October Light (59 page)

“You don't? Why son of a dog! Ariah was thirteen years old at the time. Prettiest thing in all the Shires. Eyes blue as skies in October and yellah yellah hair. Got darker later, but when Ariah was thirteen, it was still about the color of thrashin straw. She was over at her aunt's on the Monument Road, there by the Drake place, and she got it in her mind she'd take a ride in the buggy. Hoss they had was skittish, but Ariah was pretty good at handlin the thing, and her aunt never gave it two thoughts, I guess. So they hitched up the buggy and away she went.

“Half an hour later, just about time it was gettin down toward dark, aunt was out in the yahd and what should she behold but that man with that cussed white bear go by, bear sittin there in the buggy-seat just like a human, right next to the man. Well the aunt knew pretty well what that hoss was gonna think when he looked at that bear, so she goes flyin down the road yelling ‘Ha-a-a-lp! Ha-a-a-lp!'
and every neighbor from far or near come flyin to the rescue. Happened my father was there in the vicinity in his trap, and me there beside him, and as soon as he leahnt what was happenin, away we flew to overtake 'em.

“Well we never saw the bear, as it happened; all we saw was that hoss and little Ariah come flyin down the road towahds us, and my father whipped around and went fast he could go in the same direction as that runaway hoss, and finally he captured it. Found out later what happened was, the man had heard Ariah's hoss comin, when she was comin through the shale line on Monument Road, and he'd run his buggy up in some weeds and got the bear down and sat on the thing till the hoss went by. But Ariah's hoss had smelled the bear, and that was ah it took. You fahgot that story?”

“No,” James said, “I remember now.” His eyes had filled with tears, though he was not aware of any feeling.

“Those was fine elections,” Ed Thomas said and nodded, still not opening his eyes. “But they's too many people for such elections now. I don't begrudge it. I like those TV elections too. Believe you me! I member the John F. Kennedy election. First time I ever understood what was really goin on at those things—cameras pokin out every cranny and nook, talkin to delegates when they was drunk and half crazy—it was an eye-opener. Demonstrations on the floor, they would've fooled me easy, but there was Walter Cronkite explainin what was happenin, or Huntley or what-have-you, and I tell you it made me more excited than I ever was before about a public election. People groan abut the modahn world, but let me tell you, I've been proud, sometimes, watchin the elections.

“People scoff at TV. I b'lieve
you
do, James. But let me tell you, we don't vote like we use to. Whole country could be swayed by a tame white bear, or one time three hosses that supposably could talk. It was fun, by tunkit, but it's over; the world's grown up. People are thinkin and ahguin like they never did previous to this present age, and it's the idiot-box more'n ennathin else that made it happen.

“Well, I'll miss the election.” He shook his head, opening his eyes for a moment, then letting them close again. James gazed out at the monument, waiting, hoping for something, he could hardly have said what. He wiped his wet eyes.

“I'll tell you some other things I'll miss, if you ask me.”

James stirred himself to ask, but Ed went on:

“I'll miss walkin out these last days of October, when the land's dyin and the sky's oversharp, and findin where the deer are on their hind legs pickin wild apples. And I'll miss winter, by guard. I've never gotten over how much snow can fall in just five short months of winter. Never mind November, stot with the dark time, December. Blackest month of the year it is, and steadily increasin in blackness as the month draws on. Vermont's a lot farther north than most people realize, ye know. A man I knew left the State a few years ago and moved south. Where he went was Canada, city of London, Ontario, to be precise, which is a hundred and twenty-five miles south of where he stotted, which was St. Albans, Vermont. If he'd gone on to Kingsville, he would've been two hundred miles south, swelterin in the sun.

“But the dahkness at least increases in a known and predictable way, and furthermore, by the end of the month the days reach their shottest and stot growin again. The cold's trickier. Month begins gently, but one day—I've known it to be as early as the fifth and as late as the twentieth—you wake up cold and pull up another blanket. No use—you're still cold. In the mahnin you look at the thehmometer and it's eight below. Yestehday the Walloomsac was open water; today it's solid ice. Then January. That's the month of the snow. I don't mean more snow falls, because it doesn't—so cold that even the clouds lock up tight—but there's snow there always, not a speck of bare ground, nothin alive but some deer and rabbits and snowmobiles.” He opened his eyes to meet James'. “Lot of people don't care much for snowmobiles,” he said accusingly, “and I grant you they're loud, besides nocturnal. But I tell you this: I use to go lookin at the scenery round my place on skis or snowshoes. Now I just walk in the snowmobile tracks. Funny thing about snowmobiles. They're stupid little animals, but they know where the sights are, better than a deer.

