Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  The bludgeoning percussion had ceased. I stood at the end of the porch, now very quiet, listening. Behind me, the kitchen door opened and rattled shut. Henry was out here, too, I assumed. Above, on the eaves, all was still. Only the eternal wash of stream water in the lowest folds of the valley gave up any sound. This standoff lasted, again, for some incalculable length of time. It seemed unusually foolhardy of the night visitor to have climbed onto the roof, where he could be treed, so to speak, cornered in his arrogance without any easy path of escape. I could hear Henry down in the yard below, and shivered from the damp chill. Henry trained a flashlight on the roof; I saw the single bright beam sweep slowly from south to north, though could not see what it illuminated on the eaves above me. No shouting, no cursing, no threats. All was eerily calm—so much so that I felt emboldened by the quiet and left the relative security of the veranda for the footpath at the base of the knoll. Having walked it so recently, my feet recalled its first switchbacks in the lightless night. Breezes stirred the leaves of trees, the atmosphere upset, I supposed, from the earlier quick blizzard. I turned around twenty, thirty feet up the rise, from where I could now see the rooflines.

  “Come on, man,” I muttered. “Come on down.”

  No sooner had these words settled themselves into the air than I heard a scraping, scratching sound on the far side of the house, to the west, and just instinctively moved toward the clamor there. Henry clearly heard, too, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed his flashlight bobbing past the pebbled walk that led to the front gate, up the gentle grade between the big pines south of the house and the long front porch. Myself, I stumbled blind across the base of the rise, through the kind of natural alley between the back gable and scrubby hill. There was the squeal of torn tin, which I presumed was a rain gutter peeling away from its moorings as the prowler came sliding off the roof and, having caught himself on the lip of the gutter, plunged to the earth, bringing the conduits down with him. This was it, I believed; he would break a leg in the fall, or else be knocked out cold when he hit the hard ground, and now we would finally learn what all this was about. I hurried, tripping, catching the butt of my hand on stone, hoping to arrive around at the west end of the house before my uncle, in case there was a scuffle.

  When I came to the corner, I stopped momentarily, caught my breath, listened. It seemed darker around on this side than on the other. Faint as something nearly forgotten were the footfalls I heard—or, rather, the rhythmic brush of someone’s legs combing fast through grass, running away from the house, up into the long field that rose toward the saddle ridge and fenced boundary beyond. Wary, I took some steps out into the black open yard. Henry arrived from around the opposite side, and I called out to him to shine his flashlight up into the field. The ghostly sphere leapt over grass and ground as he swept back and forth across the darkness, bringing into view small chunks of landscape at any given instant. Nothing, nothing, and no one. And then, yes. The figure was quite distant already, and running with surreal agility and haste. But still, there he was, embraced at least for the moment in a luminescence by which we could see him. I was off, in pursuit without the slightest thought of what I would do should I happen to catch up. Henry, too, chased him across the field—the figure was already half a hundred yards ahead of us—but it wasn’t long before both the intruder and I had left him back alone in the field, catching his breath while continuing to hold the flashlight on the pursued, until both the night visitor and I had sprinted beyond its range, where the pitch blackness of the night encompassed every shape and form, and the only senses left to me to trail him by were hearing and taste, for I swear to God I could taste the person on my tongue, as one would taste a bad penny placed there. It was a taste impossible to describe, not acrid nor tart, nor sweet nor sour. Tasted of nothing, tasted of a thousand subtle poisons.

  My voice cried out, “Stop,” but the man kept running—I could hear the crashing footfalls not so far ahead of me—and it was as if, again, another voice proclaimed, in a rough imitation of my own, “I said stop. I’ve got a gun.” The voice that came from my mouth, that bellowed those words and that lie, might as well have been the devil’s own, for what they provoked. I myself now stopped, because I no longer heard those comfortable sounds of the intruder escaping my pursuit. What I heard now was the very faraway sound of my uncle laboring up this long ridge, as I stared hard as I could into the blackness ahead, and tried to hold down the clamor of my gasping breath. Something here was going wrong, I knew. This was the first time I felt the searing panic rise through me. The first understanding that now, here, I was in serious danger. Or could be.

  Then it was I fell hard on the outcropping of stone, having been broadsided, knocked down full force without warning. Far too startled to react with anything approaching intelligence or swiftness, I sat there stunned, in total darkness. The ache in my hand suggested to me that my skin was torn away. Instinctively, I touched the palm to my lips to see if it was wet with blood. My back throbbed, my shoulders stung, pain irradiated through me. Even my pride, such as it might have been worth at that juncture, had been bruised. I heard the intruder—the assailant—running fast in a new direction, down along the fence line toward the east. Henry was still too far behind for me to bother calling out to him to shine the light toward the horsegate, where apparently the intruder was headed. It occurred to me that I might as well remain where I was, curled into a seated fetal ball. Why stand if there was any chance of being knocked over again? And why believe that, even if the man who’d assaulted me was halfway down the slope by now, making his escape, some other person didn’t lurk nearby, ready to come at me? Hadn’t I mistakenly thought the person I’d been chasing was far ahead of me? I decided to remain right where I was, since the hillside had become populous with night visitors, at least in my imagination.

