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

He nodded, noncommittal.

She had an image of him, all at once, living with Neva, growing weirder and weirder, dirtier, smellier, wilder of eye, and she had a flash of understanding, as if from outside herself, that she did not want him to destroy himself, and that finally it had nothing whatever to do with her own desires. “So you imagined,” he would say later, scornfully, when she told him of the feeling, and there was no way she could prove it was the truth. But she knew. It was like the free will argument he was always on about. For all his reasoning, for all his fancy logic, all his long-winded quotes, you knew when you were free and when you weren’t, it was as easy as that. Some things were certain—many things, in fact—and if reason undermined those certainties, it was best not to listen.

“Nevertheless,” she said firmly—she could not know until he told her later, that her tensed cheeks, her sternness made it seem like tyrannical assertion, an attempt to command his feelings—“I do love you.”

After he’d left, she asked herself in panic, “What in hell am I going to do in the godforsaken Ozarks?”

That night, because of the drugs, perhaps, she had a brief, frightening memory of the man she’d seen coming toward her through the rain, just before she’d fainted. He had his head slightly tipped, his arm stretched toward her as if he was greeting her, had been looking for her. His skin was gray, and for a moment it seemed to her that she remembered seeing Death. She toyed with the idea, knowing all the while that he’d been only an old man, perhaps an old man alarmed by her cries and hurrying to help her; and she remembered something she hadn’t thought about in years, that her Grandma Frazier was supposed to have seen Death many times. She’d seen him one day when she was a child, in church—or so she claimed and obviously believed. They were singing a hymn, and a stranger came into the back of the church—an elderly country man in a shabby black Sunday suit, his hands folded limply in front of him, his head just perceptibly moving, as if with palsy, his lips touched by little involuntary tremors—and he’d come timidly down the aisle, no usher noticing him or coming to his assistance, and he’d come to a bench where there was room to sit and had stopped there. He didn’t join the hymn, merely looked, with a somewhat curious, intent expression at a cousin of hers, a girl named Dora McClaren. When the congregation sat down, he too sat down. Then the sermon began—the message from the Lord, they’d called it then—and she’d stopped watching the man, though she could still feel his presence, still feel the oddity of no one at all’s having noticed him. Whenever she happened to glance over at him, he was still gazing as if thoughtfully at Dora. And then once when she glanced over, he was gone. She started as if from a dream and looked all around her and back down the aisle behind her, but it was as if the boards of the church floor had opened up and swallowed him. That night Dora McClaren took a fever; three nights later she was dead. No one believed Lulu Thompson’s story of the man she’d seen in church.

Joan pushed all that away, as she’d always done, or had always done at least since the age of twelve. She would never understand those misty times, she’d decided long ago, the days when Missouri was like a tropical jungle, full of snakes and vines and rich, dark green grasses, Indians, riverboat Negroes, dour, bushy-bearded Germans, lanky Scotchmen with eyes like flint—a time when every voting day meant murders and riots, when the Mississippi River had no bridges, only ferries, and the houses, like palaces, in downtown St. Louis were centuries apart from the cabins where country people chopped down trees and sank ploughs into the land and shot snakes. It was possible, perhaps, that her grandmother had told the truth about what she saw in plain daylight, walking along Halls Ferry Road, or sitting half asleep under a shade tree near Coldwater School. Looking at the faces in old photographs, the buildings sharp-edged, as if cut out of paper, the sky oddly luminous, she had the feeling, sometimes, that things might have been visible then that were visible no longer.

But what she mainly felt now, and only partly because she’d remembered again the stories of her grandmother’s second sight, was revulsion at the thought of returning to that place. It was a feeling she could never have explained to Martin—he demanded logic, reason, possibly because if she worked by those rules he could always win—and her feeling about Missouri was the very opposite of logical. She loved the place, loved her family, and did not want to be there. She could say no more. Where was it, then, that she wanted to be? That was the kind of question Martin would ask. Paris, perhaps. Geneva. How was she to know? For now, San Francisco. He would think it immoral that she had no idea where she wanted to live, what she wanted to become. It wasn’t immoral, it was good—but what was she to say? When he told stories of adventures he’d had with the children, things they’d said or seen, she felt cheated of a natural right. That too she wanted, to play with them as Martin did, let the hours slip by as a child’s hours do. She wanted everything, all of it—but not return, not roots, not a life she’d lived already.

She would learn, later, a metaphor for the helplessness she felt, when Martin and Paul would talk of the right and left lobes of the brain, the left one intelligent and verbal, tyrannical, the right a poor ignorant womanish thing, too stupid to say pencil when