“Then February. The days are longer then, the sun is higher, the snow's more dramatic. An evening flurry will come down in huge, wet flakes, so thick and fast you're convinced in an hour your fahm will be buried like Pompeii. But the flurry stops in ten minutes or so, leavin maybe two inches of good snowball snow, big feathery flakes. The mahnin after such a snow as that is what gave rise to picture postcards in the first place. The sky's clear, air still and cold but not too cold. From every chimney you see the smoke goes up straight as a stick. You pass through a valley with an unfrozen brook, and such vapor comes up through the fifteen degrees that for fifty yards on each side of it, the branches, the bob-wire, the weeds that poke up through the snow are ah covered with jewelry.

“But I'll tell you what I'll miss more than ah the rest, and that's ‘unlocking.' Fools call it ‘mud season,' and I don't dare deny you, there's a good deal of mud, because the first thing unlocks is the ground. I'll tell you the first sign. It's easily missed. Every year one of the first four or five days in March is going to be warm and sunny, with the temperature rising, for a little while, to somewhere between fifty and sixty. Look hard at a birch or red maple that day, you'll see a peculiar haze of color in the upper branches: yellow on birch, red on a red maple. Look again the next day and the color is gone, nothing but dark, bare branches and, likely, a sleet storm. All the same, unlocking's stotted. Dirt roads unlock first—the only ground not covered with snow. Each warm day the top inch or two of road touched by the sun thaws out. First cah goes by makes a couple of inch-deep ruts that'll freeze by evening. You can pretty well count on getting stuck once or twice. I never count on it, myself, but I always do.

“Rivers unlock next. The two I know best—the Walloomsac and the Hoosac—both stot the same way. You first see two small streams running on top of the ice, one near each frozen bank. Then one day towards the middle of March, a patch of open water appears, then another. On the Walloomsac, which has a good many dams and slow water, the patches slowly enlarge for a week, until one day you notice an open channel with a line of ice floes sailing solemnly down the middle like Pharaoh's boats.

“Meanwhile, two other kinds of unlocking have stotted. One's the town meeting, where, you know yourself, what we mostly do is block progress—keep to our old covered bridges, for instance, though the richest and smartest people in town want concrete for their darn trucks and bulldozers. The other's done with a brace and bit, and it's called sugarin.

“The weather's capricious, around sugarin time—the more capricious the better. The more Miss Spring dances in and backs out again, the more syrup you get. People in cars get furious when they're stopped by a late, wet April snow, but in the sugarbush that's a cause for rejoicing. Most of the season you do well to get three four inches of sap in the bottom of each bucket over twenty-four hours, but on the day of a sugar snow, your best buckets fill to the brim and run over. That night you boil to midnight, and it seems like a holiday.

“That's a life, James, I'll tell you, not as if you didn't know—standin out there in the maple grove countin up your buckets like a banker, and lookin out over the hills as the whole world outside and inside unlocks. First the pussy willows come, and the rivers run emerald green. Then the deer come out. After a winter of eating just tree buds, and not too many of even them, they're mad for grass. They come boldly into the fields to eat last year's withered stems. One mornin last April I saw fourteen of the things in the pasture behind my house.

“Then the robins arrive, sometimes in flocks of two or three hundred, brightening the bare brown southern cants. About the same time, spring peepers stot up. Then fields begin to green. Some reason, the green always appears first where the snow's melted last. And one day after the first green tips appear, the first woodchuck pops up. Woodchucks are great gourmets, I'll tell you, and they ain't about to eat that old winter-killed hay the way the deer do. In April their brown fur has reddish glints to it, and for a couple of weeks, until the grass gets long or some neighbor's son comes out with his twenty-two rifle, they dot the fields like flowers. By that time, of course, it's no longer unlockin time; it's spring.

“I'll miss that, this year, or ennaway take pot in it in a way I never did before. But I can't complain.”

