October Light

by John Gardner

  Partridge held his pipe up, an old drugstore Kaywoodie not worth a nickel when the thing was brand new, and Partridge had been smoking it fifteen years, polluting the air and consuming good tobacco to no purpose. His nose was long and thin, malevolent looking, dark as a baboon’s at the zoo. His eyes, come to think of it, were also like a baboon’s. His voice sounded something between a rusty hinge and a handsaw. “I’m just tellin you what I hear, James,” he whined. “I understand your old sister’s got a snit on.”

  “News flies,” the old man said and raised his glass as if to toast Sam Frost, then drank.

  “You got me, James,” Sam Frost said, chuckling, so harmless and amused the old man had no choice but to forgive him on the spot. “I guess the little woman maybe did hear somethin on the telephone, and I guess I just may have spilled the beans.”

  “Well—” James said. He looked around the room. The strangers were eating their T-bone steaks. At the table next to theirs three young villagers sat drinking, glancing at the strangers now and then and smiling. The old man had seen the three many times before and could probably remember who they were if he had to. One of them was fat, with longish black hair. He’d likely be drunk before the night was out, though all he drank, anytime he came, was beer. He was always in jail for one reason or another—singing, mostly, or sleeping in people’s cars. He was harmless as a girl. Another one was tall and pock-marked, worked for the phone company. The third one was one of the Grahams, blond-headed and muscular. When he was a boy he’d broke into a barn and mutilated an old blind horse, him and some other boys. They’d nearly had to go to reform school for it. He was trouble, that Graham. Had a look about him. He was what they used to call, in the old days, a lad born to hang.

  James sipped his beer. Emily passed close, and Henry Stump-church raised his hand, one finger pointing ceilingward, asking for another round. She nodded and hurried on.

  “You wonder what in hell the world’s comin to,” Bill Partridge said, and fit his pipe between his crooked, brown teeth.

  “She out of her room yet?” Sam asked, smiling. When James looked puzzled, Sam added: “I mean your sister.”

  He registered now. “Not yet,” he said. “She’s gone on a kind of strike, you might say.” He sucked at his dentures.

  Bill Partridge leaned forward. “She never did!”

  The old man nodded again and raised his glass.

  Bill Partridge struck one of his wooden matches and held it to his pipe. The light made his eyes glint. “Man couldn’t blame you if you threw her right out of the house,” he said. “It’s just like with old Judah Sherbrooke that time, when his wife got to carryin on with that organist. Locked her outdoors in the snow bare-naked.” He grinned for an instant. “Wish to hell I’d seen it.”

  “And then there’s that time when he caught her with the painter in the chickenhouse,” Sam Frost said, laughing, and the rest of them joined him. The three of them said at once—James Page remained silent—“‘This what you call makin Aht, woman?’” There were hundreds of stories about old Judah Sherbrooke and his teen-ager wife. God only knew if even one of ’em was true. Everybody told them, sometimes even women of known bad character, such as Bea and Laurie, sitting there baggy-eyed like half-drunk Halloween effigies at the bar. Sometimes the stories made the naked young wife a kind of hero of foxiness (in none of the stories was the wife given clothes); how she slipped past the old hawk’s eye to make love with the stable-boy when he was “teaching her to ride,” or how she made love to a whole string quartet at one time when the old man believed she was practicing the piano. At other times it was the rich old man that the stories praised, how he made her stay all night with the barenaked minister in the Congregational church steeple in the middle of January, and served ’em both right; how he’d made her ride naked from North Bennington to Rutland in the baggage car, where she’d been carrying on. James Page, for one, believed none of the stories and grimly disapproved of people’s telling them. Yet he felt at this moment, just as if the stories were true, old Judah’s indignation.

  “So Sally’s gone on strike,” Bill Partridge said, and blew smoke out. “What’s that woman think she is, I’d like to know?”

  Stumpchurch tipped his head, waiting for the answer. Henry was a kind of stupid man, always had been; part Welsh. But his heart was as big as all outdoors, and if once he understood a thing, he was a fair man, fair as any Judge. It occurred to James Page that he’d be interested to know what Stumpchurch thought.

