Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  We didn’t talk, but heard the robins and other thrushes making their plangent calls, announcing the onset of dusk, as they did every evening whether someone was here to listen or not. This was a piece of the land I did not know very well; for some reason, my feet had always carried me either up into the gorge north of the house, or west over the saddle ridge, or south downstream where the road stretched out toward the valley. There were cliffs here, not all that steep, nor formidable, really, but which required an effort to ascend that my urban sloth simply didn’t want to engage all that often—actually maybe never, come to think of it—and so, although I had spent years traipsing the wilderness around Ash Creek, none of the geography Helen Trentas and I now hiked was familiar to me. “This is incredible,” I called out to her, as she’d ranged ahead of me a hundred feet. She didn’t hear, maybe. She didn’t respond, at any rate.

  There it then was. A lush virgin pasture of grasses that had never been mowed since the beginning of time, whose surface reminded me of the sea, with fixed waves, ripples, swells. Out toward the edge of the meadow, from which we could see the vast valley stretching away for what seemed hundreds of miles, was situated a cemetery, with a tumbledown wrought-iron fence that ran perhaps twenty feet by twenty-five in a rectangle. An iron gate, attached by only one of its hinges, permanently ajar, faced the meadow.

  “I knew about this place, but you’re right—I’ve never come up here before,” I told Helen.

  “You’ll probably think I’m morbid, but this is my favorite spot in the world.”

  “Why morbid?”

  “The graveyard. My father’s buried here. And so are your great uncle and aunt.”

  We entered the little cemetery, wading through swales of thick grass that had grown up around the gate.

  “I haven’t been a very dutiful daughter this year, I’m afraid,” she said, as she knelt down and began to tear away some of the long growth that concealed the lettering incised in the white tablet of stone. I read the inscription,

  GIOVANNI TRENTAS

  BELOVED FRIEND AND FATHER

  7 September 1933–23 August 1992

  and stood away from where Helen knelt. She laid aside slim sheaves of grass and patted the grass that remained over the bed itself with a gentle protectiveness that made it look like she was trying to comfort the man who lay below. I turned away while she seemed to whisper a prayer in Italian, the sound rejoining my past and present as I noticed the valley had begun to gather light, pulsating glowy dust-red light, almost as if it sensed that by doing so it might stave off the absolute darkness of nightfall. Wind whistled in the trees. The bird-songs came less frequently. And suddenly Helen turned toward me, still sitting with one knee akimbo and the other bare where her embroidered skirt had fallen away some, and said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be buried here?”

  “Well, I guess if you have to be buried, this would be a better place than most,” and with that, I leaned against the hip-high fencing and uncorked the bottle—all this talk of death, I thought; let’s live while we’re still alive.

  “But of course you have to be buried somewhere in due course,” taking the glass from me with one hand and reaching out with the other to take mine, as I helped her up. “I just mean, given the inevitable—”

  We walked the few steps over to the other headstones in this private plot, those of Wesley and Rebecca Fulton, my great-uncle—Henry’s father, who was laid to rest here in 1965—and great-aunt, who lived on for another decade, as well as that of Henry’s brother, seldom mentioned since there was so little about him to discuss, a boy who died aged ten, of meningitis. I recorked the bottle, set it down, and tore away some of the tangle around the stones of these people I never knew but toward whom I felt a blood attachment. I sensed Helen watching me and now liked the feeling of those eyes on me, and thought for a moment how strange that sensation was, since I never liked people watching me, then came up with an idea.

  “I want to come up here again,” I said, “like tomorrow or the next day, with Henry’s string mower or a scythe or something, and straighten this place up a little. You want to join me?”

  “Sure,” she said, and although I had gotten what I wanted, I thought to myself, You’re too much, Grant, asking someone on a date—a date of sorts—to do a little sepulchral gardening.

  I asked Helen, “Tell me a little about how your father … unless, that is—”

  “I don’t have a problem talking about it. I don’t know how much Edmé and Henry have told you, but I’m sure he was murdered.”

  “What?”

  “There are some who don’t think so, but I do.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill Giovanni?”

  She looked at me with a face clouded by unreadable ambiguity, and said, “Why? Forgive me, but why ask why? It matters a lot less to me why someone does something hateful, especially when what’s been done is irreversible. If he was murdered, who by and how are questions that can answered. Those are the questions that keep me up nights.”

  “You know who did it?”

  “I have my ideas, but no, I don’t know for sure.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He didn’t have any enemies, but he didn’t have many friends, either—your aunt and uncle, me, we were his friends. Willa and he were pretty close. When they found him up in the gorge, he’d been away for a couple of days, which was not all that unusual. He did that. He’d go off for days, when I was older, of course, would just come up into these woods. He was a hermit at heart, loved going off like that with nothing more than a bedroll, some coffee, his rod. He knew these woods really well, they were his favorite place on earth, so I never worried about it when he took off into the hills. It was the way they found him, with his foot gone, that made me realize things weren’t right.”

