October Light

by John Gardner

  “You better stot,” his father said quietly, as if, if it didn’t start, he was going to shoot it.

  He turned the keys again. There wasn’t even a grunt.

  “Go to the bahn and get your grampa,” his father said.

  The car smelled of blood, the exact same smell as when Aunt Sally cut the heads off chickens. He opened the door and jumped out, shut the door, and ran toward the end of the house, heading for the barn. He smelled the doodie in the bushes from Aunt Sally’s bedroom. Suddenly the car made a roaring noise behind him, and white smoke rolled up, a huge cloud of it. He spun around and ran back.

  “Lock your door,” his father said, as soon as he was in. While his finger was still on the lock button, the car began backing toward the road, not fast but definite, like the charge of a bull.

  His father drove no faster than usual, saying not a word. Dickey got up on his one knee to look back at his mother. Her eyes were still open, and there was blood all over the seat. He wanted to ask if she was dead.

  “Sit down,” his father said.

  He lowered himself again and put his hands in his lap.

  When they were coming down into the valley he looked over at his father and said, “It’s because of that book.”

  His father said nothing.

  He squeezed his hands together. “I found a dirty book in the pigpen,” he said. “I put it in my pocket, but my pocket’s got a hole.” He reached his hand through the pocket and lining of his overcoat, showing his father how it was all torn away.

  “Who told you it was dutty?” his father said.

  “It had a dirty picture.” He plunged on: “I couldn’t read it. It had big words and little tiny printing.”

  “How you know it was a dutty pitcha?” his father asked.

  “It just was.” He added: “I lost the book up in Aunt Sally’s room.”

  His father glanced down but said nothing. He looked back at the road.

  When they’d driven on a little farther, Dickey said, “I lost the book the same night Grampa and Aunt Sally had the fight.”

  His father went on looking through the windshield. He sighed. “Your mother was hit by an applecrate,” he said. “It want your book.”

  4

  A little after noon Estelle called Ruth Thomas at Putnam Hospital. “How is he?” she asked.

  Ruth’s voice had no spunk. “He’s in the oxygen tent,” she said. “Dr. Phelps says we’ll just have to see.”

  “Oh dear. Oh dear,” Estelle said. “Oh, I feel so awful!”

  “Well, he’s got the best care in the world. We can be thankful for that.”

  “I feel as if it’s all my fault,” Estelle said.

  “Well it isn’t,” she said. “You can put that right out of your mind.” Her tone had an edge like a butcher knife, and Estelle said, understanding:

  “Oh, Ruth!”

  “I don’t care,” Ruth said. “I blame him, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “You can’t, dear! You mustn’t! Think what poor James had been through!”

  “Through a whole lot of liquor, that’s how it smelled to me.”

  “Oh, but dearest, that’s not fair!”

  “Fair!” Ruth said.

  Estelle could see her in her mind, eyes bugging, head drawn up in righteous indignation. You couldn’t blame her, heaven knows; she’d be the same herself, probably, if it had been Ferris and not Ed. She thought of how wonderfully everything had gone before James got home—how pitiful and apart from them all he’d looked when he’d got there, not himself, all banged up and not in his right mind. “I’m so sorry,” she said, the palsy coming over her, making her head jiggle. “It makes me just sick. Is there anything I can do?”

  “You can pray,” Ruth said. “That’s all any of us can do.”

  “I will. You know that. I’ve been praying all morning.”

  There was a pause. Estelle said, thinking in sudden distress of more difficulties, “Are the boys still there with you?”

  “They’ve gone home, thank goodness,” Ruth said, and sighed. “Chief Young was there, at the hospital. He drove them over to the bus station for us. He’d come in with a boy had an accident in the graveyard by the old First Church. Beaten up, it seems. It was the youngest Flynn boy, or Porter, whichever they’re calling themselves now. Ethain’s son?”

  “Oh good heavens!”

  “It was nothing, just scratches,” Ruth said quickly, “though they’re keeping him over for observation. It was a blessing to have Chief Young on hand, believe me. It was Providential!”

