I had one last unwelcome visitor that day. A state trooper arrived to complete the investigation into Peter’s death. My father appeared at my door:
“You should know that he died in the ambulance and that he never recovered consciousness. That means he didn’t suffer.” He asked me to come down to his office. It was part of a three-room complex at the back of the house that included a waiting room and a small examining room. The office was an interior room. Its only light came from a brass table lamp with a green glass shade that cast a small pool at its base. As we entered the shadowy room, my father moved to a place in a corner, where he stood without saying anything. The trooper was seated awkwardly at my father’s desk, which was far too small for him. Even his hat was outsized and out of place, flopped down on the desktop like a giant, brooding spider. The trooper was a young man with a blond crew cut and an open, beefy face. He was awkward and embarrassed, and except for a brief glance when I first entered and sat down, he never looked at me again. Instead, he sat with his forehead propped on one hand and his face bowed over the forms. He looked like a schoolkid unsure of his handwriting and so concentrating entirely on the act of moving his pen across the paper.
“What happened, son?”
“I don’t know.”
When I said this, it seemed as close to the truth as I could come, but I wasn’t going to be allowed to stop there.
“Start at the beginning. How did it happen?”
“We were hunting.”
“Who is we?”
I sat hunched in the chair by the desk. My eyes kept blurring. The neat row of bullets wedged into their individual loops on his gunbelt became a centipede crawling across his belly. The mahogany swivel chair he sat in had belonged to my father’s father, a man who died when I was a baby. There was a brass plaque mounted on its back that said it was the chair he’d sat in when he served as superintendent of prisons for New York State from 1915 to 1919. Now it seemed to foretell my own fate as I stared at the trooper’s handcuffs dangling over the edge of the seat.
“Tell me what happened, son.”
He was here to investigate and file a report on Peter’s death—to me, Peter’s murder. He was here to investigate a crime that I had committed. All afternoon I had struggled to believe that what had happened had not happened, could not happen, was too horrible to have happened. Every time I had closed my eyes I had seen Peter’s body on the ground, had felt the rifle in my hands. That moment had stopped forever, frozen in my brain. But that suspended moment seemed a private horror. Now this trooper, who represented society and the world of other people, was asking me to publicly acknowledge with my own words that it had happened. He was asking me to confess, to admit to the whole world that I had done the inconceivable: I had killed my own brother.
For the first time I saw that I was trapped forever. Once I had spoken the words of the narrative that linked me to my brother’s death, once they had been written down in an official report, my guilt and shame would be absolute and ineradicable. I had destroyed my family with my careless act, and now I would stand before the world and my monstrosity would be revealed by my own words. I wanted to be silent, to never speak again, just as I wanted to hide in my room forever. But this trooper, with his embarrassed patience, was forcing me to say the words that would make Peter’s death real to everyone.
“Try again, son. I know it’s not easy. What do you remember?”
“We were hunting. We shot a deer …”
Each word I spoke was innocent. Each sentence seemed harmless in itself. Yet each one moved me closer to my brother’s corpse and there was no escape. If I could lie! If I could shout: “It wasn’t loaded! My gun was empty!” or “I didn’t pull the trigger. It must have been someone else.” Would that have saved me? Or if I said nothing at all? If I simply sat there in silence and refused to speak, would someone else have been blamed?
No, I was going to be destroyed for my crime. Revenge was swift and self-inflicted. I would convict myself with my own words. There would be no trial, no need for a trial: here was judge and jury, here was my father who stood for our family, and the trooper who stood for the world outside my family—our neighbors, the town, the county, all those who had a right to know a monster lived among them.
And so I spoke the words of my story, confused as it was. I was sick to my stomach with the horror of what I had done, and sick, too, with the shame of confessing it aloud, and with fear of the punishment that must follow.
4
Meanings
It’s not possible to live in a world without meaning. Or at least I don’t think I could. I know that as a twelve-year-old child I needed meanings to understand my life. But all the meanings, all the childish understandings of life that had sustained me up until that day were suddenly and completely eradicated by Peter’s death. My whole understanding of the world, my whole sense that the world was understandable, vanished in the immediate aftermath of this catastrophe. I know my father carried Peter’s body out of the field, that it was placed in an ambulance and taken to the hospital and from there to the funeral home. But to me, his body was still in the field. Whenever I closed my eyes that day, I saw his body lying there. In this vision seared into my brain, my rifle no longer lay beside him and I was standing farther back, in a shadowy place about six feet away from where he was curled up on his side. But I was powerless to stop staring at his small form, to break my gaze from the magnetic hold of it where he lay as if asleep on the preternaturally green grass of that field. And I knew without looking up that the surrounding woods had vanished, that the hill and our distant house no longer existed. I knew that everything else in the world had been obliterated by the stillness of his body.
Could anything have saved me from that sense of absolute desolation on the day of Peter’s death and in the days and years that followed it? I think if someone had held me at some point during that day, it would have helped; it would have given me some animal comfort. I think if a person had been able to break through my shell of terror and shame and had spoken to me out of their own human brokenness and confusion, it would have helped. I felt as if I were in free fall through the Void. I needed arms to catch me. I needed some voice to tell me I was not alone. I needed my parents to be there with me to save me from the accusing voices in my head that were shouting, “Murderer, murderer!”
But the voices and human presences I yearned for so desperately could not be there when I needed them. My father and mother must each have retreated into their own sense of horror, despair, and guilt. My father must have been remembering how, only a month before, his wife’s parents had visited us on their way south for the winter, and my grandfather, a combat veteran of World War I who had himself seen horror and breathed poison gas in the shattered forests of the Argonne, had taken him aside and said: “Jim, you can’t have all these guns loose around the house with all these kids. Someone is going to get hurt.” And my mother must have remembered again and again saying to my father that morning: “Jim, maybe they could go just this one time.” Both of them must immediately have thought of the strange parallel event from my father’s childhood. And there were other family tragedies that I didn’t and couldn’t know about then. It’s no wonder my parents weren’t able to be near me that day. I know my mother tried, but perhaps she was too stunned herself; what she did manage to say only confused me more and deepened my despair. Yes, I begged people to leave me alone that day, but when they did it denied me that most basic sustaining force: the warmth of being wrapped in human arms, of someone speaking to me—not coherent words perhaps, but just the soothing repetitions of sound, the “there, there” with which a child is calmed who has woken from a nightmare. But for me, from that moment, the world was nightmare and there was no waking from it.
Peter’s death wiped out all the easy meanings I had lived by until that day,