The Poplar boy came over for dinner on Saturday. He was very well-behaved and clean, bringing along some flowers and returning the saucer he’d pickpocketed at Samantha’s birthday party last weekend. The two of them played chess until they fell asleep. His mother did not pick him up—at about quarter to midnight she rang the telephone and apologized for her lateness, but by then I had already set him up in the guest bedroom and tucked him under some florals. The next morning we dressed him in propers and delivered him at church.
Two days later I saw the boy at the grocery store, stuffing Mars bars into his overalls. I wanted to tell him off for stealing, but something about how pathetic it all was me turn a blind eye. I drove him to the creek after where I’m sure he threw all the packaging into the water.
Even now that I do not like to think of him much anymore, I cannot help but believe that he was a good boy.
He was always well-behaved around me, especially at the table. I have never before or after seen a child whose table etiquette was so impeccable. He laid the handkerchief over his lap and sat perfectly straight, making full use of his boyish charm to guide the conversation. Elbows off. He was a natural with the knife and fork, as well, but what was most peculiar is that he had none of the self-consciousness of a boy trying to create an impression: no hint of trying, nor was there any coordination to his manner. The mischief simply rolled off him like butter. His presence was both terribly young and old—fully awed by bars of chocolate and openly gleeful when cutting through cherry pie, yet reporting incidents at school with a thoughtful matter-of-factness that never once slid its way into performance. Of course Sam loved him. So did Gordon, and so did I.
The mother and the father were good people, though I only ever met them on occasion. Gordon remembers them quite fondly—he was the boy’s chess teacher, and his progress was curious enough that they would phone every few weeks to inquire about books, resources. They, too, seemed overwhelmed by how quickly he had taken to the game. I remember them having one or the other of those computer-type jobs that were all the rage, and the mother at least would drive down to Boston every so often for work meetings. Her tone, though haughty, hid an overall manner of pleasance, and she was placidly thankful for all the things we did for him. The few occasions we’d met had been invitations to their place for dinner, which I associate with the same feeling as opening an old trunk to discover nostalgic but ultimately worthless trinkets. I enjoyed the politeness, but it was quite clear that we got along far better with the boy than with his parents. There was also an older brother who he claimed went to school in upstate New York, though I never saw any traces of such a person nor do I remember the parents ever mentioning him. But then it was never clear whether the boy was lying or not. Eventually we learned not to question; the stories proved far more fanciful if we simply accepted them to be true. It is not often that an old woman gets to hear things of such a flavor. I am reminded of that time he boasted about his various little league exploits even as Sam insisted that he was not in the baseball team, yet when we took him out to the backyard he got a hit on every one of Gordon’s pitches. By the end Gordon was strained and moody, and at night when I was ironing clothes he let slip that either he had gotten too old to throw a fastball or that the boy must possess some supernatural ability, because he could not gather how in the world an untrained 10-year-old hit every pitch thrown by a former Carolina league starter.
It was June that evening I drove the boy to the creek. Sam’s mother’s calls were getting increasingly sparse, and I had made up my mind to have a sit-down with her when she arrived that August to pick Sam up for New York City. I loved my daughter as much as anyone, but over the years I had discovered that the self-possessedness that Genevieve so prided herself on was only a stone’s throw from neglectfulness. Yes, Sam was lovely and if it were up to me I would have adopted her as one of my own, but it is important that a young girl be raised by her own mother and not her grandmother as a surrogate—for all of Genevieve’s attempts to not reduce her identity to one of a mother she seemed to have abandoned that identity altogether under the pretext of flying to Europe for filming. In any case, it meant that Sam was left very much to her own devices all afternoon, and the Poplar boy proved to be an amicable companion; he, too, was a bit of a mismatch in Northfield, having moved out from Boston only that February, and unlike the other boys in town he was not given a phone to play with. The trring-trring of his bicycle bell was the most frequent sound I heard that summer. I would start looking out for it the moment after lunch that we shut the drapes and turned on the air conditioning.
All of this was usual, more or less.
The trouble started the week after I left the boy at the creek. There were many developments, all feeding into each other with a tenacity that makes it difficult to ascertain the precise order in which they occurred, but at first there was the matter of the cat.
