John Gardner - October Light

It began as a suspension of time altogether. Rudyard Kipling saw it in Brattleboro, in 1895, and wrote: “There the seasons stopped awhile. Autumn was gone. Winter was not. We had Time dealt out to us — more clear, fresh Time — grace-days to enjoy.” There’d be nothing to do but chores, load pigs for butchering, chop firewood, or walk through the dry, crisp leaves of a canted wood hunting deer. The air in the cowbarn would be clean and cold, but when you bent down between them for the milking, the cows would be as warm and comforting as stoves. Sometimes an Indian summer would break up the locking, sometimes not; but whatever the appearances, the ground was hardening; every now and then a loud crack would ring out, some oak tree closing down all business for the season. If it was warm and mild on Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning might be twenty degrees, and you’d find the water in the pig-trough frozen solid. By Thanksgiving the locking would be irreversible: the ground would be frozen, not to thaw again till spring. When the first good snow came, maybe three feet of it, maybe six, they’d call it winter.

This darkness now, fallen unnaturally early, as it always seemed every year — fallen like a thick tarpaulin around the Hideaway — was to them all, in their blood if not quite in their conscious minds, obscurely magical, a sign of elves working. If it had not been for that strangeness about things, Sam Frost might perhaps not have mentioned what he’d heard on the telephone, that old James Page had confined his sister to her bedroom.

“He never did!” Bill Partridge said, leaning toward Sam Frost. “Locked up old Sally in the bedroom? He must be daft!”

Giggling and blushing, his eyes filled with tears, Sam could only nod.

“No doubt he had plenty provocation,” Bill Partridge said. His voice had the high, thin whine of a buzzsaw. He sat with his hat on, his nose long and red, below it big folds — where there were still a few whiskers — drooping past his mouth and small chin.

“She’s got mighty strange opinions,” Henry Stumpchurch said — serious-minded, enormous and whopper-jawed, though by blood part Welshman — watching Sam Frost for some sign that he might know more.

Sam Frost nodded, still smiling and blushing. “You can understand his feelings,” he said. “Works all his life, puts his money in the bank, and there she comes with her hands held out, and he does what’s right and the next thing you know she’s got him hog-tied hand and foot, even runnin his cussed politics.”

“She don’t!” Bill Partridge said.

Sam was still nodding. “She’s a Democrat,” he said.

They waited, watching him, none of them admitting quite yet that the tale had gone somber.

Sam nodded again, eyes crinkling as if for a grin, but the grin was unconfident and failed. “Wife Ellen calls up about the Republican fund drive, and old Sally says to her, ‘James ain’t home.’ Twant the truth, point of fact. You could hear him in the background, hollerin to know who’s on the line.”

They stared, only gradually understanding the terrible implications.

“He’d ought to shoot her,” Bill Partridge said thoughtfully, and filled his glass.

By this time Lewis and Virginia Hicks were at her father’s house, trying to negotiate a peace. They’d left Dickey with a neighbor in Arlington, had come up Mount Prospect as fast as their rattle-trap car would climb, and in no time at all Ginny had persuaded the old man to unlock that door. It proved to be no help, as the old man had known it would be or he’d never have given in. “Two stubbaner people never lived,” Lewis said, not to anyone in particular. The old woman had the door-bolt shot inside and she’d rather be dead, she told them, than come out where that maniac was. Ginny and Lewis stood in the upstairs hallway, pleading through the door, the old man downstairs in the kitchen feigning indifference, but with the stairway door cracked open, allowing him to hear. Ginny grew angrier and more tearful by the minute, Lewis more despondent.

Lewis Hicks was a small man, and though he was going on forty years old he was thin as a boy. He had on the gray coveralls he’d been wearing when he came home and Ginny was making that phonecall to her father. His hair was cropped short and was by nature dry as dust and approximately that color; he had practically no chin, a large adam’s apple, and on his upper lip a brown, insignificant moustache. He had one blue eye, one brown eye. “Aunt Sally,” he said, for out in the driveway his car was running, swilling down the gas, and also he was paying that babysitter, “this is costin good money.” It was entirely unlike him to assert himself so, and as soon as he’d said it he glanced over at Ginny. He could see himself that it was petty and not likely to persuade. Ginny gave him a glance and he looked hastily at the floor. All the same, people asked a great deal of him, he thought. If crazy old brothers and sisters had fights, what concern was it of his? She’d come out, all right, when she got hungry enough; and if not, well, they could cross that bridge when they’d come to it. He glanced furtively at Ginny, then away again. He was rarely brought conviction by even his own most sensible reasoning. Life was slippery, right and wrong were as elusive as odors in an old abandoned barn. Lewis knew no certainties but hammers and nails, straps of leather, clocksprings. He had no patience with people’s complexities — preferred the solitude of his workshop down cellar, the safe isolation of a maple grove he’d been hired to trim, or some neighbor’s back yard, where he’d been hired to rake leaves — not because people were foolish, in Lewis Hicks’ opinion, or because they got through life on gross and bigoted oversimplifications, though they did, he knew, but because, quiet and unschooled as he might be, he could too easily see all sides and, more often than not, no hint of a solution.

Ginny crushed out her cigarette in the stippled glass ashtray she held in her left hand. As always when she was angry, her face was a trifle gray and puffy, putting him on guard, making him droop more than usual and run one finger across his moustache. “Aunt Sally,” Ginny said, “I want you to come out of there.” She listened, and when no answer came she flashed a look at Lewis as if her relatives’ craziness were all his fault, then called again: “Aunt Sally?”

“I hear you,” the old woman called back.

“Well, are you coming out or not?” she demanded.

“Not,” the old woman said. “I told you that. If I’m going to be treated like an animal, I might’s well be penned up like one.”

“Ha!” Ginny’s father broke in from downstairs. “Animals at least got some use in the world.”

“You see what he thinks of me?” the old woman whined. Possibly she was crying.

“Animals at least earn their keep,” he called.

“I don’t ask any keep,” the old woman called back — half convincing herself, the way it sounded—“just a little room to die in.”

“Aunt Sally,” Ginny called, “you’ve got to come out and eat something.” Her voice was sharper than ever now, annoyed, maybe, by the sentimental talk about dying.

“Don’t want to,” the old woman called back just as sharply.

It sounded final; Lewis had a feeling they’d be hearing nothing more from her. Ginny perhaps had the same feeling. She looked at him for help, then changed her mind and decided to light another cigarette. When it was going she said, “Aunt Sally, I’m going to bring a tray up here. I’ll leave it by your door. When you get hungry, you come on out and eat something.”

There was no answer for a moment. Then Aunt Sally called, “Wouldn’t bother, I was you.”