October Light

by John Gardner

  “But consider further. There is hope among scientists at the present time that sickle-cell anemia may soon be overcome, just as we’ve found medical cures for other heritable diseases or shortcomings. Diabetics, that is to say, can now live a normal life with the help of insulin; nearsighted people can be helped by glasses; the deaf can use hearing aids. Natural selection, in other words, has been ‘switched off’ once again by our invention of tools. What is the moral to be drawn from this odd fact?” He stared straight at Lewis. It was almost as if he were pointing. “Let us make sure we understand this odd fact. With every tool we invent, from the wheel to Vitamin C extract, we avoid bodily evolution. The more perfect the Buckminster Fuller dome, the more securely antique its occupant.”

  Lewis picked at his moustache and looked guilty. At the opposite end of the hallway the bathroom door opened and the priest stuck his head out, seeing if the coast was clear. He stepped out, checked his fly, shot his cuffs, then stood waiting, smiling, palms together as if for prayer. No one even noticed.

  “The moral, brothers and sisters,” said the minister—he was now so involved in the thought he was shaping that he was unaware even that Estelle Parks was being helped up the stairs by Virginia Hicks and Dr. Phelps (“What’s this?” Estelle was saying, “we’ve been missing something! Why, he’s giving a sermon!,” and her eyes lit up)—“The moral is that that which was once advanced may prove primitive, and that which was once primitive may suddenly prove advanced, or in the words of that great religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Nature is never spent.’ We, the most primitive of apes, have proved conquerors of our specialized betters. With our wonderful way of evading the issue—our swollen brains and gift for using tools, and our anachronistic nastiness—we lock them up in zoos and put plates in their heads for our amusement and edification!—Never underestimate, by the way, the importance of nastiness to our progress so far. If intelligence and gentleness were the chief criteria, the planet would be ruled by whales!

  “‘But what,’ I hear you interject, ‘of the sexes?’—for cunning animal that you are, you remember the outline I gave you when I started.”

  “The sexes?” Estelle said, just starting into the bathroom. Virginia raised her finger to her lips, then waved Estelle on. Estelle went in and closed the bathroom door.

  “My friends,” the minister said, “in every species in which labor is divided as it was for centuries among creatures of our race—by which I mean the one, sole, indivisible human race—we discover a tendency for the female to become small and quick—quick of foot and quick-witted—and highly emotional, and for the male to become large and a trifle slow-witted (consider the gorilla, the orang-utang), for in farmwork and war, to say nothing of hunting, there are certain advantages to—if you will forgive me, gentlemen—stupidity. What male with any sense would be tricked by a small, coy creature’s wiles into carrying boulders for a wall to keep her children safe? What crafty Odysseus would stand like a tower against the Trojans, dull-wittedly defending his genetic heritage, as did that huge slow-witted ox Ajax?” A look of confusion came over his face—possibly mere theater. “But then, of course, Odysseus’ line also survived, and, unlike Ajax, Odysseus eventually, after a good deal of monkeying around, made it home to his wife. Hmmm.”

  He pursed his lips and pulled at his beard, and his great slanted eyebrows lowered. The congregation waited with keen interest. It might now quite legitimately be called a congregation. The hallway was so crowded he could no longer pace. There was DeWitt in the corner at the head of the stairs, Virginia and Dr. Phelps beside him, there were the two small boys on the stairway, holding their jack-o-lanterns, there were Lewis and the priest, Sally Abbott behind the door, and there was Estelle, just emerging from the bathroom, leaning on her canes.

  Now the minister raised one finger and smiled as if enlightened, making a show of having seen a new angle in the mystery of Ajax and Odysseus. “Let us try putting it another way,” he said. “Which is more primitive?—the broad range of tendencies in the X chromosome, or the broad range of tendencies in the Y? In the days when Neanderthals killed with clubs and our own progenitors used spears and darts, a skull of bone solid as a football helmet was an enormous advantage to the Neanderthal fighting a Neanderthal; and a light skull easily jerked from place to place, and easily expanded to make room for more brain, was of similar advantage to Homo sapiens when he had to dodge a brother’s spearcast. Times change, however, and ice makes men wander. With what sad surprise must the mightiest and bravest of all Neanderthals have faced his first feather-light, dancing Homo sapiens! ‘Oof!’ the great Ajax among men said mournfully, as the spear slipped lightly through his tank of a body, and with a last, apologetic wave to heaven, the grand beast sank clattering into darkness.