It was Tuesday evening and Gordon had finished his lessons for the day when I got a call from Marie-Laurie. She was worried and stammering, and at first I presumed something might have happened to her husband, who was a sickly man that spent most of his days in front of the television while his joints worsened. I used to tell Marie-Laurie that she was too merciful, too deferent; she should allow him to perform his own chores instead of abetting such a disastrous lifestyle. But when she called the husband was as alright as he ever was, and the panicked quality of her tone had to do not with his woes but with a discovery she had made in her backyard. What she was really wondering was whether it was grounds to call the police. I told her to err on the side of caution, but inside I, too, remained unconvinced as to whether this was the best use of their time; indeed when they did arrive at the scene the evening (in the end Marie-Laurie decided I ought to take a look before we made any serious decision) they spent most of their time performing cleanup rather than displaying any genuine desire for investigation. I think they were disturbed more than concerned. Like Marie-Laurie they concluded that it must have been an animal; I was less convinced. In Minnesota my father had been a hunter, and having raised me as one with my brothers I had quite an intuition for how the wilderness proceeded in the absence of humanity—I could tell that it was a human that had done it, because no animal would have the courage to do what had been done to that cat.
Even with that bit of background the sight was not a tender one, and I was not much in the mood for dinner when I returned from Marie-Laurie’s that evening—the morbidity had sept into my appetite, and reheating yesterday’s lasagna looked far more palatable an option than preparing chicken soup. But my plans were dashed upon noticing that Sam had let her hair down. I had tried, at various points, to explain to her that braids and hairpins were not a nuisance to be dealt with but rather tools to be effectively utilized, but her natural proclivity towards disarray combined with Benny’s odd fascination with her hair ensured that my warnings fell on deaf ears. The boy had a habit of running his fingers through it and brushing it aside. The whole performance made her blush. It was certainly improper, but knowing all too well what was going on in her head I found it a tendency very difficult to rid without leaving her lonely and frustrated; despite my telling her off he insisted on her wearing it straight down over her shoulders, and seeing her in that state upon my arrival made it clear that we would again be joined by Benny for dinner today. Ordinarily this would be a matter of much fuss, but seeing as to how his skinny form gulped down my meals I privately thought it best he stuff himself up as well as he could while Sam was here—I disapproved of the dry meatballs his parents prepared for him but accusing a parent of misfeeding their children is ill-conceived behavior, and so I set the children to work peeling onions while I dialed his mother. She apologized as per usual and vowed to pick him up at around nine. Throughout this time the sight of the cat had not left my mind, leaving me dizzy with worry. I felt the strong urge to board up all the windows, and fell into Gordon’s arms when I found him reading a book in the bedroom.
‘Come here,’ he said, holding my hands.
I shook my head. ‘It was horrible.’
‘I should’ve come with you. Did you call the police?’
I nodded.
‘Good. In the backyard, too… it must have been by the creek, or in the woods.’ Marie-Laurie’s house was down the hill, and her backyard opened into a dense patch of wood which bled into the forests along the White mountains. ‘Must’ve been a coyote, or the Wilsons’ dog—’
‘Gordon,’ I interrupted, looking around to make sure that the children weren’t listening. ‘Gordon, I don’t think it was an animal.’
‘What do you mean?’
I shook my head. ‘Animals don’t do that. Have you ever seen a dog kill a cat?’
‘I sure hope not.’
‘They don’t do—they don’t do, that, whatever that was. Dogs bite, they don’t rip, tear something limb to limb—claws aren’t that sharp, they can’t slice something like that, open it up—’
‘Goodness, Gina. That’s enough.’ He pulled me closer and held me tight for a few seconds until I let out a few deep breaths.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘It must have been a person. Somebody did that. And, Gordon, the smell. My God.’
‘Do the police know?’
‘We informed them. They said they’re going to keep a watch out, and that they’re going to go around making sure that people lock their dogs up at night. I don’t know. This whole thing is scaring the Jesus out of me.’
‘I’ll talk to Hank tomorrow myself,’ he said. ‘Ask him if there’s anyone new around, anyone who could do that sort of thing. Any ropes on the site?’
I shook my head.
‘You get all kinds of dogs these days. Don’t lose too much sleep over it.’
