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

leaping up independent of him, as if perhaps a shout could drive the memory back into its darkness. Driving the big Farmall F-20 over rocky fields, dust rising behind him or, when he turned into the wind, falling like dry rain until his face and hands were as dark as a Negro’s and his hair was thick and stiff—the hills all around him greener every day, the spring wind endless and steady and sweet with the smell of coming rain—he had all the time in the world to cry and swear bitterly and hate himself. He had not loved his brother—or anyone—as much as he should have, he thought, as much as he now helplessly and for the most part without showing it loved his father and mother and sister and, a short while later, his new, red-headed baby brother. He was basically incapable of love, he thought. He was simply a bad person, a spiritual defective.

He had always told himself stories to pass the time when driving the tractor, endlessly looping back and forth, around and around over a twenty-acre field, fitting the land for spring planting. He told them to himself aloud, taking all parts in the dialogue—here where no one could see or overhear him, half a mile or more from the nearest house—gesturing, making faces (exactly as he’d do in the study where he wrote his short stories and novels, some fifteen years later). Once all his stories had been of sexual conquests—always very chaste; lasciviousness was not one of his weaknesses—or of heroic battle with, for instance, escaped convicts or kidnappers who, unbeknownst to anyone, had built a little shack where they kept their captives (female and beautiful) in the woods beside the field where he worked. But now they were all of self-sacrifice, pitiful stories in which, as in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, he made something, at last, of his worthless life by throwing it away to save some other, fit to live. At some point in these stories he would confess his worthlessness, naming all his faults and giving numerous examples, granting himself no mercy; and, absurd as it may sound, he would weep honest tears of remorse as he angrily denounced himself. If on some unconscious level he hoped he might in this way ground his guilt and sorrow, the trick did not work. The foulness of his character (as it seemed to him) became clearer and clearer in his mind until, like his father, he began to toy in earnest with killing himself. As it would do all his life, his chest would fill with anguish, as if he were drowning or bleeding internally, and his arms and legs would grow shaky with weakness, until he had to stop the tractor and sit for a few minutes sobbing. But he lacked even the strength of character to kill himself, as it seemed to him. He was finally indifferent to the agony his mother and father suffered—otherwise wouldn’t he have killed himself long ago? Once at night his father found him up in the pitch-dark silo, lying in the corn ensilage, crying, and he climbed in through the silo door and felt his way over to him and took him into his arms and tried to speak to him but couldn’t, since now he too was crying; and Buddy was aware—though he could do nothing about it—that whereas his father’s crying was real, his own was self-conscious, false. Bits of ensilage had gotten under Buddy’s collar, cold and tickling, and his mind would not ignore the unpleasantness, would not, whatever his wish, abandon itself to grief.

Thus it seemed to him that everything in the world condemned him, and condemned him in vain, since he lacked the nobility of heart to feel pain as he should. When the wind was high outside his window at night, making the screens and pinetrees groan like sorrowing ghosts, he wanted to feel horror, recognition of his state of damnation; but he felt only unloved and afraid, felt above all, perhaps, a tawdry embarrassment over the fact that, day after day, his family must see him, strangers must see him, knowing what they all must know, that he had killed his brother. That was the heart of it: he was tawdry—though the word was not one he knew at that time. That was what he hated most in his innumerable faults: they were tawdry.

He was forever telling lies—for no earthly reason, not to hide things, not to make himself seem better than he was, not even to hurt people, though sometimes the lies did turn out to do harm. It was an astonishing thing, and even more astonishing that he could do nothing about it. He made up story after story, things he’d seen, people he’d met. He told friends at school that his family was Polish and had changed the family name. (In later years he would claim and even to some extent believe that he was Welsh, though the only Welsh blood he possessed was that of his carpenter grandfather, who was only half Welsh himself.) He told his art teacher, merely to make conversation—he had at the time a great, sad crush on her—that a cow had died last night. When she ran into his father the following day she asked about it, with great sympathy. Buddy Orrick, thinking of his stupid habit, would grind his teeth and clutch his head in both hands, or sometimes jerk angrily at his hair. Also he was lazy. He simply couldn’t make himself do his school assignments. He would swear at himself aloud and order himself to work with furious indignation (he would all his life be one of those people who talk to themselves); but it was useless, the very sight of the printing on the pages of his textbooks filled him with a drowning sensation like sorrow or perhaps anger, though the work was not hard. He would get out his French horn