The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh yes! Oh.” He looked down at the wood. “I hadn’t realized,” he said, “that you weren’t unpacked yet. I was just—”

  “Come in,” I said. “Do come in.”

  The sunset was full of the smell of burning leaves.

  “I’m Dr. Grewy,” he said.

  “Yes of course. I recognized you. Deacon Grewy.” I smiled, squeezing his hand with my right hand, cupping his elbow with my left.

  “I’m an Elder, actually.” He blushed. It meant much to him, I saw, this lofty position he was certain he didn’t deserve.

  “Elder. Certainly! What a stupid mistake!—Come in, Dr. Grewy, come in!” I guided, or rather pulled him into the dingy front room and encouraged him out of his coat. When he was seated I offered him wine. He looked alarmed, then confused. “I’m a teetotaler,” he said. “Ah,” I said. “Then coffee.” “Yes, thank you.”

  We talked half the night. His soul was in torment. How absurd that a man like Dr. Grewy could possess a tortured soul! But life scoffs, as we know, at dignity. Behold what happens to the tallest oaks, the noblest elms. In poems, tortured souls are found in towering, deep-brained men, men with dark eyebrows that flare out like wings and legs firm as pillars from walking high windy cliffs, bare heaths, forsaken shores. They suffer, they see the Truth, and they overcome. Who’d need salvation if life were art? Dr. Grewy, whose sad habitation was life, was miserable.

  He was cross at first, as if it were my fault that the Presbyterian Church had betrayed him. I told him—firmly, though without any rancor—that he was behaving like a child. He complained then about my predecessor. I told him he had no one to blame but himself. For forty-some years he’d been listening to sermons about Christian love, but when bombs went off in Mississippi churches, Dr. Grewy was tallying builders’ accounts. He looked alarmed, wringing his fingers. I could not make out what made him stare at me. “Go ahead,” I said rather sternly. “What’s bothering you now? Come out with it!”

  His lips were willing, but his voice was weak. On the third try he brought out, “Suppose—I lack—the intelligence to be a Christian?”

  “Faddle!” I said. But I was sorry the next instant. He was dead serious, and the problem was real, and it had not been an easy thing for him to say. Medical doctors are intelligent by definition, yet here he was, baldly confessing … I was astonished. Intelligent or not, he was no ordinary man. His eyes swam in tears. I leaned toward him to touch his shoulder. It was a mistake. Or perhaps it was right, in the end. His arms jerked convulsively, and his tight face flew out of control, shattered into his hands, and he began to whoop, “God help me! God help me!” What was I to do? I jumped, exploded, up out of my chair—we were sitting more or less knee-to-knee—and reached down to hold him in my arms as I would a child, but I couldn’t, standing over him, so I merely patted both his shoulders awkwardly, as though I were myself another child.

  “Lost!” he whooped. “Lost!”

  “Nonsense,” I said gently. “Nobody’s lost.”

  I tried to explain about Christian redemption. It all seemed extremely simple to me, but I’ve never been sure he got it. I tried to explain to him the Parable of the Talents. He sat listening carefully, looking bewildered. (He’d finished whooping now.) When I was sure I’d made everything clear as day, Dr. Grewy nodded slowly and thoughtfully, his many-times magnified eyes red and puffy, and he ran his hands back and forth on his legs, toward his knees, back again. “Welfare is ruining this country,” he said, and nodded.

  “Ah well,” I said, “God loves us all. Probably.”

  Dr. Grewy puts the collection money in bags, sucks at his pipe, puts down numbers in the ledger. He glances at me, his eyes moving like fish behind the lenses. “It’s none of my business,” he begins, then falters. I let him stew for a moment. At last, he says: “You should be careful what you say. Overthrowing governments and things, I mean. What if someone from the FBI …” He glances at the office door. Sylvester Jones will be out there somewhere, sweeping, picking up scraps of paper, his face black as coal, his hair snow-white, a man old enough to be father of us all. “These days, you know …” He looks startled, as if by an abdominal pain. “You hear the news this morning?”

  I shake my head, watching him.

