John Gardner - October Light

She accepted the white, cracked china plate offered her and for an instant met Virginia’s eyes. She looked down at once at the brown, hot apple with marshmallow on the top and, beside it, a glittering silver spoon. “Oh, Virginia!” she said, and drew the plate closer, to breathe in the smell. For a moment the baked apple, and Virginia’s nicotine-stained hand, still steadying the plate, filled all her vision, all her senses, became the whole world.

8

(The Sermon Upstairs)

Lane Walker said, up by the old woman’s door, “Mrs. Abbott, come help us carve jack-o-lanterns.”

“Reverend Walker,” she asked almost timidly, “do you believe in ghosts?”

“Well, sort of,” he said. “I believe in the Holy Ghost, certainly.” Smiling, not in mockery but in enjoyment of the game, he threw his hand down like a bridge-player playing a card, index finger extended, counting off the Holy Ghost as one.

From behind the locked door the old woman said — she seemed closer now—“I think I may have seen a ghost.”

“Well, it’s the season for it,” he said, hand lifted again, trying to think of another ghost he could believe in and count off as two. “Thing for us to do,” he said, “is get out those jack-o-lanterns. Scares the ghosts away.” He threw a wink at Lewis Hicks, who stood scraping paint from the closet door beyond the door to Sally Abbott’s bedroom. Lewis slightly grinned and ran his tongue around his teeth, not comfortable with ministers, especially this one, who, so far as he could tell, was crazy.

“You think I’m joking, but I’m serious, Reverend,” Sally Abbott said.

He could tell well enough by her voice that she was serious, but with the storm outside huffing and puffing like a dragon, window-screens singing, stray objects thumping now and then against the house, it was hard for him to take her as seriously as she might like. “All the more reason to start cutting eyes and mouths in those pumpkins,” he said. That, he realized at once, was not as kind as it might have been, and he hurried to make amends. “Tell you what. Unlock the door, and I’ll come in and we’ll talk about it.”

There was a moment’s silence. At length she said, “No, that wouldn’t be right. I know it seems like nothing to you people—”

“Not at all,” he said. “It seems to us like a serious problem. That’s why we’re here.” Then once again he spoke too quickly, as he realized as soon as the words were out: “We should try to deal with it like people instead of crazy apes.”

There was another brief silence. “I don’t think of myself,” Sally Abbott said at last, her voice remote, “as a crazy ape.”

Lewis was looking at him as if he too, as a relative, was insulted.

“That’s not what I meant,” Lane Walker said quickly, shrugging and grinning. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything like that.” He threw a helpless smile at Lewis. Lewis shrugged one shoulder, polite but not assuaged, and turned back to his scraping.

“Oh, don’t apologize,” Sally said distantly, grandly. “My brother James feels exactly the same. Women aren’t human, they’re only half evolved.”

“Mrs. Abbott,” he pleaded, and stretched his hands toward the door, “surely you don’t think—” His natural cheerfulness was sinking fast; he made a point now of not looking at Lewis Hicks. One enemy at a time.

“You believe what you believe,” Sally Abbott said with cool charity. “It’s only right that you should stick by it.”

Though Lane Walker was a small man and congenitally good-natured, one of the elect, John Calvin would have thought — every morning when he woke up, startled back to life by the first small disturbance (the birds, his three noisy children, his wife up already giving riding lessons), he was out of bed at once, with a hundred things he was eager to get busy at, books he had to read, letters he had to write, parishioners to visit, sermons to compose (he loved composing sermons more than anything else and was a master at it) — he knew when he was beaten.

“Mrs. Abbott,” he said, “let’s start over.” He said pleasantly: “The boys and I are making jack-o-lanterns, Mrs. Abbott. Would you care to help?”

“Apes can’t make jack-o-lanterns,” the old woman said.

He stared at the door, his left hand extended toward it in a gesture of goodwill, then turned his round, elvish head to stare at the back of Lewis Hicks, who, for all the cheer of the party downstairs, for all the wailing and buffeting of the windy night outside, stood mechanically scraping off old paint —gritch, gritch. The little minister’s naturally wide blue eyes widened more, as if he’d suddenly remembered something, his nature, perhaps, and slowly, thoughtfully, he raised a finger and thumb to his leprechaun beard. He turned back to the door, tilted his head back, cast one long foot forward in a jaunty, somewhat theatrical stance, as if mentally detaching himself from the concerns of mortals but willing, like a bent but unbroken Puck, to leave, if humanity would have it, one last helpful bit of instruction and good advice. “Mrs. Abbott,” he said, “you’re terribly hard on the apes.”

“Hmpf!” she said. As a matter of fact, his remark surprised her and she could think of nothing else to come back with.

“You seem to think, like many people, that human beings descended from the apes and show, in some degree, the traces. That’s not true, in fact. Apes descended from human beings.”

Lewis Hicks’ scraper stopped moving for a moment, then began moving again, as mechanical as before. One could tell by the way his head sat, he was listening with both ears.

“It’s true of course,” Lane Walker continued loftily, his voice taking on more and more the character of a preacher’s, though it still seemed at this point mere spritely mimicry, not the real, dead-serious thing. “It’s true of course that the ancestry of man, on one hand, and the apes and monkeys, on the other, has been separate for more than thirty-five million years. Nevertheless, it can easily be demonstrated that man did not descend from the apes. It’s more correct to say that the apes and monkeys descended from early ancestors of man. The distinction is a real one, and of the greatest moral significance. Man is primitive, apes and monkeys are specialized. We have the most primitive teeth, for example, to be found in the mouth of any featherless biped, discounting ‘Platonic man,’ as Diogenes put it, that is, plucked birds. We never developed the wonderful, frightening canines of the chimpanzee or gorilla, or their large, knife-sharp incisors. We didn’t need them, it seems. We’d probably learned already to cut things with stones, and to frighten off our enemies with spears.”

He tipped forward toward the door, clasped his hands behind his back, raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice as if offering the door a tip. “Or take arms and legs. A few million years ago, gibbons had arms and legs of about equal length, just as we do today. But the apes and monkeys — especially the gibbons — developed long arms and short legs specialized for swinging through trees. We, it seems, never needed to. We’d long since ventured out of range of our trees, maybe ten million years ago, boldly invading new territory with our clubs and stones and crafty little heads. Don’t think I’ve made all this up, Mrs. Abbott. It’s perfectly standard paleontology — read for example Bjorn Kurtén. If people are going to go around discovering morals in science, they should try to get their science correct.”

Again Lewis’s scraper paused, and this time his head turned slightly for a glance at the minister. If he was expecting a sternness of expression to match the sternness of Lane Walker’s words, he was sadly disappointed. The little man was grinning from ear to ear.