John Gardner - October Light

Well, fierce and foolish opinions they might be, but he’d held them for seventy years and more (he’d be seventy-three on July the fourth); he was hardly about to abandon them. Though he was never a great talker — certainly not in comparison to her, she could lecture your arm off — he knew a significant fact or two, knew, by thunder, a truth or two — as he mentioned to his grandson, grimly poking a crooked, cracked finger at him — a truth or two that was still worth getting out of bed for. Such knowledge was as rare these days as golden parsnips. He was the last, could be, that still possessed any real, first-class opinions.

The old woman, his sister, whose name was Sally Page Abbott — she thought she was royalty, her husband had been a dentist — was up there in the bedroom, furiously pacing, locked in the bedroom by her brother’s hand, away from the boy, where her foolish ideas could have no influence. She believed in “changing with the times,” she’d said — believed in, for instance, atomic-bomb power plants, since the Government claimed they was perfectly safe and eventually, one way another, they’d get rid of that waste. “Who knows about such things if not the Government?” she’d said, flustered and offended. She’d seen some program about “feeder reactors,” hope of the universe. “Lies!” he’d said. From the look of her he might’ve been a Communist Chinese. Well, he knew what he knew, he’d told her, and smiled at her like poison come to supper. He was, he reminded her, a taxpayer. She wept. She believed there was no harm in mass production and business efficiency, even agribusiness; an opinion that lifted off his shingles. Agribusiness was the enemy of the nation, he’d informed her in no uncertain terms, thumping the arm of his chair for emphasis. Agribusiness was squeezing out honest small farmers by the thousands, making them go to work in pencil factories, stand in soup lines, turn into drunkards. He’d see them in hell, those tycoons of the ten-speed tractor, and that devil in a skin Earl Butz with ’em. The old man’s cheeks twitched and jerked as he spoke; he was shaking head to foot, like a goat that’s eaten lightning. She also believed in supermarkets (got that, too, from TV), and in New York City and Amnesty for the War Resisters, even believed it was society’s fault when some crooked little snake committed murder. She was a cotton-headed fool who confessed, herself, that she had faith in people, though she was eighty years old and ought to know better.

The brother—“James L. Page is the name,” he’d say — was never one to argue, except on occasion at a Bennington Town Meeting. He’d settled the business by driving her upstairs with a fireplace log, sister or no sister, and had locked her to herself in her room; let her think things over. “Insane, drunken devil!” she’d bawled as she retreated, stepping upstairs backwards, holding up her spotted, crooked talons for protection. “Insane drunken devil my ass,” he might have said. She could thank her sweet Saviour he was a Christian and didn’t care to pop her one. He was a patriot, and foolishness like hers was destroying this great country.

If James Page was crazy, as his sister maintained — and there were some on the mountain who’d be inclined to agree, to say nothing of all her friends — it was not for lack of study, not for lack of brooding over magazines and papers, or listening to people’s talk. Except for his morning and evening chores, or patching up the barn when a board blew off, or shoveling through shoulder-high drifts now and then to let the milktruck up, and cutting ice from the roof, or sometimes sorting through potatoes in the cellar, culling out the rotten ones, squishy to the touch and more foul of stench than politics, foul as the bloom of a rat three weeks dead in the cistern, or Social Security — except for what trivial work wandered in between the second killing frost and sugaring time, James Page, for the length of the whole Vermont winter, did practically nothing but sit pondering books (his daughter in Arlington, mother of the boy, had joined him to a book club — history books — and subscribed him to four different magazines) or reading his newspapers — grimacing angrily, baring the upper front teeth in his foot-long, narrow head, leaning toward the window in his steel-rimmed spectacles, the brittle, dry-smelling, yellowed lace curtains softening just noticeably the mountains’ light, white as his hair. Between times he’d drive to the village in his pick-up and sit with his hat on in Merton’s Hideaway, nursing a Ballantine’s and listening, full of gloom, to the talk.

She’d spoken of corruption. The best social programs in the world, she said — the powder-white wings of her nose aflicker — could be made to look bad by corruption; that wasn’t the program’s fault. She’d got feistier by the minute since the evening he’d shot out that TV. When he’d thumped his fist on his chair-arm she’d quickly pulled her chin back.

“I’ll tell you about corruption, by tunkit,” he said now, bending toward his grandson, squinting like an Indian, nodding his head, white hair glowing.

The grandson sat perfectly still, his hands, pale as alabaster, folded in his lap, his blue eyes as wide as two quarters. The black and white cat, curled up casually asleep under the old man’s chair, was used to such commotion, as was the dog, watching sadly from the corner of the room. It would be hours, the boy knew, before his mother would come get him. He was nine and, as always in his grandfather’s presence, he was terrified. His grandfather, the boy had heard people say when they thought he wasn’t listening, had had a son who’d hanged himself and another who’d fallen off the barn and broke his neck when he was little. The one who’d hanged himself had been twenty-five and had a house across the road. It had since burned down. The boy had seen the graves at the cemetery in the village. That was why the boy wouldn’t sleep in this house, or anyway not unless his mother was with him. He was afraid of the noises in the attic.

“Benjamin Franklin,” his grandfather said, still bending toward him in a threatening way, “was a nudist. Used to walk around his house nights barenaked. I bet they never leahnt you that in school.”

The boy shook his head, smiling eagerly to save himself from harm, and shrank from the old man’s eyes.

“Faddle’s ah they teach,” said his grandfather. “Bleached-out hoss-manure.” He took a puff from his pipe, blew out smoke and said, aiming the pipestem at the middle of the boy’s collarbone, “Sam Adams was a liar. Your teachers tell you that? When Sam Adams organized the Boston militia, he told ’em the port of New York had fallen, which was a damn lie. He was as bad as a Communist agitator.” He smiled again, glinty-eyed, like a raccoon in the orchard, and whether he was feeling indignation at Sam Adams or at somebody else — the old woman upstairs, the boy himself, the gray-brown whiskey and specks of ash in his glass — it was impossible to tell. “Ethan Allen was a drunkahd. When he moved through these pots”—or perhaps he said parts —“with his roughneck gang of Green Mountain Boys, he got drunker at every house he stopped at, and that’s God’s truth. It’s a holy wonder he made it up the cliffside, at Ticonderoga, him and his boys and them drunken wild Indians. It’s a wonder he could remember the names of ‘The Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress’ when he told ’em to surrender.”

He sucked at his pipe and grew calmer for a moment, thinking of Jehovah and the Continental Congress. He stared with nothing worse than a malevolent leer into the fireplace. “They was a rough, ill-bred lot, for the most pot, them glorious foundling fathers. But one thing a man can say of ’em that’s true: they wasn’t fat pleasure-loving self-serving chicken-brained hogs such as people are nowadays.”