Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page A

public defender. He liked Nadeau because the guy was raising his boys pretty much on his own since his wife had left him. The man had offered to take him deer hunting at his family’s camp this November—help him track and kill a 250-pounder, perhaps—and John had readily agreed. Nadeau liked him, too, and respected what he did as a lawyer: He wouldn’t mind that John was a complete moron in the woods and was still learning to hold a rifle and hunt. Nadeau had even told him about a friend of his in Essex Junction, a gunsmith, who would be able to remove the bullet—cartridge, to be precise—that seemed to be stuck in the chamber of John’s rifle. It had been there since last November, since the last day of John’s first hunting season. Periodically he’d tried to extract it since then, retrieving the gun from the locked cabinet in the guest bedroom and cycling the bolt over and over, but the bullet had never popped out. His older friend, the justice Howard Mansfield, had suggested he simply shove a ramrod down the barrel and force the live round from the chamber, but there was no way in the world John was going to try that little maneuver. That was exactly how newcomers to the sport—especially newcomer flatlanders—blew off their fingers or hands. He’d considered simply driving to the edge of the forest and discharging the weapon into the sky, but he feared that perhaps whatever was causing the bullet to lodge in the chamber would prevent it from leaving the barrel as well. The thing just might explode in his face. He understood he’d have to deal with the bullet before hunting season, but since he only used the rifle during those two weeks in November he hadn’t seriously focused on the problem until Nadeau suggested his buddy, the gunsmith.
    He sighed now so loudly at the reality that Dickie Ames had spent the night behind bars that Patrick turned his little boy eyes on his father’s face. At least, John told himself, he wasn’t Dickie Ames’s lawyer, and he took some comfort in this.
    “Anything else I should know about?” he asked Sally. “Sara and I were about to leave.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Well, thank you.”
    “I guess you didn’t need to know about Dickie Ames. I guess it could have waited.”
    “No, you were right to call. I appreciate it.”
    “Tell you what: For the rest of today I’ll only call you if I have good news.”
    “You have the number at my mother’s house, right? The cell phone never works over there.”
    “I do.”
    He thanked her once again, pulled his nose from between Patrick’s viselike fingers, and then continued on his way to the bathroom on the first floor of the house. After he had changed his son’s diaper, he decided, he would toss the gun bag with his Adirondack rifle into the trunk of the car. On Monday they would be driving through Essex Junction on their way home from his mother’s, and he could drop the weapon off with that gunsmith.
     
    JOHN’S WIFE, SARA, hadn’t spoken to Catherine and Spencer since Memorial Day Weekend, when they had all met at the Seton summer home to plant the vegetable garden, the cutting garden, and the beds and beds of berries: strawberries in a western field, blueberries along the house’s southern foundation, and raspberries to the east. John and his sister, Catherine, seemed to speak weekly, however, and the two siblings spoke at least that often with their mother.
    At first Sara had taken it as a compliment that she was allowed to call the family matriarch Nan while Spencer, Catherine’s husband, had to call her Mrs. Seton. It was almost comic: Spencer had known the woman since he was eighteen, and still he was required to address her with Victorian courtesy and old-money solemnity. He and her husband each received Valentine’s cards from Nan in February, and even after all these years the one to Spencer was signed “Sincerely, Mrs. Seton.” It was only after she and John had been married for a couple of