October Light

by John Gardner

  “Then the robins arrive, sometimes in flocks of two or three hundred, brightening the bare brown southern cants. About the same time, spring peepers stot up. Then fields begin to green. Some reason, the green always appears first where the snow’s melted last. And one day after the first green tips appear, the first woodchuck pops up. Woodchucks are great gourmets, I’ll tell you, and they ain’t about to eat that old winter-killed hay the way the deer do. In April their brown fur has reddish glints to it, and for a couple of weeks, until the grass gets long or some neighbor’s son comes out with his twenty-two rifle, they dot the fields like flowers. By that time, of course, it’s no longer unlockin time; it’s spring.

  “I’ll miss that, this year, or ennaway take pot in it in a way I never did before. But I can’t complain.”

  He smiled.

  “James, how come you’re listenin to all this?”

  James thought about it. “Becauth,” he said at last, “ith true.”

  Ed’s smile widened. “That’s what I tell my Ruth,” he said. “She’s got good poems and bad poems, and she’ll swear on the Bible she can’t tell which is which. I explain to her only the good poems are exactly true.”

  “Like a good window-thash,” James said, “or horth.”

  “That’s it,” Ed said. “You got it.”

  4

  “Look who’s here!” Ruth Thomas sang out, coming into the room, and whether she meant James, and intended the greeting to show that she had no hard feelings now, or meant, instead, the minister and the priest, whom she’d discovered in one of the hospital corridors and now brought into the room with her, James Page could not certainly determine.

  “H’lo, Ruth,” he said, and could hardly meet her eyes. For which reason, perhaps, she looked at him harder, all at once, and her face became serious, and she said:

  “James, I’m so glad you could come! You know, we’ve been worried about you. Is Sally out yet?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “But we’re here to pick up Ginny, and I got an idea old Thally’ll come out when we git Ginny home.”

  “Drat!” Ruth said, and clapped her hands. “If I’d known you’d be here I’d have brought Sally’s plant book.”

  “Plant book?” James said.

  “For her coleus, you know.”

  “Coleuth?”

  “Really, James! Sally’s precious coleus that’s been dying for months. I got a plant book out of the library for her, so maybe she can find out what’s wrong with the poor thing and doctor it. She’s tried everything she knows, so she tells me—more water, less water, moving it around the room—”

  “Thallyth got a coleuth in her room?” James said, head cocked.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  James nodded. “It’ll die.”

  “It is dying.” She looked at him. “Why?”

  “Ith them appleth,” he said. “Planth can’t live around appleth. We got appleth in the attic.”

  “He’s right,” Ed said, opening his eyes.

  “Why James, you should have told her!” Ruth said, indignant.

  “Thee didn’t athk,” James said.

  “Hello there, James,” Lane Walker said.

  James looked around Ruth and nodded his greeting, and the minister smiled and bowed as if that adventure in the kitchen had slipped his mind entirely. That was a curious trait in human beings, James had noticed, a trait they seemed to share with no other animal he was acquainted with excepting dogs. Hit a horse on the nose, or even a cussed chicken, he’d take a good while to make up with you, but a human being that could keep his mind firmly on a grudge (if he knew beforehand your better as well as your worse side) had to be—like Sally—exceptional. The priest’s smile was a good deal more reserved, which was not, of course, too surprising. You couldn’t say they’d hit it off, that one and only night they’d ever met. On the other hand, James, for one, had revised his opinion some. He remembered how the man had stood there facing him, even when the shotgun was up at James’ shoulder and pointing at his head. Any ordinary man would have clim the wall. Not only that, in the time since that evening James had come even to admire the man’s standing there laughing at him, there when the truck burned and he was sitting in the tree. A man who slinked and cowered had never been the old man’s favorite kind of animal—it was the one thing he’d hated in his son Richard—nor did he care for a man in the obsequious professions—ministers, dentists, and undertakers—who advertised his calling on his face. Unfortunately, being not well equipped when it came to social graces, James Page had no way of communicating this change of opinion to the Mexican, who seemed to him now to be watching him exactly as he might a black insect in a jar. James’ nod was so cautious—unbeknownst to James—that the Mexican didn’t even see it and assumed James intended to be offensive. He looked above James’ head, giving him no sign of greeting, then pointedly smiled at Ed Thomas and went over to the bed.

