October Light

by John Gardner

“I thought you might do that.”

  He could see, in his mind’s eye, her gathering frown.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “How is everything going?”

  “Oh, fine. Everything’s fine over here. How’s everything with you?”

  She said, “How’s Aunt Sally?”

  “Aunt Sally? Oh, she’s alive, far’s I know.”

  There was a pause.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, Aunt Sally didn’t get up today. Slept in.”

  “She didn’t get up at all?”

  “Not that I know of. Course I ain’t been listening at the keyhole.”

  “Didn’t she eat?”

  The old man tipped his long head back, studying the leaves on the lawn.

  “Dad?”

  “No, I can say for pretty certain she never et a thing.”

  In his mind he could picture her reflecting on that, probably fumbling with her cigarettes. At last, perhaps after a drag on the cigarette, she said, “That’s impossible! She never left her room?”

  “Never once,” he said, nodding thoughtfully at the leaves. “I can say that for pretty near certain.”

  “Dad,” she said, “you’ve nailed the door shut!”

  He shook his head. “Nope, just used the other key.”

  There was a silence. Then: “I’ll be right over.”

  “Now Ginny, don’t you do that! You mine your own business. I had the door open, but she wouldn’t come out. She wouldn’t do a stitch around the house all day, wouldn’t even fix breakfast. What’s a man supposed to do, a case like that? She thinks she can move in and live off my sustenance and never do a lick, pollute my parlor with her dad-blame TV, clutter up the air with her dad-blame chatter—”

  “Just don’t do anything more,” Ginny said, “I’ll be right over.” She hung up. James Page hung up too, and refused to feel guilty, though he could see pretty well he was in for it. Nevertheless he was well within his rights. He’d been working from sun-up to well after sundown for sixty-odd years, paying his taxes, keeping the place fit, and in she’d come like some immigrant, barging in on everything, talking about her rights …

  A mile down the mountain, Samuel Frost was also just hanging up his phone.

  “What are you smiling at?” his wife Ellen said. She too was smiling, for Sam Frost’s good humor was infectious. He was bald except for a shadow of gray hair that had once been red, and he was fat, though solid as a treetrunk.

  “You know I’m not one to tell tales,” he said, still grinning from ear to ear, hardly able to contain himself.

  “Fiddlesticks,” she said, “people use a party line, they should mind their talk.”

  “Mebby so,” he said chuckling, holding his belly. “But there’s nothin to tell. If old James Page locks his sister in the bedroom, it’s certain he’s got some good reason.”

  “He didn’t!” she said, eyes widening in disbelief and glee.

  “Mebby not,” he said, “mebby I heard wrong.” She stared a moment longer, flabbergasted, and then both of them laughed till tears ran down their faces.

  He mentioned it that night at Merton’s Hideaway, sitting with a fat, freckled hand closed tight around a Ballantine’s. He was drinking from the bottle, though as usual, out of some queer stubbornness, Merton had handed him a glass. Leave the thing clean as a whistle, Merton would still wash it; all part of the price. It was early, but dark as a pit outside. When they happened to look out, turning from the oval wooden table near the bar, it seemed to them all, one way or another, a surprising and vaguely unnatural thing—though they’d seen it every year of their lives—that sudden contraction of daylight in October, the first deep-down convincing proof that locking time, and after that winter and deep snow and cold, were coming. Whether or not they cared for winter—some claimed they did, some claimed they didn’t—every one of them felt a subdued excitement, a new aliveness that was more, in fact, than the seasonal change in their chemistry.

