by John Gardner
He had been told in school that Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony made you think of the country. It wasn’t true—or else his mind worked differently from the minds of other people. It was itself, or anyway that was all he’d cared for it to be, its note-by-note self, not sunrises or storms, though it was true that, when told to, he could imagine a storm for the storm passage, though also when listening to a real storm he could imagine a train. It was no doubt true that Beethoven had meant it to remind you of a storm, just as, of course, he intended his setting of the “Ode to Joy” to sound joyful. Beethoven’s intention was a matter of record, and Beethoven was the one great master, everyone agreed. Well …
Perhaps, he’d decided, it would all come clearer to him later, as people were always telling you things would. But if what he’d discovered was misinformation, the fact was—had been—that he preferred it to the truth. There were in this world, he’d gradually discerned, two kinds of music: real music and work music. The setting of poems, even the best poems, was work music. What the music might have done if it followed its own will was prohibited, the music was enslaved. Ballet was work music, violins trapped inside the narrow limits of swans, though ballet dancers could of course—and sometimes did—interpret real music with their bodies. And then there was the worst work music of all, picture music, the kind they kept having to play at school, The Pines of Rome, Pictures at an Exhibition. Real music, on the other hand, was music liberated, free to be itself. For these theories he’d had proofs.
His mother was always listening to Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier, and as soon as he’d noticed there was a piece for each key he had understood—so Terence had believed—the whole meaning of the piece. The meaning of the section in D minor was D minor, as if Bach should say to his numerous children, “Listen, my children, to what D minor makes me play!” What Terence had discovered about music was not quite respectable, he’d realized. Narrow minded, perhaps snobbish, not easy to defend. There were places in Mahler where the drums insisted on your thinking of an army, or the violins made you think of … whatever. Then he’d deal with Mahler and Beethoven later. For now, he’d decided, it was enough to understand firmly what he understood, that Tippett’s Sonata for Four Horns was entirely about horns.
So he’d decided. But as he listened this time, thinking of the music and of Margie Phelps, thinking of battered and bruised James Page in the house with his shotgun—down the mountain, not far from where the suicide had been, the garnet glow of his still-burning truck—Terence’s stomach was suddenly all butterflies, as if something terrible were about to happen, some great evil, some monster in the music, about to emerge. Whiffle-whiffle-whiffle! went the second, third, and fourth, humorous but threatening, perceptibly malevolent, the tip of a dangerous iceberg. The first horn sailed over them, oblivious as a child or fool, in an entirely wrong key.
Last night Terence had explained his theory, as he’d had it worked out then, to Margie Phelps, realizing as he talked that he was talking about her—the scent of her, the way her hands moved, the way she walked just a little pigeon-toed (he wouldn’t have her walk any other way), unique as a snowflake and, in Terence’s eyes, infinitely more beautiful. “I mean, everything should be what it is,” he’d said, “you know? Absolutely free.”
With a solemn expression she’d looked up at his face—she’d been watching the ground as he told her all this, not speaking except now and then to ask a question: “How do you think of things like that?” she’d said. “I could think for a million years and never come up with it!” Only now, in retrospect, was he fully aware of the darkness all around them and swirling up within them, two innocents chattering, while the old man schemed murder and Aunt Estelle, in the car, sat trembling.
Margie’s words, her perfectly serious expression, had transformed him, given him value and potential. So it had seemed to him and seemed to him now. She had seen him, seen his seeing of the music, and he had therefore seen himself.
Something stirred in the music, darting from dark place to dark place. His eyes snapped open. Had he slept for an instant? For an instant at most; yet he seemed to have dreamed of the suicide—the story his aunt had told him years ago of the young man hanging calm as stone in his attic, in the house below him, Mozart. In the dream—or perhaps inside Tippett’s music—Terence had stared at the faceless, still figure and had realized someone was in terrible danger, drifting out of key, out of orbit toward nothingness, toward emptiness and itself. Margie?, he wondered in brief panic. Ed Thomas? Aunt Estelle? For a split second he understood everything, life’s monstrosity and beauty. Then he was listening to the horns again.
