Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

“No and fine,” I said.

  “There are fugitives from the law running around free,” Helen told me, eyes wide open, with mock drama coloring her voice.

  Neither Tate nor I rose to it.

  “Where’s Willa?” she continued.

  It seemed interesting to me that Tate did not introduce any of the several men with whom he’d been holding court. They closed their own circle, conversed among themselves, turning their backs to us three. “Willa didn’t feel well enough to come tonight,” Tate answered. “She asked me to send her best to both of you.” That curl, that carnal gnarl at the corner of his mouth, ascended again.

  “I don’t blame her,” Helen said. “What’s to celebrate here?”

  David Lewis scuttled Helen’s dissidence, or whatever it was, by coming into the conversation himself, offering drinks, asking me if I wouldn’t mind helping him get something for Edmé and Helen, and sending us all off in different directions. I followed him into the modest kitchen—the house was very old, wide-planked floors and rough-plastered whitewashed walls punctuated by natural wooden trim everywhere—and saw that boxes stood in corners of the rooms in anticipation of the movers. Its fundamental barrenness, coupled with the fact that many of its chattels had already been wrapped in newspaper and crated, lent the house the feeling of a prematurely struck stage, one populated by many characters still at odds with one another, aware that they had arrived at the final act without having memorized, let alone rehearsed, the scenes left for them to play. Helen, it occurred to me, was improvising a splendid Hamlet in her search for a father, and here we were gathered together for some play within the play. I asked Lewis, as he made drinks, where he and his wife were going, what they were doing next.

  “We have decided to put everything in storage and follow the summer around for a while.”

  “Sunbirds I think they call them.”

  “Yes, that’s it. We’re going to be sunbirds. And what about you, Grant? Have you decided to live here?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I mean, I don’t really know.”

  “Have those trespassers been around?”

  “Well, except for the last visit, which was pretty insane”—and I held up my hand, which though unbandaged was still bruised, as if it were proof—“things seem to have calmed down.”

  “Isn’t that why you came out here?”

  “I hardly remember anymore, but that was the idea. Maybe I should become a sunbird, too. In a way, that’s all I’ve ever been.”

  “Helen,” Lewis said, and handed her a wine glass.

  “What’s a sunbird?” she asked him.

  “A creature who can’t chart his own path, so just follows the sun,” he answered. “Tell me something, Grant. Have you been able to figure out why all these night disturbances go on just up the road from us but we’ve never been involved, never seen or heard a thing in all these months?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Any idea who’s behind it?”

  “Somebody who knows the terrain pretty well, somebody who has something they want to get from Henry—that’s who. But beyond that I don’t understand any better than anybody else—”

  “Maybe David’s been behind it all this time,” Helen said.

  “That’s not even funny,” he frowned.

  As I watched him I noticed something about him seemed changed. He’d cut off his ponytail. Leaving it all behind, it would appear.

  I said, “I can tell you one thing. Henry hasn’t been idle these last couple of days—”

  “It’s too bad he couldn’t come.”

  “Would you have?”

  “—you’ll be interested to hear this, Helen. Remember that bear trap I asked you about that time? He got it down, scraped it clean of the rust, filed the teeth, greased it, and set the thing.”

  “You’re kidding,” Helen said, abruptly serious.

  “But isn’t that against the law, to set a trap like that for a human being?”

  “No more than it’s against the law to trespass, assault people in the middle of the night, vandalize their property. Anyway, Henry says he found bear tracks near the house and that’s why he wanted to set the trap.”

  “I suppose if I were in Henry’s situation I’d do the same.”

  “Or else pick up and move away.”

  “Helen …”

  She half smiled, composure regained, her radiance obscuring—at least from my eyes—the spite that lay behind a taunt such as that.

  “Well,” muttered Lewis, “let’s hope this is the end of it for them.”

  “If the intrusions stop after you’ve left, we’ll know where to look for the culprit,” I said, unwittingly mimicking Helen.

