The King's Indian: Stories and Tales

by John Gardner

  He listened, neither convinced nor unconvinced. His ears, unfortunately, were considerably less acute than mine. After a time, he said, thoughtfully studying me, “I don’t hear a thing.” A flurry of panic swept through me, and I pressed my ear tighter to the door. But there was no mistaking it: He was there, still pacing. At times, as he’d done in the old days, he would pause—I remembered again the way he would stare, fierce with concentration—and then he would begin to pace again. “Take my word for it, Heller, he’s in there,” I said.

  For a long moment he looked at me, absentmindedly smoothing his beard. At last he accepted it, or seemed to. “Then we must rouse him,” he said. Before I knew he would do it, he snatched up the lion’s-head knocker and banged it on the iron plate with such force that it rang like a blacksmith’s maul. I did nothing to check him, though I was sick with fear. Obviously, he had no memory of the Warden’s wrath.

  When he stopped, I bent, trembling all over, to listen at the door. The Warden had stopped pacing, but he did not come to us. The longer we waited, the greater my apprehension grew. Heller said: “You see? It’s up to us.” He smiled again, but his thoughts were far away, his long, thin hand still mechanically moving on his beard.

  I agreed in haste and, catching his arm, virtually hurled him away from the door and back to my chambers. Almost unaware that I was doing it, I allowed myself once more to be guided by Heller. As soon as we were secure, I pushed the door shut behind us and locked it, then immediately crossed to the brandy closet, where I poured a glass for myself and one for Heller. When I’d taken a sip, which did not calm me, I turned to my conspirator. “What are we to do?” I whispered. It no longer mattered to me, in fact, that if we did as Heller wished we were throwing the ancient regulations to the winds. I had no more authority to grant a pardon than to flap my arms and fly. Indeed, formal pardon was out of the question. But we could perhaps entomb Heller’s friend, if we were circumspect.

  Heller sipped his brandy and ignored my agitation. “My people,” he said, “have a long history of dealing with absurd situations. Leave everything to me.”

  “Gladly!” I said, and gave a laugh as hollow and despairing as Heller’s own.

  He sat stroking his bearded chin, looking up over his glasses at the shadows in the room’s dim corners, as if reading there, in indefinite shapes, the outline of his plan. At length he said, “This evening a large parcel will be delivered to your cottage. From there it’s only a stone’s throw to the churchyard.”

  “Whatever you say,” I said helplessly. I drank off the brandy and returned to the closet for more. My whole chamber rang, it seemed to me, with the sound of the Warden’s footsteps.

  “A burial detail,” my friend said then, with the same queer smile, “will meet at your gate after sunset.”

  The footsteps paused. I was sure he could hear every word we said.

  “Good,” I whispered. “I agree.” We shook hands in haste, guiltily, and parted.

  6

  What anxiety I suffered, waiting in my cottage that evening! My family seemed determined to drive me mad—the children quarreling endlessly, my father more fantastic than I could remember ever having seen him. Shortly before sunset, I caught sight of the great black supply wagon coming from the prison to the village. I tried to show no particular interest as it lumbered down toward my gate, drawn by four gray horses ruled more by mindless habit than by the sleepy old peasant who held the reins. The wagon listed on its broken springs like a foundering ship, and with every pothole the wooden wheels struck (the road has been in shameful disrepair for years), I was sure the whole hulk would topple, and our secret come clattering out. I fixed my eyes on whatever tract I was pretending to read—my father had his fierce eyes fixed upon me—and I did not look up until the clumsy structure paused in front of my gate. The nearer horses nibbled at my tulip tree. The driver slept on. And then, as if of its own volition, the wagon started up again. I cleared my throat, closed my book as if casually, and ambled toward the door.

  “Smells are strange things,” my father said.

  My heart leapt; but I was sure an old man could not smell, from this distance, the corpse that now lay, I knew, beside my gatepost. I strolled out onto the porch and down to the road. When I glanced past my shoulder I saw my father, my wife, and the children peering through the window. Perspiration poured down my inner arms. Heller would feel no such guilt, I was sure. I was determined that before this was over I would learn his secret.

