Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  Giovanni’s hopes weren’t altogether misguided. By the middle of April, Henry had done everything there was to do at Ash Creek, and the moment had come for him to go back to work and to Edmé. Neither he nor his lover could have known on the last night they spent in one another’s arms—down in the very cabin where I stayed those weeks in the fall—that Willa was pregnant with Helen. But when Henry and Edmé returned that summer, Willa understood all too well what had happened. Giovanni had become her confidant, and while she may have tried to keep up a good facade for some weeks as the four of them were reunited, the front couldn’t last for long. Willa arranged secretly to meet Henry one afternoon up at the cemetery, a place which had the advantage of privacy, and which was where she felt their liaison began and so was an appropriate place for it to end.

  She told him she was pregnant, then went on to say, —I love you enough to know that it wouldn’t be right to put you in the position of having to make some awful choice, so I’ve made a decision for both of us.

  Henry was petrified, no doubt. A chill must have gripped his heart as he listened.

  —I’m going away to have the child. Don’t even try to contact me. Let me do this my way.

  —But then what? It’s our child.

  —We put it up for adoption, and we never say a word about any of this to anyone.

  —What about your parents?

  —I’m old enough to go away for a while; they’re always trying to get me to go abroad; maybe I’ll have it overseas. But you’re already asking questions. When I come back we’ll be friends like we were before, but never lovers again. I’m going to be married, too.

  —You are—to who?

  —I have another idea, too. Maybe it’s something that will work and maybe not. But like I say, this is my problem now. Let me solve it and you go on with your life. Edmé is good and decent, and I won’t be a part of hurting her. I should have thought of this before, but better to set things right later than never.

  With that, Willa strode across the field and out of Henry’s life for over a year. Everything she promised to do, she did. She gave birth to a baby girl, married Graham Tate, and, unable to give the child up for blind adoption, arranged clandestinely for Giovanni Trentas and his wife to raise her in guise as one they had adopted. Time passed, healing some wounds, leaving some scars. For the most part, Willa’s plans worked well. She did her best to right wrongs, put the world she’d unwittingly been drawn to destroy back together as carefully as she could. She supported Giovanni’s parenting of her daughter by helping him financially, always in absolute secrecy. She watched Helen grow at a remove, always grateful that she was able to follow her progress and her life as closely as she did. Giovanni often shared with her all the little stories that go along with childhood, so that Willa knew when she first spoke, first walked, first went to school. A silent mother, she managed to find ways to participate in Helen’s upbringing—enough so that she felt like Giovanni’s tacit partner, she acting more like the traditional father, the distant breadwinner, while he performed the role of mother, nurturing and immediate.

  Henry and Willa kept their promise and their distance, and Giovanni, Margery, and Tate, each for different reasons, kept their silence. The only dilemmas Willa had not been able to predict and thereby preclude arose from Helen’s own suspicions as she got older, and the slow rage Willa’s husband would come to nurture toward the true father of her only child. Henry Fulton’s ruin became so dear to Tate’s heart that if he did have a child, he couldn’t have loved it any more than he loved, cherished, cultivated this bitterness.

  And when Giovanni Trentas, so many years later, sensing that his own mortality was soon to have some impact on Helen, told them he wanted her to know these truths, Willa couldn’t have foreseen that, either. Giovanni’s abruptly being silenced, before he’d been able to force the issue further, was not the end but rather the beginning of a new allegory none of them seemed to be able to govern.

  Here was a piteous howling, shrieks that seemed neither human nor bestial, but from some other world, one that no one should ever be obliged to visit. They came from across the creek, cutting the soft, chilly night air as concertina wire might slash the supplest flesh; came in barrages, heaves of pain, bursts of breathless anguish.

  I looked around me and found that I’d dozed off in the kitchen of the ranch house, waiting up for Helen. The porch lights were on, and so was the light above the table on which I’d laid my head down in my hands like some small boy might. Upstairs, I heard the frantic whispers of my aunt and uncle, and even as I rose to my feet, lifted the loden coat from where I’d placed it over the chair back, and threw it on, Henry was coming downstairs, and erupted into the kitchen, shotgun under his arm and a rifle, too.

  “Here,” he said, handing me the latter. “It’s loaded. Only shoot up in the air, you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unless you need to protect yourself. This is the end. This is it.”

  With that, he got on his own coat and hat, and went to the door.

  As we made our way quickly down the hard stone stairs from the porch into the yard, and ran past the garden and the stick figure of the scarecrow, which looked in the moonlight like some emaciated angel, I wondered what time it was and how long I had slept. Could that party down at the Lewises’ still be going on? Had Helen gone to the cabin to meet me and, not finding me there, decided to look for me at the studio? No, that couldn’t be right. But, still, I thought, Please God, don’t let it be Helen.

