The Art of Living

by John Gardner

  At this moment, as if summoned by her words, something came charging from the books, terribly shrieking. It came straight toward me. I couldn’t make out what it was, at first. It was brighter than the light from a bursting star, coming straight at me with a clatter and roar like a lightning-ball. At the last instant, I saw the apparition with absolute clarity: the hero of my youth—I was sixteen when I first read a version of his story—Achilles! Without a word, without an instant’s hesitation, he raised his sword and struck. In amazement, I watched blood rush down my chest from the deep wound in my neck. I stared at him in horror—more horror than disbelief. It was incredible! He was the hero of absolute justice, God-sent doom, terrible purgation, and I was—I screamed with all my might—“Not guilty!” He stared at me, baffled. Perhaps he spoke no English; or perhaps he was amazed that, wounded as I was, I could still speak. He raised his huge sword to strike again.

  My wife cried, from somewhere far away, “Winfred!” And then again, from somewhere nearer, “Winfred!”

  He turned, listening, more baffled than before. Slowly, carefully, eyes somewhat confused, he raised that huge, gleaming knife.

  Now she was behind me. “You were screaming! Have you gone crazy?” she demanded. He stood teetering the knife, as if he imagined I was moving, like a chicken who nervously twists its neck on the block.

  “Winfred,” she whispered, “what’s come over you?”

  Achilles, lover of justice and truth, glanced past his shoulder as if for invisible support, then swung again, this time softly, uncertainly, though his blade nonetheless cut the tendon that held my neck to my right shoulder.

  “Winfred!” cried my wife. “Say something! What’s the matter with you?”

  I sat hunched forward, hiding my condition as well as possible. Abruptly, seeing that I would not speak or turn, she left me, furiously whispering to herself.

  Not to make too much of it, I knew then and there that I was dying.

  Though time is running out—each word I write is more shaky than the last—let me pause to discuss this peculiar situation. If my sentence ends in the middle, so it ends. Goodbye, God bless you. So I pray while I still have the strength.

  Let us say, for the sake of argument, that I’m not dying but going mad. (I’m obviously rational, but no one’s more rational than a maniac, this I know. My wife, you may say, does not seem to see Achilles; but my wife is no test of reality. She too comes from a long line of lunatics, all people of substance in their day, like myself.) Very well, let us say, for argument’s sake, that I am mad. Here sits character x, a madman, struck a mortal blow by character y, a fiction. What can x do, mad as he is, but struggle to maintain justice, normality?

  Perhaps my father is unjustly accused. The judge who committed him is afraid of black cats. Even the testimony I myself gave may not have been quite fair, though to the best of my knowledge it was true. My wife also may be unjustly accused, insofar as I accuse her of imbalance. But this much, at least, seems certainly true: if a fictional character, namely Achilles, can make blood run down my chest (if it is indeed running down my chest), then a living character, or two such characters—my father and my wife—can be made to live forever, simply by being put in a fiction.

  For this reason—though possibly it makes no sense, possibly I’m making some outlandish mistake—I sit at my desk in this library, writing while the blood runs out of me, the moon hides in clouds, and the fire in the fireplace burns down to ash—Achilles, five feet tall, rather larger than the others, hacking and chopping at my shoulders and spine, while Tom Jones, Gulliver, Hamlet, and many others stand cheering, booing, or complaining in the shadows, taking note of my demise or ignoring it, involved in their own huge affairs. For this reason I construct the following, which I’ll pursue as time allows.

  “Ah, Greer, what a good, gentle woman you are,” says my father.

  She shakes her head, gloomy, and with her long fingers turns the cup handle north. The table runs east and west. “You’re babbling,” says my wife.

  Her irritation surprises him, and he glances up at her, then down again at his knees. “That’s not what I meant,” he says.

  She rises suddenly, goes over and opens the icebox door, and, like a child, stands looking inside. “Christ,” she says.

  “No cheese?” he asks. He has no idea why he thinks she’s looking for cheese.

  “Cheese?” she asks, more irritable than before. She looks at him. He can see that she thinks he’s crazy. He could make a fire in the sink, she wouldn’t think it more crazy than his assumption that she’s looking for cheese. She comes back to the table with the milk pitcher and a glass.

