Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  As I walked down to meet Helen Trentas by the gate, I believed that whatever problem Henry might have with my fledgling friendship with this young woman, I would find a way to change his mind, to convince him there was no harm in it. Indeed, quite the contrary. If it was because he thought it a little precipitous of me, even capricious, to show an interest in another woman so soon after Mary and I had gone our separate ways, I wouldn’t be able to argue convincingly that he was wrong. Assuming what Edmé said was true, that I could expect Henry not to be supportive of me and Helen—and there was no reason to believe otherwise—I understood such a response, more likely than not, would arise from his fear that someone might get their feelings hurt. I know my uncle loved me, and I could tell from the way he embraced her, spoke to her at the Labor Day party, that he was devoted, in his way, to Helen. It made sense he might be concerned about the two of us, even apprehensive. It was not like I boasted some sterling history in this regard. My uncle and I hadn’t seen all that much of each other this last decade. Why should he give me any benefit of the doubt? Here I was, separated from a woman he and Edmé had certainly liked, a woman I met and married in very short order, and not so long after I had visited Ash Creek with Jude, an entirely different kind of person from Mary, and one quite plainly I adored. What right had I to come breezing into their lives—heart before head, glands before heart—and promptly entangle myself with Giovanni Trentas’s daughter? A good question, and one for which I had no ready answer.

  “Hello, you,” she said.

  “Hello again,” I said.

  She was dressed this morning in denim: a faded denim shirt with sleeves rolled back and jeans worn smooth and a little frayed along the cuffs; brown box-toe work boots, also well worn in; and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. The sky was not overcast, though it seemed summer had somehow given way to autumn, just after Labor Day, there being a bite in the air that only last week had not been present. I took Helen’s hand, since it was presented to me as she said hello, and leaned forward to kiss her but, sensing a subtle withdrawal or hesitation, gave her a rather chaste fraternal kiss on the cheek. Helen Trentas was no easy read, I thought. ‘You ready to do some work?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” she said, cheerfully.

  “You probably know better than I where Henry keeps tools for this sort of thing,” and we walked up the slight grade to a shed next to the barn, where there hung, on pegs, a scythe and a rake, and on a workbench that ran the length of the small building lay a pair of clippers. “What’s this?” I asked, pointing at a great zero of heavy iron, a mammoth contraption with rusted jaws and teeth, to which she answered without a moment’s thought, “A bear trap. See this? This is the anchor, this staked chain, that keeps the animal from getting away once you have caught it, and this is the spring bow, and this is the opposing spring, and this disk is called the trigger pan. The bows are pulled apart, you place a piece of meat on the pan, the bear releases the springs by tampering with the bait, the trap teeth and chain hold the bear until you come the next morning.”

  “And kill it.”

  “Kill it, of course. Why trap a bear and not kill it? Unless you want to train it to walk on its hind legs in the circus.”

  “Have you done that? Trapped a bear and killed it?”

  “With my dad and Henry, a few times, sure. Back when your uncle kept livestock here, one bear could do a lot of damage. They had to take care of things, so they’d set a trap or two.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Is it awful? I mean, just killing it in cold blood like that?”

  “What choice was there?”

  We had left the shed by this time, and walked together down to the ruined bridge. “I don’t know,” I answered, feeling suddenly immature, or unsophisticated, or what have you. “I’ve never killed anything.”

  “Henry told me you’re a good fly fisherman.”

  “I’m all right at it.”

  “Then you’ve killed.”

  “Trout? It’s just not the same.”

  “Not the same? You’re probably one of those people who believes someone can be a vegetarian and still eat fish and poultry. Flesh is flesh, killing is killing.”

  “Look, trout don’t feel. They have the most rudimentary brain stem, not even a cortex, I don’t think. Mammals have brains, therefore feelings, emotions. They have warm red blood like us. I’d just think that their closeness to human anatomy would make it much more emotional, harder to look them in the eye and shoot them.”

