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

sophists’ way, or speaking out merely to keep his hand in. The table was large, and though at least three sons and their wives would be seated there, the children—Buddy and his cousins—were there too, on scriptural grounds, listening bug-eyed, spooning in food without looking at it, watching for Grandpa or Uncle Fred or Uncle Bill to bring his fist down again, or for Grandma to reach out as if casually and capture a fly. Like puppies who haven’t understood rough play and snap at a heavy old shepherd in earnest, and go sprawling, yelping, knocked across the stubble by a huge, fierce paw, the wives of the uncles would sometimes mistake the loud shouting for anger instead of mere strong rhetoric, persuasion by a show of cannon power, and would cry tears of fury as they leaped into the battle, defending what was right. The husband himself was as likely as anyone else at the table to say, “Faddle, Louise!” or “Bosh!”

It was a game all old Yankee farm families understand, though to Buddy’s uncles’ wives and even to his mother it sometimes looked senseless.

“How can you eat with all that shouting?” Buddy’s mother asked his father once, at their own kitchen table in the big brick house. “It makes my stomach upset!”

His father sat crooked, leaning like a milk can standing in a rut, waiting for the milk truck. He had a catch in his back—pain, he said, like some Indian had shot him in the kidneys with a flint-headed arrow—but it was haying time now (that was always when his back pains were worst) and if he meant to beat the rain he had no alternative, he had to keep a move on. He smiled as if apologetically, holding the cheap yellow plate with his left hand, forking with his right. “It’s interesting,” he said. “Helps you figure out in your mind what’s true.”

Knowing what was true and what was mere illusion mattered a great deal to Duncan Orrick, as it mattered a great deal to his father and brothers and would matter to his son—and as it did not matter in the least to Donald Frazier or to his daughter Joan, who played life’s most difficult passages by ear and made none of the mistakes Duncan Orrick made, though again and again they stumbled where his kind moved surely.

He was a powerfully built, good-looking, shy man with a farmer’s large belly as hard to the touch as a tractor tire. His voice when he sang hymns—or when, working around the farm, he sang “Redwing,” or “Where have you been Billy boy, Billy boy?” or “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen”—was a sweet, thin, high baritone, perfect in pitch and phrasing by natural gift, and so oddly, perhaps unconsciously sad that one paused a moment, looking at the ground, and listened. He had overcharged emotions, as his son Buddy would have: he cried easily at movies or when he heard music or poetry, a tendency that embarrassed him but one he could live with. We see in old photographs, especially one of his father’s whole family, with Luther and Caroline Orrick seated and the sons and one daughter gathered around them, solemnly attired, the boys in knickerbockers, the girl in a long, oddly bunched white dress, that Duncan Orrick, then nine, had a faraway look that instantly set him apart from all the others, the look of a poet, or of a boy marked for suicide or drunkenness—not at all the unearthly, demonic look Joan’s grandmother Lulu Frazier sometimes had, but a look otherworldly in a different sense, elfin, mystical.

He stood, in Buddy’s childhood, five foot eleven, as tall as anyone in his family had ever grown. Five foot eleven was about average among western New York farmers at that time—there were men a foot shorter, like Walt Cook or Homer Gill, but there were also, for some reason, men like Jim Hume, Sr., or Sam Parise, who looked down on the world from where the air was thin, as Buddy’s father would say, up seven and a half feet off the ground. Duncan Orrick’s stature was of another kind.

Though he had overstrong emotions that might easily have led him into sentimentality—the same too painful, too easily triggered emotions that his father in his own life had hidden by bluster and an affected sternness—he was not swayed by his emotions to an espousal of wrong causes or misjudgment of men. Though he had a streak of boyish weakness, a timidity that amounted almost to cowardice, he would not be ruled by it but acted bravely, even courageously, standing up to dangers in a way that might bring credit to a man with twice Duncan Orrick’s natural courage. As a representative to the National Synod of the Presbyterian Church, he spoke on the floor in opposition to church support of the Cesar Chavez California lettuce boycott, an action that demanded more courage than he would have thought he had. Though he was impressed by Chavez—despite the man’s bullying arrogance—and was moved by his statement on the suffering of Chicano farm laborers, it seemed to him wrong that the church legislate the conscience of its members, supporting the destruction of a lettuce crop in a year of world-wide famine; and despite the cynical and monstrous crimes of California agro-businesses (like all small farmers, he hated agro-business in any shape or form with a murderous passion that brought tears to his eyes and made him stammer), he believed it wrong that the church should support one farm union against another and approve the ruin of small farmers whose nonunion help consisted, in California as everywhere else, of their unpaid or grossly underpaid sons and daughters.

“If the small farmer can’t compete honestly, let him get out,” said the man at Chavez’s side. He smiled like a plump, sharp-whiskered cat, knowing well enough that the man in the aisle was himself a small farmer. The man on the platform was comfortable with