October Light

by John Gardner

  “Well,” Lewis said, pausing a moment to reflect on the matter, “I got to get this paintin done, and pahty or no pahty, I hate to drive all this way and just leave it set.”

  “That’s the spirit, boy,” Ed Thomas said, and laughed. “Say, what was all that goin on up here?” He pointed past his shoulder again toward where the crowd had gone.

  “Talk about apes and women,” Lewis said.

  “Jokes, ye mean?” Ed asked, squinting, mouth slightly open.

  Lewis went on with his scraping. “Not really,” he said.

  Ed Thomas lowered his head and chuckled. “Apes and women,” he said. “Hi golly.” He went to the bathroom, and while he was using the toilet, his chest going empty and ringing as if with panic as he urinated, the pain coming out for a look like a woodchuck in February, he got to thinking. When he’d zipped himself up and washed his hands and face and looked himself over in the oval mirror—half the buttons were missing from his washed-out workshirt, missing from the middle toward both ends, as usual, popped by the vast generosity of his belly, but never mine, he was a handsome old dog, as his wife Ruth told him (hair white as sugar, cheeks and nose pink)—he stepped out into the hallway and said, “Doggone it, Lewis, you’re a dahn good workman!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Thomas,” Lewis said. “I always do the best I can.”

  “That’s the truth. I’ve noticed it. By golly but it’s hahd to find a worker these days!”

  Lewis nodded and held out the scraper to pick away a few bits of grit. “Yes it is,” he said. “It makes you wonder, the way things’re goin. People don’t seem to have much pride ennamore.”

  “No pride at all. It’s a cryin shame.” The Welshman tipped his head, holding up his stomach with his interlaced fingers, and asked pointedly: “That your work, that wall at Peg Ellis’s place in Old Bennington, there by the church?”

  “Done that this summer, that’s right,” Lewis said. He added, apologetic, “Hadda use a book. Don’t get much oppahtunity to lay stone walls.”

  Ed Thomas shook his head in admiration. He began to move cautiously, like a fisherman with a bite. He leaned on the banister and looked approvingly at the newly scraped bathroom door. There was not a gouge, and not a scrap of paint left. It was a job on which some men would have taken days, yet Ed knew it had taken Lewis Hicks no such span; he’d seen how Lewis swept that scraper down Sally Abbott’s door. “I imagine you get plenty to keep you busy, a man like you.”

  Lewis nodded again, but said, “Never make me a tycoon, I guess.” He continued to stand dandling the scraper, awkward. He’d never been a man to lounge around, and that was especially true when things had him nervous. His father-in-law had been gone a good long time. It was now, by Lewis’s pocketwatch, eleven twenty-five. The people downstairs were making noises about leaving. As they’d gone down after the minister’s talk, they’d most of them bade Lewis goodnight.

  Ed Thomas pointed at Lewis’s chest. He looked him straight in the blue eye, then shifted to the brown one. “Let me ask you somethin straight out, Lewis. How’d you like to come work for me?”

  “For you, Mr. Thomas?” He smiled, uneasy, and ran the index finger of his left hand down the side of Aunt Sally’s door. He’d have to persuade her to open the thing or he’d never be able to finish, he thought. He looked at the fingertip, dusty as if with sawdust from a coping saw, and casually, as if speaking to his finger, he said, “No sir, I don’t b’lieve I could.”

  Ed Thomas stood with his mouth open. Not from surprise, necessarily. He usually stood with his mouth open. “Why not?” he said.

  “Wal, I got a lot of things lined up,” Lewis said. “Can’t really affoahd to let my customahs slide.” He took another swipe at the door with the scraper. He’d made his point as plain as he cared to. Ed Thomas was famous for being slow to pay. If possible he’d get out of it altogether. That was all right, maybe. Farming wasn’t easy for anyone these days. But Lewis would prefer to keep out of it. He listened to the voices coming up from the kitchen. They were definitely moving toward the door, he thought. Ed Thomas would do him a kindness if he’d do that too. He took another swipe at the paint. The scraper snagged; old nail-head. Lewis got out his jackknife.