  “In that case, I’ll be sure not to let you know where we are. Shouldn’t we join the others?”

  For someone who was about to leave the valley where he had been born and raised, David Lewis struck me as being remarkably composed. He bowed, with imponderable old-world manners that seemed ironically fitting in this old house, and left with a glass of wine for Edmé in hand. “What does he do?” I asked Helen, after he’d gone.

  “Not a thing,” she whispered. “Henry thinks he’s just now sold off his land, but I have reason to believe he’s been mortgaging it in little bits and pieces for years. Everything his grandfather put together, and everything his father managed to keep intact, David’s been living off all this time. They say ever since his boy drowned in the creek he hasn’t been able to work. The bank, Tate, they’ve kept him afloat in a life raft made out of loans. And finally, the collateral ran out. Everybody’s being quite civilized about it all, it looks like to me.”

  “Since you know so much, what’s Tate intend to do with the place?”

  “You’d have to ask him. Anyway, I don’t know so much.”

  “Sure you do,” and I kissed her on the cheek.

  “So Henry set that old trap, did he?” kissing me back. “Even if there were bear tracks near the house, he wouldn’t set it because of that, would he?”

  “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t go walking in the dark around his studio if I were you.”

  “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

  “Is Milland here?”

  Her face clouded.

  “That must mean yes.”

  We returned to the front room, and circulated. Parties were never my preferred method of human intercourse, I think it safe to say—my father was a genius at such gatherings, had developed some system whereby he managed to leave everyone with the feeling of having truly communicated with him, no matter how vast the function, or how brief the encounter. My mother and I—on those occasions when I was invited to attend—flowed in his genial wake through rooms small and grand, and I remember how even when a boy I marveled at his grace and skill. Now I flowed behind Helen—as she conversed with various people whom I didn’t know any better than I’d known those diplomatic consuls and envoys at parties years ago— impressed by her élan and wicked charm, and reminded oddly of Matthew Morgan, my father. Nothing she or any of the others said was memorable to me until we inevitably came upon Noah Daiches, who did not return my ersatz ambassadorial smile.

  Even Helen seemed at a loss for words.

  Noah asked after Henry.

  “He’s made his feelings pretty clear about all this,” I said, “and it’s not my place to question him.”

  I suppose Noah was meant to read between these lines some kind of remonstrance for his having had the audacity to question me the morning before.

  “I’m tempted to go up there and get him to come on down. Lewis here is no enemy of Henry Fulton. Man has a right to move. Just the same way Tate has the right to buy.”

  “Well, if you want to know the truth, I think he might best be left alone. Maybe he’ll change his mind on his own and show up, but if you go up there and try to force him to do something he doesn’t want to do—”

  “Runs in the family, stubbornness, is that what you’re saying?”

  Helen said,
“Grant’s not so stubborn.”

  “Neither he nor his uncle’s ever taken one piece of advice I’ve given them.”

  “That may be true about Henry, but what advice have you ever given me I’ve not taken?”

  Noah looked at Helen as he answered, “Can’t follow it if you can’t remember it. I told him he better get unlost before he gets more lost—more or less the same advice I gave his uncle some months ago.”

  I said nothing; neither did Helen. Through my mind raced many comebacks, none of them of any particular worth. Our impasse was broken by Tate, who appeared at Noah’s side. Rather than entangle myself with Noah then, I asked Tate the question that had been on my mind, the one about what he intended to do with the Lewis ranch. “Milland said something about widening the road, bringing in some crew before winter?” I asked.

  “Did he now. Well, let me tell you. I don’t know what we’re going to want to do. And that’s the whole truth of it. There’s a lot of financial mess here that’s got to get cleaned up, and the land itself is going to have to pay its way. You could mine it, could log it. The town’s growing every year, and power one day soon is going to be scarce. This here’s a pretty narrow hollow, with a good strong constant flowing water supply and only one couple living on the land now. I don’t know. I could imagine a day where it mightn’t be better for the welfare of the community to dam up Ash Creek and harness the energy off it.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Helen said.