I sighed again. ‘Well, come on out in a few minutes. The children are getting the vegetables ready, I’ll make the broth.’
I returned to the kitchen to find the two giggling. With a sinking feeling I remembered seeing the cat before—though not evident, one could eventually make the remains out to be those of a stray tabby that often mewed around these parts. Benny and Sam had been playing with it on the street just last week, petting it, making it purr. He seemed to have a strong presence around animals, and he could make them turn over so Sam could scratch their bellies. I told the two that I didn’t want them leaving the house for the next few days, and that instead of cycling over I could pick the boy up from the bus station. They demanded to know the nature of these sudden restrictions, and I had just finished giving them quick raps on the head when Gordon emerged with a chessboard.
I found Gordon in a wary mood when I changed into my nightgown before bed, and the cat still hadn’t gone from my mind—these things take time, and I was not keen on sleeping through the nightmares that would inevitably follow. I squeezed his arm and he chuckled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s still on my mind, too. I’ve checked the locks, and Samantha’s drapes are drawn, window latched.’
‘God help us,’ he said, frowning.
‘It’s going to be fine.’
‘It’s not that. Did you see the boy play today?’
‘Chess, you mean?’
‘That’s it. He’s really something. I’m telling you, Gina, this boy’s got something I’ve never seen before. He wasn’t even on the board. He was talking to Samantha the entire time.’
‘You mean that—’
‘I mean he was playing aloud, just telling me directions. Rook A7, like that. He beat me twice a row in the middle of talking your granddaughter about how his dad once drove through a sequoia tree.’
‘Is that impressive?’
‘I couldn’t have done it. The boy’s a genius.’
What manner of creature could have done such a thing? Where did it come from? Would it strike again? Within two days after the cat’s discovery heartbeats and temperatures had risen to a fever pitch in Northfield. Jennifer Beullens bought her children cross chains and had them blessed by the pastor. She was a foolish woman, the PTA’s designated time-waster. Then there was the question of whether to make a visit to Marie-Laurie, see how she was doing. It was not her cat, only a stray, but she had been known to set out milk for it in the evenings and the manner of death seemed to warrant questions about her health. I, too, was inundated with questions, being the only other witness. More than anything the consensus was that there was some kind of rabid animal in the woods, and that new restrictions be added to the children’s lives, at least for the foreseeable future—for all intents and purposes the event was one-time-only, but if there is anything to the job of a parent it is to worry. This was exacerbated by the further discovery of plucked-out grackle feathers and stepped-on ravens spread all over the wood on the east ridge, extending from Leland Park until the highway. On Sunday when the Audubon Society arrived at the east ridge we found Fred Abagnale of the forest service examining the remains of some trees that had burned down in a recent forest fire, and he hesitated before bidding us a good day as we stepped down the hiking route. Then just as I started descending along the red trail he asked me aside for a second, and I lent Margaret my binoculars and gestured to the rest of the birders that I would catch up.
‘Mrs. Hughes,’ he said. ‘I see to it that you were a hunter, previously.’
‘I wouldn’t say so,’ I replied. He was a handsome man, very tall; he had the kind of broad, weathered hands that came from a lifetime of working with wood. None of it befitted the lapel pin he wore on his left breast—a gaudy red square that yelled “Bear Ranger,” giving a very cheap and unserious impression. I don’t know why he was playing at investigation, but it was rude to not assist a federal officer. ‘It was only when I was a little girl.’
‘Anyway. It’s about the cat and all these dead birds.’
‘I would guess a bobcat, or coyote, perhaps.’
‘Mmm.’ He did not meet my eyes, preferring instead to place his foot on top of the burned tree, which looked as if it had been cleaved into two with a fiery axe; the inside was blackened soot while the outside was dead, very white. The area was going to be cleared out for reforestation efforts, soon. ‘I take it that you saw the cat before the police cleaned it up?’
‘Indeed I did.’
‘I hope I’m not being too forward.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. I had relived the experience enough in the past week that the image had been drained of its vitality, and while the thought of the smell still made me a little nauseous I did not have qualms against discussing it with delicacy.
