John Gardner - October Light

No response.

She had half a mind to lock the door again but thought better of it. “All right,” she said, “sulk then. When and if you decide to come out, the door’s unlocked.” She waited half a minute longer, but the old woman wouldn’t speak, so she walked down the hall, stopped and used the bathroom, then went back downstairs. Her father was not in the kitchen now. She went to the living room and put the key in the dish, then changed her mind and slipped it into her pocket so the old man couldn’t use it to lock the door again — not that that would stop him if his stubbornness hung on. He could nail the thing shut. She wouldn’t put it past him.

“Dad?” she called.

“I’m in bed,” he called back. He had the bedroom in back of the living room, the room that, when she was a child, had been used for the ironing. She went over, past the couch where Dickey lay, and tried the door, opened it two inches, and looked in. It was pitch dark. “You won’t be in bed long if I can’t get my car started,” she said.

“If you can’t stot the cah, you just run up and sleep with Aunt Sally,” he called. “He hee!”

“Like God damn hell,” she said. “You’ll hitch me up the horses.”

“Don’t fahget to turn out the lights,” he said.

Above, they heard Aunt Sally sneaking to the toilet.

The car, for some reason, started the second time she turned the key. She went back to the living room for Dickey, turned off the lights, put the screen over the fireplace — her father never used it, “Steals the heat,” he said — carried the child and Snoopy back out to the Chevy, and started for home.

The old woman, up in the bedroom, listened to her leave. She smiled wickedly, exactly like a witch on TV — she was aware of it herself, and relished it. What had it ever actually gotten her, those years of trying to be a Christian, fair and decent? A television set with the works shot out of it, a crooked old bedroom she wouldn’t have put a hired girl in if she still had her house in the village, a bedroom that, whenever the wind was strong, was so troubled by drafts that the doors rumbled, and so unhealthy, for some reason, that her coleus in its green ceramic cart — a plant that had nearly taken care of itself when she’d lived in town — was now half-dead, and nothing she could do seemed to help worth a Hannah cook. No, she would read her trashy novel; they could think what they liked.

She opened the paperback to the place she’d left off, closed her eyes for just a moment, and at once fell asleep.

It was morning when she awakened, and James was knocking, calling to her at the door. Through the window she could see the mountain, garish pink with sunrise. The air in the room around her was crisp. It smelled of winter.

“You planning to get up and have breakfast?” James called. Meaning, she knew: “You planning to get up and get me breakfast?” Ha! Before she’d come here to cook and keep house for him, he’d been sick all the time on account of the way he ate — nothing but fried foods, never any vegetables, so that he was constipated both day and night, and walked bent over at the waist with cramps. She saw him again, in her mind’s eye, waving that stick of firewood at her, eyes like a wild drunken Indian’s, prepared to kill her, his own blood sister without a friend or protector in this world.

“Sally? You hear me?”

She decided to keep silent, as she’d done with Ginny. It was a fact of life that if people knew what you were feeling they could work you around.

With a little start of joy, she remembered the apples in the attic. She could get by on those, for a while at least. She didn’t need to cook him breakfast. In her sudden happiness, she forgot her resolve to keep silent. “I’m not hungry, James,” she called. When he was out doing chores she’d sneak down and poach herself a nice egg, and make herself some toast. “I’m just not hungry this morning,” she said.

That stopped him a minute. She could see him, in her mind’s eye, standing there pulling at his long, whiskered chin, bushy white eyebrows lifted, eyes staring straight down his nose. He said: “You’ve gotta come out of there sooner or later, if it’s only to go to the potty.”

She thought about that. It was true enough, and it would be more like sooner than later. She could use the bathroom while he worked at his chores; but the rest of the time … Then her gaze, restlessly roving around the room as she groped for a rejoinder, landed on the washstand in the corner, beyond the attic door, and she realized with a start that she had him! Down inside that washstand, tucked in among old towels and washcloths, lay Ariah’s old bedpan, and right there on top, under the wooden towel-rack on its oaken lyre, peeking out from behind the kerosene lamp, sat a whole box of Kleenex! If he wanted war, war he would get. She could outlast any siege he could mount!

“All the same, I’m not hungry, James,” she called brightly.

There was another minute’s silence. She held her breath, smiling.

“Well I be cussed,” he said — more to the doorknob, she imagined, than to her. Now she heard his footsteps moving away, hay-foot, straw-foot, maugering slowly toward the head of the stairs, just past the bathroom, and then down the stairs into the kitchen.

“Well I be God damned,” said James Page to himself, down in the kitchen. The cat ducked out of sight. It was all very well for the old woman to play games, he told himself, but the facts of the matter was as they was. He was willing to admit that by rights the house was as much hers as his, now that his daughter had called it to his attention — though they was many a man he knew would never been so generous. It was him had the deed in the Courthouse. So far as the Law was concerned, she damn well had the clothes on her back. Well, tell it to the bees; law was law and fair was fair, as he’d said himself. He was willing to grant she had a certain, as you might say, moral right. But by the same token, he had certain rights. Did she think she could take away his house from him and, like some scoundrel on Relief, just lay there in her dad-blame bed like a pig in a pughole? They’d see about that!

He frowned, head thrown forward, stroking his chin, his left hand fingering the snakehead in his pocket; then, reaching his decision, went into the living room for the key. He smiled when he saw it was missing from the dish that held the others (the dish held also a thimble and some coins and buttons). He should’ve known right off his daughter would’ve taken it. And she should’ve known he’d have another one. There was always two keys to everything; that was one of the unalterable rules of the universe. And in this case, the second was in his shoebox, in his upper right desk draw.

Sally, in her bed, with her teeth in now, was still smiling with self-satisfied, malicious delight, like a foxy old general — or like wicked Captain Fist in the novel she was reading — when she heard her brother James coming back up the stairs, then down the hall toward her door. She was puzzled, a little. It was unlikely that he’d beg; even more unlikely that he’d stoop to persuasion. Then what? she wondered. The footsteps stopped outside her door and she leaned forward, listening. After a minute, she heard — her heart fluttered — the lock click! She continued to smile, but her eyes were thoughtful, even a little troubled, as his footsteps went back to the head of the stairs and then down them. Soon she smelled bacon and eggs frying.

She got up and used the bedpan (thank God for the bedpan!), then turned the stiff winglatch on the attic door, pulled the small china knob until the door came unstuck, and went up to get two apples. She polished them on her nightie as she brought them back down, and, after she’d re-latched the attic door, took them to bed with her, along with her book. She heard James whistling as he went out to milk the cows — tunelessly chirping, not a trouble in this world! — to torment her. Well they’d see about that.