  “Someone blew up the Art Building.” His face is as white as his soft, fat neck. His lips tremble. In a moment he’ll be in a fiery rage against Communist Anarchists, dope addicts, Panthers. Though I mock him, I’m slightly infected by his fear. Someone once threatened to burn down my house. The memory’s as much in my blood as in my mind: my sudden objectness, imprisonment inside the whim of some unknown madman. I shake it off quickly. The world may control me, accidents of time and space and temper, but I needn’t enchain myself with fearful fantasies.

  “That’s terrible,” I say, and look at my watch. “But we’d better go, Dr. Grewy. Actually, I’m starving.”

  He closes the ledger, stands up, puts his arms in the armholes of his suitcoat.

  I lock the office and start with him to the back door. We look up at the centerpoint of the arch above us. Behind us the wall is blue and red and yellowish green with pale projections of images in the new stained glass. All this is the work of Dr. Grewy and his building fund. Though he believes now that adding on to the church was a mistake, he’s proud, in spite of himself, of the addition. It’s a beautiful structure, modern, full of light; yet it harmonizes with the older part. I can hardly ask him to be sorry, whatever the stern opinions of the prophet Amos. I can disapprove of his love of wealth (I’d be ashamed to live in a house like his—a driveway that curves in for half a mile past shrubbery and pools; two white new pillars on the porch, set much too far apart, like a farmer’s legs when he squats in the bushes to relieve himself), but I take men where I find them; they give me no choice. The church, they were sure, would grow larger and larger— even this new bank of sunday-school rooms would soon be totally inadequate. The rooms sit empty now, week after week, like the new wing the Methodist people put up, and like the Lutherans’ new building. The Baptists unloaded their monster to the university. But all that is not Dr. Grewy’s fault. He did what was asked of him, bowed down, humble and devoted, to the brass god Stewardship, and meant no harm. He donates time to the free health clinic; he cooperates, so far as his ethic allows, with the drug crisis center. He may not be exactly the salt of the earth, but he’s as good a man as he knows how to be.

  I watch him as he studies the stippled wall, the arch-frets yawing above us like the beams of a ship thrown upside-down. He glances at me, looks uncomfortable, puts on his hat. He toes out as he walks through the double glass door ahead of me, his hat as flat on his ridiculous head as an Indian’s. I smile, let out a sigh. He pauses, waiting, while I lock the door. There’s a scent in the air, delicate, elusive, and after a moment I place it, a smell like firecrackers. The Art Building, I remember. But the Art Building’s more than a mile from here. Something else, then. Some fire in a vacant lot—dry weeds, old leaves. A larger, more usual apocalypse; another fall. Nearly all the cars are gone now from the parking lot. Marilyn Fish—pretty blonde in a fiery red coat—sits grinding on her starter. The motor catches, takes off like an explosion, and I wave to her. She smiles. I hear rumors about her. I mainly attribute them to jealousy and spite. She’s active in social work, politics, the schools. But also, of course, she’s a beautiful woman, and her husband travels a good deal in his work. One of these days she’ll come into my office late at night and say …

  “Lovely day,” says Grewy.

  Autumn trees flaming, white clouds, blue sky; as usual in southern Illinois at this time of the year. Marilyn switches on her signal light, pauses—the motor roars—and, knowing no Dante, she turns left. “Praise God for his many gifts,” I say. Lead me not into temptation, I think. So hour by hour I harmlessly recapitulate the fall. Dr. Grewy gets into his Cadillac, stares sadly through the window. I unlock the chain on my bicycle and meditate on khiseth and Marilyn
Fish.

  4

  The front page, naturally, is filled with news about the latest bombing. Speculation is that it must have been an art student who planted, as they call it, the explosive device. The art students at the university have long hair and peculiar clothes. They live in shanties, with Negro neighbors, or they erect buckminster-fuller domes in people’s woods, without permission. They smoke pot, drop acid (if that’s still the expression), and engage in what the police call orgies. Also, they have keys to the Art Building. I study the pictures. Helmeted policemen guarding the rubble and smoke from a crowd of anesthetized bystanders. A girl with long hair and an Indian headband displaying the tattered and charred remains of what may once have been her paintings. She stares into the camera with gloomy indifference, like one who has happened into newspictures all her life. A policeman points with his nightstick to writing on a partly demolished wall: OFF AID! SHUT DOWN THE V NAM STUDY CENTER. It is not known whether the sign is recent.

