John Gardner - October Light

“Ginny, what’s the matter?” he said now. “Honey, I can’t understand you. What’s happened?” Then, looking over toward the milkhouse steps, he saw Lewis and Dickey coming carefully toward them — they looked like fishermen crossing a shallow stream on rocks — trying not to step in the cowshit. “Lewis,” he called, “what’s happened?” Their faces lighted strangely as they came past the windows where the glow of the charged, crimson sky poured in. Lewis held Dickey’s hand.

“It’s Aunt Sally,” Lewis said. “It looks like she’s been usin the bedpan and dumpin it out the window.”

The old man’s heart sank. Sure as anything, they’d lay it all to him.

Lewis had come up to them now and stood three, four feet away, still holding the boy’s hand, looking like a helpless little boy himself, miserably watching Ginny. James compressed his lips, still clumsily patting his daughter’s arms on the fat place just below the shoulders, and could think of nothing to say but “There, there now, honey. There there, sweet-hot.” It was time — more than time — to get the milkers changed, and if he didn’t get down to it pretty quick, he thought, he’d have his milkers kicked clear past the barnyard. “Sweet-hot, I gotta change the milkers,” he said. Ginny nodded, vocally drawing in breath, getting her crying in control at last, and he patted her arms two or three more times then left her, went over to the Guernsey that was next in line and hung the strap over her back. He stooped to take the milker from the cow in the next stanchion, turned off the air, and stepped carefully across the gutter to dump the milk from the filled-up machine into the pail. By the whitewashed post six feet away the cats sat watching, soft and tame looking as pillows on a couch, though if you touched one you’d likely lose a finger. He went over to the cats’ post and splashed a little leftover milk into their dish, an old dented lid from a ten-gallon can, then went back, still doubled over, to put the milker on the cow he’d just strapped.

Ginny, better now, came down the line to where he was working and was able to speak, though she wasn’t entirely through crying. Lewis and Dickey came part way, too. She said, “How could she do it? She must be senile!”

Lewis said. “Could be that. When my gramp got old, he use to walk around the house with ah his clothes off, carryin a bucket.”

“I just don’t know what to do,” Ginny said. Her head was stuffed up and she kept sniffing. “We can’t put Aunt Sally in a Home. They cost a fortune.”

James knew pretty well that he’d better speak up; but all he could bring himself to say at the moment was, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry, if I was you, bout Sally bein senile.”

“Well then she’s crazy,” Ginny said, “and that’s worse.” It looked as if she was about to cry again. Lewis was shaking his head, thinking God knows what. The boy was leaning far over, pulling Lewis’s arm out straight, dangling a piece of straw over the cats.

James straightened up enough to walk and stepped over the gutter, hanging the strap around his neck as he walked. Little as he cared, right now, for that witch of a sister, it wasn’t in his nature to leave the error stand. “I doubt that a doctor’d call her crazy,” he said.

“I don’t know, though,” Lewis said, noncommittal, “you can’t say it’s normal, emptying your potty out the window, and in the front of the house.”

“Prob’ly couldn’t get to the bathroom,” James said, equally noncommittal, and stepped back across the gutter to hang the strap on the cow due next. “So-o-o bahss,” he said.

Ginny’s head swung around. “You locked her in again?”

He pressed his forehead against the cow’s warm belly. “Nope,” he said. “Just saw to it she didn’t change her mind about stayin in her room. Used the aht of pahsuasion.”

They waited. When he said no more, Ginny asked, “Dad, what did you do?”

So again he was in the wrong. It was always nobody’s fault but his. “Whant you go look for yourself?” he said. His jaw stiffened and his voice stepped higher with indignation and self-pity. His faith in laconic truth cracked and gave way like the wall of a haybarn now, broken by the weight of the injustices done him. “Look with your own two eyes and you’ll know I ain’t lying,” he said. “You mistrust I chopped off her head, you two? Well mebby so. You go look. Ain’t that the custahd, though? Sally can do ennathing she pleases in my house, and the minute I try’n put a stop to’t, I be a criminal. No end to’t! It’s just like them terrorists. They can shoot the police like they was squirrels in a tree, and nobody says one blessed word, but let some Government shoot five convicted terrorists, and there be letters gonna come from all hell and gone! It’s just like the Italians. Write down the truth about the Mafia in some book — how they’ll shoot a man quick-er’n they’ll look him in the eye, even shoot John F. Kennedy, and the country can go knit — and before ye can say Jack Robinson they got you in court, fightin off the Italian League cause you made it seem some of ’em ain’t honest.” He had the milking machine on now, rhythmically chugging, and came back across the gutter. “Ah my life I been fair’s I know how to be, and you know it, the both of you, and with Sally there was never but one thing I balked at, which is the root of all the rest, and it’s that blame TV. ‘You could’ve had her keep it in her room,’ you’ll say to me, but I tell you that ain’t true, it want possible. I’d still have heard the rumble, and I’d’ve known what sickness and filth it was spewing through my house. You might as well tell me I should let people murder little children, long’s they do it in their room. You’ll say it ain’t the same. Well I don’t care to argue. I believe it’s the same. I set there by the fire every night for two weeks and watched it, as fair as any man in a jury box, and I’ll even admit I saw one or two things I thought was more-less hahmless. But on the whole I say it was filth and corruption: murderers and rapists, drug addicts, long-hairs, hosses and policemen till yer so weary ye could spit except your mouth’s too tired. Half-naked women with microphones, stretchin out their long, limp ahms to you and puckerin and smilin with all their big, glassy teeth, singin you the damn foolest songs you ever heard, mostly bedroom talk. Quiz-shows where people go insane to get some money, news that goes jumpin around from one thing to another like a blame three-ring circus that’s in a hurry to get struck, and no more attempt to make sense of what you’re seein than a ten-cent get-well cahd from the drugstore. Sober conversations about the failure of America and religion and the family, as if there want no question about the jig bein up, and sober conversation bout how a man that’s homosexual is just as nahmal as you or me—” A catch came into his voice and he broke off abruptly.

Ginny stared at him, shocked, her heart going out to him. She’d never heard such a tirade from him, never more than glimpsed the anger and helplessness now suddenly made plain. Even Dickey understood, standing by the wall with a guilty look, as if everything were his fault. As for Lewis, she realized glancing at him now that he’d probably understood from the beginning. She could only stand with her mouth open. Staring at the tremor in her father’s cheek, watching him go past her, angry as a bot and close to tears, taking the pail of warm milk up to the milkhouse, she saw from inside him what it was like to be old and uncomfortable, cheated, ground down by life and sick to death of it. As if suddenly coming to, she started after him. “Dad, I’m sorry,” she said.