  Summer, for all its beauty on those mountain-slope farms, meant back-breaking work, long hours on the tractor where you struggled against the stiff upgrade pull of the steering wheel and fought till you ached against the jerk and jab of the plow-lift lever as the plow-points skittered over stones. And then later, in July, it meant heaving bales in the still, dead heat, with bees all around you, first-cousins to the fairies, but nothing magical about a swarm of impinged-on bees in a dry, hot hayloft in July, no magic in anything except, perhaps, to the tourists who came like a plague of locusts and had time to watch the otters in the high mountain streams, or the foal in the shadow of the barn. August was cooler, though still high summer, so cool in the morning and evening, at times, especially those mornings and occasional evenings when mist filled the valleys, that it was best to have a fire in the woodstove; but August meant even more work than before—still hay to get in, but also sweetcorn, potatoes, and tomatoes, and now wheat and oats, grainsacks to throw, your eyes and ears and nostrils full of dust, harsh chaff in the cracks around your neck. Late August, although still grain-harvest time—it would drag through September—was the time of carnivals and village fairs, church suppers, all-day auctions, and demonstrations by the Volunteer Fire Department. It was the time of respite before the air turned winy and the field-corn came in and then the busiest harvest of all. Apples. The State had been rich in them since long before the Revolution. Even in deep woods you’d come across old apple trees still bearing away, half-forgotten species like Pound Sweets and Snow-apples. Now, in October, the farmwork was slackening, the drudgery had paid off: the last of the corn went flying into the silo with a clackety roar and a smell as sweet as honey; the beans were harvested in half a day, like an afterthought; on the porch and out by the roadside stood mountains of pumpkins. The trees turned—those along the paved roads first, dying from the salt put down in winter—sugar maples orange, pink, and yellow on one branch, elm trees pale yellow, birch trees speckled with a lemony yellow, still other trees carmine and vermilion and ochre, red maples as red as fresh blood. Soon—anytime from mid-October to the end of November—it would be locking time.

  It began as a suspension of time altogether. Rudyard Kipling saw it in Brattleboro, in 1895, and wrote: “There the seasons stopped awhile. Autumn was gone. Winter was not. We had Time dealt out to us—more clear, fresh Time—grace-days to enjoy.” There’d be nothing to do but chores, load pigs for butchering, chop firewood, or walk through the dry, crisp leaves of a canted wood hunting deer. The air in the cowbarn would be clean and cold, but when you bent down between them for the milking, the cows would be as warm and comforting as stoves. Sometimes an Indian summer would break up the locking, sometimes not; but whatever the appearances, the ground was hardening; every now and then a loud crack would ring out, some oak tree closing down all business for the season. If it was warm and mild on Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning might be twenty degrees, and you’d find the water in the pig-trough frozen solid. By Thanksgiving the locking would be irreversible: the ground would be frozen, not to thaw again till spring. When the first good snow came, maybe three feet of it, maybe six, they’d call it winter.

  This darkness now, fallen unnaturally early, as it always seemed every year—fallen like a thick tarpaulin around the Hideaway—was to them all, in their blood if not quite in their conscious minds, obscurely magical, a sign of elves working. If it had not been for that strangeness about things, Sam Frost might perhaps not have mentioned what he’d heard on the telephone, that old James Page had confined his sister to her bedroom.

  “He never did!” Bill Partridge said, leaning toward Sam Frost. “Locked up old Sally in the bedroom? He must be daft!”

  Giggling and blushing, his eyes filled with tears, Sam could only nod.

  “No doubt he had plenty provocation,” Bill Partridge said. His voice had the high, thin whine of a buzzsaw. He sat with his hat on, his nose long and red, below it big folds—where there were still
a few whiskers—drooping past his mouth and small chin.

  “She’s got mighty strange opinions,” Henry Stumpchurch said—serious-minded, enormous and whopper-jawed, though by blood part Welshman—watching Sam Frost for some sign that he might know more.

  Sam Frost nodded, still smiling and blushing. “You can understand his feelings,” he said. “Works all his life, puts his money in the bank, and there she comes with her hands held out, and he does what’s right and the next thing you know she’s got him hog-tied hand and foot, even runnin his cussed politics.”

  “She don’t!” Bill Partridge said.

  Sam was still nodding. “She’s a Democrat,” he said.

  They waited, watching him, none of them admitting quite yet that the tale had gone somber.

  Sam nodded again, eyes crinkling as if for a grin, but the grin was unconfident and failed. “Wife Ellen calls up about the Republican fund drive, and old Sally says to her, ‘James ain’t home.’ Twant the truth, point of fact. You could hear him in the background, hollerin to know who’s on the line.”

  They stared, only gradually understanding the terrible implications.