  I look again at the girl with the ruined paintings. I remember old war photographs. Starvation, despair, black smoke in the distance, charred trunks of trees like skeletal hands clutching nothing. I think again of Marilyn Fish’s smile in the parking lot, the strange gray eyes alive with zeal and accomplishment. I shake my head.

  The waitress refills my coffee cup, and as I glance up, nodding thanks, I see Levelsmacher standing at the door, looking in. I look down again quickly, but he’s seen that I’ve seen him, and he isn’t free to pretend otherwise. I feel him coming over to me, jingling coins in his trousers pocket. I would rather converse with a weaving, dusty-eyed snake. As he reaches the table I look up, meet his heavy-lidded eyes. I’m struck by how wrinkled, even withered he is at forty. He seems unaware of it himself.

  “Reverend Pick!” He hits me on the shoulder.

  “Hello there!” I always make a point of addressing him as there. He makes a point of pretending I mean no offense.

  “Meeting somebody?” he says. He makes it an insinuation.

  “No no. Have a seat.”

  He swings a chair out, though he does not want to sit with me (Hypocrite Hippy, they say he calls me). He throws a leg over, pulls at the knees to preserve the press, and sits. His suitcoat is yellowish brown. “That’s really something. Man!” He thumps my paper with his index finger and grins irritably, as if to say, if I had my way … There is no smile in his tiny brown eyes. His mouth jerks. A tic. I have a theory that all his smiles are lies, attempts to sell real estate, and the tic is his last touch of honesty.

  “The people of this town are getting God damned tired of these guitar-playing crazies. Take my word for it, Gene.” He calls me Gene at the end of every sentence. It’s a memory device. I smile and take his word for it. The waitress comes. He asks for coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich, and he gives her a quick seductive wink. The tic gets revenge. He looks down. Then he looks at me up-from-under and grins. “You been getting any, Gene?”

  I sigh, smile, and shake my head. He smiles, exactly imitates my headshake. He has been getting some, of course. He thinks of himself as supremely free, liberated by Christ. All is forgiven. Nothing is unforgiveable. Love God with all your heart and soul and be kind to your neighbor’s wife. (His own wife plays ignorant.) I glance away from him, remembering dowdy, fat Carol Ann Watson, his first, or the first I learned of. She sat in my office, comfortable but prim, plump knees together, her hands on her purse. “Reverend Pick, I’m having an affair,” she said, “and the thing that makes me feel guilty is I feel no guilt about it.” “Maybe you should try having two,” I said. And we laughed, because it was all right, though perhaps a little stupid. Good for her ego, at least. It was not all right on Levelsmacher’s side, or not all right with me, anyway. I catch myself and struggle once more to think better of him. He uses the church as a power base, it seems to me. Communion as contacts. But perhaps I’m mistaken. There’s no man on earth, I tell myself, who doesn’t feel remorse from time to time, and doesn’t occasionally feel compassion. The sandwich comes. He talks as he eats. I pretend to listen, sipping my coffee, but in fact I pay no attention to him. The restaurant is full, families having Sunday dinner out. A great hum, the clink of silverware, screech of children. His talk veers between women and the bombings, as if, without his knowing it, his heart discerns some connection between them. All at once I rivet my gaze to my cup. He speaks, leaning forward, talking intimately past cheese, about Marilyn Fish. I’m startled—amazed—at the intensity of my emotion.

  As soon as he pauses, I glance at my watch and abruptly get up. “Good heavens! Excuse me!” I look again at my watch.

  “Late for something?” He appears surprised, distressed.

  “If my head weren’t screwed on—” I say, and laugh. The laugh sounds hollow, a giveaway. I wave, excuse myself again, and take my check to the counter.

  Outside, where sunlight explodes all around me, I pause, remembering that look of distress. Headlights, windshields on fire with sunlight stare at me, waiting to hear some opinion. The birds on the telephone wires are silent. A pigeon lights on the McDonald’s sign, half a block away. 6 billion sold. A policeman stands watching through the Kroger store window, his fist on his hip, beside his gun.