  But Ed stood firm, leaning on the banister, pursing his lips, breathing shallowly and frowning. He said suddenly, “I don’t mean just handyman jobs, Lewis. I want you to be my Number One.” He reached into his shirt pocket, got out a cigar, and began peeling off the cellophane. Then, some trouble occurring to him, he changed his mind and left the wrapper on.

  “I can’t deny that’s a good offer,” Lewis said, “but I’m no dairyman. I grew up in town.” He smiled again.

  “Hell, I’d tell you what to do, Lewis. You’re young yet. You got brains. You’ll learn the whole business in no time. And I’ll tell you what else: If there’s one thing a dairyman needs more’n anything else it’s an ability to handle any kind of trade—electrician, carpenter, mason, plumber, veterinarian, accountant—”

  He shook his head. “Cows bite me, Mr. Thomas. They always have.”

  “Pshaw,” Ed Thomas scoffed. “Cows don’t bite. They might bunt, they might kick, but in all my years I never seen a cow bite.”

  “I been bit, though. And by cows. I never been near a cow that he didn’t bite me.”

  “Then I’ll teach ye how to deal with it. You just hit ’em in the nose.”

  Lewis shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but no thanks, sir. What about your son?”

  “Never do it,” Ed said matter-of-factly. “Cholly hates fahmin. So do his boys, though I get a bit of help from ’em when they visit—especially DeWitt. But my boy Cholly, he won’t even help when he comes visitin, that’s the truth. It’s understandable, of course. Cholly’s got a good job in Boston, ye know. No reason to get his good shoes dirty.” He smiled. “Cholly likes that kind of thing—mowin the lawn, cookin itty-bitty chickens on the backyard bobbycue. But you now, Lewis, you’re a Vahmonter. You don’t need that sort of a life. I b’lieve it’d kill ya.”

  “That may be so,” Lewis said. “All the same, I’m like Cholly. I ain’t no fahmer.”

  “You ain’t tried it, though.”

  All at once Lewis grinned like one of those jack-o-lanterns the boys had carved, for just that instant Ed Thomas looked exactly like the man that had sold him that Chevy. “I ain’t tried cyanide either, yet,” he said.

  The Welshman laughed. He seemed persuaded at last that Lewis meant it. He turned away in the direction of the stairs. “Well, think about it though. You could just about name your terms, I can tell you.” He took two steps down, his left hand spread over the top of the newel post. The bedroom and bathroom doors rumbled, catching a sudden draft—the storm outside was getting fiercer by the minute—and abruptly, as if the rumble of the doors had told him something, Ed Thomas stopped and looked up and said, “Truth of the matter is, I could use you, Lewis. I got to get off that fahm or I’m a dead man.” His face was serious, redder than usual. He pointed at his chest with the cellophane-wrapped cigar. “It’s my ticker,” he said. “Doc Phelps’ll tell ye.” He smiled as if absentmindedly and shook his head. “I work half an hour and by tunkit I got to go in and lie down again. Chores every mornin and night—wrastlin bales, cleanin out gutters—I can’t do it anymore, that’s the long and the short of it. Doctor asked me, ‘You feel pain in your chest, Ed?’ ‘No sir,’ I says, ‘just a little discomfit.’ ‘Well now,’ he says ‘how much discomfit?’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t call it pain,’ I says. Well, Doc Phelps looks at me and says, ‘People have different ideas about what’s pain, Ed.’ I says to him, ‘What I call pain is when you jump right out of your chair.’ ‘I’d call what you’ve got pain, then,’ says he. ‘But I’ll tell you this,’ he says, ‘once winter comes, you might’s well just throw that chair away.’ By golly it was the truth, too. Here it’s only October and the damn thing won’t let me sit down. If I work that dairy I’m a dead man sure as I’m standin here.” He grinned as
if, more than anything else, it was an embarrassment.

  Lewis bit his lips together, his cheeks and eyelids tense. “What about your hired men, Ed?”

  He shook his head. “Worthless. You know the kind of help a man gets.”

  Neither of them was looking at the other now. “Maybe you could sell it,” Lewis said.

  The old man looked down the stairwell. “Ay-uh, I could do that.” He began to nod his head slowly, and Lewis sucked in his upper lip and hurriedly looked away. After a moment he touched the old man’s forearm. “Ed, we’ll talk about it,” he said.

