October Light

by John Gardner

  But it wasn’t mere myth or mere history-as-myth—exalted figures to stir the imagination, teach the poor weighted-down spirit to vault—it wasn’t mere New England vinegar and piss that made the old man fierce. Though he was wrong in some matters, an objective observer would be forced to admit—cracked as old pottery, no question about it—it was true that he had, off and on, real, first-class opinions. He knew the world dark and dangerous. Blame it on the weather. “Most people believe,” he liked to say, “that any problem in the world can be solved if you know enough; most Vermonters know better.” He’d seen herds of sheep die suddenly for no reason, or no reason you could learn until too late. He’d seen houses burn, seen war and the effects of war: had a neighbor, it was nearly thirty years ago now, who’d hunted his wife and five children like rabbits and shot ’em all dead—he’d been a flame-thrower man, earned a medal for his killings in Germany. He, James Page, had been one of the neighbors, along with Sam Frost and two others now gone on, who’d walked the man’s pastures and woodlots, looking for the bodies. He’d seen a child killed falling off a banister once, and a hired man sucked into a corn-chopper. He’d seen friends die of heart attack, cancer, and drink; he’d seen marriages fail, and churches, and stores. He’d had one son killed by a fall from the barn roof, another—his first-born and chief disappointment—by suicide. He’d lost, not long after that, his wife. He was not, for all this, a pessimist or (usually) a thoroughgoing misanthrope; on the contrary, having seen so much of death—right now, in fact, there was the corpse of a black and white calf on his manure pile—he was better than most men at taking it in stride; better, anyway, than the man sealed off in his clean green suburb in Florida. But he understood what with stony-faced wit he called “life’s gravity,” understood the importance of admitting it, confronting it head on, with the eyes locked open and spectacles in place.

  He was a man who worked with objects, lifting things, setting them down again—bales of hay, feedbags, milkcans, calves—and one of his first-class opinions was this: All life—man, animal, bird, or flower—is a brief and hopeless struggle against the pull of the earth. The creature gets sick, his weight grows heavier, he has moments when he finds himself too weary to go on; yet on he goes, as long as he lives, on until the end—and it is a bitter one, for no matter how gallantly the poor beast struggles, it’s a tragic and hopeless task. The body bends lower, wilting like a daisy, and finally the pull of the earth is the beast’s sunken grave.

  James Page was never a man of many words, but words were by no means without interest for him. They too were objects to be turned in the hand like stones for a wall, or sighted down, like a shotgun barrel, or savored like the honey in a timothy stalk. He wrote no poems—except one once, a prayer. Even when angry, at a Bennington Town Meeting, he’d be hard pressed to make a political speech. But he noticed words one by one, as he might notice songbirds, and he sometimes made lists of them, crudely pencilled into his Agro pocketsize farm record. He knew about down: a man, a horse, a rooster has times when he feels downhearted, downtrodden, down in the mouth, plain down, and in the end down and out. He turns down offers, he turns thumbs down. And James Page knew, needless to say, about up: he would at times feel uplifted, up to a thing, up to someone’s tricks, upright, or if barely on his feet, hard-up. A man, he knew, looks down on the people he considers beneath him; he has high or low ideals and opinions, high or low spirits and morale; his spirits rise or get a lift whenever things look up for him; in time his spirits fall, like a conquered city, a woman deflowered, a season. Even language, James Page understood—low speech—suffers gravity.

  Call it a curious and idle opinion, it nevertheless had, at least for James Page—who was a thoughtful man, a moralist and brooder—sober implications. It was bone and meat that the world pulled downward, and the spirit, the fire of life that pushed upward, soared. It was sin, slavery, despair that hung heavy, freedom that climbed on eagle’s wings to cliffs transcendent, not common rock. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free …” Everything decent, James Page believed, supported the struggle upward, gave strength to the battle against gravity. And all things foul gave support not to gravity—there was nothing inherently evil in stone or a Holstein bull—but to the illusion of freedom and ascent. The Devil’s visions were all dazzle and no lift, mere counterfeit escape, the lightness of a puffball—flesh without nutrients—the lightness of a fart, a tale without substance, escape from the world of hard troubles and grief in a spaceship.

