John Gardner - October Light

“Of course you’re sorry,” he snapped back.

“Listen,” she added quickly, “I’ll fix you supper.” Though his walk was slow, ordinarily, she had to hurry now to keep up with him. He moved bent over and tilted to one side, compensating for the weight of the brim-full pail, driving along swiftly and solidly like a hurrying, tipped tractor, one back wheel in the furrow. You might have thought he weighed tons. Tears shone in paths down his cheeks, which increased his fury.

“You won’t fix suppah,” he said, “when you see what I done in there.”

“You didn’t hurt her?” she asked, but even that had now no accusation in it.

“No, course not, course not.”

“I’ll fix you supper,” she said. They were going up the stairs now. The stairs were narrow and she had to drop behind.

“Don’t want you to,” he said. A little milk sloshed out and quickly went tan on the step. He pushed through the milkhouse door, where the light was suddenly bright and everything was clean, efficient, the icy air pungent with the smell of some powerful detergent, and he slid off the stainless-steel milktank cover and with both hands lifted the pail up to dump the milk in.

“You don’t want me to fix supper?” she said.

“Wouldn’t be fair, now would it,” he said. “Give me an unfair advantage.”

“What are you talking about?”

His eyes narrowed, brilliant icy blue in this bright, bright light. “It’s a battle of the bowels, ye see,” he said, and gave a quick, fierce smile though he was as angry and unhappy as ever. “There sits Sally up there on her hunger strike, prov’n if she can that I can’t suhvive without her, tryin to bring me low the way Gandhi did the British, or unions do the companies. Fair enough, I say. We’ll see who needs who! But I’ll tell you this for certain: I’ll outlast yer Aunt Sally as sure as I’m standin here, long as she don’t cheat. And just to make sure she don’t come sneakin to my kitchen and stealin food like a rat in the granary, breakin the agreement, I’m takin certain special precautions to see that she stays right there in that room like she claims she intends to.”

“You two have agreed on all this?” Ginny asked.

“Not in so many words,” he said. “But we ain’t exactly strangers, Sally and me.” He put the metal cap over the tank-hole again and started for the door. Lewis and Dickey came in just as he was about to go out. He stepped back, making way, and Lewis and Dickey did the same. “Come on through,” her father said, jerking his arm, and at once, sheepishly, they obeyed.

Ginny said, “Dad, if I make you supper it’ll be over all the sooner. She’ll see you’ve got others who can do for you if she won’t.”

He paused for an instant and slightly turned his head. “You plannin to come feed me for as long as I’m stubborn enough to stay here on the fahm?”

She blushed. “No, of course not. You know how far it is.” She was getting out cigarettes; smoking in the milkhouse was all right, there was nothing here to burn.

“Then it wouldn’t be fair. I’ll beat her my own way, by tunkit.” He started down the steps into the dimness, into the chugging of the milking machines and the oceanic rumble of the cows’ chewing, and said not another word.

“That’s an obstinate old man,” Lewis mentioned, as if to the lightbulb.

“Dad,” Ginny called, “let me take the house key.”

The old man stopped, set down the pail, and, holding his trousers with his left hand, just below the pocket, wormed down in with his right to find the key.

Outside the milkhouse, to their surprise, it was dark now. The sky was full of stars. Up the hill, there was only one light on in the house, Aunt Sally’s. A chicken ducked out of the way, looking up, and said something.

She’d been in her room now for two nights and days, without a single bite to eat, or so Ginny believed, yet Aunt Sally was unchastened. She was more stubborn than ever and wouldn’t even answer when she was spoken to. Sometimes, intending to infuriate, she would hum a little. Ginny’s father could say what he liked, it was at least a little bit senile, that behavior. And so was his, of course. Halfway up the stairs she’d glimpsed, at the rim of her peripheral vision, the trap that was almost directly above her, and she’d been so shocked she’d almost fallen —would have fallen, probably, if Lewis, coming up behind her, hadn’t seen and reached forward to steady her.

“Lewis, we’ve got to get it down!” she’d said.

He’d pursed his lips, looking up, not completely in agreement.

“Make sure Dickey stays out of here,” she remembered to instruct him then. “He mustn’t see it.”

