Whooping and yelling, the five of us scrambled down the brush-grown slope and raced to where the deer lay dead in the low grass of the field. We stood around it in a loose circle of awe. By now, my father had calmed down.
“Check your chambers,” he said.
At this command, each of us was supposed to point his rifle straight down at the ground and pull the trigger to make sure the gun was empty. If, by some mischance, the bullet had misfired, then the gun would discharge harmlessly into the dirt at our feet. But I was still delirious with glee at what I had accomplished, since it was obvious to me that I, too, not just Bill, had brought down our quarry. I knew my pulling the trigger now would only produce the dull mechanical click of a firing pin in an empty chamber.
I was wrong. In my excitement after the deer fell, I must have clicked the safety off again and now, instead of pointing my rifle barrel at the ground, I casually directed it back over my right shoulder toward the woods and never even looked as I pulled the trigger. And Peter was there, a little behind me, not more than two feet from where I stood. In that instant in which the sound of my gun firing made me startle and look around, Peter was already lying motionless on the ground at my feet. I never saw his face—only his small figure lying there, the hood up over his head, a dark stain of blood already seeping across the fabric toward the fringe of fur riffling in the breeze. I never saw his face again.
I screamed. We were all screaming. I don’t know what the others were screaming, but I was screaming “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to!” My father was yelling that we must run for help. I started off across the field toward the house as fast as I could. I ran straight across the swampy stream that split the field and scrambled up the bank and through the barbed-wire fence. I felt Bill and Jon running behind me. I was trying to get to the house first, as if somehow that could help, but what I had done and seen was racing behind me and I couldn’t outrun it. That’s what I wanted to do: run so fast that I could somehow outrun the horror itself and reach some place where it had never happened, where the world was still innocent of this deed and word of it might never arrive. But I knew that wasn’t possible and that even now I was desperately running toward more horror, toward the moment when I would reach the house and when, no matter how exhausted and out of breath I was, I would still have to tell my mother that I had shot Peter.
I hid in my room, hysterical with horror and terror. I lay on my bed, curled up in a ball, howling and crying. I never saw Dad cross the lawn carrying Peter in his arms. An hour later, dizzy with sobbing, I did get up and go to my window at the sound of the siren and the sight of the pale green ambulance backing up to our front door. I did glimpse the stretcher being slid inside, but Peter’s body was hidden by blankets and the white-coated backs of the ambulance people.
I couldn’t leave my room. I kept returning to the bed and curling up, clutching my pillow and sobbing into it or crying and biting it. I kept my eyes closed as much as I could, as if by doing that I could hide from my family and the horrible new reality I had brought into the world. It was as if I thought that by keeping my eyes shut and staying curled up on my bed, I could cancel out the world and the people around me. But with my eyes closed I kept seeing Peter’s body on the ground and I found myself pleading with my parents in my imagination, begging them to forgive me for what I had done. It was an indescribably painful ordeal, but at least it was taking place inside the privacy of my own mind. I thought I would die if I had to actually look at my parents or anyone in my family. And so I lay in a ball of agony on my bed and hoped no one would enter my room.
But eventually, several hours after the ambulance left, someone did. It was my mother.
“Greg,” she began.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, go away,” I begged.
“Greg, it was an accident. It was a terrible accident. It wasn’t your fault.”
I started sobbing all over again. What she said made no sense. Of course it was my fault. Did she think I was stupid—that I didn’t know what I had done, didn’t know that I had done it? You could say that spilling soda was an accident, but you couldn’t say that killing your brother was an accident. That was something far more horrible than an accident. Nothing in the word “accident” offered me any hope. But what she said next was even worse:
“Something very much like this happened to your father when he was your age.”
“What do you mean?”
“He killed a friend of his in a hunting accident.”
She said it that simply, though it couldn’t have been easy for her to say, any more than it could have been easy for her to visit my room. She had been standing all this time by my desk, about five feet from my bed. Her deep-set eyes were red from her own sobbing, and she stood with her arms crossed on her chest as if she were trying to hold herself together, to keep from bursting apart with grief. She was speaking to me about this strange and awful coincidence, but her voice was numb and distant, as if she were repeating it to herself simply to hear it spoken aloud, to see if it sounded believable. It didn’t. Not to me. That is, it sounded unbelievable and terrible, but this was exactly the world I had now entered with my stupid mistake: the world of the terrible and unbelievable. I had killed my own brother. Why not learn this also—that my father had once killed someone, too? I heard what she said. I wanted to ask what she meant, but I couldn’t speak. I just lay there moaning. She stood for a while by my bed and then she left the room, closing the door behind her.
I had wanted her to hold me, but I couldn’t say that. I had wanted her to forgive me, but I couldn’t ask. I felt as if I had lost her love forever.
Hours later, early in the afternoon, there was a knock on the door of my room. It was Bethany, my father’s receptionist, with a tray of soup. I was so hungry that my hunger overcame my shame, and I sat on the edge of the bed with the tray on my lap, slurping it down but unable to look up or say anything. She must have brought the soup from her home, because it had a taste I didn’t recognize. While I ate, she stood far back by the door and waited.
“This is an awful thing, Greg, but you should know that right now Peter is in heaven with Jesus.”
I stopped eating. I just sat there waiting, unable to believe I had heard her say that. I covered my face with both hands, but I was too exhausted or dehydrated to cry anymore. Still, when I closed my eyes I saw Peter and he was not sitting on Jesus’s lap and gazing up into Christ’s mild countenance as the lamb did in the stained glass window in our church. Instead, Peter was lying facedown on the cold ground in the field. I knew she was only trying to comfort me and to tell me what she believed, but it had the opposite effect. I thought she was crazy. I wanted to say: “What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you see his body? Don’t you know what happened? Don’t you know he’s dead?” I wanted to scream at her: “This isn’t Sunday school! My brother was just killed by a bullet and I fired it. What kind of nonsense are you saying?”
“It may not make sense now,” she continued, “but it’s all part of God’s plan.”
I hadn’t thought much about God, hadn’t yet had much reason to, but when Bethany dredged up out of her rural heart the strongest consolations she could find to set against my obvious suffering and terror, she inadvertently ended forever any hope I had of conventional religious belief. What she said seemed like a simpleminded mockery of what I had seen and done. Maybe if she hadn’t spoken so soon after Peter’s death, I could have found the intended comfort in what she said. Maybe if my mother had held me when she visited, had given me some reassurance that I was not a monster, I would have been more receptive to Bethany’s story of supernatural resurrection and a benevolent though mysterious plan that governed the universe. Instead, I felt rage and despair. Either this was a meaningless and horrible universe and this woman’s