October Light (28 page)

He was standing with his hands in his coatpockets, the bill of his dark blue cap pulled low so that he had to tip his head back to see things straight in front of him. He was looking at the bushes under Aunt Sally's window. His expression was thoughtful. “Somebody went the bathroom in the bushes,” he said.

“Oh Dickey,” Virginia said, “for heaven's sakes.”

But Lewis, from his angle, could see something she couldn't. He came over from the car to a little behind Dickey, looked for a minute at the bushes then up at Aunt Sally's bedroom window. “My God,” he said.

“What's the matter?” Ginny asked.

Lewis half smiled, then sobered again. Matter-of-factly he said, “She been throwin her shit out the window, looks like.”

“What are you
talking
about?” She turned from the door and went over to look. What caught her eye first was what appeared to be flowers on the lilac bushes, though the leaves on the bushes were withered to brown and bits of red. Nevertheless there were bits of white blossom, and not having quite registered what Lewis had said, though she had in fact heard it, she moved closer, scattering the chickens, and was suddenly assaulted by the stench. The bottom of her abdomen punched upward, trying to make her vomit, and she instantly covered her nose and mouth with her hands and backed away. She looked up at the window, horrified and enraged, so that her face, as Lewis and Dickey saw it, was not the Ginny they knew at all. She had bulging eyes, a sudden puffiness and redness of adrenaline—a kind of crackling look, as if she were shooting off electricity—and the sight made them cower, though they showed no outward sign. Looking up at the window Ginny saw now, despite the glow of sunset on the panes, her Aunt Sally standing there cool as a cucumber, saying not a word. Ginny drew in breath and bellowed, angrier than ever, “Aunt
Sally!”

Now Lewis saw her too. Instinctively putting himself on Ginny's side, hoping for immunity from her wrath, he yelled: “Aunt Sally, look what you done!” He pointed at the bushes.

Still she said nothing, staring down through the red-lighted panes like a madwoman, murderously serene.

Now Ginny's face was taking on a new expression. Lewis saw the change, glancing at her furtively, but he no more understood it than Ginny did herself, or the child. She knew only that her anger had suddenly flashed hotter, and that it had to do with humiliation. These were
her
relatives, and the way Lewis stood, carefully not judging, made her face sting with shame. “Aunt Sally, you
answer
me,” she yelled, white with anger, and then suddenly covered her face with both hands and cried. Lewis stood helplessly looking from Ginny to Aunt Sally to the lilacs, spattered with runny brown and the stained white of wadded Kleenex. Then the window opened, and Aunt Sally, standing in her bathrobe, a paperback book in one hand, called down: “If you want to see your father, he's out milkin.”

Lewis said, not quite to his wife, “I
thought
it might be chore-time.”

Ginny gave him such a look of pure scalding rage that his heart quaked. “Then why in hell didn't you say so?”

He had no idea what he'd done to so anger her. “I'm sorry,” he said, voice quavering. “I should've spoke up.”

“Jesus,” she spat at them all, and started toward the barn. Lewis, knees weak, caught Dickey's hand and followed.

Behind the house, where the back yard sloped down to the faded red barn on its rough rock foundation—the dingy white hives of the bees just beyond—there was only one tree, an old jagged hickory, most of its leaves fallen, so they could see the full glory of the crimson sunset above the mountain and the slope of the pasture. Perversely, for all his grief, or because of his grief, Lewis Hicks did see it, and registered that it was beautiful. He saw how the stones and grass of the pasture turned spiritual in this light, radiating power, as if charged with some old, mystic energy unnamed except in ancient Sumerian or Indian—how the forested mountains that had been a hundred colors just an hour ago—blood red, wine red, pink and magenta, bold strokes of orange, bright yellows and browns, purples that Ginny would call garish in a painting, and here and there, in blocks, dark greens and blue-greens where there were stands of pine—were now all suffused with the crimson of the sky, transmuted. Lewis Hicks saw and registered how even the old man's machinery was transformed by this stunning light, the old yellow corn-chopper tilted against the silo more distinct, more itself than it would normally be, final as a tombstone, like the big Case tractor, the paintless box-wagon, the lobster-red corn-picker or the small gray tractor with its big square faded umbrella. He had no words for his impressions, but his misery intensified. He was wrong and wronged. Wordlessly, caught at the intersecting planes of the sunset's beauty and Virginia's strange anger—strange to him even though he saw he'd been a fool, and all she'd said was right—he suddenly wished his whole life changed absolutely, wished himself free and in the same motion wished for the opposite, or the same perhaps, wished he were dead. All husbands wished that, he supposed, from time to time, same as elves and bears. And perhaps all wives. But how mysterious that not even
one
could be spared, not even he, remote from the world, in a barnyard in Vermont. Did even cattle have such pangs of unhap-piness? Grasshoppers?

