October Light (18 page)

The Spat Between the Old Man and the Old Woman Turns More Grave

She was not a fast reader. She liked to take her time and savor what she read, even when she knew what she was reading was hardly worth a speck. Moreover, whether it was because of the softness of the pillows behind her back, or the crispness of the bright, October day, or the unimportance of the writing—Horace, she knew, would have wondered at her continuing on with such a book: life was too precious to be idled away, he'd always said—her mind kept wandering and from time to time she would nod and drop off; and so, when she laid the book aside, not yet half finished, and looked over at the clock on the desk, it was mid-afternoon.

It was hunger that had roused her again from her story. She looked around in surprise, reality flooding in—or another reality, so to speak; the book, for all its foolishness, had convinced her exactly as a dream might do, she'd seen those people and that ridiculous old fishingboat as plain as day, as plain as the pictures on
Hawaii Five-O.
She glanced at the cover—the half-naked girl and the horrible old Captain (not at all as she herself imagined them)—and shook her head. “Well that does take the cake,” she said. The Captain was supposed to have eyes like bullet holes, and the girl's hair was dark. As if from another time and place, the memory of her battle with James came back. It seemed silly now, cranked up out of nothing like the troubles in her book, and considering the leaves outside her window and the blue-as-blue October sky, she had half a mind to call him and let bygones be bygones. It occurred to her that maybe, one of those times when she'd nodded off, he'd come up and unlocked her door.

She got up to see. The floor was so cold it was like walking on hard snow, and despite her curiosity about the door, she stopped to put her slippers on, and then, as an afterthought, her gray cardigan sweater. In the back of her mind she heard the phone ringing. Now she went to the door and tried it. Still locked. “Stubborn old fool,” she said aloud. The phone rang on. He'd be outdoors somewhere, collecting the eggs, cleaning the stables, feeding the pigs and horses, or whatever. Well, she thought, there was nothing
she
could do about the phone, locked in her bedroom like some poor old madwoman in a novel. She went toward the attic door, planning to smuggle down more apples. She could smell the bedpan, which she'd pushed in under the washstand after she'd used it this morning. She frowned, trying to think how to empty it. Maybe there was some old pail or empty trunk in the attic. But she was standing looking out the window toward the road as she thought the problem through, and abruptly she seized, almost without consciously thinking of it, the simplest solution: she opened the window and unhooked the screen, then, nose wrinkling, carried the bedpan over and dumped it on the bushes down below. Then she went up to get the apples.

When James came back in from watering the stock and gathering eggs, the phone was ringing. He had a pretty fair idea who it would be. He picked up the receiver and called, “Ay-uh?”

“Hi, Dad. It's Ginny.”

“I thought it might be you, Ginny.”

“I just thought I'd call and see how everything's going.”

“I thought you might do that.”

He could see, in his mind's eye, her gathering frown.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“How is everything going?”

“Oh, fine. Everything's fine over here. How's everything with you?”

She said, “How's Aunt Sally?”

“Aunt Sally? Oh, she's alive, far's I know.”

There was a pause.

“What does
that
mean?”

“Well, Aunt Sally didn't get up today. Slept in.”

“She didn't get up at all?”

“Not that I know of. Course I ain't been listening at the keyhole.”

“Didn't she eat?”

The old man tipped his long head back, studying the leaves on the lawn.

“Dad?”

“No, I can say for pretty certain she never et a thing.”

In his mind he could picture her reflecting on that, probably fumbling with her cigarettes. At last, perhaps after a drag on the cigarette, she said, “That's impossible! She never left her room?”

“Never once,” he said, nodding thoughtfully at the leaves. “I can say that for pretty near certain.”

“Dad,” she said, “you've nailed the door shut!”

He shook his head. “Nope, just used the other key.”

There was a silence. Then: “I'll be right over.”

“Now Ginny, don't you do that! You mine your own business. I
had
the door open, but she wouldn't come out. She wouldn't do a stitch around the house all day, wouldn't even fix breakfast. What's a man supposed to do, a case like that? She thinks she can move in and live off my sustenance and never do a lick, pollute my parlor with her dad-blame TV, clutter up the air with her dad-blame chatter—”

“Just don't do anything more,” Ginny said, “I'll be right over.” She hung up. James Page hung up too, and refused to feel guilty, though he could see pretty well he was in for it. Nevertheless he was well within his rights. He'd been working from sun-up to well after sundown for sixty-odd years, paying his taxes, keeping the place fit, and in she'd come like some immigrant, barging in on everything, talking about
her
rights …

A mile down the mountain, Samuel Frost was also just hanging up his phone.