  “Well,” he said, “the way she sees it there’s two different sides to the ahgument. She b’lieves if I let her come live in my house, she’s got a right to live ennaway she wants to.”

  “That ain’t right,” Henry said.

  “I dunno,” James said. He tipped his long head and poured more beer. It occurred to him beer might help his constipation, and he turned to see if, in all that crowd, he could catch Emily’s eye; but she was nowhere to be seen. No matter, it came to him. Henry had signalled for another round already. Wine, it occurred to him, might even be better. He continued thoughtfully:

  “It ain’t altogether Sally’s fault that she’s poor, and now that she’s in with me, she mostly does her share. I ought to just try and bend more, could be. Whole thing stotted with that television. If it hadn’t been for that—” He looked at Henry.

  “We heard about that,” Sam Frost said, chuckling so hard he bounced.

  James said, stern as a minister, “I hate that God damn television.”

  “Don’t blame you,” Sam Frost said earnestly.

  “But then, if I’d give a little maybe then she would too.” He pursed his lips. He thought again of that line of his wife’s, “Oh James, James.” He couldn’t summon up how she’d looked when she’d said it. With the rumble of laughter and talk all around him, he wasn’t even sure he had her voice right. He could remember the stoneboat his grandfather’d made when he was four years old; he could remember every flicker, every curl of burning white, and how the sky was bright blue when the silo caught fire when he was nine years old; he could remember every board, every barrel and brick of the sugar cabin where the family had made syrup when he was ten; yet his wife’s face escaped him.

  “Never trust a woman,” Bill Partridge said with a significant look.

  “Specially that sister of yours,” Sam Frost said, and winked.

  “What’s that mean?” he said.

  Now Emily was here with another round. As she scooped up the money, she said, “Ennathin else I can get you men?”

  James said with a little stammer, “How much is a bottle of wine?”

  She looked baffled. “You want the wine list?”

  “I don’t need a list, I just like to know what the price is.”

  “Got a bottle for three dollars if you want,” she said. “Taylor’s. You want red?”

  “I’ll take it,” he said as if crossly, shocked by the price. “I’ll take red.” He glanced at the others. “Any you want a glass?”

  They looked uneasy, shrugged, smiled, and shook their heads. He was reminded of three talking horses he’d seen in his childhood, time of some election. It occurred to him only this minute to wonder if the horses had really talked. No, of course not, he realized and, sixty years late, felt cheated.

  “Just me then,” he said. As soon as Emily was out of earshot he leaned forward and explained, “Got a bowels problem.” He looked sternly at the table.

  A draught of cold air welled around him as someone came in or went out, and he glanced toward the door. Two college girls stood there. They were Bennington girls; you could always spot ’em from a mile away. They usually didn’t get out this far from the shadow of Mount Anthony—hung around The Villager in North Bennington, picking up ’lectricians. They stood blinking, letting their eyes adjust, one girl fattish, with a scarf and gray coat and a dark green beret, heavy-lidded eyes, thick lips—Jewish—the other girl tall, pretty except she looked empty as a box. She stood like a lady on a maga
zine cover or a clothing store ad, one leg thrown forward, elegant as a deer’s, hands in the pockets of her long brown leather coat. He pulled his eyes away and pursed his lips, sucking at his dentures with his tongue.

  “Well well,” Sam Frost said, winking.

  James heard one of the girls speak, much nearer than he’d have expected, and turned his head just slightly to look again. They’d come up to the table of strangers to say hello. The tall girl was stretching out her hand to the man with the coarse gray beard—the black-eyed man was introducing them. “I’ve read all your books,” she said. The gray-bearded man got up, almost knocking down his chair, and jokingly seized the girl’s hand with both of his. They did more introductions. The man with funny ears was a writer too. Emily came now with the wine and poured a little in his glass. He signalled for her to keep pouring and slid three dollars and twenty-five cents onto the table. Sam Partridge was whining something, “… damn place is changing,” but James didn’t listen. He was listening, ears tingling like a hunting dog’s, to the table of strangers and to the Bennington girls, peeling their voices from the surrounding thrum.