  “Times change, then; that is the lesson of our text, God’s first great book, as Aquinas called it, ‘The Book of Nature.’ The carrying of boulders can be done these days by a trim little creature with a gift for pushing buttons, and the creature with the quickest reactions will be queen of the piano, the typewriter, and the jumbo jet. ‘Ah ha!,’ you say, ‘I smell here a female-supremacist!’ But not so! As we saw in the case of the sickle cell, even when a thing seems no longer of use, Nature is careful of her old spare parts. We carry, at least in genetic potential, all we ever carried from the time we were Devonian fish. Every man is part female, every woman part male, every mixture of the gene-pool a mixture for the better. Survival in a constantly evolving universe makes no petty-minded distinctions between primitive and advanced. In a word—”

  The minister raised his right hand grandly, turning once again to Sally Abbott’s door. “In a word, Mrs. Abbott, Apes—or at least the more primitive apes—can and do make jack-o-lanterns!”

  So saying, he turned to his little congregation in the hallway and on the stairs, bowing and smiling gently, and said, “Amen.”

  “Amen, amen,” said the Mexican priest, and signed the air with a gesture more soft than any butterfly could have made, sitting in the sun, and, smiling and benevolent, fat as a Buddha and light as a balloon, “Ite, missa est,” he intoned, and then, in another voice, “Deo gratias!”

  “Bless you, Reverend,” Sally Abbott called from behind her door, and judging by her voice, she was deeply moved. “May all these terrible prejudices be driven from the earth!”

  “Then you’ll come out of your room?” Lane Walker said, delighted.

  “Heavens no!” she said. “Why should I?”

  Ed Thomas called up from the foot of the stairs, “Hi golly, so that’s where everybody’s gone to! Am I missing something?”

  9

  While his great-aunt Estelle was thinking of Notre Dame, Terence Parks stood in the old man’s sitting room-bedroom, turning the French horn around and around, emptying water from the tubing. He was as shy a boy as ever lived, as shy as the girl seated now on the sagging, old fashioned bed with her hands on the flute in her lap. She, Margie Phelps, gazed steadily at the floor, her silver-blonde hair falling straight past her shoulders, soft as flax. Her face was serious, though she was prepared to smile if he should wish her to. She wore a drab green dress that was long and (he could not know) expensive, striped kneesox, and fashionably clunky shoes. As for Terence, he had brown hair that curled below his ears, glasses without which he was utterly helpless, and a small chin. He had, at least in his own opinion, nothing to recommend him, not even a sense of humor. He therefore dressed, always, with the greatest care—dark blue shirts, never with a shirttail hanging out, black trousers, black shoes and belt. He fitted the mouthpiece back into the horn and glanced at Margie. He had had for some time a great, heart-slaughtering crush on her, though he hadn’t told her that, or anyone else. In his secret distress, he was like the only Martian in the world. As if she’d known he would do it, Margie looked up for an instant at exactly the moment he glanced at her, and immediately—blushing—both of them looked down.

  He set his horn down carefully on the chair and
went over to the window at the foot of the bed to look out. A noisy, blustering wind had come up, pushing large clouds across the sky, a silver-toothed wolf pack moving against the moon, quickly consuming it, throwing the hickory tree, the barn and barnyard into darkness. He could hear what sounded like a gate creaking, metal against metal.

  “Is it raining yet?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible.

  As she came up timidly behind him, Terence moved over a little to give her room at the window.

  Her hand on the windowsill was white, almost blue. He could easily reach over and touch it. In the living room behind them—the door was part way open—the grown-ups were laughing and talking, DeWitt Thomas still picking his guitar and singing. You couldn’t hear the words. He looked again at her hand, then at the side of her face, then quickly back out at the night.

