October Light

by John Gardner

  “I don’t know,” the officer said. “Just some boat, I guess.”

  “You don’t know?” This time he did sit up. The room yawed and swung. Both the officer and the ship’s doctor looked at him as if he’d gone crazy and reached out to catch him.

  The ship’s doctor put his arm around his shoulders. “Take it easy, there!”

  “You didn’t ask?” Dr. Alkahest said.

  The officer grinned (Stupid pig! Moron!) and said, “Too much going on, Doctor. They called us to come look for a body, you know. When you’re looking for a body, in weather like this …”

  “You ought to have noticed,” Dr. Alkahest said. By pure chance, by the wildest of accidents, he had made the most important discovery of his life, and their squeezed-shut, piggish little brains had blooched it. He clenched his fist, understanding with a terrible shock how utterly alone he was: who among his medical friends could get him marijuana—not a piddling joint, a paltry pipeload, but a mountain of it, a load like the load they had in that boat, that could bring him back WHAMMO his youth? Some people might in their frosty superiority—spouting Boethius or Augustine or Carlyle—make light of his anguish. Some people might shrug off his insight as senility. But a man lives only once! He comes wriggling, howling with pain and terror into the chilly, indifferent world, and all too soon he goes trembling-like-a-leaf and howling, bawling, out. No trace of him remains, and no heaven snatches (let us face these things) the failing electrical impulses of his brain. Scoff ye who will! Dr. Alkahest thought, I’m a pitiful, miserable crippled old man without a friend in the world except my cleaning woman—who, God knows, hates my ass. Who scorns me and worse. Who ignores me! Now happiness is planted—behold!—within my reach! and, the very same instant, it’s kicked out of sight like a football! Laugh! Laugh on, ye stony distancers! Someday you too will be ridiculous and full of woe! Half my certain inalienable rights were shot away when I was nine years old. No wonder if I cling with all my might to what little remains!

  “You could at least have noticed what fishingboat it was,” he whimpered.

  “Maybe somebody else did,” the officer said. “I’ll ask around.”

  But nobody had.

  Dr. Alkahest closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and made a vow. Life was precious, never to be repeated, despite all the wide-eyed memories of the transmigrationists. He would do what he must; it was decided. The man unwilling to fight for what he wanted did not deserve what he wanted. He smiled, eyes still closed. His jaw was firm now; a change had come over him. He could not but lament the impending calamities; nonetheless, his sleep was sound.

  Meanwhile, at its pier in San Francisco, a vague shape in the tea-brown fog, the Indomitable sits waiting, moving a little like something alive, with the gentle lappings of the water supporting its bulk. Old Captain Fist appears on deck, holding his overcoated belly with one hand, leaning with the other on his cane. He is still very sick and walks with the greatest care, as a kindness to his stomach. After a moment the girl, Jane, appears beside him, wearing jeans, a man’s workshirt, and an oil-grimed baseball cap, red, white, and blue. She stands balanced and wary as a cat. “All clear?” she asks softly.

  From the dock above, Mr. Goodman answers, “All clear.”

  Captain Fist makes his way carefully, carefully to the side and stretches up a trembling hand. Mr. Goodman reaches down, takes the Captain’s hand and gently pulls, almost lifts, him to the dock. Jane climbs after him lightly.

  “Wait here,” Captain Fist says, without troubling to glance at Mr. Goodman. His old eyes stare like two bullet holes into the city.

  Mr. Goodman waits. The Captain and the handsome young woman in the patriotic cap move away toward the lights.

  “The cause of Liberty is a cause of too much dignity, to be sullied by turbulence and tumult.” John Dickinson, “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” 1768

  2

  The Old Woman Finds Trash to Her Liking; and a Chamberpot Sets Off a War

  It was a little past midnight when the old woman was roused from her reading by the squawk of a chicken and the thunderous rumble of her niece’s car pulling up into the driveway. She couldn’t believe so much time had passed, or that the novel, mere froth that it was, had so held her attention. She was always fast asleep by eleven at the latest, except, on occasion, when friends came to visit and Estelle played piano or Ruth recited poems; and even allowing for the way he’d upset her and, come to that, nearly killed her, that brother of hers—he was insane, that’s all; always had been—even allowing for the way he’d gotten her all riled up, treating her like an animal, depriving her of her most ordinary human rights till she was trembling and shaking and so weak at the knees she’d been afraid, coming up the stairs backwards, protecting her face with her hands, that she’d collapse and fall on him, and serve him right (she was shaking again now, remembering)—even allowing for all that, it was hard to believe it was fifteen minutes past midnight!