  “I should think so,” Estelle said. Then: “They’ve gone home then. That’s good. What a terrible thing for everyone!”

  “Lucky thing there was a bus,” Ruth said.

  Estelle said, “You really should blame me, not James. It was my meddling—”

  There was a silence.

  “Well it’s no use blaming anyone, I suppose,” Ruth said. “I certainly can’t blame you. It’s true he was drunk, so he wasn’t himself; but you know how we are in our family about drink.”

  “And you’re perfectly right,” Estelle said. “Of course you are!” Her mind began to race. Why had Ruth so suddenly changed her tune, holding back all at once, beginning to play charitable? She looked hard at the curtains, as if the pattern in the lace might have words for her to read, then looked down at her hands, small and liver-spotted, trembling. She looked up again at once. On the street beyond the curtains, John G. McCullough was driving by in his big, frog-green, old fashioned Marmon, John sitting straight and red-eared in the cold—the top was down—going to some meeting of the city fathers, probably, or to visit his bank, or to slip through a side door at Mt. Anthony High and have a word with poor silly Mr. Pelkie about music in the schools. There ought to be courses about people like John McCullough. Education should be real and personal. He was a direct descendent of Lady Godiva, and an important and valuable man in his own right—a patron of the arts, an important publisher, or had been for years, with his brother-in-law William C. Scott. Why, she wondered for the thousandth time, were the McCulloughs and Deweys not friendly? But all the while, just under the surface of her hurrying thoughts, she was working on why Ruth had changed her tune. And she was saying, meanwhile, “He’s not really a drunkard, it’s the stress. You know how it was when his son died.”

  “He was certainly a drunkard then, poor boy!”

  She gave a little laugh. “Poor boy indeed! But he got hold of himself.”

  “Poor Ariah, I’d say.”

  “Well,” Estelle said, nodding at the phone, “it wasn’t easy for either one of them.”

  “No, that’s true,” Ruth said. “I don’t mean to criticize. I know how fond you always were of him.”

  Estelle felt a curious sensation, then lost her thread. She waited for Ruth to speak.

  Ruth said darkly, “I suppose you’ve heard about Virginia?”

  “Virginia?” Estelle said. At Ruth’s tone of voice she was suddenly wide awake again, tingling with alarm.

  “His daughter Virginia Hicks is here in the hospital,” Ruth said.

  “No!”

  “Yes indeedy! Husband Lewis brought her in.” She said ominously: “Nobody’s saying what happened to her.”

  “Good heavens!” Estelle said.

  “Cut on the head, apparently,” Ruth said. “I understand she’s been unconscious for hours.”

  “No,” Estelle whispered.

  “Well, we’ll just have to see what we see,” Ruth said. “It’s a funny world.”

  Estelle nodded, then shook her head, saying nothing. The pattern on the curtains was sharper all at once. If there were anything there to read, she could have read it. It’s my fault, she thought, all my fault. She’d known she shouldn’t interfere. But no fool like an old fool. She said: “Is that all they’re saying? A cut on the head?”

  “You know how they are in hospitals,” Ruth said.

  Estelle’s head was jittering more troubles
omely now with the stupid palsy. “How tired you must be,” she said. “Ruth, have you slept?”

  There were noises for a moment in the background, and in a changed voice Ruth said, “Oh! Here’s Dr. Phelps and Dr. Sung. I’ll have to hang up now. It’s so good of you to call.”

  “Of course. Don’t mention it! Do keep me posted, and if there’s anything I can do—”

  “I’ll keep in touch, dear. It’s so good to talk to you!”

  “Heavens, not at all!”

  “Good-bye,” Ruth said. “Thank you.” The phone clicked.

  “Good-bye,” Estelle said to the humming line. She hung up the receiver and slowly brought her fingertips to her mouth.

  5

  (Terence on Pure and Subservient Art)

  Terence Parks sat in the corner chair in the green living room of his parents’ house, three houses down from his aunt Estelle’s, listening to the Tippett Sonata for Four Horns and trying to think, or rather struggling with a chaos of old and new feelings, in a sense old and new ideas. Evening was coming on, filling him with restlessness and a queer sense of dread, a sensation difficult to get ahold of, put a name to, worse than anything he could remember since childhood, though in a general way, of course, he understood it. James Page, waving his shotgun last night, had changed everything.