‘These birds,’ he said at length. ‘Normally this isn’t matter of concern, but Paul’s the one who noticed it, you know.’ Paul was the head of the Audubon Society—he had been birding for thirty years, and he had been to four continents. In fact he was on his way down the trail right now; he was a good friend of Gordon’s, though I had not seen him since last week. ‘The problem is that it’s not really a cat that’s pried the bird open, that’s all fine. Follow me.’
He led me through the burned forest, away from the hiking routes; it was a long walk, and the trees were all in various stages of decay. Unlike the usual ecology of stray pikes rooted into the ground, these trees had fallen over and cracked open—I could almost hear the hiss of boiling resin, and they were so blackened that it was hard to tell apart elm and cedar. After almost half a mile Fred gestured me to follow him through into a part of the forest that had been taped up as a danger zone. We were almost a mile from the park and quite a distance from the trails. The fire had not penetrated here. Even so, it was still not into the forest proper; the foliage was thick but there were still navigable deer routes, and the ‘danger’ signs were mainly to deter children from encountering coyotes—although I would be hard-pressed to imagine children making their way through the burnt waste that preceded. As we got closer to the destination I caught whiff of a nasty, rotten smell that reignited long-asleep memories not just of rifles and foxes, but also of forgotten mousetraps in the attic.
‘It’s over here,’ he said, pinching his nose and stepping over a large root, pointing to something obscured behind it.
The sight almost made me faint. It looked like a snake or a rabbit hole, albeit much larger, and was filled with what I can only describe as a mangled collection of bird parts—feathers, legs, beaks, eyes, sometimes entire carcasses. The parts were ungraciously torn off the bodies, and had been hand-stuffed into the hole. Owing to the nature of their burial, many of them were engulfed with earthworms and maggots, a thoroughly grotesque sight. What stood out to me the most was how frenzied they were—this had not been careful work, though what kind of fox or coyote had this magpie-like desire to collect the trophies of its conquests was beyond me. I shut my eyes and retreated, chanting some prayer or the other.
Fred put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry for that.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said, feeling dizzy. I did not speak until we were distant enough that the hole was both out of sight and out of smell.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘How did you find that?’
‘Paul, as I said. Well—more like Minnie.’ Minnie was Paul’s German Shepherd, the daughter of a K-9 and one of the most well-behaved dogs I had ever seen, though she was quite smelly. ‘I think they were looking for whip-poor-wills or flycatchers, I forget which. But the story goes that Minnie started feeling quite uneasy somewhere around here, and Paul followed her to that—to that thing, whatever you want to call it. ‘Course, he called us right away. I don’t know if you noticed, but they’re all ravens or crows or grackles. Those aren’t small birds, or anything.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’ I said, still reeling slightly.
‘Well, Mrs. Hughes—I’d appreciate if you don’t go around telling this to people, if you believe me. Your husband is fine, of course, I’m sure you’d want to tell Mr. Hughes first thing you get back. But some of these types around here are like dingbats. Make fuss over the slightest disturbance, you hear me.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
‘So here’s the question—you know how those birds are all mangled, all that.’
I gave a low whimper of assertion.
‘Well, you’d like to think that the bird was alive when it happened. I looked over these this morning—the area’s sort of boarded up now. Looks like it’s been going on for a couple months, to tell you the truth. But the point is that I looked into it, and the birds all have a big blow to their side—it looks like they were torn open after they were already killed, or at least made unconscious. Now we’re thinking what kind of animal could do that, because, you know, there’s not a lot of animals that punch instead of claw something down. If it’s a dog or a cat you’d see some bite marks.’
‘You think they’ve been pummeled?’
He spat on the ground. ‘More like shot, if you know what I mean.’ He raised a hand when I started. ‘No, no guns, nothing like that. It looks like something was throwing rocks at them. There aren’t that many animals that can pick up a big rock and throw.’
‘Monkeys,’ I said. ‘In New Hampshire?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. Now, that leaves people. But honest-to-God, I don’t know who’s coming out here. I mean, it’s not that far off, but it’s still quite-a-ways, if you get me. Paul’s one thing, but whoever else is coming out here is coming out to do a nasty bit of business, if you ask me. This is loony bin stuff. Need a psychiatrist to have a go at him. Now what I want to ask you, Mrs. Hughes, is about that cat in the Meyers’ backyard.’
