John Gardner - October Light

“Feeling better today?” he said.

“Not really,” Ed said.

“I’m sorry to hee-ur that!”

James Page lightly tapped his mouth with his fist, watching Ed and the Mexican and feeling guiltier by the minute. Lane Walker had gone now to the end of the room to bring the green vinyl visitor’s chair to Ruth. James, with a look of surprise, hurried after him. “Here,” he said, “let me help you with that!” The minister hardly needed help, the chair-legs had taps and slid easily across the thick, highly polished linoleum, but he accepted, with a private grin, the old man’s help. Lane Walker thought: Trying to make up, are we? Having second thoughts like old Adam? A curious fact about Lane Walker’s character was that he thought theologically all the time, exactly as writers think always as writers and first-rate businessmen think only of business.

“Here, Ruth,” James said, “have a theat.”

“Why thank you, James,” Ruth said, preparing to sit and glancing at Lane Walker. “What are you smiling at?” she said. “You look like the cat that ate the canary!”

“Well I’ll tell you,” Lane said, making, suddenly, another impish decision. “I was thinking how guilty some people feel if they’re poor benighted souls and not true, orthodox, educated Christians who are joyfully aware their salvation is fully accomplished and no questions asked if they’ll just turn to Jesus.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” Ruth said, and because the man’s elvish grin was infectious, she too began to smile.

“I’m talking about people who turn to drink in their troubles, and not to Jesus. I’m talkin about people who harden their hearts about their brothers and even sisters!”

Her eyes widened. “Why Lane!” she said, “stop that!”

But he wouldn’t be stopped. “And talkin bout people, even ministers of the Lord, who won’t reach out to those poor benighted people in the darkness of their misery and benightedness and say, ‘Brother, the Lord forgives you and even I forgive you.’”

James glanced in panic at the Mexican. The man was smiling, looking like a huge sheepish frog. By accident their eyes met, James’ and the priest’s, and automatically they nodded.

“Ah!” Lane said. “Signs of hope! Forms of civility! Hallaluja!”

Ed Thomas grinned, then closed his eyes.

“I swear,” Ruth said, “it’s a wonder they don’t defrock you, the way you mock religion!”

“He wasn’t mocking,” the priest said — and even James Page understood that it was true—“that is religion.”

5

When Lewis arrived with Ginny, they all fell silent; for a moment not even Ruth Thomas could think what to say. Ginny seemed transformed by the accident, and though in fact she would soon be her former self — except in one respect, as only Lewis was as yet aware — it was hard to believe, as they looked at her now, that she would ever again be the same. She was white as a sheet; part of her right eyebrow had been shaved; and from the eyebrow to her scalp-line ran an ugly, tightly sewed up gash. If the crate had struck three inches farther back, the doctor had told Lewis, if it had struck her, that is, on the temple, she would have been killed.

It was James who spoke first. “Hi, Ginny,” he said, going to her, reaching out to touch her.

She smiled vaguely, as if almost but not quite recognizing him.

“The poor thing!” Ruth said, pushing down on the chair-arms, laboring to rise.

“Don’t get up,” Lewis said, still holding his wife’s hand. “We got to go ennaway. Got to pick up Dickey.” Then he called past her, “Hi there, Ed. Any better?”

“Gettin there,” Ed said, and raised his arm a few inches as if to wave.

“You’ll show ’em,” Lewis said. He glanced at Lane Walker and then at Rafe Hernandez, bobbing his head to each of them, shy and eager to be away. “Mahnin, Reverend. Mahnin, sir.”

As they greeted him he backed toward the door. Ginny turned, looked at him uncomprehendingly as he pulled at her arm, then docilely followed. James bowed good-byes and left behind her.

