LITMIR.BIZ

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expect the bodily effects and feverish symptoms of salvation. Before long he had his congregants swooning in the aisles, crying and convulsing. Neighbouring preachers denounced the church as hysterical, even possessed. Ultimately, Edwards conceded that some of these signs were suspect, but not before he had raised the psychological bar: the evangelical rush, the high as conversion’s sure sign. I tried to catch this ecstatic proof all through my youth. All of us did.

      I’ve never received this blessed assurance, but I’ve found its complement. I found what David Brainerd suffered at the faith’s other pole: the sickness of the soul, the self-loathing that marks a true pilgrim’s progress. Brainerd renounced the colonial world and lived in self-imposed exile. He lived, he said, in a ‘hideous and howling wilderness’. Brainerd complained ceaselessly of ‘vapoury disorders’, of distraction and despair. At the end of his life, he retreated to Edwards’s spare room, finished up his sad notes, and died. He said he was unworthy of love, foul and sinful. His heart, he wrote, was a cage of unclean birds. My sister, Margaret Lee, has never seen this place. She’s the only one of us who isn’t bipolar, the only one of us named for a loved one rather than a Puritan.

      When he wasn’t lecturing, my father preferred to write at home in the living room. He would hole up with symphonies blasting and a constrictor draped around his shoulders. The three of us children were altogether too young for my father’s distracted, intellectual disciplines. Even my mother lacked the critical tools necessary to share in my father’s cerebral world. I’d lose myself in the woods, and my sister lost herself in books. My mother put flowers and vases on her kitchen table and worked on her paintings while Dad hunkered down in a low upholstered chair, hunched over his typewriter and insulated from the family by a wall of classical music. There was always music in the living room. Finally he ran speaker wires out to the kitchen and our dinners were swamped in Brahms and Bartók. My father would sit at the head of the table and hum, his eyes closed as his right hand hovered with the strings. He ate between movements.

      ‘Who can tell me the composer of this piece?’ he’d ask, and my sister and I vied for his approval. My mother never guessed. Once she had me pull the wires out of the speakers.

      ‘Now listen to this. This passage gives it away. Who wrote it?’

      ‘Mozart.’ My guess was always Mozart with a Beethoven fallback. The occasional choral work had to be Bach.

      ‘No, no. Here’s a hint. Afternoon of a Faun!’

      ‘What’s a fawn?’ my sister asked.

      ‘Bambi’s a fawn,’ I said. ‘Duh.’

      ‘Okay then, it’s Beethoven,’ my sister said confidently. ‘It has to be Beethoven.’

      ‘What’s Beethoven have to do with fawns?’ I challenged.

      My sister faltered. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay, Bach.’

      My father smiled broadly. ‘Wrong. You’re both wrong. It’s Debussy!’

      Of course, Debussy.

      But my father had other records, records the Willow Grove kids had given him. He didn’t have much rock and roll but he had Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. I listened to it over and over and memorized its lines, especially: ‘God said to Abraham kill me a son / Abe said man you must be putting me on / God said no Abe said what / God said you can do what you want Abe but / The next time you see me coming you better run.’ Dad had his Debussy and I had my ‘Desolation Row’.

      Some nights, when he was sick of Puritans, my father bundled me up and we went fishing. It was always just my Dad and I. Jonathan was too young and my father rarely invited my mother or Peggy. My father cited their complete and utter lack of interest and I think deep down he welcomed it. After all, they were girls. But Dad and I, we always fished.

      We returned again and again to Salem Willows, a broken-down amusement park beside smokestacks and the harbour. It smelled of fried food, cigarettes and drunks. At night – it was always at night – we would walk out on the long, dark pier, twenty feet above the water. Thirty-five years ago, before all the trawlers cleared the ocean, my father and I could regularly catch twelve-pound cod on cut clams and jigs just out from shore. When the fish hit I lowered our rusted Coleman lantern just about down to the water and lashed the line. The cod flashed white in the bright green water and I’d hold the rod while my father dropped a nasty fist of grappling hooks. I’d play the fish towards Dad and he would wait for the moment, yank and haul the fish up hand over hand. When we stood on that pier, I couldn’t have cared less for the sad merry-go-round behind us, its seasick music and mouldering horses. I didn’t need candyfloss, spinning lights and rides. And I don’t think Dad needed Debussy. We were happy just standing in the dark with some hooks and a box of slippery, translucent clams for bait, waiting for fish.

      Waiting for ducks was an entirely different matter. I remember sitting in duck hides all through dark November afternoons, scanning the horizon for anything other than seagulls. ‘Seagulls are protected,’ my father explained, to my great disappointment. ‘We can’t shoot seagulls.’ We used a small skiff to navigate through the salt marshes and, if necessary, retrieve ducks. I wanted a dog, of course, a retriever, but my father pleaded allergies and said the snakes were enough. We didn’t really need the dog; we rarely hit ducks. Instead, we sat and watched our rather sad group of plastic decoys bob out in front of our hovel while I listened to my father talk about jumping ducks along the Rio Grande of his youth: whole rafts of them, he’d say. I don’t remember bringing home edible ducks, but the family feasted on sea duck occasionally, a kind of feathered herring. I was too young for a gun and just played with the duck call. My father had a twelve-gauge monster of a Browning, a goose gun if there ever was one. It was an automatic and it jammed every time.

      Although our duck hunts never lived up to their promise, I loved the idea of hunting. Anything. I spent more and more time on the bridle paths killing small innocent things with my BB gun: chickadees, nuthatches, large beetles. I knew it was wrong but I kept score. I played for keeps. I longed to poach larger game from Myopia’s forest but stags were scarce, as were pheasants and partridge. This left squirrel. It was clear I needed more gun.

      ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘it’s perfectly fine to shoot squirrels. There’s a season and everything.’

      ‘I don’t know, David. It just seems cruel.’

      ‘People eat them all the time, Dad. Really.’

      ‘I’ve never seen anyone eat a squirrel. Maybe in Appalachia.’

      ‘Dad, there’s tons and tons of squirrels out there. A few less wouldn’t matter.’ My father resisted the idea, but I kept at it. I found recipes.

      The Browning was useless on ducks but we knocked down half a dozen grey squirrels in no time. Hitting squirrels with a twelve-gauge shotgun is as easy as it is pointless, and although the gun’s kickback knocked me into the leaves repeatedly, I quickly mastered the skill. I could squirrel hunt and trout trap like a professional. My father and I had left legal concerns such as trespass, gun law and licence vague, so when we heard the shouting my first instinct was to run but my father stood his ground. It was Mr Mosley, our neighbour. His son, Dick, beat me regularly down at the bus stop.

      ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Mosley asked.

      I dropped the squirrels and my father said, ‘Oh. Hello, Mr, Mr –’

      ‘Mosley.’

      ‘Right, Mosley. Mr Mosley. I’m Richard Lovelace and this is –’

      ‘I know who you are. I want to know why you’re out here killing squirrels with a damn shotgun.’ My father stared at him blankly. What could he say? That we needed the food? That squirrels were overrunning our lawn? Killing our livestock?

      ‘Listen, Lovelace. This is no way to teach a boy. Take him to the dump and shoot rats if you have to. Go ahead. But if you kill another goddamn squirrel with a shotgun around my house I’ll have you arrested. Understand?’ My father nodded silently and Mosley stalked off, back through the woods. I picked up the dead squirrels

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