John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Time,” he roared, “that’s what’s happened. Ghosts. Dead people.”

“Martin,” she wailed, “I didn’t do anything.”

He stood with his hand on the doorknob, the lighted swimming pool behind him, and she stood perfectly still, as if precariously balanced: perhaps, drunk as he was, he would come to his senses if she made no threatening move, waited him out as he himself would wait out some vicious dog he was gentling.

“You never do anything,” he said. He spoke as if she weren’t human, as if she were all the world’s evils squeezed together in an ugly imitation of human shape. “You do what the wind does, what falling bodies do. You plan ahead like a rattlesnake asleep on a rock.”

Her anger was rising, impossible to fight. They were good at that, at least, good at stabbing each other. “What did I do? What started this?” He was too drunk to know, she knew, and her seeming control would make him still more furious.

His hand turned on the doorknob. She took a step toward him and said in panic, “Who are you going to? I’ll kill her.”

It was a mistake. The door was open now, rain blowing in. An image came to her, more real than the room, Martin in bed with some woman — white legs, dark hair, the face hidden — and she rushed at him in rage, but he was gone, the door was closed, and she fell. “Bastard,” she said, weeping, beating the carpet with her fist. When she looked up, sometime later, her thirteen-year-old Evan was kneeling beside her, expressionless, patting her back.

They first slept together, as they would both tell friends at parties later, when they were two — slept together in a drawer, in fact, when Joan’s parents (and her Uncle John Elmer and Aunt Cora) drove east to visit the New York State cousins and help wallpaper the huge old faded-brick house the Orricks lived in. The Orricks owned a small dairy farm a mile outside the little village of Elba and were thought of locally as “old family.” Exactly what this meant was never clear to her: her father’s line went back to before the American Revolution, though west of the Mississippi such qualities weren’t much valued. Like Joan’s parents when they started, the Orricks were, despite their big house, as poor as church mice, and, except for their eldest son, so they would remain, though they might have claimed, if it had occurred to them, to be failed aristocrats: the family, a hundred years before, had been considerably better off. But very little concerning their social position occurred to the Orricks, it must be said to their credit. Like most people of their general class in the western part of New York State, they liked Indians, disliked Italians, voted Republican, put themselves down on official forms not as “Protestant” but as “Presbyterian,” openly loathed labor unions and secretly loathed Catholics. The mother — Joan’s father’s cousin — was a devoted church worker and English teacher, a plump, short red-head with sparkling eyes, who loved ripe tomatoes and the color blue. The father wrote poems while working behind his horses or, later, while riding his steel-wheeled or (still later) rubber-tired tractors and sometimes delivered sermons in small country churches — sermons that were, everyone agreed, moving, in fact inspiring, and made no mention of either heaven or hell, though full of fine language and a curious deep current of woe. He came from a long, long line of preachers, country lawyers, and schoolmasters, and would pass on his gifts as an orator to his eldest son.

Oddly enough, events from one of their first meetings would be the earliest memories either Joan or her cousin Buddy was to carry through life. She would remember, distinctly, how Buddy’s grandmother (her father’s aunt) had called from the bathroom, where she’d been giving Buddy a bath, “Everybody look out, a bear’s coming!” At the warning, Joan fled to the bedroom door, then looked back in alarm, and lo, down the hall came running not a bear but a bare, Buddy with no clothes on. She had laughed and laughed, and he had stopped, hands clasped, and looked at her with four-year-old fury and alarm, and she, understanding his strange nature even then, had instantly explained the joke to him, and then he too had laughed, though somewhat doubtfully. He would all his life be suspicious, easily offended, difficult — as Joan’s mother would say, “a dark one.” As for Buddy — or Martin, as he would come to be called — he remembered one single, powerful image: Joan in a bright yellow dress with white trim, her red hair glowing, full of sunlight, her dimple strange and wonderful, so that he stared and stared at it. She’d laughed at him for that and had taken his hand and led him around the house — as she’d be leading him from one place to another all their lives — chattering, making him play games.

From then on, Joan’s family and the Orricks would visit one another every few years — then oftener and oftener — and each time Joan and Buddy met they were surprised all over again by how much they liked each other. He visited her, as it happened — or rather, his family visited hers — at the time she had her appendix out, an occasion that would later prove grimly important for both their lives. Like all his memories of seeing Joan, that visit would have, when he thought back to it, a curious glow, a brightness of color, a heightened reality that made it like a dream or, more precisely, like a novel — he was, at that time, an insatiable reader, though he did poorly in school.

He sat on the side of her bed — she had a light blue nightdress and a light blue silk ribbon in her hair — and they made together a picture of a kind he’d never seen before. There was, in the book she had, a line drawing of a ship, and there was another page with glue on the back (as on a postage stamp) and, on the front, parts of the ship in brilliant colors — primary red, blue, yellow, bright green — which one was meant to cut out and paste onto the drawing. He listened in a kind of daze to her voice as she told him her adventures at the hospital, deftly moving the scissors around the colorful shapes. It was a voice that seemed to him unbelievably lovely — soft, light, brimming with that southern warmth that made his nasal western New York accent plain as a fence post. And as he looked at the colors, the warmest he’d ever seen on paper, he thought — as warm as the red Missouri roads, the great, curious Midwestern trees — cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores — or Missouri’s bright cardinals — and listened to the voices of her parents in the next room — the same sweet accents, the same warmth and humor — abruptly, he began to cry. No sound, only tears. But her red-headed brother James looked up from the floor where he was playing and cried out with what seemed malicious glee but was perhaps in fact just surprise and embarrassment, “Buddy’s crying!” Buddy looked at Joan in alarm, not just ashamed but frightened, and saw that she was studying him, her face clouded. She said to her brother quietly, “Jimmy, you leave him alone.” He was in love with her, in short, though the word was one he would never have thought of. In love with her whole family, her world. Despite the odd care she took of him, he had no idea that she was also in love with him.

The next time he visited Missouri, a year later, he stayed with another of the Missouri cousins — Joan’s first cousin Betty Lou — who lived in the country. Both their families, Joan’s and Buddy’s, were always very careful about being strictly fair. No one knew at the time, including the children, that some of the Missouri cousins were for profound reasons closer than others.

At Betty Lou’s, too, Buddy was happy, walking with her to the one-room country school where his mother had gone, and Joan’s father and mother, a generation before, or feeding the rabbits Betty Lou’s father raised, or simply sitting in a wide old dying tree, looking at the incredibly lush landscape, the blue, blue sky, and feeling all around him that special aliveness the Midwest always had for him and would have all his life, a “vast benevolent electric charge, a smell of the miraculous,” he would write years later in one of his novels — an aliveness impossible to defend, he would find, to anyone not emotionally persuaded already, since it meant of course not only lush growth, pools of sunlight you could cut like warm butter, but also ticks, chiggers, and copperheads, rattlesnakes and cottonmouths, cyclones and devastating floods. He was sublimely happy, soaking up a summer warmth New York State could never know, and if anyone had questioned him at just that moment, he might have said that it wasn’t his cousin Joan he liked, really, but the place.