October Light (37 page)

As for Dr. Phelps' granddaughter Margie, her heart thudded and her brain tingled; she half believed she might faint. Her friend Jennifer at school had told her weeks ago that Terry Parks had a crush on her, and she hadn't doubted it, though it seemed to her a miracle. When he played his French horn in the school orchestra or at the Sage City Symphony, his playing gave her goosebumps, and when they had answering parts in the woodwind quintet, she blushed. Finding him here at the Pages tonight had been a kind of confirmation of the miracle, and when the grown-ups had suggested that the two of them might play duets together, and had sent them here, so that the adults could talk …

Now another cloud, larger than those before it, was swallowing the moon. The noise of the wind half frightened, half thrilled her. The barn stood out stark, sharply outlined. The white thing—fertilizer bag, that was right—was snagged in a fence, gray as bone, suddenly inert.

He moved his hand a little, closing it on hers. She drew her breath in sharply. Was someone coming?

“You kids want baked apples?” Virginia Hicks called from the doorway behind them.

They parted hands quickly and whirled around, frightened and confused.

“I'll leave them here on the bedside table,” Virginia said, smiling. She seemed to have seen nothing. “You two make beautiful music together,” she said, and smiled again, with a wave of her cigarette.

Neither of them spoke, heads spinning, smiling at the floor. Virginia left them.

Something thudded hard against the house, a small limb, perhaps, but no window broke, the walls did not sway, and so they laughed, embarrassed by their momentary fear. As they laughed they walked toward the bedside table where the baked apples stood oozing juice.

“Mmm, baked apples,” Margie said softly. She picked up her plate and seated herself primly on the bedside, eyes cast down. Terence came and sat beside her.

“Listen to that wind,” he said. The night howled and thudded like an orchestra gone wrong, dissonant and senseless, dangerous, but Margie was happy, for once in her life utterly without fear, except of him. She laid her hand casually on the cover beside her, conscious of the laughter and talk in the next room and also now a sound like arguing, coming from upstairs. She glanced at Terence and smiled. Smiling back, secretive and careful, he put his hand over hers.

10

Virginia stood smoking a cigarette, filling the sink to wash dishes. People were gathering their coats in the living room, and the thought of their leaving—her father not yet home—filled her with such anxiety she could hardly catch her breath. Perhaps it was the anxiety that made her think of Richard. She thought of him often, though he'd been dead fifteen years. All grief, all trouble, all worry made her think of him, which was strange in a way; he hadn't been all that unhappy, really, or if he had—his suicide made her wonder—she hadn't known it. He'd been a living saint, just like Lewis. She smiled, slightly blushing, remembering the time he'd walked in on them. They'd gone to his house and found the door open, Richard away somewhere—she'd been something like eighteen—and they'd decided to sit on the couch and wait for him. One thing had led to another as it always did with them then, and when her brother walked in—they hadn't heard him drive up—there they were on the couch, she with her legs spread wide and Lewis with his pants half off, down around his knees, and Richard had stepped into the dimly lit room, not seeing them at first, and then had seen them and blushed scarlet, as if
he
were the guilty one. “Hi!” he'd said quickly, and hurried through the room to the kitchen. They'd lain there giggling, hardly able to think what to do, and had been tempted to sneak out the door without a word. But it wasn't as if he would yell at them; Richard had never yelled at anyone in his life—except once Aunt Sally when she said a little something about their mother. So they'd gotten themselves arranged—she must have been eighteen, because Richard was twenty-five, it was the last year he lived—and they'd gone in where he was sitting in the kitchen, drinking whiskey and reading the
Banner.
He'd looked up at them and grinned. “I didn't even know you were engaged,” he'd said. “Fix you a snort?”

“Mommy, can I have a drink?” Dickey said beside her. Without even rising from her reverie, she took one of the newly washed cups from the drainer, filled it with cold water, and gave it to him.

“What do you say?” she said.

“Thank you,” he said and drank. After one swallow he poured out the rest, into her dishwater. She sighed.

She remembered how once when she was four or five Richard had frightened her with a bee. He'd known it was a drone and wouldn't sting—smaller, darker than the rest of the bees; their father had often let Richard play with them—but she hadn't known it couldn't sting and of course had been terrified. She'd screamed, and with a look of alarm he'd grabbed her hand. “It won't sting you, Ginny! Look, it's just a drone!” he'd yelled, trying to make her stop before their father heard. He'd put the bee on her arm, yelling “See?
See?”
And then, coming around the corner of the barn, barrel-chested and terrible, carrying a milk-hose, was their dad.

