October Light

by John Gardner

“A person can believe what he pleases in a democracy,” Aunt Sally said firmly, “and say what he pleases, and live as he pleases, and watch whatever television programs he pleases, or read whatever books. That’s the law of the land.”

  “Not in this house,” Ginny’s father shouted up, then went silent.

  The old woman, too, went silent now. Ginny waited, watching Lewis, hoping perhaps for some suggestion. Nothing came. He could hear the old woman moving about, slowly, stiffly, in her bedroom slippers.

  He might have thought once it was an easy question, what rights a person had when they moved into somebody else’s house. But nothing was simple. That was the only thing he’d learnt all these years, though he’d been born, could be, with an intuition of the fact. You heard all your life about people who moved in with relatives, how they kept to themselves, did whatever bit of work they could think of to do, washed dishes, cleaned storm-windows and sap-buckets, helped with chores; and the relatives would say they were no trouble at all, though occasionally the relatives might briefly complain, with great pains making nothing much of it. That was all—or so he’d more or less taken for granted—how things ought to be. His grandmother had lived with his parents for years, and that had been, generally, how it had been then: an old woman for the most part invisible as a ghost, darning socks, dusting floors, warming baby bottles—more like an old, inefficient family servant grateful to be kept on, happy to be of whatever small use, than like a grandmother, someone who had once been a wife and mother, with a life of her own. Lewis nodded, encountering the same thought again: nothing’s simple.

  Picking at the paint, only half aware what he was doing or thinking, he saw his grandmother again—she’d been dead for years—her yellow-white hair in a bun on her head, clamped with amber pins, her brown eyes quick as a squirrel’s or a doe’s, and he realized he’d been fond of her; and mixed with that image, distinct and clear and yet a part of it, joined with it as images join in dreams, he saw the furniture he’d had to help move from Aunt Sally’s when she’d finally sold off the last of it. It had been expensive once—more expensive, anyway, than anything Ginny and he would be able to afford in this Vale of Tears. A rocking chair, for instance, of inlaid mahogany; an old cherry table with hardly a scratch; a standing lamp of brass, with etched glass bowls for the lightbulbs; a tallboy of pearwood. The furniture had been sold, the house soon after. With a few trunks and bags and a shawl around her head, she’d come away from the place like a refugee. Even if the thing had been her fault, it would hardly have been fair, somehow; and it had not been, so far as he could see, her fault. Ten years ago or more, she’d tried to make the house an antique shop. She’d been unlucky. She knew nothing about antiques, and had no real way to find out about them. People who knew more cleaned her out when she had good things and sold her mediocre things for more than they were worth. He’d repaired old tables and chairs for Aunt Sally, from time to time, and whenever he went into her living-room shop he’d had a feeling, clear as a chill, that things were out of hand. She’d been in business, if one could call it business, less than two years, then finally had resigned herself to living on her savings and the insurance and, now and then, some housecleaning work. But she’d lived too long by a good ten years, and besides, she’d been generous, giving to political campaigns and charities as her husband had done, though she knew, Lewis Hicks suspected, nothing much about them. Perhaps he could have helped her, somehow another. But she was too proud to reason with, he’d known without trying, and who was he to give anyone advice, the un-luckiest man he knew? So he’d shook his head, wondering what would come of it all, no surer than any of the rest of them how much money she had left, and one morning—it had seemed at the time just that sudden—they’d found out Aunt Sally was a pauper.

  “It’s useless, Lewis,” Ginny was saying now, stubbing out a cigarette. “We may as well go home. Let them fight it out themselves.” She was turning toward the head of the stairs when she paused and frowned. “Sweetie,” she said, “look what you’re doing to that door!”

  He’d peeled away patches up to three inches round, six or seven of them, maybe more (he didn’t count), revealing there, beneath the cream-colored paint, shiny green. It looked like the door had some dangerous new kind of chicken pox. He smiled ruefully at his guilty left hand, turning it, looking at the dirt cracks.

  “Well, come on,” she said, and led on toward the stairs. She called back to Aunt Sally, “When you’re ready to come out, Aunt Sally, come out. And try to behave yourself.”

