Emory’s Gift (6 page)

Dan Alderton had apparently dropped Lifesaving. This was the second class he’d skipped—miss two and you’re out, Kay had warned us. The sixth grader was also missing—the prospect of what we were about to do was probably just too much for him to bear. But all four seventh graders were there, nervously bumping into each other. Kay waved at us, leading us down a hall and unlocking a door to a conference room.

“Come on in, guys.”

We walked as if glued together, a gaggle of gangly geeks looking ready to bolt for the doors. The room was small, carpeted, with yellow walls and a black rubber mat on the floor. A large vinyl bag lay by the mat.

Kay smiled at us as we fidgeted our way into the room and spread out on one wall as if preparing for a firing squad. She was wearing short red shorts and a simple T-shirt. Her jet-black hair brushed her shoulders and gleamed with a metallic sheen in the fluorescent lighting. Her lipstick matched her shorts, which I found to be an almost unimaginably beautiful combination, though both the shorts and her lips were plenty nice on their own.

“So, did everyone read the chapter?”

We gave nervous nods.

Kay knelt by the bag, unzipping it. “Carl, come help me with this,” she said.

Carl was a tall, sandy-haired seventh grader, who leaped forward with absurd eagerness. Kay had him unfold a life-sized mannequin and lay it on the mat. The plastic lips on the thing were open, the eyes shut. Carl lingered until he realized he couldn’t really justify kneeling next to Kay on the floor, and then he sprang back up to be with the rest of us on the wall.

“Okay, so, we can do this two ways. You can do it either on the dummy or on me. Who’s first?”

Relief and disappointment were written on our faces. The tension went out of our bodies like a breath we hadn’t realized we’d been holding.

Carl, eager to exploit the incredible intimacy he felt he’d developed with Kay during the whole lay-out-the-dummy incident, stepped forward. He knelt by the mannequin’s head, unmistakably picking plastic lips over real ones.

There was absolutely nothing in Kay’s expression to betray whether she was kidding or not about the idea of doing live lip-to-lip training. She lectured us about compressing the water out of the lungs and made sure Carl squeezed the nose shut. I listened numbly. The next boy in line picked the dummy, as did the next. I held back, asking myself what would happen if I told her I wanted to try it on her. Would she laugh at me? Tell me I was stupid for taking her offer seriously?

The safe thing would be to do like everyone else and blow into the dummy.

I stood there, locked in indecisiveness, until all the other boys had gone and it was my turn.

“Charlie?” Kay said. “You ready?”

I nodded. I stepped forward. I cleared my throat. “I’ll, uh, do you.”

The boys on the wall straightened as if they’d just been hit with a cattle prod. As for Kay, those dark eyes flickered just a little—amusement? Pity? I stood, awaiting my fate.

“Okay,” she said simply. She pushed the dummy off the mat and lay down. “What’s the first thing?”

“Check the airway,” I muttered. My pulse was hammering in my head so hard I couldn’t really hear myself. I lowered myself to my knees. What was I thinking? Was I really going to do this?

Her nose was soft and delicate. I pinched it shut. Her head was back. I shakily put my mouth on hers.

If I did everything as I was trained—watched for her chest to rise, simulated rolling her over to press the water out of her lungs, timed my breaths—I have no memory of any of it. But I will never for a moment forget the light, warm, amazing sensation of touching my mouth to Kay’s. It wasn’t a kiss, not really. But it was close enough.

“Good, Charlie,” Kay said with her studied blandness. I could feel that the boys on the wall were ready to raise their hands and ask for another go at it, but Kay had me practice on the dummy a few times so she could watch, and then class was over.

When I saw my father’s Jeep waiting for me in the parking lot, it held none of the usual dread for me. For once I didn’t approach the passenger door knowing that I’d spend the whole car ride wrestling with the thick silence from my father, seeking desperately to draw him into conversation. I didn’t want to talk to anyone; I just wanted to think about Kay.

My dad waited for me to put on my seat belt before he yanked the Jeep into gear. Safety was his biggest concern, since Mom died.

“How’d it go, Charlie?” he asked.

I shrugged. There was simply no answer to that question.

“Well then. You want to go see what I’ve been putting all my time and money into, lately?”

