October Light by John Gardner
Then, piled like alligators, they slept. Mr. Nit, small as a boy in her arms, moaned, troubled by bad dreams. She patted his head. Suffer the little children …
Hours later, Peter Wagner sat up suddenly. There was the drone of an engine—a plane, a boat, he couldn’t tell.
“Luther!” he whispered.
Santisillia sat up, shaking his head to clear it. Jane sat up too and snatched about wildly, hunting for her clothes. There were lights and noises over by the shaft that led down to where the boats were hidden. Near the cave, Santisillia hunted naked for the guns. At last Santisillia found the machine gun. “Come on,” he called. Peter Wagner followed, jumping as in a sack-race, trying to get into his pants as he ran. On the flat rock at the mouth of the shaft they found a trembling, wild-eyed old man in a wheelchair. There was no one else. Whoever had brought him and the wheelchair was gone.
“My name is John F. Alkahest,” the old man whimpered, sniffing the air like a mouse. The eyes behind the thick glasses looked terrified.
Santisillia aimed the machine gun at him but did nothing. “Man, this isn’t happening,” he said. “This has got to be that grass.”
“Got to be,” Peter Wagner said. But he had another theory. He was still falling from the Golden Gate Bridge, and all his adventures were a split-second dream, one more cheap illusion of freedom. It came to him that the old man was Death. He smiled and raised one hand to his mouth, a gesture he’d gotten as a child from Little Orphan Annie. Something was wrong. The fingers stank of sex and marijuana.
“No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means to extricate himself from them.” General George Washington, December, 1776
5
The Old Man and the Old Woman Choose Violence
1
Teeth clenched together, chest full of wrath, James Page shot his truck past the cars in his yard, nearly killing his own chickens, and started down Prospect Mountain. The right side window was partly open—it would no longer close—and ice-cold wind sliced in at him. It would be colder by morning, cold as a cane. He could smell a change in the weather moving in—hard wind, likely rain that would tear off the last of the leaves and turn the pastures drab, make the cows hang close, to the barn, dismal. Locking time, his uncle Ira had called it. In a day or maybe a week—or then again a month; there was just no predicting the weather in Vermont—he’d look out his bedroom window and the fields would be frosty, and when he went out to chores there’d be thin panes of ice on the watertrough. Locking had begun.
The lights of his house were no longer in the mirror. He was coming to what had been the Jerome place twenty-five, thirty years ago—huge barns, huge house; all gone long since, burned to the ground. There’d been a black and white sign, Horses Stabled: $1.00 per day for Hay Grain & Stabling. His elder boy
Richard had worked there some. The place was grown up in weeds, bone-gray in the glow of his headlights. Sometimes old Jerome—the man’s first name escaped him at the moment—sold apples by the peck or bushel crate off a two-wheeled cart by the roadside. Man blew his horn if he wanted to be served. Nobody stole, in those days.
He passed the Crawfords’; he remembered how the Crawfords had used to haul logs, a square Ford truck with hard-rubber tires with chains on ’em, and a sledge behind; a single load brought a thousand board feet. He remembered the sawmills, the slap of the belts, the scream of the big steam-driven saws and the smell of the wood, the sawdust piled up into mountains where he and his friends had played while his father and uncle unloaded. The sawdust would be frozen stiff in winter. He remembered the longhaired horses in the snow—seemed as if winters had been colder then—remembered the flat-cars, the raw-log railroad ties.
He came to the Reynolds place, family all in bed, two limp, unlighted Halloween men propped by the door like sleeping watchmen. They’d raised sheep on the Reynolds place, years ago, called Horned Dorsets. Lambed in September instead of in the spring, lambs born so woolly it was amazing. Vermont had been famous for sheep-farming once. Killed by the Democrats. When the weather warmed, he’d go with his father and uncle to help shear, the two of them long-bearded, sharp of eye and silent, and he remembered as if it was yesterday how surprised he’d been, when he was seven or eight, at how the wool came off all in one piece, like a soft white overcoat. They’d been hit one time, some of those Horned Dorset sheep, by a Bennington & Rutland railroad train. He remembered looking from the cab of the truck, where his father’d had him stay. His uncle stood turning around in a circle, warding off the evil. A crowd of neighbors moved among the dead and dying sheep—there were splashes of blood, bits of clotted wool, there was a whole lot of baaing—and the neighbors would sometimes bend down, sometimes pose for a photograph. They always liked having their picture taken. They’d pose by a wrecked car, a flood, a dead bear … When the Jennings house burned, sometime in the twenties, as soon as they found there was somebody had a camera, the people all ran up on the porch and posed, the flames leaping out through the high doors and windows behind them.
