Giovanni's Gift (36 page)

“You can face Milland Daiches?”

“We'll find out.”

As I left, I noticed a black gaucho hat on the rack by the door, which I commented on as attractive. “Willa Tate gave me that one day years ago,” Helen said, and while I couldn't at just that moment remember where I'd seen it before, sometime during the drive back across the long valley I did. Helen Trentas, I thought—was it possible she'd always known more than she'd let on? Maybe not, but a singular woman either way, and not someone to have for an enemy.

The evening was cloudless. No breeze provoked the leaves along the creek road where we walked, the three of us together. Parrish blue hastened toward black over where the sun had set, and out to the east above the dark ridge, the stars glistened dry and limpid. Edmé brought a flashlight but kept it in her pocket. We could see well enough without. The last flycatchers of the season—tenacious little souls in their feathery array—dove through the tender air and peeped, though surely most of their venturing forth must have been in vain, as the swarms of mosquitoes and gnats were gone by now.

Helen spoke in high spirits and even laughed with Edmé about nothing in particular. She had never seemed before so peaceful and gracious and, yes, happy. Edmé watched the two of us leave the house and descend the stone stairs hand in hand, and seemed herself to have reached some kind of harmony with the fact of our being a couple. Henry, it was true, remained adamant about not attending the dinner, but even he—though he didn't come over from the studio when Helen arrived—had been a benevolent specter that afternoon when I returned from town with Giovanni's box back in my possession. I still marveled at his having prepared me some fried bologna on toast the day before, which I ate cringing but happily, as it was the first time he had ever done such a thing for me in all the years I had been coming to Ash Creek. Delusion or not, I felt a measure of tranquillity had settled over those around me, who had each seemed so recently to have been mired in every variety of turmoil. The lights of David Lewis's house were so festive down in the distance, as we strode alongside the creek, that for a moment I hardly remembered what the dinner was about. It seemed more a celebration than a farewell. That was, at least, how I read—or misread—the atmosphere.

Until we crossed the bridge and began to climb the road up to the Lewis house, which was set behind a cluster of bushes and trees, situated so that it faced south and west at an angle that conformed to a long knob, it had not dawned on me that I'd never been inside. Indeed, I knew very little about David Lewis, and nothing about his wife. Edmé once told me about a tragedy that had struck their family, an accident that took their only son from them, but I'd never been clear about the circumstances of the child's death. As I have mentioned, Lewis was a recluse among recluses, minding his own business as his father had before him, and as we neared the lit porch of the squarish board-and-batten ranch house, I recognized that part of the reason his selling off this land and moving away had made so little impression on me—and, thus, part of my not fully appreciating the impact it must have had on Henry—was this very ignorance. I wanted to ask Edmé to tell me again about what had happened to the boy, but before I had the chance, Jenn Lewis opened her door and welcomed us in.

Half a dozen cars were parked informally on the grass out front, and when we entered I saw the party was under way.

Helen showed miraculous pluck by going right to Tate, who stood with a group of men, several of whom I had never seen before, and kissing him on the cheek, as she said just audibly enough for me to hear, “Noah tells me there's been some trouble down at the office. I hope nothing serious.”

“Nothing serious,” Tate said, confidence unshaken. Did that curling at the fleshy corner of his lip signify insolence? or was it really meant to be some sort of smile, as he reached out his hand to me, saying, “Grant, have you found employment yet? How are you tonight?”

“No and fine,” I said.

“There are fugitives from the law running around free,” Helen told me, eyes wide open, with mock drama coloring her voice.

Neither Tate nor I rose to it.

“Where's Willa?” she continued.

It seemed interesting to me that Tate did not introduce any of the several men with whom he'd been holding court. They closed their own circle, conversed among themselves, turning their backs to us three. “Willa didn't feel well enough to come tonight,” Tate answered. “She asked me to send her best to both of you.” That curl, that carnal gnarl at the corner of his mouth, ascended again.

“I don't blame her,” Helen said. “What's to celebrate here?”