  “He’ll lock it as soon as you’re gone,” Aunt Sally called back, and seemed thoroughly pleased.

  “No he won’t. You be reasonable and he’ll be,” Ginny said.

  Lewis Hicks doubted it but said nothing.

  When they reached the kitchen, her father said, getting up from his chair at the Formica table, “Right’s right, that’s ah.” It seemed he intended to say no more.

  “Nothing’s simple,” Lewis said thoughtfully, as if to himself, and nodded. He saw, too late, it put him squarely in the wrong—put him with the Liberals. The old man pointed at him, eyes narrowed, hard as flints. “That’s what you say, boy. But suppose you had a house, and some woman come into it and turnt it end for end? She’s got a right to live ennaway she pleases, she says. But what about me, now? That’s ah I want to know. I been living the same way for sixty-odd years, paying up my taxes and obeyin ah the laws, keepin my mind clear of lies and foolishness, and now, because she’s had a little hahd luck, I got to change my ways till this life’s just not woth gettin up for.”

  Ginny was over to the door by now, as eager to get out of there as Lewis was. “You know it’s not that bad,” she said.

  “I know no such thing. Meaner than a wasp, that’s what she is. Soft-headed as a cheese. We read in the paper, sittin right here at this same kitchen table, some woman over there in Shaftsbury has been breakin and enterin, stealing people’s things, and by tunkit Sally stots tellin me how society’s to blame. You and me! We done it! I never said it’s a picnic to be poor, ye know, but the way she talks wrecks my supper, and that wrecks my sleep nights. I got work to do, ye see? When a man has to get up in the mahnin for milkin, it ain’t healthy to be lyin awake nights, sick.”

  Ginny had her hand on the doorknob but still didn’t turn it.

  “Well,” Lewis said, nodding in the general direction of her father, venturing no definite opinion.

  “And now,” the old man went on, “there she is on strike. That’s the long and the shot of it. Let her go back where she come from, then, that’s ah I can say.”

  “Dad, she can’t go back,” Ginny said.

  The old man said nothing, merely stood puckering his lips in righteous anger.

  Ginny let go of the doorknob and turned again to face him. Unconsciously, she was opening her purse and reaching in. She said, “Maybe she should come live with us for a while.”

  Lewis frowned almost unnoticeably.

  She saw it all right but pretended not to, getting the cigarette between her lips now and lighting it. “We could keep her for a little while at least, sweetie, till we think of something better.” She blew out smoke.

  He could see the old woman moved in at their place, bumping into Ginny in the kitchenette, where there was hardly room for two mosquitoes to pass, sleeping on the sofa, with her bags piled around her, or on a mattress on the dining-room table, maybe. He mentioned aloud, his eyebrows lifted thoughtfully, “It’s a pretty sma’ house.”

  “We could figure something out.” Her hand was shaking. He hadn’t seen Ginny shake this bad since the night after they’d been inspected by the people from the adoption agency.

  He mentioned, as if thinking aloud again, “We wouldn’t have room for her things, course. Mebby a suitcase, one or two.”

  From upstairs, Aunt Sally called—she’d apparently opened the door to listen—“I wouldn’t go where I’m not wanted, thank you.”

  “You think you’re wanted here?” Gi
nny’s father called.

  Ginny’s eyes filled with tears, and the cigarette she drew to her lips shook violently. “Oh the hell with the both of you,” she said. “Lewis, let’s go.”

  “Now, Ginny,” he said vaguely.

  But she’d opened the door. Cold air rushed in. He nodded to her father, apologetic, gave a left-handed wave, and followed her out. When he reached back with his left hand to close the door behind him—Ginny was already in the car and had turned on the headlights to hurry him—her father was holding the door on his side, pulling against Lewis. Lewis nodded awkwardly, let go, and went on toward the car. The old man called after them, “Don’t worry, now. I’ll straighten this out.” His voice had such determination that Lewis, hurried as he felt, had to pause and look back one more time, uneasy. Then Lewis gave his left-handed wave again and walked to where Ginny sat waiting, blowing smoke like a chimney.