Dickey said, “Why's she so mad?”

Abruptly, almost without noticing it, he was better. His soul crashed inward from the sky, the sweep of mountains like ocean waves—collapsed back to time out of timelessness—and he became a small man walking, holding his son's hand, moving again through a specific time and place, not a disembodied, universal cry but a sober-faced husband and father who had certain problems, certain groundless duties. In the trunk of the Chevy he had paint-remover and a scraper.

“She's upset,” he said. “Don't worry about it.”

They ducked under the electric wire of the gate, then he picked up Dickey to carry him, stepping carefully, not that his shoes were all that fine, from firm place to firm place, grass-tuft to grass-tuft, past mud and slime and cowplops toward the milkhouse. Ginny had already disappeared through that door, hurrying ahead of them. They could hear the
chuff-chuff
of the milking-machine compressor.

Having seen what she'd seen, Ginny was solidly on her father's side when she found him between two Holsteins, putting on a milker strap.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

The old man jumped, then smiled, pleased to see her, yet somewhat grim. “Hi there, Ginny,” he said.

“I knocked and knocked, up at the house,” she said. “The door was locked.”

It was a question, of course, but he pretended not to notice. “Wintah's just around the cohnah,” he said.
“So
bahss”—leaning over to put the teatcups on.

“Have you seen what's happened to the lilac bushes?” Ginny asked. She had her arms folded, hands clamped in tight on each side of her bosom, because her father would allow no smoking out here in the barn.

“Can't say I have,” he said, and tipped up his long face to look at her. She said nothing, and he finished adjusting the machine, absently batting away a fly with his right hand, then stiffly raised himself, helping himself up by grabbing the cow's sharp hipbone. When he was more or less erect—still bent over some, so that she was struck by the fact that her father had gotten old—he stepped back over the steaming, half-filled gutter to the walkway, placing the treads of his red boots carefully, to keep himself from slipping in manure or wet lime. He draped the strap from the cow he'd just finished around his neck. Ginny sniffled back tears. Though her father was strong from a lifetime of lifting and carrying, his flesh was wasting away, these last years, so that his rough red skin sagged and his bones stuck out like a half-starved animal's, especially the vertebrae in the back of his neck, his skull—unpleasantly prominent, lately, like the skull of a foetus—and the bones of his fingers and wrists. “What about 'em?” he asked, “—the lilacs?”

“Aunt Sally's been throwing her shit out the window,” she said, and abruptly, jerking her hands up to cover her face, she began sobbing. Her shoulders shook, her voice came out in whoops. The old man stood with his knuckly hands hanging at his sides and couldn't think what to do. He hadn't heard what she'd said, or, rather, wasn't sure he'd heard correctly, and the crying was so extreme—as if somebody'd been killed—he could only stand fogbound and hope in a minute things came clearer. Ginny wailed, and what she said was even less distinct now, distorted by her sobbing. “Right there where everybody can
see
it, Dad. Anybody passing down the
road
can look over and—” The sobbing overwhelmed her and she could say no more, could only squeeze her face with her hands and gasp for breath, as she'd done when she'd cried as a little girl. He remembered when he'd spanked her out by the clothesline when she was something like seven, maybe eight, spanked her no harder than he ought to have done, but her sobbing, heart-broken, had filled him with anguish, and he'd held her and kissed her cheek—as now, awkwardly, he moved toward holding her, raising his stiff crooked hands toward her arms but unable really to hold her, because Ginny was grown now, and he was old, bent half double with constipation cramps. He remembered how she'd sobbed when little Ethan had fallen off the barn and broke his neck, their younger son, and was dead at just seven.

“Ginny, what's the
matter?”
he said now. “Honey, I can't understand you. What's happened?” Then, looking over toward the milkhouse steps, he saw Lewis and Dickey coming carefully toward them—they looked like fishermen crossing a shallow stream on rocks—trying not to step in the cowshit. “Lewis,” he called, “what's happened?” Their faces lighted strangely as they came past the windows where the glow of the charged, crimson sky poured in. Lewis held Dickey's hand.

“It's Aunt Sally,” Lewis said. “It looks like she's been usin the bedpan and dumpin it out the window.”

The old man's heart sank. Sure as anything, they'd lay it all to him.

