October Light

by John Gardner

  “Mythtery?” he asked blankly.

  “The door was open, you remember,” she said. “That may have had nothing to do with it, he may have just then given some child his treat—it happened on Halloween—and before he got the door closed, he had his attack. But I kept thinking at the time—I sometimes think now …”

  James was squinting, waiting as if alarmed.

  “I keep thinking, what if he’d just seen something—or someone—and whatever it was meant to frighten him, and gave him that heart attack. They must have known, if that’s what happened, but they ran, let him stagger over to his chair and … A child, I suppose. But how could a child—” She broke off, looking at him. “What, James?”

  The old man was twitching, feeling his chin with his fingertips, one muscle ticking rapidly in his cheek as if some control had snapped. Now the side of his neck began to throb as if his heart had sped up, and there was something around his face, or for an instant so it seemed, a dark light.

  Lewis came nearer, watching from behind her shoulder.

  James said, turning away to the right as if unaware he was doing it, beginning a slow, complete circle, “You never told me the door wath open.”

  “I told the police.” A shiver went up her back, and the hallway snapped into sharper focus, exactly as if this were a dream, not really happening—a dream that had been sunlit and pleasant and now suddenly was changing.

  “But you never told me,” he yelled.

  “James,” she said, voice low in fear of him, “tell me what you’re thinking?”

  He seemed far away, still making his circle, rubbing the sides of his chest. “I will,” he said, “don’t worry. Let me think.”

  She turned to glance at Lewis. Without speaking or moving he convinced her it was best not to press, give the old man his time.

  James, having completed his full circle, turned to the right again as if to make another, but this time he came out of it and moved toward the head of the stairs and then, after some thought, slowly down to the kitchen.

  “I’ll get dressed,” Sally said.

  Lewis nodded.

  James, stepping into the kitchen, could hardly see. He rubbed away tears with his fingertips—he couldn’t tell whether they were tears of fear or sorrow or shame or what. Maybe all of that, or maybe mere words were too narrow for the feeling charging through him like a fire. It was as if, suddenly, he had fallen back into the world, found the magic door. He saw Ariah’s face clearly, as he hadn’t remembered it for a long time—saw her as a young woman, laughing with just a touch of fright in her voice as he pushed her on the swing; saw her laughing again, a few years older, sitting around the table at (it must have been) Thanksgiving time at the Blackmer house, hearing old man Dewey, Jede-diah’s great-great-grandson, tell the story of the time the sleigh tipped over, and all the Dewey women were hurled into the street and it was revealed to all Bennington that under their long black skirts they wore petticoats splashed with every color in the rainbow. He saw her in her last illness reaching to touch his cheek, saying Oh James, James, forgiving him—and forgiving herself—though he, even when she was dying, could forgive neither one of them. More pictures of her rose, one after another, it was as if he had suddenly been given back his life, and, still weeping, groping ahead of himself with one hand, he moved as quickly as he could toward the living room, because it was there that the albums were, and he wanted to look, find out if the pictures had come alive again.

  Ginny was on the couch, sitting perfectly still. Dickey snuggled up beside her, holding her hand.

  “Hi, honey,” James said, and again he brushed away the tears, wanting to see her.

  She smiled, and this time he knew that, for a minute, anyway, she’d known him. Thank God. Thank God!

  “She can talk,” Dickey said. “She talked to me.”

  “Thank God,” he said.

  And then, because he could do nothing for Ginny that Dickey wasn’t doing, and maybe doing better than he could now, he moved on past them and over to the bookshelf to the left of the fireplace and bent down and drew out the albums. He opened the oldest of them—dust flew, and it seemed that the paper itself was partly made of dust—opened it hungrily, and the first picture of her he saw leaped alive in his mind as if her ghost had come back to remind him that life had been good once, of course it had been, and that life was good, as poor Ed Thomas understood now more clearly than ever, now that he was dying. He saw a picture of her standing in snowshoes, grinning, a dog beside her—even the dog’s name came back to him: Angus. There she was on a tractor, and there looking out from the porch they’d had on the house at that time, she was leaning coyly against the pillar. He remembered the time. Remembered all the times. Also this: she was sewing, sitting in an island of light. As he came into the room, having just finished chores and brought the milk in, she looked up and said suddenly, as if otherwise she mightn’t get it out, “Richard’s sick, James. Ill.”

  “Richard?” he’d said.

  She’d looked down then, face flushing. “It’s something he’s done,” she said almost inaudibly. “Five years ago.”

  “That’s why he’s turned to a drunkahd?”

  “I suppose so.” Still her head was bowed, light pouring over it, the hair brown, streaked with gray, yet pretty, that instant.

  “What was it?”

  “It’s better if Richard tells you, when he comes over.”

  “What was it?” he’d insisted. “Women?” He’d seen one at his house one time, staring out the window.