  “Least number of persons would be displaced off this particular tract than anywhere else I can think of. But then who knows. We may just turn around and put it on the market.”

  As I listened to Tate’s marvelously unveiled threats, I found myself thinking back to that day when David Lewis first told Henry about his decision to sell, how Henry had foretold Tate’s purposes with unnerving accuracy, even going on to equate this stripping of the world to a kind of disease. He had, I remembered, recited just precisely this list of transformations—logs into lumber, earth to metals, rivers to dams, and so forth. When I thought about just how far back these men had been engaged in their rivalry, their small war, I wondered how much of the world’s history had turned on such rivalries. Here was a valley settled a hundred years ago by a couple of families, a marginal but beautiful narrow valley that had been carved by a marginal but persistent creek over the course of eons, which fed into the vast valley below where many such creeks collected themselves together into a river, which graced the wide, verdant plain down there and supported the growth of a town and many ranches. Yet for all its isolation and insignificance, this valley was host to the depravity of human history, just as iniquitous as any grand and famous setting of war, rebellion, subversion, and riot that raged elsewhere. I looked at Tate, at Noah, at Helen, and understood for just a fleeting moment the profundity of the notion that history is merely the saga of small jealousies and struggles, individual conflicts in these brief existences of ours, writ large on the canvas of life. I lifted the glass to my lips and realized I’d finished my wine. Helen saw this and used it as an opportunity to bow out of the conversation, saying, “Let me refill that for you.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said, but Tate interrupted my own escape, saying, “Grant, can I have just another minute of your time?”

  I shrugged at Helen, who left. Noah, too, took this hint and drifted away, leaving Graham Tate and me more or less alone at the periphery of this room of partyers. He spoke in a lowered voice as he handed me an envelope, “I want you to take a look at this when you get home tonight and consider carefully what’s inside. You think you know what happened to Giovanni Trentas? What happened to him can happen to somebody else.”

  “Did I just hear you confess?”

  “You just heard me give you some very good advice, and I suggest you take it. Your welcome here has long since worn out.”

  His smile, inappropriate and overbearing, backed me away from him. I said nothing. What more was there to say?

  In the kitchen, Helen asked, “What happened? You look white as snow.” When she put her hand on my shoulder, it was as if I’d been shaken awake from yet another dream.

  “Maybe Noah’s right,” I said, lighting a cigarette with my now unsteady hand.

  “About getting unlost?”

  “Yeah, maybe he’s right.”

  “You’re not lost, Grant. They’re the ones who are lost.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Grant. You want to go home?”

  “I’m all right,” taking a deep drag off the cigarette.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not sure about anything.”

  “Look, you’ve done your duty. Edmé looked to me like she was ready to go, too.”

  “We just got here.”

  “You walk Edmé back to the ranch when she wants, and I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “But Tate’s going to think—”

  “Since when do you care what Tate thinks?”

  She was right about Edmé, and maybe not wrong about me, and though we did stay on for another half hour or so, the two of us thanked the Lewises—Aunt Edmé embracing Jenn Lewis and genuinely wishing her nothing but best luck wherever she found herself in the future—and said good night. As she and I walked back up the creek road, we found again we needn’t have brought the flashlight. The moon had risen, round and full and bright enough to cast shadows on the ground beside us. We stopped at the gate and stared at it for some moments before ascending that last meadow hill. There it soared, absolutely distinct in the cold spangled void above, so bright we could see its mountains, its luminous seas, its craters, its broken and irregular face, with such heightened clarity that it seemed impossible we couldn’t reach out and impress our fingerprints on its dusty face.

  Wesley Fulton, the man who had erected with his own hands the first structure at Ash Creek, had lived a long and decent life before he passed on to what he was certain would be an even longer and more decent life among kindred spirits above. The winter of 1965 was harsh, and the heavy blanket of snow which covered the fields and forests made it impossible to carry out his wishes to be buried on his own lands, beside his dead son, who would have been in his thirties by then had he lived, and who—he’d been convinced—would have stayed on the ranch, unlike his younger brother, Henry. For six weeks, then, the body lay in a temporary coffin, wrapped in winding sheets, and placed in the frozen barn until the snow should melt enough that Henry could come back and manage the burial.

