October Light (58 page)

“I thought I might. Few little things I got to do around the place.”

Again she was silent, and again, uncomfortably, he smiled. He could imagine her pursing her lips, sorely tempted, though he knew pretty well she'd say no.

“No,” she said. “I realize nobody understands—”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that.”

“If James would just show some respect for my rights—”

“Well, you do what you think's best,” he said.

“Poor Ginny,” she said. “It's good you're bringing her here. I'll be glad to see her.”

Below, the woodshed door opened. A chicken squawked. The old man was coming in, grumbling something at the dog.

“Well, I got to go now,” Lewis said. He took a step toward the stairs.

“Do drive carefully, Lewis,” she said. The old woman's voice was both cranky and urgent, as if she had no idea herself what she felt or meant.

“I will,” he said.

From the foot of the stairs the old man called, “We thtill goin, Lewith, or did you change your mind?”

“I never knew a soul in this family to change his mind,” Lewis mentioned to the air.

All the way to town, the old man sat with his lips sucked in and kept mum.

2

When they'd parked the car and were walking up the steps to the hospital, Lewis said, “Whant you visit Ed Thomas while I see if Ginny's ready?”

James had been afraid he'd say that. But immediately, as if he'd already decided it, he said, “Thath a good idea.”

They stopped at the desk, and Lewis made sure Ed Thomas's room number was the same as before. They'd talked of moving him to a double, let him have more company to pick up his spirits.

James Page, bent forward, his face unshaven, his cap in his hands, said cautiously to the nurse, “Ith all right if he hath vithitorth, then?”

“Perfectly all right,” she said, and smiled.

James nodded, glanced at Lewis. “I thought tho,” he said.

They walked to the elevator, Lewis Hicks fiddling at his moustache with two fingers as usual, the old man nervously chewing on his mouth. They reached the elevator—stainless-steel doors—and Lewis pushed the button. They put their hands behind their backs and waited, the old man from time to time glancing at his son-in-law, once even clearing his throat to speak; but when the elevator arrived and the doors hummed open, neither of them had yet broken silence. Two doctors of some sort were on the elevator already, coming up from the basement, a tall blond doctor and a short Oriental one, both in green outfits with green caps and little green masks hanging loose below their chins. “The really hard part,” one of them said, “is keeping yourself from saying ‘Woops!' when you slice through a nerve.” They both laughed. The door hummed open and they got off. James started to follow. “We go one more, Dad,” Lewis said. James came back in, eyes darting like an animal's. Lewis looked up at the ceiling, hands behind his back. They reached their floor.

Such guilt was coursing through the old man's veins he could hardly breathe. He felt as he'd felt when his son had killed himself, or, long years before, when he'd found his uncle Ira in the woods. It was a little while after his parents' funeral—they'd been killed in a car wreck when Richard was something like nine years old and Ginny was still small enough to sit in a highchair. Why Ira had done it he would never know; there was no telling with Uncle Ira, even for James, who had probably known him better than anyone else except possibly James' father. Perhaps, though he showed nothing, it was sorrow that had done it, old Ira rattling around in the suddenly empty house; or perhaps it was anger at their leaving the house to James and Ariah, not him; or perhaps it had been what he took, in his crazy, half-animal mind, for a kindness to them: if he was dead, they could move up from the smaller house Ariah's parents had bought them and take the family place. Whatever it was, there the old man lay, everything above his beard shot to hell, his right foot bare—with the barrels in his mouth he'd pulled the triggers (he'd rammed down both of them) with his toe. On a stump right beside him sat the snake's skull, an ash stick, and the claw of a bear. James, though a grown man, had kneeled beside the body, crying in great whoops. He'd pointed the place out to Richard, years later, when Richard was maybe twenty. James had mentioned, without making too much of it, how he'd wept. Richard had asked, “What was Uncle Ira like?” James had shook his head and had been close to tears again. “He was crazy,” he'd said and, remembering, had smiled. “He was the bravest, toughest man I ever knew. Man shot him one time, some drunken Irish. Shot him in the chest. Tracked that man nine miles through the snow, it was the dead of December, and would have killed him for sure but luckily he lost so much blood he passed out. My father caught up to him and dragged him home, and two days later Uncle Ira was back at the chores.” Richard had said, “He never talked much, they say.” “No, that's true,” James said. “I guess most people talk because they're lonely or there's somethin they're not clear on. That wasn't his case, or if it was he never knew it.” Richard had asked, looking up into the trees, “Was his mind clear when he—shot himself?” James had glanced at his son, wanting to reach out and touch him but holding back, half sick with love for his big, handsome child and confused by the feeling, as he'd always been, though he'd never had trouble showing love to little Ginny; and then he'd looked down at the ground thoughtfully, fingering the snake's head in his pocket as if thinking of giving it to the boy. “I suppose he must've
thought
his mind was clear,” he at last brought out.

