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

these conflicts, in fact thoroughly enjoyed them. Duncan Orrick had no great distaste for a verbal fight himself, at the local Elba school board meeting, or at a meeting, back home, of the Board of Elders at his church. But here, he knew, he was out of place, outclassed. It was a forbidding, ultramodern auditorium that smelled of cigar smoke, seats like theater seats falling away—as it seemed to Duncan Orrick’s myopic eyes—like a restless sea. In the front of the room, the speaker’s table, the chair’s glowing gavel, the silver microphones on long, silver booms, filled him with awkwardness and apprehension.

No one rose to help him. He resisted the powerful temptation to sit down. Red-skinned and uncomfortable, his left foot hurting in its new black shoe, he said mildly, but with a trembling voice that rang through the hall, “Get out of business, you say. You and agro-business are on the same side there, with all your money and power and certainty you’re right. Against odds like that, a small man’s got hardly any choice but to stand up against you.” There were shouts of “Hear, hear!”

The Synod talked, too, about women’s liberation, about the Supreme Good as biblically male, about the need for rewriting the sexist hymn-books—“Faith of our fathers, living still.” He watched in anguish as furious, angry-hearted women read passages of Scripture that, it seemed to them, reviled their kind, or read, in shrill voices, lines out of hymns or standard prayers. From time to time the assembly laughed—when it was pointed out, for instance, that altering the hymnbooks would cost five million dollars, “assuming we make all the changes ourselves, instead of hiring an army of expensive lady poets.” The laughter troubled him, filled him with distress and helpless confusion in the same way the anger of the women had done. He had difficulty breathing, all at once. He was old, at the time of this Synod meeting, and his heart was not good. He had chest pains more or less constantly, especially in winter, and sometimes when something upset him they flamed higher, became alarming.

His wife of fifty years sat beside him, listening, not laughing with the others except for an occasional “Mpf!” as if at something in her mind, and when she looked over at him now she did not at once see that something was wrong with him. “What will they think of next!” she said, and smiled her crooked smile—still pretty, still lively, though she was seventy-two. It was a fact that she did not like these young women, their strident voices, their extreme, intentionally abrasive opinions, above all their absolute indifference to what was for her (as for her cousin Donald Frazier) the central truth of the Christian religion, Love God, and thy neighbor as thyself.

“They’re right,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised and perhaps a trifle cross, but willing to consider his point of view.

“But they’re asking for a whole new religion,” he whispered. “They can’t understand it’s a historical process—the Virgin birth, the Apostle’s Creed …”

She understood what he meant. Like all old, happily married couples, they’d been talking in a kind of code for years. She touched his hand. Hers was white and liver-spotted, his, dark red and rough, with cuts and scabs where he’d barked his knuckles prying a board loose or tightening a bolt with a wrench too large. “You should tell them, Duncan. You should raise your hand and tell them.”

“No, I can’t,” he said. He tried to get his breath.

“You should. It’s something they should think about.”

“No, no.”

She leaned closer to him, pursing her lips. “Are you all right?” she said.

“Perhaps I need some air.”

They got up, with difficulty, their bodies old and stiff, and moved toward the exit, he slightly tilted, favoring his back, she walking with a great rolling limp, legacy of the time, a few years earlier, when she’d broken her hip.

The woman on the platform was reading angrily, “… and the glory of children are their fathers.”

He was better, out on the street, walking.

She said, “I think you should have stood up and told them what you think, Duncan.”

“I couldn’t seem to get my breath,” he said. “But next time.”

Five

On two or three occasions when the two families met in Missouri, the reason for the visit was that Buddy’s family had driven out to pick up his Grandma Davis—his mother’s mother, Joan’s father’s aunt—who had been staying, for the past six months, with the Missouri cousins. She stayed with the Orricks normally, but it was in Missouri that she’d grown up—John Frazier’s twinkling, hell-raising sister—and it was in Missouri that she’d met her Welshman husband, a carpenter, and raised her children. The house she’d lived in had burned to the ground many years ago, and the friends of her childhood and the days of marriage—those who weren’t dead—were scattered now from coast to coast, living with relatives as she did, or at any rate most of them were. But even with her friends gone she loved Missouri and obviously belonged there. Though yellowish white now, her hair had once been red—like her brother’s, like Buddy’s mother’s, like Donald Frazier’s, like Joan’s—and her complexion, though faded, still carried a hint, like a painting’s undercoat, of the warmth that came from Missouri sunlight or the red Missouri earth. She could be happy anywhere, she always said, and it was true, no doubt; she loved to be with people, hear their stories, look carefully through their photograph albums, glance over at the children, observe their changes; but it was also true that whenever they drove across the Chain-of-Rocks Bridge, bringing her home for one of her visits, her face took on a mysterious peacefulness, as if she thought she was entering the Promised Land. She stayed sometimes with Betty Lou’s family, sometimes with her brother for a day or two. She didn’t get on well with her sister-in-law Lulu: against Lulu’s fierce Baptist righteousness she raised the impenetrable, infuriating battlements of her