“What are
you
smiling at?” his wife Ellen said. She too was smiling, for Sam Frost's good humor was infectious. He was bald except for a shadow of gray hair that had once been red, and he was fat, though solid as a treetrunk.

“You know I'm not one to tell tales,” he said, still grinning from ear to ear, hardly able to contain himself.

“Fiddlesticks,” she said, “people use a party line, they should mind their talk.”

“Mebby so,” he said chuckling, holding his belly. “But there's nothin to tell. If old James Page locks his sister in the bedroom, it's certain he's got some good reason.”

“He didn't!” she said, eyes widening in disbelief and glee.

“Mebby not,” he said, “mebby I heard wrong.” She stared a moment longer, flabbergasted, and then both of them laughed till tears ran down their faces.

He mentioned it that night at Merton's Hideaway, sitting with a fat, freckled hand closed tight around a Ballantine's. He was drinking from the bottle, though as usual, out of some queer stubbornness, Merton had handed him a glass. Leave the thing clean as a whistle, Merton would still wash it; all part of the price. It was early, but dark as a pit outside. When they happened to look out, turning from the oval wooden table near the bar, it seemed to them all, one way or another, a surprising and vaguely unnatural thing—though they'd seen it every year of their lives—that sudden contraction of daylight in October, the first deep-down convincing proof that locking time, and after that winter and deep snow and cold, were coming. Whether or not they cared for winter—some claimed they did, some claimed they didn't—every one of them felt a subdued excitement, a new aliveness that was more, in fact, than the seasonal change in their chemistry.

Summer, for all its beauty on those mountain-slope farms, meant back-breaking work, long hours on the tractor where you struggled against the stiff upgrade pull of the steering wheel and fought till you ached against the jerk and jab of the plow-lift lever as the plow-points skittered over stones. And then later, in July, it meant heaving bales in the still, dead heat, with bees all around you, first-cousins to the fairies, but nothing magical about a swarm of impinged-on bees in a dry, hot hayloft in July, no magic in anything except, perhaps, to the tourists who came like a plague of locusts and had time to watch the otters in the high mountain streams, or the foal in the shadow of the barn. August was cooler, though still high summer, so cool in the morning and evening, at times, especially those mornings and occasional evenings when mist filled the valleys, that it was best to have a fire in the woodstove; but August meant even more work than before—still hay to get in, but also sweetcorn, potatoes, and tomatoes, and now wheat and oats, grainsacks to throw, your eyes and ears and nostrils full of dust, harsh chaff in the cracks around your neck. Late August, although still grain-harvest time—it would drag through September—was the time of carnivals and village fairs, church suppers, all-day auctions, and demonstrations by the Volunteer Fire Department. It was the time of respite before the air turned winy and the field-corn came in and then the busiest harvest of all. Apples. The State had been rich in them since long before the Revolution. Even in deep woods you'd come across old apple trees still bearing away, half-forgotten species like Pound Sweets and Snow-apples. Now, in October, the farmwork was slackening, the drudgery had paid off: the last of the corn went flying into the silo with a clackety roar and a smell as sweet as honey; the beans were harvested in half a day, like an afterthought; on the porch and out by the roadside stood mountains of pumpkins. The trees turned—those along the paved roads first, dying from the salt put down in winter—sugar maples orange, pink, and yellow on one branch, elm trees pale yellow, birch trees speckled with a lemony yellow, still other trees carmine and vermilion and ochre, red maples as red as fresh blood. Soon—anytime from mid-October to the end of November—it would be locking time.

It began as a suspension of time altogether. Rudyard Kipling saw it in Brattleboro, in 1895, and wrote: “There the seasons stopped awhile. Autumn was gone. Winter was not. We had Time dealt out to us—more clear, fresh Time—grace-days to enjoy.” There'd be nothing to do but chores, load pigs for butchering, chop firewood, or walk through the dry, crisp leaves of a canted wood hunting deer. The air in the cowbarn would be clean and cold, but when you bent down between them for the milking, the cows would be as warm and comforting as stoves. Sometimes an Indian summer would break up the locking, sometimes not; but whatever the appearances, the ground was hardening; every now and then a loud crack would ring out, some oak tree closing down all business for the season. If it was warm and mild on Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning might be twenty degrees, and you'd find the water in the pig-trough frozen solid. By Thanksgiving the locking would be irreversible: the ground would be frozen, not to thaw again till spring. When the first good snow came, maybe three feet of it, maybe six, they'd call it winter.