  The Bennington girls had moved on past the strangers now, over to the three young village men. The voice of the shorter, fatter one said, “You guys want company?”

  The black-haired boy said—Albert, his name was, the old man remembered—“Does a bear shit in the woods?”

  James sipped his wine. The taste was better than he’d expected, reminded him of something a long time ago—some important memory, but he couldn’t quite jump it. He sipped again and then on impulse—his generalized anger, his loss of his own past—he abruptly tipped up the glass and drained it.

  “Good wine?” Henry said. He sat with his fingers on the edge of the table, his square, slightly bug-eyed head tilted and thrown forward as if he’d never seen a human being drink wine before.

  “You want some?”

  Henry raised his hands, palms out.

  The fat girl was saying, “What are your interests?”

  James Page turned his head again to look. She was talking to the Graham boy. She had her coat off now. The Graham boy was looking at her. “You really want to know?” he said, grinning.

  “That’s why I asked.”

  The tall girl drew herself up and looked at Albert. “Are you for real?” she said.

  At their table the strangers were gathering up checks, getting ready to leave.

  “One more for everybody,” the bearded man sang.

  The red-headed woman leaned toward him, smiling, but her voice, the old man somehow knew, though he couldn’t quite hear it, was like ice.

  “Screw yourself,” the bearded man answered. The words slipped out as casually as a murderer’s knife and easily carried the length of the room. Heads turned. The man seemed not to notice.

  The woman blanched and everyone at the table hung hushed and motionless for an instant, like people caught off guard in a photograph. Then the blond, long-haired boy put his hand gently on the drunken man’s shoulder and said something.

  The bearded man bowed his head and touched his nose, then abruptly pushed his chair back and, helping himself with one hand on the chairback, the other on the table, stood up. The man in the light suit and monkey ears hurried around to steady him, grinning, saying something and making a funny face. The gray-bearded man mumbled something back, apologetic.

  James Page poured himself more wine and sipped it, trying to analyze the sensation in his chest. He felt exposed, the whole room mysteriously unsafe. Furtively, he watched them pay Merton at the bar. At the door the bearded man paused for an instant, and it seemed to James that he was about to turn and look back, straight at him; but if that was what was in the man’s mind he thought better of it—or in his drunkenness forgot it—and went out. James slowly turned his head. Through the window he watched them help the man over to the foreign car and into the back seat. When the others had gotten in, the motor roared like a race-car engine, the lights went on, then the back-up lights—the lights of the American car went on a second later—the cars backed slowly from their parking places, one after the other, and in a minute both of them were gone.

  2

  The incident, trifling as it was, had an odd effect on him. Now as his three old friends talked on he was a thousand miles away, going over it in his mind, still trying to identify the deep disquiet in his chest. The man with black eyes was a teacher, he decided—since the Bennington girls knew him—and likely a teacher of literature, like Sally’s friend Estelle—since someone had mentioned that his friends the gray-bearded man and the other one wrote books. Maybe all three of them wrote books. James Page was not a great reader of books himself, though he’d bought one, once when he’d driven Estelle and Sally to the Greyhound bus station, because it said on the cover it was a “comic blockbuster,” and he was curious to know if it was true or just more empty babble. He’d read about two sentences, had leaped forwards about a hundred pages and had seen it was all sex, and had thrown it in the garbage for the pigs. It was some kind of masterpiece, according to the cover. No doubt the black-eyed teacher and the writers would agree. Those were the books people liked, these days, those were the books people learned, these days, to live from. “Books that tell the truth,” they’d no doubt claim, the teacher and the writers. Pure hogslop, same as TV. Where would it end? Bunch of black-eyed Brazilians made a pornographic movie where they finished by actually murdering the actress, and if the acting was right and the language was vile enough, people would be hard put to figure out why it wasn’t art.

