John Gardner - October Light

Call it a curious and idle opinion, it nevertheless had, at least for James Page — who was a thoughtful man, a moralist and brooder — sober implications. It was bone and meat that the world pulled downward, and the spirit, the fire of life that pushed upward, soared. It was sin, slavery, despair that hung heavy, freedom that climbed on eagle’s wings to cliffs transcendent, not common rock. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free …” Everything decent, James Page believed, supported the struggle upward, gave strength to the battle against gravity. And all things foul gave support not to gravity — there was nothing inherently evil in stone or a Holstein bull — but to the illusion of freedom and ascent. The Devil’s visions were all dazzle and no lift, mere counterfeit escape, the lightness of a puffball — flesh without nutrients — the lightness of a fart, a tale without substance, escape from the world of hard troubles and grief in a spaceship.

He believed sure as day in those airy cliffs — not heaven, exactly, but a firm, high place luring feeling and ambition past existence as it is; not the Oz of the fairy tales his wife Ariah had read in the living room to his daughter and sons (James Page, in his spectacles, pretending to read the paper), not an emerald city where dreams come true, but some shadowy mountain calling down to intuition, some fortress for the lost made second by second and destroyed and made again, like Mount Anthony seen through fog.

Because of this opinion or general set of thought, the old man — almost without thinking, almost by instinct — was violently repelled by all that senselessly prettified life and, in his own dark view, belied it. He hated the Snoopy in his grandson’s lap, hated Coca-Cola and the State of California, which he’d never seen, hated foreign cars, which he identified with weightless luxury and “the Axis,” hated foam rubber, TV dinners, and store-bought ice cream. At Christmas, when the stores in the town of Bennington were jubilant with lights, and shoppers’ voices, breaking through the Muzak and feathery snow, were as clear and innocent as children’s cries, James Page would pause, blanching, his hands in his overcoat, his ears sticking out, and would stare in black indignation at a glittering white astronaut doll in a window. Whether or not he could have said what he was feeling, and whether or not it would have mattered to the world or the company that runs it, the old man was right about the meaning of that doll. It was there to undo him, both him and his ghosts. Whether or not it was true, as he imagined, that once in his childhood he’d heard angels sing, and had seen them moving in the aurora borealis, it was undoubtedly true that the Muzak made certain he would hear them — if in fact they were still up there singing — no more. It was hard to believe that any soul, however willing, could be uplifted by the conflict of recordings rasping through the snow-flurried air; hard to believe that the nodding, mechanical Santa in the Bennington Bookstore window could be drawn to the house by the magic of a Christmas tree cut with an axe on Mount Prospect’s crest and sledded, the children all squealing, to the woodshed door.

He did not of course, when he stopped to think, believe in elves or believe that bees can talk with fairies or pigs with wind, or that bears are visitors from another world; did not believe in Jack Frost or even, with his whole heart and mind, Resurrection. Though he muttered spells from time to time — though for luck he spit left or made a circle to the right, and carried with him everywhere he went a small stick (a stick of ash) and a rattlesnake’s skull, protection against changelings — in even these he did not, when he considered carefully, believe. He believed in the most limited natural magic, the battle of spirit up through matter, season after season; and he believed that his ghosts, insofar as they were real or had the power of things real, were allies in the grim, universal war, as were the huge crayon paintings — the work of some nun of the Bennington Convent, years ago — that he liked to take people to see, now and then, at the Bennington Museum. He knew many such allies in the struggle toward ascent — church music, for instance, or Ruth Thomas’s poetry, even his own life’s work caring for dumb animals: horses, dairy cows, bees, pigs, chickens, and, indirectly, men.

He glanced at the boy, feeling guilty, as if the child were his judge. “Never mind,” he said aloud. He thought of a phrase Estelle Parks used, one of Sally’s friends: “Very fragile, this world.” He nodded, full of gloom. His world, he knew for pretty sure, was beyond fragility. Smashed. Well, tell it to the bees. Yet he listened to the wind even now, unconsciously, for some faint suggestion of articulate speech, and he glanced uneasily at the ceiling again, imagining his sister asleep, sunk into an absolute loneliness like death, just short of oblivion, molested by dreams.

He was reminded of his wife, then of her tombstone, down in the village cemetery, glossy. “Oh James, James,” she would say to him. He sighed. His anger was foolishness, tonight as always. All life was foolishness, a witless bear exploring, poking through woods. He couldn’t remember very well how his wife had looked when they were young. Even when he studied the picture album — a thing he rarely did — it was no help. He remembered one single moment — picking her up in his buggy one afternoon; an instant of emotion like a snapshot. The air had been yellow.

He gazed into the fire, hunting some sharper recollection in its flickering light.

Concerning his sister, as it happened, the old man was wrong. She had paused above the table beside the bed, weeping hot, pinkish tears of indignation and spite, planning out her definite and terrible revenge — she was a demon for revenge, he ought to know that by now — and happening to look down when she’d just rubbed the tears away, pushing her hankie past the bottoms of her blue plastic spectacles to her eyes, she had noticed on the floor below the table, and had bent down to pick up for closer inspection, a dog-eared paperback with what looked to be pinpricks or possibly tooth-prints and ugly bits of grit and dark stain on the cover — coffee grounds, or maybe wet-and-then-later-dried-out bits of oat-grist. It was torn half to pieces, as if it had been run over, and the binding glue was weakened so that the pages were loose and great chunks of the story were fallen away. It was probably one of her niece’s books, the boy’s mother’s, she supposed — though why the girl had saved it, ruin that it was, only the good Lord knew. Anyway this was where the niece had fixed her make-up, before leaving for her meeting — little Dickey watching her, promising to be good — and it was the kind of book that girl would read, no doubt: common drugstore trash, you could tell by the cover. The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock, it said, and above the title, in big white letters: “A Black-comic Blockbuster” —L. A. Times.

She turned the book over, clamping it tightly to keep the pages in, brushed futilely at a stain, then squinted, reading what it said in red letters on the back.

“Blows the lid off marijuana smuggling, fashionable gang-bangs, and the much-sentimentalized world of the middle-aged Flower Child. A sick book, as sick and evil as life in America …”

— National Observer

“Deeply disturbing!”

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Hilarious!”

— New York Times

She lowered the book, then half-absentmindedly raised it once more to reading range, her hands still trembly — the book was so dried out and bleached and cheap it was lighter than nothing — and opened it indifferently to “Chapter 1.” Lips puckered with distaste, brushing away dirt with the side of her hand, she read a sentence, then another. The print swam and blurred and the sense drifted up through her brain like smoke. She tipped up her blue plastic spectacles again and dabbed at her eyes with her hankie. She had, of course, no intention of reading a book that she knew in advance to be not all there; but on the other hand here she was, locked up like a prisoner, without even her sewing to occupy her mind (it was down on the table by the ruined TV). Forgetting herself, almost unaware that she was doing it, she eased down onto the bedspread and went back to the beginning. She let her mind empty, drift like a balloon, as she would when she sat down to television. She read: