“I thought we’d be too drunk to get back,” Stafford said. “We might pass out and freeze to death. Emmett knew a guy who did that.”

  “Maybe,” Bobby said. “But next time get six.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Appetite

  Appetite is contrary to choice.

  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

  Monday, March 10, 2003

  Kingston, Ontario

  WHEN STAFFORD CHECKED OUT of the Holiday Inn, his intention was to drive straight to Napanee. His throat was getting worse, and he knew if he didn’t get to Toronto by early afternoon, he would be too sick to fly to Vancouver and would have to overnight in Toronto. But that, he decided, was preferable to another night in Kingston at the Holiday Inn. In Toronto he could house himself in a better hotel, and if he had to spend a few days recovering from whatever travel-fueled affliction he had caught in Kingston, he could do so there with some degree of comfort and anonymity.

  He decided also that he would not call his uncle Christy again, nor any other family members in the Kingston area, before he left town. Young Chris, his uncle’s son, would be busy running the farm in any event, and what could Stafford and Chris possibly have in common at this point in their lives, two first cousins who hadn’t laid eyes on each other for decades? They would have nothing to talk about, and Stafford disliked conversations that went nowhere. His mother had a second cousin in Kingston, an elderly woman who sent him a Christmas card every year, but she had become increasingly deaf and would not be content with a telephone call. She would insist on seeing him. She would want him to come over.

  “Can you stop by the apartment?” she would ask in a tentative voice, and then he would be caught. He would have to go and see her, and that would take the better part of an hour, an uncomfortable hour with an elderly stranger who would fuss about with stale cookies on a tray and coffee that cooled too quickly in the cup. No, Stafford thought, it would serve no purpose to call his mother’s cousin if he didn’t have time to see her. It would only confuse her that a relative had come halfway around the world for one night and there was no value in that. The matter of his brother, though, was more complicated, and while it was easy to bypass a cousin or two, Emmett was different. Emmett could not be ignored.

  But the last time Stafford spent any time with Emmett they had come to an agreement that they would not seek each other out again. Their parents were dead and the farm gone. They were separated by fifteen years and a thousand other things, and it no longer mattered that they were brothers. Stafford had often tried to send Emmett money, and twice he had offered to buy him a little farm somewhere. Not a real farm, perhaps, but a few acres with a house and a barn that wouldn’t be too much for him to manage. But Emmett said he didn’t want a farm anymore. He had a room in the city, a room at the top of a boardinghouse on Emily Street, and when he stopped drinking, he was able to manage for himself without anyone’s help. He liked chocolate, though, and books on dogs. He once said he would like to have a dog again, but when Stafford went to the trouble of arranging it, even going so far as to pick one out and deliver it himself, Emmett said he wouldn’t take it. It wouldn’t be his dog now, he said, and Stafford should take it back.

  “He won’t take anything from me,” Stafford complained later to his uncle Christy.

  “Well, maybe he can’t, Stafford,” his uncle said. “He’s not right in his mind anymore. He’s gone too far downhill.”

  “I took him a box of chocolates. He said he’d keep that. But that was all. No money, no farm, not even a dog.”

  “A dog’s just the same as a farm to him. A dog’s all the things he doesn’t want to remember. Just leave him. He’s managing on his own, and that’s the main thing.”

  “Is he still drinking?”

  “I expect some. But he’s mostly too sick now.”

  “He looks like an old man.”

  “That’s true enough.”

  And so the years passed, and Stafford came less frequently to Kingston, and when he did, for funerals or the short visits driven by the nostalgia that initially plagued him, he would find an hour or two in the middle of the day when he would go, box of chocolates in hand, looking for Emmett, who would somehow know he was coming. It was a ritual both brothers could cope with, and when Stafford accepted the inherent rules of their brief reunions, he found them less painful. But gradually Stafford’s visits subsided, until they stopped altogether one fall afternoon when Stafford returned to Kingston to receive an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University. He was comparatively young for such an honor, but his fame and fortune as a television executive had made him an attractive commodity to the university’s board of directors. Stafford had always regretted his failure to complete his doctorate when he had the chance, so the thought of receiving it as some sort of intellectual compensation for making so much money elsewhere proved irresistible.

  His mother had died a decade earlier and would not be present to see her younger son presented with the robes and papers that would have finally allowed her to call a family member Doctor Hopkins, but Emmett came. He came to the hall, drunk and incoherent, and when Stafford’s name and achievements had been addressed by the chancellor, he began to shout from the back of the hall, a disconnected tirade of words that made no sense to anyone, revealing only that a mentally ill person had wandered into the hall and would have to be taken out again.

  “Probably an ex-con,” the woman next to Stafford said.

  “Yes,” Stafford replied.

  “They’re all half crazy,” the woman said, “but you can’t do much when they’re drunk.”

  “No, you can’t,” Stafford said.

  “How did he get in? That’s the real issue. Campus security dropped the ball on this one,” the woman said, but Stafford didn’t answer. He was watching the two burly security guards who had taken hold of Emmett on either side to get him out of the hall as quickly as possible.

  “There may be brain damage,” Stafford said. “It’s not always alcohol.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, it’s not always alcohol.”

