October Light

by John Gardner

  All at once she was startled by a memory more harsh. Ferris had thrown a cigarette in the river, and she’d been furious. Was that all? Had there been something more than that? She’d been so angry she couldn’t speak. Had he said something, perhaps? Insulted her, made her jealous? As for Ferris, his face had gone white as ivory—he was always rather pale—and his lip had curled up uncontrollably, almost in a sneer. They’d walked like two deadly enemies, in silence, or in silence except for the click of their footsteps, as in a tomb. Such fools they’d been! Such children! The night had been enormous above Notre Dame, as menacing and empty as a gargoyle’s eyes—the mad, staring gargoyle that eats a small animal eating its arm. The noise and lights of the cathedral garden, where hucksters sold trinkets, live birds, fruit, relics, had seemed sullen and far away, a shoddy vision of hell. She remembered the lighted cathedral spires against the pitch-black night and imagined herself on the walled sidewalk along the Seine, absolutely alone.

  When she stirred from her reverie, she was surprised to hear Ruth reciting, dead serious, as if a party to her thought:

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Yes, she said inwardly. She had believed, like old King What’s-his-name, that nothing could go wrong. She’d been happy before, or so she’d imagined, but then there was Ferris, beautiful and successful, and traveling with him to France and Germany, Mexico and Japan, she’d discovered that the world was radiant and holy and above all—if they could be true to one another—safe. She remembered walking through a huge Shinto temple in Kyoto. There was almost no one there. Their Japanese friend, Professor Kayoko Kodama, a scholar whom Richard had known at Yale, had told them in his shy, gentle voice about Shinto, how it had legends but no theology—it was the favorite religion of the young, these days—how one clapped in prayer to get the god’s attention, though perhaps, he thought, the idea was much older, much deeper than that, had to do with electro-magnetic forces, ancient theories of the body that come down to us, for instance, in acupuncture. Tears came to Professor Kodama’s eyes when he spoke of the generosity of the American people to the defeated Japanese. He could not know then (Estelle was thinking of Sally Abbott’s indignation), he could not know then what loveless welcome Americans had in store for their allies in Viet Nam. “Very fragile, this world,” Professor Kodama had said, “the tiniest rent in the veil, as we say—the tiniest disturbance of the god’s sleep …” He’d removed his glasses, smiled shyly, brushing tears from his eyes again. Only this instant did it dawn on her that he must have been speaking of some personal grief. Professor Kodama!, she thought, partly in sympathy, partly as a cry for help, as to a spirit-guide. The music of the horn and flute had ended, she realized—perhaps had ended some minutes ago. Virginia was coming through the kitchen door, carrying baked apples.

  “Look here!” Dr. Phelps cried. “To the blessed Virgin-ia!” He held up his cup, splashing cocoa. They all laughed and lifted their cups and hoorayed, Estelle among them, though her mind was far away. She registered that the boys were gone from the doorway, registered that their voices came now from the kitchen, squealing something, and she heard DeWitt answer—registered that the dog was moving toward Virginia with an obsequious look, begging for whatever it was she carried on the yellow plastic tray—but she was remembering images from a movie she’d seen with Ferris in Japan, a film about Kamikaze pilots, mere boys, devout Buddhists. She remembered how beautifully they smiled, how they waved with gloved hands, taking off at dawn to die for the Emperor and all they loved in this tragic, fragile world. They wore trailing white silk scarves. The tiniest disturbance of the god’s sleep … Sally and Horace Abbott had saved her life, when Ferris died. If one said it aloud it would sound foolish, but it was true. It would be good to speak, now that she was wiser, with young Professor Kodama.

  She accepted the white, cracked china plate offered her and for an instant met Virginia’s eyes. She looked down at once at the brown, hot apple with marshmallow on the top and, beside it, a glittering silver spoon. “Oh, Virginia!” she said, and drew the plate closer, to breathe in the smell. For a moment the baked apple, and Virginia’s nicotine-stained hand, still steadying the plate, filled all her vision, all her senses, became the whole world.