Lips still pursed, the side of one finger brushing at his moustache, Lewis slowly turned, still looking up, then went back downstairs. She heard his voice rumbling in the living room, talking with Dickey, telling him, presumably, to get the blocks out and play. “Aunt Sally,” she said sternly, “I’m warning you, I’ve just about had it with these stupid childish antics of yours.” She listened. No answer. She felt compelled to add, for fairness’ sake. “Dad’s too. You’re both acting like you’ve gone dotty or something. Aunt Sally are you going to answer me or not?”

No answer.

Lewis put his head in at the foot of the stairs. “Sweet-hot,” he called, “I think I’ll go out to the cah and bring in the tools.”

“Tools?” she said.

“I thought I’d stot scrapin the paint off.”

“What?”

“Be right back,” he said.

“Lewis, we got to take this gun down!”

But he was gone. When he came back, three minutes later, with a cardboard box that had scraping knives and steelwool, cans and bottles, rags, a screwdriver, a hammer, and a putty knife, she decided for some reason not to mention the gun just this moment. It was wrong of her, she knew, and she half believed that in a minute she was bound to bring it up again; but for now she put it off. Aunt Sally was still refusing to answer, which made Virginia Hicks simply furious, as angry as she’d been, as she was growing up, when a cow got out and was so stupid it couldn’t find the fence-hole and be driven back in. If she could get her two hands on the old woman right now, heaven only knew what she’d do to her. But it was more than that. Her father’s extraordinary outpouring of anger and grief, out in the barn, was still fresh with her, and in Ginny’s heart, whatever fairness might dictate, the choice between the two of them was no contest.

She heard the back door open and scrape closed again, her father coming in from the milking, moving slowly. Filled again with pity, she listened for his footsteps moving toward the kitchen, carrying tonight’s milk for the house to the white porcelain pitcher in the refrigerator; but she could hear nothing now, the sound was drowned out by Lewis’s scraper, gritching through the dry white enamel almost down into the wood. He was starting on the molding, taking off the old paint in two-inch wide strokes, making it look easy.

“Why are you doing that, Lewis?” she asked.

He pretended not to hear.

She let it pass. “Aunt Sally?” she called. She tapped on the bedroom wall, keeping back from the strings. “Aunt Sally, if we take this thing down, will you come and have supper?” She stared at the end of her cigarette and listened.

No answer.

“If you don’t, you know, I couldn’t care less,” she called.

Lewis said, casting his voice above the scraper’s noise, not turning, “She’s a smot cookie, refusin to talk to us. Makes us feel more guilty.”

It was true. Since Aunt Sally would say nothing, Ginny found herself saying in her mind what Aunt Sally disdained to say, thinking up justifications. She could understand well enough her father’s hatred of television. He belonged to a different world and time than the rest of them did, even Aunt Sally, and the hatred he felt for all things shoddy, according to his lights, didn’t even seem, in Ginny’s mind, particularly cranky or unnatural, though she liked TV herself. What he said when he ranted and raved had a fair amount of truth to it. Once when their own TV had come back after two months in the shop, she’d seen it for a while — perhaps two, three days — with entirely new eyes. She’d noticed how tiresomely gay things were if they were supposed to be funny, how tiresomely earnest if they were supposed to be mysteries, how program after program had boats or motorcycles in them, as if the same half-wit mind, or eleven-year-old mind, maybe, had written every single story. On any given night it was common to see three different programs in which people were murdered in exactly the same way, drowned in a bathtub or run over by a bulldozer; or three different programs in which a girl was threatened by urban witches; or three different programs in which someone said, word-for-word the same, “Walter! Something’s happened!” or “No use, she’s dead”; and six in which someone said, “Hold your fire!” and maybe twenty in which someone said, “Drop it and turn around slow!” (She wondered if anyone had ever said that, ever even once, in the real world.) The commercials were no relief, buzzing in again and again like flies, sometimes in two hours one of them repeating up to five or six times until at sight of that waterfall or horse or snowmobile or slow-motion swing of some pretty girl’s hair you felt your vital signs weakening, or your hackles going up like a tomcat’s. And she could easily understand why her father thought them evil: they prostituted children, hard-selling Pop-tarts with a three-year-old’s smile, selling washing soap or toothpaste or imitation orange juice by sweet displays of five-year-olds with footballs. It was all a kind of crime against decency and goodness, when you thought about it. You could never again see a white country church, or a cute little puppy or kitten, without thinking of some mouthwash.