Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

Stillness and Shadows

John Gardner

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1986 by The Estate of John Gardner

cover design by Robin Bilardello

ISBN: 978-1-4532-0360-6

This 2010 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media 180 Varick Street New York, NY 10014 www.openroadmedia.com

Beauty is momentary in the mind, The fitful tracing of a portal, But in the flesh it is immortal.

—WALLACE STEVENS

… but love can move mountains, love can burst all bonds, even steel; nothing can stand in its way, as we all know. It’s our own mediocrity that makes us let go of love, makes us renounce it.

—EUGÈNE IONESCO

PROLOGUE

“The people are like gnomes,” Martin Orrick would write, “small and quiet, overmuscular, bearing overlarge heads. As your car drives past, just a few miles from town, they draw up from their work in the steaming bottomlands and stand quietly dangerous, though intending no harm, as still as old stumps or fence posts or deer, watching without expression, their eyes like chips of steel. Toward noon, when the heat of the sun grows unbearable, they sink into the dark wooded hills from which they’re sprung, fall back slyly into the shade of the past; and for a while nothing moves but the circling hawks, an occasional eagle, the ear of a sleeping sow in a thick clump of pokeweed, and, always, the river. Oak trees, sycamores, and pines stand guard, and in the places where houses or trailers lie—or places where they once lay—maples, tulip poplars, cedars. Drive on, stranger, there’s nothing for you here. If everyday humdrum life hides here, if men and women touch with years-old affection, or sing antique songs, or tell stories from their days of railroad building, when a few men made fortunes on apples or coal and the rest worked a lifetime for no better pay than their scars, crooked fingers, and shrewd, creased faces, you will not find it, you’ll glimpse no smile not prepared with fearful calculation in advance. Here there is no trust. This is a harsh, inhospitable land: even those poor fools who love it are hardly at home on it, cursing its floods and tornadoes, its rust-red, eroding hills, cursing all those whom God saw fit to send more profitable land, yet clinging, for no reason, to this miserable tick- and mosquito-rich place, spawning ground of rattlers, cottonmouths, and copperheads, half the year drowned out by unrelenting rain, half the year dry as a biscuit. This is no place to pause, sink roots: here all things swirl and churn like the river, and the heart finds no rest, no peace, no stillness but the cyclone’s core. This is a country for gnomes and madmen, a country for the living and dying, not the rich, calm dead.”

Useless, as always, to inquire too narrowly what Martin Orrick meant. He was, obviously, one of those poor fools who loved the place—the southern Missouri Ozarks, where he’d fled from San Francisco in what his psychiatrist would describe, not long afterward, as a desperate attempt to shake the demons from his back, purify his sick heart by fire. That was not how it appeared at the time. He came, one who knew him at the time might have thought, in search of not life but a death worth dying, a death not wan and casual, unfelt. He would gallop his Roman-nosed black stallion through the night, when neither he nor his horse could see—his children in their beds, wide-eyed with fear, his beautiful wife indignant and trembling—and time after time he would fall and, drunkenly, crawl home. Twice he fractured his skull and, though his brain was his living, showed no remorse. Once, so drunk he could barely stand, he rode off on the bicycle his wife had bought him to keep him off the horse and made ten full miles before he tumbled, bicycle and all, down a twelve-foot embankment and came to rest in a stone-filled branch, where at dawn he awakened, guarded by his whimpering dogs. It was not, of course, the fault of the mountains. In their infinite patience, they could bear up any form of life at all: swift, light deer, sly coon, huge, thoughtful cows, squirrels, rabbits, wolves and foxes, skunks and groundhogs, cross-eyed, old-as-the-hills opossum, who murder young chickens for their sport. He would see the place later as gentle and beautiful, when his eye had changed. What he saw now—what he wore flared around him like a wizard’s cape—was suffering, hunger for conclusion: life or death. “Old Man Death,” in Martin Orrick’s phrase, was evidently tempted. Again and again he sniffed the wind and came near, then miraculously drew back.

There was a party at the Orricks’ high-gabled, pillared house, gray under starlight, the security lamp, and the shadow of trees—the roof and square tower surrounded like a graveyard by wrought-iron fence, and the hill on which the pretentious, severe old house stood (and the horse-barn, chicken house, smokehouse, and pump house) surrounded by low, shaggy mountains and, in the valley to the east, the silent, wide Mississippi. It was a party for one of Martin Orrick’s students, who had that day passed her comprehensive exams. Though the house shook with music and light came bursting from every narrow rectangular or round-arched window—though cars stood everywhere, glinting like