  He believed sure as day in those airy cliffs—not heaven, exactly, but a firm, high place luring feeling and ambition past existence as it is; not the Oz of the fairy tales his wife Ariah had read in the living room to his daughter and sons (James Page, in his spectacles, pretending to read the paper), not an emerald city where dreams come true, but some shadowy mountain calling down to intuition, some fortress for the lost made second by second and destroyed and made again, like Mount Anthony seen through fog.

  Because of this opinion or general set of thought, the old man—almost without thinking, almost by instinct—was violently repelled by all that senselessly prettified life and, in his own dark view, belied it. He hated the Snoopy in his grandson’s lap, hated Coca-Cola and the State of California, which he’d never seen, hated foreign cars, which he identified with weightless luxury and “the Axis,” hated foam rubber, TV dinners, and store-bought ice cream. At Christmas, when the stores in the town of Bennington were jubilant with lights, and shoppers’ voices, breaking through the Muzak and feathery snow, were as clear and innocent as children’s cries, James Page would pause, blanching, his hands in his overcoat, his ears sticking out, and would stare in black indignation at a glittering white astronaut doll in a window. Whether or not he could have said what he was feeling, and whether or not it would have mattered to the world or the company that runs it, the old man was right about the meaning of that doll. It was there to undo him, both him and his ghosts. Whether or not it was true, as he imagined, that once in his childhood he’d heard angels sing, and had seen them moving in the aurora borealis, it was undoubtedly true that the Muzak made certain he would hear them—if in fact they were still up there singing—no more. It was hard to believe that any soul, however willing, could be uplifted by the conflict of recordings rasping through the snow-flurried air; hard to believe that the nodding, mechanical Santa in the Bennington Bookstore window could be drawn to the house by the magic of a Christmas tree cut with an axe on Mount Prospect’s crest and sledded, the children all squealing, to the woodshed door.

  He did not of course, when he stopped to think, believe in elves or believe that bees can talk with fairies or pigs with wind, or that bears are visitors from another world; did not believe in Jack Frost or even, with his whole heart and mind, Resurrection. Though he muttered spells from time to time—though for luck he spit left or made a circle to the right, and carried with him everywhere he went a small stick (a stick of ash) and a rattlesnake’s skull, protection against changelings—in even these he did not, when he considered carefully, believe. He believed in the most limited natural magic, the battle of spirit up through matter, season after season; and he believed that his ghosts, insofar as they were real or had the power of things real, were allies in the grim, universal war, as were the huge crayon paintings—the work of some nun of the Bennington Convent, years ago—that he liked to take people to see, now and then, at the Bennington Museum. He knew many such allies in the struggle toward ascent—church music, for instance, or Ruth Thomas’s poetry, even his own life’s work caring for dumb animals: horses, dairy cows, bees, pigs, chickens, and, indirectly, men.

  He glanced at the boy, feeling guilty, as if the child were his judge. “Never mind,” he said aloud. He thought of a phrase Estelle Parks used, one of Sally’s friends: “Very fragile, this world.” He nodded, full of gloom. His world, he knew for pretty sure, was beyond fragility. Smashed. Well, tell it to the bees. Yet he listened to the wind even now,
unconsciously, for some faint suggestion of articulate speech, and he glanced uneasily at the ceiling again, imagining his sister asleep, sunk into an absolute loneliness like death, just short of oblivion, molested by dreams.

  He was reminded of his wife, then of her tombstone, down in the village cemetery, glossy. “Oh James, James,” she would say to him. He sighed. His anger was foolishness, tonight as always. All life was foolishness, a witless bear exploring, poking through woods. He couldn’t remember very well how his wife had looked when they were young. Even when he studied the picture album—a thing he rarely did—it was no help. He remembered one single moment—picking her up in his buggy one afternoon; an instant of emotion like a snapshot. The air had been yellow.