  Ed Thomas flicked his eyes up, met those strange blue and brown eyes, looked down again, and nodded. He waved the cigar, then grinned mechanically, leaning on the railing, and started down the stairs.

  12

  “Nothing’s perfect,” Ruth Thomas was declaiming in the kitchen. On the kitchen table there were two big, saw-toothed jack-o-lanterns, slanted eyes grotesquely staring, black inside. She pointed a long finger ferociously at Dickey, who grinned and shrank back toward his friend Roger and giggled. “You ever hear the poem about the ’possom?” she demanded. Her face was merry, the eye-bags dark. Both boys shook their heads, though Roger, her grandson, had heard it a thousand times.

  “Oh yes, Ruth,” Estelle cried, eyes twinkling, “do that one!” Ruth drew herself up to her full height, DeWitt grinning with embarrassment behind her, and in something faintly suggestive of the style of a nineteenth-century orator, she recited for the assembled company—

  The Opossum

  One day, having nothing much to do, God

  Created the Opossum. It was a kind of experiment:

  How stupid, ugly, and downright odd

  A creature (he wondered) could he possibly invent?

  When the ’Possum was created, God shook his head

  And grinned. “That’s not very good,” he said.

  But for no real reason he loved the fool thing

  And kept the thing functioning age after age.

  The dinosaurs died out, or began to sing,

  Transformed into birds; apes became the rage;

  But the ’Possum trudged on—with some other antiques:

  Spiders, sand-crabs, various old freaks.

  “Father,” said the Son, “that Opossum’s a killer—

  Murders baby chicks for no reason. He’s got to go!

  Times have changed, and changed for the better.

  He’s an anachronism, if I may say so.”

  God sighed. “Peace and Justice are right,” he said,

  And whispered to the ’Possum, “Lie down. Play dead.”

  The company all laughed, as they always did when Ruth Thomas recited poetry. And as always, they wouldn’t let her off with just one. She was an artist of a sort almost vanished from the earth—the “country reciter,” as William Lyon Phelps, Estelle Parks’ teacher, had called it in his book. “The verse equivalent of the folk-singer.” They got their poems from everywhere, these country reciters—from calendars, feed-store account books and almanacs, small-town newspapers, verse-writing aunts, occasionally old school-books or the Saturday Evening Post. No doubt now and then a reciter wrote some of his verses himself, but there was, in the heyday of the country reciter, no great honor in that, and he tended to make not too much of it. Certain poems were, for all reciters, classic, of course, written by known poets like Eugene Field and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, names “now universally scorned by the literate,” as Professor Phelps said, “though one might hesitate to scorn them after hearing them presented by a reciter.”

  Ruth Thomas, at least in Estelle’s opinion, was as good a reciter as any to be found in these degenerate days, though not pure in technique. The faces she made—bugged eyes, pursed lips—and her tendency to insist on the different voices when a poem used dialogue—all these showed she’d been just a touch corrupted by dramatic monologue and the Broadway stage. Be that as it may, she was the best you could hope for, and the effect on the company was not much worse than in former times, “the true and proper effect of all art,” Professor Phelps had written, “when it is taken for granted, when no fine distinctions between bad and good are thought necessary, so that the more-or-less good has a way of prevailing, unthreatened by the overreaching snatch at ‘the Great’ which creates failed masterworks and devalues the merely excellent, leaving all the world rubble and a babble of mixed-up languages.” It was a passage Estelle had often quoted to students and had even used once at a School Board meeting, in defense of she forgot just what. Even now, after all these years, it was impossible for Estelle to hear Ruth recite without thinking of William Lyon Phelps. She was glad of that, perhaps even forced the recollection a little. It heightened her pleasure in listening.

  “Say another one,” Virginia said. “Say the one about the cat and dog.”

  “That’s a good one,” Ruth’s grandson DeWitt said, then blushed.

  “The Cat and the Dog,” Ruth Thomas began.

  Lane Walker poked his Mexican friend in the arm. “Listen to this,” he said.

  “Listen closely to this one,” Dr. Phelps broke in, the same moment, “this is a toughie!”

  She drew herself up, then broke character to say: “I recited this once at the McCullough Mansion. John McCullough had heard me reciting somewhere—I forget where it was—and invited me to do a kind of poetry concert.” She smiled, devilish. “He told me afterward, ‘That’s the kind of poem I can only follow with a pencil.’”