He'd remembered all that, standing in the attic when he'd found his son, and he'd thought of the empty whiskey bottle on the table downstairs, the whiskey Uncle Ira hadn't needed, as of course Richard knew. If his son could come back—if some magic could happen in the world just once, and his son could slip back through the secret door—he would say to him: “Richard, never mind about the whiskey. It's all right.”

But there was, of course, no secret door; that was the single most important fact in the universe. Mistakes were final—the ladder against the barn, the story about the death of Uncle Ira that he shouldn't have told. He felt himself fingering the snake's head again, scraping the tip of his bobbed finger against the one remaining tooth, and a brief flush of some queer emotion went through him—not anger, exactly; perhaps a brief flicker of understanding. There was a wastebasket standing by the table in the corridor ahead of them, and he drew out the snake's head and, when he came to the wastebasket, dropped it in. “Thorry,” he said aloud. Lewis glanced at him.

Ed Thomas's door was partly closed. Lewis, after a moment's thought, leaned over toward it and lightly knocked.

“Come in!” someone called, possibly Ed Thomas's voice gone light.

Lewis pushed the door a little, stepping back from it as if he thought it might have a crate on top. “I'll go see about Ginny,” he said.

James sucked his mouth in, his eyes darting in alarm once more, then nodded. “Ay-uh,” he said. “Well … I be here.”

Far down the corridor there was a middle-aged red-headed woman he thought he knew. She was heavy, rumpled from sleeplessness. She did not seem to see him.

3

(Ed's Song)

No one had prepared him for how Ed Thomas looked. He was better, Lewis had said, and it was true he was out of the oxygen tent—it was over by the wall, ready to be used again if he should need it—but he was no better than he might be. His skin had gone transparent, the blood in his veins looked the blue of snowy shadows in January, his eyes had sunken, and one got the impression that in a few hours he'd lost weight. Though he was weak—his voice, above all, had lost energy—he lit up with pleasure as James came in. It was an effect difficult to pin to any physical particulars: though he was weak as a baby, too feeble even for a full-fledged smile, his mind, perhaps spirit, seemed as lively as ever, locked inside.

“James, boy,” he said, almost a whisper. “Hi golly there!”

“Mahnin, Ed.” He approached the bed timidly, his cap in the two hands in front of him like a rabbit's, chin arching over it, meek as Ethan Allen when Jedediah Dewey got through with him for shootin at the churchbell, before Ticonderoga.

It was a single room—a chest, a lamp, a standing bed-table, some closets, a door to a bathroom, one chair, and one long window looking out at the Bennington Monument and the mountain beyond. Ed was in pajamas Ruth had brought him, dark red with black collar, Japanese-looking. His white hair was cocked up at curious angles; along the hairline there were tiny beads of sweat. He held out his hand for James to shake, though neither one of them was a hand-shaker, and both would have thought it, any other time, affected, citified, and morally dubious, like the smiles of a salesman. Ed made an effort to squeeze heartily; the effect showed only on his face.

“Hi golly,” he said again. “Lewis told me he'd trick you up here!”

“Didn't take him no trickin, Ed. Ith good to thee you better.”

“Sorry bout the way I went and crumpled there.” Ed smiled feebly and slightly shook his head. “Own damn fault. Thirty years they been tellin me to quit those cigars.”

