John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

It was a game all old Yankee farm families understand, though to Buddy’s uncles’ wives and even to his mother it sometimes looked senseless.

“How can you eat with all that shouting?” Buddy’s mother asked his father once, at their own kitchen table in the big brick house. “It makes my stomach upset!”

His father sat crooked, leaning like a milk can standing in a rut, waiting for the milk truck. He had a catch in his back — pain, he said, like some Indian had shot him in the kidneys with a flint-headed arrow — but it was haying time now (that was always when his back pains were worst) and if he meant to beat the rain he had no alternative, he had to keep a move on. He smiled as if apologetically, holding the cheap yellow plate with his left hand, forking with his right. “It’s interesting,” he said. “Helps you figure out in your mind what’s true.”

Knowing what was true and what was mere illusion mattered a great deal to Duncan Orrick, as it mattered a great deal to his father and brothers and would matter to his son — and as it did not matter in the least to Donald Frazier or to his daughter Joan, who played life’s most difficult passages by ear and made none of the mistakes Duncan Orrick made, though again and again they stumbled where his kind moved surely.

He was a powerfully built, good-looking, shy man with a farmer’s large belly as hard to the touch as a tractor tire. His voice when he sang hymns — or when, working around the farm, he sang “Redwing,” or “Where have you been Billy boy, Billy boy?” or “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen”—was a sweet, thin, high baritone, perfect in pitch and phrasing by natural gift, and so oddly, perhaps unconsciously sad that one paused a moment, looking at the ground, and listened. He had overcharged emotions, as his son Buddy would have: he cried easily at movies or when he heard music or poetry, a tendency that embarrassed him but one he could live with. We see in old photographs, especially one of his father’s whole family, with Luther and Caroline Orrick seated and the sons and one daughter gathered around them, solemnly attired, the boys in knickerbockers, the girl in a long, oddly bunched white dress, that Duncan Orrick, then nine, had a faraway look that instantly set him apart from all the others, the look of a poet, or of a boy marked for suicide or drunkenness — not at all the unearthly, demonic look Joan’s grandmother Lulu Frazier sometimes had, but a look otherworldly in a different sense, elfin, mystical.

He stood, in Buddy’s childhood, five foot eleven, as tall as anyone in his family had ever grown. Five foot eleven was about average among western New York farmers at that time — there were men a foot shorter, like Walt Cook or Homer Gill, but there were also, for some reason, men like Jim Hume, Sr., or Sam Parise, who looked down on the world from where the air was thin, as Buddy’s father would say, up seven and a half feet off the ground. Duncan Orrick’s stature was of another kind.

Though he had overstrong emotions that might easily have led him into sentimentality — the same too painful, too easily triggered emotions that his father in his own life had hidden by bluster and an affected sternness — he was not swayed by his emotions to an espousal of wrong causes or misjudgment of men. Though he had a streak of boyish weakness, a timidity that amounted almost to cowardice, he would not be ruled by it but acted bravely, even courageously, standing up to dangers in a way that might bring credit to a man with twice Duncan Orrick’s natural courage. As a representative to the National Synod of the Presbyterian Church, he spoke on the floor in opposition to church support of the Cesar Chavez California lettuce boycott, an action that demanded more courage than he would have thought he had. Though he was impressed by Chavez — despite the man’s bullying arrogance — and was moved by his statement on the suffering of Chicano farm laborers, it seemed to him wrong that the church legislate the conscience of its members, supporting the destruction of a lettuce crop in a year of world-wide famine; and despite the cynical and monstrous crimes of California agro-businesses (like all small farmers, he hated agro-business in any shape or form with a murderous passion that brought tears to his eyes and made him stammer), he believed it wrong that the church should support one farm union against another and approve the ruin of small farmers whose nonunion help consisted, in California as everywhere else, of their unpaid or grossly underpaid sons and daughters.

“If the small farmer can’t compete honestly, let him get out,” said the man at Chavez’s side. He smiled like a plump, sharp-whiskered cat, knowing well enough that the man in the aisle was himself a small farmer. The man on the platform was comfortable with these conflicts, in fact thoroughly enjoyed them. Duncan Orrick had no great distaste for a verbal fight himself, at the local Elba school board meeting, or at a meeting, back home, of the Board of Elders at his church. But here, he knew, he was out of place, outclassed. It was a forbidding, ultramodern auditorium that smelled of cigar smoke, seats like theater seats falling away — as it seemed to Duncan Orrick’s myopic eyes — like a restless sea. In the front of the room, the speaker’s table, the chair’s glowing gavel, the silver microphones on long, silver booms, filled him with awkwardness and apprehension.

No one rose to help him. He resisted the powerful temptation to sit down. Red-skinned and uncomfortable, his left foot hurting in its new black shoe, he said mildly, but with a trembling voice that rang through the hall, “Get out of business, you say. You and agro-business are on the same side there, with all your money and power and certainty you’re right. Against odds like that, a small man’s got hardly any choice but to stand up against you.” There were shouts of “Hear, hear!”

The Synod talked, too, about women’s liberation, about the Supreme Good as biblically male, about the need for rewriting the sexist hymn-books—“Faith of our fathers, living still.” He watched in anguish as furious, angry-hearted women read passages of Scripture that, it seemed to them, reviled their kind, or read, in shrill voices, lines out of hymns or standard prayers. From time to time the assembly laughed — when it was pointed out, for instance, that altering the hymnbooks would cost five million dollars, “assuming we make all the changes ourselves, instead of hiring an army of expensive lady poets.” The laughter troubled him, filled him with distress and helpless confusion in the same way the anger of the women had done. He had difficulty breathing, all at once. He was old, at the time of this Synod meeting, and his heart was not good. He had chest pains more or less constantly, especially in winter, and sometimes when something upset him they flamed higher, became alarming.

His wife of fifty years sat beside him, listening, not laughing with the others except for an occasional “Mpf!” as if at something in her mind, and when she looked over at him now she did not at once see that something was wrong with him. “What will they think of next!” she said, and smiled her crooked smile — still pretty, still lively, though she was seventy-two. It was a fact that she did not like these young women, their strident voices, their extreme, intentionally abrasive opinions, above all their absolute indifference to what was for her (as for her cousin Donald Frazier) the central truth of the Christian religion, Love God, and thy neighbor as thyself.

“They’re right,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised and perhaps a trifle cross, but willing to consider his point of view.

“But they’re asking for a whole new religion,” he whispered. “They can’t understand it’s a historical process — the Virgin birth, the Apostle’s Creed …”