  “Can I ask, where is your mother in all this?”

  “Her? Long gone.” Helen said these few words with a distinct new tone of voice: flat, detached.

  “You mean dead?”

  “I mean long gone. She ran off on him.”

  “On you, too.”

  “I shouldn’t hate her, I never even knew her really, but I do hate her,” she said, with magnificent ferocity. “I’m glad she’s gone. Anybody who could do that to him, I never want to see her. Margery. Like in that nursery rhyme, ‘See-saw, Margery Daw.’ Ugly name, don’t you think?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.”

  Silence hovered over us there for a few moments before I asked, “You must have been really young when she left?” but Helen seemed to be thinking about something else.

  When she looked up at me, she said, “Look, I’m a bit of a bastard, all right? Let’s change the subject. Why don’t we talk about you?”

  “Because you’re more interesting than me.”

  “Why should I believe that?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in asking why, but all right. What do you want to know?”

  “You’ll tell me whatever I want?”

  “Why not?”

  “First question—”

  “You only get three.”

  “First question. Why did you always avoid me when we were growing up? How come this is the first time we ever met?”

  “That’s two questions. Answer is, I didn’t avoid you—I’ve always assumed you had other things to do; at least that’s what they told me, whenever I asked about you.”

  “You asked about me?”

  “Of course. Now you have one more question.”

  “That’s not fair.” She laughed, her face brightening with the most remarkable swiftness before she grimaced with concentration. “I’ll ask my other question when we come back. I’ll ask my other two, in fact.”

  “If you say so,” realizing the exchange had come to an end. We sat, two pixillated waifs who had drunk more than perhaps we should have, our backs against the eastern length of filigreed black barrier, as the clouds that towered out toward the west punched
up their sunset tangerines and silvers and neon golds. After a silence, I added, “I hope you don’t think I’m being insensitive, asking about your father, but I am curious—that is, I mean to say, if he was murdered, wasn’t there an investigation or something?”

  Helen didn’t answer, sat instead with knees up and head leaning back against the iron crosspost, staring at the clouds, and didn’t seem to mind that I now studied her in the feverish light. Rather, she appeared to have withdrawn so far into herself that I doubted she had even heard my last question (how I hoped she hadn’t), and so I didn’t say anything more but took advantage of this withdrawal, or whatever it was, to run my eye down the gentle curve of her profiled forehead to the delicate dark brow and then to follow the straight projection of her nose. It was more sensual, in its way, how I felt looking with total absence of inhibition, than if I were touching the profile my eye traced. Her philtrum was pronounced, where the angel touched her just above the lips, as the fable has it. And her lips themselves were somber, the lower lip very full, and the chin was modest but strong, with the slightest hint of a cleft.

  She simply didn’t move, for minutes that accumulated one upon another, and neither then did I. Her ambiguous serenity forestalled my making any stupid mistake like coming out with the usual crap that one asks another in a moment such as this, like, Penny for your thoughts, or, Was it something I said? I glanced over at the clouds to see if something was there, a vision of some god descending to earth, or a visitor from another planet, that would make her so rapt, but of course I saw nothing but a diminishing day. When I did reach over, and with my middle finger tucked her hair behind her ear, she turned to me without blinking and looked me in the eye more deeply than I could recall anyone ever doing before. Our kiss came almost as an afterthought to this eroticism of the eyes, this real passion of openly looking, but it was a kiss made just with the lips and tongue and teeth, and had nothing to do with arms or bodies crushing together in any kind of embrace. The kiss continued for a long while before Helen Trentas climbed to her feet, offered me her hand, said, “We need to be getting back.”

  I’m not sure, but I don’t think I said anything, because I wasn’t able to say anything. Nor did we talk, though I held her hand for part of the way back across the cemetery field until we reached the tree line, where again she led and I kept up with her quick pace, from rock to rock and on down the knoll. As we hiked, my head was obviously aswirl with Helen Trentas, but I also found myself wondering how they managed to get a body up this declivity in order to bury it. Something to remember to ask, I supposed. I pictured a moment in the future, the remote future, when I might have to carry Uncle Henry up this rough path, or dear Edmé—no, my mind was not steady, nor was it full of romantic thoughts as perhaps it ought to have been. And when I recognized this, I glanced ahead at the form of Helen Trentas and marveled at what had just happened between us. Where was all this going? It didn’t matter to me. I could smell the perfume of her hair, and nothing much mattered more than that.

  The woods filtered out dusk so that in here it appeared to be false night, with columns of sun shooting horizontal through the blindering leaves over there, and over there. The way out seemed much longer than the way in, which was fine with me, though it made no sense, as we surely were walking more quickly downhill than up.