No, I didn’t, but this was the most engaging thing my father had said to me since
We’re going to the Becks’ for Sunday dinner.
I gazed at him with eyes that I supposed were as unreadable as Kay’s.

“Okay,” I said.

chapter

FIVE

BEING with my father spoiled my mood, a little—his presence interfered with my intentions to wallow in sweet enthrallment over Kay, the way someone’s radio can rattle you with a competing tune when you’re trying to sing a song of your own. I decided to put Kay away to savor later, like a dessert brought home after dinner in a restaurant.

When my dad turned off on the rutted two-track that led up to the handful of graying, sagging buildings that was Grassy Valley Ranch, my stomach lurched independently of the bouncing Jeep. It was a familiar sensation that upset my insides whenever a strong memory of Mom collided with the unreal reality of her death.

My dad grew up with horses—when we moved to Selkirk River, he made glowing promises about how healthy we’d all be, out in the clean air, riding horses everywhere. I pictured myself going to school on horseback. I thought maybe I’d be sent into town to buy groceries on my own horse, whom I planned to name Flash.

None of that happened. When I got around to noticing I didn’t own a horse, I put a heartbroken tone in my voice and asked about it. (As was true of any good child, I knew precisely how deep to stab my mother and father in their guilty consciences.) And it worked, to a degree: we started taking family trips to Grassy Valley Ranch to rent horses.

Grassy Valley was where my dad met Rod Shelburton, who bought the ranch for the same reason my dad moved us to a thirty-acre property on top of a hill, only the Shelburtons were from Chicago and not Prairie Village. My dad and Mr. Shelburton liked to have what sounded like loud, heated arguments about Vietnam and the environment and Richard Nixon, only they agreed with each other on everything.

More than two years before, when my mom’s chemotherapy ended, the two of us took a horseback ride up into the hills. It was a wonderful May day, wildflowers dancing in front of us as we left the barn.

Normally when we rode, Mr. Shelburton put me on Nanny, a gentle old horse who could not be spurred into a gallop regardless of how many clicks I made with my mouth or unsubtle hints I gave her with my boot heels.

Nanny was sick that day, though, so I was on Ginger, a younger horse my mom didn’t trust. She kept Ginger attached to her horse with a lead, which I felt was insulting for a boy my age. We marched along with me launching a barrage of bitter complaints the whole time, until my mom’s shoulders sagged with the weight of them.

Then I was angry because she didn’t want to ride up to take a look at what boys my age called Dead Man’s Falls (located in an area known to us as Dead Man’s River and close to Dead Man’s Rock), saying she was tired.

“You’re
always
tired,” I told her viciously.

I brought my contemptuous attitude with me to the dinner table, infuriating my father.

“Charlie, you are being rude to your mother!” he barked.

“It’s okay,” my mom murmured.

“It’s not okay. Go to your room, Charlie. No TV tonight. Let’s see if you can be more polite in the morning.”

The lash of my dad’s anger stung me, but I didn’t let him see any pain in me as I slid off my chair and flounced down the hall as if I didn’t care what they did to me.

I think I know now what that was all about. A restlessness was starting to afflict me, a sense of not being able to fit into my own skin. Manhood was a long way off, but already I was becoming impatient with being a boy. I wanted to ride a horse by myself, without an umbilical cord. And mostly I wanted to push my mother away from me, to gain independence from her, as all men must eventually do.

At the time, though, these irrational impulses came to me like temporary insanity, goading me into churlish behavior and then fading away to leave me stewing in guilt.

The house darkened; my parents murmured; my dad passed my doorway without a word. I heard my mother clink a few things in the kitchen, and then she was in the hallway, pausing at my door.

“Mom?”

She looked into my room. Her face was different, her cheekbones sharper and her eye sockets more pronounced, and of course her hair was nothing more than a wispy fuzz trying to make a comeback on her head, but the smile she gave me was the same. I’d treated her like dirt all day and here she was smiling at me with all the love in the world.

“Yes, Charlie.”

I’d say I was sorry now. God, how I wish I could say I was sorry to my mom, sorry for every single thing I ever did to hurt her. But instead I said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?”

More than a year had passed since I’d asked for—no, demanded—a halt to the nightly ritual of a kiss. But on my mom’s face there was no triumph, nor surprise, nor self-satisfaction. I saw only affection in her eyes as she came in and gently touched her lips to my forehead.

