Legend of a Suicide by David Vann Page B

have to worry about it anymore.
    It looked like you just stepped off.
    I got too close to the edge. It’s all right.
    So they waited. Roy fed him soup and water again, and then his father had to go to the bathroom.
    I have to go, he said. And I can’t get up by myself. Grab some TP and come help me up.
    Roy grabbed the toilet paper and got behind his father to pull him up under his armpits. His father was able to help some with his legs, then with a hand on the table, and so they were able to stand and then make it to the door, where they rested.
    It doesn’t seem like you broke anything, Roy said.
    No, it doesn’t, his father said. I was really lucky.
    They rested against the door for a few more minutes while his father looked out at the cove. Then they moved along the outside wall and out to the steps and took them one at a time, Roy going first, his father leaning on him.
    This is gonna work, his father said. We’ll be fine. I’m just a little sore and stiff, but it won’t last.
    They rested at the bottom of the steps.
    The outhouse might actually be easier, his father said. Even though it’s farther away.
    I can try to carry you, Roy said.
    I think I can walk if you help me.
    So his father hung on him. They stepped slowly toward the outhouse, resting every ten or twenty feet, and then it started drizzling faintly but they decided to keep going and made it to the outhouse, where his father got help turning around and sitting and then Roy stepped outside to wait.
    Roy standing there in the drizzle felt things he could not make sense of. His enormous fear had mostly lifted, but a part of him that he did not understand well wanted his father to have died in the fall so that there would have been a kind of relief and everything could be clear and he could simply return to his life. But he was afraid to think this, as if it were a kind of jinx, and the thought that he could have lost his father made his eyes well up suddenly so that when his father called out from inside that he was done, Roy was trying not to cry, trying to fight it down in his throat and eyes.
    His father extended a hand when Roy opened the door. Help me up, he said. But he still had his pants down and Roy couldn’thelp looking at his penis hanging there and the hair on his thighs. Then he was embarrassed and tried to look away as if he hadn’t looked.
    His father didn’t say anything. When he was standing, still holding on to Roy’s hand, he pulled up his pants with the other, then turned to lean against the doorjamb so that he’d have both hands to button. Then they went on to the cabin, where his father lay back down, ate and drank a little bit, and slept the rest of the day.
    Over the next week, his father strengthened. He became limber again, enough to walk himself to the outhouse and then walk around out front slowly and then finally walk out to the point and back. Soon after, he announced himself fully well.
    Back from the grave, he said. Lungs never felt better. And I’m not gonna let anything like that happen again, I promise you.
    Roy wanted to ask again whether his father had stepped off on purpose, because that was the way it had looked, but he didn’t.
    They hunted and shot deer, the first from the pass behind the cabin shooting down the other side. His father let Roy take the shot and he hit it in the neck. He had been aiming low behind the shoulder and so was way off, but he let it seem afterward that he had intended the neck.
    They found it sprawled in the blueberries, its tongue hanging out and eyes still clear.
    Good deal, his father said. This will be good meat. He un-slung his rifle and got out his Buck knife. He slit up the stomach, pulled out the entrails, bled the neck, cut off the balls and everything else down there, and then slotted the hind legs and pushed the forelegs through to make a kind of backpack.
    Normally I’d carry it, he said. But my back and side are still a bit sore, if you don’t mind.
    So while his