‘What about it?’ Did he think they were connected incidents?
‘Well—I would’ve asked Mrs. Meyer, but she’s a lot more shaken up than you are. Really what I’m looking for is what you remember.’
‘It was horrible,’ I said. ‘It was dismembered, I think it took them a while to even pick all the pieces up. As maimed as these birds, that’s for sure, perhaps even more so. The insides, just splayed all over.’ I shivered. ‘Why do you ask? The police would’ve already told you this.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘But I want to ask your opinion regardless, because I think you’d know a lot more than these lousy cops about this sort of thing. Look, these guys—they’re all from Buffalo, places like that. Whole state’s full of deadbeats. Shoot first, ask questions later. It’s not like they know anything about these animals, all they want is to find the perp in the process of skinning whatever the new target is, so that they could lock him up. Now I’m not saying that’s wrong, but that’s not any way to get to the bottom of what’s going on here—which is why I need your help. The thing about these birds is that they were all neutralized before having a go at them. What can you say about the cat?’
I said nothing for a while. Truth be told, the site left quite a bit to the imagination—there simply wasn’t enough substance there to piece together any picture of what might have occurred beyond the obvious. But then something came to mind. ‘Well, considering it happened in Marie-Laurie’s backyard, if the cat was alive it would have yelled. Cats don’t stay quiet, they make a lot of noise. So it must have already been dead before it was torn up, otherwise Marie-Laurie would have heard it and looked out her window, caught it in the process of happening.’
Fred looked triumphant. ‘Just what I suspected.’
‘Do you have any idea who—who might have done it?’
He grimaced, leaning against a tree. ‘Running theory is Harrison Cooper. He’s got that rabid mongrel, the bulldog. It already bit the Andersons’ cat last year. And he’s walking it around at night along the mountains, long after the park’s closed, smoking his cigarettes. We’re thinking he shoots the birds down and then lets the dog have a go at them, but that’d be a bit advanced for someone like Cooper. It’s troubling stuff.’
That was the first bit, and it was already unsettling enough. Often when I allow myself some reminiscence what I end up interested in is the epistemological process of discovery; at some point the evidence had become too damning to ignore, but the precise moment is difficult to articulate. It was more a gradual dawning. But then all I had was vague stipulations about cats and crows. Nevertheless, it was a veritable enough foundation for speculation. Not that I had any desire to speculate—at the time the primary feeling was of sheer terror, my protective instincts coming crashing down on the two children under my care. It was all I could do to not lock them up. I have discovered that the further I am separated from childhood the less I see children as beings with whims and desires and something more akin to dolls to be dressed and fed and sheltered from the cruel beast of the outside world. Everything they did was more or less benign, an expression of hormonal agencies rather than any notion of independent thought. But then I felt much the same of Genevieve, and the curious nature of how the children’s mind functioned was alien to me. My memories of being a young girl have become static, and though I can remember throwing marbles over wooden floors and unrolling newspapers into makeshift sleds I cannot recall the primordial pleasure in those acts, nor can I remember how we came up with those ideas. We just seemed to know things and how to do them. One of the major preoccupations of Sam and Benny was that of card games, makeshift attempts at Poker and Cheat which somehow always devolved into some variant of Slapjack. I remember Samantha begging me to get her a deck of Bicycle cards, as per the boy’s whims—while I myself insisted on only the best for our Rummy group at the country club, I could not fathom what possessed the two of them to stake their savings on such luxuries. Was it merely some arbitrary notion of ‘best,’ something they had heard from adults? How did they evaluate a good deck from a bad one—did they understand softness and texture, ease of shuffling? Because I only ever saw them shuffle their decks by fumbling them around on the ground. Perhaps Sam had been spoilt by her mother, who had imbued in her this city doctrine of ‘getting her money’s worth’ that she must have obtained from elsewhere. But then Genevieve had been one of those children that only grew more difficult as she got older. She had been a tomboy when young, prodigious and talented, and such types are defined very much by older, thoughtful rebellion instead of the instinctual escapism of less ambitious children like Sam. The Poplar boy, on the other hand, reminded me darkly of Genevieve, and against my will I felt that the permissiveness he had been granted could only be good, lest he abandon the whimsy and carelessness in his manner for Genevieve’s fastidiousness. From the outside Genevieve was a parents’ dream, being a television actress, and all that, but despite her protests I could never once imagine her happy, and I often told Gordon that we had been too harsh on her during her childhood. Unfortunately he never cared about such things—I think he was able to accept her existence as a separate being far better than I was, and my private regrets slipped into my caretaking of the children that summer, and eventually let things get further out of hand than they would have otherwise.