  “Don’t look them in the eye, then,” Helen finished as we made our way into the copse at the top of the east meadow, and from there climbed up the steeper slopes.

  Strange girl, I thought, following, doing my best not to feel overwhelmed by her.

  As the sun baked the crispness out of the air, we performed our task in the most curious silence, a mute calm that was fragile and edged by paradox. The fragility arose from the fact that though we desired to speak to one another, get to know each other better, the sober stark purity of the small cemetery forbade it, somehow, this morning. A visual caress, a frank kiss, seemed further away than they had the other evening, when the wine encouraged me and the embracing dusk covered us. The paradox I sensed arose from how physically close Helen and I were up here, alone, side by side cutting overgrown orchard grass, raking, trimming with the long stiff shears around the headstones and the fence—and simultaneously how distant, as I say. I could hear her sigh and groan when she worked; could smell her perspiration, saw out of the corner of my eye the bead of it run from her temple down over her cheek, all of which I found erotic, despite my efforts to dampen such sentiments, given where we were and what we were doing. Eros and Thanatos, as equivocal bedfellows as ever. They were with us in this mountain meadow, as we labored with little sense of the passing time. If we traded more than three words, I’d be surprised. After what must have been hours of hard work, the cemetery began to emerge from under the years of growth. A great pile of cut grass had been raked together outside the fence and remained to be burned or moved to a place out of view where it could rot into yellow mulch. Otherwise the job was finished, and we agreed that the small graveyard looked beautiful. Glancing up at the sun, I could see that the day had dwindled well into afternoon.

  Helen said, “Follow me.” She’d brought with her a knapsack and in it lunch—olives, sandwiches, sun-dried tomatoes in oil, a mason jar of water, Anjou pears. I watched her hands, mostly, while she unpacked. We sat, ate, at the edge of the high field, some distance from the cemetery, looking out over the valley. “Thank you,” I said, as she presented me with a checkered napkin.

  “Thank you,” Helen remarked. “You don’t know how many times I wanted to come up here and do this. I couldn’t ever face it by myself.”

  “You don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d be spooked by anything.”

  Helen looked away when she said, “You don’t know me.”

  Startled once more by her forthrightness, I kept my mouth shut.

  “I’m spooked by all sorts of things,” she said, drinking water from the jar. “I’m completely superstitious, something I inherited from my father.”

  “Superstitious about what, for instance?”

  “Wait a minute. I’m the one who has two questions coming.”

  Again, I said nothing.

  “All right,” she said. She uncrossed her legs, pulled off her boots and socks, dropped the latter into the former, and set them away from her before crossing her legs again, now barefoot. “Second question. Tell me, why are you here?”

  “I thought you didn’t care about why things happened. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “That was then, this is now.”

  “All right. But what makes you think I have any other reason to be here than to visit my aunt Edmé and uncle Henry?”

  “When someone answers a question with questions, it generally means the answers would be questionable, if you were able to hear them. So in a way you’ve answere
d your own question. If you were only here to visit, you would just’ve answered my question by saying, I’m only here visiting and that’s all.”

  “Too complicated for me. What’s in that water, anyway? Listen, I’m here in part because I didn’t have anywhere else to go—”

  “Yes—and?”

  I told her that there had been things happening down at Ash Creek, in the night mostly, that Henry was loath to discuss with anyone. He and Edmé didn’t really know who was behind it, or why it had been going on, and so I asked her to keep this to herself. She held my gaze steadily as she crossed her heart with her forefinger, and waited for me to elaborate, which, though I knew I should not, I did. The night music, the other aberrant facets of the twilight siege—much of which still had not been fully revealed to me by Edmé—I narrated to Helen Trentas, who sat there rapt, while she listened: not so much shocked, or agog, as such, than engaged fully, as if she were memorizing each mite of data I could provide. “You know all about this already,” I said.