  Sally Page Abbott sat listening in her bed, waiting for signs that her brother had finally gone to sleep. She got nothing of the kind. No sooner would the house become quiet for a moment, leading her to believe that before long she’d be free to sneak down to the kitchen where the food was—a little something just to stave off diarrhea—than there it would be again, the dumpings and shufflings of his moving around, hay-foot, straw-foot, coming up the stairs, breathing hard, the way he breathed when he was carrying things. What he was up to, Great Peter only knew. She was tempted to go open the door a crack and look, but it was impossible to be sure he wasn’t watching from somewhere, or listening and she was bound and determined to give that man no satisfaction. He would come down the hallway and move past her door, hay-foot, straw-foot, not pausing for a moment, though the hallway went nowhere, only to the closet beyond her room, and the place where the plaster of the wall was cracked from the chimney heat. She heard him grunting sometimes, and whistling just under his breath in a way that seemed curious, somehow cautious—whistling as he might when he was doing some moderately dangerous work such as electrical wiring. He worked for more than an hour after Ginny and her husband what’s-his-name went home. (She squinted, trying to remember that man’s name—she knew it as well as she knew her own, of course—but all she could think of, now wasn’t that something?, was “Mr. Nit.”) Much of the time he worked so quietly she began to doubt he was still there. Then one time James said, shuffling away toward the head of the stairs, “The door’s still unlocked, Sally, case you’re wonderin.” She heard him go into the bathroom and close the door and, after a long time, come out, the toilet flushing—a sound unnaturally loud in the otherwise still house—and then she heard him go slowly downstairs, heard the door pulled closed at the foot of the stairs, and then silence except for the grunt of a pig once or twice and the ticking of her clock.

  She sat up straighter to listen harder, her sharp-beaked head tipped forward and sideways like an eagle’s. There was still not a sound, but he’d left the hallway light on, it came to her. Tight as he was, he’d never have gone off to bed and forgot there was a light on. She smiled and went on waiting. For the second night in a row, she saw when she looked at the onyx, Roman-columned clock, she’d been up past midnight. She couldn’t have felt better, more young for her years, more wide awake. She tapped the bedspread with the paperback book, too excited and impatient for reading. “You see what it’s come to, Horace,” she said. She hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant, or even that she was speaking; it was merely a fragment of a daydream surfacing, diving again before she noticed.

  It came to her then that perhaps her brother had gone to sleep after all. He’d be sitting up waiting, that was how it was, trying to surprise her when she sneaked into the kitchen—trying to starve her to submission as did all those tyrants of old—and before he’d known it he’d nodded off. She could just walk right down and …

  That was it, yes, certainly: he was trying to lay an ambush. He’d done that with his poor son Richard, she remembered. Spied on the boy and jumped him when he was guilty. If he skimped on cow-feeding, as boys will do when it’s fifteen below out and Jack Armstrong is playing on the radio, one day suddenly there James L. Page would be, stepping out grimly from behind some beam, pointing like an Angel of Judgment at the job left half done. If Richard came home late after an evening with the Flynn girl and tried to sneak into his bedroom with his shoes off, there James L. Page would be, waiting like the sheriff. “Your watch workin, Richahd?”

  It was true of course that Richard had a tendency to sneak and play twice and was not always “forthright in his story-telling,” as Horace used to say, and true too that Ariah was far too soft on him, spoiled that child rotten, as a matter of fact; but after all, as Horace also said—Horace had been especially fond of Richard—no one was as forthright as James L. Page, “not even God,” as Horace put it, “or He’d never have given us the word in such a language as Hebrew.” Horace was furious whenever he heard of those ambushes her brother would lay for the boy, and though he knew well enough it was none of his business how James raised Richard, it was all poor Horace could do to keep from bringing it up, letting James know his mind.