  “Rain scares me,” she said. Though her face turned only a little, he could feel her watching him.

  The moon reappeared, the black clouds sweeping along like objects in a flood. Terence put his hand on the windowsill near hers, as if accidentally. He listened for the sound of someone coming into the room and realized only now that the door to his left went to the back entryway and, beyond that, the kitchen. He felt panic, thinking they might go out that door unmissed. Something white blew across the yard, moving slowly, like a form in a dream.

  “What’s that?” she asked, startled, and put her hand on his. Her head came slightly closer and, despite the violence of the storm in his chest, he smelled her hair.

  “Fertilizer bag, I think,” he said.

  “What?” she said.

  He said it again, this time loud enough to hear. She did not draw her hand away, though the touch was light, as if at the slightest sign she would quickly remove it. His mind raced almost as fast as his heart, and he pressed closer to the window, pretending to follow the white thing’s ghostly flight. Again he smelled her hair, and now her breath—a warm scent of apple.

  As for Dr. Phelps’ granddaughter Margie, her heart thudded and her brain tingled; she half believed she might faint. Her friend Jennifer at school had told her weeks ago that Terry Parks had a crush on her, and she hadn’t doubted it, though it seemed to her a miracle. When he played his French horn in the school orchestra or at the Sage City Symphony, his playing gave her goosebumps, and when they had answering parts in the woodwind quintet, she blushed. Finding him here at the Pages tonight had been a kind of confirmation of the miracle, and when the grown-ups had suggested that the two of them might play duets together, and had sent them here, so that the adults could talk …

  Now another cloud, larger than those before it, was swallowing the moon. The noise of the wind half frightened, half thrilled her. The barn stood out stark, sharply outlined. The white thing—fertilizer bag, that was right—was snagged in a fence, gray as bone, suddenly inert.

  He moved his hand a little, closing it on hers. She drew her breath in sharply. Was someone coming?

  “You kids want baked apples?” Virginia Hicks called from the doorway behind them.

  They parted hands quickly and whirled around, frightened and confused.

  “I’ll leave them here on the bedside table,” Virginia said, smiling. She seemed to have seen nothing. “You two make beautiful music together,” she said, and smiled again, with a wave of her cigarette.

  Neither of them spoke, heads spinning, smiling at the floor. Virginia left them.

  Something thudded hard against the house, a small limb, perhaps, but no window broke, the walls did not sway, and so they laughed, embarrassed by their momentary fear. As they laughed they walked toward the bedside table where the baked apples stood oozing juice.

  “Mmm, baked apples,” Margie said softly. She picked up her plate and seated herself primly on the bedside, eyes cast down. Terence came and sat beside her.

  “Listen to that wind,” he said. The night howled and thudded like an orchestra gone wrong, dissonant and senseless, dangerous, but Margie was happy, for once in her life utterly without fear, except of him. She laid her hand casually on the cover beside her, conscious of the laughter and talk in the next room and also now a sound like arguing, coming from upstairs. She glanced at Terence and smiled. Smiling back, secretive and careful, he put his hand over hers.

  10

  Virginia stood smoking a cigarette, filling the sink to wash dishes. People were gathering their coats in the living room, and the thought of their leaving—her father not yet home—filled her with such anxiety she could hardly catch her breath. Perhaps it was the anxiety that made her think of Richard. She thought of him often, though he’d been dead fifteen years. All grief, all trouble, all worry made her think of him, which was strange in a way; he hadn’t been all that unhappy, really, or if he had—his suicide made her wonder—she hadn’t known it. He’d been a living saint, just like Lewis. She smiled, slightly blushing, remembering the time he’d walked in on them. They’d gone to his house and found the door open, Richard away somewhere—she’d been something like eighteen—and they’d decided to sit on the couch and wait for him. One thing had led to another as it always did with them then, and when her brother walked in—they hadn’t heard him drive up—there they were on the couch, she with her legs spread wide and Lewis with his pants half off, down around his knees, and Richard had stepped into the dimly lit room, not seeing them at first, and then had seen them and blushed scarlet, as if he were the guilty one. “Hi!” he’d said quickly, and hurried through the room to the kitchen. They’d lain there giggling, hardly able to think what to do, and had been tempted to sneak out the door without a word. But it wasn’t as if he would yell at them; Richard had never yelled at anyone in his life—except once Aunt Sally when she said a little something about their mother. So they’d gotten themselves arranged—she must have been eighteen, because Richard was twenty-five, it was the last year he lived—and they’d gone in where he was sitting in the kitchen, drinking whiskey and reading the Banner. He’d looked up at them and grinned. “I didn’t even know you were engaged,” he’d said. “Fix you a snort?”

