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 ideas were a lollipop she sucked in the dark, or else there was a divine plan, but it was not benevolent. What had my mother meant about my father having killed someone, too? How could my father and I have done the same horrible thing at the same age? Certainly that coincidence represented some mysterious, even supernatural pattern, but who could imagine it being a happy pattern, a pattern that showed there was a God and he cared about us humans?
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.