  He gazed into the fire, hunting some sharper recollection in its flickering light.

  Concerning his sister, as it happened, the old man was wrong. She had paused above the table beside the bed, weeping hot, pinkish tears of indignation and spite, planning out her definite and terrible revenge—she was a demon for revenge, he ought to know that by now—and happening to look down when she’d just rubbed the tears away, pushing her hankie past the bottoms of her blue plastic spectacles to her eyes, she had noticed on the floor below the table, and had bent down to pick up for closer inspection, a dog-eared paperback with what looked to be pinpricks or possibly tooth-prints and ugly bits of grit and dark stain on the cover—coffee grounds, or maybe wet-and-then-later-dried-out bits of oat-grist. It was torn half to pieces, as if it had been run over, and the binding glue was weakened so that the pages were loose and great chunks of the story were fallen away. It was probably one of her niece’s books, the boy’s mother’s, she supposed—though why the girl had saved it, ruin that it was, only the good Lord knew. Anyway this was where the niece had fixed her make-up, before leaving for her meeting—little Dickey watching her, promising to be good—and it was the kind of book that girl would read, no doubt: common drugstore trash, you could tell by the cover. The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock, it said, and above the title, in big white letters: “A Black-comic Blockbuster” —L. A. Times.

  She turned the book over, clamping it tightly to keep the pages in, brushed futilely at a stain, then squinted, reading what it said in red letters on the back.

  “Blows the lid off marijuana smuggling, fashionable gang-bangs, and the much-sentimentalized world of the middle-aged Flower Child. A sick book, as sick and evil as life in America …”

  —National Observer

  “Deeply disturbing!”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Hilarious!”

  —New York Times

  She lowered the book, then half-absentmindedly raised it once more to reading range, her hands still trembly—the book was so dried out and bleached and cheap it was lighter than nothing—and opened it indifferently to “Chapter 1.” Lips puckered with distaste, brushing away dirt with the side of her hand, she read a sentence, then another. The print swam and blurred and the sense drifted up through her brain like smoke. She tipped up her blue plastic spectacles again and dabbed at her eyes with her hankie. She had, of course, no intention of reading a book that she knew in advance to be not all there; but on the other hand here she was, locked up like a prisoner, without even her sewing to occupy her mind (it was down on the table by the ruined TV). Forgetting herself, almost unaware that she was doing it, she eased down onto the bedspread and went back to the beginning. She let her mind empty, drift like a balloon, as she would when she sat down to television. She read:

  1

  THE DROWNED MAN

  “Snuff it, baby,” he’d hissed at the world, but the world dragged on.

  After thirty-three years of insipid debauchery—balling and whiskey and dreary books (poetry and novels, philosophy and science), more foreign ports than he could now remember and, between them, endless weeks at sea, where he shoveled his head fuller yet with books—Peter Wagner had come to the end of his rope or, rather (this time), the center of his bridge. All life, he had come to understand, was a boring novel. Death would be boring too, no doubt, but you weren’t required to pay attention.

  “Isn’t it the truth!” Sally Abbott said aloud, head lifting as if someone had spoken to her. Why she said it she could hardly have told you—except that it was something she’d occasionally said to her late husband Horace when he’d read to her, years and years ago. The truth in the novel she was looking at now was a trivial one at best, she was partly aware—even downright silly. But she wasn’t thinking with any care just now. She wasn’t really thinking at all, in fact, merely hovering between fury at her brother and escape into the book. Edging back toward fury, she held her breath and listened past the ticking of the clock for some sound from downstairs. Everything was silent—from outside the house not a cluck, not a whinny, not the grunt of a pig, and from the living room below, not a murmur. James was no doubt reading some magazine, little Dickey fast asleep. Heartless, both of them. She sighed bitterly, glanced down with distaste at the paperback book, then raised it again into reading range.

