Giovanni's Gift (20 page)

The answer, which came from behind, startled me. “It's me,” is what she said, and although I hadn't known her all that long, I easily recognized Helen, as I turned on my heel and glimpsed her silhouette, dark black against a vaguer black backdrop. She stood, in fact, by the horsegate.

“Helen?” I murmured. “What are you doing here?”

She was walking toward me. A shiver released my welled-up apprehension; it was as if my body involuntarily shook off fear the way some beast might shake off water. I was grateful this darkness hid from her my odd spasm.

“I had to see you,” she answered. Even as she spoke I felt her arms around me and found myself absorbed in a kiss more impatient than deep, more severe than pleasant. The urgency of her tongue and hands was nearly as startling as her presence here in the first place. I dropped the ash stick to the ground. When the embrace ended, I asked, “Are you all right?”

“Let's go up to the house,” she said, taking my arm.

“I'm not so sure that's a good idea.”

“We won't wake them up, don't worry.”

“But if you want to talk—” I said.

“I
don't
want to talk.”

Despite everything—despite that rational, wiser part of my character telling me, This is not what you want to do, Grant—I walked beside her, more or less swept away by the strong current of her will.

“Don't you realize how dangerous it is to come up here in the middle of the night?”

“You mean because of those music men you were telling me about?”

“Well, them too, but I meant you come unannounced and you risk having Henry take his shotgun to you. I know; he almost shot me not so long ago.”

“It doesn't look like you learned your lesson, does it? You're out wandering around in the dark. Anyway, I can handle myself. I'm not afraid of night visitors, or Henry, for that matter.”

“Your father wasn't afraid, either, and—well—”

“The gorge is a dangerous place.”

We neared the foreyard gate, and I said, “Helen, what're we doing?”

She stopped, turned, and kissed me once more, somewhat less panicky, more deliberate this time, and whispered, “Didn't you miss me, too?”

I admitted that, yes, I did. We passed through the gate and up into the house. She knew her way through the rooms as well as I, and within minutes we found ourselves in my bedroom, unclothing one another in the hushed but charged atmosphere, a harmony of fingers unbuttoning shirts, unzipping pants, removing underwear, until our bodies were naked and entwining on my sheets. She was my aggressive lecheress tonight, sat in the splayed fork of my legs and lifted my hips toward her face with a strength I might never have predicted. Her tongue and mouth moved in long methodical arcs around from thigh across the flat plain of my stiffened belly over to other thigh, and I lay back with no doubt a grimace on my face, as this physical ecstasy was excruciating to me. My palms cupped both sides of her precious head when she finally took me inside her mouth and lowered herself over me, her hair spread like fibrillate waves across my middle. Time passed, supple and plastic time bent from its normal regularity. When I moved to kiss the top of her head, maybe press my lips into the mysterious soft spot that centers the parietal juncture where, at the crowns of babies' heads, the new blood pulses, she lifted her mouth to mine and I tasted the sweet saltiness of my own body on her lips. She took both my hands and pressed them out away from me and above my head, as we lay down, so that I stretched out beneath her like some intoxicated martyr being prepared for his lascivious crucifixion. Though we tried as best we could to do all this in silence, there was a moment in which nothing mattered anymore, and the rest of the world disappeared from consciousness. The oblivion that drew upon me and blanketed my exhausted body in the wake of climax was sudden and total, and so whether the springs creaked or not, or whether the bedstead whacked against the wall, or whether Helen may have allowed herself to giggle when I found a ticklish notch in the flesh of her neck with my tongue, or even whether we cried out in the moment of abandonment of everything, I couldn't say.

That I woke up alone, with no sign that Helen had been there other than the scent of her on my skin, somehow didn't surprise me. Indeed, my first feeling was of relief at not having to appear downstairs in front of Edmé and Henry with Giovanni Trentas's daughter at my side. I didn't really understand, still, the nature of Edmé's warning regarding Henry, his probable discouragement of our liaison. Despite the several objections I already mentioned, none of which seemed of great merit so far as I could see, especially in light of the fact that I was falling in love, and had no intention of hurting her, I felt I had every right to be with this young woman—felt that surely we were
meant
to be together, that our separate childhood roads had finally merged. Having thought that, I drew the blankets up over me, screening myself off from those many lightening predawn clouds that skimmed the window-framed horizon over the eastern ridge, and slumbered awhile longer, peacefully ecstatic that such an encounter had just taken place, without our having inherited any shame or confusion, or opened ourselves up to judgment the morning after.