  “Nothing of the kind,” she contradicted, with such force that I found myself offering an apology.

  “I might stick around for a little longer, if they’ll let me. Not that they need my help, God knows—I’m not that patronizing—but just because … I don’t know,” and I wondered whether I should add that my interest in remaining here had also to do with her.

  “You’re curious,” she said.

  “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “No, I don’t mean you are curious. I mean you are curious.”

  “Me? curious?”

  “I don’t say it as an insult; it’s a compliment really. Most people are neither curious about things nor curious per se, and I think you’re both.”

  Who was this woman? I thought, with faint regret at having told her what I had about the episodes at Ash Creek, a sudden paranoid worry that I had made a mistake.

  “I have one more question, but I’ll save it.”

  “Why do you get to ask all these questions?”

  “Only three, just like in the fairy tale,” she said. “I’ll save the third one for just the right rainy day,” leaning forward toward me, having taken a bite from the pear that she’d been tossing gently from palm to palm. Her face was very close to mine and I studied the flecks, slivers, specks of variant colors in her irises, and the distension of her pupils as she moved into the small shadow my head cast upon hers under the lowering sun, a warm afternoon sun that must have been about halfway along in its descent through the blue elliptic. She tasted of musky pear when her mouth opened on mine, and she kept her eyes unshut, looking into my own with an urgency that suggested to close them would be a kind of travesty, or betrayal, or even a hypocrisy. And so, although she was blurred, I focused on the buttery light on her skin and on her dark drift of hair, glistening with reds and prismatic greens, even golds and oranges. I could hear us each breathing through our noses with a steady rhythm that had become congruent, so that we inhaled at the same time and then slowly let out the air, paused, and breathed in again, as if metamorphosing into a single person.

  We kissed for what must have been a very long time, before my hands—which had touched her back and her hip, had come to rest on her thigh after tracing her side, caressing her breast beneath the thick, smooth surface of denim—before my hands found themselves on the grassy earth, supporting our weight as we shifted and lay down. Our fingers began to loosen buttons and belts and pull away clothing, and when we were both naked from the waist down and I moved on top to enter her, she finally closed her eyes, turned her head to the side. On her face was a perfect fusion of ecstasy and anguish. My hands on her shoulders, my elbows dug into the unpliant ground cushioned only by long waves of heavy grass and tiny flowers, I lowered my head to kiss her at the side of her coral-brown lips, in which a twining of her hair was caught. “Is this all right?” I whispered, surprised at how breathless my voice was, and when she moaned Yes, I did enter her, and the softness of her was beyond anything I’d ever known.

  We were simply meant to coalesce, it would seem, just there. My left cheek pressed into her right cheek, as if we were slowly dancing. Her arms splayed, wrists up above her head, freely vulnerable but somehow powerfully sure—because such a gesture of relinquishment indicated trust, and such trust came solely from choice, and such choice was hers because she was ardent and strong—she loved me back with the same vitality I gave to her. As we moved with each other, her suppleness and élan merged beneath me, in a way that seemed to have little to do with our rhythmic plunging bodies, so that my skin on hers was as if charged by an order of spiritual electricity that raced down my bristling spine. When I finally strayed onto my side, facing her, close, our nostrils taking in the same small air, though there was a vast universe of air surrounding us and moving in breezes over us that we might have seized if we wanted, the world went temporarily obscure.

  A little black ant, delicate and harmless, awakened me, as it made its way across my forearm, sometime later. Helen was already conscious, again with her dark eyes on me, although she had not pulled away an inch from where we had been when I blacked out before. You are beautiful, was all that came into my mind when I saw her there, studying me, a look of magnificent knowing innocence on that face. Then, I said it aloud, “You’re beautiful,” and she said to me before a moment had passed, “You are, too.” When we got up to stand on the tangle of our clothing, began to gather ourselves together to return to Ash Creek, I was sorry to relinquish the joy of that tiny mutual paradise we’d briefly created.

