John Gardner - October Light

“How’s every little thing with you?” she said. She gave the table a quick swipe with her cloth. She was thirty, dyed her hair. She had hips like a healthy young stallion, though the rest of her was small.

“Just fine, Emily.” He counted out fifteen cents extra. “Keep it.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she said, and smiled.

He noticed that the stranger with the long gray beard was staring at him.

Bill Partridge said, “Hear you been havin some troubles up there on the mountain.”

James poured himself a beer. When the glass was filled, not more than one inch of white on top, he set the bottle back down and said, “Is that what you hear?”

Partridge held his pipe up, an old drugstore Kaywoodie not worth a nickel when the thing was brand new, and Partridge had been smoking it fifteen years, polluting the air and consuming good tobacco to no purpose. His nose was long and thin, malevolent looking, dark as a baboon’s at the zoo. His eyes, come to think of it, were also like a baboon’s. His voice sounded something between a rusty hinge and a handsaw. “I’m just tellin you what I hear, James,” he whined. “I understand your old sister’s got a snit on.”

“News flies,” the old man said and raised his glass as if to toast Sam Frost, then drank.

“You got me, James,” Sam Frost said, chuckling, so harmless and amused the old man had no choice but to forgive him on the spot. “I guess the little woman maybe did hear somethin on the telephone, and I guess I just may have spilled the beans.”

“Well—” James said. He looked around the room. The strangers were eating their T-bone steaks. At the table next to theirs three young villagers sat drinking, glancing at the strangers now and then and smiling. The old man had seen the three many times before and could probably remember who they were if he had to. One of them was fat, with longish black hair. He’d likely be drunk before the night was out, though all he drank, anytime he came, was beer. He was always in jail for one reason or another — singing, mostly, or sleeping in people’s cars. He was harmless as a girl. Another one was tall and pock-marked, worked for the phone company. The third one was one of the Grahams, blond-headed and muscular. When he was a boy he’d broke into a barn and mutilated an old blind horse, him and some other boys. They’d nearly had to go to reform school for it. He was trouble, that Graham. Had a look about him. He was what they used to call, in the old days, a lad born to hang.

James sipped his beer. Emily passed close, and Henry Stump-church raised his hand, one finger pointing ceilingward, asking for another round. She nodded and hurried on.

“You wonder what in hell the world’s comin to,” Bill Partridge said, and fit his pipe between his crooked, brown teeth.

“She out of her room yet?” Sam asked, smiling. When James looked puzzled, Sam added: “I mean your sister.”

He registered now. “Not yet,” he said. “She’s gone on a kind of strike, you might say.” He sucked at his dentures.

Bill Partridge leaned forward. “She never did!”

The old man nodded again and raised his glass.

Bill Partridge struck one of his wooden matches and held it to his pipe. The light made his eyes glint. “Man couldn’t blame you if you threw her right out of the house,” he said. “It’s just like with old Judah Sherbrooke that time, when his wife got to carryin on with that organist. Locked her outdoors in the snow bare-naked.” He grinned for an instant. “Wish to hell I’d seen it.”

“And then there’s that time when he caught her with the painter in the chickenhouse,” Sam Frost said, laughing, and the rest of them joined him. The three of them said at once — James Page remained silent—“‘This what you call makin Aht, woman?’” There were hundreds of stories about old Judah Sherbrooke and his teen-ager wife. God only knew if even one of ’em was true. Everybody told them, sometimes even women of known bad character, such as Bea and Laurie, sitting there baggy-eyed like half-drunk Halloween effigies at the bar. Sometimes the stories made the naked young wife a kind of hero of foxiness (in none of the stories was the wife given clothes); how she slipped past the old hawk’s eye to make love with the stable-boy when he was “teaching her to ride,” or how she made love to a whole string quartet at one time when the old man believed she was practicing the piano. At other times it was the rich old man that the stories praised, how he made her stay all night with the barenaked minister in the Congregational church steeple in the middle of January, and served ’em both right; how he’d made her ride naked from North Bennington to Rutland in the baggage car, where she’d been carrying on. James Page, for one, believed none of the stories and grimly disapproved of people’s telling them. Yet he felt at this moment, just as if the stories were true, old Judah’s indignation.

“So Sally’s gone on strike,” Bill Partridge said, and blew smoke out. “What’s that woman think she is, I’d like to know?”

Stumpchurch tipped his head, waiting for the answer. Henry was a kind of stupid man, always had been; part Welsh. But his heart was as big as all outdoors, and if once he understood a thing, he was a fair man, fair as any Judge. It occurred to James Page that he’d be interested to know what Stumpchurch thought.

“Well,” he said, “the way she sees it there’s two different sides to the ahgument. She b’lieves if I let her come live in my house, she’s got a right to live ennaway she wants to.”

“That ain’t right,” Henry said.

“I dunno,” James said. He tipped his long head and poured more beer. It occurred to him beer might help his constipation, and he turned to see if, in all that crowd, he could catch Emily’s eye; but she was nowhere to be seen. No matter, it came to him. Henry had signalled for another round already. Wine, it occurred to him, might even be better. He continued thoughtfully:

“It ain’t altogether Sally’s fault that she’s poor, and now that she’s in with me, she mostly does her share. I ought to just try and bend more, could be. Whole thing stotted with that television. If it hadn’t been for that—” He looked at Henry.

“We heard about that,” Sam Frost said, chuckling so hard he bounced.

James said, stern as a minister, “I hate that God damn television.”

“Don’t blame you,” Sam Frost said earnestly.

“But then, if I’d give a little maybe then she would too.” He pursed his lips. He thought again of that line of his wife’s, “Oh James, James.” He couldn’t summon up how she’d looked when she’d said it. With the rumble of laughter and talk all around him, he wasn’t even sure he had her voice right. He could remember the stoneboat his grandfather’d made when he was four years old; he could remember every flicker, every curl of burning white, and how the sky was bright blue when the silo caught fire when he was nine years old; he could remember every board, every barrel and brick of the sugar cabin where the family had made syrup when he was ten; yet his wife’s face escaped him.

“Never trust a woman,” Bill Partridge said with a significant look.

“Specially that sister of yours,” Sam Frost said, and winked.

“What’s that mean?” he said.

Now Emily was here with another round. As she scooped up the money, she said, “Ennathin else I can get you men?”

James said with a little stammer, “How much is a bottle of wine?”

She looked baffled. “You want the wine list?”

“I don’t need a list, I just like to know what the price is.”

“Got a bottle for three dollars if you want,” she said. “Taylor’s. You want red?”