John Gardner - October Light

“It’s useless, Lewis,” Ginny was saying now, stubbing out a cigarette. “We may as well go home. Let them fight it out themselves.” She was turning toward the head of the stairs when she paused and frowned. “Sweetie,” she said, “look what you’re doing to that door!”

He’d peeled away patches up to three inches round, six or seven of them, maybe more (he didn’t count), revealing there, beneath the cream-colored paint, shiny green. It looked like the door had some dangerous new kind of chicken pox. He smiled ruefully at his guilty left hand, turning it, looking at the dirt cracks.

“Well, come on,” she said, and led on toward the stairs. She called back to Aunt Sally, “When you’re ready to come out, Aunt Sally, come out. And try to behave yourself.”

“He’ll lock it as soon as you’re gone,” Aunt Sally called back, and seemed thoroughly pleased.

“No he won’t. You be reasonable and he’ll be,” Ginny said.

Lewis Hicks doubted it but said nothing.

When they reached the kitchen, her father said, getting up from his chair at the Formica table, “Right’s right, that’s ah.” It seemed he intended to say no more.

“Nothing’s simple,” Lewis said thoughtfully, as if to himself, and nodded. He saw, too late, it put him squarely in the wrong — put him with the Liberals. The old man pointed at him, eyes narrowed, hard as flints. “That’s what you say, boy. But suppose you had a house, and some woman come into it and turnt it end for end? She’s got a right to live ennaway she pleases, she says. But what about me, now? That’s ah I want to know. I been living the same way for sixty-odd years, paying up my taxes and obeyin ah the laws, keepin my mind clear of lies and foolishness, and now, because she’s had a little hahd luck, I got to change my ways till this life’s just not woth gettin up for.”

Ginny was over to the door by now, as eager to get out of there as Lewis was. “You know it’s not that bad,” she said.

“I know no such thing. Meaner than a wasp, that’s what she is. Soft-headed as a cheese. We read in the paper, sittin right here at this same kitchen table, some woman over there in Shaftsbury has been breakin and enterin, stealing people’s things, and by tunkit Sally stots tellin me how society’s to blame. You and me! We done it! I never said it’s a picnic to be poor, ye know, but the way she talks wrecks my supper, and that wrecks my sleep nights. I got work to do, ye see? When a man has to get up in the mahnin for milkin, it ain’t healthy to be lyin awake nights, sick.”

Ginny had her hand on the doorknob but still didn’t turn it.

“Well,” Lewis said, nodding in the general direction of her father, venturing no definite opinion.

“And now,” the old man went on, “there she is on strike. That’s the long and the shot of it. Let her go back where she come from, then, that’s ah I can say.”

“Dad, she can’t go back,” Ginny said.

The old man said nothing, merely stood puckering his lips in righteous anger.

Ginny let go of the doorknob and turned again to face him. Unconsciously, she was opening her purse and reaching in. She said, “Maybe she should come live with us for a while.”

Lewis frowned almost unnoticeably.

She saw it all right but pretended not to, getting the cigarette between her lips now and lighting it. “We could keep her for a little while at least, sweetie, till we think of something better.” She blew out smoke.

He could see the old woman moved in at their place, bumping into Ginny in the kitchenette, where there was hardly room for two mosquitoes to pass, sleeping on the sofa, with her bags piled around her, or on a mattress on the dining-room table, maybe. He mentioned aloud, his eyebrows lifted thoughtfully, “It’s a pretty sma’ house.”

“We could figure something out.” Her hand was shaking. He hadn’t seen Ginny shake this bad since the night after they’d been inspected by the people from the adoption agency.

He mentioned, as if thinking aloud again, “We wouldn’t have room for her things, course. Mebby a suitcase, one or two.”

From upstairs, Aunt Sally called — she’d apparently opened the door to listen—“I wouldn’t go where I’m not wanted, thank you.”

“You think you’re wanted here?” Ginny’s father called.

Ginny’s eyes filled with tears, and the cigarette she drew to her lips shook violently. “Oh the hell with the both of you,” she said. “Lewis, let’s go.”

“Now, Ginny,” he said vaguely.

But she’d opened the door. Cold air rushed in. He nodded to her father, apologetic, gave a left-handed wave, and followed her out. When he reached back with his left hand to close the door behind him — Ginny was already in the car and had turned on the headlights to hurry him — her father was holding the door on his side, pulling against Lewis. Lewis nodded awkwardly, let go, and went on toward the car. The old man called after them, “Don’t worry, now. I’ll straighten this out.” His voice had such determination that Lewis, hurried as he felt, had to pause and look back one more time, uneasy. Then Lewis gave his left-handed wave again and walked to where Ginny sat waiting, blowing smoke like a chimney.

Sally Page Abbott sat listening in her bed, waiting for signs that her brother had finally gone to sleep. She got nothing of the kind. No sooner would the house become quiet for a moment, leading her to believe that before long she’d be free to sneak down to the kitchen where the food was — a little something just to stave off diarrhea — than there it would be again, the dumpings and shufflings of his moving around, hay-foot, straw-foot, coming up the stairs, breathing hard, the way he breathed when he was carrying things. What he was up to, Great Peter only knew. She was tempted to go open the door a crack and look, but it was impossible to be sure he wasn’t watching from somewhere, or listening and she was bound and determined to give that man no satisfaction. He would come down the hallway and move past her door, hay-foot, straw-foot, not pausing for a moment, though the hallway went nowhere, only to the closet beyond her room, and the place where the plaster of the wall was cracked from the chimney heat. She heard him grunting sometimes, and whistling just under his breath in a way that seemed curious, somehow cautious — whistling as he might when he was doing some moderately dangerous work such as electrical wiring. He worked for more than an hour after Ginny and her husband what’s-his-name went home. (She squinted, trying to remember that man’s name — she knew it as well as she knew her own, of course — but all she could think of, now wasn’t that something? was “Mr. Nit.”) Much of the time he worked so quietly she began to doubt he was still there. Then one time James said, shuffling away toward the head of the stairs, “The door’s still unlocked, Sally, case you’re wonderin.” She heard him go into the bathroom and close the door and, after a long time, come out, the toilet flushing — a sound unnaturally loud in the otherwise still house — and then she heard him go slowly downstairs, heard the door pulled closed at the foot of the stairs, and then silence except for the grunt of a pig once or twice and the ticking of her clock.

She sat up straighter to listen harder, her sharp-beaked head tipped forward and sideways like an eagle’s. There was still not a sound, but he’d left the hallway light on, it came to her. Tight as he was, he’d never have gone off to bed and forgot there was a light on. She smiled and went on waiting. For the second night in a row, she saw when she looked at the onyx, Roman-columned clock, she’d been up past midnight. She couldn’t have felt better, more young for her years, more wide awake. She tapped the bedspread with the paperback book, too excited and impatient for reading. “You see what it’s come to, Horace,” she said. She hadn’t the faintest idea what she meant, or even that she was speaking; it was merely a fragment of a daydream surfacing, diving again before she noticed.