Hunter’s Pond

I grew up in a tiny town called Hunter’s Pond, a sleepy, ordinary town that could have been found most anyplace. We had two stop signs then, and one traffic light, a five-and-dime and two markets.

We did not have an A&W, or a Wal-Mart, though these could be found in Mill Landing, a larger town twenty or so miles up the road.

For us kids, life in Hunter’s Pond settled into the familiar routine of school and paper routes, girl scouts and hot days spent at the swimming hole near Ezra Hammond’s farm. About the most exciting thing that ever happened in Hunter’s Pond was the time Molly Jackson’s eldest daughter Peg won a blue ribbon at the county fair, with a hog she’d raised for FFA.

My father was the sheriff of the town, a tall and lean man with deep-set ebony eyes and short hair that had been gray around the edges for as long as I could remember. He was well-liked and respected in the town, and he’d served seven consecutive terms as sheriff. I suspect this was in part because he was good at his job and cared about the town, and in part because the job was mundane enough that nobody else felt much like running against him.

I always thought my father looked so handsome in his uniform, with the crisp blue shirt and the shiny silver badge. He wore his pistol in a scarred but immaculately polished leather holster, left over from years in the army after World War Two. It hung, along with a shiny black nightstick and a pair of handcuffs that I’d only rarely seen out of their pouch, on an inky black leather belt that he polished often.

Most days he sat at his battered wooden desk in his tiny office nestled behind the town hall, reading the newspaper and listening to the AM radio. He’d spend part of each day patrolling the town, of course, but Hunter’s Pond was small enough and quiet enough that this rarely consumed more than an hour or two.

All things considered, there was never much in the way of crime for him to deal with. He made two or three visits each week to The Roundabout, the only bar in Hunter’s Pond, where he broke up the occasional fight. He arrested Zebediah Culhain more times than I could remember for staggering down Main Street drunk and cussing. It seemed to us as though “Crazy Zeb”, as we all called him, spent almost as much time in jail as he did in the bar.

My mother was a quiet and unassuming woman, a small-town wife and mother of the type one might find in a Norman Rockwell painting. She’d married my father just a few months out of high school, and as far as I was aware, she’d never aspired to be more than the sheriff’s wife. If she had hopes, dreams or ambitions of her own, she never to the day she died shared them with me.

I had two brothers, Robert and John Paul, who liked to be called just Paul. Both were older than I, and very protective of their little sister.

Robert was the eldest, three years my senior and a mirror image of his father, with strong hands and long, sinewy legs. He aspired then to become a policeman like his father. And, indeed, many years later he’d go on to do just that, though he’d have left Hunter’s Pond and his family far behind him by then.

Paul, a year younger than his brother, looked more like my mother, short and slightly round, with an infectious smile that never seemed to leave his face. Paul dreamed of becoming a banker, a captain of industry. It was a dream that would never be fulfilled. But that knowledge was later. Paul worked hardest of the three of us in school, though his penchant for mischief seemed to keep him in as much trouble as his grades kept him out of.

I suppose it only fair to include a few words here about me, since I’ve not even properly introduced myself. My name is Merrilee Amanda Bowles, though my friends call me Merri, and most everyone else calls me by my first name. I rarely heard my middle name used when I was young, unless I was in trouble.

Back then I was tall and reedy, with long brown hair that blew in clouds around my head on the breezy days, and blue eyes through which I thirstily took in all that happened around me.

I was rarely without a book, and even more rarely without a notebook and pencil, in which I wrote about the world, as I saw and understood it. I enjoyed especially writing the tales of my father’s doings on “the beat”, though I always knew he embellished them to add the excitement that Hunter’s Pond lacked.

None of us, my mother and my brothers and I, ever thought much of the danger of daddy’s job.

Cops, in our narrow view of the world, wore their guns primarily to look forceful and strong, a sort of prop necessary to project the image of a policeman. Daddy never talked much about his gun, and we all suspected that the only time it left his holster was when he went out behind our house to shoot at tin cans and paper targets.

* * * * *

That October morning in 1961 dawned overcast and gloomy, and the sharp chill of winter was in the air. I was in sixth grade then, nearly twelve years old and painfully aware that I was teetering on the edge of a transition, that soon I’d be a teenager and no longer a child.

I tended to be a precocious and introspective girl, and the looming presence of grown-up-ness troubled me, even as the first signs of growing up showed themselves in the changing shape of my slender body. Still and all, I was content being a child, and was determined to hold off the approach of adulthood for as long as I could.

I’d dressed in my favorite dress that day, a long and flowing thing of charcoal gray cotton with tiny gray buttons from hem to bodice. My mother had made it for me, and I treasured it and loved the way the hem swirled when I walked. I’d wrapped a sweater around my waist and tied it in place with a large knot.

When I came into the tiny kitchen of our modest home, Paul and Robert sat at the butcher-block table eating plates of eggs. My mother slid a plate in front of me with a warm smile but without comment, and I watched my father sip his coffee and stare off into the distance while I ate my breakfast.

My father never spoke much at the breakfast table, and that day was no exception. Still, I noticed him glancing my way out of the corner of his eye while I ate, and I noticed that he couldn’t quite keep the smile off his face.

Our dog, a black Labrador retriever named Shadow, lay sprawled in front of the wood stove with his belly turned to the fire. He was a lazy dog, and spent most of his time in that pose, rising only to slurp water and gobble table scraps from a pair of bowls in the corner of the kitchen. My father loved that dog, and often slipped him food from the table, seemingly oblivious to my mother’s disapproving frowns.

After breakfast, I washed my plate and cutlery and set them in the wire dish rack to dry. My book bag sat in the corner of the room, next to the door. I picked it up and slung the strap across my shoulder before returning to the table to kiss my father goodbye.

“I love you, pumpkin,” he told me, just as he did every day. Pumpkin was a name only he could call me, and I always felt a special pride when he said it. I gave him a tight, but brief hug, before dashing outside to await the school bus at the end of the road.

Had I known what was to be, I think I’d have lingered longer in his embrace that morning, but life doesn’t often show us what lurks around the next bend in the road.

* * * * *

It was during third period … math class, my least favorite … that Mrs. Eckerly stepped into the classroom. She was the vice principal of the town’s lone school, a tall, gaunt and stern woman with gray hair shaped into a severe bun on the top of her head.

She and Mrs. Johansen, my teacher, engaged in a whispered conversation at the front of the classroom, and she gestured at one point in my direction. She beckoned to me then, and I gathered my books and rose from my desk.

I followed her from the classroom and into her tiny office in silence, wondering what she wanted and yet afraid, for no reason I could define, to ask. She sat in her padded chair and motioned me to a hard seat across from her. I glanced up at the clock on her wall, noticing it was nearly lunchtime.

She sat there and watched me for a few ticks of the second hand, saying nothing. I crossed my hands in my lap, bowed my head, and waited for her to speak.

“Merrilee, I…” she began. “I have some bad news.”

Somehow, in that moment, I knew what was coming, and my heart constricted into a tight knot inside my chest.

“Your father,” she continued, holding out her hand to me in a manner very unlike her. I let her take my tiny hand in hers and waited, barely breathing.

“Your father…was shot,” she said. “He’s in the hospital, and…”

She stopped, gave me an apprising look. I liked Mrs. Eckerly because she always talked to us kids honestly, always told us the truth. That day was no exception, though it seemed to take her longer than usual to decide just what to say. I held my breath, said nothing, waited for her to find the right words to tell me what I already knew.

“They don’t think he’s going to survive,” she said at last.

Even though deep inside I’d known what was to come, the news still hit me with all the force of a locomotive, hard enough that I felt faint and the world seemed to spin all around me. I remember Mrs. Eckerly rising, putting her arms around me, saying words that I don’t recall really hearing.

* * * * *

Later, much later, mother and my brothers and I sat in a faceless, impersonal room in the county hospital thirty miles from our home, watching people we didn’t know pass us by while we waited for news. The hospital seemed unfamiliar to me, a city place that seemed cold and harsh to me. The wall clock ticked off the minutes, and we maintained our silent vigil like that for nearly six hours.