  The morning after, my uncle discovered the scene in his studio that Tate would refer to when I met with him later at his house in a room full of books he would never read. My uncle’s utopian city of board and paste was demolished, leveled most likely with the same length of iron that had been used to pound the roof and wake us all from our sleep.

  Henry was apoplectic. He was grim and unnerved and enraged at the same time. As well, he seemed beaten. He entered the kitchen, where Edmé and I sat, having just finished putting salve and bandages on my hand, ourselves still in shock from the visit during the night, and collapsed slowly into the chair beside the telephone stand at the doorway there, pale and staring blind ahead into the room.

  “Henry, my God, what is it?” Edmé said, rising to approach him. Her hand was delicately extended in his direction, the fingers, I saw, tentative, even trembling. Edmé’s reaction to Henry was difficult for me to watch. She knew this man; it was clear she’d not often seen him this distraught. Even David Lewis’s news had not caused in him this kind of response. My mind, beginning to race, imagined this was just the look he had on his face the day he came back from his hike into the gorge after having discovered Giovanni’s mutilated corpse.

  “They just wouldn’t do that,” he said, casually.

  “What?” said Edmé, her voice lowered. She moved toward him as one might approach a hurt animal, tenderly but with a kind of slow caution—as if he might jump from catatonia into a frenzy.

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “They who? Henry?” Edmé asked.

  Henry turned abruptly toward me, and locked his eye on mine. “You answer that question, Grant.”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Don’t you see your responsibility in this?”

  Now I stood up. “Wait just a minute. This was going on long before I got here. You can’t blame this on me.”

  “It was never this bad. They came and woke us up, maybe, with their music. They’d do things like that. Pranks, kid stuff. It wasn’t until you came that it turned violent, burning buildings and vandalism and—”

  “I haven’t done anything,” I said.

  Edmé plac
ed her hand on Henry’s shoulder, interrupting his concentration. He glanced up at her, but then right back at me.

  “Grant hasn’t done anything, Henry,” she echoed, quiet, firm.

  “They completely destroyed it. It wasn’t like it meant a thing to anybody else. I don’t see why they had to do that.”

  Truly he was talking like a child.

  “Edmé?” I asked; though I had no question other than a vague query, I suppose, about what to do.

  Henry continued on a different tack, “Parading around with Helen like you are, can’t keep your pants up for two minutes, is it any wonder you’re in another divorce? Your father would be ashamed; your mother, too. You don’t even know Helen—”

  “Henry, stop,” Edmé breathed.

  “—and what do you care about Giovanni Trentas, going around asking about his murder? Who the hell do you think you are? You think people don’t talk to each other, you think this hasn’t gotten back to me? Now look. They break into the studio and do this. You’re going to make it so they do win, so they push us out of here. You’re on their side.”

  “Edmé,” I said, myself trembling at this outburst. “Tell him again I didn’t have anything to do with whatever it is.”

  “You heard Grant?” she asked him.

  “I heard,” he shouted, then quietly, “I heard.”

  Finally, averting his eyes, my uncle wept.

  He would find me later in the day and apologize. I accepted the apology and made one of my own, but knew that a profound change had taken place between us; or rather, a schism that maybe had been there for some long time without acknowledgment had been unveiled, revealed to us both.

  And now, not so very many hours later, here I was, hearing the voices of Henry and Tate commingling in my head, speaking to me as I made one last turn in the road, which delivered me again into the long valley. The stars were all above me, as well they should be. The road was straight, which I preferred, for once. I rid myself of the voices by listening to the wind rushing around the edges of the old jeep. It was chilly, and the heater did not work. I found myself shivering a little and thought quite seriously, for the first time since I’d arrived in Ash Creek, about driving and driving all night in any direction that might carry me away from here. My usual fantasy under such circumstances was to wonder how I might go about finding Jude, and then give myself over to a Jude reverie. But that seemed less palatable than in times past. And not because I’d promised myself I’d leave my direction to the whims of chance, but because that promise seemed more and more one which, if I had any wisdom left in me, I would go out of my way not to keep.

  Why? For one, I missed Helen anew, despite any warnings Henry might have made about such feelings, and it seemed to me if I left, only to change my mind and return—I knew this is what I’d do if I ran away—she’d have every right never to speak to me again. I didn’t want that. I didn’t care about warnings and threats. She had been abandoned enough in her life, I thought, and had no need to experience it once more, not at my hands. For another, I had a growing if uneasy sense of compassion for Edmé, though just what motivated this I couldn’t articulate. And for yet another, I knew that there remained someone with whom I must speak, sooner rather than later. I was too enmeshed now. There was no driving away from this. Only Willa Tate could tell me who Willa Richardson had been, back in the days when she and Giovanni Trentas made their bond, and she and Henry Fulton made theirs.