  By the time we crossed the creek, the excruciating howls had ceased. The creek rustled along beneath my feet, the moon glowed brightly overhead, having risen to its apogee and swollen to a fullness that seemed impossibly great. Hard to believe the moon was only a couple thousand miles in diameter, so huge it was tonight. I stayed on Henry’s heels, wasn’t about to fall behind, or get lost. His urgency, and the urgency of those screams, gave me my own sense of need. Whatever lay ahead had to do with me now, too. It wasn’t that I was here any longer in the role of patronizing nephew or fool or fuck-up—this had to do with me tonight. Where such exigency suddenly came from, I wouldn’t have been able to say. But it was there, in my legs and arms, in my lungs and beating heart. Henry shouted something inarticulate upon arriving at the studio, near the doorway. “Get back, Grant,” he seemed to say. But it was too late. I was beside him, looking down at the image captured within the periphery of whiteness cast by his flashlight.

  Milland Daiches had the silliest look on his face. The eyes were bulging and a clownish smile spread on his lips, a dark smirk accentuated by that red grin of blood his toothy mouth had formed. I never knew blood could be so florid. But there it was, and coming forth in profusion, as the heavy jaws of the bear trap, rigid and unarguable, had clutched him about his lower belly, biting down on him below the waist and around there along his back. His hands had seized upon its uncompromising embrace, where they’d tried with no success to pry the thing apart and free himself from its iron teeth. I would have thought his coat and pants might have protected him some from the thing, but this was not what I saw before me. They’d been sharpened to a fine edge and had done their work.

  Henry was kneeling, trying to force the spring bows—as Helen had taught me these jaws were called—away from their victim.

  “Milland?” he was asking, oddly.

  I got down beside him and grasped the opposite bow, and the two of us pulled against one another—I couldn’t believe how strong the spring was—and managed to get the body out of the apparatus. My hands, wet with gore, caught him up by the sleeves, and it was some struggle to lift him into the studio, Milland at dead weight being surprisingly heavy.

  “Get that light,” Henry said.

  I wanted to speak, but even the word Okay wouldn’t form itself.

  In the light, lying on the plank floor of the studio, in this environment of books and paper and fresh clay maquettes, the corpse looked much less real than it had outside.

>   “Jesus God,” and Henry backed away from the body. We both did.

  “What you want me to do?” I heard myself ask.

  “I—well—”

  “Maybe we better call down to Lewis’s, see if Noah’s there?” now finding my voice.

  “He was trespassing,” Henry explained.

  “Don’t worry about that. You didn’t ask him to come and do this to himself.”

  “This is—Tate did this.”

  “Uncle—”

  Milland’s dying here did seem to bring matters to full circle, though something I sensed was terribly wrong still. Here was our night visitor, yes, and that receipt Helen had discovered in Tate’s files seemed to take on fresh meaning, but then we heard something beyond the studio walls—a quick cry, faint and extraneous—which was even less expected than Milland’s last brutal utterances.

  Abruptly, we stepped outside and listened under the stars and powerful moon, having extinguished the lights. Now we heard the sharp sound of a stick cracking, above where we stood, up toward the falls.

  “Who’s there?” Henry asked, confused, his voice vague.

  Purest silence reigned; we saw no movement.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted aloud after clearing his throat.

  The silence would have overwhelmed us, I think, if it hadn’t been saturated by the continuous whispering of the creek and falls. I couldn’t fathom how our night visitor lay dead on the floor, but some form of his degenerate ritual seemed now to carry on without him. Careful to step around the bloodied trap, and with every conceivable nuance of cheap triumph having been wiped out of our minds, Henry and I left Milland’s body behind, as we glided along the brief gable of the studio and began to walk across the flat upper end of the meadow. We moved slowly, cautiously, each of us no doubt coming to fresh conclusions about what possibly was happening. Henry stopped, shushed me, and I stopped beside him, and listened. We must have stood dead still for half a minute before we heard the next sound.

  A rattling, first, then it crunched and crunched again. The rhythm of it pulsed, supple in the resonate valley.

  Someone was running. We could just make out the presence of the figure in the light of the moon.

  We said nothing to one another but began to stride quickly out of the relative flatness of the meadow and up toward the mouth of the gorge. Henry stayed with me for a hundred yards or so, but then fell behind. I heard him breathing hard back there, and when I stopped long enough to allow him to catch up, we saw the figure in the silvery light again, climbing higher into the gorge, over on the other side of the creek.

  Side by side we hesitated, and if the context hadn’t been so bizarre, we might have marveled at the miraculous beauty of these moonlit woods in which we stood like two hapless mortals transported by magic into a wonderland. The moonbeams laced through innumerable branches in their passage to the floor of the forest. The world had converted to two colors, silver and black. But for the fresh vision of Milland impaled in the death trap, this might have been a moment Henry and I would cherish, standing together bewitched by what we saw and by how small we really were in this wild world. But our purpose came rushing in to take its rightful place. I asked Henry, “Why don’t you go back and check on Edmé,” adding that I would chase this intruder all night if I had to: Like he’d said, this was it.

  He refused, saying Edmé was armed and Milland wasn’t going anywhere. “Come on,” he finished, in a low, hoarse voice.