  She stared at the open book in her hand as if reading it, but her eyes went through the print, still studying what James had done to Richard. She didn’t mean to say—she would be the last to say—that James was responsible for what that poor boy had done, how he’d gotten himself drunk and hanged himself. As well lay the blame on that silly, whimpery Ariah, meek as a fieldmouse all her life, and plain besides—all the Blackmers were plain, though hardly one in a century was ever simple as a nit, like Ariah. Not that Sally hadn’t been fond of her, and pleased that she could make James happy. She shook her head, remembering how proud—and openly skeptical—her parents had been the day James got engaged to a Blackmer. Her father had flatly refused to believe it. He’d said nothing, as usual, glancing at Uncle Ira, who also said nothing, as usual—two peas in a pod, her father and Uncle Ira, glint-eyed and bearded, still as a pair of Stoughton bottles when they weren’t out working—and then finally her father had said, as if someone had mentioned to him blizzards in July: “Don’t b’lieve it.” Her mother had said, puzzled, “How old is this Ariah?” When they’d told her which one of the Blackmers it was, she’d had nothing more to say. It was clear that she too would believe in the marriage when the rings passed. But the Blackmers had known a good thing when they saw it. With a girl as plain and simple-minded as Ariah, it was either a Page or some African, and after the engagement had gone on a while it was the Blackmers who’d bought them a house of their own, later Richard’s little house across the road and down the mountain a bit, the one James had drunkenly burned that night, God knew why, not even for insurance.

  Poor Richard! He could have been a glorious boy, if James had just let him be. Besides handsome, he’d been wonderfully quick, and charming—though never around James, which was a pity. James might have liked him better if he’d allowed himself to know him. Everyone liked Richard. Little Ginny had downright worshipped him, which was why she’d renamed her adopted boy Richard—much to Lewis’s disgust. On that matter, actually, Sally had to side with Lewis Hicks for once. It was a dreadful thing, changing a boy’s name from John to Richard when he was six years old. It was somehow unnatural, a kind of bad magic. All of them had thought so, in fact, except Virginia. There had been a great thundering row about it between Ginny and her father, or so she’d heard up at Arlington. The woman next door had heard the shouting. She knew no details, or at any rate, being a close-mouthed Vermonter, chose not to tell them. No wonder if James had been upset, of course. He’d never admit it this side of the grave, but everyone knew he’d detested that boy. Blamed him for his second son’s death among other things—it had been Richard left the ladder against the roof of the barn. (Richard blamed himself even more for it. Horace had once tried to talk to him about it, hoping to set him straight; but no chance, the chance of a hankie in a hurricane. Richard had treasured his guilt, as Horace told her. It was the one thing his fat
her had taught him and he’d got down pat.) But it was long before the death of little Ethan that the trouble had started. It was as if James had taken a dislike to the boy when he was still a little mite in his cradle. “Don’t be a cry-baby!” James was always saying.

  Absently, she smoothed the gritty pages of her book.

  They’d gone sleigh-riding once, she remembered, and it was cold. Richard was just seven; little Ginny wasn’t born yet, Ariah was pregnant with her—“Big as a bahn,” James Page said proudly. It must have been zero if not ten below, so biting cold that the snow squeaked when you walked on it. The horses were flying, the big sleigh rushing along the slant without a sound, and even snuggled up between Horace and herself, with the blanket up over his face, little Richard was freezing. She and Horace were freezing too, though they had too much sense to say so. Richard called out, “Mommy, I want to go home! I’m cold!” James turned just enough to call past his shoulder—he’d been a big man then, beefy, his face red and raw from the wind, but of course he didn’t mind it, not James—“Don’t be a cry-baby! Blow on your hands!”

  Meek little Ariah said, “I’m cold too, James. Let’s do start back.”

  “Hell,” he said, and reached over to slap her leg—he was always slapping her, mauling her, hugging her; no doubt she was better than you’d have thought up in bed—“don’t always stick up for him. When I was Richard’s age—”

  Sally had glanced over at Horace, whose face was pink and white, like a turnip, and whose glasses looked to be frozen to his skin. His scarf was wrapped around and around him, and his stocking cap was pulled down as far as it would go, but both the scarf and the hat were storebought, not terribly substantial—not at all like the bright red home-made things James wore—so no wonder if Horace had had enough of this January fun, though he was damned if he was saying so. He merely bit his lips together, staring hard at James’ head. He cried out, as if he meant it as a joke, “When I was Richard’s age I nearly died of pneumonia.”