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PROLOGUE
That night while they slept the heavy clouds from the west crossed the mountains and into Eden, and with them came the rain, a cold, driving rain that fell in sheets and rattled the twelve-pane windows in the bedroom the two brothers shared in the old farmhouse. Charlie slept fitfully. At one point the rain was falling so hard it woke him, and he rose up on his elbows and watched it streaming down the windows and the light outside was gray and subdued with dawn. He was able to fall back asleep but he tossed and turned and sometime that morning he woke suddenly, sensing his mother before he even heard her, before she opened the door to their room, and then she was there and he knew from the look on her face that something was wrong, that something was terribly wrong.
“Mom,” he said, “what is it?”
“It’s your father, Charlie. He went into the woods.”
Charlie sat up, rubbed his eyes; ran a hand through his hair. “So?”
“He had a gun.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Hunting season is two months away, Charlie. I’m worried he might—“
Charlie stood quickly and he felt lightheaded. “I’ll get him,” he said and by now their voices had woken Owen and he was looking at them with the slight daze of sleep.
“What’s up?” Owen said.
“Get dressed,” said Charlie.
“What’s going on?”
“Just get dressed. Hurry.”
Charlotte left the room and Charlie heard her footsteps going down the stairs. He slipped on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and outside he could see that it was still raining, though not with the fury it had during the night. Owen climbed out of bed and followed Charlie’s lead, sliding into his jeans, pulling a shirt over his head.
“It’s pouring out,” Owen said.
“I know,” said Charlie. “Let’s go.”
“What is this?”
“It’s Dad,” he said. “He took his rifle into the woods.”
Owen caught the look in Charlie’s eyes and he did not ask anything further. A few minutes later they were out the front door, the screen slapping shut behind them, their mother moving out of the kitchen to watch them go, two boys cutting across the wet pasture on a gray, rainy fall day to find their father in the woods.
They were children of Eden and they knew these forests and hills even better than their father did. He had been taking the two of them deer hunting since they were old enough to shoot a gun. Charlie got his first spikehorn when he was eight, Owen a year later. He still remembered seeing the deer from the stand they had built, how it stood between the trees, how beautiful it was, how his father told him when to pull the trigger, how the animal collapsed to the forest floor when he did. He remembered how he cried when he stood over the carcass, the life having already seeped out of it. How his father lighted a cigarette at that moment and put his hand on the back of his neck, told him it was good to cry, it showed he respected the killing. And he remembered how he felt better when the venison was on the menu at their restaurant and his father proudly told anyone who would listen that it was Charlie’s venison.
Now, Owen entered the forest of tamarack, spruce and maple first, at the only clear opening, an overgrown logging road. The boys did not speak, they figured their father would most likely have gone to the stand; it was the only logical destination. They went as fast as they could, a half-run down the old logging road, stopping to climb over fallen trees. The road was narrow and led them away from the house and around the side of the ridge. The tree cover was heavy here and they could no longer feel the rain though their shirts were soaked through from the run across the wet field.
Soon the makeshift road came to an end and in front of them was the thick forest, sloping sharply away from them, some hills visible through the trees, some partially obscured by a rising mist. Their experienced eyes picked up the deer run that started to their right, little more than a break between trees, wide enough for one man to pass through. They took this and it was narrow and the forest fell away steeply on their left and the going was slow. The run led them along the spine of the hill and they knew that shortly it would intersect with another, wider run that would lead them to the stand in the large oak. They had both seen the footprints in the wet mud beneath their feet; sloshing footprints from their father’s boots, though it was hard to tell how long ago he had made them.
Soon they hit a stretch where they could move quicker, the run widening a bit, when they heard it. A sound like no other, a sound they knew intimately. Its report echoed off the hills and back to them and Charlie said, “Fuck,” and they began to run as fast as they could, recklessly moving downhill, their hands in front of them in case they tumbled.
They reached the intersection of the larger run and they could sprint here, side by side, their breath coming hard and fast as they went. When they reached the small clearing where the stand was, they saw it, the stand, but there was no sign of their father. They stood breathing heavily next to the tree, and with no canopy above them now the soft cool rain soaked their hair.
Charlie scanned the small meadow with his eyes and then he saw his father, and in the half-second he looked over at his brother, he knew he had seen him too. He was directly across from them, slumped against a tree on the ground.
“Oh, Jesus,” Owen said.
When they reached him, he almost looked normal, as if he had decided to stop and rest. But there was a burnt smell in the air and no amount of rain could conceal the fact that the back half of their father’s head was no longer there. That there was a mass of blood-matted hair and then nothing.
Charlie heard his brother’s sobs and inside him there was a pain like he had never felt before. He sank to his knees. Sank to the muddy ground. There was a ringing in his ears and he became aware of the spinning of the earth beneath him. He wanted nothing more at that moment than to find something to hang on to, something to make it stop.
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