  Nothing in his father’s large record collection was more familiar to Terence than the Tippett Sonata: happy music, he’d always thought; but tonight it had dark implications he’d never before noticed. Not that the music wasn’t happy even now—in general, at least—and not that he wasn’t himself feeling something like happiness, or at any rate feeling stirred up, uplifted by excitement—though at the same time fearful. Even talking with Margie last night he hadn’t worked out the exact way to say it, but he was onto something. He had made, or perhaps was on the verge of making, a discovery. It had to do, it seemed to him now, with walking in the rain with Margie Phelps, and with the mad old man’s shotgun, and with music.

  When her grandfather had had to go to the hospital with the Thomases—Ed Thomas groaning, his wife sick with fear, and even old Dr. Phelps alarmed—Terence had suggested that he and his aunt Estelle drive Margie home. The grown-ups had accepted his suggestion at once, like panic-fuddled children who’d been waiting for advice, and though he’d been surprised at their listening to him—treating him, abruptly and without thinking, as an equal—he’d known instantly that their listening was right. It was not so much a thought as suddenly ripe knowledge, like the knowledge that one day comes to a young bull when by chance he knocks down the farmer.

  That was only the beginning. As soon as the Thomases were out of the yard, his aunt had changed her mind about starting down the mountain. They must wait, she insisted, at least until the police came. She sat with her head lowered, lips clamped tight, watching the house. She was as pale and shaky as Ed Thomas had been—for which Terence couldn’t blame her, he was shaky himself—yet there was something more to her distress than ordinary fear, he sensed. Whimpering, touching her face with both hands, now praying that poor James might be brought to his senses, now praying for Sally’s life, she showed a side Terence had never before seen in her and couldn’t understand, found distasteful. Her emotion seemed to him extreme, theatrical in fact, and, what was worse, unbalanced: there was no one to impress with her pious concern except himself and Margie—and Aunt Estelle seemed hardly to be conscious of their existence. Pulling at her face, whimpering and whispering, she struck him as a little like a madwoman: nothing in the real world (nothing he could think of) could provoke all this, though of course it was possible that the fault was his, that he too should feel grief and concern but was cruelly insensitive. It did not occur to him, since he knew them only as cranky and old, even at their best moments “difficult,” that his great-aunt Estelle in fact loved James Page and Sally Abbott, dearly loved both of them, remembering them young—remembering how James had been wide of chest, cocksure and quick-witted, and how Sally had been a remarkable beauty and, sometimes in spite of her instincts, a faithful friend.

  Margie, too, had been uncomfortable in the car. All at once she’d said, practically a whisper, “I think I’ll get out and walk a little, if you don’t mind. I love walking in the rain. Do you mind?” His aunt had said, “Why, child, you’ll catch your death!” But her attention was elsewhere, eyes straining toward the lighted upstairs window. “I’m used to it, really,” Margie had said, and though her smile and the tilt of her head were meek, she was already opening the door. His aunt could say only, “Really? In this weather?” “I’ll keep her company,” Terence had said, making it sound half reluctant, a duty.

  The thought, or memory, of walking through darkness, holding her hand, was pleasant beyond comparison, and he was fully aware that his pleasure last night had been intensified by the horror earlier—the old man waving his shotgun, his mad eyes darting, mouth shaking, and then Ed Thomas’s heart attack, Aunt Estelle’s strange behavior in the car. He thought again of Margie’s voice, the smell of her hair. He’d wanted to ask her for a picture—it had seemed important, mysteriously so—a way of keeping clear, as if by voodoo, her exact quality and, in a way, his own—a way of welding both their natures firmly to the urgent, as if timeless quality of that moment: the alarming darkness of trees, the groan of wind.