  My father feels pain, a light ticking exactly in the center of his chest. Once, years ago, riding with my mother, he had to stop the car—she’d been bawling him out about his failure to press charges against someone who had robbed him—he had to stop the car and run down the road pell-mell to keep from having a heart attack.

  “All I meant …” says my father, and lets it trail off. With enormous effort, he reaches across the table and takes her hand.

  Tears burst into my wife’s eyes and spill down her cheeks. “Never mind,” she says. “I’m sorry.” She thinks about it, then slowly lowers her head to the tabletop. My father, after carefully thinking about it, raises his crooked, calloused hand and lowers it to touch her soft hair.

  “Dear God, if I were Winfred’s age,” my father complains. He moves the stiff hand to the side of her face and brushes the barely perceptible fuzz on her cheek. He does not touch the tears.

  “You’re crazy,” she says, and laughs, half crying. “Has it ever struck you that if you and I were normal people, like Winfred, for instance, in there turning the pages, one, two, three—”

  “Now now,” says my father. “When you’re my age you’ve thought about everything, more or less.” His hand moves slowly, gently, over her hair. He’s eighty-two. She’s thirty. No one would think him insane except that he once backed his truck through the plate-glass window of my bank.

  The hair prickles on the back of my neck, as if an ice-cold wind has touched it. Achilles, Lord of Justice, is standing in the doorway, dressed in a drab, neat suit, like a Jehovah’s Witness. I see that he has grasped the situation between my wife and my father.

  I snatch at his elbow. “No justice,” I plead, “enough of justice!”

  None of this is possible, I realize. My father is in the asylum, Achilles does not exist. I focus hard, trying to read what I have written. The desk is all blood.

  My head is filled with planets and stars. Achilles moves slowly toward my father, raising his knife.

  “Dear Heavenly Father,” I whisper with all my might, for any good fiction will serve in hard times—I clench my eyes against the tumbling of the planets—“Dear Heavenly Father,” I whisper with all my might.

  THE JOY

  OF THE JUST

  1

  There’s all kinds of justice, I suppose you might say. But give me the justice of Aunt Ella Reikert, the time she got run off the road by the Preacher’s wife, down on Boskydell Road, this side of Makanda. By the time she got, for the second time, to the diner that her niece’s husband ran—one of her real nieces, not one of the hundred, maybe two hundred kids that imagined “Aunt Ella” was her natural designation—she was hopping mad. She pulled that half-demolished old square-framed black-and-yellow Dodge up in front of the gaspumps and pushed open the only door that still worked. The car had rolled just once. The sticky red gumbo in the creekbed stopped it. The only real damage was to the tires and roof and sides—the whole right side of the roof was caved in so it looked like a chicken coop or hog-shed on wheels—or that was the only real damage unless you counted (and she did) the damage the Hume boys had done with their tractor, pulling it out of the mud and up onto the road. They’d broken off both bumpers with their chain, one after the other, and then they’d looped the chain around the right-hand windshield post and broke that. When they’d star
ted hitching onto the runningboard she’d made Ralph get out of the car, cast and all, and make them stop. He looked sadder than usual when she made him get out in that mud. He was sure he’d broken his leg all over again, which he had. But he got at least one crutch out the door, and all of his wide pink nose, and he said, looking as if he might cry, “Come on now, Gib, you mind Aunt Ella.” She’d told them and told them they ought to use mules, they pulled easier; but they wouldn’t try it, or not till they thought of it themselves. When it worked they grinned at her and said, “Now didn’t we tell you we’d lug you out, Aunt Ella? There it is, setting in the sunshine as good as new, almost.” If she hadn’t been so angry at the Preacher she’d have given them a switching apiece, big as they were.

  She got out nimbly for a woman of her years, considering the trouble she had with her knees, and she slammed the car door, forgetting Ralph would be coming out behind her since the door on his side wouldn’t open. The window hit him squarely, high on the forehead, and he sat still a minute, wincing so hard you could see most of his gums, and he was rubbing his pink bald spot with both pink hands. Then he opened the door again and got his crutches under his armpits and started for the diner.

