my children’s happiness, to go to bed with her, and even now it was a pleasant prospect. But, damn my eyes, I saw a black hump sticking up from the curved euonymus hedge, whose top was crusted with hardened snow. The black shadow moved—changed shape like an amoeba in the dirty water of the dark, or like some ectoplasmic visitation from a former inhabitant of our venerable house. “Honey, he’s eating the hedge,” I said softly.
My wife screamed, “He is! Do something! Damn you, don’t just stand there smiling!”
How could she know I was smiling? The living room was as dark as the front lawn with its ghostly herbivore.
“I’m calling the Pientas! It’s not too late! It’s not even eight-thirty! I’m going to borrow Charlie’s gun! We’ve got to do something, and you won’t do anything!”
The Pientas live fifteen minutes away. Louise is a Garden Club friend of Gloria’s; Charlie has that Old World-peasant mentality which loves the American right to bear arms. He owns several shotguns, for ducks mostly, and my wife, having hurled herself and her teal-blue Japanese station wagon into the dark, brought one of Charlie’s guns back with her, with a cardboard box half full of ammunition. The church bell down in the village was tolling nine. “I’ll prop it right here behind the armchair,” she said, “and we’ll keep the bullets—”
“Shells.”
“—shells on the bench in the upstairs hall. Charlie does that to keep children from putting them together.”
We were in too jangled a mood to attempt love; we read instead, and then kept waking each other up, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Though she is younger, her bladder is graciously weakening along with mine. It was still dark when she woke me in a voice between a tender sexual whisper and the whimper of a terrified child. “Ben! He’s eating the euonymus again! Hurry! I’ve assembled your socks and boots and overcoat.”
I had been dreaming of photographs, of life-moments that were photographs and had been placed in a marketing brochure for a mutual fund that called for them to be reduced to the size of postage stamps, though they were in full color. I couldn’t quite make them out. My children by my former marriage? Their children? I was a grandfather ten times over. I wondered about the printing costs and determined to report my reservations to Firman Frothingham, the one of my colleagues at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise given to such unseemly wooing of the general public. As Gloria insistently woke me I realized, with a twist in my stomach, that I was retired and this brochure was not my problem. I said, hoping to smuggle out my truth-telling wrapped in a blanket of sleepiness, “I don’t want to shoot any fucking deer.”
“Not shoot him,” she pleaded, “shoot over his head, so he gets the idea we hate him. Oh please, darling, hurry!”
She rarely asked anything so heartfelt of me, not since we had managed, twenty years ago, amid many social impedimenta, to marry. With much of me still immersed in my warm, puzzling dream, I found myself outdoors in the predawn murk, holding the shotgun, which I had with difficulty, drawing upon ancient boyhood memories, broken open and loaded with a Remington shell.
But by the time I got around the house, the front (or back) door opening noisily and the snow crunching at every step, the deer had vanished. A pile of fresh scat made a dark round spot on the snow by the euonymus hedge. Inside the house, her voice pathetically muffled and dwindled by the double glass of window and storm window, my wife was rapping the glass and shouting, “Shoot! Shoot!” It was like the voice of a cartoon mouse in a bell jar. Involuntarily a smile of sadistic pleasure creased my face. The peace of the gray morning— dawn just a sliver of salmon color above the lefthand, eastward side of the sea’s horizon, beneath a leaning moon—was something sacred I didn’t want to mar. And I didn’t want to shock my sleeping neighbors. We own eleven acres but from the house the land stretches in only two directions. The Kellys live just a wedge shot away, on the other side of a wide-branching beech, and the Dunhams a solid three-iron down through the woods toward the railroad tracks, and Mrs. Lubbetts in the other direction, a good drive and then perhaps a five-iron drilled straight toward the sea. I trudged around, willing to