  “Curious that Willa would stay with somebody like Tate,” I said, and as the words left my mouth I could feel Helen subtly stiffen. Her unclothed arms and legs were woven around mine in a warm tangle of sheets and blankets. Though the sky was still dark outside her bedroom window, I figured it must be nearing morning. “What’s her story?” prompting her, after she moaned by response to my remark.

  “Come on sweet let’s don’t talk now just sleep,” she blurred.

  I closed my eyes, kissed her forehead, which was already pressed against my lips, inhaled the exquisite smell of her, and held her close as I tried to clear the question from my head. She caressed me in a dreamy way, again relaxed, and I listened to her breathing slow, then deepen, until it was apparent she was asleep again. How I wanted sleep, too, but the harder I tried, the more it eluded me. A perfect silence reigned throughout her house, and in that peacefulness I began to worry in a manner possible only at night—a kind of strew of disconnected cares came parading by—while at the same time I marveled at where I was, and who lay here with me flesh on flesh. Henry’s claim that I didn’t know Helen rose like a specter to haunt me; as much as I might want to disagree with him, of course his claim resonated with truth. Here I was, finally sleeping with this young woman, trying to sleep, anyway, in her house filled with her objects—her vases, furniture, bric-a-brac—and those of her mythic father. Henry was not wholly wrong. I didn’t know her, except in this tenebrous way.

  At some moment, I discovered myself in a subcellar I didn’t recognize, and seated nearby was my mother, who was speaking with me, though I couldn’t quite see her face in the wispy shadows. She was worried for me, concerned about my sick shoes, as she put it, uneasy about how worn their soles had become and that my toes were exposed from the leather having been eroded by the bad weather, or something of that sort. I assured her, my mother who sat there prim, with her knees together under a print dress of black vines on a white ground, her hands folded gently in her lap, assured her not to worry about my shoes, that I was fine and my feet weren’t so very cold. Though I knew I was dreaming, nevertheless I continued to scold myself for remaining unable to sleep, and for a time I must have drifted back and forth from half-conscious wakefulness to light dreaming, until I did awaken, hours later, with the sun in my eyes and Helen no longer in my arms.

  Given her penchant for disappearing, it wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d gone downstairs to find Helen had left a note on the table and taken off for the day. She was in the kitchen, however, of all things whisking eggs. Espresso stood in a Mellor pot, blacker than the ripest fig—strong coffee such as I had not drunk since leaving Italy. Toasted English muffins lay in a basket under a cloth. Fresh grapefruit juice. She turned, set down the bowl of eggs, embraced me, smiled her rare smile that was nothing less than a crucible of brilliant, warm light, and said, “Scrambled or some kind of fall-apart faux omelette. Those are your choices.”

  “This is a side of you I don’t know.”

  “Which is?”

  “The domestic Helen.”

  “I’m very domestic.” She smiled again, and poured the eggs into a pan. “What was so important you were trying to wake me up in the middle of the night, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” as I poured coffee. Barefoot in my jeans and untucked shirt in Helen Trentas’s kitchen, I thought to telephone Edmé to let her know I was all right, but imagined she knew precisely where I was. The most unpleasant, curious feeling of having triumphed over Henry passed through me. “I was just wondering about Tate and Willa—you never talk much about her, you know.”

  “You woke me up to say that?”

  “I thought you were awake.”

  Helen carried the pan to the table, served the scrambled eggs. They smelled of olive oil, rosemary, sage. Giovanni’s legacy. Like that pesto Edmé and I’d made. If Giovanni Trentas had never become friends with Henry all those years ago, would there be rows of brave basil plants in the Ash Creek garden?

  “You already know what I think about Tate. As far as Willa goes, she was always closer to my father than to me. She’s been kind to me over the years, sometimes kinder, more generous than I could understand, really.”

  “Nothing wrong with kindness, not in this world.”

  “I guess sometimes she would dote on me too much, and it made me feel uncomfortable, like she might expect something in return. But I’m afraid that’s the way I am. You give me something freely and there I’ll be, looking it over for the strings attached. I’m the kind of person who if you give me a gift horse I’ll
look it right in the mouth. Not my best quality.”

  “Maybe she just was being nice to you to help your father, you know, since he was left to raise you himself.”

  “No doubt. But it made me suspicious.”

  We sat side by side, and I held her hand, so that we each ate breakfast with our free hands. “Did she ever ask you for anything in return?”

  Helen said, “Willa? No, never.”

  “You’re paranoid, then. Simple as that.”

  “Master of the obvious.”

  “Well. Just remind me never to give you a horse.”

  “Speaking of which, look at this,” and she lifted away one side of her white robe to reveal a bruised thigh.

  I touched it gently, said, “Jesus.”

  “Got rammed into the stockade yesterday. It never happened to me before. I don’t know what got into the horse I was working with, but he’d never been skittish before.”

  “Did it hurt last night?”

  “You mean, when we? no, nothing hurt last night. Last night was wonderful. I bruise more easily than most. Another bad trait.”

  “I hadn’t any idea you had so many bad traits.”

  “Deal with it,” she smiled.