  5

  When I hear her voice in the vestibule, I realize I’ve been thinking about her a good deal this past three days. I’m not ashamed, by any means, but I’m bothered by it. Who isn’t childish enough to wish that Eden could remain forever pure? My feelings about Marilyn were innocent, once. We worked together on social projects—I got her appointed to the Community Conservation Board—we joked, told long stories when she happened to drop in and had half an hour to throw away. I cared about her, as the saying goes, and cared equally about her husband, her children. No, precision: I admired her hips and breasts, her walk; but there was a line I did not cross or admit the existence of. At the sound of her voice I’d think, Ah, Marilyn! and I’d go out to meet her. That is not how it is with me this moment. Poisoned by Levelsmacher’s leer, bits of cheese at the corner of his mouth. My chest is sick with secretiveness.

  Satan, shove off.

  I’m concerned about her; that too is true. I do not want some creep messing up her marriage, least of all myself. Is it possible the things he told me were lies? I can hardly get Marilyn to talk to me about it, not unless she brings it up herself.

  Janice pokes her head in. “Reverend Pick, Marilyn Fish is here.”

  “Send her in, by all means!” I jump up and move around my typing desk to meet her, as always. She appears, beads of sweat on her tanned and freckled forehead, a clipboard in her hand—no doubt one of her petitions. Her smile is, as always, childlike. She has the teeth you see in toothpaste ads.

  “Hi Gene. Can I get your signature on this?” She leans forward for my kiss on her cheek as she speaks, as usual. My kiss is self-conscious. She notices—so it seems to me—but ignores it, smiling at my forehead. Marilyn greets everyone she’s remotely fond of with a quick, light hug and kiss.

  “What this time?” I say, mock-scornful, looking down at the half-filled sheet.

  She laughs. “You want me to help you read it?”

  I pretend to read. She turns away, goes over to the green leather couch below the Carbondale churches’ welcome sign, sits down, takes cigarettes from her purse, lights one.

  “Well ok,” I say doubtfully. I sit behind my desk, reach for a pen, write my signature. I swivel back.

  “Man what a day,” she says. She looks at the photograph of Lake Geneva, the round-topped table with the green glass ashtray, assuring herself that all’s well, all’s clean. “What’s happening with you?”

  “Same old thing,” I say. “Saving souls, writing sermons to ruin them again.” I glance away from her, then back, and smile. “How’s Don?”

  “Terrific, at last report. We never see each other, but now and then we get a note through. He’s in Chicago the rest of this week and all next.”

  It strikes me that she’s not a
s happy about it as she pretends, and I’m glad. “He’s there now?” I ask. I’m not sure why I’ve asked it.

  “Tomorrow morning.” She swipes her hair back. She breathes smoke deep into her lungs, lets it out through her nostrils. It bothers me. Mutability. In the back of my mind I’m aware of some unnameable wish. She pulls down her skirt, unnecessarily. It occurs to me that everything is all right between us. I feel comfortable with her, as she feels with me. I like her shape, high cheekbones, freckles, gray eyes, but what I feel now is pleasure in her company, not desire. I could laugh at Levelsmacher’s sick-minded talk. She’s one of the elect. I think again of the dead-eyed stare of the girl in the newspaper. I could have been a missionary, all right, like Miss Ellis’ dear, dear friend. They say they’ve found the answer, these Children of Albion, with their communes and pot and devotion to Art. But I compare their malnutritious faces with Marilyn’s, their staring eyes with Marilyn’s eyes, and I scoff at their claims of holiness and peace.

  She says, “Say. Speaking of saving souls, you won a convert last Sunday.”

  I raise my eyebrows, widen my eyes in amazement.

  She laughs. “I sent him here to listen to you. A boy I met in the drug clinic. He’s no druggy. He’s ‘into revolution,’ he says.”

  “Ah,” I say. Uneasiness goes through me. “I noticed him.”

  “He’s all right,” she says, reading my emotion as usual. “He’s a sweet, gentle boy. A little crazy, of course.” She laughs again, then catches herself, looks apologetic for laughing at a friend. “You blew his mind, he says. He wants to talk to you sometime.”

  I throw my arms wide. “Suffer the little revolutionists to come unto Me.”

  “I will, if you promise to be nice.”

  “I promise.”

  “I don’t know that he’ll come, of course. He’s strange.”

  “Unlike the rest of us.”