  He closed his eyes, listening to the Tippett and summoning up her image, a light, still core in a swirl of change, chaos and dissonance, leaping darkness. When her hair had come a little loose under the rainhat she wore and she’d reached up to slide out the bobby pins, pushing her hair back to fall under her collar, he had almost asked her for one of the bobby pins, but he couldn’t find the nerve. He’d have been glad to get anything at all that was hers (he smiled at himself, thinking of it)—a bit of wood, an old bone, a dead chicken’s foot …

  He scroonched lower in the chair, until his head was just above the level of his knees, his large hands in his lap, folded. His father, who was for the most part a wise and gentle man, a psychiatrist, sat on the couch across the room from him, leafing without interest through a magazine. His mother was in the room off the kitchen sorting laundry. Terence could just hear her singing, a sign that she was cross.

  Terence had listened to the Tippett often. In the beginning he couldn’t have said why except, of course, that it was for horns, and he was a hornist. It was not “thrilling” or in the usual sense “beautiful” or any of the things that make particular pieces “universally appealing,” as his teacher at school would say. The Sonata was simply something that—knowing really nothing about music except what he knew about playing French horn—he had “taken a shine to,” as his mother would put it—an Alabamian. It was a piece to daydream by—or to remember by, as he was remembering now (but with unusual intensity), his consciousness closed like a fist around last night. And also the music had been for him a kind of puzzle, one he was reworking now, this moment.

  When he had first begun to listen to it, once having gotten past his interest in the tone, the hurry of sixteenth notes, he had asked himself what it was that the music reminded him of—the first movement, for instance, with its medieval opening and surprisingly quick flight from any trace of the medieval, a hustle-bustle of sweetly dissonant liquid sounds, sometimes such a flurry that you’d swear there were dozens of horns, not just four—and he’d tried various ideas: the idea that the image was of threatening apes, harmless ones, small ones, chittering and flapping unbelligerent arms in a brightly lit jungle; the idea that the picture was of children at the beach in sped-up motion …

  Then it had come to him as a startling revelation—though he couldn’t explain even to his horn teacher Andre Speyer why it was that he found the discovery startling—that the music meant nothing at all but what it was: panting, puffing, comically hurrying French horns. That had been, ever since—until tonight—what he saw when he closed his eyes and listened: horns, sometimes horn players, but mainly horn sounds, the very nature of horn sounds, puffin
g, hurrying, getting in each other’s way yet in wonderful agreement finally, as if by accident. Sometimes, listening, he would smile, and his father would say quizzically, “What’s with you?” It was the same when he listened to the other movements: What he saw was French horns, that is, the music. The moods changed, things happened, but only to French horns, French horn sounds. There was a four-note theme in the second movement that sounded like “Oh When the Saints,” a theme that shifted from key to key, sung with great confidence by a solo horn, answered by a kind of scornful gibberish from the second, third, and fourth, as if the first horn’s opinion was ridiculous and they knew what they knew. Or the slow movement: As if they’d finally stopped and thought it out, the horns played together, a three-note broken chord several times repeated, and then the first horn taking off as if at the suggestion of the broken chord and flying like a gull—except not like a gull, nothing like that, flying like only a solo French horn. Now the flying solo became the others’ suggestion and the chord began to undulate, and all four horns together were saying something, almost words, first a mournful sound like Maybe and then later a desperate Oh yes I think so, except to give it words was to change it utterly: it was exactly what it was, as clear as day—or a moonlit lake where strange creatures lurk—and nothing could describe it but itself. It wasn’t sad, the slow movement; only troubled, hesitant, exactly as he often felt himself. Then came—and he would sometimes laugh aloud—the final, fast movement. Though the slow movement’s question had never quite been answered, all the threat was still there, the fast movement started with absurd self-confidence, with some huffings and puffings, and then the first horn set off with delightful bravado, like a fat man on skates who hadn’t skated in years (but not like a fat man on skates, like nothing but itself), Woo-woo-woo-woops! and the spectator horns laughed tiggledy-tiggledy-tiggledy!, or that was vaguely the idea—every slightly wrong chord, every swoop, every hand-stop changed everything completely … It was impossible to say what, precisely, he meant.