The planet keeps oxygen in balance so that living things can breathe It without choking, so that air won’t catch on fire and kill us all when lightning crackles through it—or somebody strikes a match against a NO SMOKING sign, or we test an atom bomb. Water keeps recycling itself so that it stays fit to drink. And every now and then, the world reluctantly gives us someone like Victor as an antitoxin to the worst in all of us, so that we can build up a resistance against epidemic malevolence.
Victor was raised on a farm where his father, Greyson Mills, put a couple of hundred acres or so into corn or soy beans, tomatoes or sugar beets, and sometimes two or three, or all four of them. Grey had once raised some livestock, but he developed issues with the slaughtering part of it, and gave it up, except for a couple of milk cows. He kept ten or so acres in woods which he would selectively thin out for the mahagony that furniture makers and such, would solicit him to sell. Grey kept it as a refuge for wildlife.
When Victor started school, only one sister of the three to whom he was sole brother remained at home, the other younger two, Jane and Martha, dead of childhood cancers at ages six—and six. But Ann went on to junior high leaving Victor to defend himself from the third grade on where bullying him had become a rite of passage for the other boys (and some girls) his age who had been taught that violence was a necessary element of the trek towards adulthood. Because Victor had been strictly forbidden to fight by his parents, who were aided by selected biblical passages read by Grey—and smiling, nodding assent by Naomi Mills, who was tiny, and looked every bit as cute and as gentle as a ladybug. Grey used to tell Victor that he’d never been in a fight—and it seemed likely that he’d never be, because he was six foot four and weighed two hundred fifty pounds of work-toughened flesh and bone. But Victor favored his mother.
He endured the constant provocations of his schoolmates through the rest of elementary school; and on through the eight grade where his reputation—or lack of it—had preceded him. In the ninth grade, he went out for freshman sports with the reluctant consent of his parents, and he threw himself into baseball, football, basketball and track with such fierceness that he inspired no little measure of respect, and it freed him finally from his constant torment. But there would still occasion incidents where his contemporaries would demonstrate—to those unfamiliar with Victor—the nature of his nonviolence, by slapping him and ordering him to “turn the other cheek.” But Victor would only smile and endure it.
He stayed happily busy by helping on the farm, tutoring less capable students, pitching in on the local lliteracy council, teaching a Sunday school class for pre-teens, fundraising for various groups, and delivering meals on wheels to senior folks during weekends
One summer day, while discussing his choice of colleges with his parents and Ann at the dinner table, three individuals in ski masks came in through the open front door and interrupted supper, with at least one gun pointed at the Mills, trying to extract the location of a cache of money from them, taking their time though, in a taunting way uncharacteristic of thieves in desperate need of loot. After asking everyone the questions that evoked no satisfactory answers, they slapped Victor in a very deliberate and obvious way on both cheeks. Then they slapped Naomi, and when Victor made a move to defend her, Grey gripped his arm with the strength of a vise and held him immobile. When the robbers saw this, they backed Grey into a corner and concentrated their interrogation of him by making fun of his non-aggressiveness, and by slapping him four times that resounded like gunshots. Then one of the three took hold of Ann from behind, letting his hands rove over her in a suggestive way. This time, Victor was held in place by the direct look of Grey into his eyes, and the talon-like hold of two small hands on his arms from behind. Because Naomi was a Mills by marriage, but an O’Bruin by birth.
Stepping to the front of Victor, she took a cast iron skillet—that her mother had passed on to her and that she kept inside a hand-knit cover on a lamp table in the living room—and applied it to the back of the head of one of Grey’s tormentors who collapsed like cut rope. When one other turned around in reaction, she swung the pan again and literally knock him off his feet. Grey took the third by the scruff of the neck and enclosed the hand holding the gun with a sizeable hand of his own and took him to the floor, breaking the thief’s nose in the process and at least three fingers, including the one on the trigger.
While Victor drove the pickup truck, Grey sat in the back with the three, stopping that many times with each one of them to walk him to the door where he held a brief discussion with the parent answering it. On the last stop, Grey waved to Victor, and Victor went up to join Grey,and took the gun with him, and he heard Grey say, “This is probably yours. If it isn’t, you might want to get rid of it. I didn’t want to hurt the boy, but it just happened. I’m sorry.” Grey never bothered to unmask the boys; he delivered them the same way that they came in through the front door, maybe a little better for wear.
Victor graduated from the state university as a veterinarian and joined the military, much against his family’s wishes, but he had to do his part. While he was away—showing Afghanis how to worm a camel, when he wasn’t tightening ligatures on young men’s butchered stumps to keep them from bleeding to death—Naomi got cancer, and after a year-long battle that left her with Frankenstein scars from each of her shoulders to her ribcage, hairless, and with not much left of her but the O’Bruin gleam in her eye, she died. Victor didn’t make it to the funeral—on Grey’s orders. A month later, Grey was found dead in his barn from one bullet in his back and three in his chest. The one in his back was the first one to hit him. A pail of milk was found beside him still full where he’d laid it down to face his attackers. The house was practically torn apart by ransackers. On Victor’s way home for this funeral, Ann, now teaching history of religion at a local branch of the state university, became the third victim of a psychotic senior who got mad at his mother because she wouldn’t buy him a BMW for his graduation.
Standing in as sole surviving family, two of the boys who had been authors of the first raid on the farm, stood by Victor’s side at the double funeral. One was a lawyer, the other still in medical school.
The minister overseeing the funeral declaimed, “It is a mournful day when we, the bereft, including a man of God like myself, must arm ourselves against the random nature of this plague of violence that threatens to deprive us all of our families,” and he whipped the tail of his coat back to show a pistol holstered at his waist.
On the way to the cars, the minister stopped Victor, and with an air of speechless condolence, slapped him lightly, on each side of the face with an open hand. Victor hauled off and knocked him down with a vicious right that broke the minister’s jaw and laid him flat.
That same afternoon, Lieutenant John Merit, the third boy in the first raid, took his John Browne off before he went up alone to the front door of the Mills farm to arrest Victor. On the way to town for the arraignment (which probably would not amount to much since the lieutenant’s father was the judge in common pleas), John said, “Why’d you do it, Victor?”
Victor said, “I don’t know. There was just something about that motherfucker I didn’t like.”
Noe.