  His death was to be a grand act, however senseless. He’d drop without a sound through pitch-dark night to be swallowed by the Old Symbolic Sea. He’d read the grisly tales—suicides gruesomely, foolishly impaled on the radar antennae of passing ships or splattered obscenely on pilings or rocks—and had planned ahead. He had examined the span by daylight and had marked his spot with an unobstructive X in light green paint. Now the hour was at hand, in a sense the toughest of his life. He was extremely drunk and had to walk the bridge three times to find his X. By the time he found it, there were red and yellow lights flashing on and off at both ends of the bridge—they had found his car—and the suicide squad had its sirens going. He climbed over the rail where the X was and hung there waiting for the squad cars to pass. They didn’t. They too knew the perfect place. For a panicky second, he thought of dropping immediately, but good sense prevailed, as it always did with him, or he wouldn’t be here committing suicide. What could they do when they saw him there, hanging by his fingertips? Shoot him?

  “Ha,” Sally laughed, tentatively amused. But she at once changed her mind. It wasn’t funny, it was irritating, and again she raised her eyes, listening past the clock, focusing on a door panel, lips pursed. She had half a mind to throw down the book and forget it, half a mind even to throw it out the window, where it couldn’t contaminate her bedroom. It was base, unwholesome. That nonsense, especially about suicide proving a man’s “good sense.” People might say such stupid, irresponsible writing did no harm, but you could bet your bottom dollar, no one who’d experienced the tragedy of the suicide of someone near and dear would ever in this world dream of saying such a thing. If anyone had dared even hint such a notion, back when Richard had died, a man still young, everything still ahead of him—a young man so gentle that it simply broke your heart—well, she hated to think what she’d have done to him.

  Her heart churned and for an instant she remembered how everywhere she’d looked, just after her nephew had taken his own life, the world had seemed inert, like a half-fallen, long-abandoned barn on a still, cold day. She remembered the feeling, though not the details, of how she’d flown up the mountain in her late husband’s Buick, after James had phoned, and how he’d stood in the doorway stunned to vagueness. When she’d reached to take his hand—trying to protect him as she’d done when they were children, she the big sister and he the poor helpless little boy with darting eyes—she’d been painfully aware of how cold the hand was, and rough from farmwork, unresponsive. Ariah, his wife, was behind him in the kitchen, watching from the sink, moving the dishcloth around and around a cup, in her cheeks no life.

  “He hanged himself,” Ariah said; then her throat constricted and she could say no more.

  Sally had looked back at her brother and moaned, “Oh, James!” tightening her grip on his hand. There was no response.

  She gave her head a little shake now, freeing herself from the flicker of memory
—enemy to her perfectly reasonable anger at her brother’s insane and savage ways. She at once raised the book. She’d been making a mountain of a molehill, no doubt. She’d never liked loose talk of suicide; but it wasn’t as if the book was in earnest. She was on edge, that was all, and who could blame her? She hunted for her place.

  … sense prevailed, as it always did with him, or he wouldn’t be here committing …

  … do when they saw him there, hanging by his fingertips? Shoot him?

  Sally Abbott nodded; that was where she’d stopped.

  With the intense vision of the very drunk, he watched the door of the white car fly open and saw two booted feet hit the pavement. “There he is!” someone shouted, and the sound seemed, amusingly, to reach him from behind, from the thick night and fog. It came to him that if he were hanging from the bottom girder of the bridge, as he’d meant to be, he couldn’t see the squad cars. Gripping tightly with his right hand, he let go with his left and groped for something lower. It was farther down than he would have expected, but large, with wonderful flanges. He gripped it with all his might, and lowered his right hand. He swung, or else the bridge yawed—by mathematics he could support either theory—but the grip of both hands held. He made his legs into dead weights to stop the swinging.