by John Gardner
No, I’m lying, of course. Nothing to do with politics. It has to do with responsibility, the dangerous freedom my pulpit grants. I told them what was true, or what I believe to be true (we are forgiven in advance for nonomniscience), and what it was necessary for them to hear. If I’d known he was listening I would not have spoken in quite the same way. I didn’t know; but any effect my sermon had is nevertheless my fault. They know that too, my congregation. It isn’t easy to stare down their stares.
I could weep and confess, like Dr. Grewy. Throw up my hands in despair, like Miss Ellis.
My mind flicks away from the idea as if burned.
I try to read the paper that I’ve already read three times. The light outside is green. It will be night soon. Abruptly I get up and start toward the club car. I can drink myself into a stupor if I please; there’s no one here to be offended by the sight of his minister drunk. It’s a curious feeling. If I meet some young lady who’s willing, I can climb into bed with her. Everything is possible. I think of Levelsmacher. What conceivable line can he have used on Marilyn Fish?
Though my own car is practically empty, the car behind is half-filled. Long-haired boys and girls in beads and rags; an acrid stench in the air, maybe pot. Legs and arms sprawl into the aisle. I carefully step over them. A beefy man in an expensive gray suit looks up from his magazine and nods as I pass. I nod back, though I’m sure I’ve never seen him before, and I continue down the aisle, steadying myself on seatbacks against the swaying of the train. I push against the pressure of the door; the roar of wheels assaults me. I push against the second door and enter the club car.
As soon as I’m seated with my drink I see him coming—the man in the suit. Alarm leaps up in me, then passes. It’s impossible that the man’s a policeman. Even if he is, what have I to hide? He stops, tips his head, smiles at me.
“Care for company, my friend?” Before I can answer, he extends his big hand. “Name’s McGiver, Paul Anthony McGiver, M.D.”
I’m not sure I believe him. His jaw is enormous, with creases like pits at each side of his mouth. He has similar cracks between his eyebrows and running from beside and below his eyes. His chest and arms are like a wrestler’s, or maybe a weight lifter’s.
“Have a seat,” I say, and gesture across the table.
He accepts at once, sliding in, carefully holding up his large glass of bourbon. I consider telling him my name’s Johnson, but, then, for no reason, I tell him the truth.
“A minister,” he says. He studies me, then smiles. “I’d have guessed in a moment. I’ve got a good eye for things like that. Of course, with ministers it’s easy.”
I struggle not to be offended.
“I couldn’t help but notice that paper you’re carrying. It’s a terrible business.”
I nod. “Terrible.” It occurs to me only now that I’m still carrying the thing. It’s two days old.
He lifts one black eyebrow. “You heard the latest, I suppose?”
I wait, keeping calm.
“The crazy nut’s blown up some church. I saw it on television.”
Every line of the club car, the stranger’s face, is suddenly too sharp, so precise as to seem unreal. I can’t speak for a moment. I bring out, finally, “In Carbondale?”
“That’s what they said on television. It’s a hell of a thing!” He leans toward me. “You all right, Reverend?”
I suck in breath. He scowls at me as if furious, then leans forward, preparing to stand up. “Let me get you something. I’ve got my medical bag right back—”
“No no. I’m fine. What church was it?”
He continues to study me, not hearing. I repeat the question, and he relaxes a little, looks down at his glass, shakes his head. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch the denomination,” he says. “Maybe someone here knows.” He looks around the car. Two soldiers playing cards; the conductor sitting in the corner, writing on a tablet; an elderly man in a straw hat, drinking beer.
“Never mind,” I say. “It’s not important. Please.”
He scowls at me again, then decides to accept it. Suddenly, he smiles. “I gave you one hell of a shock there. Never crossed my mind how news like that would hit a minister.”
I too smile, then notice my martini, and drink.
