Benny’s room is a menagerie of stuffed animals: dragons, bears, birds, squirrels, fuzzy and sweet, many of them comical. There are dozens. His parents and Lucy stay outside the doorway while I walk in and pause in the middle of the room, looking around, letting the surroundings speak to me. Taped to the walls are bright pictures done in Magic Marker, again of animals, and they show imagination and a great deal of talent. Benny was an artist. Mr. White tells me from the doorway that Benny loved to take his sketchpad outside and draw trees, birds, whatever he saw. He was always drawing pictures to give people for presents, too. Mr. White talks on while his wife cries silently, tears rolling down her face.
I am looking at a drawing on the wall to the right of the dresser. The colorful, imaginative picture depicts a man in a small boat. He wears a wide-brim hat and is fishing, his rod bent as if he might just be having some luck. Benny has drawn a bright sun and a few clouds, and in the background, on the shore, is a square building with lots of windows and doors. “Is this the creek behind your farm?” I inquire.
“That’s right,” Mr. White says, hooking an arm around his wife. “It’s all right, sugar,” he keeps saying to her, swallowing hard, as if he might start crying, too.
“Benny liked to fish?” Lucy’s voice sounds from the hallway. “I’m just wondering, because some people who are big animal lovers don’t like to fish. Or else they let everything go.”
“Interesting point,” I say. “All right to look inside his closet?” I ask the Whites.
“Go right ahead,” Mr. White says without hesitation. “No, Benny didn’t like to catch anything. Truth is, he just liked to go out in the boat or find him a spot on the shore. Most of the time he’d sit there drawing.”
“Then this must be you, Mr. White.” I look back at the picture of the man in the boat.
“No, I think that would be his daddy,” Mr. White answers somberly. “His daddy used to go out in the boat with him. Truth is, I don’t go out in the boat.” He pauses. “Well, I don’t know how to swim, so I just have this uneasiness about being in the water.”
“Benny was a little shy about his drawing,” Mrs. White says in a shaky voice. “I think he liked to carry his fishing pole around because, well you know, he thought it made him look like other boys. I don’t think he even bothered bringing bait. Can’t imagine him killing even a worm, much less a fish.”
“Bread,” Mr. White says. “He’d take bread, like he was going to roll it up in bread balls. I used to tell him he wasn’t going to catch anything very big if all he used for bait was bread.”
I scan suits, slacks and shirts on hangers, and shoes lined on the floor. The clothing is conservative and looks as if it was picked out by his parents. Leaning against the back of the closet is a Daisy BB gun and Mr. White says Benny would shoot targets and tin cans. No, he never used the BB gun on birds or anything like that. Of course not. He couldn’t even bring himself to catch a fish, both parents make that point again.
On the desk is a stack of schoolbooks and a box of Magic Markers. On top of these is a sketchpad and I ask his parents if they have looked through it. They say they have not. Is it okay if I do? And they nod. I stand at the desk. I don’t sit or in any way make myself at home in their dead son’s room. I am respectful of the sketchpad and turn pages carefully, going through meticulous drawings in pencil. The first one is a horse in a pasture and it is surprisingly good. This is followed by several sketches of a hawk sitting in a bare tree, water in the background. Benny drew an old broken-down fence. He drew several snow scenes. The pad is half filled, and all of the sketches are consistent with each other until I get to the last few. Then the mood and the subject decidedly change. There is a night scene of a cemetery, a full moon behind bare trees softly illuminating tilting headstones. Next I turn to a hand, a muscular hand clenched in a fist, and then I find the dog. She is fat and homely and is baring her teeth, her hackles up, and she cowers, as if threatened.