John Gardner - October Light

Ginny was on the couch, sitting perfectly still. Dickey snuggled up beside her, holding her hand.

“Hi, honey,” James said, and again he brushed away the tears, wanting to see her.

She smiled, and this time he knew that, for a minute, anyway, she’d known him. Thank God. Thank God!

“She can talk,” Dickey said. “She talked to me.”

“Thank God,” he said.

And then, because he could do nothing for Ginny that Dickey wasn’t doing, and maybe doing better than he could now, he moved on past them and over to the bookshelf to the left of the fireplace and bent down and drew out the albums. He opened the oldest of them — dust flew, and it seemed that the paper itself was partly made of dust — opened it hungrily, and the first picture of her he saw leaped alive in his mind as if her ghost had come back to remind him that life had been good once, of course it had been, and that life was good, as poor Ed Thomas understood now more clearly than ever, now that he was dying. He saw a picture of her standing in snowshoes, grinning, a dog beside her — even the dog’s name came back to him: Angus. There she was on a tractor, and there looking out from the porch they’d had on the house at that time, she was leaning coyly against the pillar. He remembered the time. Remembered all the times. Also this: she was sewing, sitting in an island of light. As he came into the room, having just finished chores and brought the milk in, she looked up and said suddenly, as if otherwise she mightn’t get it out, “Richard’s sick, James. Ill.”

“Richard?” he’d said.

She’d looked down then, face flushing. “It’s something he’s done,” she said almost inaudibly. “Five years ago.”

“That’s why he’s turned to a drunkahd?”

“I suppose so.” Still her head was bowed, light pouring over it, the hair brown, streaked with gray, yet pretty, that instant.

“What was it?”

“It’s better if Richard tells you, when he comes over.”

“What was it?” he’d insisted. “Women?” He’d seen one at his house one time, staring out the window.

She shook her head, tears running down her cheeks. “I can’t tell you,” she’d answered, not rising, not even looking up at him, yet for all that standing up to him; it wasn’t usually her way. She said, “I told him I wouldn’t.” It was she who’d made the boy weak. She said so.

When he’d come the next day and James had demanded to know what he’d done, what was wrong with him — his son had whiskey on his breath, as usual — the boy had blanched and refused to say a word except, “Tell you, you old bastahd?” He gave a kind of laugh, that cowardly-sounding laugh he’d had all his life, and he’d brought out, already ducking like a gun-shy dog, “I’d die first,” laughing again. It was because of the laugh and because he was ducking already that James had slapped him. The boy had stared, as if some terrible suspicion was confirmed, and had abruptly walked away. He’d gone over to his own house and gotten himself drunk — he’d never have had the nerve for it otherwise — and he’d hanged himself. When he was dead, Ariah wouldn’t tell what it was he’d done, clinging foolishly to the promise she’d given him, even now when he was dead and it meant nothing, promise to a manure pile. “It’s too late,” she’d said, and had made James understand — whether or not it was what she meant him to understand — that she would not stop blaming him for the boy’s death, even in her grave. If they’d had time no doubt they’d have softened, both of them, though a year after his suicide she had still not said a word. Then one day there were bumps in her armpits and the backs of her knees. Four months later she was buried, and even in his grief he had found he couldn’t picture her in his mind.

Now he knew and could see that he’d misunderstood completely. The boy had had reason to be afraid to give an answer. James would have told Sally, would have taken the boy by the scruff of the neck for all his twenty-five years and would have made him face up. The boy had known, as his mother had known, because all his life, he understood now, James Page had had a petty-minded notion of truth, had been a dangerous fool.

Guilt. All this time he’d carried it, a burden that had bent his whole life double and when he caught it and held it in his two hands and opened them, there was nothing there. He’d been benighted, just as the minister said. And she too, poor Ariah, had gone to her grave full of guilt because, having told James, she blamed herself for the suicide. And the boy — James brushed away tears again, crossly — it had not been rage at his father, had not been revenge, or only a little of it was that. It had been the burden of five years’ nurtured guilt at the fact that, in some foolish or maybe drunken prank — Richard had been twenty, a grown man, or so Richard would have thought, though no man of seventy-two would allow that a boy of twenty was grown — the boy had frightened his uncle to death, and, cowardly all his life (whipped all his life, threatened and hollered at and told he was a coward — James would face all of it, now that he’d come to), he had not even stayed or cried out to his aunt for help, but had been true to the image James Page had created for him to live by, or both James and Ariah and even little Ginny — they’d all been in on the conspiracy — and had fled. Benighted, the lot of them, himself worst of all. He’d prayed for punishment, and had been punished well: punished years before the prayer.

Tears streamed down the old man’s face, though what he felt did not even seem sorrow, seemed merely knowledge, knowledge of them all from inside, understanding of the waste. Again he wiped his eyes, drying them on his sleeve. When he could see again, Ginny was looking at him. Her mind had cleared.

“Dad!” she said, starting to rise, then sinking back again. “Are you all right?”

“Ginny, you’re better!” he cried.

She tried again to get up from the couch — Dickey drew back — and for an instant the fog was there again, but then again her eyes cleared, She raised two fingers to her forehead to touch the wound. “What happened?” she exclaimed.

“Ith all right,” James told her, going to her. “Crate of appleth fell down on ye.”

“Aunt Sally made a trap for Grampa,” Dickey said eagerly, then glanced at James to see if it was all right.

“And you walked into it,” James said.

Now Lewis and Aunt Sally were there, pleased to see her rational again.

“Ginny, my poor darling!” Sally said, hurrying to her.

“Boy, do I feel funny!” Ginny said. She looked around the room. “Anybody seen my cigarettes?”

“I got ’em,” Lewis said.

“Thank heavens! Toss me one, would you, sweetie?”

“No,” he said. He looked over at the wall, not straight at her.

“What?” she said.

“You’re quittin.”

She stared at him — so did Sally — and for a moment it seemed that the fog had come back over Ginny. Then she said, blistering, “Lewis Hicks who in the hell do you think you are?”

“Never mind,” he said, “you’re quittin.”

“Why?” she demanded. “Is this a free country or isn’t it?”

He looked over at the other wall. “No,” he said.

7

(The Intruder)

Out by the hives, where he was finishing up with what he’d started that morning, taking the last of the honey out, removing the thick wax that meant a queen bee — she’d steal half the hive if he left her free to hatch — putting in sugar-water, then sealing up the hives — James Page had a strange experience. He was working in a daze, the shotgun leaning against a hive ten feet away from him, his hands automatic, his mind still engaged in savoring the pleasures and sorrows of memory. It had begun with a drone: looking at it, as he’d looked at drones thousands of times in his life, he’d remembered how sometimes he’d given Richard and Virginia drones to play with, when they were young — since drones would not sting and had only a short life anyway. He could see them both just as clear as day, and remembered they had both had, like their mother, yellow yellow hair. While he was staring at this image of his two children — his second son hadn’t yet been born at this time — he’d moved through the image of them to another, a memory of his wife.