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, as if a giant hand swept the counters and dice of a child’s game off the board. But this hand, with its single swipe, wiped the board itself clean of its orderly squares and all that was on them—the chutes and ladders, the neat lettering on certain squares inviting you to roll again, the reassuring declarations of “start” and “finish.” All this was wiped out by the single movement of the giant hand and the board itself was now a terrifying blank square. What now? How was I to orient myself on a board as bare and empty as an Arctic ice floe? What meaning was strong enough to set against this sinister glare, blank and blind as an eye glazed over with cataract?
God, Bethany’s God, was not believable to me—this God who was already setting a place for Peter at his heavenly feast table before my brother’s body was even buried in this world. Such an instant and naive solution to suffering seemed repellent and unreal. Even if I could have imagined it before Peter’s death, now that I had been a part of this horror, I couldn’t believe in anything as simple as this God who was portrayed as a smiling dinner host. Still, Bethany had also spoken of another aspect of her God—that he knew and understood everything and he had a plan into which even Peter’s death fit. This plan, Bethany implied, was benevolent and purposeful in a way we mortals couldn’t, because of our limits, comprehend, something grand and sacred that only a god could grasp.
If there was no plan, if the game board really had become irrevocably blank, then I had nothing to hold on to but that single, other word people had used to explain what happened: “accident.” If there was no plan, then maybe the god who ruled this world was named Accident, a god who joyed in randomness, who ripped apart lives for no reason, who swallowed stars and toyed with the Void.
But this was an insupportable idea. How could I live in a world where everything was random, where Accident ruled and where one day I might wake to sunshine and blue sky, and another, find my own brother dead at my feet? Accident. Unbearable word, unbearable world.
And so I came back to Bethany’s God. But maybe her God was different than she, in her naive goodness, believed. Maybe he wasn’t merely a designer of obscurely comprehended but benevolent plans—no, but a God even more inscrutable, with a penchant for making sinister, incomprehensible patterns. Patterns like this: I killed Peter with a gun, just as my father, years before, when he was my age, had also killed an unknown someone with a gun.
If not for a god, a strange and dangerous god, how could anyone explain a repetition as bizarre as this? My father and then myself—each performing the same, almost unimaginable deed. Here was a chilling and compelling pattern right before my eyes. I might not believe God could lift Peter out of the morgue to dine at his celestial banquet, but how could I doubt that this violent coincidence was full of meaning? And wasn’t that what I wanted and desperately needed that day of Peter’s death: a world where meaning existed?
I decided that there must be a God who had willed this pattern, and that for some reason he had turned his other face toward me: his merciless aspect, riven with mysterious shadows. I had a choice: I could try to live without meaning, or I could bow before this God. I bowed.
5
Child Mind
I don’t know how adult minds arrive at meanings. I don’t know what they need, or how they figure things out. But here are two stories about children and how they think. When my wife, as a child, first heard the opening phrase of the prayer “Our Father who art in Heaven,” she imagined a bearded man wearing a smock and a beret, holding a paintbrush in one hand, a palette in the other, and standing before an easel. And why not? Here was a Creator God. Here is the figure who might well have painted the bright primary arc of the rainbow as a symbol of his good intentions toward his people. I’m not surprised my wife became a painter.
The other story about how children think isn’t so charming and benign. I heard it from my younger brother, Jonathan, only recently, when he learned I was writing this book. It was a story he had never told anyone except his wife in all the time since the accident. The week of Peter’s death, Jonathan was scheduled to have a math test that he knew he couldn’t possibly pass. That Sunday evening, before he climbed into bed, he prayed to God: “God, if you just get me out of this math test, I will never ask you for anything else again. Just help me this once, please.” We didn’t go to school that week after the accident, and when we finally did, Jon’s math test was long forgotten.
As Jon sat in his room, as he watched neighbors enter to dismantle Peter’s