  She shook her head, tears running down her cheeks. “I can’t tell you,” she’d answered, not rising, not even looking up at him, yet for all that standing up to him; it wasn’t usually her way. She said, “I told him I wouldn’t.” It was she who’d made the boy weak. She said so.

  When he’d come the next day and James had demanded to know what he’d done, what was wrong with him—his son had whiskey on his breath, as usual—the boy had blanched and refused to say a word except, “Tell you, you old bastahd?” He gave a kind of laugh, that cowardly-sounding laugh he’d had all his life, and he’d brought out, already ducking like a gun-shy dog, “I’d die first,” laughing again. It was because of the laugh and because he was ducking already that James had slapped him. The boy had stared, as if some terrible suspicion was confirmed, and had abruptly walked away. He’d gone over to his own house and gotten himself drunk—he’d never have had the nerve for it otherwise—and he’d hanged himself. When he was dead, Ariah wouldn’t tell what it was he’d done, clinging foolishly to the promise she’d given him, even now when he was dead and it meant nothing, promise to a manure pile. “It’s too late,” she’d said, and had made James understand—whether or not it was what she meant him to understand—that she would not stop blaming him for the boy’s death, even in her grave. If they’d had time no doubt they’d have softened, both of them, though a year after his suicide she had still not said a word. Then one day there were bumps in her armpits and the backs of her knees. Four months later she was buried, and even in his grief he had found he couldn’t picture her in his mind.

  Now he knew and could see that he’d misunderstood completely. The boy had had reason to be afraid to give an answer. James would have told Sally, would have taken the boy by the scruff of the neck for all his twenty-five years and would have made him face up. The boy had known, as his mother had known, because all his life, he understood now, James Page had had a petty-minded notion of truth, had been a dangerous fool.

  Guilt. All this time he’d carried it, a burden that had bent his whole life double and when he caught it and held it in his two hands and opened them, there was nothing there. He’d been benighted, just as the minister said. And she too, poor Ariah, had gone to her grave full of guilt because, having told James, she blamed herself for the suicide. And the boy—James brushed away tears again, crossly—it had not been rage at his father, had not been revenge, or only a little of it was that. It had been the burden
of five years’ nurtured guilt at the fact that, in some foolish or maybe drunken prank—Richard had been twenty, a grown man, or so Richard would have thought, though no man of seventy-two would allow that a boy of twenty was grown—the boy had frightened his uncle to death, and, cowardly all his life (whipped all his life, threatened and hollered at and told he was a coward—James would face all of it, now that he’d come to), he had not even stayed or cried out to his aunt for help, but had been true to the image James Page had created for him to live by, or both James and Ariah and even little Ginny—they’d all been in on the conspiracy—and had fled. Benighted, the lot of them, himself worst of all. He’d prayed for punishment, and had been punished well: punished years before the prayer.

  Tears streamed down the old man’s face, though what he felt did not even seem sorrow, seemed merely knowledge, knowledge of them all from inside, understanding of the waste. Again he wiped his eyes, drying them on his sleeve. When he could see again, Ginny was looking at him. Her mind had cleared.

  “Dad!” she said, starting to rise, then sinking back again. “Are you all right?”

  “Ginny, you’re better!” he cried.

  She tried again to get up from the couch—Dickey drew back—and for an instant the fog was there again, but then again her eyes cleared, She raised two fingers to her forehead to touch the wound. “What happened?” she exclaimed.

  “Ith all right,” James told her, going to her. “Crate of appleth fell down on ye.”

  “Aunt Sally made a trap for Grampa,” Dickey said eagerly, then glanced at James to see if it was all right.

  “And you walked into it,” James said.

  Now Lewis and Aunt Sally were there, pleased to see her rational again.

  “Ginny, my poor darling!” Sally said, hurrying to her.

  “Boy, do I feel funny!” Ginny said. She looked around the room. “Anybody seen my cigarettes?”

  “I got ’em,” Lewis said.

  “Thank heavens! Toss me one, would you, sweetie?”

  “No,” he said. He looked over at the wall, not straight at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “You’re quittin.”

  She stared at him—so did Sally—and for a moment it seemed that the fog had come back over Ginny. Then she said, blistering, “Lewis Hicks who in the hell do you think you are?”

  “Never mind,” he said, “you’re quittin.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “Is this a free country or isn’t it?”

  He looked over at the other wall. “No,” he said.

  7

  (The Intruder)

  Out by the hives, where he was finishing up with what he’d started that morning, taking the last of the honey out, removing the thick wax that meant a queen bee—she’d steal half the hive if he left her free to hatch—putting in sugar-water, then sealing up the hives—James Page had a strange experience. He was working in a daze, the shotgun leaning against a hive ten feet away from him, his hands automatic, his mind still engaged in savoring the pleasures and sorrows of memory. It had begun with a drone: looking at it, as he’d looked at drones thousands of times in his life, he’d remembered how sometimes he’d given Richard and Virginia drones to play with, when they were young—since drones would not sting and had only a short life anyway. He could see them both just as clear as day, and remembered they had both had, like their mother, yellow yellow hair. While he was staring at this image of his two children—his second son hadn’t yet been born at this time—he’d moved through the image of them to another, a memory of his wife.

