John Gardner - October Light

It was hunger that had roused her again from her story. She looked around in surprise, reality flooding in — or another reality, so to speak; the book, for all its foolishness, had convinced her exactly as a dream might do, she’d seen those people and that ridiculous old fishingboat as plain as day, as plain as the pictures on Hawaii Five-O. She glanced at the cover — the half-naked girl and the horrible old Captain (not at all as she herself imagined them) — and shook her head. “Well that does take the cake,” she said. The Captain was supposed to have eyes like bullet holes, and the girl’s hair was dark. As if from another time and place, the memory of her battle with James came back. It seemed silly now, cranked up out of nothing like the troubles in her book, and considering the leaves outside her window and the blue-as-blue October sky, she had half a mind to call him and let bygones be bygones. It occurred to her that maybe, one of those times when she’d nodded off, he’d come up and unlocked her door.

She got up to see. The floor was so cold it was like walking on hard snow, and despite her curiosity about the door, she stopped to put her slippers on, and then, as an afterthought, her gray cardigan sweater. In the back of her mind she heard the phone ringing. Now she went to the door and tried it. Still locked. “Stubborn old fool,” she said aloud. The phone rang on. He’d be outdoors somewhere, collecting the eggs, cleaning the stables, feeding the pigs and horses, or whatever. Well, she thought, there was nothing she could do about the phone, locked in her bedroom like some poor old madwoman in a novel. She went toward the attic door, planning to smuggle down more apples. She could smell the bedpan, which she’d pushed in under the washstand after she’d used it this morning. She frowned, trying to think how to empty it. Maybe there was some old pail or empty trunk in the attic. But she was standing looking out the window toward the road as she thought the problem through, and abruptly she seized, almost without consciously thinking of it, the simplest solution: she opened the window and unhooked the screen, then, nose wrinkling, carried the bedpan over and dumped it on the bushes down below. Then she went up to get the apples.

When James came back in from watering the stock and gathering eggs, the phone was ringing. He had a pretty fair idea who it would be. He picked up the receiver and called, “Ay-uh?”

“Hi, Dad. It’s Ginny.”

“I thought it might be you, Ginny.”

“I just thought I’d call and see how everything’s going.”

“I thought you might do that.”

He could see, in his mind’s eye, her gathering frown.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“How is everything going?”

“Oh, fine. Everything’s fine over here. How’s everything with you?”

She said, “How’s Aunt Sally?”

“Aunt Sally? Oh, she’s alive, far’s I know.”

There was a pause.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, Aunt Sally didn’t get up today. Slept in.”

“She didn’t get up at all?”

“Not that I know of. Course I ain’t been listening at the keyhole.”

“Didn’t she eat?”

The old man tipped his long head back, studying the leaves on the lawn.

“Dad?”

“No, I can say for pretty certain she never et a thing.”

In his mind he could picture her reflecting on that, probably fumbling with her cigarettes. At last, perhaps after a drag on the cigarette, she said, “That’s impossible! She never left her room?”

“Never once,” he said, nodding thoughtfully at the leaves. “I can say that for pretty near certain.”

“Dad,” she said, “you’ve nailed the door shut!”

He shook his head. “Nope, just used the other key.”

There was a silence. Then: “I’ll be right over.”

“Now Ginny, don’t you do that! You mine your own business. I had the door open, but she wouldn’t come out. She wouldn’t do a stitch around the house all day, wouldn’t even fix breakfast. What’s a man supposed to do, a case like that? She thinks she can move in and live off my sustenance and never do a lick, pollute my parlor with her dad-blame TV, clutter up the air with her dad-blame chatter—”

“Just don’t do anything more,” Ginny said, “I’ll be right over.” She hung up. James Page hung up too, and refused to feel guilty, though he could see pretty well he was in for it. Nevertheless he was well within his rights. He’d been working from sun-up to well after sundown for sixty-odd years, paying his taxes, keeping the place fit, and in she’d come like some immigrant, barging in on everything, talking about her rights …

A mile down the mountain, Samuel Frost was also just hanging up his phone.

“What are you smiling at?” his wife Ellen said. She too was smiling, for Sam Frost’s good humor was infectious. He was bald except for a shadow of gray hair that had once been red, and he was fat, though solid as a treetrunk.

“You know I’m not one to tell tales,” he said, still grinning from ear to ear, hardly able to contain himself.

“Fiddlesticks,” she said, “people use a party line, they should mind their talk.”

“Mebby so,” he said chuckling, holding his belly. “But there’s nothin to tell. If old James Page locks his sister in the bedroom, it’s certain he’s got some good reason.”

“He didn’t!” she said, eyes widening in disbelief and glee.

“Mebby not,” he said, “mebby I heard wrong.” She stared a moment longer, flabbergasted, and then both of them laughed till tears ran down their faces.

He mentioned it that night at Merton’s Hideaway, sitting with a fat, freckled hand closed tight around a Ballantine’s. He was drinking from the bottle, though as usual, out of some queer stubbornness, Merton had handed him a glass. Leave the thing clean as a whistle, Merton would still wash it; all part of the price. It was early, but dark as a pit outside. When they happened to look out, turning from the oval wooden table near the bar, it seemed to them all, one way or another, a surprising and vaguely unnatural thing — though they’d seen it every year of their lives — that sudden contraction of daylight in October, the first deep-down convincing proof that locking time, and after that winter and deep snow and cold, were coming. Whether or not they cared for winter — some claimed they did, some claimed they didn’t — every one of them felt a subdued excitement, a new aliveness that was more, in fact, than the seasonal change in their chemistry.

Summer, for all its beauty on those mountain-slope farms, meant back-breaking work, long hours on the tractor where you struggled against the stiff upgrade pull of the steering wheel and fought till you ached against the jerk and jab of the plow-lift lever as the plow-points skittered over stones. And then later, in July, it meant heaving bales in the still, dead heat, with bees all around you, first-cousins to the fairies, but nothing magical about a swarm of impinged-on bees in a dry, hot hayloft in July, no magic in anything except, perhaps, to the tourists who came like a plague of locusts and had time to watch the otters in the high mountain streams, or the foal in the shadow of the barn. August was cooler, though still high summer, so cool in the morning and evening, at times, especially those mornings and occasional evenings when mist filled the valleys, that it was best to have a fire in the woodstove; but August meant even more work than before — still hay to get in, but also sweetcorn, potatoes, and tomatoes, and now wheat and oats, grainsacks to throw, your eyes and ears and nostrils full of dust, harsh chaff in the cracks around your neck. Late August, although still grain-harvest time — it would drag through September — was the time of carnivals and village fairs, church suppers, all-day auctions, and demonstrations by the Volunteer Fire Department. It was the time of respite before the air turned winy and the field-corn came in and then the busiest harvest of all. Apples. The State had been rich in them since long before the Revolution. Even in deep woods you’d come across old apple trees still bearing away, half-forgotten species like Pound Sweets and Snow-apples. Now, in October, the farmwork was slackening, the drudgery had paid off: the last of the corn went flying into the silo with a clackety roar and a smell as sweet as honey; the beans were harvested in half a day, like an afterthought; on the porch and out by the roadside stood mountains of pumpkins. The trees turned — those along the paved roads first, dying from the salt put down in winter — sugar maples orange, pink, and yellow on one branch, elm trees pale yellow, birch trees speckled with a lemony yellow, still other trees carmine and vermilion and ochre, red maples as red as fresh blood. Soon — anytime from mid-October to the end of November — it would be locking time.