  Outside it was blowing, as if the weather had been following James Page’s mood. Two state policemen were hurrying across the parking lot, their coats billowing, their right gloves pressing down their gray fur caps. Behind them, hickories and maples bent back and forth, back and forth, hurrying, black against the mountains, the moon- and cloud-filled hastening sky, and leaves tore loose in shaggy clusters, fluttering in haste through the lighted parking lot and then away again, batlike, fleeing into darkness. When they were halfway to the door, a fat man bundled in an old sheepskin jacket came up to the policemen and stopped them. They talked.

  By the light of the Old Grand-Dad clock above the bar it was after eleven. He could hardly believe it, and when he looked at the bottle and discovered he’d drunk more than half of it, the impression was confirmed: Time had shifted gears, or was leaking, like energy from the universe, so he’d heard. He couldn’t remember at first where he’d heard it, but then it came to him: Sally’s minister. Talk about change! They’d never have allowed such a man to stand up in a church and preach, fifty years ago—or twenty, come to that. They’d have locked him away in an insane asylum. Teachers, ministers … It was as if there was a plot against the world’s survival, disaster on its way irreversible as a railroad car broken loose on a twenty-mile grade. He filled his glass and drank, heartsick, then excused himself and walked, bent over, to the toilet. His bowels were still jammed, tough as snakewood. He urinated and sat a while with his trousers around his shoes, waiting, then at last gave up.

  As he was heading back for the booth, someone said behind him, near the restroom door, “We gotta get home, Fred. We gotta. Drink up.”

  “Gotta get home,” the man agreed—the voice was familiar but

  James couldn’t place it. He kept moving; too much trouble to turn around. “Jeezum,” the man said, “look at the time!”

  Bill Partridge nodded and touched his hat-brim, coming toward James on his way to the toilet. James nodded back and continued to the booth.

  The door at the end of the bar swung open and the policemen came in. Mechanically, Bea and Laurie smiled. One of the policemen mumbled something, and the four of them laughed. The older policeman—James would know his name if he thought about it—went over to talk to Merton. While they talked, leaning together, their faces serious, the younger state policeman went halfway down the bar, just far enough to see the television, then stood, hands hanging at his si
des, looking up at it. On the screen a policeman was lifting a child in his arms, face sweating. The child was black, the policeman white. The camera hurried in until all you could see was the two faces. The policeman standing at the bar grinned. Someone spoke to him. He answered without looking from the screen.

  Now Partridge was back. James stood up, making way for him. As he was seating himself again, he turned his head slightly, watching the couple pass—a fat young red-headed man—Fred what?—and his wife … the name at last came to him: Sylvia. He’d seen them here must be a hundred times, but the last name refused to come. They smiled at him; he nodded back. Then he shook his head, poured the last of the wine, and looked up, startled, as Henry Stumpchurch said: “Right, James?”

  “Mmm,” he said. Then, with a jerk, he came out of the wine-fog. “What?” he said. A tight muscle in his cheek gave a snap.

  Henry Stumpchurch leaned his chin toward him, forehead back aways. “People want to talk about animal cunning, they shouldn’t talk about women, they should talk about the beaver.”

  James looked at him blankly and lifted his wineglass to drink.

  “You want to know something?” Henry said. He turned to stare, slightly bug-eyed, at Partridge. “You want to know what a beaver’ll do? If the trees are cut down along the edge of the crick where he’s decided to build his dam, you know what he’ll do?” He sat waiting, head lifted, taller by a foot than the rest of them.

  “What’ll he do,” James asked, annoyed.

  “He’ll dig a canal, by tunkit. That’s God’s own truth. He’ll cut down them trees and trim off the twigs and the whatchamacallums—the crops, that’s it, crops—and he’ll gnaw up the boles and the whatchacallum—branches—into four-foot lengths—more or less four foot—and he’ll dig a canal about two foot across and two foot deep—” he measured it out with hands two feet apart, eyeing the gap critically “—and he’ll float them damn logs to his damsite.” He hit the table with his fist.

  “Damn site,” said Partridge, and for a split second grinned.