This darkness now, fallen unnaturally early, as it always seemed every year—fallen like a thick tarpaulin around the Hideaway—was to them all, in their blood if not quite in their conscious minds, obscurely magical, a sign of elves working. If it had not been for that strangeness about things, Sam Frost might perhaps not have mentioned what he'd heard on the telephone, that old James Page had confined his sister to her bedroom.

“He never did!” Bill Partridge said, leaning toward Sam Frost. “Locked up old Sally in the bedroom? He must be daft!”

Giggling and blushing, his eyes filled with tears, Sam could only nod.

“No doubt he had plenty provocation,” Bill Partridge said. His voice had the high, thin whine of a buzzsaw. He sat with his hat on, his nose long and red, below it big folds—where there were still a few whiskers—drooping past his mouth and small chin.

“She's got mighty strange opinions,” Henry Stumpchurch said—serious-minded, enormous and whopper-jawed, though by blood part Welshman—watching Sam Frost for some sign that he might know more.

Sam Frost nodded, still smiling and blushing. “You can understand his feelings,” he said. “Works all his life, puts his money in the bank, and there she comes with her hands held out, and he does what's right and the next thing you know she's got him hog-tied hand and foot, even runnin his cussed politics.”

“She don't!” Bill Partridge said.

Sam was still nodding. “She's a Democrat,” he said.

They waited, watching him, none of them admitting quite yet that the tale had gone somber.

Sam nodded again, eyes crinkling as if for a grin, but the grin was unconfident and failed. “Wife Ellen calls up about the Republican fund drive, and old Sally says to her, ‘James ain't home.' Twant the truth, point of fact. You could hear him in the background, hollerin to know who's on the line.”

They stared, only gradually understanding the terrible implications.

“He'd ought to shoot her,” Bill Partridge said thoughtfully, and filled his glass.

By this time Lewis and Virginia Hicks were at her father's house, trying to negotiate a peace. They'd left Dickey with a neighbor in Arlington, had come up Mount Prospect as fast as their rattle-trap car would climb, and in no time at all Ginny had persuaded the old man to unlock that door. It proved to be no help, as the old man had known it would be or he'd never have given in. “Two stubbaner people never lived,” Lewis said, not to anyone in particular. The old woman had the door-bolt shot inside and she'd rather be dead, she told them, than come out where that maniac was. Ginny and Lewis stood in the upstairs hallway, pleading through the door, the old man downstairs in the kitchen feigning indifference, but with the stairway door cracked open, allowing him to hear. Ginny grew angrier and more tearful by the minute, Lewis more despondent.

Lewis Hicks was a small man, and though he was going on forty years old he was thin as a boy. He had on the gray coveralls he'd been wearing when he came home and Ginny was making that phonecall to her father. His hair was cropped short and was by nature dry as dust and approximately that color; he had practically no chin, a large adam's apple, and on his upper lip a brown, insignificant moustache. He had one blue eye, one brown eye. “Aunt Sally,” he said, for out in the driveway his car was running, swilling down the gas, and also he was paying that babysitter, “this is costin good money.” It was entirely unlike him to assert himself so, and as soon as he'd said it he glanced over at Ginny. He could see himself that it was petty and not likely to persuade. Ginny gave him a glance and he looked hastily at the floor. All the same, people asked a great deal of him, he thought. If crazy old brothers and sisters had fights, what concern was it of his? She'd come out, all right, when she got hungry enough; and if not, well, they could cross that bridge when they'd come to it. He glanced furtively at Ginny, then away again. He was rarely brought conviction by even his own most sensible reasoning. Life was slippery, right and wrong were as elusive as odors in an old abandoned barn. Lewis knew no certainties but hammers and nails, straps of leather, clocksprings. He had no patience with people's complexities—preferred the solitude of his workshop down cellar, the safe isolation of a maple grove he'd been hired to trim, or some neighbor's back yard, where he'd been hired to rake leaves—not because people were foolish, in Lewis Hicks' opinion, or because they got through life on gross and bigoted oversimplifications, though they did, he knew, but because, quiet and unschooled as he might be, he could too easily see all sides and, more often than not, no hint of a solution.