David Lewis knew where he would find Henry that morning. He knew Henry's several defining obsessions and where they took him after dawn, or were likely to take him noon or night. So that when he pushed his hands down the sleeves of his barn jacket and settled a hat on his head for the walk, he sensed there would be no need for him to relate his news to both Edmé and Henry at the same time. He would find Henry, whose business this was, in his opinion, insofar as it pertained to the ranch lands, and tell him—the son of one steader to the son of another. Let Henry go and grieve or complain about it to his wife, as he would: that was none of David Lewis's affair. Instead, as he stepped outside into the crisp midmorning, he pictured his neighbor up in the studio, like always, intent upon that curious chipboard and foam-core utopia of his, the blueprints of indeterminate shapes, and clay models conforming to wise organic curves. As Lewis walked across the bridge that took him from his own lands over onto the creek road, he called out to his dogs, two black Labradors. They bounded ahead when he turned north and up the road, climbing its mild incline with ease.

He would miss this. The road, the very greenness of the valley and familiar purity of the air, the dogs leading the way, up to Ash Creek. His gait was not as spirited as usual this morning. The quickness of his step, the resilience, was not there. Nor did his hands swing freely at his sides, as they always had over the many years Lewis had tramped here. Why should they? After all, what Lewis had to confess to Henry troubled him, too. These were circumstances he had averted for the longest time, as Henry well knew. His heritage, his own personal history, decades of both hard and sweet toiling, had been at stake. His family had lived in this valley bordering the Fultons for as many decades as anyone alive could remember, and therefore he believed his regrets were every bit as strong and earned as what Henry would no doubt feel. Times change, he reminded himself as he reached the horsegate and shot back the bolt. The dogs had long since figured out a way around obstacles like gates, and rejoined him momentarily, coats wet with creek water from their wading around the terminus of the fence.

Lewis ran his fingers through his hair and glanced up at the bright roof of the house where it mirrored morning light. Smoke from the near chimney meant Edmé was in the kitchen. All these intimate nuances, the tiny particulars he was able to interpret from living in such proximity for so long, all the simple knowledge he would miss having at his disposal … he shook his head, then turned away toward the east, where he crossed the rickety bridge into the farther meadow. Let Henry tell Edmé, he thought. By the time he did, Lewis would already have returned down this same road, following these rampant dogs across the narrow wood trestles, back home.

He was there: Lewis knew his man. When he rapped fist against doorframe he heard, —Come on.

—Henry? he said, and to the dogs, —You two sit,
stay.

—Lewis? Heh.

He stepped inside.

—Take your coat off, man, said Henry.

And so he did.

—What have you got to say for yourself this morning?

David Lewis had this to say: As Henry knew, he'd avoided it for some years now, but the inevitability of the numbers—the loans and second mortgages he could not carry, the taxes he could no longer afford to pay, the ranch revenues or lack thereof—made the place untenable. He was forced to let it go, was selling it off in its entirety. He'd been approached by a broker who brought him an offer he could not sanely refuse. The contract had been signed, and it was only a matter of some weeks before they'd go to closing.

—I either sell now with some dignity, or foreclose sometime soon without, and I like what dignity I've got, Henry, just like you would if you were in the same spot.

Henry sat tacit. He stared at the constancy of the water out the window—moving and falling, pooling and moving and falling—up at the gorge aperture. He said, at last, —This is all done, then?

—I'm afraid so.

—Thank you for telling me.

—I'm sorry, Henry. I know you think of this as a kind of treachery, but who's to say? Maybe they'll do something better with the place than I'm doing.

—You made no deed restrictions?

—Well, I tried to get some language into the contract that would serve as a restrictive covenant against building or doing anything unfortunate with the land, but they weren't going for it. Like I say, I'm really sorry. I didn't have a choice.

—We always have choices.

—No, not always, he said.

—Are you at liberty to tell me who's buying?

