John Gardner - October Light

Lewis bit his lips together, his cheeks and eyelids tense. “What about your hired men, Ed?”

He shook his head. “Worthless. You know the kind of help a man gets.”

Neither of them was looking at the other now. “Maybe you could sell it,” Lewis said.

The old man looked down the stairwell. “Ay-uh, I could do that.” He began to nod his head slowly, and Lewis sucked in his upper lip and hurriedly looked away. After a moment he touched the old man’s forearm. “Ed, we’ll talk about it,” he said.

Ed Thomas flicked his eyes up, met those strange blue and brown eyes, looked down again, and nodded. He waved the cigar, then grinned mechanically, leaning on the railing, and started down the stairs.

12

“Nothing’s perfect,” Ruth Thomas was declaiming in the kitchen. On the kitchen table there were two big, saw-toothed jack-o-lanterns, slanted eyes grotesquely staring, black inside. She pointed a long finger ferociously at Dickey, who grinned and shrank back toward his friend Roger and giggled. “You ever hear the poem about the ’possom?” she demanded. Her face was merry, the eye-bags dark. Both boys shook their heads, though Roger, her grandson, had heard it a thousand times.

“Oh yes, Ruth,” Estelle cried, eyes twinkling, “do that one!” Ruth drew herself up to her full height, DeWitt grinning with embarrassment behind her, and in something faintly suggestive of the style of a nineteenth-century orator, she recited for the assembled company—

The Opossum

One day, having nothing much to do, God

Created the Opossum. It was a kind of experiment:

How stupid, ugly, and downright odd

A creature (he wondered) could he possibly invent?

When the ’Possum was created, God shook his head

And grinned. “That’s not very good,” he said.

But for no real reason he loved the fool thing

And kept the thing functioning age after age.

The dinosaurs died out, or began to sing,

Transformed into birds; apes became the rage;

But the ’Possum trudged on — with some other antiques:

Spiders, sand-crabs, various old freaks.

“Father,” said the Son, “that Opossum’s a killer —

Murders baby chicks for no reason. He’s got to go!

Times have changed, and changed for the better.

He’s an anachronism, if I may say so.”

God sighed. “Peace and Justice are right,” he said,

And whispered to the ’Possum, “Lie down. Play dead.”

The company all laughed, as they always did when Ruth Thomas recited poetry. And as always, they wouldn’t let her off with just one. She was an artist of a sort almost vanished from the earth — the “country reciter,” as William Lyon Phelps, Estelle Parks’ teacher, had called it in his book. “The verse equivalent of the folk-singer.” They got their poems from everywhere, these country reciters — from calendars, feed-store account books and almanacs, small-town newspapers, verse-writing aunts, occasionally old school-books or the Saturday Evening Post. No doubt now and then a reciter wrote some of his verses himself, but there was, in the heyday of the country reciter, no great honor in that, and he tended to make not too much of it. Certain poems were, for all reciters, classic, of course, written by known poets like Eugene Field and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, names “now universally scorned by the literate,” as Professor Phelps said, “though one might hesitate to scorn them after hearing them presented by a reciter.”

Ruth Thomas, at least in Estelle’s opinion, was as good a reciter as any to be found in these degenerate days, though not pure in technique. The faces she made — bugged eyes, pursed lips — and her tendency to insist on the different voices when a poem used dialogue — all these showed she’d been just a touch corrupted by dramatic monologue and the Broadway stage. Be that as it may, she was the best you could hope for, and the effect on the company was not much worse than in former times, “the true and proper effect of all art,” Professor Phelps had written, “when it is taken for granted, when no fine distinctions between bad and good are thought necessary, so that the more-or-less good has a way of prevailing, unthreatened by the overreaching snatch at ‘the Great’ which creates failed masterworks and devalues the merely excellent, leaving all the world rubble and a babble of mixed-up languages.” It was a passage Estelle had often quoted to students and had even used once at a School Board meeting, in defense of she forgot just what. Even now, after all these years, it was impossible for Estelle to hear Ruth recite without thinking of William Lyon Phelps. She was glad of that, perhaps even forced the recollection a little. It heightened her pleasure in listening.

“Say another one,” Virginia said. “Say the one about the cat and dog.”

“That’s a good one,” Ruth’s grandson DeWitt said, then blushed.

“The Cat and the Dog,” Ruth Thomas began.

Lane Walker poked his Mexican friend in the arm. “Listen to this,” he said.

“Listen closely to this one,” Dr. Phelps broke in, the same moment, “this is a toughie!”

She drew herself up, then broke character to say: “I recited this once at the McCullough Mansion. John McCullough had heard me reciting somewhere — I forget where it was — and invited me to do a kind of poetry concert.” She smiled, devilish. “He told me afterward, ‘That’s the kind of poem I can only follow with a pencil.’”

They all laughed. Dr. Phelps’ granddaughter smiled at Estelle’s grand-nephew, who stood beside her, and both of them blushed. (Ah ha! thought Estelle.)

Again Ruth drew herself up and took a breath, like an anthem singer.

The Cat and the Dog

Though he purrs, the Cat’s only partly here,

Poised ’tween the hearth and the street outside.

Half-tame, half-wild, he’s a walking riddle,

Playing both ends against the middle.

And so Man hangs between Truths he must fear

And the murderous animal under his hide.

The Dog’s by nature the best of his friends,

Playing the middle against both ends.

There was a silence when she finished. Then Ed Thomas said, half-joking, face red: “It’s true. I need a pencil!”

“Mrs. Thomas,” little Margie Phelps said almost inaudibly, “do the one about the bear.”

“The bear!” everyone shouted happily. “The bear! The bear!”

For no reason, tears began to stream down Ruth Thomas’s cheeks but she said, “The Bear,” and drew herself up, more grand than ever.

Estelle whispered, watching her old friend’s face in alarm, “Listen to this one, Lewis. This is wonderful.”

Ruth Thomas declaimed:

The Bear

If someone offers you a Bear, bow low,

And say “No!”

It was suddenly late. They’d all been aware of it before, which was why they were standing in the kitchen with their coats on, but now they all became conscious at once that the time had come. Virginia Hicks realized that she was frightened. Her father was still not home! But there was nothing she could do, or nothing but light one more cigarette — her throat and lungs on fire — and throw a glance at Lewis, who could give her no help, though she knew he felt it too. If her father had been hurt, the police would call, or the hospital — if they found him, that is. She imagined accidents that would make no sound, rouse no neighbor — the truck slipping softly off the road into the creek, or quietly tipping over on an embankment, vanishing from sight.