Finally, a white-coated man with a beard and a gold name tag entered the tiny room. Engraved letters on the gold surface spelled out his name, “E HOYT, M.D.”. I have no other memory of him beyond those glittering letters and the profound weariness that followed him like the scent that lingers from a strong perfume.

Four pairs of eyes looked up at him expectantly, but we could all read in his body language the words he hadn’t yet spoken. My mother fell apart when the doctor said the words “couldn’t save”, her body heaving with great wracking sobs that I thought might tear her to pieces. My brothers and I sat motionless, all of us unable to express our own emotion, so focused were we on hers.

The intervening days remain a featureless blur in my memory, but the Friday of my father’s funeral dawned cold and blustery and white. It seemed as though nearly the whole town of Hunter’s Pond crammed themselves into the tiny cemetery. My mother wore a dress of solid black, and a veil that did little to hide her raw, naked pain.

The minister of the Baptist church led the service, and his eulogy was full of talk about the mystery of God’s plan and the nobility of dying in the service of one’s community.

I found little noble about the loss of my father, but I knew enough not to express aloud the doubts I felt inside. My mother sobbed and wailed throughout the whole affair, and by the time they folded the flag that had draped my father’s coffin, she’d wept so long and so hard that she could barely speak.

We endured a parade of well-meaning neighbors over the following days, each one of them bringing casseroles and pies and stories of “your husband” or “your father”. I believe we must have eaten close to a hundred casseroles in the first few weeks after the shooting, and I’ve never eaten another since.

Publicly, my brothers and I tried to remain polite and civil to the visitors, but inside I think we all wished everyone would leave us alone.

My mother, who’d long defined herself by the “policeman’s wife” role she’d played to perfection, donned a new role, that of “grieving widow”. It was a role she slipped into as easily as I slipped into my school dresses, and I wonder now if she didn’t find some comfort and even perhaps joy in it.

Or, perhaps it’s just that a woman who so long defined herself by her relationship to another simply found herself unable to manage the leap to standing on her own.

Whatever the reason, she embraced her sorrow as one might embrace a long-lost lover at last returned home, and she never quite managed to let it go. The consuming sadness and anger ate at her, and she became withdrawn and sullen, prone to bursts of fury and sudden tears that sprung from nowhere and passed as quickly as a prairie flash flood.

She never talked with my brothers and I about her feelings, nor did she do much to help us deal with ours. I’m not blaming her for that, mind you – she did what she was capable of, and it consumed all of herself just to hold the family and our household together – but her choices took a toll on us whether or not she intended them to.

* * * * *

I think my brothers were more affected by what happened than I was, though none of us escaped unscathed.

Robert fled to the city shortly after he turned eighteen, where he strove to become very much a replica of his father. As far as I know, he never again spoke to my mother after he left. He sent me a few letters and postcards here and there – when he was accepted into the police academy, when he graduated, and a handful of times since. I’ve heard nothing from or about him in several years, and my last letters to the address he’d given me were returned with a big red “undeliverable” stamp sprawled across their fronts.

Paul, who was perhaps closest of all of us to our father, sank into a deep and violent depression soon after daddy’s death. He became an angry young man, prone to outbursts of violence that terrified us and, I think, shamed him even as he surrendered himself to them. But it was one incident in particular that showed us just how dark his mood had become, and it marked more or less the end of his relationship with us.

It was a warm, sunny July morning, three years or so after my father died, a day that held for me the promise of walks among the wildflowers and perhaps even a visit to the swimming hole. We sat together for breakfast at that same scarred butcher-block table, eating our toast and eggs with little conversation. The kitchen table had been quiet and subdued before my father’s death, and had become even more still and lifeless since that day.

Paul stared at his plate, his eyes downcast and dark. He’d been quiet and sullen that morning, but this was no different than most days in our house. Suddenly, he snatched up a ceramic bowl from the table. It was a beautiful thing, that bowl, nearly a foot across, made of china whiter than the freshest snow, painted with bright blue and pink flowers and swirling green stems.

It had belonged to my grandmother, and was one the few possessions we owned that truly mattered to my mother. She’d even said once, back before my father’s death robbed her of the emotion of happiness, that she’d give it to me on my wedding day, so that I might someday give it to my own daughter.