His father, on the couch, opened the center-page foldout and looked at it without interest, then raised his eyes and looked at Terence. “What’s the matter?” he said, grinning.
“Nothing,” Terence said, and blushed.
6
“You mean to thay you ain’t comin out even now?” James called in.
She was silent a moment, hugging herself against the cold and watching herself as she might a stranger, seeing if she’d relent. “Nothing’s changed,” she said.
“Nothingth changed!” he yelled. “By God, Thally, you’re the meaneth, thtubborneth, bitchieth, mule-headedeth, vengefulleth cold-blooded therpent in the Thtate of Vermont!”
“That may be true, and I don’t say I’m proud of it, but it don’t change the facts one iota.” She stood with her chin lifted, her two hands holding the bathrobe together, one of them clutching the paperback book, her whole being braced against the world, against God and all His angels if need be.
James was hopping mad. She could see him, in her mind’s eye, bent over the doorknob, wild blue eyes bulging from his black-and-blue, scratched up face. Well rant on, Lucifer! She hadn’t made him get crazy drunk and drive that truck off the road—smash up his truck till there was nothing left of it and he couldn’t even drive to the hospital to visit his daughter.
“Ith a lucky thing for you they don’t thtill burn witcheth!” he yelled. “You theen the blood out here? Little Ginnyth half-dead in the hothpital and that don’t change nothing?”
“Applecrate want meant for her and you know it,” she snapped. “It was you started wavin that gun around, James Page.
I was just setting here mindin my own business, and you went—”
“And eatin appleth!” he yelled.
“What?” she said.
“You wath juth thettin there mindin your own bithneth and eatin appleth! Pretendin you wath goin on a hunger thtrike like Mahatma Gandhi, and all the time you wath cheatin like you’ve cheated me all your life! You wath livin on appleth!”
The old woman clamped her lips together and her eyes flashed. “That’s not the argument we’re havin,” she yelled, faster and sharper than a horsewhip snapping, “and don’t you go slitherin from one thing to another like I don’t know a cow from a cornknife. If your idea is to bring up every speck and mite of dirt you can think of from fifty, sixty years ago, why let me just warn you I can bring to mind a few little incidents myself that I’d be pleased to tell you, so if I was you I’d drop that, and faster’n you’d ever drop a bumblebee!”
“Damn!” he yelled. He stamped his foot. “Damn if you don’t make me want to come in there and thute you all ovah again! You jith won’t quit! Therth my little Ginny in the hothpital—”
“God knows that applecrate want meant for Ginny. If you’d took it on the head yourself as you was meant to—”
He was incredulous. His voice went up two octaves. “Ye’d have killed me, Thally! Damn if you wouldn’t. I’m an old man! Ye’d have thmathed my head like an eggthell and broken my back! Who’d ye gone and lived off then, damn it?”
“I never started it, believe you me, and I don’t see the need for all this swearin and coarse language. If your daughter’s in the hospital it’s nobody put her there but you, James Page, same as you put old Ed Thomas in the hospital and would’ve put me in the hospital if not in my grave if I ha
dn’t defended myself. You can rant and rail till the cows come home, and try to make me feel guilty and come clean up your mess for you—all the blood you spilt and the dishes you broke and I don’t know what-all—but the situation hasn’t changed one iota, or if it has it’s for the worse: I came into this room because you chased me with stove-wood, and ye’d like to have killed me then and there if I hadn’t stepped lively. That’s how you do things, that’s all you know. You think the whole world’s just a herd of milkcows that you can drive wheresoever you please by hittin ’em with a stick or throwin some stones or maybe sickin the dog on ’em. Well believe you me it won’t work on Sally Abbott and that’s all there is to it, so here I sit!” When she finished, far stronger and firmer than she’d started, rising on her anger and rhetoric to conviction—becoming like her mother in her final years, Rebekah Page, tall and unyielding, sober-eyed and stern as Old Testament Justice—and also like her grandmother Leah Starke, who had borne sixteen children, most of whom died young, and had survived to the age of a hundred and three, much of that time in the Old Folks’ Home—her voice was ringing like an old-time orator’s, so that the silence that followed was like a sudden courtroom hush. She waited for him to answer, half alarmed by her own gall. Instead, she heard him moving away.
