what had taken place, an awful realization dawned on him: God had answered his prayer. God had heard his selfish request and had granted it by killing Peter.
6
Numb
I was numb at the funeral. I remember almost nothing except a white curtain that was drawn to keep us, the family, separate from the rest of the mourners. We sat in a little alcove. I remember the chairs—the same folding metal ones I’d set up or folded countless times in the school gym or at Cub Scouts or in church basements. I don’t remember people, except as a kind of whispering around me. And where was I? I was deep in a desert wilderness as desolate as that inhabited by those early, God-tormented Christian saints who lived their whole lives alone on top of stone columns. Only I wasn’t on top of the column, I was embedded inside it, as if it were a shaft of pure shame transparent as Lucite, and I was immobilized inside it, like an insect or some unusual beetle. I heard people whispering around me like the desert breeze around the pillar, but I couldn’t move or look up, and so as far as I could tell no one was there.
The grave site was a two-hour drive from our town—across the Hudson and north into the Helderberg Hills southwest of Albany, where we had lived when I was first born. As we drove home, in the dark, I felt my faith in the devouring God grow stronger. I saw that Death, his angel, was everywhere, that it had entered our lives and I had opened the door to welcome it. I saw that it could enter in the spectacular, terrible form of Peter’s violent death, but that it could also insinuate itself in minor ways, in numberless tiny shapes you might not even notice until they had worked their way toward a beating heart in order to still it. Sitting in the dark in the back seat during that long drive, I saw that death was with us. It was the small white snail of wadded Kleenex my mother kept pressing against her face; it was nibbling holes in her cheek as if it were a leaf. I saw that death was the moonlight’s patch of blue mold growing on my father’s shoulder as he drove, oblivious, through the deep night.
When I tried to sleep that night and for years after, I could only do so if I began in one position: flat on my back with my arms crossed on my chest and my legs hooked over each other at the ankles. Lying like that in the dark room, in the pose of a mummy in an Egyptian sarcophagus, I calmed myself toward sleep. I imagined I was both the body inside, immobilized by its wrapping of thin linen strips, and the wooden case itself, painted with the expressionless face and figure of its dead occupant. I was afraid of my thoughts and afraid of the dark. I needed a double magic of rigidity to brace me against the violent storms of my dreams.
7
The Field
In my dream, I heard God’s voice demanding, “What have you done with your brother?” His question was like a fiery finger poking a hole through my chest, through my life. I saw the Bible they’d given me years ago in my first Sunday school, with its black leatherette cover stamped at the top in large gold letters “Holy Bible” and at the bottom “Gregory Orr” in a tiny font. A slow-motion bullet approached the book from behind and struck the back cover dead center, entering it in a ragged hole but not emerging on the other side. Now the book was a black wall I was facing and the bullet hole had become the entrance to a cave. I walked through the tunnel, listening to whispers from the tissue-thin pages that had been torn to incoherence. I could feel that the book’s later meanings had been destroyed by the bullet, especially those that offered hope and redemption. It had penetrated all the way to the earliest pages and now I had to follow its path. I walked for hours through darkness. The whispering disappeared. I saw nothing and heard only the sound of my own breathing. Then far ahead there was a dim red glow that grew brighter as I approached, and suddenly, I was standing in a hollow space stained with ancient blood. I heard again our horrified screams as my gun fired, and I saw Cain standing above his brother, Abel, bleeding to death in a field.
8
Cain Continuing
Frightening as my dream of Cain was, it offered me hope by offering me the shelter of a story. And stories are where human meanings begin. If I were Cain, I knew who I was and where I was situated in the universe. I was the one who had slain his brother. I was the one God was angry at. But he would not kill me. The story didn’t go in that direction. Instead, he would drive me alone into the wilderness. And wasn’t that how I felt? Isolated, alone. Shunned by people. Townspeople and my fellow students were, like my parents, afraid to speak to me. They probably felt sorry for me, but I didn’t know that. I thought they were afraid of me, because they saw my brother’s blood on my hands, sensed the uncanniness of Cain—that he was picked out by God to commit a terrible crime. I felt abandoned by my parents, but no one harmed me. Even the trooper had not arrested me. It was as if I wore the mark of Cain. It was a worse punishment for Cain to live than it would have been for him to die: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.”
“And Cain said unto the Lord, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear.’” But God would not let Cain die and he would not let anyone punish me. He knew that my own self-hatred was a far more terrible punishment.
Like Cain, I would be allowed to live and to live in a world of meaning, though it was a meaning that filled me with despair. The story of Cain satisfied my childish needs by placing me at the center of a story. I was a child and believed that the world, if it made sense at all, made sense with me as the central character.
I didn’t know that other people were making up other stories to explain Peter’s death. In my child’s egoism, I couldn’t realize my parents had lives and fates of their own, distinct from mine. It never occurred to me that they might believe that their own actions had brought them to this place.
PART TWO
9
Alcove
Dashing, spontaneous, irrepressible, my father, James Wendell Orr, must have swept my mother off her feet when they first met. He was darkly handsome, with thick black hair, dense eyebrows, and an open, grinning face. Everything about his manner said that life was fun in a wild kind of way and should be enjoyed. Coming from her pinch-faced, teetotaling New England background, my mother couldn’t possibly have ever seen anyone like him before. Grammie Howe, my mother’s mother, hated him from the start, which may have made him only that much more irresistible to my mother. Within months of their meeting, my parents were married.
My father’s father had begun as a homeless newsboy on the streets of Detroit and risen to become city editor of the New-York Tribune and later, secretary to the governor of New York. My own father had grown up as the spoiled youngest child of his rich Yonkers family.
Somewhere in the story of my father’s privileged childhood something is missing: Is it a simple bump in the road, or a secret point on which his whole life pivoted? Somewhere in his early adolescence is his own story of responsibility for the sudden death of a loved one. It is not a story he has ever told to anyone I know. Not a single word about it has ever passed between him and me in all these years. My mother spoke her single, cryptic sentence about it to me the day of Peter’s death, and then she, too, would never mention it again. I could tell from the way she spoke that it was a dark and shameful secret. And yet, now I do know something about it; I even know the victim’s name. Six years ago, I called my father’s older sister, a woman I knew as Aunt Doe. She and my father hadn’t talked in forty years, though I didn’t know why.
“Aunt Doe,” I said, “this is your nephew Greg. If you don’t mind, I need to ask you an odd question.”
“Well, go ahead.”
“When