“It’s a hell of a thing all right,” he says. He nods, solemn. He takes out cigarettes and holds the pack toward me. I wave it away. “They just don’t care about anything, those people. I’ve been watching them— those hippies up there in the car where I am. I don’t mean they’re evil, I don’t mean they’re all of ‘em nihilists; nothing like that.” He scowls at his drink waiting for the idea to come clearer in his mind. His huge jaw works and the heavy cracks in his face deepen. He looks furious, as if any moment he might leap up and smash things. When he speaks again I forget to listen. I feel again as if I’m falling endlessly through space. In a kind of daydream, I imagine John Grewy coming into the club car, lips pursed, eyes distressed, perspiration on his forehead. Ever since I vanished he’s been looking for me. He knows well enough what shame I feel, and he knows my arrogance—knows how impossible it would be for me to face them all. But a man can’t simply drop out, he tells me. His fingers tremble and his eyes are wet. And so he’s come seeking the hundredth lamb, bringing encouragement, concern, forgiveness.…
I smile, sickened. It is more blessed to give than to receive. They won’t come after me. I have vanished from the face of the earth, fallen into freedom. It is nearly dark. In the west, a blood-red line. I sip the martini. It runs down my throat like lava. My fingers are already losing feeling. When you get used to martinis, like Marilyn Fish, like Level-smacher … I suddenly understand something, but before I can firmly grasp it, it’s gone. Be barren forever. For an instant the darkness hurtling by us alarms me, and I focus intently on the face across the table. The man is saying: “… of fatalism. Nothing is any longer evil to them, that’s the thing. They ‘love’ each other—you’ve heard their talk—but they don’t ask anything, they don’t expect anything. If anything, in fact, they expect betrayal. The people they care about go through ‘changes,’ as they say, so they shrug and separate, have a smoke, a little wine. It’s a strange way of life.”
I nod. “Strange.”
“Life’s absurd, they say. Why fight it? So they put on funny-looking clothes, let their hair grow however it may, they abandon soap …” He shakes his head slowly, and the muscles of his neck bulge. He’s outraged, if faces mean anything, but his voice is calm, as if weary. It comes to me that his leg is pressed against mine. I consider moving my leg but do nothing. If he hasn’t yet noticed … Either way, embarrassment.
Suddenly he asks, “Do you believe in God?”
“Doctor, I’m a minister!”
“Yes of course. Of course. Forgive me.” He’s badly flustered— and still, it seems to me, furious. I too am furious. Why, I wonder?
“I wonder if it matters,” he says. He seems to speak more to himself than to me. His leg is pressed firmly against mine, and now I’m certain that he knows it. His right hand is under the table, in his lap. I could laugh, it’s all, suddenly, so obvious. The weight lifting, the seductively serious talk.
Fruit, I think, and am back to the fig tree, to fruitless Pick. And if my life is fruitless, does it matter? Outside, the night falls endlessly. Where the darkness is heaviest I see for an instant the bearded, blue-eyed face. It does not matter. The truth explodes out of the night and the sound of wheels. The world is dying—pollution, old, unimportant wars, the grandiose talk of politicians, the whisper of lovers in cheap motels. The sentence of death is merely language, a pause between silences. They know, the Children of Albion asprawl in the aisles of hurtling trains. They have seen and understood, have abandoned all mission. I sip my martini, then on second thought drain it. As I rise to get another, I’m thrown violently forward, my head slams against the doctor’s, then both of us are falling, clutching one another, shouting. The lights go off, then on again. The whole
train jolts and shudders. We’re standing still. People are shouting.
10
I have no idea what’s going on. I stumble down the track with the doctor and the official, torches and lanterns all around us. Ahead of us, hippies in flapping rags, shouting, howling at one another. Behind us someone is ordering the passengers back onto the train. The stopped train—I glance at it over my shoulder—is grotesque in the enormous darkness. The red of the lantern on the rear platform is like light seen through blood. Beyond the cinders at the edge of the tracks there’s a deep, dry gully on either side, and, beyond the gullies, old trees, barkless, strangled by woodbine now also dry and dead. We reach the silent group of people, faces out of some war photograph.
“Let us through, please,” the official says. “This man’s a doctor.”
The crowd murmurs, opens up a path for us. I press in behind the official and the doctor. We come to a gigantic young man on his knees, bent over, writhing. He’s crying and moaning something, I can’t make out what. “This man’s a doctor,” the official says again.