  “Mommy, can I have a drink?” Dickey said beside her. Without even rising from her reverie, she took one of the newly washed cups from the drainer, filled it with cold water, and gave it to him.

  “What do you say?” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said and drank. After one swallow he poured out the rest, into her dishwater. She sighed.

  She remembered how once when she was four or five Richard had frightened her with a bee. He’d known it was a drone and wouldn’t sting—smaller, darker than the rest of the bees; their father had often let Richard play with them—but she hadn’t known it couldn’t sting and of course had been terrified. She’d screamed, and with a look of alarm he’d grabbed her hand. “It won’t sting you, Ginny! Look, it’s just a drone!” he’d yelled, trying to make her stop before their father heard. He’d put the bee on her arm, yelling “See? See?” And then, coming around the corner of the barn, barrel-chested and terrible, carrying a milk-hose, was their dad.

  “Oh God,” Richard had said, letting go of her, starting to cry already; and she’d understood she’d gotten him in trouble again. He was always in trouble, though he never did a thing; their father just somehow had it in for him.

  “All right,” their father said.

  “It was just a little drone,” he said, and then said no more—in her mind she could see him just as clear as day, a big gawky boy of eleven or twelve, golden-haired in the sunlight, face bright red with shame and anger, crying before he was even hit. All through her childhood, it seemed to her, her father had been beating him for one thing or another. “A lad born for hanging,” her father had called him, and again and again laid his belt to him, or a milk-hose, or a stick. She knew pretty well what it was in him that made their father furious. He was timid—exactly as their father had been, Aunt Sally said—afraid of the cows, the horses, even of the chickens; afraid of strangers; afraid of cold and of thunder; afraid of
ghosts and nightmares; afraid, more than anything else, that one of them might die, or that his father might go crazy, as a man had done once down the road, and might shoot them with his gun. Perhaps if her father had been able to see …

  Her brother had a wonderful sense of humor, though, even about himself. He knew he was a coward, and made a joke of it. If something made him jump, he’d exaggerate the jump and put mock terror on his face, so you couldn’t be sure if he’d really been startled or was just playing; and when he asked their mother for the keys to the car—their gentle, good mother of whom not even mice could conceivably be frightened—he would duck and cringe as if scared she meant to hit him, and she would laugh and catch hold of his hand. He’d once dressed up for a costume party in a horrible outfit—he had a beard and long hair made of white horse’s tail, and had a long black coat that had belonged to their father’s crazy uncle Ira, and he was carrying an axe with red paint splashed over it. When he came before the party to spring it on their mother, he’d seen himself in the mirror and actually jumped. Even their father had smiled, for once, but all he’d said was, “Don’t fahget to clean off that axe when you’re through with it.” He was something, her father. He was beyond belief! Yet he’d meant no harm. Whatever Uncle Horace and Aunt Sally might think, her mother saw the truth: “He loves that boy more than his own life. That’s why he frets so.”

  Ginny looked at her watch. Where was he so long?

  “Well, Ginny,” Dr. Phelps said behind her, “I guess we better be moseyin on.”

  “Oh!” Ginny said, and snatched up a towel to dry her hands.

  11

  When Ed Thomas got to go up to the bathroom—he had to step back for the descending crowd—he found Lewis Hicks standing at Sally’s door scraping off the paint. “Hi gol, Lewis,” he said, “you ain’t goin down with the others?” He pointed past his shoulder with his partly cut off thumb. “Ye’ll be missin the party, boy! Won’t last much longer, I can tell ye that fer certain. Ye better get in on it!”