  She put down the paperback, opened to her page, on the white-painted square-topped wicker table beside the head of the bed—higher than the bed, an awkward, foolish excuse for a table if ever there was one, wicker-wrapped legs angling out past a useless little shelf down underneath (the table, she was sure, was a remnant from the years her niece Virginia had occupied this room)—and got up to go over to the clock on the desk to make certain she was seeing right. She was, it seemed.

  It was a grayish-black clock made of onyx, or something made to simulate onyx—it weighed twenty-five pounds if it weighed one ounce—with ostentatious pitted gold pillars on the front, Roman columns, and Roman numerals so unevenly spaced it took study to be sure of what hour it was, let alone what minute. It stood in front of the mirror on the top of the closed oak desk, to the right of the glassed-in bookcase, level with her eyes. She couldn’t help noticing, looking above her blue plastic spectacle-rims at the hands on the clock, that her eyes, in the mirror behind it, were red, ruined by her weeping, and perhaps made redder still by all that reading. She was not a great reader, she’d be quick to admit—certainly not a person who ordinarily read trivia! That’s what he’s brought us to, she thought, and her lips and white, white cheeks began to tremble. By “us” she meant herself and her late husband Horace.

  Horace, her husband of thirty-five years, would never have read such a book as hers. He’d read only the finest literature, authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe. She had not read them clear through herself, but she knew, if only by the fact that he read them, that they were profoundly serious-minded authors, “heavy,” as they say, full of difficult philosophy and memorable prose and keen insights into human nature. It was wonderfully comforting, hearing him read her memorable passages just as she was drifting off to sleep, prose that rolled over her dimming mind like the ocean over tumbling wrecks at sea. Sometimes as he read he would choke a little with emotion. She would pat his elbow. Heaven only knew what he would think of her—gentle Horace Abbott with his mild gray eyes and soft dentist’s hands—if, standing, ghostly, at her shoulder, he should find her reading trash. Her eyes filled with tears, not so much of self-pity as righteous indignation, for she was thinking again of her television set, and, taking her embroidered hankie from the sleeve of her nightie, where she’d tucked it, she angrily blew her nose. “We’ll get even, Horace, you wait and see,” she whispered to the empty room. Her husband had been dead for twenty years—twenty years exactly this Halloween. Dead of a heart attack. Someone had been in the room with him; they were gone when she got there.

  Her niece’s car was still rumbling, down below, though Virginia was in the house now; the old woman could hear them talking. It was odd, she thought, that Virginia’d gone and left the engine running, eating the gas up at sixty cents a gallon; but then she remembered. Sometimes when they turned off the motor the car wouldn’t start again. Last Sunday afternoon when they’d come over after church (Sally’s church, not theirs; Lewis was an atheist), they’d had to work two ful
l hours to get the old thing running. It was a terrible car, a Chevrolet four-door (she and Horace had had Buicks). But Virginia and her husband were poor, of course. Virginia’s husband Lewis—Lewis Hicks—was shiftless and dull-witted—or at any rate that was Sally Abbott’s opinion, not that she condemned him; it was a free country. He had just a little touch of Indian in him. His great-great-great-great-grandfather had been a Swamp-Yankee. It was well known. Lewis had never gotten past eighth grade and was now just a handyman, a painter of porches, fixer of old pumps, shingler of barn and woodshed roofs, installer of screens and storm-windows, and in the winter, a gluer of old broken pictureframes and caner of chairs. He’d worked for her some, years ago, when she’d sold antiques. The Chevrolet, bluish-gray with brown patches, was a menace: she, for one, refused to ride in it. To take the thing out on the highway should be a criminal act. There were great rusted holes you could put your whole leg through, the front left headlight had been smashed out for months, and the back had been crashed into by a hit-and-run so that they had to hold the trunk shut with electric wire.