That had been a whole different world; gone for good. There weren’t many who, like him, remembered. It was a world so forgotten that people now scoffed about “the good old days,” made out they were nothing but misery and pain, superstition and narrow-mindedness, and all that was true and firm in them, all that was honest and neighborly and solid as a mountain was some fool illusion. So pygmies hacked the legs off giants—always, of course, for some high-minded purpose, some glorious, bellowing ideal. Like Burr or the State of New York against Ethan Allen. “There’s gods of the valleys,” Ethan Allen said, “and there’s gods of the hills,” and scairt them with his eyes. He was ready to make war on the whole United States if they dared steal his land. But the giants were losing to the pygmies, no question. James Page had seen in the paper where somebody claimed it was wrong to have picture-cartoons of Uncle Sam, because America’s the melting pot, and Uncle Sam was male and white. Lord God! You couldn’t say nigger or Polack anymore, but you could still say wasp. You could write it in the New York Times. That was progress. He’d like to see that black-eyed Popish Mexican push ice-crusted logs through a saw sometime, ten hours straight in the freezing cold, the way Wasps used to do in his father’s day, before the Jewish and Irish and Italian politicians, the Japanese and Mexicans and the God damned city-slicker Donkey party killed the lumber business, and then the railroads, and then finally the farms. It used to be a man took pride in his work: he built you a wheel or a window-sash, you could pretty well figure it would last you a while. Not now. Why? Because nobody cared a mite anymore, cared not one tunkit, that was why. These days they had unions, and against the law to try and fight ’em. Whatever kind of work a man might do, you couldn’t turn him out till he’d killed somebody. All that mattered now was seniority and raises. Come to that, if a man’s work happened to be honest, what good did it do him?—And what point anyways in trying to make an “honest” disposable syringe—that was all they had at the hospital anymore. What point in trying to make a really good, Class A, machine-molded Styrofoam cup? So now if a man bought a chair he’d just better not set too hard, and if he bought himself a truck he’d better try it out first in the haylot. No use anymore to go looking around for a hired man, or a boy to help out at the grocery store. They’d be in town joining unions or drawing unemployment, all the smart ones. Had no choice. Good workmanship hadn’t just died in this country, it had been murdered, shot dead in its sleep like a bear in the sugarhouse. You take glass-blowing. Priced right out of the market by strikes—unions destroying their own workers, and nobody could stop it. You take coal.—Between the unions and the city politicians, between crazy demands and confused regulations, the only inalienable right there was left in this country was the right to Relief. And you needn’t go pointing a finger at where it went wrong—that want American!
He saw again in his mind’s eye the fat, black-eyed Mexican, standing there gazing around his kitchen as if thinking of buying it
He’d thought that leaving the house would calm him. In fact, his anger and frustration were mounting. His cheeks were twitching, his legs were trembling, it was hard for him to get his breath. He felt helpless—everybody did these days, but for him it was new, and a large part of it was physical. The bitterness was that he felt like a young man, trapped inside this wrecked and dying body. He felt as alert as he’d ever been, handsome and full of beans, not at all the hollow-eyed, ghastly white ghost that for an instant stared at him, piteous with appeal, from the windshield. He was like the young parrot at the Arlington House, screaming with holy indignation in his cage while the hotel burned down around him.
Now, as the road broke suddenly from the woods and he could see the lights of the village below, he remembered—as he hadn’t remembered in years—how the village had looked in his childhood, before electricity. By horse and buggy it had been a long trip from the farm to this crest where the valley came in view. The sight had been something they’d strongly anticipated—he and Sally and his father and mother and Uncle Ira—and when it came it was earned, like a hard month’s wages, or marriage. The lights had been yellow in those days, not white. Only in winter, when there was moonlit snow, could you see the shapes of barns and houses, the square church tower with its four-spike, New England crown. By the river there had been a papermill; place had burned down when he was still a young boy. Whole thing looked like a picture postcard, or one of Grandma Moses’ paintings, or the background of one by Norman Rockwell, who’d lived for years up the road a few miles, in Arlington. James Page had known him, by sight that is. Everybody did. Now the first thing that assaulted your eye when you came over that crest was the garish yolk-yellow of the Shell station sign, and the tombstone-and-lightning cold white all around it. He brought his eyes to the road again and jerked the steering wheel, swerving back away from the shoulder. His heart pounded harder, and he slowed down.
At Merton’s Hideaway he parked out behind, where he always parked, nosing toward the incinerator. He pulled on the emergency brake and carefully climbed out. There were only a few cars here in back, two of which he didn’t recognize, a five- or six-year-old American one, white, with N.Y. State plates, and another white one, expensive looking and foreign. He hawked and spit left, accidentally just missing the foreign car—spit not cleanly but like a sick old man who smoked too much—then made his way, painfully bent over, across gray cinders to the green-lit door. Two windows faced the back, each with a small neon sign in it—Ballantine’s, one said, the other said Schlitz. Inside he paused, adjusting to the darkness and the din.