  We hurried forward into the mercurial dark, snaking our way between clumps of shadowy bushes and jagged upheavals of rock. To our left the water spilled and pooled and moved forward to the next rough lip of stone, where it plunged again. This close to the falls, we lost track of the running figure, but assumed whoever it was we were chasing intended to continue climbing on up through the narrowing gorge and escape into the high forest. We crossed at a place several hundred yards from the studio. The creek narrowed to a point where you could leap from a jutting boulder over onto a flat patch of ground.

  Water surged, gushed, rose, flooded along beside us. I was angry, and afraid, and committed this time to not losing. After all, I was closing in on my reason for having come here in the first place. I began to lose all sense of time, but was committed only to the chase. My lungs began to burn. My throat was raw from sucking in this thin cold wet air. The muscles in my legs and back were scorched and deadening. Henry was no longer right behind me. I stopped for a moment to get my bearings and catch my breath, knelt down on both knees with my hands still clutching the rifle on the earth before me, as if bent in prayer before some false idol, and listened for him. I thought maybe he had given up, gone back down to the house to attend to the business of telephoning Noah for help—though that would be no easy task, telling a man that his brother had died such a death as Milland’s. Or maybe he knew some other path up here. Either way, I was on my own now. I looked behind and was startled to see how high I’d climbed. Far in the distance were the faint hazy lights of the town, and here and there, like enchanted jewels spread across the black carpet of the broad valley, other lights glimmered. Wind breathed in the boughs of conifers and made the dry deciduous leaves in the aspens and scrub oaks clatter. I stood again, and began to plod on, not altogether certain of what I was doing. It was quite clear to me that no matter how determined to catch the intruder I might have been, if he chose to slip me, he probably could. But then, just as I’d begun to despair, I saw him again. I felt as if my mind were being read.

  The race became considerably more arduous now, the walls of the gorge began to close upon each other, and as they did the sheerness of the ascent increased and the creek path became treacherous. I worked my way up through a rocky passage, so narrow and unstable, where stones clattered out from beneath my feet, and emerged into the primordial forest of stubble pines. It was, I knew, somewhere in this tract of woods that Giovanni met his fate, and for the first time since my pursuit had begun, a stab of panic flashed through me. You could die here, I reflected. He did, and unlike yourself, he knew his way around.

  Again the morbid image of Milland’s grimacing face arose with galling clarity before me. I heard some rocks unloosened above—or was it just in my imagination now?—and I walked on, but not with the same confidence and desire that had got me this far. Bent at the waist, once more bowing as a penitent might, I carried the rifle with barrel forward and finger on the trigger—a savage penitent, less prepared for reverence than for violence.

  He was close by. It wasn’t as if I could see him as such; I rather felt his presence. He couldn’t have been more than a hundred paces away—I could swear I heard his breathing, no more calm than my own—and I took those steps like one who was sentenced but bound to continue, locked into an irrevocable journey. Even if the occasional scutter of tumbling scree didn’t smack the air, even if I hadn’t caught sight of him, oddly spidery in the tangle of boughs and stone architecture, I would have known he was there in the silvery darkness, waiting. I sensed how alert he was, and tried my best not to make any noise that would betray my advance. By moving slowly I hoped to be more invisible. He was within yards, I sensed. Why couldn’t I see him? With heart pounding crazily, I moved sideways in the direction of the fountainhead that rustled steadily just to the east. As the creek provided me with neither shelter nor safety, my movement toward it had no purpose other than that it felt like some kind of lifeline connecting me with the ranch below and the world beyond.

  The word “Henry” was whispered, in a voice I recognized as coming not from the rushing water, which had such a knack for deceiving me into believing it could speak, but from someone right behind me. “Who am I?” it breathed.

  “I don’t know,” slowly turning.

  “Stop.”

  I froze.

  “Say who Helen Trentas is. Tell the truth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The shotgun blast stung both my ears and for an instant lit the immediate landscape with a yellowish burst. I
dropped to my knees, and was surprised to find I’d not been shot. The detonation echoed, and then the forest was quiet again. Terrified, I didn’t move.

  The voice was still there and spoke once more, empathetic but weirdly calm. “Say Helen Trentas is your daughter.”

  Surely I recognized this voice, distorted though it was by fear and the whispering. “She’s—”

  “Henry?”

  “But—no, it’s Grant.”

  Now the burst of sound just behind me was different. Not the coercive explosion of a shotgun but a cry of disappointment and the footfalls of someone running headlong away from this site of our confrontation. I’d dropped my rifle and, in the rush to catch this whisperer, I left it where it lay among pine needles and broken branches, and ran hard after, heedless of the boughs that scratched at my eyes and the capricious terrain beneath my feet. I could see the figure in the thicket ahead, shouted, “Stop,” as it dashed out over the glistening flat rock formations which cradled the headwaters of Ash Creek. It disappeared into the flow, and emerged on the far bank, and in I plunged, surprised by how heavily the current shoved against my thighs. I grabbed down at the surface of the flood, as if it were something to hold on to for balance. Then came a great surge, and a flicker of icy water that scorched my face, and the shock of feeling myself toppled and being swept several yards, maybe, and once more thrown upright. My hand caught something firm, and I was steady again although I couldn’t see. I felt myself being pulled in another direction, by the hand that held my own, wrenched toward the bank of stones.