James met his eyes, tasted his lips, getting courage up, then changed his mind and looked down.

“Damned embarrassin to be sick,” Ed said. “Raises hob with the fahmwork. But then—” He rolled his eyes toward the window without turning his head. “I guess if I ain't made a fortune by now, I might's well tell it to the bees.”

“You know how it ith in Vermont,” James said. “Mebby neth year.”

Ed nodded, half-smiled. “Mebby.” For a moment he closed his eyes. When he opened them he said, “I spose you're hopin that boy Lewis will take over the fahm for you, one day.”

“I dunno. Don't much matter. I put him in my will—after Thally.” He smiled, seeing the irony in that, and glanced at Ed. “I thould have cut off that ole woman without a thin dime.”

Ed smiled back. “It's a funny world,” he said.

James nodded thoughtfully, pushing his hands into his overalls pockets, then abruptly shook his head. “That Thallyth the Devilth own thtepmother,” he said.

As if he'd heard something completely different—or as if he knew James had meant something different—he said, “She was a beautiful woman all right.” His voice all at once had turned surprisingly sad. He rolled his head sideways to look more comfortably at the monument and mountain. James said nothing, hardly knowing what to say, and after a time Ed said, “I'll be sorry to miss the elections on TV.”

James' eyebrows lifted.

“Never live to see 'em,” Ed said, not making much of it. “Man knows about these things, sometimes. Got no reason to complain, never said I do, but I always enjoyed a good election.”

“Now wait a minute, Ed—”

He waved it away, half smiling. “No, never mine that. They'll let me inta Heaven. Only real sin they can lay on me is I never did a dollar's worth of sin in my life.” He smiled again. “Oh, I've thought a few. Maybe they'll count that.”

The Bennington Monument was creamy white, with the sunlight falling full on it. On the crest of its high hill, surrounded by mountains, it ruled the valley. Despite its pure color, its imposing height, it was an ugly structure, most people with a modicum of sense maintained. James Page was among them, though he loved the thing anyway, patriot that he was, and in fact thought it fitting—massive, countrified, a towering but somewhat orotund obelisk constructed not of Vermont marble but of New York State limestone, plain and raw as the people memorialized: Col. Stark, for instance, one of James' ancestors, famous for standing on a farmer's pair of fence-bars and sighting the enemy and yelling to his men: “There's the British, and they're ours, or tonight Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” Mount Anthony was grayish blue to the west of it, here and there a patch of green, or a single tree with yellow leaves still on it, a poplar maybe, among the last to go. Overhead, the sky was bright blue.

Ed rolled his head back—lying with it turned to look out was too much strain—and closed his eyes. He went on talking, and James Page listened, unable to think of a word he could say except lies, and it wasn't a good time for lies.

“I always enjoyed a good election,” he said. “It was better in the old days, when you and I was young. There'd be bunting in the villages, streets full of buggies, some fancy politician come to hammer on our ears. You remember the election of nineteen twelve? Teddy Roosevelt came and made a speech there in Bennington, that was the year of the Bull Moose campaign. I dunno what he said, I was too young to listen, but I remember, by tunkit, that man was
big.
You look at his picture, you'd think he was some little bespectacled doctor or college professor, and you read all the stories of how he overcame sickness and what-not, you might get the idea he was one of those little Napoleons proving his stuff. But hi golly, that man stood a whole head taller than John G. McCullough in his prime, and more solid than one of George Ellis's Marmons. I member that same year President William Howard Taft came to Manchester, fat as a hippopotamus—played golf with my uncle—I member the President had a floppy white hat. He was no good, that Taft. See it in his eyes. Back-slappin hand-claspin stogie-puffin bandit, so fat if you'd put a wick in him, you could have burned him for a candle.” He smiled.

“I member one year at election time there was a man came to town had a white bear.”

“I remember that!” James Page said, startled.

“You oughtta remember it,” Ed said with a laugh—his eyes remained closed—“it was dahn near the end of your Ariah.”

James frowned. “Now that pot I
don't
remember.”