  They all laughed. Dr. Phelps’ granddaughter smiled at Estelle’s grand-nephew, who stood beside her, and both of them blushed. (Ah ha! thought Estelle.)

  Again Ruth drew herself up and took a breath, like an anthem singer.

  The Cat and the Dog

  Though he purrs, the Cat’s only partly here,

  Poised ’tween the hearth and the street outside.

  Half-tame, half-wild, he’s a walking riddle,

  Playing both ends against the middle.

  And so Man hangs between Truths he must fear

  And the murderous animal under his hide.

  The Dog’s by nature the best of his friends,

  Playing the middle against both ends.

  There was a silence when she finished. Then Ed Thomas said, half-joking, face red: “It’s true. I need a pencil!”

  “Mrs. Thomas,” little Margie Phelps said almost inaudibly, “do the one about the bear.”

  “The bear!” everyone shouted happily. “The bear! The bear!”

  For no reason, tears began to stream down Ruth Thomas’s cheeks but she said, “The Bear,” and drew herself up, more grand than ever.

  Estelle whispered, watching her old friend’s face in alarm, “Listen to this one, Lewis. This is wonderful.”

  Ruth Thomas declaimed:

  The Bear

  If someone offers you a Bear, bow low,

  And say “No!”

  It was suddenly late. They’d all been aware of it before, which was why they were standing in the kitchen with their coats on, but now they all became conscious at once that the time had come. Virginia Hicks realized that she was frightened. Her father was still not home! But there was nothing she could do, or nothing but light one more cigarette—her throat and lungs on fire—and throw a glance at Lewis, who could give her no help, though she knew he felt it too. If her father had been hurt, the police would call, or the hospital—if they found him, that is. She imagined accidents that would make no sound, rouse no neighbor—the truck slipping softly off the road into the creek, or quietly tipping over on an embankment, vanishing from sight.

  “Well, I’ve had a wonderful time,” Dr. Phelps sang heartily, “and so has my Margie, if I mistake not.” He winked at her and she blushed. “Come come, my birdy,” he said, reaching toward her from across the room. With his red face, his long green scarf wrapped around and around and trailing past his shoulder, he looked like a greetingcard caricature of Christmas. Whispering something—perhaps just “Goodnight”—Mar
gie detached herself from Terence.

  “Well, boys?” Ed Thomas said, turning to his grandsons. They shifted slightly to show that they were ready. He turned back to Ruth and slipped his arm around her, preparing to help her walk. “Lewis, my boy,” he called out as if casually, “let’s don’t forget, eh?”

  “Yessir,” Lewis said, helping Estelle to her feet from the chair by the table.

  “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” Ed Thomas sang out, and laughed.

  When Dr. Phelps opened the door it pushed him back a step and wind came bounding into the room like a horse. “Great Christ!” he exclaimed. Whether it was the wind or something darker, a chill went through them, as if the old doctor’s cry had in fact been a prayer.

  “Wintah’s just around the cohner,” Lewis Hicks said. No one else spoke.

  “Get outta here, you guys!” Ruth Thomas said, addressing the wind, “you think it’s Halloween already?” No one laughed. She stood tall as a Druid, her head thrown back.

  With the door still blown open, the kitchen nearly hushed, there came from somewhere below them on the mountain, surely not more than a half mile away, a sound like the explosion of a bomb.

  “What was that?” Estelle whispered.

  Virginia put her hand on Dickey’s shoulder, her eyes very still.

  “Sounds like he didn’t make the cohner,” Lewis mentioned to the night.

  The minister and priest were out the door now, running toward their car.

  Sally Abbott, in her room, did not hear the explosion, or if she heard, did not register. She knew only that the house had become quiet, there were just a few people in the kitchen, talking. She couldn’t make out what they were saying or even who was there. She listened at the door and then, when she heard cars starting up, went over to look out the window. “They’re certainly in a hurry to get away,” she said aloud. She went back to the bedroom door to listen, but the voices were quieter than ever now. She went to the edge of the bed and sat down, trembling, feeling strangely alarmed—it was the howling wind, perhaps—and looked at the clock. Past midnight!