Giovanni's Gift

by Bradford Morrow

  They slept a wakeful sleep over the course of the warm close day following their vigil. They worried about the shots fired into the dark, anxious that someone might have been hurt. Doing this was against every rule Henry had ever been taught as a boy when learning from his father the gospel rules of wielding firearms. Never shoot unless you can clearly see your target—it was the first tenet of gunsmanship. That law he had surely broken, and through the long day Henry drifted in and out of a dull regret about it. He should have fired into the air. The music maker, whoever he was, couldn’t clearly see Henry there on the porch, camouflaged by darkness, and so wouldn’t have had any idea whether he was drawing a bead right on him or not. A shot at the moon would have been as effective a warning as one in his direction. The second shot had also been unnecessary. After all, he was apparently withdrawing down the gentle rise, presumably running away. Nothing justified firing at a man in retreat, no matter what sort of reprobate thing he had done to you. And while, yes, the music was malicious, terrifying to the two of them, without explanation or reason, as they could see it then, it was nothing so criminal as to merit being shot in the back.

  These thoughts bothered him. He shared them with Edmé, who said, simply, —They had coming to them whatever would’ve happened to them, and that put his mind at ease, at least a little.

  The weather turned sultry, unusual in these high mountains, and especially so given that the month had been marked by cool nights. Now the evening was whitened by haze. Whenever a draft shuffled through the trees, wheezy as if with asthma, the leaves would quiver in gratitude. The windows were left open to draw what cool vesper air rose from the gorge hollows and lively creek. Doors, however, were bolted, the new household habit. His twelve-gauge was leaned against the bedroom wall, whose papered pattern was a series of formal urns from which an abundance of fanciful sun-faded blossoms teemed. Full moon only a week away, the waxing light outside would have been quite intense had the sky been clear, but clouds gathered as summer mist lay upon the valley.

  The music broke in on this large silence which ranged around them, and again the middle of the night had gone mad.

  My uncle listened not in disbelief so much as contempt before descending the stairs once more. Behind him, he heard her say, in an exhausted voice, —Don’t go down, just let it finish, and as he walked out to the second-floor landing he answered, —Go ahead and call Noah.

  The outburst seemed to originate now from a different place. Rather than from below the house, it flooded the dark from a knoll above. Some rock song, unidentifiable to Henry and if anything even more raucous, eerie, wanton than before.

  —Henry, she cried out.

  But he had vanished downstairs.

  At the northern end of the long veranda the hill adjoined the house along the back. Scraggly bushes cluttered the sheer ascent, and squarish blocks of stone, granite and igneous chunks, tumbled scree, jutted here and there, wild outcroppings decorated in every cranny by corsages of thorny flowering thistle and stubborn foliage. Without benefit of light, he made his way up the snaking path toward the summit of the first knoll, where the recorded voice taunted and the synthetic beat persevered, and though Edmé had gone out to the edge of the porch and even pursued him a little way up the trace, she thought the better of following, so returned to the veranda.

  All the house lights remained off. She didn’t know whether Henry had taken a flashlight with him up the steep bank, but if he had she saw that he wasn’t using it to make the climb. Not that he needed it—his feet knew the trail as well as his eye. The path veered, zigzagging within the natural curves of the cliff face, and she squinted upward into the shadows, tracking its meanderings in her mind—Edmé knew the path nearly as well as Henry—but failed to catch sight of him. She ran back inside the house, then returned to the porch with her camera, which was fitted with a telephoto lens, a one-hundred-thirty-five millimeter. Pressing her eye to the viewfinder, she scanned the miniaturized yet magnified horizon for movement. She calculated that Henry must have reached the first bluff, a flat stony field covered with scrub.