  8

  (The Sermon Upstairs)

  Lane Walker said, up by the old woman’s door, “Mrs. Abbott, come help us carve jack-o-lanterns.”

  “Reverend Walker,” she asked almost timidly, “do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Well, sort of,” he said. “I believe in the Holy Ghost, certainly.” Smiling, not in mockery but in enjoyment of the game, he threw his hand down like a bridge-player playing a card, index finger extended, counting off the Holy Ghost as one.

  From behind the locked door the old woman said—she seemed closer now—“I think I may have seen a ghost.”

  “Well, it’s the season for it,” he said, hand lifted again, trying to think of another ghost he could believe in and count off as two. “Thing for us to do,” he said, “is get out those jack-o-lanterns. Scares the ghosts away.” He threw a wink at Lewis Hicks, who stood scraping paint from the closet door beyond the door to Sally Abbott’s bedroom. Lewis slightly grinned and ran his tongue around his teeth, not comfortable with ministers, especially this one, who, so far as he could tell, was crazy.

  “You think I’m joking, but I’m serious, Reverend,” Sally Abbott said.

  He could tell well enough by her voice that she was serious, but with the storm outside huffing and puffing like a dragon, window-screens singing, stray objects thumping now and then against the house, it was hard for him to take her as seriously as she might like. “All the more reason to start cutting eyes and mouths in those pumpkins,” he said. That, he realized at once, was not as kind as it might have been, and he hurried to make amends. “Tell you what. Unlock the door, and I’ll come in and we’ll talk about it.”

  There was a moment’s silence. At length she said, “No, that wouldn’t be right. I know it seems like nothing to you people—”

  “Not at all,” he said. “It seems to us like a serious problem. That’s why we’re here.” Then once again he spoke too quickly, as he realized as soon as the words were out: “We should try to deal with it like people instead of crazy apes.”

  There was another brief silence. “I don’t think of myself,” Sally Abbott said at last, her voice remote, “as a crazy ape.”

  Lewis was looking at him as if he too, as a relative, was insulted.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Lane Walker said quickly, shrugging and grinning. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything like that.” He threw a helpless smile at Lewis. Lewis shrugged one shoulder, polite but not assuaged, and turned back to his scraping.

  “Oh, don’t apologize,” Sally said distantly, grandly. “My brother James feels exactly the same. Women aren’t human, they’re only half evolved.”

  “Mrs. Abbott,” he pleaded, and stretched his hands toward the door, “surely you don’t think—” His natural cheerfulness was sinking fast; he made a point now of not looking at Lewis Hicks. One enemy at a time.

  “You believe what you believe,” Sally Abbott said with cool charity. “It’s only right that you should stick by it.”

  Though Lane Walker was a small man and congenitally good-natured, one of the elect, John Calvin would have thought—every morning when he woke up, startled back to life by the first small disturbance (the birds, his three noisy children, his wife up already giving riding lessons), he was out of bed at once, with a hundred things he was eager to get busy at, books he had to read, letters he had to write, parishioners to visit, sermons to compose (he loved composing sermons more than anything else and was a master at it)—he knew when he was beaten.

  “Mrs. Abbott,” he said, “let’s start over.” He said pleasantly: “The boys and I are making jack-o-lanterns, Mrs. Abbott. W
ould you care to help?”

  “Apes can’t make jack-o-lanterns,” the old woman said.

  He stared at the door, his left hand extended toward it in a gesture of goodwill, then turned his round, elvish head to stare at the back of Lewis Hicks, who, for all the cheer of the party downstairs, for all the wailing and buffeting of the windy night outside, stood mechanically scraping off old paint—gritch, gritch. The little minister’s naturally wide blue eyes widened more, as if he’d suddenly remembered something, his nature, perhaps, and slowly, thoughtfully, he raised a finger and thumb to his leprechaun beard. He turned back to the door, tilted his head back, cast one long foot forward in a jaunty, somewhat theatrical stance, as if mentally detaching himself from the concerns of mortals but willing, like a bent but unbroken Puck, to leave, if humanity would have it, one last helpful bit of instruction and good advice. “Mrs. Abbott,” he said, “you’re terribly hard on the apes.”