  She stood twisting the hankie in her two hands, as if trying to wring it out, wondering what they could be saying so long, James and Virginia. She ought to get that Dickey home to bed; tomorrow was a school-day. Picking up the book, not noticing she was doing it, she went over to the tall narrow door—the door to the hallway, the one James had locked (there were two other doors, the closet door and the one by the foot of the bed that went up to the attic)—to see if she could hear what they were saying. She couldn’t. Even with her good ear pressed to the wood, all she could catch was a faint rumble and vibration in the wood—ordinary chat of the kind you might expect in the middle of the night, her telling him, no doubt, the gossip from her meeting of the Rebekahs, or whatever, him saying just enough to keep her there, the way an old man will when his daughter comes by, and over by the fireplace or on the overstuffed plush couch, little Dickey curled up asleep with his deformed, one-eyed Snoopy.

  In her mind’s eye the old woman could see her niece Virginia as clear as day, all dolled up in rouge and lipstick, artificial black lashes, the stiff, half-dead looking dyed-blonde hair teased high over her head in a wide bouffant, cigarette between her fingers—she was a nervous wreck, and no wonder, growing up with that mad fool James and her poor troubled brother who had killed himself, and then marrying that Lewis!—nails dark red, same color as the lipstick not quite following her lips—there would be lipstick too, lined like a fingerprint, on the filter of her L&M. Virginia was pretty, for a woman of thirty-eight. She luckily hadn’t drawn that long, narrow Page head but, instead, the short, wide one her mother, Ariah, had—James’ wife—and that same double chin. Ginny was a good girl, always had been, just as her poor simple mother had been, one of the Blackmers. You could be certain James Page hadn’t told her yet that he’d gotten drunk on whiskey and chased his own eighty-year-old sister up the stairs with a fireplace log and locked her in the bedroom like a madwoman! Virginia’d have something to say, all right, when she heard about that. And no doubt he was working up to tell her, that old mule. Likely’s not he’d pretend to be proud of it—maybe would be proud of it, you never knew. Anything he did, he’d confess it right away; that was the way he’d been since he was old enough to talk. Thought it proved him honest. She pressed her ear to the door again. They were still blabbing on quietly. She pulled her head away and straightened up, lips compressed, annoyed, absentmindedly slapping the paperback book against the palm of her left hand, thinking again about revenge.

  The room smelled of apples. He had twelve bushels of them upstairs in the attic, where in the winter it would be cold but not too cold. She didn’t give a hoot about the smell just now, but when her mood was better she liked it, sometimes even opened the attic door to let it float down the narrow wooden stairs and drift around her bed while she slept. It reminded her of her childhood, in this same house. This had been James’ room, in those days. She’d slept downstairs in the room off the pantry. Even then the floor—the wide, softwood boards—had been un-level, so that at night the furniture would incline to slide toward one corner. The same old drop-leaf oak desk with glassed-in books to the left of it had been here then, though the books had been different—heaven only knew where these had come from, perhaps James’ poor wife’s mother: Little Journeys into the Homes of the Great, Coe’s Cyclopaedia, The New Pharmacopeia, The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Training Vicious Dogs, and a dozen ragged hymnals. The grayish-black clock had been kept downstairs in those days, on the fireplace mantel, and the chimes, back then, still rang.

  She noticed she had the paperback book in her hand and thought, How odd, and shook her head. She was half-inclined to read a little more in it. The grayish-black clock said twenty to one now, but strange to say she wasn’t sleepy at all. It must be she’d gotten her second wind; or perhaps the truth was she never really slept much anyway, anymore, just fooled herself, laid her head against the pillow, closed her eyes, let her mind drift, and passed it off for sleeping. Yes, she would read a page or two more, she decided. She wasn’t some child, going to be corrupted by a foolish book. Which was worse, come right down to it?—a book that made you smile from time to time, though it spoke about certain things better left unmentioned, such as bedroom things, and suicide, or a book full of gloomy opinions and terrible fore-warnings in memorable prose that was all hogwash anyway? “Show me, Horace Abbott,” she demanded sternly, “a book that’s got insights into human nature that an eighty-year-old woman hasn’t thought of!” The ghost kept mum. Yes, then: she’d tuck herself in and poor Horace could just look the other way.