The young man twists his head up, bearded, wild. His eyes are as tiny and crooked as a goat’s. He shouts at us, enraged. “We don’t need a doctor, we need a priest!”
“I’m a minister,” I say, but no one hears me.
“Let us through,” the doctor says.
The young man straightens up, shouting at us, crazy, and we see what he’s been bending over. I look away, getting only a fleeting impression—an enormous pregnant abdomen in labor, a face smashed featureless, dripping hair, the dead stock of a tree.
“Christ,” the doctor whispers.
“Is she alive?” someone asks.
“Get these damn people out of here,” the doctor hisses.
The official straightens up, wipes his forehead, begins shouting. Everyone ignores him, staring at the body in the unearthly light of torches, red lanterns.
“She was stoned,” someone explains to me, clinging to my shirt, driving the words in like hammer blows in hopes of being rid of all guilt. “She was stoned. Couldn’t see where she was going.”
“Get them out of here,” the doctor shouts. His crease-chopped face is satanic with rage; his dry voice crackles with violence.
I back away; one more quick look at the body. Smashed, one leg turned backwards like a ridiculous doll’s. Trainmen are pulling and pushing at the crowd. The great tall wildman with the beard and the crooked, goatish eyes is shaking his fists and shouting at us, or shouting at the sky; no one can tell. “Lunatics! Where were you? God damn you to hell!” He locks his giant hands together and wrings them, elbows going right and left, his torso cocked forward, his knees clamped together like the toes of his oversized shoes. “Damn them!” he wails. “God damn them! God damn you!” He flings his arms outward, rocks back on his heels. His rags fly crazily around him. Though the trainmen are hurrying the others along, no one goes anywhere near the enormous goat.
A thin-bearded boy takes my elbow, explains to me soberly, as if I might help him with his problem, “She was his chick. Back there.” He searches my face.
The wildman keens, rocking backward and forward. “She’s free of you at last, God damn you all. She’s free, you hear me?” He laughs, shrill with pain. “She’s free! She’s free!” There’s no doubt of it now: it’s the stars he shakes his fists at—the indifferent shrapnel hurtling away from the darkness, black hole at the center.
I move a step toward him. I can’t help myself, though I know pretty well what I’ll seem to him. “Listen!” I call out. “Get hold of yourself!”
He stops, glares at me, his horrible goat-nosed face reddish-gray in the lantern-light.
“Let me talk with you,” I say. “I’m a minister.”
His head drops, his wicked eyes roll up, and for an instant I believe he really will charge me, in the blindness of his pain and rage. But there is nothing to charge. I am no one, for the moment; a disembodied voice; God’s minister.
The wildman stumbles, drops to one knee, groaning, gushing tears. Cautiously, I touch his shoulder. “Trust me,” I say. (The fall is endless. All systems fail.) I force myself to continue. I have no choice.
THE RAVAGES OF SPRING
1
Life, I’ve often been inclined to believe, is preposterous. Witness, for instance, the fact that I of all people should be elected to tell this tale. I have, like other men, my virtues and defects—rather more virtues than defects, I believe (and I would say the same of any other more or less law-abiding man)—but I am not, have never been, the kind of being who causes great stirrings and swarmings whenever he sits or nibbles a pastry or puts his cap on. I’m as plain a man as was ever set to toiling and grieving on this godforsaken planet: a bachelor; a reader of dull books; a country doctor.
But perhaps the powers are wiser than they seem, choosing a common, unpoetic soul for a tale at first glance more fit for the author of “The Raven” or that even more curious masterpiece of feeling and thought caught in one great gasp, the “Ulalume.” I am not, like Mr. Poe, a Platonist. (So he seems, at least, in the writings I’ve encountered.) I am, as I say, a country doctor, and what I chiefly know about absolute values is that they do not necessarily aid the digestion, but frequently impair it. Neither can I whole-heartedly share the Platonistic predilection for Eternity as opposed to Present Time. In my youth I used to ponder, in mixed discomfiture and annoyance, the remark of the famous chemist Davy, that when he had heard, with disgust, in the dissecting rooms, the opinion of the physiologists on the gradual accretion of matter, and its becoming endowed with irritability, ripening into sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were necessary by its own inherent forces, and at last issuing into intellectual existence—when he heard this atheist opinion, he remarked, a walk into green fields or woods, beside the banks of rivers, would bring back his spirit and feelings from Nature to God. I concluded, in the end, that Humphrey Davy was a perfect fool, though by no means mistaken. His pompous bray refuted nothing, but the walk was a piece of pure sanity. The mulch of the flowering spirit is under thy feet, neighbor!