  “Feeling better today?” he said.

  “Not really,” Ed said.

  “I’m sorry to hee-ur that!”

  James Page lightly tapped his mouth with his fist, watching Ed and the Mexican and feeling guiltier by the minute. Lane Walker had gone now to the end of the room to bring the green vinyl visitor’s chair to Ruth. James, with a look of surprise, hurried after him. “Here,” he said, “let me help you with that!” The minister hardly needed help, the chair-legs had taps and slid easily across the thick, highly polished linoleum, but he accepted, with a private grin, the old man’s help. Lane Walker thought: Trying to make up, are we? Having second thoughts like old Adam? A curious fact about Lane Walker’s character was that he thought theologically all the time, exactly as writers think always as writers and first-rate businessmen think only of business.

  “Here, Ruth,” James said, “have a theat.”

  “Why thank you, James,” Ruth said, preparing to sit and glancing at Lane Walker. “What are you smiling at?” she said. “You look like the cat that ate the canary!”

  “Well I’ll tell you,” Lane said, making, suddenly, another impish decision. “I was thinking how guilty some people feel if they’re poor benighted souls and not true, orthodox, educated Christians who are joyfully aware their salvation is fully accomplished and no questions asked if they’ll just turn to Jesus.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Ruth said, and because the man’s elvish grin was infectious, she too began to smile.

  “I’m talking about people who turn to drink in their troubles, and not to Jesus. I’m talkin about people who harden their hearts about their brothers and even sisters!”

  Her eyes widened. “Why Lane!” she said, “stop that!”

  But he wouldn’t be stopped. “And talkin bout people, even ministers of the Lord, who won’t reach out to those poor benighted people in the darkness of their misery and benightedness and say, ‘Brother, the Lord forgives you and even I forgive you.’”

  James glanced in panic at the Mexican. The man was smiling, looking like a huge sheepish frog. By accident their eyes met, James’ and the priest’s, and automatically they nodded.

  “Ah!” Lane said. “Signs of hope! Forms of civility! Hallaluja!”

  Ed Thomas grinned, then closed his eyes.

  “I swear,” Ruth said, “it’s a wonder they don’t defrock you, the way you mock religion!”

  “He wasn’t mocking,” the priest said—and even James Page understood that it was true—“that is religion.”

  5

  When Lewis arrived with Ginny, they all fell silent; for a moment not even Ruth Thomas could think what to say. Ginny seemed transformed by the accident, and though in fact she would soon be her former self—except in one respect, as only Lewis was as yet aware—it was hard to believe, as they looked at her now, that she would ever again be the same. She was white as a sheet; part of her right eyebrow had been shaved; and from the eyebrow to her scalp-line ran an ugly, tightly sewed up gash. If the crate had struck three inches farther back
, the doctor had told Lewis, if it had struck her, that is, on the temple, she would have been killed.

  It was James who spoke first. “Hi, Ginny,” he said, going to her, reaching out to touch her.

  She smiled vaguely, as if almost but not quite recognizing him.

  “The poor thing!” Ruth said, pushing down on the chair-arms, laboring to rise.

  “Don’t get up,” Lewis said, still holding his wife’s hand. “We got to go ennaway. Got to pick up Dickey.” Then he called past her, “Hi there, Ed. Any better?”

  “Gettin there,” Ed said, and raised his arm a few inches as if to wave.

  “You’ll show ’em,” Lewis said. He glanced at Lane Walker and then at Rafe Hernandez, bobbing his head to each of them, shy and eager to be away. “Mahnin, Reverend. Mahnin, sir.”

  As they greeted him he backed toward the door. Ginny turned, looked at him uncomprehendingly as he pulled at her arm, then docilely followed. James bowed good-byes and left behind her.