  When I reached the road (the sky was now red, and evening birds had begun to sing), I found an old, innocent-looking trunk, its clasps unnaturally gleaming in the decaying light. The stone wall beside the road and the long-dead climbing roses hid it from my family’s view. I drew it into the shadow of the wall, holding my breath against the stench. I hastily covered it with branches and leaves, then hurried back up to the cottage. My father was sitting in the kitchen, tamping his pipe with a nail.

  “It’s a beautiful evening,” I remarked as naturally as possible.

  “It’s a good evening,” the old man said, pursing his lips and squinting at me, wicked eyes glittering.

  My panic increased by the minute. I’d be a very unsuccessful criminal! I remembered Josef Mallin’s ungodly calm, the smile of scorn, the self-righteous conviction that was visible even on his decapitated head. Halfheartedly, I made conversation with my palely smiling, abstracted wife as she prepared our supper. She was later than usual, which alarmed me. If Heller’s burial detail should arrive while we were still at table, I had no idea how I’d escape my family’s watchfulness. Between dreary, absentminded remarks to my wife and father, I asked myself a thousand questions. Was I right to trust Heller to arrange the detail? Obviously I’d been out of my wits! It was a hundred to nothing that sooner or later one of the guards he’d persuaded to help would disclose what we’d done. But it was no use thinking about such things now. In my agitated state, I felt downright relief when my father turned, for no discernible reason, to the subject ordinarily more distressing to me than all others.

  “I’ll tell you what it is with Josef Mallin,” he said. He drew in pipe smoke, savored it, and let it out again. I actually leaned forward, eager to hear him. “He’s convinced all ideals are a flight from reality. The unpleasant facts of life, he claims, charge the human soul with longing. They drive a man to make up a world that’s better than ours. But that better world is mere illusion, says Mallin; and illusion, being false, a mere cowardly lie, is as foul as actuality. So he goes at the universe with dynamite sticks.—It’s a natural mistake.” He leered, showing his crooked, gray teeth. His eyes came into me like nails.

  “Well, he’s paid for his mistake,” I said too loudly.

  My father nodded, presumably to keep peace. He lit another match, and held it over the cracked, black pipe bowl. He said, “The Warden, now, he believes in the mystical experience. But, unfortunately, he’s never had one. He wastes his life anticipating. It’s a terrible crime. A mortal sin, I judge.”

  “That’s true,” I said eagerly, senselessly. But it did not persuade the old man to babble on. He fell silent, as if everything were settled.

  At just that moment, my wife announced supper. I went to the parlor to call in the children. They came at once, not from obedience, of course; from hunger. As I was about to follow, I glanced out, hardly thinking, toward the lane. They were there—Heller’s burial detail! I could see nothing but their shapes, dark blocks against the gray of the road, standing motionless as tombstones, waiting. A curious feeling of calm came over me, a mingled indifference and determination that reminded me of Heller. Without a word to those expecting me for dinner, I stepped to the door, opened it, and went out.

  7

  My mind was curiously blank, as I climbed, with my walking stick, up the old stone lane toward the churchyard; and blank as I took my turn at the shovel. We would have been, to a passer-by, a curious sight. Of the dozen or more of us, only I myself was beardless, the rest of them
shaggy with orthodoxy. Two of them at least must have been rabbis; they were not only bearded but wore tattered robes. No one spoke. They were a company born for undertakings, sad-eyed, stooped shouldered, all their faces the mirror images of a single expression: shrugging surprise and mild pleasure that they too were not dead. They worked in rhythm with one another, or stood harmoniously silent. It was as if they were performing a religious duty—though the churchyard was Christian and the man we were burying certainly no Jew. The night above us was immense, majestic. Except for the graveyard itself, all the grounds of the church were shrouded in darkness, shadowed by the interlocking limbs of chestnut trees and oaks. Above the open space of the graveyard, the full moon shone serene, mysterious. The grave was chest-deep when, panting heavily, sticky with sweat and slightly dizzy from my unusual exertion, I handed the spade to the old man seated in the grass above me and prepared to climb out for my period of rest. A hand reached down out of the group to help me; I accepted it. When I was free of the grave I recognized Heller. “Thank you,” I said. He said nothing. He led me to a crooked, low tombstone wide enough that both of us could sit on it. The old man who had taken my place shoveled steadily, his upper teeth closed on his bearded lower lip, three younger men standing above him, waiting their turns.

