Giovanni's Gift (2 page)

This music was different from the other night. Where first the music had been rock and roll, this was orchestral, a brooding tone poem—Richard Strauss,
Tod und Verklärung,
Edmé recognized—but once more pushed through speakers with such sheer belligerence as to render it primeval. Like the birth of some nasty new universe out in the kitchen garden.

Henry was prepared this time. He pulled on his trousers under his nightshirt and slid into his wellies. With twelve-gauge, already loaded, in hand, he made his way downstairs in the dark, and stole out onto the side porch that paralleled the creek some hundred yards away. Standing for several moments in the pitch black, he tried to get a precise sense of where the music was coming from. He grasped the shotgun, cheekpiece of the thing up against his heart, as he studied the nightscape before him. A haze filtered the light, and he blinked as if to clear it away. As he glimpsed his land he saw it wasn't black outside, and yet it wasn't light, either. The fields, walls, barn, vista, every familiar landmark—all awash in music—had been robbed of detail and visual nuance. The moon, high overhead, had leached the sky of pigment. If he hadn't been quite so enraged, he might have thought he was having a vision.

He trained the gun on what seemed to be the source of the noise, and thought for a moment about how the world out there seemed afflicted, in some way unhealthy, as if it had been wounded and some metaphysical physician had wrapped it in medicinal vapor. He pulled the trigger. The blast, which under other circumstances would have seemed loud, was weirdly faint, enveloped as it was by music. Since the mouth of the barrel had flared bright, giving his position away to anyone who might be watching, he strode, careful not to catch his knee against any of the old Adirondack chairs arranged along the porch, to the corner where the front adjoined this side veranda. He stood at the head of the staircase that led down to the foreyard and, having noted the music was drifting toward the south, shot in that general direction a second time. The report echoed through the valley and up into the gorge above the falls. The music ceased.

Henry swallowed what felt like a small stone going down his dry throat. Silent, Edmé came up next to him, and together they waited.

The smell of powder tasted bitter in the dewy air. Henry was a man comfortable with guns. When he pumped the twelve-gauge to eject the spent shell, he felt a momentary surge of power, only slightly edged by the horror of having just unloaded live ammunition at a man. Edmé whispered, —Look there.

—What? he asked.

—See that, down by the gate? They're gone now.

She was sure she'd seen double red taillight eyes blink down beyond the lowest meadow. They listened, but their ears were ringing from the cacophony of music and gunfire. Then they heard the engine of the car traveling away from the ranch, down the dirt road, which was nothing more than a pair of furrows hedged by wild grass, larkspur, and thistle.

Henry squinted, thinking, This is Tate doing this. Nobody else could be so hateful.

It was a thought he would keep from Edmé.

An hour eased by, maybe more. Certainly, the moon had moved down the sky. A shower of meteors brought them back to themselves, a fine cascade of silver threads, and Henry saw that the world had been returned to its subtle nighttime colors, its cobalt and Prussian and blackberry blacks. They sat side by side under the eaves until dawn conjured other bands of the spectrum, pinks and saffrons, to dye the horizon. She went into the house and made coffee. Her back was numbed by the long watch.

—Now will you call Noah? she asked, when at last he followed her inside. He propped the shotgun against the wainscot, and took his chair at the table. Sunlight decanted through the window at his back. His irises, hazel in most light, were ebonized by shadow that morning, and his blinded eye, a whole story unto itself, had a wedge nicked from it that made one iris pearlescent along its bottom. My uncle was still a handsome man, with broad high cheeks and aquiline nose distinguished by a fine, raised, whitened ridge, the result of being broken in a fall. His uncombed hair caught the dawn in such a way it might have seemed like haloed flax.

He ran his hands over his face. —What the hell do they want?

But though neither he nor Edmé knew, as the trespasser hadn't yet left behind a message or any evidence of wanting something, Noah Daiches never heard from them that day.

The third occurrence, and what Henry witnessed the following night, finally helped both of them grasp that what was happening at Ash Creek was not some innocent mischief. This night visit had an unexpected twist, like a signature in invisible ink that would slowly materialize so it might be read, a specific denouement that followed the music, and it had the effect of breaching what was left of Henry's confidence that he could protect himself from the malign will of others. My uncle had endured debacles over the course of years, my aunt had been forced to cleave to idealism during times of trouble, yes. But the crudeness of the third visit threw into question, surely, any orthodoxies such as
One reaps what he sows
or
You get what you deserve.
No one deserved this, he believed. Nobody sowed seeds this rotten.

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 better 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.