  “You know that man?”

  “No,” Stafford said. “Not anymore.”

  “But you used to?” the woman said as if she had caught him in a lie. “Or did I misconstrue your meaning?”

  “Misconstrue?”

  “I don’t know him anymore?”

  Stafford turned then and looked at her, a middle-aged academic with a studied intelligence that seemed somehow absurd to him. He had green-lit a television show about academics once, but it had failed—his only failure. It was an inside look at the cutthroat world of academia, but Stafford had miscalculated the relationship between product and audience. The people he hoped to attract were people who didn’t actually watch television, and when low ratings and brutal reviews killed the show after four painful episodes, Stafford had been humiliated. And unaccountably annoyed by this reminder, he did something he rarely did. He told the truth.

  “He’s had two concussions that I know about,” Stafford whispered. “But the bullet did the most damage.”

  “Bullet?” the woman asked, no longer whispering.

  “Well, they couldn’t take it out without doing more harm, so they left it. It was safer to leave it where it was.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I was there,” Stafford replied, and if the woman had any more questions, she didn’t ask them, because it was time for the ceremony to resume and it was Stafford’s turn to approach the podium and speak about philosophy.

  Later, when the ceremony was over and Stafford had excused himself from the reception at the faculty club, he went to his brother’s boardinghouse, but Emmett was not there. So he had made the rounds of the places Emmett was most likely to be. The steps of the public library, the park at Murney Tower, the emergency ward at the hospital, and Portsmouth. But Emmett was not at any of those places. He could no longer drive, of course, and Stafford knew he could not get far drunk and on foot, but he might have tried to hitchhike and, if so, Stafford knew exactly where his brother would go. And without knowing it would be the last time, Stafford began to retrace his brother’s steps until they brought him, as they always did, to the same place.

  “Get in, Emmett,” Stafford said. “We can drive together.”

  “I’m just resting.”

  “Emmett, get in the car. Please,” Stafford said, and he opened the passenger door.

  “I don’t need a ride in your car, Stafford.”

  “It’s cold. I’ll drive you home.”

  “I’m not going home,” Emmett said, and he got to his feet and began walking up Bath Road, stumbling as he went, somewhere in the middle of his hangover but not quite sober.

  “It’s too late,” Stafford said, and he followed alongside Emmett in the car, the passenger door still open.

  “It’s too late for some.”

  “Emmett, please get in.”

  “Go home, Stafford.”

  “Come on, Emmett.”

  “You can go away now,” Emmett said. “Go on your business, Doctor Hopkins.”

  Stafford lost it then, slamming the gearshift into park, his foot halfway out of the car before it stopped moving. He left the keys in the ignition and the engine running and when he kicked the driver’s door shut, he caught his thumb in the door. He opened the door, howling with rage and pain, and then he kicked it shut a second time and then he kept on kicking it, pausing only to scoop up handfuls of gravel from the ditch, which he flung at the windshield.

  “Jesus Christ, Emmett! Just get in the fucking car! Just get in! Get in! Get in! Just get in, why can’t you! Goddamn fucking shit! Fuck it! Fuck it all, Emmett! Fuck the whole fucking mess!”

  “Stafford, stop that,” his brother said finally. “It’s a good car. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  The nail on Stafford’s thumb would later be pried off by a doctor in Los Angeles who said Stafford was lucky he didn’t lose the whole thumb because the infection that set in was far worse than the injury itself. But Emmett had insisted that Stafford rub the wound with the charcoal ash from his cigarette, which he said would ease the pain. Which it did, briefly, before the infection set in.

  They sat together by the side of the road for a long time while Stafford settled down and Emmett smoked. It was getting dark and the traffic along Bath Road was steady, but there seemed no urgency now about where they should go or what they should do.

  “I’m sorry about the horse mostly,” Emmett said finally. “I don’t remember everything.”

  “It was a bad night,” Stafford answered.

  “Did I do those things, Stafford? Did I really do all those terrible things?”

  “Some,” Stafford said.

  “I know I did. Was Father angry?”

  “Father wasn’t there.”

  “He died at Collins Bay.”

  “No, he got sick at Collins Bay. He had a heart attack.”

  “I was there.”

  “No, Emmett, you weren’t there. Not then.”

  “He saw the horse then.”

  “Yes, he saw the horse, Emmett. He saw the horse when he came home from the hospital.”

  “I was supposed to buy cattle. I went to Quebec to buy cattle. I should have done that.”

  “Father loved the horse, Emmett. The cattle didn’t matter.”

  “Father died at Collins Bay because I didn’t buy the cattle, Stafford.”

  “No, Father died in the hospital.”

  “You can take me back now,” Emmett said.

  “You don’t want to go out to the farm?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody will know. It’s dark. They won’t see us from the house. Uncle Christy will stay away.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Okay, then,” Stafford said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “I can’t remember her name, Stafford.”

  “Brenda Bee Hoover,” Stafford said, and he was annoyed when his voice broke, and he looked down at his hands.

  “That’s it,” Emmett said. “Brenda Bee Hoover. That was a good name for a horse.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was too pretty for me. I just gave him the money and took her.”