“Oh God,” Richard had said, letting go of her, starting to cry already; and she'd understood she'd gotten him in trouble again. He was always in trouble, though he never did a thing; their father just somehow had it in for him.

“All right,” their father said.

“It was just a little drone,” he said, and then said no more—in her mind she could see him just as clear as day, a big gawky boy of eleven or twelve, golden-haired in the sunlight, face bright red with shame and anger, crying before he was even hit. All through her childhood, it seemed to her, her father had been beating him for one thing or another. “A lad born for hanging,” her father had called him, and again and again laid his belt to him, or a milk-hose, or a stick. She knew pretty well what it was in him that made their father furious. He was timid—exactly as their father had been, Aunt Sally said—afraid of the cows, the horses, even of the chickens; afraid of strangers; afraid of cold and of thunder; afraid of ghosts and nightmares; afraid, more than anything else, that one of them might die, or that his father might go crazy, as a man had done once down the road, and might shoot them with his gun. Perhaps if her father had been able to see …

Her brother had a wonderful sense of humor, though, even about himself. He knew he was a coward, and made a joke of it. If something made him jump, he'd exaggerate the jump and put mock terror on his face, so you couldn't be sure if he'd really been startled or was just playing; and when he asked their mother for the keys to the car—their gentle, good mother of whom not even mice could conceivably be frightened—he would duck and cringe as if scared she meant to hit him, and she would laugh and catch hold of his hand. He'd once dressed up for a costume party in a horrible outfit—he had a beard and long hair made of white horse's tail, and had a long black coat that had belonged to their father's crazy uncle Ira, and he was carrying an axe with red paint splashed over it. When he came before the party to spring it on their mother, he'd seen himself in the mirror and actually jumped. Even their father had smiled, for once, but all he'd said was, “Don't fahget to clean off that axe when you're through with it.” He was something, her father. He was beyond belief! Yet he'd meant no harm. Whatever Uncle Horace and Aunt Sally might think, her mother saw the truth: “He loves that boy more than his own life. That's why he frets so.”

Ginny looked at her watch. Where
was
he so long?

“Well, Ginny,” Dr. Phelps said behind her, “I guess we better be moseyin on.”

“Oh!” Ginny said, and snatched up a towel to dry her hands.

11

When Ed Thomas got to go up to the bathroom—he had to step back for the descending crowd—he found Lewis Hicks standing at Sally's door scraping off the paint. “Hi gol, Lewis,” he said, “you ain't goin down with the others?” He pointed past his shoulder with his partly cut off thumb. “Ye'll be missin the party, boy! Won't last much longer, I can tell ye that fer certain. Ye better get in on it!”

“Well,” Lewis said, pausing a moment to reflect on the matter, “I got to get this paintin done, and pahty or no pahty, I hate to drive all this way and just leave it set.”

“That's the spirit, boy,” Ed Thomas said, and laughed. “Say, what was all that goin on up here?” He pointed past his shoulder again toward where the crowd had gone.

“Talk about apes and women,” Lewis said.

“Jokes, ye mean?” Ed asked, squinting, mouth slightly open.

Lewis went on with his scraping. “Not really,” he said.

Ed Thomas lowered his head and chuckled. “Apes and women,” he said. “Hi golly.” He went to the bathroom, and while he was using the toilet, his chest going empty and ringing as if with panic as he urinated, the pain coming out for a look like a woodchuck in February, he got to thinking. When he'd zipped himself up and washed his hands and face and looked himself over in the oval mirror—half the buttons were missing from his washed-out workshirt, missing from the middle toward both ends, as usual, popped by the vast generosity of his belly, but never mine, he was a handsome old dog, as his wife Ruth told him (hair white as sugar, cheeks and nose pink)—he stepped out into the hallway and said, “Doggone it, Lewis, you're a dahn good workman!”

“Thank you, Mr. Thomas,” Lewis said. “I always do the best I can.”

“That's the truth. I've noticed it. By golly but it's hahd to find a worker these days!”

Lewis nodded and held out the scraper to pick away a few bits of grit. “Yes it is,” he said. “It makes you wonder, the way things're goin. People don't seem to have much pride ennamore.”

