Read Online Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Chris Bohjalian
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Grandmother said. “I had a golf lesson this morning, but all we did was stand around with our putters. Boring.”
“Honey, do you want to join us?” her father asked her mother. “Willow, you wouldn’t mind watching Patrick, would you?”
She thought her parents were taking the news about the garden pretty well, and she felt another surge of that affection she’d experienced when she’d been preparing flower arrangements for their bedroom that morning and when she’d turned around at the pool and seen them approaching.
“Nope,” she said, pulling Patrick away from the strap of her Speedo and kissing him once on his nose. The baby gurgled and sighed. She realized, much to her surprise, how happy she was to see him, too.
Five
S pencer McCullough had been watching the lakes with their impenetrable Native American names—Winnipesaukee, Sunapee, Squam—outside his plane window for almost ten minutes now, and so he knew they’d be on the ground any moment. Even in a fifteen-seat puddle jumper, the Friday afternoon flight from LaGuardia to West Lebanon was barely an hour. He glanced across the aisle at Catherine, saw she was focused on an article in her magazine, and turned back to the window. He thought of the garden. It wasn’t its size that excited him: Anyone with enough time on his hands could plant a third of an acre of carrots or beets or squash. It was the garden’s variety. Granted, he had appeased his mother-in-law and Sara and John—who, because they lived in Vermont, presumed they knew more than he did about growing vegetables in the faux tundra of northern New Hampshire—by planting rows and rows of the basics. But there were also yards of surprises interspersed in the dirt and clay, and he couldn’t wait to see them. White icicle radishes. Kohlrabi. The arugula and the endive that he understood his daughter, his niece, and his mother-in-law already were eating and the blue Hubbard squash that by the fall would look like the pods from which aliens always seemed to spring in the camp horror films of the 1950s.
He could never, of course, have a vegetable garden on West Eighty-fifth Street. They lived on the ninth floor of a building full of co-op apartments.
Even when they had lived in Connecticut in the first years after Charlotte had been born, however—their postpartum foray into suburbia—he couldn’t have had a garden like this. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been the time when he was home or that they hadn’t had the space—though that was more limited in the suburbs than it was in northern New Hampshire. It was the deer. Those beautiful animals with their big dark eyes, their white plumelike tails, and their ridiculous Vulcan-like ears. He had tried three times in the four years they had lived in Long Ridge to have a vegetable garden, and each time the deer had devoured it. Eaten whatever they wanted, despite his attempts to deter them. Eaten the lettuce, despite the tobacco-tea—chewing tobacco in water, really—that he had sprinkled on the grass that bordered the garden. Eaten the flowers on the string beans, despite the garlic and Tabasco concoction he had doused on the plants themselves (a remedy that proved as bad as the ailment, since the smell had made the few plants the deer hadn’t bothered to gobble completely inedible). Eaten the peas and the beet greens despite the old bathwater. The deer had ignored the mothballs he put in his yard (the nuclear option, in his mind, since mothballs contained naphthalene), and the myriad animal urines—bobcat, wolf, his own—that he showered along the perimeter. Alas, nothing could dissuade the deer that wandered contentedly in the night through those suburban backyards from eating whatever they wanted.
But, then, what did he expect? Sometimes he would ask himself if he honestly believed that he could outsmart an animal so perfect in terms of its evolution that its bone structure hadn’t changed in four million years. A mammal
“Honey, do you want to join us?” her father asked her mother. “Willow, you wouldn’t mind watching Patrick, would you?”
She thought her parents were taking the news about the garden pretty well, and she felt another surge of that affection she’d experienced when she’d been preparing flower arrangements for their bedroom that morning and when she’d turned around at the pool and seen them approaching.
“Nope,” she said, pulling Patrick away from the strap of her Speedo and kissing him once on his nose. The baby gurgled and sighed. She realized, much to her surprise, how happy she was to see him, too.
Five
S pencer McCullough had been watching the lakes with their impenetrable Native American names—Winnipesaukee, Sunapee, Squam—outside his plane window for almost ten minutes now, and so he knew they’d be on the ground any moment. Even in a fifteen-seat puddle jumper, the Friday afternoon flight from LaGuardia to West Lebanon was barely an hour. He glanced across the aisle at Catherine, saw she was focused on an article in her magazine, and turned back to the window. He thought of the garden. It wasn’t its size that excited him: Anyone with enough time on his hands could plant a third of an acre of carrots or beets or squash. It was the garden’s variety. Granted, he had appeased his mother-in-law and Sara and John—who, because they lived in Vermont, presumed they knew more than he did about growing vegetables in the faux tundra of northern New Hampshire—by planting rows and rows of the basics. But there were also yards of surprises interspersed in the dirt and clay, and he couldn’t wait to see them. White icicle radishes. Kohlrabi. The arugula and the endive that he understood his daughter, his niece, and his mother-in-law already were eating and the blue Hubbard squash that by the fall would look like the pods from which aliens always seemed to spring in the camp horror films of the 1950s.
He could never, of course, have a vegetable garden on West Eighty-fifth Street. They lived on the ninth floor of a building full of co-op apartments.
Even when they had lived in Connecticut in the first years after Charlotte had been born, however—their postpartum foray into suburbia—he couldn’t have had a garden like this. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been the time when he was home or that they hadn’t had the space—though that was more limited in the suburbs than it was in northern New Hampshire. It was the deer. Those beautiful animals with their big dark eyes, their white plumelike tails, and their ridiculous Vulcan-like ears. He had tried three times in the four years they had lived in Long Ridge to have a vegetable garden, and each time the deer had devoured it. Eaten whatever they wanted, despite his attempts to deter them. Eaten the lettuce, despite the tobacco-tea—chewing tobacco in water, really—that he had sprinkled on the grass that bordered the garden. Eaten the flowers on the string beans, despite the garlic and Tabasco concoction he had doused on the plants themselves (a remedy that proved as bad as the ailment, since the smell had made the few plants the deer hadn’t bothered to gobble completely inedible). Eaten the peas and the beet greens despite the old bathwater. The deer had ignored the mothballs he put in his yard (the nuclear option, in his mind, since mothballs contained naphthalene), and the myriad animal urines—bobcat, wolf, his own—that he showered along the perimeter. Alas, nothing could dissuade the deer that wandered contentedly in the night through those suburban backyards from eating whatever they wanted.
But, then, what did he expect? Sometimes he would ask himself if he honestly believed that he could outsmart an animal so perfect in terms of its evolution that its bone structure hadn’t changed in four million years. A mammal
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