John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you, Martin,” Paul said. “It was just—”

“No, it’s all right.” His hand was still shaking.

Joan said, almost finished with her crying, “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I burned myself on the fucking stove, because of the drugs — I couldn’t think right—” At the memory she began to cry again. She brought out, “I wasn’t blaming you. You should see what it’s like, just once, Martin.”

Now he did get up and turned to them, full of rage and grief, though not rage at them. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m sorry . For the love of God—”

“Martin,” Paul said sharply, “you didn’t do anything.”

“I know, it all just happens. That’s the point .” Tears rushed into his eyes all at once, and his rage and helplessness increased, and as he fought the tears a whimper came out, childish, infuriating. Instantly, Joan came to him, put her arms around him, and pressed her face against his chest. “Joan, I’m sorry,” he said, and was crying now in earnest. “We’ve got to change our lives.” He half sobbed, half laughed.

Joan said, “Paul’s told me about his psychiatrist in Detroit. I want to go to him, Martin.”

Martin nodded, clinging to her, unable to speak. He brought out, “Do. Yes, do.” He reached, like a feeble, foolish old man — or so it seemed to him — toward Paul’s shoulder, bringing him into the embrace. Martin Orrick had, needless to say, no hope that a psychiatrist could help. She’d been to plenty before. But perhaps; perhaps. Paul’s presence helped, certainly — helped them to break their deadly patterns, circle for a moment more like dancers than like fighters. So he told himself now. But he’d known from the first, and would know tomorrow, that when she threw those dishes, she threw them — in her mind — at him. And she was right; he should have noticed and helped.

Causes and effects are not neatly separable, as we sometimes find them in fiction. Martin Orrick’s nature helped the accident to happen, and the accident helped to shape his nature, each feeding on the other as past and present do, or ends and means, or — as Orrick would say — the brain’s two lobes. In any event, part of what Joan’s mother called his “darkness” had to do with this: One day, in a farm accident, Martin — that is, Buddy — ran over and killed his brother Gilbert. It was an ugly and stupid accident which, even at the last moment, Buddy could have prevented by hitting the tractor brakes; but he was unable to think, or rather thought unclearly, and so watched it happen, as he would watch it happen in his mind, with undiminished clarity, again and again until the day he died. It was a shattering experience, needless to say, for all the Orricks. Buddy’s father was almost unable to go on living. Sometimes Buddy would find him lying in the manure on the barn floor, crying, unable to stand up. Duncan Orrick was, as I’ve said, a good man — gentle and intelligent, a dreamer. He’d loved all his children and would not consciously have been able to hate Buddy even if Buddy had been, as he seriously imagined himself, Gilbert’s murderer. But of course he could not help seeming to blame his son, though in fact he blamed no one but himself. Though he was not ordinarily a man who smoked, he would sometimes sit up all night or move restlessly from room to room smoking cigarettes and crying, or he would ride away on his motorcycle, trying to forget, or playing with the idea of killing himself, hunting in mixed fear and anger for reasons not to do so and coming down, always, to just one, the damage his suicide would unquestionably do his children. Sometimes, as his son would do long afterward, he would forget for a while by abandoning reason and responsibility for love affairs. He was at this time still fairly young, distinctly handsome, and so full of pain that women’s hearts went out to him automatically. At times he would be gone from the farm for days, abandoning the work to Buddy and whoever was available to help — some neighbor or one of Buddy’s uncles. A fool might have condemned Duncan Orrick for all this, but no one in the family did, certainly not Buddy, not even Buddy’s mother, though it increased her sorrow. He had always been a good and faithful man; no one, whatever the pain he might cause, would dream of demanding that he do more than survive.

As for Buddy’s mother, she cried all night, sometimes lying alone, and did as much as she had the strength to do — so drained by grief that she could barely lift a pot or pan — for her husband and children. She comforted Buddy and his younger sister, and herself as well, by embracing them almost ferociously when the waves of guilt and sorrow swept in, or by thinking up work that would distract their minds, or by prayer. And because she had great strength of character, and because, also, she was a woman of strong religious faith, she kept the family functioning. Her children would have no real sense until long afterward just how much strength that period demanded of her or how heavily she depended, for her own survival, on Duncan’s sister Mary and Mary’s husband, Buddy’s uncle George.

But for all his mother could do for him, Buddy Orrick had suffered psychological damage that would take a long time to heal. He had been, before, suspicious, easily hurt, self-absorbed. He became now more withdrawn, more self-absorbed than ever. The accident had happened in early spring. He’d seen, the day it happened, the first light-blue wild flowers blooming along the road. Working the farm, ploughing, disking, dragging, cultipacking from morning to night, he had plenty of time to think — plenty of time to replay the accident in his mind, against his will, his whole body flinching from the picture as it came, his voice leaping up independent of him, as if perhaps a shout could drive the memory back into its darkness. Driving the big Farmall F-20 over rocky fields, dust rising behind him or, when he turned into the wind, falling like dry rain until his face and hands were as dark as a Negro’s and his hair was thick and stiff — the hills all around him greener every day, the spring wind endless and steady and sweet with the smell of coming rain — he had all the time in the world to cry and swear bitterly and hate himself. He had not loved his brother — or anyone — as much as he should have, he thought, as much as he now helplessly and for the most part without showing it loved his father and mother and sister and, a short while later, his new, red-headed baby brother. He was basically incapable of love, he thought. He was simply a bad person, a spiritual defective.

He had always told himself stories to pass the time when driving the tractor, endlessly looping back and forth, around and around over a twenty-acre field, fitting the land for spring planting. He told them to himself aloud, taking all parts in the dialogue — here where no one could see or overhear him, half a mile or more from the nearest house — gesturing, making faces (exactly as he’d do in the study where he wrote his short stories and novels, some fifteen years later). Once all his stories had been of sexual conquests — always very chaste; lasciviousness was not one of his weaknesses — or of heroic battle with, for instance, escaped convicts or kidnappers who, unbeknownst to anyone, had built a little shack where they kept their captives (female and beautiful) in the woods beside the field where he worked. But now they were all of self-sacrifice, pitiful stories in which, as in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities , he made something, at last, of his worthless life by throwing it away to save some other, fit to live. At some point in these stories he would confess his worthlessness, naming all his faults and giving numerous examples, granting himself no mercy; and, absurd as it may sound, he would weep honest tears of remorse as he angrily denounced himself. If on some unconscious level he hoped he might in this way ground his guilt and sorrow, the trick did not work. The foulness of his character (as it seemed to him) became clearer and clearer in his mind until, like his father, he began to toy in earnest with killing himself. As it would do all his life, his chest would fill with anguish, as if he were drowning or bleeding internally, and his arms and legs would grow shaky with weakness, until he had to stop the tractor and sit for a few minutes sobbing. But he lacked even the strength of character to kill himself, as it seemed to him. He was finally indifferent to the agony his mother and father suffered — otherwise wouldn’t he have killed himself long ago? Once at night his father found him up in the pitch-dark silo, lying in the corn ensilage, crying, and he climbed in through the silo door and felt his way over to him and took him into his arms and tried to speak to him but couldn’t, since now he too was crying; and Buddy was aware — though he could do nothing about it — that whereas his father’s crying was real, his own was self-conscious, false. Bits of ensilage had gotten under Buddy’s collar, cold and tickling, and his mind would not ignore the unpleasantness, would not, whatever his wish, abandon itself to grief.