so often resulted when Mom entered into our childish bickering with her reasonable justice that tended toward compassion for the weaker party. Bill and I had no choice but to start whining ourselves, as if we were the more righteous and injured. But Dad cut it all short from the stairs: “OK, they can go. But everyone pipe down. And the two of you—get dressed pronto.”
They whooped their way up the stairs, while Bill and I muttered and shared one of our rare moments of communion and agreement: the kids, we were certain, were bound to ruin the trip. With them along, we might as well invite Mom, too, and even Nancy, who was only four. Why not bring the dog and the cats, too? Why not have a picnic?
It had been a clear night and was still dark as the five of us started our march along the dirt road and then out over the frosted field grass that made a crunching sound underfoot. To keep my ears from the bitter cold, I’d pulled my hood down so that I had no more than a small, fur-bordered porthole through which to view the world. I kept my eyes on Dad’s boots silhouetted in his wavering flashlight beam and tried my best to ignore the frigid air that fit like a thin mask of ice over the exposed parts of my face.
A faint gray light was just seeping up from the eastern horizon as we arrived at our trench. Our whole group paused there as Bill, Dad, and I removed our gloves and each loaded a single shell into his rifle. My hands trembled with cold and excitement as I slid the hollow-point bullet into the chamber of my .22 and clicked on the safety catch that would prevent any accidental firing until I was ready to shoot. We set the rifles on the ground beside us and began the awkward clambering down into our hillside excavation that had been dug by two somewhat lazy workers to hold three and was now being asked to accommodate five. It did so somehow and packed us in so tight that what we lost in mobility we gained in body heat.
Now, all was silence broken only by whispers and the occasional distant caw of crows. As the gray light grew, I watched the frost flowers scattered across the dirt mound a few inches from my face melt like the stars going out overhead. I watched my breath rise up in wisps like the mist off the dew-drenched reeds. I waited as patiently as I could. And then we saw it: a deer slowly working its way along the trail through the powerline swamp and out into the field below us, where it paused to browse the short grass. An antlered buck! Dad whispered that Bill would shoot first. This order, if a whispered statement could be called an order, stunned me. What could he possibly mean? Was this another one of those “you’ll have your chance when you’re older” routines? Did he mean that if Bill missed, I could shoot? Or did he imagine that our luck would be so extraordinary that if Bill killed this deer, a second one would appear this same morning? Surely he couldn’t imagine that I would wait for another day. There was no time to explain to Dad how wrongheaded he was being. No time to tell him I had to take part, that it would be impossible for me not to shoot at this deer, too. As Bill put his rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the deer, I, too, lifted my .22 with the one bullet in the chamber and sighted along the barrel. And when Bill fired, I fired, too, at the exact same instant, so that our two rifles made a single harsh sound that echoed off the woods as the deer collapsed in the green field.
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