Lewis had come up to them now and stood three, four feet away, still holding the boy's hand, looking like a helpless little boy himself, miserably watching Ginny. James compressed his lips, still clumsily patting his daughter's arms on the fat place just below the shoulders, and could think of nothing to say but “There, there now, honey. There there, sweet-hot.” It was time—more than time—to get the milkers changed, and if he didn't get down to it pretty quick, he thought, he'd have his milkers kicked clear past the barnyard. “Sweet-hot, I gotta change the milkers,” he said. Ginny nodded, vocally drawing in breath, getting her crying in control at last, and he patted her arms two or three more times then left her, went over to the Guernsey that was next in line and hung the strap over her back. He stooped to take the milker from the cow in the next stanchion, turned off the air, and stepped carefully across the gutter to dump the milk from the filled-up machine into the pail. By the whitewashed post six feet away the cats sat watching, soft and tame looking as pillows on a couch, though if you touched one you'd likely lose a finger. He went over to the cats' post and splashed a little leftover milk into their dish, an old dented lid from a ten-gallon can, then went back, still doubled over, to put the milker on the cow he'd just strapped.

Ginny, better now, came down the line to where he was working and was able to speak, though she wasn't entirely through crying. Lewis and Dickey came part way, too. She said, “How could she do it? She must be senile!”

Lewis said. “Could be that. When my gramp got old, he use to walk around the house with ah his clothes off, carryin a bucket.”

“I just don't know what to
do,”
Ginny said. Her head was stuffed up and she kept sniffing. “We can't put Aunt Sally in a Home. They cost a fortune.”

James knew pretty well that he'd better speak up; but all he could bring himself to say at the moment was, “Oh, I wouldn't worry, if I was you, bout Sally bein senile.”

“Well then she's crazy,” Ginny said, “and that's worse.” It looked as if she was about to cry again. Lewis was shaking his head, thinking God knows what. The boy was leaning far over, pulling Lewis's arm out straight, dangling a piece of straw over the cats.

James straightened up enough to walk and stepped over the gutter, hanging the strap around his neck as he walked. Little as he cared, right now, for that witch of a sister, it wasn't in his nature to leave the error stand. “I doubt that a doctor'd call her crazy,” he said.

“I don't know, though,” Lewis said, noncommittal, “you can't say it's normal, emptying your potty out the window, and in the front of the house.”

“Prob'ly couldn't get to the bathroom,” James said, equally noncommittal, and stepped back across the gutter to hang the strap on the cow due next. “So-o-o bahss,” he said.

Ginny's head swung around. “You locked her in
again ?”

He pressed his forehead against the cow's warm belly. “Nope,” he said. “Just saw to it she didn't change her mind about stayin in her room. Used the aht of pahsuasion.”

They waited. When he said no more, Ginny asked, “Dad, what did you
do ?”

So again he was in the wrong. It was always nobody's fault but his. “Whant you go look for yourself?” he said. His jaw stiffened and his voice stepped higher with indignation and self-pity. His faith in laconic truth cracked and gave way like the wall of a haybarn now, broken by the weight of the injustices done him. “Look with your own two eyes and you'll know I ain't lying,” he said. “You mistrust I chopped off her head, you two? Well mebby so. You go look. Ain't that the custahd, though? Sally can do ennathing she pleases in my house, and the minute I try'n put a stop to't, I be a criminal. No end to't! It's just like them terrorists. They can shoot the police like they was squirrels in a tree, and nobody says one blessed word, but let some Government shoot five convicted terrorists, and there be letters gonna come from all hell and gone! It's just like the Italians. Write down the truth about the Mafia in some book—how they'll shoot a man quick-er'n they'll look him in the eye, even shoot John F. Kennedy, and the country can go knit—and before ye can say Jack Robinson they got you in court, fightin off the Italian League cause you made it seem some of 'em ain't honest.” He had the milking machine on now, rhythmically chugging, and came back across the gutter. “Ah my life I been fair's I know how to be, and you know it, the both of you, and with Sally there was never but one thing I balked at, which is the root of all the rest, and it's that blame TV. ‘You could've had her keep it in her room,' you'll say to me, but I tell you that ain't true, it want possible. I'd still have heard the rumble, and I'd've known what sickness and filth it was spewing through my house. You might as well tell me I should let people murder little children, long's they do it in their room. You'll say it ain't the same. Well I don't care to argue. I
believe
it's the same. I set there by the fire every night for two weeks and watched it, as fair as any man in a jury box, and I'll even admit I saw one or two things I thought was more-less hahmless. But on the whole I say it was filth and corruption: murderers and rapists, drug addicts, long-hairs, hosses and policemen till yer so weary ye could spit except your mouth's too tired. Half-naked women with microphones, stretchin out their long, limp ahms to you and puckerin and smilin with all their big, glassy teeth, singin you the damn foolest songs you ever heard, mostly bedroom talk. Quiz-shows where people go insane to get some money, news that goes jumpin around from one thing to another like a blame three-ring circus that's in a hurry to get struck, and no more attempt to make sense of what you're seein than a ten-cent get-well cahd from the drugstore. Sober conversations about the failure of America and religion and the family, as if there want no question about the jig bein up, and sober conversation bout how a man that's homosexual is just as nahmal as you or me—” A catch came into his voice and he broke off abruptly.