John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Caroline Slaine was by all this not greatly impressed. Though Anglo-Irish and a lawyer, she had no more scruple than a butterfly, no more fear of his bluster than a fox in a chicken house. Though she couldn’t so express it in that sober time, not even secretly, he was a sexy old bastard and she wanted him. She summoned him therefore to her small, dark green, cluttered, book-and-map-filled office and, with a sweet imitation of feminine sternness, presented Orrick with her foreclosure threat. Luther Doane Orrick, breaker of horses, harrumphed twice, struck the floor with his cane, and denied her on grounds of principle, the principle being that he did not love her, not her nor no other Irishwoman, madam — no sir, by thunder, not even though she dared to declare herself of Protestant persuasion. From his positions, he told her, she would find him unmovable, no gilded rooster on a barn, that will turn with every wind. “Nonsense,” she said, and at once set in motion the foreclosure proceedings.

When it appeared that the fool would rather give up his land than relinquish a principle, she trumped up an incredible criminal charge — yet was it so incredible after all, one wonders, considering the causes he was willing to support, the secret meetings he thought it honorable to attend? — at which point he said, or is said to have said, “Woman, what the devil are you after?” to which she is said to have responded — salaciously, considering the age in which they lived—“Children.” She started, with easy Ram-child firmness, proceedings on the criminal charge against Orrick, and he hastily gave in. He could part with the ancestral estate (at the outside, nine hundred acres), but not with his good name. He was a ceremonious man, a high-ranking member of the Society of Freemasons (he would be buried with terrifying Masonic ritual, his grandson Buddy watching with wide, alarmed eyes), he was a titled officer in the local Grange League Fellowship, and he was, it would be discovered soon after his death, an officer in the Ku Klux Klan. What the Klan was up to in western New York in the late 1930s has never been certain. As an abolitionist and dedicated Yankee, Luther Orrick had nothing against the Negro race, of which Genesee County had then no representatives; but there were Catholics aplenty, a dangerous brood of drunken vipers, speakers of a wickedly ungrammatical English, suivants of a foreign potentate, the pope, hence a knife aimed directly at the heart of the American Experiment.

But mockery is always an easy thing; it brings down republics, schools of philosophy, and personal reputations without regard for truth or justice. “If the world ends in fire,” Martin Orrick would write (though he was himself among the worst offenders), “it will surely be the arsonous fiery indignation of the stupidly self-righteous.” Luther Orrick’s hatred of the pope and all he stood for was perfectly earnest, perfectly sincere, and not a case of mere whimsical malice. He’d read certain accounts, some of which were true, about unruly Irish and Italian workers; he weighed them against the personality and character of that papist-deist Alexander Pope, who, though dead these centuries, was a man he might justly have said he loved, had love been one of the words he ever used; he considered the role of the Church in European history — the Children’s Crusade and the Glorious Crusade of the Bishop of Norwich, the papal debasement of public morality which outraged Dante, the Vatican’s making and breaking of kings, the cruel persecutions and mass exterminations — not that he entirely neglected the crimes of Protestantism; he considered the evil of idol worship, and the far greater evil of mindless superstition, with which even his own church had dangerously toyed in the days of Cotton Mather. He considered these things, weighed them, and made his judgment, characteristically severe.

As far as anyone who knew him could tell, and as Martin Orrick would remember him, he was an absolutely honest man, though one of strong opinions, most of them wrong. We may rightly scoff now at the sides he took, but his problem was the all but universal human problem, not that that wholly excuses him (as Luther Doane Orrick would be the first to grant): he understood only as much as he knew. He read more widely and a good deal more carefully than anyone else of the time and county he lived in. Though it may sound absurd to modern ears — yet in fact it is the case — he could quote much of Shakespeare, most of Pope, and all of Milton, not including the Latin, of which he could find no copy. He read both Latin and Greek with ease, though his education, he knew because he’d checked, was a trifle beside that of a twelve-year-old boy of the eighteenth century. For at least a week after closing it, he could quote to you all that had seemed to him of interest, sometimes whole pages, in the monthly Rural Messenger. But it is also perhaps true (discounting the rant) that, as Martin Orrick was to write of him later in the gloomiest of his novels, “for all his careful reading, for all his love of justice, he was a victim of the only press he could get hold of, which urges the reflection that we should thank our minimally lucky stars that so few people left in the world can read at all.” Though he started late, he was an excellent father, a man who by word and example could inculcate the highest moral principles — though what his children would have done without their mother’s affection, love of bad light verse, and ultimate moral laxity, God only knows. He had the largest and easily the most beautiful garden in New York State, or so he contended, and spent the best part of his last years planting trees. (Hence Martin’s pronouncement: “The chief mark of a decent man is that he occasionally plants what he knows he can never live to see.”) He was a splendid orator who had political aspirations, but his positions, which his eloquence made very clear, were fortunately unpopular. He was a Yankee soldier to the day he died, who came to church late — because his chores took time and he lived seven miles from town — and always, with the greatest formality, would salute the flag when he came abreast of his pew, bringing the service to a momentary standstill, before he would condescend to sit. He walked with a twisted cane of polished applewood, and when the minister said something he thought false, he would thump it severely.

After Sunday services Martin’s family would argue, at his grandfather’s house, about all the minister had said and foolishly neglected to say. The meals were such as meals were then and are not now — homemade bread, baked apples, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, squash, chicken, turkey, goose, pork, calf or cow from his grandfather’s slaughter shed, or ham from the smokehouse, corn, peas, sweet pickles, cranberry sauce, elderberry or apple or mincemeat pie, fresh milk and butter, the milk so cold no normal man would dare set his glass against his lip, such as men are today. The old man quoted Scripture, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, or Julius Caesar, and banged his fist on the table; his sons shouted back at him, delighting in conflict but shouting with conviction — no one would have dreamed of cheating in the debate, or toying with the subject in the sophists’ way, or speaking out merely to keep his hand in. The table was large, and though at least three sons and their wives would be seated there, the children — Buddy and his cousins — were there too, on scriptural grounds, listening bug-eyed, spooning in food without looking at it, watching for Grandpa or Uncle Fred or Uncle Bill to bring his fist down again, or for Grandma to reach out as if casually and capture a fly. Like puppies who haven’t understood rough play and snap at a heavy old shepherd in earnest, and go sprawling, yelping, knocked across the stubble by a huge, fierce paw, the wives of the uncles would sometimes mistake the loud shouting for anger instead of mere strong rhetoric, persuasion by a show of cannon power, and would cry tears of fury as they leaped into the battle, defending what was right. The husband himself was as likely as anyone else at the table to say, “Faddle, Louise!” or “Bosh!”