“James,” she said sternly, fiercely—though her wish was to keep him there.
“I got work to do,” he said. “Gotta thtot the furnace.” He continued down the hall. “Anytime you want to come out, you jith come out.” It was a whimper. She saw that she’d hurt him, and though she had meant to, she was distressed at having managed it so well.
She heard him reach the head of the stairs and start slowly down, and she thought, in brief panic, of calling to him again, then decided against it. She laid the book on the bed and rubbed her palms together in front of her chin, frowning, sharp-eyed, thinking of her grandmother. There was no reason she herself should not live that long—at very least that long, if James didn’t kill her. Despite the image of her niece fallen and stock-still in the doorway—on the hall floor behind her blood-spattered apples, blood pouring down from Ginny’s scalp as from a hose (but that had not frightened her, at least not unduly: there was always a good deal of bleeding with a scalp wound)—she must, she saw again, hold firm, stick tight to her principles. Days, months, years passed quickly when you were old, but even so, twenty years of life was a span worth getting decent terms for. She’d been cheated long enough.
When the telephone rang, James Page was in the kitchen, frying himself an egg. He jumped, not because it surprised him but because he’d been expecting it, turned off the heat under the pan, and hurried as fast as he could go to the living room to pick up the receiver. As he did so he drew out his watch and looked at it. Nearly four o’clock. He spit to his left.
“Ay-uh?” he called.
“H’lo,” Lewis called back—neither of the two had full confidence in wire—“this is Lewis.”
“H’lo,” he said. “I recognithed your voith.” He thought of asking What’s the news? but hesitated out of fear.
“You ah right up there?” Lewis asked.
“Fine. We’re jith fine. Howth everything down there?”
“Ginny’s ah right,” he said. “Doctor says she’s got a haihline fracture on her skull, but she’ll be fine.”
“Thath good newth!” he said. His hands shook.
“If you wanta come see her I’ll come get you,” Lewis said. He didn’t sound eager. You couldn’t blame him.
“Oh?” he said. “Can thee have vithitorth, then?” He realized that he was, strange to say, stalling. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see her. Ever since he’d come in after finishing chores and had come upon the blood and apples in the upstairs hallway, he had wanted to see with his own eyes that she was alive and would be well—had wanted to hold her hand as he would when she was a child and feverish, wanted to watch till she came back to consciousness, be there when she opened her eyes. He’d called Putnam Hospital from time to time and had gotten reports—she’d regained consciousness a little after two—and he’d even gone so far as to consider calling some neighbor, maybe Sam Frost, and asking for a ride down to Bennington. But it was a long way, more imposition than he could bring himself to make, so he’d dismissed the idea, had gone up to the bathroom and had tried to ease his mind by talking with Sally—fool that he was! She was a pure hell-fire demon, always had been! The country could fall to the Communist Chinese and she’d still be settin there, locked in her bedroom, demandin her rights!
Lewis said, “Ay-uh, doctor says there’s no hahm in her havin visitors. She won’t recognize you, though. Little foggy from that bump on the head.”
“Foggy, ith thee?”
“What?” Lewis said.
“I thaid Ginnyth foggy.”
“Oh, foggy. Ay-uh.” Lewis seemed to consider. At last he said, “I could come on up and get you if you want me to. Ed Thomas is here in the hospital too, ye know.”
He bent his head more and pulled his arms against his chest, steadying them. “Howth Ed?”
“He’s better. Ruth’s gone home.”
“Thank God for that—that heeth better.”
“Thank somebody, ah right.” It was not meant to be ironic. It was merely that Lewis disbelieved in God. There was a silence. At length, Lewis said, “Well, what you think, Dad. You want me to come get you?”
“I don’ think tho, no,” he said, and frowned, feeling guilty. “Ginny wouldn’t know me, and Ed jith ath thoon not thee me, I gueth—”
“Ed what?”
He said it again.