  “Leon,” she said to her niece’s husband, “I been run off the road.”

  “Again?” he said.

  He stood there tall as a pinetree, grinning at her, wiping his hands on a dishtowel. Darthamae came into the doorway behind him, holding the baby. The dog was with her.

  “No, the same time,” Aunt Ella said. “Wasn’t it bad enough once?”

  “But that was three days ago, Aunt Ella,” Darthamae said. It was Leon who’d put on four new tires for her and straightened the fenders so the wheels would turn. She’d come into the Dew Drop Inn on the rims, the tires cut to ribbons and flopping, one of them completely gone, the whole car screaming like a cow the slaughterer’s maul had glanced off too lightly. He’d bent the fenders into shape by hand, as if easily. For the roof he was going to need tools, though; and Aunt Ella was too angry and impatient to leave the car.

  She said now, “It don’t make a particle of difference how many days ago it was.” Both her hands and her head were shaking, and her false teeth barely kept rhythm with her tongue. “I been shamed and humiliated and there’ll not a soul lift a finger in my behalf.”

  “Now Aunt Ella,” Leon said.

  “I been to the lawyer and I’ve got no legal recourse, that’s what he said.”

  “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” Leon said sadly.

  “Now don’t you mock, young man,” she said. She shook her finger. “He that saith unto the wicked, Thou art righteous, him shall the people curse, nations shall abhor him; but to them that rebuke him shall be delight, and a good blessing shall come upon them.”

  “The meek shall inherit the earth,” Leon said.

  “Leave not thy place, for yielding pacifieth great offenses,” she said.

  “And the greatest of these is charity,” he said.

  “Leon, stop it,” Darthamae broke in. The dog looked up at her to see if she meant him too.

  “Come on in and sit down, Aunt Ella,” Leon said, timid all at once, ashamed of himself—as he usually was when Darthamae came down on him. He pulled off the army cap he always wore and led Aunt Ella to the middle booth, poor Ralph hopping along behind. It came to Leon too late that with her gimpy knees she couldn’t comfortably get into the booth, and neither could Ralph with his leg in a cast. He brought over chairs for them and set them down facing out the window to talk to the gaspumps and the highway. It was a bad arrangement, he saw right away. With the wrecked car sitting in front of her—the car she’d taken care of all these years like the child of her own she’d never had—she couldn’t forget her indignation for a minute. Leon squeezed into the booth himself and sat wedged there, hands folded, trying to look sympathetic. “Darthamae,” he said, “bring over some tea for Aunt Ella.” She got the tea, carrying the baby on her hip. The baby kept his eyes on them, especially on Ralph. Neither Leon nor Darthamae thought of getting tea for Ralph too.

  “Boo!” Ralph said to the baby. The baby looked at him.

  “It was the Preacher’s wife,” Aunt Ella said.

  “We know that, Aunt Ella,” Leon said. “That’s what you told us before.”

  Nevertheless, she said it again. “It was her, it wasn’t him at all. As I hope for Glory there wasn’t a soul in that blessed car but her.” She was outraged, which made her palsy worse. Her eyes were big as saucers, and her nose twitched. She told them the whole story again, fighting her teeth over every third word—it must be fifteen times she told it by now—and they shook their heads and nodded and agreed.