  But then the aspen grove appeared before us, and the meadow after. Just before we reached the clearing, Helen turned around and said, “Thanks for letting me show you that,” to which I was going to say something like, Thank you for … whatever I was going to say, who knows what abstracted palaver, except that what I saw beyond her—fire not of sunset but crisp flames reaching from the ground toward the sky rather than vice versa—made any response unthinkable as we both looked across the creek, and began to sprint, me in front of her now, as quickly as we could.

  The ranch house was not on fire, nor the studio, nor the barn. I crossed the bridge and joined the others who had already formed a haphazard bucket brigade from the creek up the bank to the oldest building on the land, a one-room house that was sunk in desuetude already, was almost entirely overgrown by greedy saplings and vines—which burned like black coily snakes—and whose roof had long ago collapsed. What burned swiftly to the ground was a structure that had no practical value whatever. Henry himself hadn’t bothered to raze it for the simple reason of sentiment—it was the place where he’d been born, the first building erected at Ash Creek.

  “How’d it start?” I shouted at Noah Daiches, who stood next to me at the dousing end of the line. The fire was nearly out already, and had apparently burned in a burst. Smoke and miniature orange rafts of hot ash flowed toward the pale first stars.

  “Don’t know,” as he tossed an emptied bucket behind him to someone who jogged it back down to the creek for refilling, then reached out to take the full pail from me.

  “What a shame,” half to myself.

  “What?” he shouted back.

  “I said, What a shame.”

  “Yeah, shame,” he said.

  The fire flamed out to smoldering char within an hour. Beyond its initial eruption, apparently, it had never burned so hot that it did much more than blacken the surfaces of the timber. But the old edifice was sufficiently gutted so that Henry would decide, within the next week, to ask the fire company to come up to the ranch and finish the job somebody had started. That is, assuming someone had deliberately set it. Assuming the crackling and hissing of fire was a form of night music.

  Early morning. The first downstairs, I filled the kettle with water and lit the gas burner with a match. The blue flame tinged yellow reminded me of a celestial crown, but the kind only fallen angels would dare wear, since their heads are already on fire. I felt a little out of plumb, felt muddled, bemused; and in some sort of contradistinction to this, euphoric and bright as the sun on the chrome handles and trim of the stove. As I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the pot, two images turned over, projected before me on the nebulous screen that hung, in a way, between my eyes and what they should have seen. The images are predictable: Helen Trentas’s beautiful head, and the flames of the fire stabbing the ultramarine dusk. As I made my coffee, I began to come around. What little I had accomplished thus far this morning, I realized, had been in a sleepwalk. Only when I ground the Java beans did I actually awaken.

  Edmé found me on the short veranda that looked out to the east field, toward the gate. Two blue spruce taller than the house framed our view of the blackened cabin, which continued to smoke. From a limb of one of these spruces a red squirrel was scolding us for disturbing it, issuing sharp cries of chip-chip-chip. Dew lay, ephemeral fluid crystals, on every surface out there in the natural world.

  “Morning,” she said, and sat beside me, her cup in one hand, and in the other what appeared to be a decorative vintage cigar box, whose gold and brilliant green edge glistened in the dawn light. The box was wrapped round and round with ribbons, some of them old and some newer.

  “What have you got there?” I asked.

  “You and Helen seemed to get along last night,” she said, and sipped her coffee.

  “Yes.”

  Edmé said nothing for a moment, then went on: “We’ve got a lot to do today, dealing with what’s left down at the old cabin after that fire.”

  “Just let me know how I can help—”

  “Your uncle’s devastated about it. What’s more, I can tell you—I don’t know how to say this to you, Grant, but your uncle—I believe you can count on his not being very supportive of you and Helen—”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You two went off together for quite a while.”

  “She took me up to the cemetery.”

  Edmé heard eagerness betray the actorly control I attempted to lace into my tone of voice like some kid who hoped to get away with denying the obvious—and it wasn’t in fact quite clear to me why she needed to forewarn me about Helen Trentas and my uncle Henry, or why I was hiding my agitatio
n, or ardor, or whatever, but it was rather clear to both of us that I had every intention of circumventing his wishes, if this was what they were going to be. She said nothing, so I simply asked, “Why would he care one way or the other? Plus, it’s not like we aren’t adults, first, and second, we haven’t done anything.”

  “I’m just telling you what I think would happen if you brought it up this morning, is all.”

  “Understood,” I said, uncomprehending.

  “I want you to have something.” She set her cup on the wide arm of the Adirondack chair, lifted the cigar box, and handed it to me. “Giovanni asked me to keep it in a safe place for him, and I’ve kept it for three years. He gave it to me a month before he passed away. I think you should have it now. Don’t ask why, I don’t know exactly why—but here.”

  I took the box, waited for her to continue.

  “When I asked Giovanni if he wanted me to have Henry put it in his safebox he said no. I sensed he didn’t want me to show it to anybody. I haven’t, but the thing makes me more uneasy all the time. It may sound silly, but I’m superstitious about it.”