  “He’d ought to shoot her,” Bill Partridge said thoughtfully, and filled his glass.

  By this time Lewis and Virginia Hicks were at her father’s house, trying to negotiate a peace. They’d left Dickey with a neighbor in Arlington, had come up Mount Prospect as fast as their rattle-trap car would climb, and in no time at all Ginny had persuaded the old man to unlock that door. It proved to be no help, as the old man had known it would be or he’d never have given in. “Two stubbaner people never lived,” Lewis said, not to anyone in particular. The old woman had the door-bolt shot inside and she’d rather be dead, she told them, than come out where that maniac was. Ginny and Lewis stood in the upstairs hallway, pleading through the door, the old man downstairs in the kitchen feigning indifference, but with the stairway door cracked open, allowing him to hear. Ginny grew angrier and more tearful by the minute, Lewis more despondent.

  Lewis Hicks was a small man, and though he was going on forty years old he was thin as a boy. He had on the gray coveralls he’d been wearing when he came home and Ginny was making that phonecall to her father. His hair was cropped short and was by nature dry as dust and approximately that color; he had practically no chin, a large adam’s apple, and on his upper lip a brown, insignificant moustache. He had one blue eye, one brown eye. “Aunt Sally,” he said, for out in the driveway his car was running, swilling down the gas, and also he was paying that babysitter, “this is costin good money.” It was entirely unlike him to assert himself so, and as soon as he’d said it he glanced over at Ginny. He could see himself that it was petty and not likely to persuade. Ginny gave him a glance and he looked hastily at the floor. All the same, people asked a great deal of him, he thought. If crazy old brothers and sisters had fights, what concern was it of his? She’d come out, all right, when she got hungry enough; and if not, well, they could cross that bridge when they’d come to it. He glanced furtively at Ginny, then away again. He was rarely brought conviction by even his own most sensible reasoning. Life was slippery, right and wrong were as elusive as odors in an old abandoned barn. Lewis knew no certainties but hammers and nails, straps of leather, clocksprings. He had no patience with people’s complexities—preferred the solitude of his workshop down cellar, the safe isolation of a maple grove he’d been hired to trim, or some neighbor’s back yard, where he’d been hired to rake leaves—not because people were foolish, in Lewis Hicks’ opinion, or because they got through life on gross and bigoted oversimplifications, though they did, he knew, but because, quiet and unschooled as he might be, he could too easily see all sides and, more often than not, no hint of a solution.

  Ginny crushed out her cigarette in the stippled glass ashtray she held in her left hand. As always when she was angry, her face was a trifle gray and puffy, putting him on guard, making him droop more than usual and run one finger across his moustache. “Aunt Sally,” Ginny said, “I want you to come out of there.” She listened, and when no answer came she flashed a look at Lewis as if her relatives’ craziness were all his fault, then called again: “Aunt Sally?”

  “I hear you,” the old woman called back.

  “Well, are you coming out or not?” she demanded.

  “Not,” the old woman said. “I told you that. If I’m going to be treated like an animal, I might’s well be penned up like one.”

  “Ha!” Ginny’s father broke in from downstairs. “Animals at least got some use in the world.”

  “You see what he thinks of me?” the old woman whined. Possibly she was crying.

  “Animals at least earn their keep,” he called.

  “I don’t ask any keep,” the old woman called back—half convincing herself, the way it sounded—“just a little room to die in.”

  “Aunt Sally,” Ginny called, “you’ve got to come out and eat something.” Her voice was sharper than ever now, annoyed, maybe, by the sentimental talk about dying.

  “Don’t want to,” the old woman called back just as sharply.

  It sounded final; Lewis had a feeling they’d be hearing nothing more from her. Ginny perhaps had the same feeling. She looked at him for help, then changed her mind and decided to light another cigarette. When it was going she said, “Aunt Sally, I’m going to bring a tray up here. I’ll leave it by your door. When you get hungry, you come on out and eat something.”

  There was no answer for a moment. Then Aunt Sally called, “Wouldn’t bother, I was you.”

  “What?” Ginny called.