David Lewis scuttled Helen's dissidence, or whatever it was, by coming into the conversation himself, offering drinks, asking me if I wouldn't mind helping him get something for Edmé and Helen, and sending us all off in different directions. I followed him into the modest kitchen—the house was very old, wide-planked floors and rough-plastered whitewashed walls punctuated by natural wooden trim everywhere—and saw that boxes stood in corners of the rooms in anticipation of the movers. Its fundamental barrenness, coupled with the fact that many of its chattels had already been wrapped in newspaper and crated, lent the house the feeling of a prematurely struck stage, one populated by many characters still at odds with one another, aware that they had arrived at the final act without having memorized, let alone rehearsed, the scenes left for them to play. Helen, it occurred to me, was improvising a splendid Hamlet in her search for a father, and here we were gathered together for some play within the play. I asked Lewis, as he made drinks, where he and his wife were going, what they were doing next.

“We have decided to put everything in storage and follow the summer around for a while.”

“Sunbirds I think they call them.”

“Yes, that's it. We're going to be sunbirds. And what about you, Grant? Have you decided to live here?”

“No, no,” I said. “I mean, I don't really know.”

“Have those trespassers been around?”

“Well, except for the last visit, which was pretty insane”—and I held up my hand, which though unbandaged was still bruised, as if it were proof—“things seem to have calmed down.”

“Isn't that why you came out here?”

“I hardly remember anymore, but that was the idea. Maybe I should become a sunbird, too. In a way, that's all I've ever been.”

“Helen,” Lewis said, and handed her a wine glass.

“What's a sunbird?” she asked him.

“A creature who can't chart his own path, so just follows the sun,” he answered. “Tell me something, Grant. Have you been able to figure out why all these night disturbances go on just up the road from us but we've never been involved, never seen or heard a thing in all these months?”

“I haven't.”

“Any idea who's behind it?”

“Somebody who knows the terrain pretty well, somebody who has something they want to get from Henry—that's who. But beyond that I don't understand any better than anybody else—”

“Maybe David's been behind it all this time,” Helen said.

“That's not even funny,” he frowned.

As I watched him I noticed something about him seemed changed. He'd cut off his ponytail. Leaving it
all
behind, it would appear.

I said, “I can tell you one thing. Henry hasn't been idle these last couple of days—”

“It's too bad he couldn't come.”

“Would you have?”

“—you'll be interested to hear this, Helen. Remember that bear trap I asked you about that time? He got it down, scraped it clean of the rust, filed the teeth, greased it, and set the thing.”

“You're kidding,” Helen said, abruptly serious.

“But isn't that against the law, to set a trap like that for a human being?”

“No more than it's against the law to trespass, assault people in the middle of the night, vandalize their property. Anyway, Henry says he found bear tracks near the house and that's why he wanted to set the trap.”

“I suppose if I were in Henry's situation I'd do the same.”

“Or else pick up and move away.”

“Helen …”

She half smiled, composure regained, her radiance obscuring—at least from my eyes—the spite that lay behind a taunt such as that.

“Well,” muttered Lewis, “let's hope this is the end of it for them.”

“If the intrusions stop after you've left, we'll know where to look for the culprit,” I said, unwittingly mimicking Helen.

“In that case, I'll be sure not to let you know where we are. Shouldn't we join the others?”

For someone who was about to leave the valley where he had been born and raised, David Lewis struck me as being remarkably composed. He bowed, with imponderable old-world manners that seemed ironically fitting in this old house, and left with a glass of wine for Edmé in hand. “What does he do?” I asked Helen, after he'd gone.

“Not a thing,” she whispered. “Henry thinks he's just now sold off his land, but I have reason to believe he's been mortgaging it in little bits and pieces for years. Everything his grandfather put together, and everything his father managed to keep intact, David's been living off all this time. They say ever since his boy drowned in the creek he hasn't been able to work. The bank, Tate, they've kept him afloat in a life raft made out of loans. And finally, the collateral ran out. Everybody's being quite civilized about it all, it looks like to me.”

“Since you know so much, what's Tate intend to do with the place?”

“You'd have to ask him. Anyway, I don't know so much.”

“Sure you do,” and I kissed her on the cheek.

“So Henry set that old trap, did he?” kissing me back. “Even if there were bear tracks near the house, he wouldn't set it because of that, would he?”

“I don't know. But I wouldn't go walking in the dark around his studio if I were you.”

