by John Gardner
As far as anyone who knew him could tell, and as Martin Orrick would remember him, he was an absolutely honest man, though one of strong opinions, most of them wrong. We may rightly scoff now at the sides he took, but his problem was the all but universal human problem, not that that wholly excuses him (as Luther Doane Orrick would be the first to grant): he understood only as much as he knew. He read more widely and a good deal more carefully than anyone else of the time and county he lived in. Though it may sound absurd to modern ears—yet in fact it is the case—he could quote much of Shakespeare, most of Pope, and all of Milton, not including the Latin, of which he could find no copy. He read both Latin and Greek with ease, though his education, he knew because he’d checked, was a trifle beside that of a twelve-year-old boy of the eighteenth century. For at least a week after closing it, he could quote to you all that had seemed to him of interest, sometimes whole pages, in the monthly Rural Messenger. But it is also perhaps true (discounting the rant) that, as Martin Orrick was to write of him later in the gloomiest of his novels, “for all his careful reading, for all his love of justice, he was a victim of the only press he could get hold of, which urges the reflection that we should thank our minimally lucky stars that so few people left in the world can read at all.” Though he started late, he was an excellent father, a man who by word and example could inculcate the highest moral principles—though what his children would have done without their mother’s affection, love of bad light verse, and ultimate moral laxity, God only knows. He had the largest and easily the most beautiful garden in New York State, or so he contended, and spent the best part of his last years planting trees. (Hence Martin’s pronouncement: “The chief mark of a decent man is that he occasionally plants what he knows he can never live to see.”) He was a splendid orator who had political aspirations, but his positions, which his eloquence made very clear, were fortunately unpopular. He was a Yankee soldier to the day he died, who came to church late—because his chores took time and he lived seven miles from town—and always, with the greatest formality, would salute the flag when he came abreast of his pew, bringing the service to a momentary standstill, before he would condescend to sit. He walked with a twisted cane of polished applewood, and when the minister said something he thought false, he would thump it severely.
After Sunday services Martin’s family would argue, at his grandfather’s house, about all the minister had said and foolishly neglected to say. The meals were such as meals were then and are not now—homemade bread, baked apples, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, squash, chicken, turkey, goose, pork, calf or cow from his grandfather’s slaughter shed, or ham from the smokehouse, corn, peas, sweet pickles, cranberry sauce, elderberry or apple or mincemeat pie, fresh milk and butter, the milk so cold no normal man would dare set his glass against his lip, such as men are today. The old man quoted Scripture, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, or Julius Caesar, and banged his fist on the table; his sons shouted back at him, delighting in conflict but shouting with conviction—no one would have dreamed of cheating in the debate, or toying with the subject in the sophists’ way, or speaking out merely to keep his hand in. The table was large, and though at least three sons and their wives would be seated there, the children—Buddy and his cousins—were there too, on scriptural grounds, listening bug-eyed, spooning in food without looking at it, watching for Grandpa or Uncle Fred or Uncle Bill to bring his fist down again, or for Grandma to reach out as if casually and capture a fly. Like puppies who haven’t understood rough play and snap at a heavy old shepherd in earnest, and go sprawling, yelping, knocked across the stubble by a huge, fierce paw, the wives of the uncles would sometimes mistake the loud shouting for anger instead of mere strong rhetoric, persuasion by a show of cannon power, and would cry tears of fury as they leaped into the battle, defending what was right. The husband himself was as likely as anyone else at the table to say, “Faddle, Louise!” or “Bosh!”
It was a game all old Yankee farm families understand, though to Buddy’s uncles’ wives and even to his mother it sometimes looked senseless.
“How can you eat with all that shouting?” Buddy’s mother asked his father once, at their own kitchen table in the big brick house. “It makes my stomach upset!”
