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

placid, all-forgiving Methodist piety, proving in her brother’s hushed, worried house that, though it may not be the case that “a soft answer turneth away wrath,” it is certainly true that it can leave wrath speechless, fuming, and more terrible than before. Her brother, who had his own ways of dealing with things, would sit rocking on the porch, his narrow head tipping in rhythm with the rocker, his crafty, wickedly humorous eyes gazing off through the peach trees that edged his front lawn—his sister in the lumpy gray armchair beside him, Lulu in the house banging pots and pans as if seeing what it took to knock holes in them—and he would say, for instance, “Sis, I b’lieve you better move on into Donald’s before Lulu gets so riled I got to shoot her.”

Mostly, during her Missouri visits, she stayed with Joan’s parents, Donald and Emmy. She was an even-tempered, generous woman who, little as she had, supported more charities than a man could shake a stick at. She would gladly mind the children, wash the dishes, dust-mop the floors, do whatever was needed, though it was not in her nature to notice, especially in a house as meticulously, inhumanly German-clean as Emmy’s, that things needed doing. She would sit in the livingroom reading old copies of the Reader’s Digest or taking a little nap sitting upright in her chair, her head supported by her goiter, and it would never occur to her to wonder what on earth had become of Emily (she was down in the basement, doing the wash, feeling persecuted); or she would sit in the kitchen, hands folded on the table, talking about old times or kinfolk, while Emmy washed and wiped the dishes, cut up celery and carrots, peeled potatoes, shucked peas, husked corn, sifted flour, made lemonade and tea, and Emmy would answer Grandma Davis’s questions with seeming interest or would remark, “Well ye-es,” or “I declare.” Since, like most people, Donald and Emmy made abstract, general human virtues of the particular natures they happened to possess, they never dreamed of hinting to Grandma Davis that if she was going to live with them—eat their food, use their telephone, sleep in their bed, pile her amber hairpins on the dresser that was theirs—she should try to be a little more help. Asking her to work would have tried their basic timidity, and since they, in her place, would have seen at a glance what needed doing and would have done it, they could only feel she took terrible advantage of their hospitality. She would have been shocked and hurt if she’d ever had the faintest inkling of how they felt—if she’d known, for instance, that when she was well out of earshot Donald would sometimes call her, with a giggle and a blush, “the Queen.”

For all that, she was in fact something of a queen. Much of the day she wrote letters in her room, keeping up with the friends and relatives she had left, or sending whatever little pittance she might have to needy Indians, orphans, southern Negroes, churches or medical stations in Africa and India, Oklahoma and New York. She was a preserver of traditions and rituals, telling the children stories of the family, how her father’s people had come up from South Carolina to Kentucky and eventually to Missouri—you could walk in a straight line all day long and never leave Frazier land—or she would gather them around her chair and read the Bible to them, explaining the meaning of everything, explaining without rancor—with sympathy, in fact—how the Jews, despite all the warnings of the prophets, had betrayed Our Lord and had been forced, exactly as the prophets foretold, to wander the face of the earth all these centuries, despised by mankind, and had never been granted a home. “It’s a strange thing, a terrible strange thing,” she said thoughtfully, almost with distress, but never for an instant would she question her Maker’s plan.

Buddy Orrick would remember all the rest of his life certain moments from those times Grandma Davis had spent with them, talking of Jesus and heaven’s golden streets and angels. He would remember her reading of the story of Samuel, and how deeply impressed he had been by its message: if ever he should hear a voice call his name in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, he should answer, “Here am I, Lord.” Joan would remember not the briefest flicker of those pleasant times—perhaps she’d experienced fewer of them; more likely she’d seen past Grandma Davis’s opinions instinctively and, when the old woman talked, let her mind wander. What she remembered—not clearly, but with the greatest pleasure—was a book her mother had read to her, a large book with pictures that had a great deal of purple in them, the story of Mr. Mixiedough, a story that somehow involved the whole world’s becoming dark.

Though most of her old Missouri friends were dead, Grandma Davis could count on seeing those who were left, or at least all those within driving distance of Florissant, Missouri, because they came to the meetings of the Cemetery Association.

Long before Joan and Buddy’s time there had been, on an abrupt, sunlit rise in a hollow—a place unreachable now except by an overgrown farm lane—a square, white church with plain glass windows and a bell tower built like a wooden box with a well roof over it. In the yellowed photograph on Joan Orrick’s wall, the church is a clean, well-carpentered building as sturdy and simple as a Shaker chair, so pure of line, so right in its proportions, so decorous—even the hitching posts as strong and direct as good sculptures—that the mind is teased toward wonder at the taste and common sense of the long-dead farmers, blacksmiths, storekeepers, and carpenters who built it. Two of the hitching posts remain, and the tree that in the photograph was a ten-foot-high sapling by the square front door is now a large