Maisie was five and Charlie was barely three when we came across the carcass of an antelope while walking on our ranch in western Montana. The creature was young, the size of a large dog, and its hind legs had been torn away by predators. Its eye sockets were empty, pecked clean by magpies, its petrified grey tongue was jutting out, and the top of its skull had been gnawed on and laid bare. I tried to hurry my children past the sight but they wouldn't come. They edged closer to the body. They nudged its bloated belly with their feet.
"Come on. You'll give yourself nightmares," I said to Maisie.
"We don't care," she said flatly. "We love dead things."
I let my children go on probing the corpse because I'd loved dead things too at their age. Most kids do, and most country kids especially. My own favorite dead thing from childhood, I recalled, was a mummified baby robin I'd found one day stuck to the bottom of a fallen nest. Picking it up and carrying it home, I couldn't believe how light it was, how weightless, and how perfectly it had retained its living form. I kept it under my pillow for three days. Healthy animals couldn't be approached — they ran away, they flew up into the sky — but death had domesticated my little bird and made its mysteries accessible. "Poor thing," my Mom said when she found it. Doesn't it scare you?" I told her yes, a little bit. It scared me because it was so beautiful.
"How do you think the antelope died? Did something kill it?" Maisie asked me. She and her brother were holding sticks by then and poking them into a ragged, bloody hole in the creature's throat. Their curiosity was frank and clinical, but I knew how the night would go if I answered them honestly. They'd end up crawling into bed with me, craving reassurance for bad dreams. "I don't know," I said.
My children frowned. My job was to tell them the truth. I'd let them down. This failure made them nervous in its own way — far more, perhaps, than the true story behind the slaughter.
"It looks like a cougar kill," I finally said. "That's how cougars do it: they bite the neck, cutting the windpipe and carotid artery. Then they move to the back and strip the bowels out."
"Out where?" Charlie asked.
"Through the anus."
Maisie interpreted. "I think Dad means the butt hole." She inserted her stick and proceeded with the autopsy, digging green clods of undigested grass out of the ruptured intestines and shredded stomach. She broke the clods open to reveal their centers, which were darker and wetter, more fully decomposed.
"Yuck," said Charlie. "Cool," said Maisie. "I like how the veins on the stomach are so blue."
But, as I'd predicted, the nightmares came on schedule: Charlie's at midnight, the whimpering, confused kind, and Maisie's at three a.m., the full-blown shrieking kind. I had them lie down on either side of me and gave them each one arm. They slept. I didn't. By morning everything was better, though, and after breakfast my children made me promise that we would go hunting for other dead things soon, as we've done every weekend in the two years since. Two years of ribcages scattered in the grass, tufts of fur attached to hunks of hide, and skulls in the mud. And nightmares, naturally. But nightmares they seem to hunger for, my kids, because of what comes after them: Dad's bed.
Kids like being scared, and I like them scared, I realize (within certain reasonable limits, of course). It demonstrates that they're growing up and moving away from what makes them comfortable into the realm of the challenging and confusing. It's also a reflexive show of confidence in me, their omnipotent parental protector. It's a stage that I have no desire to see end soon, although I sometimes wonder if what scares my kids is what they tell me scares them, or something subtler.
For Maisie, who's a precocious seven now, the fears that loom largest are of vast catastrophes that threaten to transform human history. I discovered a drawing recently that she must have slipped into a book some time ago, since it isn't a book that we've read in ages: Goodnight Moon. The drawing showed a large blue rectangle with stick-figure bodies falling from its sides, and some of the bodies had little burps of dialogue attached to their round, howling mouths by dotted lines. "I'm burning! Help!" a couple of them said, and across the top of the page was written, in oversize, solemn, misplaced block letter: "Nwe Yrok 3000 ded Setembr."
"Is this yours?" I asked my daughter. "We should talk about it."
"It's Charlie's."
"It couldn't be. Charlie can't write like this."
"We did it together," she admitted.
"When?" I asked. "Why? Do you know what it means?" My kids were too young to remember 9-11, but maybe their Montessori teachers had mentioned it or they'd happened upon some photos in an old Time magazine.
"That we're glad you don't work in New York," my daughter said. "Mom says you have to take trips there sometimes, though."
Global warming scares her too, she says, and for this I could throttle her liberal-minded teachers, because her hysterical notion is that huge floods will soon inundate the coastal cities and summers will be too searing to go outside in. She literally fears that people will catch flame. Then there's something my father told her about the moon. He told her it was coming closer or something and that in a few hundred years the average day will be two weeks long. I'd never heard this crackpot theory until Maisie woke up crying late one night and explained it to me. She hugged my shoulders and wouldn't let me go for the longest time. "Grampa's all wrong on that," I said, but the prospect of Grampa being wrong on something only seemed to worry her further. "Is he going crazy?" she asked me. "Not at all, hon. He just doesn't understand science all that well."
Charlie's fears are plainer, more direct. A rattlesnake is nesting under his bed. A teacher at school has a gun that shoots 'green rockets.' When I explain to him that these fears aren't real (unlike Maisie's, which are inspired by the news or by ominous loose talk from tipsy grown-ups), he quickly and thoroughly calms down and doesn't seem haunted in the intervals. Maisie, though, can never be quite persuaded that earth and its people aren't headed for dire, dark changes that are beyond my capacity to reverse. I wish it were only monsters that made her nervous, and not, as she once confided in me, "that all the water is running out."
My memories of my own youth suggest to me that even such grand, elusive cataclysms may not be what are scaring her down deep. When I was a kid, the threat was nuclear war. I had a hard time picturing it. There would be loads of smoke and toppled buildings and something called radiation poisoning that would cause the skin to burn and blister, but the crucial destruction I feared was closer to home: being trapped in my school, unable to reach my parents. I might be surrounded by rubble and dead bodies, but if my folks could just wrap me in their arms everything would be okay somehow. Images of storms and monsters, ghosts and earthquakes, mountain lions and bears were all made tolerable by the way they drove you into a comforting embrace. But, if something made that embrace impossible — terror.
I have a theory about human development. The reason that adults love horror movies and indulge their taste for grisly news stories is that they're reminded at some level of how it felt to be reassured as kids. To be spoken to in confident low voices while being served hot cups of milk tea. To be tucked underneath their blankets with a forehead kiss. After a certain age, however, no one performs those essential favors for us. We miss them. Unconsciously we want them back. And maybe that's what really scares us when we're little: that a day is coming, inevitably, when there will be no one larger than ourselves to seek solace from when the monsters come. It's not the nightmares themselves that frighten kids, particularly as they grow older, but the prospect of losing that cozy parental bedroom where even the worst dreams dissolve in caring touch.
photo courtesy Eric Ogden