  “He was a strange man,” Heller said. I merely looked at him, too winded to comment. “He never ate,” he said. He took a deep breath and looked up into the night. “It’s amazing he lasted as long as he did.”

  I nodded, a trifle reluctantly, glanced over toward the grave-diggers.

  Heller frowned, silent for a moment, then at last continued: “I think of something he used to say: ‘In the inorganic life, pain cannot be; thus the necessity for the organic’ There’s the secret of the man. He relished his pain because of, you know, his mysticism.” He looked away from me, down at the grass, then sighed deeply and looked up at the moon again. “He hated life, you know, yet delighted in it, because of what its horrors would do for him later.”

  Something my father had said crossed my mind, flitting softly, like a bat at dusk, almost too swift for me to catch it.

  “Perhaps he was guilty after all,” I said.

  Heller turned his face toward me.

  I rose from the tombstone, less giddy now, though still short of breath, just perceptibly light-headed. He, too, rose. I walked, hands in pockets, down the aisle between graves. Neither of us spoke. At length, we came to the slope declining to the moonlit pool. The shadow of willow trees lay on the water, motionless, snatched out of time. We could hear the faint crunch of the spade behind us. On the opposite side of the pool the old stone church stood brooding, as patiently still as its reflection. Beyond the church, where the dark trees began, there was motionless fog. We stood for a long time saying nothing. At length, following some train of thought of his own, Heller said, “It was a terrible injustice.”

  I said nothing, watching the reflection of the church.

  “He clung to his pain, but in the end he lost all sense of it. If there are angry ghosts, envious prowlers in the shadow of the living—” He stared across the pool, smiling thoughtfully, perhaps unaware that he was smiling. It was not, I saw, a matter of great importance to him. Merely another of life’s ironies. I felt a queer irritation and found myself squeezing the handle of my cane. I calmed myself, listening to the rhythmical crunch of the spade.

  “There’s no such thing as a ghost,” I said suddenly.

  “I don’t believe in them either,” he said, “but I’m afraid of them.”

  I moved closer to the water, head bowed, musing. He followed. We looked at the dead-still reflection of the church. No one had used it regularly for years. Doors hung loose, some of the windows were broken. People who came to the graveyard would repair it, from time to time, for the sake of the dead or for those who were yet to be buried here, but the repairs were pitiful at best. A wired-up sash, a softwood patch where the door had been broken, a supporting stake to prop a sagging iron fence. Heller said: “Or is it the Mallins of the world who come back—the enemies of ‘illusion? Maybe the unexpected fact of their survival—maybe it makes them more furious than before at the particled world of sticks and stones, the obstruction blocking—”

  “No one comes back,” I said, and struck the ground with my stick.

  He smiled, looking at the grass. “No doubt you’re right. Not the Mallins, at any rate.” He sat mechanically nodding. “How could a man like Josef Mallin live more intensely than he did?—boiling like a cauldron from the cradle to the grave!”

  Nothing, it seemed, would drive him from the subject. Why it was important that we speak of other things, I could not say; but it was. I felt as I’d felt on the road, walking home from the prison that night—that any moment I might slip outside myself, become no one, everyone, the drifting universe.

  “Enough of this,” I said, and gave a false little laugh. “Heller, this is hardly the time or place—” I let it trail off. I was thinking suddenly: Which is more appalling, the crude stone church on land or the one upside-down in the pool?

  Heller touched my arm and tipped his head down to study me. “You’re in earnest,” he said.

  “We’re grown men,” I said, and laughed again. “Talk of ghosts is for children.”

