John Gardner - October Light

“Got to be,” Peter Wagner said. But he had another theory. He was still falling from the Golden Gate Bridge, and all his adventures were a split-second dream, one more cheap illusion of freedom. It came to him that the old man was Death. He smiled and raised one hand to his mouth, a gesture he’d gotten as a child from Little Orphan Annie. Something was wrong. The fingers stank of sex and marijuana.

1

Teeth clenched together, chest full of wrath, James Page shot his truck past the cars in his yard, nearly killing his own chickens, and started down Prospect Mountain. The right side window was partly open — it would no longer close — and ice-cold wind sliced in at him. It would be colder by morning, cold as a cane. He could smell a change in the weather moving in — hard wind, likely rain that would tear off the last of the leaves and turn the pastures drab, make the cows hang close, to the barn, dismal. Locking time, his uncle Ira had called it. In a day or maybe a week — or then again a month; there was just no predicting the weather in Vermont — he’d look out his bedroom window and the fields would be frosty, and when he went out to chores there’d be thin panes of ice on the watertrough. Locking had begun.

The lights of his house were no longer in the mirror. He was coming to what had been the Jerome place twenty-five, thirty years ago — huge barns, huge house; all gone long since, burned to the ground. There’d been a black and white sign, Horses Stabled: $1.00 per day for Hay Grain & Stabling. His elder boy

Richard had worked there some. The place was grown up in weeds, bone-gray in the glow of his headlights. Sometimes old Jerome — the man’s first name escaped him at the moment — sold apples by the peck or bushel crate off a two-wheeled cart by the roadside. Man blew his horn if he wanted to be served. Nobody stole, in those days.

He passed the Crawfords’; he remembered how the Crawfords had used to haul logs, a square Ford truck with hard-rubber tires with chains on ’em, and a sledge behind; a single load brought a thousand board feet. He remembered the sawmills, the slap of the belts, the scream of the big steam-driven saws and the smell of the wood, the sawdust piled up into mountains where he and his friends had played while his father and uncle unloaded. The sawdust would be frozen stiff in winter. He remembered the longhaired horses in the snow — seemed as if winters had been colder then — remembered the flat-cars, the raw-log railroad ties.

He came to the Reynolds place, family all in bed, two limp, unlighted Halloween men propped by the door like sleeping watchmen. They’d raised sheep on the Reynolds place, years ago, called Horned Dorsets. Lambed in September instead of in the spring, lambs born so woolly it was amazing. Vermont had been famous for sheep-farming once. Killed by the Democrats. When the weather warmed, he’d go with his father and uncle to help shear, the two of them long-bearded, sharp of eye and silent, and he remembered as if it was yesterday how surprised he’d been, when he was seven or eight, at how the wool came off all in one piece, like a soft white overcoat. They’d been hit one time, some of those Horned Dorset sheep, by a Bennington & Rutland railroad train. He remembered looking from the cab of the truck, where his father’d had him stay. His uncle stood turning around in a circle, warding off the evil. A crowd of neighbors moved among the dead and dying sheep — there were splashes of blood, bits of clotted wool, there was a whole lot of baaing — and the neighbors would sometimes bend down, sometimes pose for a photograph. They always liked having their picture taken. They’d pose by a wrecked car, a flood, a dead bear … When the Jennings house burned, sometime in the twenties, as soon as they found there was somebody had a camera, the people all ran up on the porch and posed, the flames leaping out through the high doors and windows behind them.

That had been a whole different world; gone for good. There weren’t many who, like him, remembered. It was a world so forgotten that people now scoffed about “the good old days,” made out they were nothing but misery and pain, superstition and narrow-mindedness, and all that was true and firm in them, all that was honest and neighborly and solid as a mountain was some fool illusion. So pygmies hacked the legs off giants — always, of course, for some high-minded purpose, some glorious, bellowing ideal. Like Burr or the State of New York against Ethan Allen. “There’s gods of the valleys,” Ethan Allen said, “and there’s gods of the hills,” and scairt them with his eyes. He was ready to make war on the whole United States if they dared steal his land. But the giants were losing to the pygmies, no question. James Page had seen in the paper where somebody claimed it was wrong to have picture-cartoons of Uncle Sam, because America’s the melting pot, and Uncle Sam was male and white. Lord God! You couldn’t say nigger or Polack anymore, but you could still say wasp. You could write it in the New York Times. That was progress. He’d like to see that black-eyed Popish Mexican push ice-crusted logs through a saw sometime, ten hours straight in the freezing cold, the way Wasps used to do in his father’s day, before the Jewish and Irish and Italian politicians, the Japanese and Mexicans and the God damned city-slicker Donkey party killed the lumber business, and then the railroads, and then finally the farms. It used to be a man took pride in his work: he built you a wheel or a window-sash, you could pretty well figure it would last you a while. Not now. Why? Because nobody cared a mite anymore, cared not one tunkit, that was why. These days they had unions, and against the law to try and fight ’em. Whatever kind of work a man might do, you couldn’t turn him out till he’d killed somebody. All that mattered now was seniority and raises. Come to that, if a man’s work happened to be honest, what good did it do him? — And what point anyways in trying to make an “honest” disposable syringe — that was all they had at the hospital anymore. What point in trying to make a really good, Class A, machine-molded Styrofoam cup? So now if a man bought a chair he’d just better not set too hard, and if he bought himself a truck he’d better try it out first in the haylot. No use anymore to go looking around for a hired man, or a boy to help out at the grocery store. They’d be in town joining unions or drawing unemployment, all the smart ones. Had no choice. Good workmanship hadn’t just died in this country, it had been murdered, shot dead in its sleep like a bear in the sugarhouse. You take glass-blowing. Priced right out of the market by strikes — unions destroying their own workers, and nobody could stop it. You take coal. — Between the unions and the city politicians, between crazy demands and confused regulations, the only inalienable right there was left in this country was the right to Relief. And you needn’t go pointing a finger at where it went wrong — that want American!

He saw again in his mind’s eye the fat, black-eyed Mexican, standing there gazing around his kitchen as if thinking of buying it. The old man’s jaw — and the fists closed around the steering wheel — clenched more tightly. He was guiltily aware that it was not all the Mexican’s fault, exactly. The man had had no real idea what it was he was treading on. It was Estelle that was to blame, and Sally, and Ruth Thomas. But in his present state the old man had no patience for fine distinctions. He mistrusted Mexicans, that was all — their looks, their smell, the sound of their voices … It wasn’t a thing he’d defend, wasn’t even a thing he approved of. He’d readily admit that all men are created equal, as the Declaration of Independence said; but if one of his rights was the pursuit of happiness, he oughtn’t to be forced to have equals he happened to despise and detest and know for a fact to be lazy, unclean, and of low moral character — oughtn’t to be forced to have Mexicans — right there in his kitchen. It was not his kitchen, that was the truth of it — no more than a factory belonged, these days, to the man who’d sweated and risked all he owned to see it built. Fair and just profit was no longer a part of the American Way, nor was dignified labor. The country was in the hands of usurers, and not even American usurers, not even the miserable soft-fingered Jews but the God damned black-eyed Arabs.