That summer I used to swim in the mornings: it helped with my back and kept my skin clean, and I was conscious enough of gaining weight that it was a firm part of my schedule. There was also the fact that the swim club was right next to the Northfield Tennis Academy, where Sam had been enrolled for the summer—she was already proving herself to be fairly talented for her age, being as tall as she was, and her father especially had decided that even the lapse of a single summer could be disastrous for her development. It was the day after the discovery of the hole—I had just washed and dressed myself after swimming when I was asked by a coach to follow her to her office, which was not unprecedented; a few weeks ago Sam had been bumped up to the under-12s, and for a while we had been expecting news of pre-season tournaments. But instead I found her sitting on a corner stool, staring into her knees and playing with her feet. The coach asked me to sit down and placed a box cutter on the table between us.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘A girl saw Sam playing with it in the locker room,’ she replied. ‘While I understand your desire for safety, we really don’t think that a box cutter is something that’s appropriate for a 10-year-old girl to carry around, if you’ll understand me. This sort of thing can cause a lot of damage. I assure you that we’re fully committed to the safety of our students, and there’s always a security guard on duty.’
‘No, I absolutely understand,’ I said. ‘In fact, I agree.’ I turned towards Sam, who was staring determinedly at the wall. ‘Where did you get this, Sam?’
‘You mean to say that you didn’t give it to her?’ asked the coach, astonished.
‘Of course not. She could poke someone in the eye, cut her fingers off.’
‘Well, I hope you understand that we’ll have to confiscate the box cutter. It’s hardly appropriate for a child. I hope you can sort out the matter between the two of you.’
‘Yes, you do that,’ I said, still glaring at Sam. It was the Poplar boy, of course—that was the inevitable conclusion of tall tales, and I would not have put it past him to steal a couple of cutters from some drawer at home. I apologized to the coach and pulled Sam out to the parking lot, and it was not until we were past the turn signal that she spoke.
‘It was for bears,’ she said. ‘There are bears in these woods, of course I’ve heard about the cat. Everyone’s talking about it.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘What did you hear?’
‘Just that some kind of animal had killed the tabby cat. Ruby’s mom was all worried, she doesn’t let her use the bus anymore.’
‘Listen, Sam,’ I said. ‘You do know those things are very dangerous.’
‘Not if you know how to use them.’
‘You’re young. Children make mistakes—I cut myself with a box cutter once, and I was almost thirty. You need to really understand how to use such things, you can’t just keep one in your bag, especially at the tennis academy. What if you poke someone’s eye? What then?’
‘It’s for bears, gran. I’m not just going to pull it out for no reason.’
‘And yet Coach Edwards says she saw you playing with it in the locker room.’
‘I was only showing it to Suzy and Carmen, what’s the big deal.’
‘The big deal is that you didn’t ask me about it. Who gave you these ideas about bears? Benny?’
‘Who else?’
I shook my head. ‘That boy is a nuisance. I suppose he stole them from Walmart.’
‘He did not. His dad gave them to him for a school project a few months ago. Besides, he gave me the good one. His knife is all bent out of shape, anyway, it can’t even cut open Swiss cheese.’
‘Even so,’ I said. ‘And how exactly do you expect a box cutter to help you with a bear?’
‘Benny says that if you see a black bear, you hit it and make noise. And if you see a grizzly you play dead, but if it’s any other kind of bear you have to attack it, like a polar bear, or a sloth bear.’
‘And do you see any polar bears around Northfield?’
‘No,’ she said, crossing her arms and sulking, but I could tell that the observation had been a severe blow to her.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m happy you know how to deal with bears, in case you ever come across one, but that’s no reason to go around with weapons in your backpack. And the next time your friend comes around let him know that I want a word with him. Goodness knows how that boy thinks. He’s going to get himself into trouble.’