John Gardner - October Light

2

Ginny started suddenly, waking with a snap from a nightmare of being eaten. It was freezing cold and her right arm was so numb it felt dead. She opened her eyes.

“Mahnin, sweet-hot,” Lewis said, looking at her forehead as if afraid he might offend. He was kneeling at the fireplace, trying to start a fire. The room was full of billowing smoke. She flapped her left hand in front of her and made a face. Dickey said something—“I’m hungry”—but she didn’t quite register the words. She sat up abruptly, pushing up on one arm, the numb one, her left hand still flapping at the smoke. A kind of pain, almost a shock, went up the arm that was asleep. “What time is it?” The light coming through the smoke from the windows and off the walls was dull, as if the sun were dying. “Christ,” she said.

“Almost noon,” Lewis said.

“Why’s it so cold?”

Lewis n;ew a time or two more, down on his hands and knees. “Seems like the frunace wasn’t stoked,” he said.

“I’m hungry,” Dickey said.

“Just a minute, honey,” she said. “Let Mama wake up.”

“Lots of wood down there,” Lewis said. “Only trouble is, it’s wet.”

She rubbed here eyes, smarting from the smoke, then looked at Lewis again. “You’re not srating that fire with Dad’s good magazines! You know he save ’em!”

“Well, I could“ ve used the wah-paper,” he said.

It was as harsh as he ever got, and she was warned. “I suppose he’ll never notice. — Almost noon, you say? Aren’t you supposed to be working for Mrs. Ellis?”

“I called her up on the telephone,” he said.

“Oh.”

she swung her legs over the side of the couch, yawned and stretched, thought of smoking a cigarettem then changer her mind. Sometimes he mad comments (distant and indirect) when she smoked first thing in the morning. She straightened out her coat, draped it around her shoulders, and remembered she had cigarettes in the pocket. She threw a look at him. On the back of his head a shock of hair stood up. Guiltily, she reached for the cigarettes, shook one out, and opened the pack of matches tucked inside the cellophane.

“God damm smoke” Lewis said, rubbing his eyes. He turned and looked at her, or, rather, not at her, at the cigarette in her hand. “Whant you fix Dickey some breakfast,” he suggested. He made it sound like an alternative.

“I will,” she said. “Don’t I always?” She steeled herself against his tyranny and lit the cigarette.

Suddenly last night came over her, in its full horror, her father gone insane, waving the gun at them, his face a horrible leer above the jack-o-lanterns on the table. “Oh God!” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I was thinking of last night.” The wallpaper was light-gray and dark-gray, diamond-shapes with roses. She remembered staring at it as a child, when the colors were fresh and it had seemed to her pretty. Christ, what a ruin! Waking up in the living room was like learning you were dead.

“Never mine,” Lewis said. He was fanning the fire with a magazine now. “Yoah dad was drunk, that’s ah.”

“He was going to kill her!”

“I wouldn’t think too much about it.”

She stood up, sucking hard at the cigarette. It was like Kleenex in her throat, and in her back, just under the shoulder-blade, there was a sharp pain. Oh, Jesus, she thought. Oh, Christ. She started for the kitchen door. “Come on, Dickey.”

“I’m cold,” Dickey said.

“Jump up and down,” she said. “Hurry up! Come on!” At the door she turned her head, raising her hand and running it through her stiff, oily hair. “You had breakfast, Lewis?”

“Not yet,” he said, careful, as if avoiding a fight.

“Jesus,” she said angrily, and hit the door with just the heel of her hand, the cigarette between two fingers. “Dickey, go up and use the bathroom,” she said.

“I don’t need to, Mom.”

“Go try! Go on before I clobber you!”

He went, dawdling, and when he returned she had breakfast on.

While they were eating — she wasn’t hungry — she went up to the bathroom and the first thing she saw was that damn shotgun. Her cheeks went fiery, mainly because Dickey had just been here and might have killed himself, and if she could have thought of a way to destroy it that instant, she’d have done so. Instead, she sat down to go to the bathroom and while she was seated there picked up the shotgun to see if she could open it and make sure it was empty. It was heavy. She felt an urge to empty it by pulling the triggers /shooting out the little square bathroom window, but it was only a passing thought, not a real temptation, and she continued to study the shotgun looking for a release. She found one on the top, where the barrels began, and the minute she touched it the gun broke, smoothly and silently, sending a shiver up her back — the pure efficiency of the thing. Once when her father had been hunting woodchucks with the shotgun and his dog, they’d cornered one against an old stone wall, and when the woodchuck had tried to attack the dog her father had poked the gun-barrel at it. The woodchuck had bit at the gun — had the barrel in his mouth — when her father pulled the trigger. You could hardly find the pieces.

There were no shells where she knew they should be and she snapped the gun shut again. Perhaps there’d been no shells from the beginning, she thought, but then remembered the explosion when the minister and priest came diving out the door. Another job for Lewis. The pellets had not only demolished the plaster, they’d blasted away the lath.

“Crazy!” she whispered, and felt tears welling up. How would she ever dare face them again, all those people! Again she felt her cheeks go hot with anger, this time at Lewis — superior bastard. But instantly, flushing the toilet, she was ashamed of the feeling. It wasn’t his fault. He’d been born that way, a damned saint. He really was! She arranged herself, splashed water on her face, and looked in the mirror. She looked, she thought, like an old village whore — hair sticking up crookedly where she’d slept on it, big circles under her eyes. She heard her father shouting and looked out the window. He was chasing the bull with a pitchfork, slipping and sliding in the mess of the barnyard. Chickens stood watching. He’d kill the damn thing before he knew it and be out a thousand dollars. “Stupid bastard,” she whispered. Tears welled up in her eyes again, and she splashed more water on her face. In the medicine chest above the sink she found an orange plastic comb with half the teeth gone. She held it under the faucet to wet it, then ran it through her hair. She looked as bad as before when she was finished, but gave up and put the comb back and angrily dried her hands. She felt some unconscious, habitual dissatisfaction and remembered she’d left her cigarettes downstairs.

As she was about to go down it struck her like a thunderbolt that Aunt Sally’s door was open. She stood a moment staring in disbelief, then went striding down the hallway to reach it before Aunt Sally could slam it shut. She saw her aunt asleep on her back, snoring, her flabby brown and light-blue speckled arms outside the covers, and she felt something wrong —danger! her body said, jerking her to a halt. She smelled kerosene smoke and stood perfectly still, or still except that she was tentatively pushing at the door. Suddenly, from nowhere, something heavy and sharp slammed down hard on her head — she felt a flash of unspeakable, splintering pain — and Aunt Sally’s eyes popped open. There was a roar like an explosion, a terrible, dark rumbling, the room shone with glittering pinwheels and stars, and she went hurtling, as if at the speed of light, into blackness.