John Gardner - October Light

Now Lewis saw her too. Instinctively putting himself on Ginny’s side, hoping for immunity from her wrath, he yelled: “Aunt Sally, look what you done!” He pointed at the bushes.

Still she said nothing, staring down through the red-lighted panes like a madwoman, murderously serene.

Now Ginny’s face was taking on a new expression. Lewis saw the change, glancing at her furtively, but he no more understood it than Ginny did herself, or the child. She knew only that her anger had suddenly flashed hotter, and that it had to do with humiliation. These were her relatives, and the way Lewis stood, carefully not judging, made her face sting with shame. “Aunt Sally, you answer me,” she yelled, white with anger, and then suddenly covered her face with both hands and cried. Lewis stood helplessly looking from Ginny to Aunt Sally to the lilacs, spattered with runny brown and the stained white of wadded Kleenex. Then the window opened, and Aunt Sally, standing in her bathrobe, a paperback book in one hand, called down: “If you want to see your father, he’s out milkin.”

Lewis said, not quite to his wife, “I thought it might be chore-time.”

Ginny gave him such a look of pure scalding rage that his heart quaked. “Then why in hell didn’t you say so?”

He had no idea what he’d done to so anger her. “I’m sorry,” he said, voice quavering. “I should’ve spoke up.”

“Jesus,” she spat at them all, and started toward the barn. Lewis, knees weak, caught Dickey’s hand and followed.

Behind the house, where the back yard sloped down to the faded red barn on its rough rock foundation — the dingy white hives of the bees just beyond — there was only one tree, an old jagged hickory, most of its leaves fallen, so they could see the full glory of the crimson sunset above the mountain and the slope of the pasture. Perversely, for all his grief, or because of his grief, Lewis Hicks did see it, and registered that it was beautiful. He saw how the stones and grass of the pasture turned spiritual in this light, radiating power, as if charged with some old, mystic energy unnamed except in ancient Sumerian or Indian — how the forested mountains that had been a hundred colors just an hour ago — blood red, wine red, pink and magenta, bold strokes of orange, bright yellows and browns, purples that Ginny would call garish in a painting, and here and there, in blocks, dark greens and blue-greens where there were stands of pine — were now all suffused with the crimson of the sky, transmuted. Lewis Hicks saw and registered how even the old man’s machinery was transformed by this stunning light, the old yellow corn-chopper tilted against the silo more distinct, more itself than it would normally be, final as a tombstone, like the big Case tractor, the paintless box-wagon, the lobster-red corn-picker or the small gray tractor with its big square faded umbrella. He had no words for his impressions, but his misery intensified. He was wrong and wronged. Wordlessly, caught at the intersecting planes of the sunset’s beauty and Virginia’s strange anger — strange to him even though he saw he’d been a fool, and all she’d said was right — he suddenly wished his whole life changed absolutely, wished himself free and in the same motion wished for the opposite, or the same perhaps, wished he were dead. All husbands wished that, he supposed, from time to time, same as elves and bears. And perhaps all wives. But how mysterious that not even one could be spared, not even he, remote from the world, in a barnyard in Vermont. Did even cattle have such pangs of unhap-piness? Grasshoppers?

Dickey said, “Why’s she so mad?”

Abruptly, almost without noticing it, he was better. His soul crashed inward from the sky, the sweep of mountains like ocean waves — collapsed back to time out of timelessness — and he became a small man walking, holding his son’s hand, moving again through a specific time and place, not a disembodied, universal cry but a sober-faced husband and father who had certain problems, certain groundless duties. In the trunk of the Chevy he had paint-remover and a scraper.

“She’s upset,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

They ducked under the electric wire of the gate, then he picked up Dickey to carry him, stepping carefully, not that his shoes were all that fine, from firm place to firm place, grass-tuft to grass-tuft, past mud and slime and cowplops toward the milkhouse. Ginny had already disappeared through that door, hurrying ahead of them. They could hear the chuff-chuff of the milking-machine compressor.

Having seen what she’d seen, Ginny was solidly on her father’s side when she found him between two Holsteins, putting on a milker strap.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

The old man jumped, then smiled, pleased to see her, yet somewhat grim. “Hi there, Ginny,” he said.

“I knocked and knocked, up at the house,” she said. “The door was locked.”

It was a question, of course, but he pretended not to notice. “Wintah’s just around the cohnah,” he said. “So bahss”—leaning over to put the teatcups on.

“Have you seen what’s happened to the lilac bushes?” Ginny asked. She had her arms folded, hands clamped in tight on each side of her bosom, because her father would allow no smoking out here in the barn.

“Can’t say I have,” he said, and tipped up his long face to look at her. She said nothing, and he finished adjusting the machine, absently batting away a fly with his right hand, then stiffly raised himself, helping himself up by grabbing the cow’s sharp hipbone. When he was more or less erect — still bent over some, so that she was struck by the fact that her father had gotten old — he stepped back over the steaming, half-filled gutter to the walkway, placing the treads of his red boots carefully, to keep himself from slipping in manure or wet lime. He draped the strap from the cow he’d just finished around his neck. Ginny sniffled back tears. Though her father was strong from a lifetime of lifting and carrying, his flesh was wasting away, these last years, so that his rough red skin sagged and his bones stuck out like a half-starved animal’s, especially the vertebrae in the back of his neck, his skull — unpleasantly prominent, lately, like the skull of a foetus — and the bones of his fingers and wrists. “What about ’em?” he asked, “—the lilacs?”

“Aunt Sally’s been throwing her shit out the window,” she said, and abruptly, jerking her hands up to cover her face, she began sobbing. Her shoulders shook, her voice came out in whoops. The old man stood with his knuckly hands hanging at his sides and couldn’t think what to do. He hadn’t heard what she’d said, or, rather, wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly, and the crying was so extreme — as if somebody’d been killed — he could only stand fogbound and hope in a minute things came clearer. Ginny wailed, and what she said was even less distinct now, distorted by her sobbing. “Right there where everybody can see it, Dad. Anybody passing down the road can look over and—” The sobbing overwhelmed her and she could say no more, could only squeeze her face with her hands and gasp for breath, as she’d done when she’d cried as a little girl. He remembered when he’d spanked her out by the clothesline when she was something like seven, maybe eight, spanked her no harder than he ought to have done, but her sobbing, heart-broken, had filled him with anguish, and he’d held her and kissed her cheek — as now, awkwardly, he moved toward holding her, raising his stiff crooked hands toward her arms but unable really to hold her, because Ginny was grown now, and he was old, bent half double with constipation cramps. He remembered how she’d sobbed when little Ethan had fallen off the barn and broke his neck, their younger son, and was dead at just seven.