His father sat crooked, leaning like a milk can standing in a rut, waiting for the milk truck. He had a catch in his back—pain, he said, like some Indian had shot him in the kidneys with a flint-headed arrow—but it was haying time now (that was always when his back pains were worst) and if he meant to beat the rain he had no alternative, he had to keep a move on. He smiled as if apologetically, holding the cheap yellow plate with his left hand, forking with his right. “It’s interesting,” he said. “Helps you figure out in your mind what’s true.”
Knowing what was true and what was mere illusion mattered a great deal to Duncan Orrick, as it mattered a great deal to his father and brothers and would matter to his son—and as it did not matter in the least to Donald Frazier or to his daughter Joan, who played life’s most difficult passages by ear and made none of the mistakes Duncan Orrick made, though again and again they stumbled where his kind moved surely.
He was a powerfully built, good-looking, shy man with a farmer’s large belly as hard to the touch as a tractor tire. His voice when he sang hymns—or when, working around the farm, he sang “Redwing,” or “Where have you been Billy boy, Billy boy?” or “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen”—was a sweet, thin, high baritone, perfect in pitch and phrasing by natural gift, and so oddly, perhaps unconsciously sad that one paused a moment, looking at the ground, and listened. He had overcharged emotions, as his son Buddy would have: he cried easily at movies or when he heard music or poetry, a tendency that embarrassed him but one he could live with. We see in old photographs, especially one of his father’s whole family, with Luther and Caroline Orrick seated and the sons and one daughter gathered around them, solemnly attired, the boys in knickerbockers, the girl in a long, oddly bunched white dress, that Duncan Orrick, then nine, had a faraway look that instantly set him apart from all the others, the look of a poet, or of a boy marked for suicide or drunkenness—not at all the unearthly, demonic look Joan’s grandmother Lulu Frazier sometimes had, but a look otherworldly in a different sense, elfin, mystical.
He stood, in Buddy’s childhood, five foot eleven, as tall as anyone in his family had ever grown. Five foot eleven was about average among western New York farmers at that time—there were men a foot shorter, like Walt Cook or Homer Gill, but there were also, for some reason, men like Jim Hume, Sr., or Sam Parise, who looked down on the world from where the air was thin, as Buddy’s father would say, up seven and a half feet off the ground. Duncan Orrick’s stature was of another kind.
Though he had overstrong emotions that might easily have led him into sentimentality—the same too painful, too easily triggered emotions that his father in his own life had hidden by bluster and an affected sternness—he was not swayed by his emotions to an espousal of wrong causes or misjudgment of men. Though he had a streak of boyish weakness, a timidity that amounted almost to cowardice, he would not be ruled by it but acted bravely, even courageously, standing up to dangers in a way that might bring credit to a man with twice Duncan Orrick’s natural courage. As a representative to the National Synod of the Presbyterian Church, he spoke on the floor in opposition to church support of the Cesar Chavez California lettuce boycott, an action that demanded more courage than he would have thought he had. Though he was impressed by Chavez—despite the man’s bullying arrogance—and was moved by his statement on the suffering of Chicano farm laborers, it seemed to him wrong that the church legislate the conscience of its members, supporting the destruction of a lettuce crop in a year of world-wide famine; and despite the cynical and monstrous crimes of California agro-businesses (like all small farmers, he hated agro-business in any shape or form with a murderous passion that brought tears to his eyes and made him stammer), he believed it wrong that the church should
support one farm union against another and approve the ruin of small farmers whose nonunion help consisted, in California as everywhere else, of their unpaid or grossly underpaid sons and daughters.
“If the small farmer can’t compete honestly, let him get out,” said the man at Chavez’s side. He smiled like a plump, sharp-whiskered cat, knowing well enough that the man in the aisle was himself a small farmer. The man on the platform was comfortable with these conflicts, in fact thoroughly enjoyed them. Duncan Orrick had no great distaste for a verbal fight himself, at the local Elba school board meeting, or at a meeting, back home, of the Board of Elders at his church. But here, he knew, he was out of place, outclassed. It was a forbidding, ultramodern auditorium that smelled of cigar smoke, seats like theater seats falling away—as it seemed to Duncan Orrick’s myopic eyes—like a restless sea. In the front of the room, the speaker’s table, the chair’s glowing gavel, the silver microphones on long, silver booms, filled him with awkwardness and apprehension.
No one rose to help him. He resisted the powerful temptation to sit down. Red-skinned and uncomfortable, his left foot hurting in its new black shoe, he said mildly, but with a trembling voice that rang through the hall, “Get out of business, you say. You and agro-business are on the same side there, with all your money and power and certainty you’re right. Against odds like that, a small man’s got hardly any choice but to stand up against you.” There were shouts of “Hear, hear!”
The Synod talked, too, about women’s liberation, about the Supreme Good as biblically male, about the need for rewriting the sexist hymn-books—“Faith of our fathers, living still.” He watched in anguish as furious, angry-hearted women read passages of Scripture that, it seemed to them, reviled their kind, or read, in shrill voices, lines out of hymns or standard prayers. From time to time the assembly laughed—when it was pointed out, for instance, that altering the hymnbooks would cost five million dollars, “assuming we make all the changes ourselves, instead of hiring an army of expensive lady poets.” The laughter troubled him, filled him with distress and helpless confusion in the same way the anger of the women had done. He had difficulty breathing, all at once. He was old, at the time of this Synod meeting, and his heart was not good. He had chest pains more or less constantly, especially in winter, and sometimes when something upset him they flamed higher, became alarming.
His wife of fifty years sat beside him, listening, not laughing with the others except for an occasional “Mpf!” as if at something in her mind, and when she looked over at him now she did not at once see that something was wrong with him. “What will they think of next!” she said, and smiled her crooked smile—still pretty, still lively, though she was seventy-two. It was a fact that she did not like these young women, their strident voices, their extreme, intentionally abrasive opinions, above all their absolute indifference to what was for her (as for her cousin Donald Frazier) the central truth of the Christian religion, Love God, and thy neighbor as thyself.
“They’re right,” he said.
She looked at him, surprised and perhaps a trifle cross, but willing to consider his point of view.
“But they’re asking for a whole new religion,” he whispered. “They can’t understand it’s a historical process—the Virgin birth, the Apostle’s Creed …”
She understood what he meant. Like all old, happily married couples, they’d been talking in a kind of code for years. She touched his hand. Hers was white and liver-spotted, his, dark red and rough, with cuts and scabs where he’d barked his knuckles prying a board loose or tightening a bolt with a wrench too large. “You should tell them, Duncan. You should raise your hand and tell them.”
“No, I can’t,” he said. He tried to get his breath.
“You should. It’s something they should think about.”
“No, no.”
She leaned closer to him, pursing her lips. “Are you all right?” she said.
“Perhaps I need some air.”
They got up, with difficulty, their bodies old and stiff, and moved toward the exit, he slightly tilted, favoring his back, she walking with a great rolling limp, legacy of the time, a few years earlier, when she’d broken her hip.
The woman on the platform was reading angrily, “… and the glory of children are their fathers.”
He was better, out on the street, walking.
She said, “I think you should have stood up and told them what you think, Duncan.”
“I couldn’t seem to get my breath,” he said. “But next time.”
