John Gardner - October Light

“Then February. The days are longer then, the sun is higher, the snow’s more dramatic. An evening flurry will come down in huge, wet flakes, so thick and fast you’re convinced in an hour your fahm will be buried like Pompeii. But the flurry stops in ten minutes or so, leavin maybe two inches of good snowball snow, big feathery flakes. The mahnin after such a snow as that is what gave rise to picture postcards in the first place. The sky’s clear, air still and cold but not too cold. From every chimney you see the smoke goes up straight as a stick. You pass through a valley with an unfrozen brook, and such vapor comes up through the fifteen degrees that for fifty yards on each side of it, the branches, the bob-wire, the weeds that poke up through the snow are ah covered with jewelry.

“But I’ll tell you what I’ll miss more than ah the rest, and that’s ‘unlocking.’ Fools call it ‘mud season,’ and I don’t dare deny you, there’s a good deal of mud, because the first thing unlocks is the ground. I’ll tell you the first sign. It’s easily missed. Every year one of the first four or five days in March is going to be warm and sunny, with the temperature rising, for a little while, to somewhere between fifty and sixty. Look hard at a birch or red maple that day, you’ll see a peculiar haze of color in the upper branches: yellow on birch, red on a red maple. Look again the next day and the color is gone, nothing but dark, bare branches and, likely, a sleet storm. All the same, unlocking’s stotted. Dirt roads unlock first — the only ground not covered with snow. Each warm day the top inch or two of road touched by the sun thaws out. First cah goes by makes a couple of inch-deep ruts that’ll freeze by evening. You can pretty well count on getting stuck once or twice. I never count on it, myself, but I always do.

“Rivers unlock next. The two I know best — the Walloomsac and the Hoosac — both stot the same way. You first see two small streams running on top of the ice, one near each frozen bank. Then one day towards the middle of March, a patch of open water appears, then another. On the Walloomsac, which has a good many dams and slow water, the patches slowly enlarge for a week, until one day you notice an open channel with a line of ice floes sailing solemnly down the middle like Pharaoh’s boats.

“Meanwhile, two other kinds of unlocking have stotted. One’s the town meeting, where, you know yourself, what we mostly do is block progress — keep to our old covered bridges, for instance, though the richest and smartest people in town want concrete for their darn trucks and bulldozers. The other’s done with a brace and bit, and it’s called sugarin.

“The weather’s capricious, around sugarin time — the more capricious the better. The more Miss Spring dances in and backs out again, the more syrup you get. People in cars get furious when they’re stopped by a late, wet April snow, but in the sugarbush that’s a cause for rejoicing. Most of the season you do well to get three four inches of sap in the bottom of each bucket over twenty-four hours, but on the day of a sugar snow, your best buckets fill to the brim and run over. That night you boil to midnight, and it seems like a holiday.

“That’s a life, James, I’ll tell you, not as if you didn’t know — standin out there in the maple grove countin up your buckets like a banker, and lookin out over the hills as the whole world outside and inside unlocks. First the pussy willows come, and the rivers run emerald green. Then the deer come out. After a winter of eating just tree buds, and not too many of even them, they’re mad for grass. They come boldly into the fields to eat last year’s withered stems. One mornin last April I saw fourteen of the things in the pasture behind my house.

“Then the robins arrive, sometimes in flocks of two or three hundred, brightening the bare brown southern cants. About the same time, spring peepers stot up. Then fields begin to green. Some reason, the green always appears first where the snow’s melted last. And one day after the first green tips appear, the first woodchuck pops up. Woodchucks are great gourmets, I’ll tell you, and they ain’t about to eat that old winter-killed hay the way the deer do. In April their brown fur has reddish glints to it, and for a couple of weeks, until the grass gets long or some neighbor’s son comes out with his twenty-two rifle, they dot the fields like flowers. By that time, of course, it’s no longer unlockin time; it’s spring.

“I’ll miss that, this year, or ennaway take pot in it in a way I never did before. But I can’t complain.”

He smiled.

“James, how come you’re listenin to all this?”

James thought about it. “Becauth,” he said at last, “ith true.”

Ed’s smile widened. “That’s what I tell my Ruth,” he said. “She’s got good poems and bad poems, and she’ll swear on the Bible she can’t tell which is which. I explain to her only the good poems are exactly true.”

“Like a good window-thash,” James said, “or horth.”

“That’s it,” Ed said. “You got it.”

4

“Look who’s here!” Ruth Thomas sang out, coming into the room, and whether she meant James, and intended the greeting to show that she had no hard feelings now, or meant, instead, the minister and the priest, whom she’d discovered in one of the hospital corridors and now brought into the room with her, James Page could not certainly determine.

“H’lo, Ruth,” he said, and could hardly meet her eyes. For which reason, perhaps, she looked at him harder, all at once, and her face became serious, and she said:

“James, I’m so glad you could come! You know, we’ve been worried about you. Is Sally out yet?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But we’re here to pick up Ginny, and I got an idea old Thally’ll come out when we git Ginny home.”

“Drat!” Ruth said, and clapped her hands. “If I’d known you’d be here I’d have brought Sally’s plant book.”

“Plant book?” James said.

“For her coleus, you know.”

“Coleuth?”

“Really, James! Sally’s precious coleus that’s been dying for months. I got a plant book out of the library for her, so maybe she can find out what’s wrong with the poor thing and doctor it. She’s tried everything she knows, so she tells me — more water, less water, moving it around the room—”

“Thallyth got a coleuth in her room?” James said, head cocked.

“That’s what I just said.”

James nodded. “It’ll die.”

“It is dying.” She looked at him. “Why?”

“Ith them appleth,” he said. “Planth can’t live around appleth. We got appleth in the attic.”

“He’s right,” Ed said, opening his eyes.

“Why James, you should have told her!” Ruth said, indignant.

“Thee didn’t athk,” James said.

“Hello there, James,” Lane Walker said.

James looked around Ruth and nodded his greeting, and the minister smiled and bowed as if that adventure in the kitchen had slipped his mind entirely. That was a curious trait in human beings, James had noticed, a trait they seemed to share with no other animal he was acquainted with excepting dogs. Hit a horse on the nose, or even a cussed chicken, he’d take a good while to make up with you, but a human being that could keep his mind firmly on a grudge (if he knew beforehand your better as well as your worse side) had to be — like Sally — exceptional. The priest’s smile was a good deal more reserved, which was not, of course, too surprising. You couldn’t say they’d hit it off, that one and only night they’d ever met. On the other hand, James, for one, had revised his opinion some. He remembered how the man had stood there facing him, even when the shotgun was up at James’ shoulder and pointing at his head. Any ordinary man would have clim the wall. Not only that, in the time since that evening James had come even to admire the man’s standing there laughing at him, there when the truck burned and he was sitting in the tree. A man who slinked and cowered had never been the old man’s favorite kind of animal — it was the one thing he’d hated in his son Richard — nor did he care for a man in the obsequious professions — ministers, dentists, and undertakers — who advertised his calling on his face. Unfortunately, being not well equipped when it came to social graces, James Page had no way of communicating this change of opinion to the Mexican, who seemed to him now to be watching him exactly as he might a black insect in a jar. James’ nod was so cautious — unbeknownst to James — that the Mexican didn’t even see it and assumed James intended to be offensive. He looked above James’ head, giving him no sign of greeting, then pointedly smiled at Ed Thomas and went over to the bed.