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Lewis drawled. “Ed don’t hold grudges. I talked to him some. He’s out of the oxygen tent, by the way.”
“Oh?” he said, and waited.
“They got him restin now.”
The old man could think of no way to ask right out what Ed might have said about his behavior last night. Every time he thought of it, the more intense his shame was. He’d be glad to get some idea how the others looked at it. Even to know that they hated him would be something. He’d had in his lifetime more than one or two that had hated him.
“Edth better, then, hey?”
“He’ll be ah right. They got him restin.”
James nodded to the phone. When he was sure Lewis would say no more about Ed Thomas, he asked, “You got Dickey there with you?”
“He’s at the sitter’s,” Lewis said.
“Thath good.” He nodded to the phone again. Finally he said,
“If ye’d come up and get me tomorrow, I’d be glad. Maybe I’ll have Thally out of her room by then.” He laughed.
“I wouldn’t bet my ahm on it,” Lewis said.
When they’d said good-bye and hung up, he sat looking out the window a while, his mind just drifting. The afternoon was as gray as the morning had been, no life but a few chickens in the yard, and he realized that this was the season he’d always forgotten, all his life, had neglected to prepare for until suddenly it was upon him, the gap between the glory of fall and the serenity of winter in Vermont, the deep soft snow of November and December, the long blue shadows of January … Though it was only last night that the storm had torn them off, the leaves seemed to have lost their vitality already, their yellow dulling to a yellowish gray, the red dimming down towards orange. It was the light, perhaps, that made the leaves seem half-rotted, but if the rot hadn’t really set in yet today, it would be there for sure tomorrow or the next day, and the gap of drab weather, no life but in the sky, would drag on and on, the days growing shorter, more uncomfortable, more unhealthy, no pleasure but a few butternuts the squirrels had missed—perhaps a glimpse of a fox—until getting out of bed was the hardest of his chores, and getting back into it at night was unconditional surrender. The gap might last for weeks—gray pastures, gray skies, even the crows in the birches looking up—and then when he began to believe he would never get through it alive, there suddenly, one morning, would be the wor
ld transformed, knee deep in snow, and even if the sky was gray, the farm would be beautiful.
He sat feeling his gums with his tongue-tip, tasting his mouth, then leaned forward in his chair, pressed down on his knees, and got up. He walked to the kitchen and remembered the egg he’d been frying. He turned the electric burner back on and, because it would be slow to heat, thought he’d go to the bathroom. When he did so, it was almost not worth the trouble; yet his stomach for some reason wasn’t paining him especially right now—the pains came and went, though mostly they were there, dug in good, either stabbing like hot spears or rumbling, burning on low, but burning. He rinsed off his hands, wiped them on the towel, and started back downstairs. He called to Sally as he took the first step down.
“That wath Lewith on the phone. Ginnyth all right. Little foggy from the bump.”
“Thank heavens,” Sally called. “Is Ed Thomas better?”
“Edth better too,” he said, and took another step.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
He took another step down.
She called, “James?”
He waited.
“What you going to do about that truck? You can’t get through the winter without a truck.”
“I’ll worry about that.” There were always the horses.
“Well we can’t just set here on the mountain all winter long, ye know. And what about your teeth? How you going to pay for new teeth?”
“Maybe jith ath well,” he said crossly, “I don’t get no teeth I can’t bite nobody.”
“Thath right,” she mimicked. “You can drown ’em to death in thpit!”
He went angrily down the stairs—she could smell his fried eggs burning—and from the way he grunted with every step she knew he was bent like a gorilla. She was doing none too well herself. She’d brought the bedpan back down from the attic, not just because now that the cars were gone she could empty it out the window, but also because she had to use it every fifteen minutes or so—she kept it with her in the bed—and every time she used it her diarrhea was worse. She was so sore and stinging that doing her business made her eyes well up. If anything broke her spirit, she knew, it would be the pain of those bowel movements. If it weren’t for the pain she knew he was in, tied in knots by constipation, she’d have abandoned the fort long since. She would run out of Kleenex in another day, but she’d manage. She could tear up sheets.