  Cottony fog was punctuated by drops of lukewarm rain, heavier than drizzle, but not an outright shower, a spitting sky, as Henry might jokingly have referred to it in other circumstances. His face ran with sweat, and he drew deep breaths through pursed lips rather than give himself away by gasping, though he might surely have wanted to gasp, as the night bore down on him and the rain had the odd effect of seeming to sponge away all the breathable air. The darkness was more comprehensive than on the previous nights of disturbance, and Henry was grateful for that, since he assumed he could read the myriad natural obstacles in these woods better than any stranger, and therefore lightlessness served him, gave him the advantage. Still, he hesitated, knelt, collected himself, got his breath back, before pressing forward toward the locus of music. He guessed two hundred yards, three at the most, separated him from the trespasser. Best, he thought, to circle around behind on the creek side—the creek twisted through an endless series of small but furious falls in the gorge below him, just east, off his right shoulder, as he negotiated the narrow footpath along the cliff rim—in order to avoid walking straight into the clearing where he assumed the man, or men, awaited him.

  Edmé lit a candle. It gave off a strong scent of fennel as she set it down on the telephone stand in the kitchen by the door. She flicked through the pages of the address book until she found Noah’s number. She lifted the handset and ran her finger around the rotary to connect his exchange, wondering whether anyone would be at the station at this hour, though imagining that of course someone had to be there, if not Noah himself, because didn’t problems like this occur most often at night? When she raised the handset to her ear, she heard nothing. When she tried to disconnect—tapping the plungers over and over with shaking fingers—she disbelieved the banality of her gestures as much as the fact that the line was dead.

  What did they think they were doing? Edmé might have said it aloud, —What do you think you’re doing? but found she didn’t have sufficient breath to get the words out. She snuffed the candle, and the kitchen filled with a fennel perfume.

  As for Henry, he too smelled smoke, but not of candle wax and wick. Rather, of burnt birch, he guessed. Punkwood. Bitter and rotty—not resinous like pine, nor a clean burn like oak. He knew at once what it meant, and it served to raise in him an even greater resentment than he’d already felt. How dare they burn a fire on his land? They’d known enough about surviving in the woods in stealth to gather soft wood in order not to make any noise with an ax, known, it seemed, that birch bark will start damp. The winds up here were apt to shift in frivolous ways, so Henry was not certain exactly where the fired been set. He continued up toward a small pasture quite near, ducking under the low-slung boughs of tart blue spruce and ponderosa, which gave off their own spicy scent that mingled with the aroma of wet smoke.

  He was more careful now to proceed unhastily, defensively. A wary calm came over him, a fine sharp focus. A few steps taken, he took a few more.

  Then, beneath the din, he could have sworn he heard Edmé calling his name, —Henry? faint as a reverie. But, well, no. The voice couldn’t have been Edmé’s, could it? Surely she wouldn’t make such a mistake as calling his name, and risk betraying to the music maker that his victims had separated. Edmé wouldn’t want him to know that she and he were confused, frightened—although of course it was the truth. If ever, Henry thought, there was an instance where the truth would not set him free. He breathed hard, moved forward.

  Clothes soaked through by the rain, which had let up some. They were heavy and clung to his thighs and back and made his climb harder. A new song saturated this high corridor, and echoed off massive tablets of ancient earthbones, as he once told me they were, stones coerced to the surface by volcanic shoving and unveiled by antique masses of glacial ice. Henry heard the words

  You’re the real thing,

  Yeah the real thing.

  Even be
tter than the real thing

  which made him wonder, though only for a moment, How can anything be better than the real thing? But the slide guitar cut through that thought like shears through tired old ribbon, and so he kept moving forward toward this real thing, getting higher and higher just as the music did, finding that his heart beat hard, inarguably to the rhythm of the bass and drum, as he heard

  Gonna blow right through ya

  Like a breeze

  or something to that effect, and more than ever felt unconnected from any sense of explanation for what might be happening here, or why. One matter he did comprehend, however, was that he was very near the origin of his grievance. The backlit limbs, slack under the weight of August, danced, it seemed, up ahead of him. He considered shooting a warning into the air overhead, but reasoned he had the best opportunity of forcing matters to a less violent resolution if he maintained his anonymity under this shroud of night and seized for himself some advantage of surprise.