  “Hmpf!” she said. As a matter of fact, his remark surprised her and she could think of nothing else to come back with.

  “You seem to think, like many people, that human beings descended from the apes and show, in some degree, the traces. That’s not true, in fact. Apes descended from human beings.”

  Lewis Hicks’ scraper stopped moving for a moment, then began moving again, as mechanical as before. One could tell by the way his head sat, he was listening with both ears.

  “It’s true of course,” Lane Walker continued loftily, his voice taking on more and more the character of a preacher’s, though it still seemed at this point mere spritely mimicry, not the real, dead-serious thing. “It’s true of course that the ancestry of man, on one hand, and the apes and monkeys, on the other, has been separate for more than thirty-five million years. Nevertheless, it can easily be demonstrated that man did not descend from the apes. It’s more correct to say that the apes and monkeys descended from early ancestors of man. The distinction is a real one, and of the greatest moral significance. Man is primitive, apes and monkeys are specialized. We have the most primitive teeth, for example, to be found in the mouth of any featherless biped, discounting ‘Platonic man,’ as Diogenes put it, that is, plucked birds. We never developed the wonderful, frightening canines of the chimpanzee or gorilla, or their large, knife-sharp incisors. We didn’t need them, it seems. We’d probably learned already to cut things with stones, and to frighten off our enemies with spears.”

  He tipped forward toward the door, clasped his hands behind his back, raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice as if offering the door a tip. “Or take arms and legs. A few million years ago, gibbons had arms and legs of about equal length, just as we do today. But the apes and monkeys—especially the gibbons—developed long arms and short legs specialized for swinging through trees. We, it seems, never needed to. We’d long since ventured out of range of our trees, maybe ten million years ago, boldly invading new territory with our clubs and stones and crafty little heads. Don’t think I’ve made all this up, Mrs. Abbott. It’s perfectly standard paleontology—read for example Bjorn Kurtén. If people are going to go around discovering morals in science, they should try to get their science correct.”

  Again Lewis’s scraper paused, and this time his head turned slightly for a glance at the minister. If he was expecting a sternness of expression to match the sternness of Lane Walker’s words, he was sadly disappointed. The little man was grinning from ear to ear.

  Sally Abbott started to say something—something about ghosts—then thought better of it.

  The minister turned from the door, hands still clasped behind him, and set off in the direction of the head of the stairs, then abruptly spun around and came marching back—Lewis Hicks seemed startled—strode past Sally Abbott’s door, then spun around again, heading back toward the stairtop, pacing like a tiger. “What,” he asked rhetorically, and dramatically raised his right hand, wagging his fingers, “—What are the real morals to be drawn from the study of evolution? What does it teach us, that is to say, with regard to social oppression and, in particular, the role of women?”

  At this, Lewis Hicks let the hand that held the scraper drop to his side, turned halfway around, and merely stared.

  The minister, ignoring him, nodded thoughtfully, as if someone else had asked the question. “Good question,” he said, and continued to pace. “First off,” he said, “let it be understood that natural selection is still a vital force in human evolution. Natural selection by differential mortality is as important as ever, perhaps more important than it ever was before. Let us consider the dramatic recent history of the red man, the white man, and the black.”

  While the minister was speaking, warming to his subject more and more, DeWitt Thomas came up the stairs, heading for the bathroom. The minister paid no attention to him, busily pacing and lecturing to the door. DeWitt grinned, nodded in Lewis Hicks’ direction, rubbed the side of his nose—a habitual gesture—and went in and closed the bathroom door behind him.

