's Swan who likes to read. I'm proud of him, I want him to know things.” Clara spoke dreamily, reaching out to touch Judd's arm with a blade of grass; it was one of her gestures that were seemingly unconscious, unpremeditated. “I want him to read but not if it makes him … strange. Too quiet. Different from the other boys. He's only ten, yet he acts older. When I was ten, I wasn't a child any longer, I had to grow up fast, and I don't want that for my son, god-damn I don't.”

Clara had been speaking urgently. Judd said, “Why are you so worried, Clara? Has something happened?”

“No. And I don't want anything to happen. Like I don't want Swan to remember about me, how I was living when he was little. Before I came here.”

Judd was lighting a cigarette, and he offered her one. Clara guessed that he was thinking of her living alone, Curt Revere's girl-mistress; but really she was thinking of Lowry.

“I want to understand my son when he talks. I don't want to be
some damn stupid old woman, that her own son is embarrassed of. Here's a book Swan was reading, I brought out to read for myself.” She pointed, and Judd picked it up.

“
A Natural History of Animals.
Sounds like something a boy should be reading.”

“Here's another one, I had trouble with—
Descent into a
—” Clara paused, unwilling to attempt the word. “This Edgar Allan Poe, I heard of. He's famous, huh?”

Judd took up this book as well, thumbing through it. He smiled, but the smile was puzzled, Clara saw.

“
A Descent into the Maelstrom and Other Stories.
This is tougher going. Not for a ten-year-old, I wouldn't think.”

“You've read it?”

“Some of the stories. But not the ‘Maelstrom.' ”

“What's it about?”

Clara spoke with such childlike eagerness, Judd regretted he could only shrug. “A typical Poe adventure, I guess. Descending into some region like the bottom of the sea, or maybe hell. ‘Hades.' ”

Hades? Clara smiled, not knowing what this was.

She was thinking how in the speckled sunshine Judd didn't look homely as she sometimes thought him. Only just awkward, and worn; not by time, for he was much younger than Revere, but by something like thoughtfulness, thinking. Clara would have liked to slide her warm bare arms around his neck, making a gift of herself to any man, wanting nothing from the exchange except to give pleasure, to make someone happy with no consequences. “I hate it that I don't understand my own son, sometimes.”

Judd smoked his cigarette, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, somberly. “Don't feel bad about it, Clara. It's the same way with us all. We want to understand the people close to us, but we don't want them to understand us. Right?”

Clara laughed, startled. She'd thought that only she, Clara Walpole, was so secret to herself, impenetrable to others.

Judd said, “Having children doesn't change things. It doesn't change you, much.”

“I think it does change you.”

“No. Not really.”

Having children killed my mother
Clara wanted to say. Instead she smiled, teasing. “A man, maybe. A man can be a father and hardly know it. But a woman, that's different.”

Judd laughed. “Well, look: my own experience has been that nothing changes essentially, in our souls. Except we become older, and our souls wear thin. I know a hell of a lot more now than I did just a few years ago but I don't know anything that's essential; I have more information, more facts, that's all. I have more money, too. But I'm not a wiser person. It seems to me that nature runs one way, like an hourglass. For most people, everything has been accomplished already—we can't invent, we can't discover, we can't create. We can imitate, that's all. We can fail.” He paused, smoking. Clara had lighted a cigarette when he had, but was too distracted to smoke. “I don't have your husband's legendary energy, I wish to Christ I did. I used to think I'd like to clarify one thing, set one thing in order: I'd like to write one book, get everything into it. Truth, beauty—everything.” He'd dropped Swan's books beside his chair, and poked now at
A Descent into the Maelstrom
with his foot, with a look of regret. “But I haven't even begun.”

“Write a book?” Clara narrowed her eyes.

“One book. And I'd like to travel, too.”

“To Egypt?”

“Why Egypt? What makes you say that?”

“Oh, Swan has some idea.… There's ‘pyramids' there? Ancient ruins?” Clara smiled hesitantly. “Maybe we could all go, Judd? Sometime?”

Judd shrugged. “Maybe.”

“I've seen pictures of places in Europe, too. Paris. You don't need to speak French, do you? They wouldn't laugh at me, would they?— I mean, my accent.”

Judd shifted uncomfortably. “You don't have an accent, Clara. You speak just fine.”

“Bullshit. I talk like white trash. Soon as I open my mouth in some fancy store in Hamilton, the bitch salesclerks look at me like I'm a bad smell. Even the money I spend, Curt Revere's checking account, doesn't make any difference.”

Judd said vaguely, as if this were a subject he didn't care to pursue, “My wife, now. She hates to travel.”

“So leave her home.”

“Well …”

“My husband is so goddamned busy, he only travels for business. More and more now, it's land he's buying, or selling, or—what's it called—leasing. It used to be farming he did, he says, now it's ‘business.' So he can stay in the U.S. You and I could go, and take Swan.”

“You're teasing, Clara? I guess?”

Judd stared at her, exhaling smoke. For a long awkward moment he seemed unable to speak, as Clara remained silent, stubborn. Let him think what he wanted to think, Clara thought. Unconsciously she was gripping her belly; with this pregnancy she'd hardly gained any weight, yet she felt burdened; not the way she'd felt when she was pregnant with Swan, and in love with Lowry.