  “I know that.”

  “Who dug that grave?”

  “Uncle Christy.”

  “I was glad he did that. It’s not easy to bury a horse.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “It’s a lot to dig. I wouldn’t want that job.”

  “He got a backhoe from the Baileys,” Stafford said finally.

  “They had a backhoe?”

  “The Baileys had everything.”

  “They had a good tractor. John Deere. Brand new. That was something. Father talked about that tractor. I went to get the doctor and came back on that tractor. Through the snow and we came back on that tractor and you were born. That’s what I remember. We had a little Jersey cow. Jersey milk’s good for a baby. You have to boil the milk first.”

  “We can’t stay out here, Emmett.”

  “I have to get back, Stafford. Let’s go.”

  So they didn’t go out to the rise on the hill that night where their uncle Christy had buried Brenda Bee Hoover, the horse their father had loved. They went instead back down Bath Road, past the Cataraqui marshlands and the Collins Bay Penitentiary with all its lights and fences and the red turreted roof that everyone said made it look like Disneyland. Emmett got out near Emily Street and said goodbye to Stafford. He didn’t apologize for showing up drunk at the Queen’s University fall convocation, which he seemed to have forgotten about in any event. He said, though, that Stafford shouldn’t come again and not to be sending any more chocolates. He was busy now, he said, and he couldn’t be busy with Stafford and his business anymore.

  “It’s all gone,” he said. “Let it go, Stafford.”

  And then he walked away, an old man, dirty and drunk, still swaying slightly on his feet, his beautiful teeth all broken and gone, his blue eyes clouded with the murkiness of alcohol and memory. Stafford watched him, knowing that Emmett was no longer thinking about him or even what had happened between them that day. And it was true, Stafford thought, what his brother had said. It was gone.

  The Collins Bay Penitentiary was built on land west of Kingston, but the city had expanded over the years until the only thing that separated it from Collins Bay was Little Cataraqui Creek and the marshlands on either side. The prison was a 485-cell medium-security institution and also a farm, built on twenty-eight acres of prime farmland with a federal reserve of another eight hundred acres, all of which were owned by the government of Canada. With so much land at its disposal, the prison farm was able to sustain a variety of food crops along with a fine herd of milk-producing Holsteins. There was agrarian interaction between the prison farm and the local farming community, and the prison farm occasionally held cattle auctions that were open to accredited local breeders, one of whom was Stafford’s father.

  Michael Hopkins had always struggled financially, but he had a breeder’s eye for Holsteins and by 1960, with the help of a secondhand milking machine, he had built up a nice little herd of his own, including a cow he called Bugsy, who placed third in Canadian milk production two years in a row. A good breeder was always on the lookout for new livestock, but there was fierce competition among local farmers, and few had the funds to risk a bidding war. So when Michael Hopkins got advance notice about a cattle sale at Collins Bay from his brother Frank, a guard at the prison, he jumped at the chance to get in ahead of the pack.

  “Goddamnit! This goddamned useless son of a—boys. Stafford, Bobby! Get over here and give me a hand with this.”

  “What’s up, Pops?” Stafford asked, and he tried to sound jaunty and confident like the teenagers he heard on American television shows.

  “Don’t Pops me, Stafford. Just help me get the goddamned trailer bolt through. Bobby, you hold it steady. Stafford, hand me that other wrench.”

  “Where are you going with this bucket of bolts?” Stafford asked, because they didn’t use the old horse trailer his father was struggling to connect to the family car anymore. They had a proper cattle truck now, a five-ton truck that Emmett had taken to Quebec.

  “There’s a cattle sale at Collins Bay.”

  “Disneyland?” Bobby said.

  “I thought Emmett was buying cattle,” Stafford said.

  “The jail?” Bobby said.

  “Well, we don’t know where the hell your brother is right now, do we, Stafford? Hold that steady for me, Bobby. Keep it level.”

  Emmett had been sent to Saint-Isidore, Quebec, at the end of July to buy Holsteins from a French Canadian dairy farmer named La Salle. It was a full day’s drive there and another one back, and Emmett planned to overnight at a Brennan cousin’s farm near the Quebec border. But Emmett did not show up at the cousin’s farm, or anywhere else for that matter. He had simply disappeared with a five-ton cattle truck and fifteen hundred dollars of his father’s money in his pocket.

  “Well, there’s no point in calling the police,” Mary-Jean said after the first week. “We’ll just have to wait for him to show.”

  “Okay, that’s just about—well, shit! Jesus Christ and Uncle Ambrose!”

  “Father!” Stafford said.

  “This goddamned useless shit crap of a monkey wrench—there, that’s it! That’s perfect. That’ll hold, boys, that’ll hold!”

  Stafford’s father stood up slowly, and when he handed the wrench to Stafford, his left hand shook and he almost dropped the wrench. But he smiled when he took off his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve.

  “We’re going to Disneyland, boys,” he said, and then he added, “Collins Bay, that is.”

  “Why?” said Stafford.

  “They’ve got a Holstein I want.”

  “What’s she in for?” Bobby said.