John Gardner: October Light

He looked at the ceiling, and the boy looked up too. The old woman had stopped pacing. The old man squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his head, then opened them, staring in the direction of his knees. He pursed his lips and sucked at his teeth, and his bushy white eyebrows were red in the glow of the firelight. Perhaps for an instant he felt a touch of remorse, but if so he got rid of it. He nodded in thoughtful agreement with himself. “They was a rough, ill-bred lot—‘filthy rabble,’ as General Geahge Washington called ’em — but there was things they believed in, a sma’ bit, ennaway: a vision, you might say, as in the Bible. It was that they lied for and fought for and, some of ’em, croaked for. What will people lie for now, eh boy? Soap and mattresses, that’s what they’ll lie for! Coca-Cola, strip-mines, snowmobiles, underarm deodorants! Crimus! Thank the Lord those old-timers can’t be hollered back to life. There’d be bloody red hell to pay, believe you me, if they saw how we’re living in this republic!”

He groped for the glass beside his foot and chuckled, still full of lightning but maliciously pleased at the ghastly idea of the foundling fathers coming staggering from the graveyard — hollow-eyed and terrible, their blue coats wormy, musket-barrels dirt-packed — and starting up a new revolution. He glanced at the boy and saw that, hands still folded, he was looking up timidly at the ceiling. Not meaning it quite as an apology, though it was, the old man said: “Never mind, do her good,” and waved his long hand. “She be asleep by now.” He sipped his whiskey, and when he’d lowered his glass to the carpet beside his iron-toed shoe again, he discovered his pipe was out. He reached into the pocket of his shirt to get a match, struck it on a stone of the fireplace, and held it to his pipebowl.

The boy could not help understanding that the rant was serious, nor could he help knowing — though he couldn’t understand it — that he himself was in some way, at least in the old man’s eyes, in alliance with what was wrong. Staring at the flames, finding forms in the logs — an owl, a bear with its arms extended — the two were not seeing the same thing at all. The old man had been born in an age of spirits, and lived in it yet, though practically alone there, and filled with doubts. When the windows of his house, on a cold winter morning, were adazzle with flowers, forest-scapes, cascades and avalanches, he believed — except if he stopped to think — that Jack Frost had done it, best painter in the world, as James Page’s sharp-eyed old uncle used to say. The grandson, who lived in a warmer house, had never seen such windows. The old man believed, except if he stopped to think, in elves and fairies, in goblins and the Devil, in Santa Claus and Christ. The boy had been told since he was small that such things were just stories. And in the exact same semidark level of his mind, the old man believed in that huge old foul-mouthed bear of a man Ethan Allen, whose spectacles lay yet in the Bennington Museum, along with his account at the Catamount Tavern, which he’d lived next door to, the brown writing firm and unmythic as the writing of Jedediah Dewey, hellfire preacher, whose great-great-great-great-grandson Charles built fine eighteenth-century furniture for friends and could be seen here and there throughout New England with his matched black team and one of his buggies or his high, polished sleigh, sitting there grinning in the forty-below weather when cars wouldn’t start. The old man believed — as surely at least as he believed in Resurrection — in Daniel Webster, who’d spoken to four thousand people once in a natural theater, a great swoop of valley walled in by green mountains, now a forested stretch on John McCullough’s estate. He believed as surely in Samuel Adams, that angry, crafty old son of a bot, embarrassment to Franklin and the Continental Congress, indispensable as Death to the Sons of Liberty, and not much more welcome at an Easter party — believed in him as surely as he did in Peg Ellis of Monument Avenue in the village of Old Bennington, who had, by way of her late husband George, who had them from his grandfather, who had them direct from the addressee, faded copies of Sam Adams’ letters, the few he’d been unable to get back, at the time of the Burr scare, and put to the torch.

But it wasn’t mere myth or mere history-as-myth — exalted figures to stir the imagination, teach the poor weighted-down spirit to vault — it wasn’t mere New England vinegar and piss that made the old man fierce. Though he was wrong in some matters, an objective observer would be forced to admit — cracked as old pottery, no question about it — it was true that he had, off and on, real, first-class opinions. He knew the world dark and dangerous. Blame it on the weather. “Most people believe,” he liked to say, “that any problem in the world can be solved if you know enough; most Vermonters know better.” He’d seen herds of sheep die suddenly for no reason, or no reason you could learn until too late. He’d seen houses burn, seen war and the effects of war: had a neighbor, it was nearly thirty years ago now, who’d hunted his wife and five children like rabbits and shot ’em all dead — he’d been a flame-thrower man, earned a medal for his killings in Germany. He, James Page, had been one of the neighbors, along with Sam Frost and two others now gone on, who’d walked the man’s pastures and woodlots, looking for the bodies. He’d seen a child killed falling off a banister once, and a hired man sucked into a corn-chopper. He’d seen friends die of heart attack, cancer, and drink; he’d seen marriages fail, and churches, and stores. He’d had one son killed by a fall from the barn roof, another — his first-born and chief disappointment — by suicide. He’d lost, not long after that, his wife. He was not, for all this, a pessimist or (usually) a thoroughgoing misanthrope; on the contrary, having seen so much of death — right now, in fact, there was the corpse of a black and white calf on his manure pile — he was better than most men at taking it in stride; better, anyway, than the man sealed off in his clean green suburb in Florida. But he understood what with stony-faced wit he called “life’s gravity,” understood the importance of admitting it, confronting it head on, with the eyes locked open and spectacles in place.

He was a man who worked with objects, lifting things, setting them down again — bales of hay, feedbags, milkcans, calves — and one of his first-class opinions was this: All life — man, animal, bird, or flower — is a brief and hopeless struggle against the pull of the earth. The creature gets sick, his weight grows heavier, he has moments when he finds himself too weary to go on; yet on he goes, as long as he lives, on until the end — and it is a bitter one, for no matter how gallantly the poor beast struggles, it’s a tragic and hopeless task. The body bends lower, wilting like a daisy, and finally the pull of the earth is the beast’s sunken grave.

James Page was never a man of many words, but words were by no means without interest for him. They too were objects to be turned in the hand like stones for a wall, or sighted down, like a shotgun barrel, or savored like the honey in a timothy stalk. He wrote no poems — except one once, a prayer. Even when angry, at a Bennington Town Meeting, he’d be hard pressed to make a political speech. But he noticed words one by one, as he might notice songbirds, and he sometimes made lists of them, crudely pencilled into his Agro pocketsize farm record. He knew about down: a man, a horse, a rooster has times when he feels downhearted, downtrodden, down in the mouth, plain down, and in the end down and out. He turns down offers, he turns thumbs down. And James Page knew, needless to say, about up: he would at times feel uplifted, up to a thing, up to someone’s tricks, upright, or if barely on his feet, hard-up. A man, he knew, looks down on the people he considers beneath him; he has high or low ideals and opinions, high or low spirits and morale; his spirits rise or get a lift whenever things look up for him; in time his spirits fall, like a conquered city, a woman deflowered, a season. Even language, James Page understood —low speech — suffers gravity.