He smiled.

“James, how come you're listenin to all this?”

James thought about it. “Becauth,” he said at last, “ith true.”

Ed's smile widened. “That's what I tell my Ruth,” he said. “She's got good poems and bad poems, and she'll swear on the Bible she can't tell which is which. I explain to her only the good poems are exactly true.”

“Like a good window-thash,” James said, “or horth.”

“That's it,” Ed said. “You got it.”

4

“Look who's here!” Ruth Thomas sang out, coming into the room, and whether she meant James, and intended the greeting to show that she had no hard feelings now, or meant, instead, the minister and the priest, whom she'd discovered in one of the hospital corridors and now brought into the room with her, James Page could not certainly determine.

“H'lo, Ruth,” he said, and could hardly meet her eyes. For which reason, perhaps, she looked at him harder, all at once, and her face became serious, and she said:

“James, I'm so glad you could come! You know, we've been worried about you. Is Sally out yet?”

“Not yet,” he said. “But we're here to pick up Ginny, and I got an idea old Thally'll come out when we git Ginny home.”

“Drat!” Ruth said, and clapped her hands. “If I'd known you'd be here I'd have brought Sally's plant book.”

“Plant book?” James said.

“For her coleus, you know.”

“Coleuth?”

“Really, James! Sally's precious coleus that's been dying for months. I got a plant book out of the library for her, so maybe she can find out what's wrong with the poor thing and doctor it. She's tried everything she knows, so she tells me—more water, less water, moving it around the room—”

“Thallyth got a coleuth in her room?” James said, head cocked.

“That's what I just said.”

James nodded. “It'll die.”

“It is dying.” She looked at him. “Why?”

“Ith them appleth,” he said. “Planth can't live around appleth. We got appleth in the attic.”

“He's right,” Ed said, opening his eyes.

“Why James, you should have told her!” Ruth said, indignant.

“Thee didn't athk,” James said.

“Hello there, James,” Lane Walker said.

James looked around Ruth and nodded his greeting, and the minister smiled and bowed as if that adventure in the kitchen had slipped his mind entirely. That was a curious trait in human beings, James had noticed, a trait they seemed to share with no other animal he was acquainted with excepting dogs. Hit a horse on the nose, or even a cussed chicken, he'd take a good while to make up with you, but a human being that could keep his mind firmly on a grudge (if he knew beforehand your better as well as your worse side) had to be—like Sally—exceptional. The priest's smile was a good deal more reserved, which was not, of course, too surprising. You couldn't say they'd hit it off, that one and only night they'd ever met. On the other hand, James, for one, had revised his opinion some. He remembered how the man had stood there facing him, even when the shotgun was up at James' shoulder and pointing at his head. Any ordinary man would have clim the wall. Not only that, in the time since that evening James had come even to admire the man's standing there laughing at him, there when the truck burned and he was sitting in the tree. A man who slinked and cowered had never been the old man's favorite kind of animal—it was the one thing he'd hated in his son Richard—nor did he care for a man in the obsequious professions—ministers, dentists, and undertakers—who advertised his calling on his face. Unfortunately, being not well equipped when it came to social graces, James Page had no way of communicating this change of opinion to the Mexican, who seemed to him now to be watching him exactly as he might a black insect in a jar. James' nod was so cautious—unbeknownst to James—that the Mexican didn't even see it and assumed James intended to be offensive. He looked above James' head, giving him no sign of greeting, then pointedly smiled at Ed Thomas and went over to the bed.

“Feeling better today?” he said.

“Not really,” Ed said.

“I'm sorry to hee-ur that!”

James Page lightly tapped his mouth with his fist, watching Ed and the Mexican and feeling guiltier by the minute. Lane Walker had gone now to the end of the room to bring the green vinyl visitor's chair to Ruth. James, with a look of surprise, hurried after him. “Here,” he said, “let me help you with that!” The minister hardly needed help, the chair-legs had taps and slid easily across the thick, highly polished linoleum, but he accepted, with a private grin, the old man's help. Lane Walker thought: Trying to make up, are we? Having second thoughts like old Adam? A curious fact about Lane Walker's character was that he thought theologically all the time, exactly as writers think always as writers and first-rate businessmen think only of business.