  Then he saw them. Two of them.

  A man dangled aloft with arms limp at his sides and legs stiff, hung by heavy rope from the crooked thick limb of an old oak there, one of the trees that had withstood many winters, had endured for generations, one of those trees that ranchers referred to as a wolf tree, because when all others failed you, if you were being pursued, this one would be there for you to climb and escape the predator’s fangs. The other, whose movements were at first not much more emphatic than his companion’s, or whoever, stood near the hanged man, visible in the flickering light of the fire. He wore a half mask that did not hide the crazed look set upon the barely visible features of his face—his mouth, the eyes seen through the cutouts of the mask. The two were framed, from Henry’s vantage, by jagged, spiky leaves, and by twigs and many tesserae of saplings and wild hedges, on the opposite side of this meadow, a hundred feet distant.

  Before he had the least chance to speculate upon what this could mean—one person hanged and with luminous spikes driven into his pale skull from forehead over crown and down to the base of the neck, the other with an insipid grin seizing his lips—Henry found he had stumbled headlong into the clearing, his own damp head swimming with confusion, in a state closer to terror than he had ever felt. In the low surge and dance of what small fire was left, Henry stared agape at the living figure as it strode toward him now with such quickness as to seem inhuman, then halted beside the hung man. With a nonchalant flick of the wrist, fingers touching the knees, he set the suspended body in motion, so that it swung, stiff and surely lifeless. The intruder said not a word but returned with frank delight Henry’s shocked gaze, and then, taking several steps oddly backward away from the other, who stood with his shotgun half raised, offered Henry what could only be called a condemning smile. The music all the while continued, louder than Henry could bear. He put his left hand up to his ear, for a moment dropping his concentration. As he did, the figure leapt backward, crashing into the thicket on the far edge of the clearing. The silver crate or box, from which the music seemed to emanate, the fleeing man had been seen to snatch from the ground in one swift flowing movement as he sprinted into the tangle of woods. And there had been something else, too, inanimate and accusatory, which the trespasser had waved in the air before him, and which Henry witnessed in the dying light, before the figure made his escape.

  Henry did not pursue him, nor did he fire any shells into the air, still reverberant for another few moments before all was a fresh calm and the forests on either side of the gorge swallowed up the last echoes of music. When he approached the hanging man, whose unpliant form still swayed to the beat of gravity’s measure and no other, the recognition that its clothing was Henry’s own came as a last insult. Plaid shirt, charcoal wool trousers, silver buckled belt—all had been stolen from his house apparently, to be brought up here for this. And the mannequin—for the hanging figure was not dead but constructed of rags, bound in white cotton to resemble the human form—had painted upon its blank countenance a childish rendition of a skeleton’s skull face.

  Henry unyoked the effigy and pulled it down. The thick rope he afterward cut with his pocket knife, having climbed into the wolf tree and edged out on the limb to get at it. He stood for a long time by the fire whose flames devoured the stuffed figure and lariat, and stared at its playful oranges and crimsons, until the thing burned itself out, was reduced to ashen junk, to nothing.

  Over the course of my thirty-three years, my aunt had never asked for help. Edmé was a woman of prodigious independence. She was stoic, both she and my uncle were, always had been. It was not a matter of pride—though they were proud, after their own modest fashion—nor did it have anything to do with arrogance. Their manner was the result of a life lived simply, with detachment, and far enough away from the frenzy of success so as not to be ruined by its needs. This was how I always saw it, anyway. Independence was for them the greatest sine qua non, the very last thing they would ever relinquish.

  Yet when Aunt Edmé telephoned me at my small flat in Rome, to apprise me of what had been happening during this past year at the ranch, I heard in her story, or behind it somehow, a cry for help. This was new. Nothing I had ever heard in her voice before. I offered to come visit, as it had been a while since I’d seen them, and although I didn’t say so, such a trip wouldn’t involve much of a sacrifice on my part, as my own affairs were not in the best order. But I sensed her immediate withdrawal.