“I'll have to keep that in mind.”

“Is Milland here?”

Her face clouded.

“That must mean yes.”

We returned to the front room, and circulated. Parties were never my preferred method of human intercourse, I think it safe to say—my father was a genius at such gatherings, had developed some system whereby he managed to leave everyone with the feeling of having truly communicated with him, no matter how vast the function, or how brief the encounter. My mother and I—on those occasions when I was invited to attend—flowed in his genial wake through rooms small and grand, and I remember how even when a boy I marveled at his grace and skill. Now I flowed behind Helen—as she conversed with various people whom I didn't know any better than I'd known those diplomatic consuls and envoys at parties years ago— impressed by her élan and wicked charm, and reminded oddly of Matthew Morgan, my father. Nothing she or any of the others said was memorable to me until we inevitably came upon Noah Daiches, who did not return my ersatz ambassadorial smile.

Even Helen seemed at a loss for words.

Noah asked after Henry.

“He's made his feelings pretty clear about all this,” I said, “and it's not my place to question him.”

I suppose Noah was meant to read between these lines some kind of remonstrance for his having had the audacity to question
me
the morning before.

“I'm tempted to go up there and get him to come on down. Lewis here is no enemy of Henry Fulton. Man has a right to move. Just the same way Tate has the right to buy.”

“Well, if you want to know the truth, I think he might best be left alone. Maybe he'll change his mind on his own and show up, but if you go up there and try to force him to do something he doesn't want to do—”

“Runs in the family, stubbornness, is that what you're saying?”

Helen said, “Grant's not so stubborn.”

“Neither he nor his uncle's ever taken one piece of advice I've given them.”

“That may be true about Henry, but what advice have you ever given me I've not taken?”

Noah looked at Helen as he answered, “Can't follow it if you can't remember it. I told him he better get unlost before he gets more lost—more or less the same advice I gave his uncle some months ago.”

I said nothing; neither did Helen. Through my mind raced many comebacks, none of them of any particular worth. Our impasse was broken by Tate, who appeared at Noah's side. Rather than entangle myself with Noah then, I asked Tate the question that had been on my mind, the one about what he intended to do with the Lewis ranch. “Milland said something about widening the road, bringing in some crew before winter?” I asked.

“Did he now. Well, let me tell you. I don't know what we're going to want to do. And that's the whole truth of it. There's a lot of financial mess here that's got to get cleaned up, and the land itself is going to have to pay its way. You could mine it, could log it. The town's growing every year, and power one day soon is going to be scarce. This here's a pretty narrow hollow, with a good strong constant flowing water supply and only one couple living on the land now. I don't know. I could imagine a day where it mightn't be better for the welfare of the community to dam up Ash Creek and harness the energy off it.”

“You wouldn't,” Helen said.

“Least number of persons would be displaced off this particular tract than anywhere else I can think of. But then who knows. We may just turn around and put it on the market.”

As I listened to Tate's marvelously unveiled threats, I found myself thinking back to that day when David Lewis first told Henry about his decision to sell, how Henry had foretold Tate's purposes with unnerving accuracy, even going on to equate this stripping of the world to a kind of disease. He had, I remembered, recited just precisely this list of transformations—logs into lumber, earth to metals, rivers to dams, and so forth. When I thought about just how far back these men had been engaged in their rivalry, their small war, I wondered how much of the world's history had turned on such rivalries. Here was a valley settled a hundred years ago by a couple of families, a marginal but beautiful narrow valley that had been carved by a marginal but persistent creek over the course of eons, which fed into the vast valley below where many such creeks collected themselves together into a river, which graced the wide, verdant plain down there and supported the growth of a town and many ranches. Yet for all its isolation and insignificance, this valley was host to the depravity of human history, just as iniquitous as any grand and famous setting of war, rebellion, subversion, and riot that raged elsewhere. I looked at Tate, at Noah, at Helen, and understood for just a fleeting moment the profundity of the notion that history is merely the saga of small jealousies and struggles, individual conflicts in these brief existences of ours, writ large on the canvas of life. I lifted the glass to my lips and realized I'd finished my wine. Helen saw this and used it as an opportunity to bow out of the conversation, saying, “Let me refill that for you.”