  Lunch detritus in the knapsack, scythe over shoulder like the figure of death, rake slung beside it, we juggled the sundries and tools in such a way that we could hold hands, leaving the meadow behind. My instinct, a suspicion which spread through me like dye spilled in water, that we had been observed in secret, maybe from the verge of the clearing, just within the curtain of trees, didn’t come over me until we were well down into the dappling shade that struggled with sunlight in the lower woods. I stopped suddenly, and Helen stopped also. “What is it?” she asked.

  Wary, I looked back up the path to scan the complex of trees, rocks, leaves, flowers, behind us.

  “Grant?”

  Of course there was nothing to see. I say “of course” because even now, knowing what I know, this premonition remains ambiguous to me. “I’m not sure,” I answered Helen then, and half smiled at her. “Is someone back there?”

  “Maybe,” I answered, and yet if the questions were put before me now—What proof do you have you were being watched? what proof is there that such a feeling was not the result of your own sense of, like, guilt or paranoia or even something else?—I’m not sure I could answer any better than before.

  “Shall we go look?”

  “No. Let’s get back,” I said.

  We continued down through the forest, and though the sensation remained with me, I turned my attention to asking Helen when I could see her next. “I’ll be away for a few days—there’s a thoroughbred show I have to ride in,” she said. “That’s what I do, you know, work at a stable, training horses. You’ll have to come by sometime.”

  “I will.”

  We reached her car, down by the main gate, knowing we were within view of the house, and somehow sensed, though without saying as much, that we had best shake hands. So we did, and afterward I traipsed halfhearted, faintly out of sorts, toward the shed to rehang the antique apparatus and stare for a moment at that rusted but potent bear trap, trying and failing to imagine Helen raise a shotgun at the growling head of the poor beast caught in that iron jaw, while she studied it with the same sweet holy eye that had so recently stared into mine, before pulling the trigger that would send its brute and terrified soul hurtling into the next life.

  Ma bien aimee soeur et beau frére, il-y-a quelque jour que j’ai reçu votre letre … , I read, behind the closed door of my bedroom, hearing the steady noise of the creek through the window, thinking I should go downstairs soon to help Edmé set the
table for dinner, but not before despairing of my ever making much headway with the clutch of letters written in patois … tante belle cose … some kind of northern dialect, written to Giovanni many years ago by a friend of his family’s. The handwriting was spidery, the ink blotched and paper browned. What emerged from the correspondence was this above all: that Giovanni Trentas and his sister were consigned to the care of friends, left to continue on alone in their new providence in part because of the sudden death of their mother and in part because of the disappearance of a father who seemingly was caught up in the nasty politics and dark war of his day—a fragment of biography derived from these other missives from Aosta and Rome. Trentas senior appeared to be a gunrunner for the partigiani, the antifascist partisans, a fact that Edmé would later corroborate, though she herself would say Giovanni was never quite clear about the hard facts of his father’s deeds and ultimate fate. What was clear, from the letters, was the boy’s abandonment, whatever the reasons, to the currents of life in bucolic Coeur d’Alene, where he learned the ways of a new culture.

  The letters from overseas were interesting, but did not really offer me, or at least so I thought, anything about the Giovanni who was my uncle’s friend and my (now) lover’s father, and so I turned to the next, much smaller bundle of notes, which were folded, and secured with a paper clip.

  These were more like bits of old confetti swept up from the gutter in the wake of a forgotten parade, so exhausted was the paper and faded the writing. They were also immediately more provocative. The first was merely a scribbled note, penciled on a tiny scrap, When he goes I can come to see you but not before. I don’t want him to see me. Until tomorrow, then. Unsigned, I saw: anonymous to me but so close to Giovanni that no name was needed. Or was the sender afraid it might fall into other hands?

  I turned to the next, written on notebook paper with bristly edge where it had been torn from a spiral pad,