  He too laughed, watching me. His teeth, in the darkness, were misty white. “Come now, Herr Vortrab. Look at the fog in the trees, the glitter of stars in the windows of the church. Surely such stubborn realism does them an injustice!” But he paused, seeing my agitation. “Well—” he said. He turned his hands palms up, a harmless tailor once more.

  Behind us, the crunch of the spade, old men’s voices, the black hole awaiting the world’s latest victim, persuading him to rest.

  “What man can say what he really believes about these things?” Heller said lightly.

  I felt unwell. I’m too old, too fat to be shoveling graves. My heartbeat was a little wrong somehow; my tongue was dry.

  Heller said, downright merry now, “No one comes back, of course. You’ve convinced me, Herr Vortrab! Neither the unfeeling nor the hypersensitive, neither idiots—”

  I touched his arm.

  Everything was silent. The pool was so still the night itself seemed dead. The gravedigging was finished and Heller’s burial detail stood across from us. I counted them. Eleven.

  I gazed at the upside-down image of the church. Tangled vines crawled down toward the steeple and pushed against the windows. The still air was wintry, not as if cold had come but as if all warmth in the area had lost its vitality, decayed. I was aware of someone standing to my right, and I glanced over, casually. It was the Warden, standing with one hand in his pocket, the other cradling a revolver. He stood with one highly polished boot thrown forward. I saw, without alarm, that a part of his forehead was blasted away, as if by some violent explosion. He noticed my glance and nodded, severe, withdrawn—laboring despite some inner turmoil to be sociable. Dried blood from his wound lay over his left eye and cheek. “Good heavens,” I said, with a quick, no doubt somewhat obsequious smile, and leaped back a step. I threw a look at Heller. When I turned to look back at the Warden, he was walking away, moving hurriedly around the rim of the pond in the direction of the church. Heller was touching his beard, looking over his spectacles at me.

  “Impossible!” I whispered—probing, perhaps, to learn for certain whether Heller too had seen it.

  But Heller had no answer, as silent as the eleven across from us, watching—all twelve of them watching: grim, moonlit jury.

  “We’re finished here,” I said abruptly, my voice rather shrill in that midnight stillness. I pointed with the tip of my stick toward the gravemound.

  Heller nodded, still not commenting. What was I to do?

  Stiff-legged, ridiculous, my back still tingling, I led them past headstones to the iron gates and down the pitchdark lane to my cottage, where I left them with a crisp good-night and a click of my heels. No doubt they smiled at that later.
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br />   What was I to do? I too had my laugh. From the darkness of my parlor I peeked out at them, trudging down the road, the rabbis’ skirts dragging, the younger men clinging to the elbows of the old.

  That is how things stand with us. I no longer bother to deny that I am frightened, hopelessly baffled, but neither do I pretend to believe that sooner or later he will answer my knock. I need rest, a change of air, time to sort out my thoughts … but each day provides new calamities.…

  We no longer go home nights; it wouldn’t be safe to leave the prison in the hands of the guards we have now, except, of course, Heller.

  A fool came to visit me, to sell me a book. It began, as I remember, Modern thought has made considerable progress by reducing the existent to the series of appearances which manifest it. Its aim was to overcome certain dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy, and to replace them by the singleness of the phenomenon. … I drove the man out with my walking stick. Heller looked on with his cap in his hands, mournful of eye but not altogether disapproving. He thinks I’m mad, of course. Each new regulation I bring “from the Warden,” each new pardon or death sentence, increases his despair. I understand his feelings. I do what I can for him. “If Order has value, you and I are the only hope!” I whisper. He nods, mechanically stroking his beard.

  I worry about him. Late at night, when he should be asleep, I hear Heller pacing, occasionally pausing, deep in thought.

  JOHN NAPPER SAILING

  THROUGH THE UNIVERSE

  1

  My Joan drives slowly, as she always does after those drunken parties, clinging to the wheel with both small, blue-white hands, her jaw thrown forward. Her beauty in the darkness makes me faint: white cheekbones high as an Indian’s, red copper hair, gray eyes. An apparition; an apprehension of weirdly lighted crypts in a mist-hung grove.