  He’d come to pick her up in the buggy. It was a bright, bright day. He had no thought then of marrying; it would be years before he could afford to support a family—his father was at that time still running the farm, or his father and his uncle. And if he had thought of marrying, it would probably not have been Ariah he’d have thought of getting married to, supposing someone should have asked him, that moment, to make his choice. She was his good, delightful friend, from a family much better off than his, better educated, richer. There was no way on earth he could have asked her to marry him—except the way he did. She came running toward the buggy, smiling, glad to see him as she always was—it was a curious thing, what fun they’d had together all their lives, though of course they’d had their spats, mostly, he knew now, because of his excessive Yankee pride in workmanship, his greed, his refusal to stop and simply look, the way Ed Thomas had looked, or play—and he’d dropped the lines over the thill to get down from the buggy and help her. She’d stopped abruptly, four feet from the wheel, and said, “James Page you’ve got a mighty funny look on you. Tell me what you were thinking right then.” Before he knew he’d say it—from the pure, benighted habit of absolute honesty (when he heard himself saying it, it was as if it was coming from the sun above his head, or from God Himself, tricking him to happiness): “I was thinking I wish we could get married,” he said. She tipped her head sideways, smiling, showing her dimples, and said, “Let’s!” Three years later, they did.

  So the unlocking of his heart continued. He remembered the death of his younger son—that had been the first death—remembered Sally’s horror and indignation when Ginny got engaged to that strange looking Lewis Hicks. “He don’t seem a bad sort,” James had said. Sally had said, “She’s selling herself cheap. Our Ginny’s a wonderful and intelligent girl. Have you noticed that boy’s eyes?” “You don’t like him,” James had said smugly, “because he’s pot Indian.” That had pleased him—pleased him still, thinking back to it.

  While he was savoring his memories, by this time standing there motionless as a frog, snowy head bowed, something came up behind him or materialized from invisibility and draped its shadow over him. His blood ran cold—there was a smell of wildness—and slowly, expecting God knows what, he turned to look. Five feet away from him, between him and the gun, there stood what must’ve been—judging by the tracks when he examined them later—a six hundred pound black bear. Perhaps it had not realized the old man was here; perhaps it was sick, or paying no attention … It was an old bear, that much he knew at once, observing dispassionately even as his knees banged together. Around the bear’s muzzle the hair had all turned gray, and it seemed to James Page that there was something not quite right about the eyes.

  The two ancient creatures stared at one another, both of them standing more or less upright—the bear considerably more upright than the man—the old man unable to do a thing to defend himself, too weak-kneed to try running or even jump for the gun, his heart so hammering at the root of his throat that he could not even make a sound. He often thought, going over it later, how that Britisher must have felt when he looked up at the top of the wall by the cliff, there at Fort Ticonderoga, and beheld that stone man Ethan Allen towering against the stars and gray dawn, filling the sky with his obscenities. He, the Britisher, had been an ordinary man, as James Page, here among his hives, was only an ordinary man. Ethan Allen had been put upon the earth like Hercules, to show an impression of things beyond it. So it was with this enormous old bear that stood sniffing at the wind and studying him, uncertain what heaven had in mind. A full minute passed, and still the bear stood considering, as if baffled by where the old man had come from and what his purpose could be, creeping up on him. Then at last the bear went down on all fours again, turned to where the containers for the honeycombs sat, and began—as if he had all day and had forgotten James’ existence—to eat. James made for the gun and, despite the weakness of his legs, reached it. The bear turned, a low growl coming from low in his throat, then went back calmly to his business. James with wildly trembling hands raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed it at the back of the bear’s head. What happened then he could not clearly remember afterward. As he was about to pull the trigger, something jerked the gun straight up—possibly, of course, his own arm. He fired at the sky, as if warning a burglar. The bear jumped three feet into the air and began shaking exactly as the old man was doing, snatched up an arml
oad of honeycombs, and began to back off.

  “And you didn’t shoot at him?” Lewis said, looking thoughtfully past him with that one blue eye, one brown eye.

  “I fahgot!” James said, squeezing his lower lip between his right-hand finger and thumb.

  “It theemed like—” He broke off, realizing he must have, for an instant, fallen into a dream. It had seemed to the old man that the bear had said something, had said to him distinctly, reproachfully, Oh James, James!

  A BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN GARDNER

  John Gardner (1933–1982) was a bestselling and award-winning novelist and essayist, and one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, are noted for their intellectual depth and penetrating insight into human nature.

  Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for the rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977). After graduating from high school, Gardner earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1958, after which he entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life, including a period at Chico State College, where he taught writing to a young Raymond Carver.