  “When the white man came to America,” Lane Walker said, “natural selection very nearly wiped out the Indian. No North American Indian liver had ever had to deal with alcohol. Wine, beer, cider, mead, pulque, sake, whiskey—they’d been known for hundreds and hundreds of years over most of this planet, and though they’re deadly poisons, a panchromatic race of men- had evolved that could take in the pleasures of alcohol and survive. Not so the Indian! His liver and brain went into lunes and shudders, and if he was lucky enough to handle the thing physiologically, he didn’t know what to do with it behaviorally. The Vanishing American vanished with his whiskey in one hand and his rifle in the other, and because of the whiskey, neither hand knew what the other was doing—to paraphrase Scripture—and so down he went tail over tincup! Check your history books. It wasn’t the United States Cavalry that beat the almighty Apache, it was the supply wagon! Firewater!

  “God moves, however, in strange ways. The dying red man got his revenge: with one of the hands that didn’t know what it was doing, he gave the white man tobacco!” The bathroom door opened just as the minister was reaching it in his pacing, and Lane Walker jumped back, bowed absentmindedly in DeWitt’s direction, pivoted, and paced back toward Lewis Hicks. DeWitt—tall, stoop-shouldered—moved to the head of the stairs but then, instead of going down, stood with his hand on the newel post, a wide, shy grin on his red-headed, freckled face, and listened.

  “American Indians”—the minister shook his finger—“had been smoking tobacco for hundreds of years. They’d developed the lungs, the body chemistry, and the social institutions to handle it. The white man, on the other hand—also the black and the Asiatic—having no such defenses, was to find (as he still finds) his race decimated by lung cancer, heart disease, and heaven knows what. One might compare, though I will not, what happens when the opiates, hash, etcetera,—relatively harmless in the Orient—begin to be popular with young Americans. Those who have the security, wisdom, and strength to resist these poisons against which their bodies are defenseless—whether by rejecting the various drugs completely or by using them only sparingly—those are the people who will change the world in the most direct way possible: they will control one whole current in the gene pool.”

  He paused, both in his speech and in his pacing, and drew himself up. “Now take the most interesting genetic case of all, the black!”

  “More interesting than the Chicano?” Rafe Hernandez cried in mock horror, coming up the stairs.

  “You are late,” Lane Walker said, raising his hand like a traffic policeman, “and like all late-comers you have no rights, so I bid you peace.”

  The priest touched his chest with his fingertips in protest and made his eyes large. “I was here before Columbus!”

  “In that case you are allowed one right,” Lane Walker said, bowing. “You may go piss.”

  The priest smiled happily, bowed from the waist and went, in comic haste, into the bathroom.

  “Why Reverend!” Sally Abbott said, more surprised, from the sou
nd of it, than offended.

  “We were speaking,” he pressed on, blushing, “of the black.” He broke in on himself, leaning toward the door: “These are serious matters, you understand. This is no trifling circus entertainment I make you privy to. We were speaking of the morals to be drawn from science, one of the most serious of human investigations, second only, I might say, to Queen Theology. I must ask you to please pay attention.” Without turning, he pointed at the bathroom door behind which Father Hernandez was emptying his stream into the toilet. “Sh!” Lane Walker commanded sternly, but the noise went on.

  “The black,” he began, then paused, looking up at the ceiling, hunting for his place. Lewis Hicks looked up too, then down again.

  Then, remembering, the minister continued, “One of the most striking things about the blacks, genetically, is the sickle cell. In times past, as you know, one-quarter of the whole black race died of sickle-cell anemia, one-quarter possessed no sickle cells and, in central Africa, died of malaria, and one-half were perfectly healthy and carried on the breed. Expensive, in terms of human lives; but it worked. But what happens, we may ask, when the threat of malaria is ended—as in fact it has, since doctors can now treat it?” He paused, leaning toward the door as if for an answer. “Exactly!” he cried, pretending to have gotten one, and again began pacing. “The so-called ‘bad gene’ begins to vanish. In a few short generations—think of it—the black race has begun to lose its odd, no longer useful but still-sometimes-deadly gene. Useless adaptations, in short, tend to die, though they never disappear completely—an important point, and one we will return to.