  It was Monday. She was only going over to Henry Hawkins’ for milk and eggs, not a two-mile drive and all country road, as sunny a day as you’d hope to see. She’d been driving herself because she hadn’t any choice, Cousin Gordon was over to the market with his turkeys, and Ralph was laid up with a broken leg from Sylvester Lipe’s running him over with the buckrake. Ralph had no license anyway, but the sheriff allowed him to drive the truck between fields, as long as he kept it in low-low and off on the shoulder. It was wrong, her driving an automobile with her eyes not what they used to be (from the front pew she couldn’t see whether the Preacher was bowing or looking at the ceiling). But a person had to eat, and there was Ralph to think of, her own dead sister’s son. And so she was inching around the corner, not yet three rods from the foot of her driveway, heading up toward the church, when there was the Preacher’s car heading straight toward her, way over on the wrong-hand side of the road, and she’d had to take the ditch. When they were sitting down there in the creekbed and the Preacher’s car jacked up on the shoulder from when it had started to follow them down, who should they see climbing out of that car but the Preacher’s wife, all painted up with rouge and lipstick, running up the hill for her house. (“It was her,” she said fiercely. “I told them and told them who it was. Who was it, Ralph?” “It was her,” he said.) And then pretty quick down comes the Preacher, still wearing his black-and-white cowboy shirt from riding that palomino horse, and he came down to the cattails where the mud began and leaned toward them, saying, “You all right, Sister Reikert?” “Don’t you sister me” she said. “Your wife run me clear off the road.” “My wife?” he said. “Why, Sister, my wife hasn’t even got a driver’s license.”

  And he’d stuck to it. He’d told the deputy how sorry he was, Sister Reikert had been over on his side of the road and hadn’t seen him till the last minute and he’d surely be glad to help defray the expenses of fixing her car. “Why that’s a blessed lie,” she’d said, “it was his wife driving. Ralph, tell them it was his wife.” “It was his wife,” Ralph said. But they didn’t believe her, nor Ralph either. He was the Preacher, and she was half blind, and Ralph would say anything she told him. He’d say it was Grover Cleveland, if Aunt Ella said to. He’d even believe it. “Are you saying I’m bearing false witness?” she said. The deputy said (no more than a youngster; he was one of the Howard children), “We just think you might be mistaken, Aunt Ella, what with your eyesight. We’ll look into it, you can be sure.” Yes indeed. Shortly after Doomsday. She’d said to Ed Hume, “Ed Hume, he was never in that car at all. He was up on that palomino horse he bought with people’s tithes.” “That may be so,” Ed Hume said, “and then again it may not be so.” “Well I saw him,” she said. “If I never saw him the Lord strike me dead on this spot.” Ed Hume took a puff from his cigar and looked at his shoes and said, “Anyways, I’ll send down the boys to try and lug you out.”

  Leon shook his head sadly.

  “He never believed me,” Aunt Ella said. “I nursed him through scarlet fever when he was no more than a little thing, but he never believed me now.”

  “It’s criminal,” Darthamae said. She shifted the baby to her other hip, and Aunt Ella looked at him. After a minute she patted the baby’s shoulder, her hand as stiff as wood. The baby rolled his e
yes down to look at the fingers and smiled, drooling. “Bless him,” she said, but only from habit; she was still thinking of the Preacher’s wife. The dog lay next to the foot of Ralph’s cast, sniffing at it.

  Leon James tapped the tips of his fingers together. “Aunt Ella,” he said, “let’s try and be reasonable about this. It was a bad thing for the Preacher to do, we all admit….”

  “Preacher!” she said. Her mouth worked as if she were lining up her teeth, getting ready to spit.

  “Ain’t much of a preacher,” Ralph said, speaking slowly, concentrating on getting the sounds right so they’d understand him. He shook his head.

  “Let’s look at this thing from the Preacher’s side,” Leon said. “He’s a young man yet, you’ve got to remember. He’s not mature in judgment.” He sighed, once more tapping his fingers together. He was moved for a moment, thinking of judgment. Then he was moved by the thought of youth. (Sometimes looking at Darthamae sitting at the window with the baby, light falling into the nearly-one-year-old’s delicate new-grown hair and into Darthamae’s, rich and full and warm as ripe wheat or an orchard in August—or looking at the flawless smoothness of their faces, the child’s still innocent and undefined, Darthamae’s blooming and too easily wise—the heaviness of his middle age, the indignity of his baldness and, worse, his monstrous, gangling, ridiculous height seemed more than he could carry. He could envy Ralph, a man still innocent at forty, kicked by a cow at the age of six and transformed to a kind of earthly angel, his baldness a halo, the lines at his eyes mere weather marks like the cracks in a smooth old rock.) “It’s his first call, this job here, and everything’s gone well for him so far. The people all like him. He gives good sermons. He’s found himself a pretty wife—”