  In the car the old man took the back seat, the left-hand side, and rode leaning far forward so that his forearms lay flat on the back of Lewis’s seat, so that he could watch his daughter, sitting on the right in front. Nobody spoke. Ginny rode staring straight in front of her, on her face an expression frightening because it was not an expression, a kind of smile without humor or even life in it. Her throat was—as Ed’s face had been, back at the hospital—bluish white, that same blue of shadows on the January snow.

  “They thay Ginny be ah right, hey Lewis?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Well then I gueth thee will be.”

  “I guess so,” Lewis said.

  They turned onto Pleasant Street. Small, shabby houses; by the curb an old Volkswagen with one fender the wrong color.

  “Where we going?” James said.

  “Got to pick up Dickey,” Lewis said.

  “Oh, thath right. I fahgot.”

  He stopped in front of a dark green house and got out. James continued to look at Ginny. He leaned farther forward and said, “Doth it hurt, honey?”

  After a moment, she turned her head slowly and looked at him. Please, God, he whispered inside his mind. It was his first prayer in years, the first since his wife died, when he’d carefully, tortuously written down in his Agro book his prayer for punishment, or understanding, or at least death. It was nothing like death that he prayed for now.

  Then Lewis came out, holding Dickey’s hand—there was a young, thin woman in a housecoat at the door, or perhaps not a woman but a child, the old man couldn’t tell for sure—and Dickey got in with them, sitting in back on the right. Exhaust fumes came pouring in while Dickey had the door open.

  “Ah you ok, Mommy?” he said.

  “Hi, honey,” she said. It made them all start. But the next instant she was as far away as ever.

  “She knew me!” Dickey said, keeping his father from closing the door.

  “I saw,” Lewis said. “Draw yer head in.”

  The old man batted away exhaust fumes. Lewis slammed the door and walked around to the driver’s seat, got in, closed the door, and nosed back out into the street.

  “Ith a funny thing thee’d know Dickey and not her own father,” James said.

  Lewis smiled and drove in silence.

  James’ mind went back to Ed, lying there in the hospital, maybe dying. So he believed, and so it looked. All because of him, James Page, and his sister Sally. He thought about the story of the white bear. It was a queer thing to have forgotten. He must’ve heard it a hundred times. As Ed was telling it he’d seen her plain, flying in the buggy behind the runaway horse, with her yellow, yellow hair. He remembered picking her up one time in his own buggy—remembered the black-tailed, chestnut horse, the shine of lines hanging down over the thill. He remembered Ariah’s round, smiling face, two dimples cut into it, a small, pretty nose. She had not been strikingly beautiful, like Sally, but she had been good—loving and lovable—in a way Sally would have no way even of perceiving. He stared hard at the frozen mental image: Ariah in sunlight looking up at him, the lines hanging down—which meant that he was soon to jump down from the buggy and help her up in—but, strangely, he couldn’t remember jumping down, couldn’t remember what it was he’d just said that had made her smile, if that was why she was smiling, couldn’t remember where, or when …

  The sky was still the same clear blue; the valley below where the road climbed, and the mountain range beyond, were scratchy with trees; in the middle of the valley, the village sat like a village of toy houses, a Christmas village waiting for fake snow and lights. He thought of Merton’s Hideaway and of the drunken writer, thought of how the man had turned to stare at him, stared as if to consume him, put him in some book. Nothing wrong with that, of course, James reflected, dubious. Mr. Rockwell put people in his pictures—real people, many of whom James Page had known: his cousin Sharon O’Neil a time or two, Lee Marsh’s wife and Mrs. Crofut, once or twice Grandma Moses herself. No harm. But of course Mr. Rockwell had always meant no harm, which was why he’d achieved it. He’d meant to paint the way things could be, he’d explained once to the schoolchildren, and to paint how some of the time, if people will stay awake, things actually are. People always thought of him as a happy man, and he had been, in a way—all his friends right there around him, and getting paid for doing what he would’ve done anyway—but there was another, less cheerful side to him, they said in Arlington; there were times he seemed weighed down with grief, they said, and James had some evidence that it was true.