Paul picked up that bowl, full of apples harvested from the tree where my tire swing used to hang, and held it in his meaty hands, staring at something in its depths that only he could see. His eyes seemed to darken and filled with a terrifying sense of purpose, and perhaps resolve. In one motion, he lifted the bowl above his head and dashed it to slivers on the stone hearth with an inarticulate bellow full of all the feelings he’d held inside those three long years.

We all stared at him, appalled and shocked, and he turned and stormed from the house without a word. He never again set foot in that house, and so far as I know, he never again spoke to my mother or brothers. He sent me a postcard when he was drafted into the army, and we received a telegram when he was killed, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam.

* * * * *

As for me, I stayed in Hunter’s Pond. Where my brothers both tried to run from the demons that stalked them, I managed to make an uneasy truce with mine. After a while, the nightmares stopped, and I was able to see that the end of my father’s life didn’t mean the end of mine. Things more or less went back to normal, as far as I could see, though I did occasionally hear the townsfolk whisper about me as I went about my business.

“That’s Alan Bowles’s little girl,” they’d say. “Isn’t it awful what happened to him?”

I finished school in Hunter’s Pond and, though I thought I’d leave town the day I graduated, something kept me there. Perhaps it’s true what they say, that you can never really go home once you leave. Perhaps it was that knowledge that leaving the town would be a one-way journey that kept me there.

I ended up in a tiny stone cottage on the far edge of town, still in the only place that I’d ever called home, but somewhat removed from my mother and her endless drowning pool of grief.

So, I stayed, and I became a writer of moderate success, in the way successes were judged in small towns, the editor of the Hunter’s Pond News and an occasional correspondent for the big paper in the city. It’s a quiet, mostly uneventful job, writing about county fairs and quilting bees, but it suits me. Hunter’s Pond grew some over the years – we got a second traffic light, and a mini-mart, but we still don’t have a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot or a Starbucks.

I still think of my father often, and of the fact that his murder has never been solved. Nobody ever figured out what he was doing at the deserted quarry where Red Rock Road met the dusty highway, nor who’d put a rifle bullet through his head from atop a promontory at the south side of the quarry.

His duty log said only “unknown trouble” and the location where his car had been found.They found the empty shell casing in the quarry, along with smudged boot-prints and a lone tire track. They found his patrol car parked alongside the road, shotgun still in its rack. His pistol and badge were missing. There the knowledge of how my father spent his final moments ends.

I wish I could tell you that this story has a happy ending, that a deathbed confession or a mysterious envelope in the mail one day told me the truth about what happened at Red Rock Quarry on that cool October afternoon. But life doesn’t come neatly packaged like a storybook, with all the loose ends bundled up like a ball of yarn.

In the end, nobody ever did come forward to confess any part in my father’s death. No trace of a motive was ever found, and neither his badge nor his missing pistol ever turned up. I suspect that whoever once knew the truth took his, or her, secret to the grave.

My father’s death exacted a price from each of us who loved them, and the toll, though different for each one of us, was steep nonetheless.

For Robert and Paul, the coin with which they paid that toll consumed their lives, and ultimately cost them their sister, and me my brothers. The sorrow took a different toll on my mother, who never realized that the cloak of identity defined by grief sucked the life from her as surely as the bullet took the life from my father. She passed away just about a year ago, and when I visit her grave I wonder if the choices she made in her life were worth it to her. I suspect, with a hint of melancholy, that they were.

For my part, I was left to grieve alone, lost in my own world of books and journals and words on a page. I was left to fend for myself, emotionally if not physically, by a mother and two brothers too consumed with themselves to have anything left for me.

I learned, that way, that to place one’s reliance on another is to leave an opening for the monsters to take that person from you. And thus I find myself, forty years old and the last of a dead family, living out my days comfortable, content, and yet alone.

In time, as I grieved and struggled, I discovered that, even in the face of terrible tragedy and terrible pain, the world still turns on its axis. The death of a loved one or the felling of an ancient tree might each be tragedies in their own ways, but the world does not come to an end in honor of the fallen.

The dawning of each new day may not bring comfort, and it may not bring answers, but at least it brings one more day to spend among the living.