  Snow still clung in patches everywhere that March, but the time had come to put the poor man to rest, and so Henry and Edmé made the trip from the West Coast out to Ash Creek. With spade and fence-post digger, Wesley’s only surviving son and Giovanni Trentas hammered their way down past the frostline, and got the plot ready. The funeral was attended by twenty stalwart souls, including Willa Richardson and her parents, a young, ambitious Graham Tate, and others.

  After the funeral, Edmé returned to the coast. She and Henry had decided that she had best keep things going back home, while he stayed to help his mother put things in order, and figure out what to do about the administration of the ranch. What had passed between Willa and Henry at the funeral, an exchange of looks that ran deeper than anyone might have noticed, or some few words from Willa, which gave Henry the perilous impression that she and he shared this loss in a way that maybe Edmé and he did not—whatever had aroused them brought the beginnings of their affair to fruition much more quickly than even they could have expected, or desired.

  Henry called her the night Edmé left, I learned later from Henry himself, when so much that had been dark became light, after those last few days of my own stay thirty years later at Ash Creek. The romance must have been impetuous and explosive. His judgment was surely mired by grief and obscured by the misgivings he must have felt at having the responsibilities of the ranch fall on his shoulders, since he went ahead with it, knowing he risked losing the love of his life in order to pursue Wil
la Richardson. Most details of their affair will always remain lost fragments in a secret story, but not all of them.

  The decision to place Ash Creek in Giovanni’s reliable hands followed Rebecca Fulton’s insistence that she had no intention of moving into town, as Henry’d suggested she do, at least during the rough winters. She wasn’t all that old, she said, and between her and Giovanni, with the help of outside labor, they could maintain much of the basic functioning of the ranch. Henry’s idea to call on Willa’s father to seek his help with arrangements for partnering annual livestock sales and other such things—for a commission, Richardson’s concern would oversee for a time most of the market transactions having to do with Ash Creek—was not, of course, based only on business.

  After Richardson and Henry were finished with their talk, maybe Willa came into the room to bring them refreshments, or maybe she simply asked Henry if he would like to take a walk and see their family operation. Then the flirtation would have continued, the downward glances and thoughts in both their minds: Is this only happening to me or does he feel it, too, does she feel it? And I can imagine the guilty self-doubts would come forth like a pattern on the loom of this inevitable weave. Remorse, shame, sanity—none of these feelings ultimately could have restrained them from the greater one of passion. Willa had a fierceness that would be reborn in her daughter one day, and Henry was guided by an intelligence which understood how precious this woman was, and that these days and weeks were theirs to seize.

  Death was temporarily vanquished in the swirl of love. They met as often as they could. They maintained as socially chaste a disguise as was possible to protect their sudden friendship. If anyone in their acquaintance wondered about the propriety of this married man going to a dance recital with Willa Richardson, while his wife awaited his return home, no one brought it to their attention. Rebecca Fulton hadn’t a clue, nor did the Richardsons, that Willa wasn’t merely being supportive of a friend who’d lost his father.

  Two people did find out, however, as did eventually a third. Giovanni, I believe, gave them a place to be alone together after that dance. He would have conspired because Henry was his best friend, but reluctantly since his friendship with Edmé was also close. He and Margery had averted their gaze, so to speak, knowing that soon Henry would go back to his wife, and hoping when that time arrived, the lovers would come to their senses and realize the madness of allowing it to go any further. Tate was the third person who would know of this adultery, or at least suspect, but given he had no claim on Willa then, nor any power over Henry, there wasn’t much he could do about his suspicions other than watch and wait. His designs for the future involved maintaining the good graces of Willa. He pursued a young woman who was blind to him, quietly, with strategic slowness, believing his day would dawn.