Here was the one question Lewis might have hoped Henry would not ask, for wasn't it unnecessary, really, wasn't it finally just a little cruel to force him to state the obvious? Given how Henry felt about Tate, how he represented a kind of leisurely, methodical evil to Henry, through his patient acquisition of power over the years and his equally unhurried dispensation of trouble to anyone who happened to find himself in Tate's path, why would he want Lewis to speak the name? Or, that is, the corporate mask for the name, since who or
what
had already paid a percentage of the substantial sum for some thousand acres of stream, valley, and hills was not in fact Tate, but one of any number of anonyms. Lewis must then have wondered why every year, without fail, Tate had been invited to the Labor Day function, allowed to mingle among them, dine upon Henry and Edmé's fare and drink their wine, possessed of an arrogant bearing that might suggest to any uninformed bystander that all this was
already his.
But there it was, come he always did. Possibly he was invited for Willa's sake—a vestige of days, perhaps, when Henry and Willa were closer, or when Giovanni Trentas was alive and among her best friends, however odd the friendship seemed to anyone who paid attention to such matters. Or else he was invited so Henry could remind Tate just how handsome was Ash Creek, this place which he'd never be able to own.

Lewis hesitated as he thought about all this, and within that instant Henry first gave him a look of burning hostility—almost as if Lewis had metamorphosed into Tate himself—and then, as quickly, Henry's grace returned to him, and he apologized by saying, simply, —Never mind. Thank you again, David, and good luck to you.

Henry then smiled with resolute composure at Lewis.

That was it? Lewis must have thought. That was all?

He accepted Henry's hand, shook it, then turned, retrieved from the horn coat tree his oilskin jacket, and left.

My uncle did not watch him make his way across the meadow back down to the ruined bridge at the end of the trace. From his stool he could hear one of the dogs bark. He remained alone in the studio for some long while, before coming over to the house to deliver the news to me and my aunt.

I might have had some inexplicit handle on the meaning of the sale of Lewis's lands, but conceived my role was to remain silent, an observer, though it did occur to me that David Lewis had never been visited by the night people. Was this because he had been seen as eventually willing to sell, without the spooky, cheap, midnight tactics to urge him along? Was what was going on here a reprise of the Posner story that Edmé'd told me? These seemed obvious questions, except that had not Henry said he'd never been approached with any offer for Ash Creek? Well, then, of course, there would be another question—questions always beg questions—and that is: was Henry telling me the truth? And again: was
this
question planted in my mind by that note left on the gate, what seemed a lifetime ago, or did it have merit on its own? Questions and more questions—the significance of the possible answers to these questions hadn't yet struck an emotional chord within me. That would come.

“The way we are going about dismantling the world,” Henry was saying, “turning timber to boards, rivers to dams, ore to metal, and so on and so forth, is just like a cancer working its way across a system of healthy cells.”

I listened to my uncle, heard the crackling edge in his speech. Edmé betrayed none of her disquietude—the fear and the anger, the belief that somehow things were drawing down toward some irrevocable finish—while I was still with them in the room.

As it was, I left, sensing they wanted to talk alone, but also needing to get away. I hiked up to the long ridge where I'd come to read that letter from Mary announcing her wish that we divorce, and sat and looked down over Ash Creek valley, whose brilliant expanse dwarfed the house and outbuildings. My thoughts came to a halt, for a moment, and I felt healing gratitude for this small reprieve. It was a calmness, however, before the tempest that now began to storm within. What was going to happen down there? and what effect was it to have upon me? My old room, what minuscule claim on history I had anywhere on earth, was in that house. Edmé and Henry, sole survivors of my limited family, were there, too. And across the valley, nestled in a high pasture to the east of where I sat, the cemetery where Helen and I made love that first time. All these delicate ties, last remnants of past and future, were coming unloosed, little by little tearing apart at seams that only last night had appeared to be reliable, solid, even
seamless.
Was it because I had not slept much that my eyes were suddenly warm and tearing? Surely it wasn't because I feared that this small foothold on the world was about to be taken away from me? Surely this veteran rambler, this Grant who'd always enjoyed being uprooted, wasn't worried, or needy, or afraid?