John Gardner - October Light

“Thally?” he said.

She was dead to the world.

He recognized the smell as insurance oil — kerosene, that is; but for years in Vermont, because of the Democrats, its main use had been getting back money out of fire insurance. On the bedroom walls he could make out a hint of the flame’s yellow flickering. After a moment he spit on the floor to his left for luck, then carefully, carefully put his head through the open door to look. His heart pounded once, like a blow from outside, when he saw the lamp. It was burned almost out, no more than an inch of kerosene in the bottom of the grayish glass bowl. He could let it burn on; it had burned all night without accident. But even as he thought it he knew it was no good. The gods take care of fools and children for only so long; they eventually look away. He took a deep breath and straightened up — pains shot through his abdomen — and inched far enough through the door to reach the lamp. With his fingertips he pushed it from the edge onto the table, clear to the middle, where it wouldn’t fall even if the applecrate fell; then carefully, balanced like an acrobat, he drew his hand away and edged himself back into the hall. He let his breath out.

Sally slept on.

He went to the head of the stairs, then, gripping the banister firmly with his left hand, started down. The cows mooed more urgently. “I hear you,” he said. With his right hand he rubbed his forehead, then his right temple.

The kitchen startled him: broken plates on the floor, and the jack-o-lanterns; one of them leering up at him. He bent over to pick up some pieces of plate, put them on the table, then decided to let it go. First the chores, or he’d have himself a barn full of mastitis. He went to the back door to put on his coat and boots, then paused, thinking back, and because he’d changed his mind about which door to leave by, turned himself around to the left three times, then crossed the kitchen, awkwardly cocked forward, to open the front door and look out into the yard. The state police car was still sitting there, the policemen asleep, and a few feet away Lewis Hicks’ car, empty. The others were gone.

He looked at the headlights of the police car a while, steeling himself, then opened the door farther and went out. The stoop was still wet — the rain had apparently stopped not long since — and the ground, when he stepped on it, was mushy. He walked over with long, squishy steps and knocked on the window of the police car. He knocked again. The man in the driver’s seat opened his eyes and turned his head, not startled, not thinking anything at all, the way it looked. The old man yelled, “Mahnin!”

The state policeman nodded, then rolled down his window. He looked at James, saying nothing.

“Mahnin,” James said.

The state policeman nodded.

James said, “Ith all over.”

The policeman looked at the house. At last, pointedly not speaking, he reached for the radio mike to the right of his steering wheel. Now the younger one woke up, looked startled, then relaxed.

“Mahnin,” James said.

He nodded.

“Winterth put-near here,” James said. His voice knocked against the trees, high and plain. He looked around the yard. The limbs were bare — all in one night. He shut his eyes. The luminous sky behind the bare branches even now sent pain shogging through him.

The driver was saying on the radio, “It’s ok here. We’re comin in.”

“You don’t want to arreth me?” James said.

The driver looked at him, still holding the radio microphone. “Go milk your cows,” he said.

James nodded and started to turn away.

“Me ask you somethin,” the policeman said.

He half turned back.

The policeman looked at him, severe but not quite meeting his eyes. “You sure this is over?”

“Ith over,” James said.

The policeman hung up the radio mike, professionally uncivil.

Despite the day’s dimness, he reached for his dark glasses on the dashboard, opened them, and hooked them on his ears.

It crossed James’ mind that he could shoot his cows, then himself; but it was an idle thought.

“Thankth,” he said.

The policeman started up the motor.

When he was back in the kitchen, intending to walk through it and out to the barn to begin his chores, he remembered that Ginny’s husband’s car was still here, out there sitting in the yard, and stopped in his tracks, looking down at the ripply linoleum, then turned and went over to the living-room door. It creaked as he opened it, but they remained fast asleep, Ginny on the couch, Dickey in front of the burned-cold fireplace, Lewis sitting up in the armchair next to the TV. Ginny lay crumpled and gray-faced, her coat and another one, a black one, over her, the black one from his closet. He recognized it as the one his son Richard had worn when he dressed up once as an axe-murderer for some party — a good joke, they’d all agreed, Richard included. All his life he’d been one of those people ascairt of his own shadow. Dickey too had two coats on, Lewis’s and his own. Lewis had only the afghan James’ wife Ariah had made when she was dying. He remembered for an instant how she’d worked on it, lying with her eyes closed, listening while Ginny read to her. Ariah would hardly speak to James, would look away when he came in. Well, he could endure it, just as she was enduring; anyway, she hadn’t been herself, with all those drugs. There were droplets on Ariah’s forehead, but she never once complained. It was assumed you’d try to be brave, in those days. When you were gone, people would tell stories of how you died, so you better not kick and whine and whinny like the man Judah Sherbrooke shot.

The momentary sharp memory of his wife was gone now; his years with her frozen up as solidly as ever. The old man stood miserably gazing at his family, all that was left of it not counting Sally, his head splitting, the light in the room fluorescent gray, the child not even their own true blood but adopted, the spawn of God knew what — though there were of course times when James loved the child, whatever that meant — and the image before him he would have called, if he’d known the word, symbolic: poor miserable creatures not beautiful in any way, uncomfortably sleeping in an ugly room, lit by such weather as only October had the gall to fob off on dismal humanity — though that was unfair, October would be bluer than blue again soon — dense, sharp daylight, the last thing left alive — and his heart ached, that instant, even more than his head. He listened to the bellowing of the cows in their pain and with part of his mind heard the dog scratching, locked, for some reason, in the cellar. He backed out of the room and softly closed the door, then went to let the dog in. It leaped up on him, wet-muzzled. He pushed it away roughly, with a snarl not human, and went, with the cowering animal beside him — pushing up against him and wagging its tail — to the woodshed to put down food for the dog and cat. As soon as he shook the Purina box, the cat appeared from nowhere, racing, then switched to slow-motion, as if disdainful and not his dependent. Like Sally. “Come on, Thpot,” he said gruffly, for the dog held back, fearful of a kick. The dog snivelled up and ate timidly, looking up at him, large U’s of white below his eyes. The cat settled calmly, tail slowly switching, aware that he could vanish in an instant, or snarl, hiss, scratch, stay King of the Mountain and James Page be cussed. A foolish image, a kind of daydream, came into his head of putting down food for Henry Stumpchurch, Henry smiling, surprised and pleased. He thought of Henry’s theory of the cunning of the common frog, and his eyes slipped out of focus for a moment, dreaming again. Then the horses called to him, and, gingerly rubbing the sides of his head, the old man started for the barn.