“No pride at all. It's a cryin shame.” The Welshman tipped his head, holding up his stomach with his interlaced fingers, and asked pointedly: “That your work, that wall at Peg Ellis's place in Old Bennington, there by the church?”

“Done that this summer, that's right,” Lewis said. He added, apologetic, “Hadda use a book. Don't get much oppahtunity to lay stone walls.”

Ed Thomas shook his head in admiration. He began to move cautiously, like a fisherman with a bite. He leaned on the banister and looked approvingly at the newly scraped bathroom door. There was not a gouge, and not a scrap of paint left. It was a job on which some men would have taken days, yet Ed knew it had taken Lewis Hicks no such span; he'd seen how Lewis swept that scraper down Sally Abbott's door. “I imagine you get plenty to keep you busy, a man like you.”

Lewis nodded again, but said, “Never make me a tycoon, I guess.” He continued to stand dandling the scraper, awkward. He'd never been a man to lounge around, and that was especially true when things had him nervous. His father-in-law had been gone a good long time. It was now, by Lewis's pocketwatch, eleven twenty-five. The people downstairs were making noises about leaving. As they'd gone down after the minister's talk, they'd most of them bade Lewis goodnight.

Ed Thomas pointed at Lewis's chest. He looked him straight in the blue eye, then shifted to the brown one. “Let me ask you somethin straight out, Lewis. How'd you like to come work for me?”

“For you, Mr. Thomas?” He smiled, uneasy, and ran the index finger of his left hand down the side of Aunt Sally's door. He'd have to persuade her to open the thing or he'd never be able to finish, he thought. He looked at the fingertip, dusty as if with sawdust from a coping saw, and casually, as if speaking to his finger, he said, “No sir, I don't b'lieve I could.”

Ed Thomas stood with his mouth open. Not from surprise, necessarily. He usually stood with his mouth open. “Why not?” he said.

“Wal, I got a lot of things lined up,” Lewis said. “Can't really affoahd to let my customahs slide.” He took another swipe at the door with the scraper. He'd made his point as plain as he cared to. Ed Thomas was famous for being slow to pay. If possible he'd get out of it altogether. That was all right, maybe. Farming wasn't easy for anyone these days. But Lewis would prefer to keep out of it. He listened to the voices coming up from the kitchen. They were definitely moving toward the door, he thought. Ed Thomas would do him a kindness if he'd do that too. He took another swipe at the paint. The scraper snagged; old nail-head. Lewis got out his jackknife.

But Ed stood firm, leaning on the banister, pursing his lips, breathing shallowly and frowning. He said suddenly, “I don't mean just handyman jobs, Lewis. I want you to be my Number One.” He reached into his shirt pocket, got out a cigar, and began peeling off the cellophane. Then, some trouble occurring to him, he changed his mind and left the wrapper on.

“I can't deny that's a good offer,” Lewis said, “but I'm no dairyman. I grew up in town.” He smiled again.

“Hell,
I'd
tell you what to
do,
Lewis. You're young yet. You got brains. You'll learn the whole business in no time. And I'll tell you what else: If there's one thing a dairyman needs more'n anything else it's an ability to handle any kind of trade—electrician, carpenter, mason, plumber, veterinarian, accountant—”

He shook his head. “Cows bite me, Mr. Thomas. They always have.”

“Pshaw,” Ed Thomas scoffed.
“Cows
don't bite. They might bunt, they might kick, but in all my years I never seen a cow bite.”

“I been bit, though. And by cows. I never been near a cow that he didn't bite me.”

“Then I'll teach ye how to deal with it. You just hit 'em in the nose.”

Lewis shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but no thanks, sir. What about your son?”

“Never do it,” Ed said matter-of-factly. “Cholly hates fahmin. So do his boys, though I get a bit of help from 'em when they visit—especially DeWitt. But my boy Cholly, he won't even help when he comes visitin, that's the truth. It's understandable, of course. Cholly's got a good job in Boston, ye know. No reason to get his good shoes dirty.” He smiled. “Cholly likes that kind of thing—mowin the lawn, cookin itty-bitty chickens on the backyard bobbycue. But you now, Lewis, you're a Vahmonter. You don't
need
that sort of a life. I b'lieve it'd kill ya.”