“Good night, Charlie. I love you.”

“Good night, Mom.” I didn’t tell her I loved her back. I don’t know why. If I had it to do over again, I would have said it, and it would have been as true as anything I’d ever uttered.

This memory hit me like a sucker punch when the Jeep stopped at the ranch, the dirt cloud that had been pursuing us engulfing the vehicle, then drifting away like a dog who chases cars and doesn’t know what to do when one stops. I watched the dust but focused on my memories, pangs of something like hunger clawing at my insides.

“What do you think of that?” my dad asked proudly.

I looked where he was pointing. On the other side of a wooden fence a dark herd of maybe twenty-five buffalo were standing around, their tails swishing. Some sort of wooden pathway led from this corral to pass beneath an odd platform above the fence, as if the buffalo were going to walk down the chute and have somebody leap on them from the perch.

“Buffalo,” I said.

“American bison,” my father said. It sounded like a correction, but when I looked at him curiously he nodded. “Buffalo, sure.”

“For rides?”

My dad grinned at me. It was a full grin, unburdened by any death or sadness. “For eating. Mr. Shelburton and I are going to raise buffalo and sell them for meat.”

“Cool,” I replied, though I was hardly sure of the sanity of his statement.

“Beef’s got cholesterol in it, and doctors are saying cholesterol is what gives people heart attacks. Buffalo has a lot lower cholesterol, though we’re calling it American bison because we don’t think people will eat it otherwise. What you’re looking at is the start of a herd we’re going to let get to about five hundred head.”

A red pickup truck was parked out beyond the buffalo pen—I recognized it as Mr. Shelburton’s vehicle. Mr. Shelburton himself was on a horse.

“Hey, Charlie, you going to help us inoculate these critters today?” he called. Mr. Shelburton used words like a cowboy, but his accent was the same as the gangsters we saw in the movies.

I was excited to help until my job was explained to me.

“You can sit on the hood of the Jeep,” my father said to me, his voice singsongy with false promise. I pretty much knew that if I were up on top of the Jeep I wouldn’t be on a horse or anywhere near the “critters.”

“I got a clipboard here, and every time we inoculate a bison, you call out the number and keep a written tally,” my father continued.

I pictured it in my mind. I’d sit on the front of the Jeep, holding a clipboard, with absolutely nothing to do but watch the two of them maneuver a buffalo down the narrow wooden chute. One of them would lean over from the platform and inject the bison, and then they’d open the door and the buffalo would walk out. I’d make a mark and then call out the number. In other words, I’d be a bookkeeper. “Why can’t I help inoculate?” I demanded.

“Charlie, these are wild creatures, these buffalo. They’re not like cows.”

There it was—no matter what, I had to be kept safe. My dad had buried one family member and was never going to risk losing another.

“Sure ’preciate your help, pardner!” Mr. Shelburton called out to me.

I wonder how my dad’s worry reflexes would react if I told him I’d been cavorting in the woods with an animal so fierce he could
eat
a buffalo. Among the three of us men, who was the real rancher wrangler? Why, it was Charlie Hall, master of the grizzlies, that’s who.

I obviously wasn’t going to give voice to these thoughts or tell my father anything about the bear. Living with my father was so emotionally dangerous I’d learned to parse truth and dole out only as much information as was absolutely necessary—to do otherwise would be to risk the disapproval that always came charged with the clear and devastating message that with my mom gone there wasn’t a family anymore, nothing to anchor Dad to my life, no connection. Avoiding the conclusion that my father didn’t love me was my main pastime, and I’d withhold any amount of truth from him to keep it from myself.

Of course, I didn’t have the advantage of months of painful psychotherapy then, so I didn’t have any actual insight into why I’d become such an artful dodger of integrity. I just knew that it was always smarter to keep my mouth shut than to give my father any ammunition he could use against me.

I climbed up on the Jeep, clipboard in my lap, and watched as my dad and Mr. Shelburton tried to coax a buffalo out of the corral and into the wooden chute. Before me the Grassy Valley Ranch, more than a thousand acres in all, spread out like a wide green ocean shouldered on either side by rugged, thickly wooded hills.