  Perhaps all Vermonters were inclined to be pessimists, but the painter had not only expected the worst, he’d brooded on it. “The country’s ill,” he’d said one time, sitting on the porch at Pelham’s place, James Page standing below him with a glass of ice-tea. (James had come to Pelham’s delivering wood, and Mrs. Pelham had asked him if he’d mind a little tea.) “The country’s ill,” the man had said. “Christianity’s ill. Sometimes I feel a little shaggy myself.” They’d all laughed, including the painter. But a few minutes later, getting into his truck, James had looked at the tall, skinny artist, and he’d understood by the expression on the man’s face in repose that he’d been dead serious, at least about the country and Christianity: that for all his easy ways, his security in this safe, sunlit village in Vermont where they were still in the nineteenth century, he was worried, smoking day and night just like Ginny, and now and then frowning the way Ginny would sometimes do when she wasn’t aware you were watching her. The man had painted as if he had a devil in him, so people said that knew him, sitting or standing there legs akimbo, straight pipe clenched in his long, yellow teeth, small blue eyes glittering. Painted as if his pictures might check the decay—decay that, in those days, most people hadn’t yet glimpsed.

  “Tell me the story about the parson,” Dickey said.

  James turned, eyebrows lowered, shifting his gaze reluctantly from his daughter’s face. “Parthon?”

  Dickey nodded. He had his hands in his lap, as if making a point, for James’ benefit, of his excellent behavior. “You know,” he said, “The one about Parson Dewey and the hero.”

  “Ah!” James said. “That parthon.” He sat back a little, to give the story proper weight. “On the Thunday right after the battle of Fort Ticonderoga, when Ethan Allen hit the Redcoath from behind, thneakin up on ’em by climbing a cliff and dragging up hith cannonth—an impothable feat, moth people will agree—and that thon-of-a-gun hunk of rock Ethan Allen did it drunk—Jede-diah Dewey wath thaying a long prayer in the pulpit, thanking God for the victory at Fort Ticonderoga, and giving God all the credit for it. Ethan Allen couldn’t thtand it, and finally he jumped up—all thix-foot-thix of him—and thouted to the minithter, ‘Parthon Dewey! Parthon Dewey!’ Three timeth he thouted it. ‘Parthon Dewey!’ he thouted. Jedediah blinked and come out of his tranth and thaid, ‘Thir?’ Ethan Allen thaid, ‘Would ye pleath mention to the Lord about my being there?’”

  Dickey laughe
d, as usual—possibly, James knew, as a kindness.

  “Is that story s’posed to be true?” Lewis said.

  “Everythin they tell about Ethan Allen ith true,” James said. “Thath what maketh a hero.”

  6

  The old woman came out of her room for many reasons, the least of which was that, in a technical sense, at least, she won the war. In fact, she hardly noticed the victory when it came. James had come up to use the bathroom—Lewis was in the hallway, painting, and her door was unlocked, because Lewis said he couldn’t finish scraping if she wouldn’t please open it—and James, after he was finished in the bathroom, came over and said: “Ed Thomath tellth me TV ith a wonderful invention, around electhion time. I hadn’t thought of that.—Heeth not too well, by the way. Himthelf, he don’t think he’ll pull through.”

  “What?” she said, alarmed, opening the door more and looking at his face.

  “He lookth bad, truth of it.”

  She cocked her head out to look at Lewis. “He took a turn for the worse?” She brought her hands up to her heart.

  Lewis kept his eye on the paintbrush. He was painting the doorframe shiny white; hadn’t even asked her what color she’d prefer. But despite her irritation she returned her mind to Ed, and to poor Ruth. Lewis said, “He’s awful pale, looks to me. Weak as a kitten.”

  Before she knew it, she was out in the hall. “Poor Ruth,” she said. She remembered vividly, for the thousandth time, how she’d wept and wept, that terrible Halloween twenty years ago, half in fear, half from loss. She’d found him sitting in his chair, still warm, his record caught in a groove—it was that that had made her come in. She found herself speaking of it, looking at James, at the same time seeing Ruth in her mind’s eye. “I remember how it was when Horace died. I thought I’d die myself, of crying. At least, with Ruth, there’ll be no mystery to it, nothing to be afraid of.”