  “I wouldn’t bother if I was you. I won’t eat, and after you’re gone he’ll just feed it to the pigs.”

  Ginny took a deep breath, mostly cigarette smoke, or so it seemed to Lewis. He’d always been a worrier, and Ginny’s smoking was the chief of his worries, though he rarely spoke of it. We ought to be getting back, he thought. She knew well enough the situation was hopeless, but she kept at it. Lewis shook his head, miserable, picked at his moustache, and then, catching himself, pushed his hands into his coveralls pockets. “We ought to be getting back to Dickey,” he said casually.

  “I know that,” she said, and as if he were surprised that he’d spoken the offending words aloud, he lifted his eyebrows, tipped his head, and focused his attention on the chipping, cream-colored paint on the bedroom door. Without thinking he raised his left hand and with one square fingernail picked experimentally at the edge of a chipped place. A larger chip came off. Ought to be scraped to the wood, he thought, and knew if it were done it would be he who’d have to do it, and then he’d have to do the rest of the doors, and the moldings, to make them match, and then new papering—for no money, because he was a son-in-law, and old James Page was tighter than a snakeskin. More than before he felt guilty and depressed. Now that he’d noticed the chipping paint, he had a feeling it was his duty, in a way, to fix it.

  Aunt Sally was saying, full of righteous indignation and self-pity, enjoying herself, “It’s a free country. Just you tell him that. I have rights the same as the next person.”

  “Any time she wants,” Ginny’s father called, “she’s free to pack her bags and go live where she damn well pleases.”

  “That’s the way he thinks!” Aunt Sally said. The way she pounced on it, even a perfect stranger would have known it was an idea she’d been over and over in her mind. “It’s a free country to die in, that’s all! You ever hear him talk about Welfare?”

  “Aunt Sally,” Ginny began, but she knew it was useless. They all did.

  “You get him on Welfare and that man will stutter and foam at the mouth like a rabid wolf. You just try it. ‘Welfare’s the ruin of this country,’ he’ll say. ‘Let the people that’s fit to work eat, and let the rest go hang!’”

  From the bottom of the stairs Ginny’s father shouted, “Let the people that’s willing and able to work eat. You get it wrong on puppose.”

  “Same thing,” she snapped.
>
  “Ain’t the same at ah!” But he bit off all the rest of what he had to say, how it wasn’t child labor he was asking for, or turning a deaf ear to the whimperings of the sick, but if a healthy man was too fussy to take a job when it was offered him—and so forth and so on, they’d heard it many times, so that even Lewis Hicks, who agreed with the old man, was glad to hear him stop. Yet at the same time, confusingly, Lewis was sorry to see the truth choked off, as it so often was in this miserable world, it seemed to him. He could see old James Page, in his mind’s eye, with his mouth clamped shut like a snapping turtle’s, arms folded tight across his chest, down there at the foot of the stairs, his eyes aglitter with cold fury.

  “Just get him onto Social Security,” she said. The old woman pounced on that subject too with malicious glee. She knew her brother. It was no case of “tensions raised by misunderstanding.” Struggle as he might, bite his false teeth together hard as he pleased, hop on one foot with his eyes shut, he couldn’t help answering. “I’d rather see the Government rob banks than have Social Security,” he cried out.

  “You see?” she shrieked.

  Lewis could picture her with her hands squeezed together, behind that door, lips violently trembling, her smile like the smile of an axe-murderer. Without thinking he said, as if he thought he was in heaven and reason might settle the whole dispute, “Social Security’s a terrible thing though, you got to admit it, Aunt Sally. You pay all your life, and then when you retire it ain’t enough to live on, and if you go get a job you ain’t eligible for your own damn money. It’s dollers down a rat-hole.”

  “Oh, Lewis,” Ginny said.

  “Well, it’s true, sweet-hot.” He spoke gently, eyebrows lifted, not insisting on the point, just appealing to common sense.

  “What’s true has nothing to do with it,” she said.

  That too, he realized, was true. He turned from her, feeling, as usual, stupid as an Indian, and absently picked another chip from the door. He’d had things to do tonight. Jack up the kitchen. Repair the woodshed door.