As soon as he could see, his eyes fell at once on the strangers. There was a whole table of them, sitting right next to where he and his friends sat, usually, not far from the bar—grown-ups and children, the whole lot of them as out of place in Merton’s Hideaway as Egyptians. He noticed first the women, a black-haired one and a red-haired one, both young or early-middle-aged, gleaming and assured, talking and laughing as if they owned the place, but not loud—no, soft as lambs wool; in the general rumble of the place he couldn’t even hear them. They had perfect teeth and glowing hair, the look of the rich, and so did their children, a blond teen-age boy and a girl, no doubt his sister, and across from them a child in a highchair. The grown-ups were drinking martinis and such, and Merton’s girl Emily was bringing in salads. They were lost, he decided. He’d have said they were New York City leaf-lookers, but the foreign-car plate was from here in Vermont. Maybe they’d come from the College, then, and had got off the highway and stopped the first place they could find where a body could get supper.
He saw his own crowd and went toward their booth—Sam Frost, Bill Partridge, Henry Stumpchurch. There were others he knew in booths or at tables or up along the bar—farmers, county road-men, the Ranzona boys, who did light hauling, here and there a woman, most of them unattached, most of them brawlers, troublemakers, thieves. There was a fifty-year-old, dark-eyed woman named Bea and another one named Laurie, watching from the corner, with burnt-out eyes. As he moved past the group he hadn’t seen before, giving their table as wide a berth as he could in all that hubbub, he glanced at the men among the company. There were three of them. Funny looking devils, he’d have to say. One of them, the quietest, had a suit like a gangster’s. In the dim, infernal light of the Hideaway it looked almost pink. He had funny looking ears, a little like a monkey’s, and a short, black beard. The second had on boots and an open leather shirt, a man unnaturally handsome in a round-faced, movie-star way. He had coal-black hair, dark skin, black eyes. Talked with an accent. Third one had brittle gray hair to his shoulders and a big gray beard. He had a sagging, red face and huge dark bags under his eyes, though he didn’t look old, maybe fifty. His clothes—an old suit with big holes in it and snags—were like a tramp’s. None of the three looked human, quite, but this one least of all. With that long gray beard so much lighter than his hair you’d have thought it was artificial, and with that tipped up nose more like a woman’s than like a man’s, he looked like an elf grown oversize. He flourished a pipe, waving it, pointing it, and he talked somewhat louder than the others, feeling his martinis.
James Page scowled, putting the strangers out of mind, and worked his way to the booth where his friends sat.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Sam Frost piped, grinning.
Bill Partridge, sitting in his hat, said, “Thought you want comin tonight, James.” His voice was like a scraper.
“I’m here all right,” he said.
“Grab yerself a beer and come rest yer weary bones,” Henry Stumpchurch said.
James turned stiffly to catch Emily’s eye. She nodded at once, not bothering to smile at him, running her legs off, taking a tray of cheeseburgs over to the Ranzonas, by the jukebox. He took off his cap, got his pipe and tobacco from his jacket pockets, and squeezed in beside Henry Stumpchurch, across from Sam. He had from here a view of the bar and the strangers’ table.
“Turned colder out there yet?” Sam asked, and grinned in that foolish way he had, a tic of sorts, in James Page’s opinion, a way of making everything he said sound humorous—if you asked him the date and he told you “Today is October the twenty-ninth,” he’d wink and give you a poke as he said it, as if the date had salacious implications. But James was used to it—most people never seemed to notice the thing, or so it seemed. Sam meant no harm.
“Not too bad yet,” James said. He nodded absently in the direction of the bar, where Merton had seen him and offered his greeting, the little half-salute they’d all used in the war. He was a big man, crew-cut, gray shirt, suspenders. He was leaning on the bar at the darker end, where four, five young toughies sat drinking beer, all regulars from town. Over the bar he had the television on, with the sound off. James filled his pipe. For all his years of milking, his fingers
Now Emily arrived with his Ballantine’s. He leaned far over, groped behind his rear end—his fingers had no feeling—and drew out his billfold.
“How’s every little thing with you?” she said. She gave the table a quick swipe with her cloth. She was thirty, dyed her hair. She had hips like a healthy young stallion, though the rest of her was small.
“Just fine, Emily.” He counted out fifteen cents extra. “Keep it.”
“Thanks a bunch,” she said, and smiled.
He noticed that the stranger with the long gray beard was staring at him.
Bill Partridge said, “Hear you been havin some troubles up there on the mountain.”
James poured himself a beer. When the glass was filled, not more than one inch of white on top, he set the bottle back down and said, “Is that what you hear?”