All this may seem wearisome and irrelevant to you. Most people, I’ve noticed, are forever impatient, always hustling and bustling and darting their eyes around, now glancing nervously back past their shoulders, now craning forward in hopes of discerning in the mists of Time the outlines of things yet to be. I take no part in all that. I stand pretty firmly where I happen to be put, and I ponder things. I do not necessarily learn anything. But pondering is good for the constitution: it lends a wise calm to all bodily parts and lends to the mind and soul a special dignity, like that of an old Red Indian sitting in a tree. I like things done properly—even tortuously, when that’s what’s required—but done by a man who’s got one ear cocked toward the infinite. It’s for that reason I begin this tale with a few rather ponderous but needful remarks about myself.
It is difficult, however …
Hmm. Yes.
Perhaps I will drop that approach and attempt some other.
2
We always have tornadoes in the spring, down in southern Illinois. I’ve grown used to them, and thoroughly fatalistic. I feel, perhaps, a certain hesitancy about going out on calls on one of those mornings whose calm forbodes a twister. But sickness does not start up and stop as bird-songs do, depending on the weather, and so, despite the uneasy feeling, I hitch up Shakespeare, throw in my medical bag, and away we go. The weather darkens, as the day progresses; my uneasiness increases, and so does Shakespeare’s. He glances at me as I come out from a call and loose the reins from the hitchingpost, and I throw a glance back at him, startled by some fear far, far below conscious thought. It’s as if, for an instant, we don’t recognize each other, after all these years together. In a flash, that’s past, the ear that seemed for one stroke of a heartbeat, to be flattening back like a warhorse’s ear is erect once more, and the eyeball that seemed to have madness in it is merely my old friend Shakespeare’s eye, long-suffering and p
ossibly amused. I glance at the sky. So does he. “Getting darker,” I say, and the old horse considers it, turning it over in his mind till he forgets what made him think of it. I chat on, riding down country roads, saying pretty much what I say to my patients to keep their minds off aches and pains. And the sky darkens further— blue clouds, almost black, coming over from south-southwest. The light burns green, slanting from the east, and the forested hills are suddenly beautiful: great, white sycamores bursting through the blue-black and emerald green forest like heart attacks, and above us the thunderheads loaded and flickering with lightning like a dying man’s brain.
At the crest of the hill, on this particular occasion—the occasion I’ve set out to recount to you—I tug at the reins, he resists, I tug harder, and we stop. I gaze at a world transmogrified: glowing green fields, woodlots with trees as gray as bones, bright houses and barns, and, winding between them, the rich, gravy brown of the road. The horse turns his head. He thinks I’m a fool, and he’s correct.
Then comes the wind. We can see it from ten miles away, coming at us, moving across the whole world like a thrasher’s scythe. Where its cutting edge is, trees burst to life with the shudder of an infant first sucking in air, and behind, in the swath of the wind, even oak trees bend and buckle, and the willows are in motion like the sea. Then rain slams down on the hot, cracked earth. It kills more things than it nourishes, no doubt. Down in southern Illinois, whatever can make it through the ravages of spring to the time when the heavy, wet heat moves in, crowding every meadow and marsh with green—the time when the rattlesnakes come out on the rocks in dry, brown creeks to sun themselves (coil on coil, their hatchet heads lifted to watch you pass) … the deadly hot summer when farmers get up before dawn to hoe bottomlands, and work there only till the dew’s off the ground, then quit, which happens when the sun’s shoulder-high … in summer, I was saying …