Five
On two or three occasions when the two families met in Missouri, the reason for the visit was that Buddy’s family had driven out to pick up his Grandma Davis—his mother’s mother, Joan’s father’s aunt—who had been staying, for the past six months, with the Missouri cousins. She stayed with the Orricks normally, but it was in Missouri that she’d grown up—John Frazier’s twinkling, hell-raising sister—and it was in Missouri that she’d met her Welshman husband, a carpenter, and raised her children. The house she’d lived in had burned to the ground many years ago, and the friends of her childhood and the days of marriage—those who weren’t dead—were scattered now from coast to coast, living with relatives as she did, or at any rate most of them were. But even with her friends gone she loved Missouri and obviously belonged there. Though yellowish white now, her hair had once been red—like her brother’s, like Buddy’s mother’s, like Donald Frazier’s, like Joan’s—and her complexion, though faded, still carried a hint, like a painting’s undercoat, of the warmth that came from Missouri sunlight or the red Missouri earth. She could be happy anywhere, she always said, and it was true, no doubt; she loved to be with people, hear their stories, look carefully through their photograph albums, glance over at the children, observe their changes; but it was also true that whenever they drove across the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge, bringing her home for one of her visits, her face took on a mysterious peacefulness, as if she thought she was entering the Promised Land. She stayed sometimes with Betty Lou’s family, sometimes with her brother for a day or two. She didn’t get on well with her sister-in-law Lulu: against Lulu’s fierce Baptist righteousness she raised the impenetrable, infuriating battlements of her placid, all-forgiving Methodist piety, proving in her brother’s hushed, worried house that, though it may not be the case that “a soft answer turneth away wrath,” it is certainly true that it can leave wrath speechless, fuming, and more terrible than before. Her brother, who had his own ways of dealing with things, would sit rocking on the porch, his narrow head tipping in rhythm with the rocker, his crafty, wickedly humorous eyes gazing off through the peach trees that edged his front lawn—his sister in the lumpy gray armchair beside him, Lulu in the house banging pots and pans as if seeing what it took to knock holes in them—and he would say, for instance, “Sis, I b’lieve you better move on into Donald’s before Lulu gets so riled I got to shoot her.”
Mostly, during her Missouri visits, she stayed with Joan’s parents, Donald and Emmy. She was an even-tempered, generous woman who, little as she had, supported more charities than a man could shake a stick at. She would gladly mind the children, wash the dishes, dust-mop the floors, do whatever was needed, though it was not in her nature to notice, especially in a house as meticulously, inhumanly German-clean as Emmy’s, that things needed doing. She would sit in the livingroom reading old copies of the Reader’s Digest or taking a little nap sitting upright in her chair, her head supported by her goiter, and it would never occur to her to wonder what on earth had become of Emily (she was down in the basement, doing the wash, feeling persecuted); or she would sit in the kitchen, hands folded on the table, talking about old times or kinfolk, while Emmy washed and wiped the dishes, cut up celery and carrots, peeled potatoes, shucked peas, husked corn, sifted flour, made lemonade and tea, and Emmy would answer Grandma Davis’s questions with seeming interest or would remark, “Well ye-es,” or “I declare.” Since, like most people, Donald and Emmy made abstract, general
human virtues of the particular natures they happened to possess, they never dreamed of hinting to Grandma Davis that if she was going to live with them—eat their food, use their telephone, sleep in their bed, pile her amber hairpins on the dresser that was theirs—she should try to be a little more help. Asking her to work would have tried their basic timidity, and since they, in her place, would have seen at a glance what needed doing and would have done it, they could only feel she took terrible advantage of their hospitality. She would have been shocked and hurt if she’d ever had the faintest inkling of how they felt—if she’d known, for instance, that when she was well out of earshot Donald would sometimes call her, with a giggle and a blush, “the Queen.”
For all that, she was in fact something of a queen. Much of the day she wrote letters in her room, keeping up with the friends and relatives she had left, or sending whatever little pittance she might have to needy Indians, orphans, southern Negroes, churches or medical stations in Africa and India, Oklahoma and New York. She was a preserver of traditions and rituals, telling the children stories of the family, how her father’s people had come up from South Carolina to Kentucky and eventually to Missouri—you could walk in a straight line all day long and never leave Frazier land—or she would gather them around her chair and read the Bible to them, explaining the meaning of everything, explaining without rancor—with sympathy, in fact—how the Jews, despite all the warnings of the prophets, had betrayed Our Lord and had been forced, exactly as the prophets foretold, to wander the face of the earth all these centuries, despised by mankind, and had never been granted a home. “It’s a strange thing, a terrible strange thing,” she said thoughtfully, almost with distress, but never for an instant would she question her Maker’s plan.