In the car the old man took the back seat, the left-hand side, and rode leaning far forward so that his forearms lay flat on the back of Lewis’s seat, so that he could watch his daughter, sitting on the right in front. Nobody spoke. Ginny rode staring straight in front of her, on her face an expression frightening because it was not an expression, a kind of smile without humor or even life in it. Her throat was — as Ed’s face had been, back at the hospital — bluish white, that same blue of shadows on the January snow.

“They thay Ginny be ah right, hey Lewis?”

“That’s what they said.”

“Well then I gueth thee will be.”

“I guess so,” Lewis said.

They turned onto Pleasant Street. Small, shabby houses; by the curb an old Volkswagen with one fender the wrong color.

“Where we going?” James said.

“Got to pick up Dickey,” Lewis said.

“Oh, thath right. I fahgot.”

He stopped in front of a dark green house and got out. James continued to look at Ginny. He leaned farther forward and said, “Doth it hurt, honey?”

After a moment, she turned her head slowly and looked at him. Please, God, he whispered inside his mind. It was his first prayer in years, the first since his wife died, when he’d carefully, tortuously written down in his Agro book his prayer for punishment, or understanding, or at least death. It was nothing like death that he prayed for now.

Then Lewis came out, holding Dickey’s hand — there was a young, thin woman in a housecoat at the door, or perhaps not a woman but a child, the old man couldn’t tell for sure — and Dickey got in with them, sitting in back on the right. Exhaust fumes came pouring in while Dickey had the door open.

“Ah you ok, Mommy?” he said.

“Hi, honey,” she said. It made them all start. But the next instant she was as far away as ever.

“She knew me!” Dickey said, keeping his father from closing the door.

“I saw,” Lewis said. “Draw yer head in.”

The old man batted away exhaust fumes. Lewis slammed the door and walked around to the driver’s seat, got in, closed the door, and nosed back out into the street.

“Ith a funny thing thee’d know Dickey and not her own father,” James said.

Lewis smiled and drove in silence.

James’ mind went back to Ed, lying there in the hospital, maybe dying. So he believed, and so it looked. All because of him, James Page, and his sister Sally. He thought about the story of the white bear. It was a queer thing to have forgotten. He must’ve heard it a hundred times. As Ed was telling it he’d seen her plain, flying in the buggy behind the runaway horse, with her yellow, yellow hair. He remembered picking her up one time in his own buggy — remembered the black-tailed, chestnut horse, the shine of lines hanging down over the thill. He remembered Ariah’s round, smiling face, two dimples cut into it, a small, pretty nose. She had not been strikingly beautiful, like Sally, but she had been good — loving and lovable — in a way Sally would have no way even of perceiving. He stared hard at the frozen mental image: Ariah in sunlight looking up at him, the lines hanging down — which meant that he was soon to jump down from the buggy and help her up in — but, strangely, he couldn’t remember jumping down, couldn’t remember what it was he’d just said that had made her smile, if that was why she was smiling, couldn’t remember where, or when …

The sky was still the same clear blue; the valley below where the road climbed, and the mountain range beyond, were scratchy with trees; in the middle of the valley, the village sat like a village of toy houses, a Christmas village waiting for fake snow and lights. He thought of Merton’s Hideaway and of the drunken writer, thought of how the man had turned to stare at him, stared as if to consume him, put him in some book. Nothing wrong with that, of course, James reflected, dubious. Mr. Rockwell put people in his pictures — real people, many of whom James Page had known: his cousin Sharon O’Neil a time or two, Lee Marsh’s wife and Mrs. Crofut, once or twice Grandma Moses herself. No harm. But of course Mr. Rockwell had always meant no harm, which was why he’d achieved it. He’d meant to paint the way things could be, he’d explained once to the schoolchildren, and to paint how some of the time, if people will stay awake, things actually are. People always thought of him as a happy man, and he had been, in a way — all his friends right there around him, and getting paid for doing what he would’ve done anyway — but there was another, less cheerful side to him, they said in Arlington; there were times he seemed weighed down with grief, they said, and James had some evidence that it was true.