  But just as the old woman was taking the first step in the direction of the bed, the commotion broke out downstairs. With a look of what could only be described as manic glee, she darted back to the door and flattened her ear to it.

  For once in her life, as it happened, the old woman was wrong in her prediction about her brother. The old man had fully intended, in point of fact, to tell his daughter just exactly what he’d done, and he’d repeatedly moved the conversation in that direction; but somehow or other he had never quite said it, had merely stood there like a Stoughton bottle, and when she’d got up and picked up her Dickey to carry him to the car, he’d decided to let the thing slide. It was thus his grandson Dickey who told Ginny what the old man had done. They were halfway to the car, Ginny carrying the boy in her arms, his long legs dangling, his pale eyelids closed, one elbow clamped on Snoopy. “How’s my good baby?” Ginny asked him, as she’d been asking every night since they’d got him from the adoption agency. “Mmm,” he said, as always, and brushed his cheek against her hair. Ahead of them in the darkness, just within range of the light falling over the leaf-covered lawn, the grayish Chevrolet with its smashed-in headlight was rumbling and clanking and sending out such thick brown clouds of exhaust one might have thought at first glance it had been parked near a pile of burning leaves. They were just out of range of the old man’s hearing when the little boy said, “Grampa chased Aunt Sally up the stairs with a stick.”

  Virginia Hicks stopped walking, mouth opening, eyes widening, and with an expression more like sorrow and terrible weariness than anything else, turned her head, slightly drawing it back, to try to see her son’s face. She could only see his neck and ear. Not in disbelief—in despair, more like—she said, “With a stick?”

  Dickey nodded his head. “It was a fireplace log. He locked her in the bedroom.”

  Ginny turned, child and all, eyes swimming in tears, to face her father. “Oh, Dad,” she wailed. She saw his back straighten and his long jaw stiffen, prepared to be belligerently defensive as usual, and the same instant she felt Dickey tense up with alarm, realizing too late that now he was in for it from his grampa. Both Dickey and the old man spoke at once, her father barking, “She had it comin’! She stotted the whole thing!” and her son: “Mommy, I want to stay in the car.”

  “You can’t stay in the car,” she snapped.
“The damn fumes’ll kill you.” She started back with him toward the house.

  “Now Ginny you mine your own business,” her father said, self-righteous and whining at the same time, standing his ground in the doorway though both of them knew he’d back off if she pressed him. “This is between yer aunt Sally and me, and nobody else’s got a pot in it.”

  “Holy Christ,” she said, and moved straight on toward him, unconsciously using Dickey as a human shield, and the old man backed out of the doorway. She went straight to the living room, put down Dickey on the couch, mechanically stuck the red sateen pillow under his head and Snoopy in his arms, then went striding back to deal with her father. He was still standing in the kitchen, looking hawk-eyed and sullen and crazy as a loon, his hand on the white doorknob, holding the door open. She closed the door to the living room behind her. “Just what the hell,” she asked, “is going on here?”

  “This is my house,” her father said, “and if Sally don’t like the way I live here, she can damn well move right on out of it.”

  “It’s the family house,” Ginny said, throwing her head forward, fists on her hips. “She’s got as much right to it as you have.”

  “That ain’t so!” His indignation was more confident now, for about this there could be no question. “It was left to me and I’ve lived here ah my life.”

  “Well it shouldn’t have been left to you,” she yelled, “it’s not fair and you know it. Why should one child get everything and the other one nothing?”

  “Sally was rich. She had her dentist.” He sneered childishly.

  “Well she don’t now, does she? If they’d known he’d die young and Aunt Sally would live on years and years past him, they’d have left it to you both. Fair’s fair.”

  He was less confident, all at once. “Fair is fair and law is law,” he said.