“Sure, I'm teasing. Try me.”

“Clara, aren't you—happy here? With—him?”

“Why don't you make me happy, damn you, instead of asking about it? You're always asking, with your eyes. I can feel you asking.”

Judd's face darkened with blood. In his confusion he shook ash from his cigarette, so vigorously the cigarette itself fell into the grass.

“You sound angry, Clara. I don't understand why.”

“Bullshit! You know.”

“
You
know that he loves you very much. Your husband.”

“So what? What can I do with it, what does it mean to me? And you,” Clara said, contemptuously, “all that time I was living in that house you'd come around and you wanted to make love to me but you didn't—didn't dare! Think I don't know it? Didn't know it? And you could have married me, if you'd wanted to. Revere was married to that wife of his he had to ‘respect,' like he didn't ‘respect' me. And now every day almost you come here and look at me, but the hell with you—”

“Clara, for God's sake. What are you saying?”

They sat in silence. They were both excited, aroused. Clara could not have said if she was happy or deeply unhappy; hopeful, as
a wayward child is hopeful, or sullen and defeated and without hope. If Judd had touched her, she might have slapped him. Or she might have gripped him around the neck with her strong, slender arms. Judd was sitting with his face turned from her, shocked and still listening to what she'd said. And at that moment the shot rang out.

A rifle shot, too close to the house.

A moment of silence followed, like the silence after a thunder-clap. Then they heard the screaming begin.

It was a Springfield “thirty-caliber” rifle Revere had given him. With a gleaming wooden stock, and most of the long barrel was wood, with polished metal at the tip. The trigger was like a hook, shaped to fit your finger. Swan had stared at the rifle shocked by its size and frightened of it but Revere had said, an edge of annoyance in his voice, that he was old enough, it was time.

He'd made himself smile, as he did when Clara was watching. He'd murmured
Thank you, Pa
as he knew he should.

He would remember afterward: that was the first false thing.

So many false things, he gave up counting. He hadn't enough fingers on both his hands. Hadn't enough toes! When he'd been smaller, a little boy, he and Clara could giggle over such things, counting fingers and toes. But he wasn't a little boy any longer.

Here was a false thing: the way he had to follow Robert along the tramped-down path through the back field and the birchwoods that he'd walked countless times, as if Robert alone knew the way. As if Robert was Clark, or Jonathan. Or Revere himself. Bossy, important. Commanding Swan over his shoulder, “C'mon. This way. And keep your eyes open.”

Swan did as Robert said. For here he was
hunting.
Carrying his heavy rifle the way Robert carried his, barrel slanted toward the ground. As Revere had taught them.

Hunting:
it was playing at being a man, mostly.
Hunting
was what men did, older boys and men. Swan tried to think that this was something
he wanted, this was good; Clara was always pleased, when one of his brothers invited him to come along with them, or even spoke kindly to him.

Little bastard. Pisspot. Mamma's baby Swan-Swan
were words of Jonathan's muttered out of the side of his mouth that Clara did not hear. Swan tried not to hear them, either.

Now Robert was saying, in an undertone, “C'mon, Steve! You're so damn slow, I'm gonna piss my pants.” It was a senseless remark, like most remarks uttered by the boys. Yet you had to smile, sometimes you had to laugh. It was what you did.

Robert was keeping up a fast pace, it seemed just to make Swan stumble. If Clark and Jonathan had been there, Robert would have fallen behind, too. It was all a game, Swan hated it. It was boring. But it was dangerous, too. He dreaded the rifle going off. Robert could raise his rifle barrel at any time, and shoot. Revere had said that no firearm ever caused injury to any hunter, only careless
huntsmanship.
Swan shaped that word with his mouth, cautiously:
huntsmanship.
You walked with the barrel lowered, and your head raised. A hunter is always alert. A hunter doesn't talk any more than he needs to talk. A hunter keeps his eyes open.

Revere had taken Swan out target shooting three times. He'd never taken Swan hunting for he had no time now for hunting, he said with regret. Revere had positioned the rifle in Swan's arms, the stock against Swan's thin shoulder. The barrel was so heavy, Swan had trouble keeping it erect. And the stock against his shoulder was loose. Revere warned him only once that the kick would “hurt like hell” if the stock wasn't snug against his shoulder but he had not repeated the warning and so when Swan pulled the trigger, the recoil felt like a horse's kick, making him cry out in pain.

Revere had said, See what I told you, son.

For there was never anything that Revere told Swan that was not crucial for him to know. Even if Revere told Swan only just once.

How to position the rifle, and how to sight along the barrel, through the scope; how to bring his trembling finger against the trigger; how to breathe, in and out and in and out and on the expulsion of breath to press the trigger.

Press, not jerk.

And don't shut your eyes.

“Steven. Open your eyes.”

That was childish behavior, shutting your eyes. Stupid behavior. Swan knew, and was ashamed.

Hours of tramping in the back fields, in the woods. In the marshy soil by the creek. Gnats had gathered on Swan's sticky face, his eyelids and lips. He was out of breath, trying to keep up with Robert. “C'mon! There's some damn old vultures by the creek,” Robert was saying, over his shoulder to Swan, crouched, like the two were in a war movie, “I like to puked seeing them picking apart I guess it was a raccoon or something, that'd died, a few days ago.”