  “We’re all right, Grant,” she said. “These past few months have been quiet. Just, like I say, all of a sudden they seem to be back to their old tricks, and we wanted to let you know, in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “Just … in case,” the words assuming the flat reserve of her part of the world.

  “Edmé, why didn’t you mention this before?”

  “Tell me, Grant. How’s your lovely Mary?”

  “Well. I’ve been meaning to call you about that.”

  “About what?”

  Silence. Then, “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.”

  Even before the cliché faded into a faltering explanation and her response that she hoped we would find some way to work things out, a wave of regret, a savory nausea, passed over me. Aunt Edmé was not going to pry. It was not in her nature. She presented another question, innocent if poignant: “How is your work going?”

  I had no better answer to this than to her inquiry about Mary.

  My work, I thought—this hodgepodge of translating, of private tutoring in English, of clerking in a bookshop, not to mention the ridiculous opportunity I’d recently been offered at an import-export firm—and muttered something by way of bringing this brief conversation with Edmé to an end. My God, I thought. My expatriation, my doomed marriage, my general absence of bearings and direction—these were not issues I felt it was possible to discuss with this beloved woman, who never had the least acquaintance, so far as I knew, with any of them. After we said goodbye, I found myself twisting the nose off a loaf of bread I had bought early that morning at the alimentari downstairs from the studio where Mary and I had lived this past half year. I lifted the bread to my lips and then, unable to eat, laid it on the table by the window. Looking out across the roofs of Rome, I saw the cupolas and domes here and there in the distance, and my mind went blank. What followed was a moment of thorough paralysis, an inertia of both body and spirit. What regret, what longing, what physical loneliness overwhelmed me as I stood alone in this room, nor would it have helped if I could have scolded myself for feeling so suddenly low. I had had my chance with Mary. There was no disowning that hard fact.

  Rome was the end of our brief but troubled road. Mary and I came here hoping the eternal city would either restore our love or collaborate in the final throes of this marriage gone wrong. Why it seemed to us that Rome would be a better place than elsewhere to follow matters through to their inevitable end is now a mystery. Maybe it had to do with our belief that here in a city so inundated by ghosts, the deliverance or death of
our love might happen with greater ease in the vast drowning wash of its history. The end would come quiet as a sigh underwater, was what we thought. Such was the peace we’d sought, and such was the peace we found, though both of us were aware that hidden within this small triumph of discretion was our great failure.

  The marriage had gone well enough in the beginning, three years earlier in New York, where we met. An impetuous consortium of two, it was us against the world, the same way many must feel, encouraged by passion and the intuition that nothing can destroy an intimacy, a synergy this strong. We met one night, then again late the next afternoon, and by the third evening, after we’d spent the entire day in one another’s arms, I was absolutely sure she must be pregnant. It seemed impossible to me, to both of us, that such erotic yearning and relinquishment could have any other result. She called me husband, and I called her my wife. Not for even the briefest moment during those nights and days together did any remnant of the larger, more cynical world, which would have seen us as perfect fools, break in on our selfish ecstasy with one another.

  We shut ourselves away from the city. Day and night became emptied of meaning. Once in a while we would wander out into the whirlwind of urban life, into streets swarming with people going on with their innumerable pursuits, but we felt detached from all we saw, except when looking into one another’s eyes. I have no memory of what we might have said to each other about what was happening to us, though no doubt we felt as if we’d managed to accomplish the impossible. That we had left this world behind.

  Not some summer romancers, we fell in love under gray skies, walking hand in hand past Chinese families gathering ginkgo berries in the park, where within weeks the leaves would come down off the branches of the trees under the torrents of November rain. We kissed in dark corners and were scandalous in the back seats of cabs that carried us in the middle of the night from my place to hers. We made love in a corridor outside her door one impatient evening and were nearly caught by one of her neighbors, but felt that a kind of wholesome purity graced our every pleasure. Nothing could touch us, we believed. Ours was indomitable love.