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

of crazy joy. If he would condescend to go down with them into the storm cellar, he would stand near the foot of the stone steps listening, and as the roar came nearer, the boom-boom-boom of colliding, warring mountains and skies, his mingled excitement and welcome fear would make his eyes demonic. “Listen to it!” he would say, and the children, one on each side of him, would take his hands, thrilled and terrified, and would stand, knees bent, as if prepared to run for the darkest corner of the storm cellar, their white faces peering up the stairway at the crack of greenish light. She remembered that her peculiar uncle Zack used to stand—so people said—on the listing porch of his shanty in the woods and fire his shotgun at cyclones when they came near. And she remembered that once when someone spoke of it, her Grandma Hughes—her mother’s mother, who’d lived with them a while when Joan was four—had said, making everything strangely clear: “He likes cyclones.” (Grandma Hughes was tiny and wore floor-length skirts and a Mother Hubbard bonnet. Joan’s father had cut her toenails with hedge clippers. She rarely spoke and made very little sound when she walked. She got up early and worked steadily all day long, endlessly circling with her dust mop or broom, or patching at whatever little chores she could find to do. Sometimes she would suddenly smile.) And now, watching Martin, Joan happened to remember that her Grandpa Frazier, too, for all his gentleness and playfulness, had loved storms. How strange and complicated everything was—as if everything in the universe was secretly connected, tending toward some meaning too large for human beings but sure, just the same, and final, and perhaps serene. Then the cyclone was past, leaving nothing but a wide, sweet stillness, and she felt that in a moment something would come clear to her. Martin held out his arm to her. He said, “May I escort you back into the world, madam?” She smiled. The children were smiling too. Had she imagined all those fights? Imagined the drunkenness, the fear of her that showed in his eyes, or hatred? “Wah, mah goodness,” she said, “yo so kind, suh!” They waltzed toward the stairs.

One afternoon, almost by accident, Dr. Crouse, their general practitioner in Sikeston, made a discovery. If an X-ray was taken when she was standing up, it was strikingly different from one taken when she was lying down. He ordered an exploratory operation at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, by a Dr. Saul Krassner—“not much of a bedside manner, I’m told, but he’s one of the best in the business,” their Sikeston doctor said—and what he’d suspected proved true: she was a mutant, her internal organs weren’t anchored to her body walls, and, partly because of that, she had a malrotated colon. All that could cause discomfort, but it wasn’t the reason for the mysterious pain. She was one of those fairly rare people who grow adhesions, Dr. Krassner explained—delicate flesh tubers that begin in inflamed tissue—after a fall or an operation, for instance—and grope out through the darkness of the body—potato sprouts—tentacles of an octopus—thousands of little strands, completely invisible to the X-ray camera, feeling their way like timid snakes through the maze of her workings, closing around bone or intestine or liver, wrapping around the tiny electric switches of her nerves, locking her pain signals into the “on” position, so that from her knees to her shoulders she was one great howl of pain. When she was unusually tense, or went through a period of unusual exertion, the adhesions, like her muscles, tightened, closed like a fist. It had all begun, apparently, when as a child she’d had her appendix out—it was around the scar on her abdomen that the adhesion growth was thickest—but she’d suffered, since then, many falls, many blows. There were signs of those flesh weeds everywhere, groping through her body.

“What can be done about it?” Martin said. He sat absolutely still, pale.

“Well,” the doctor said, rubbing his hands, “periodic operation can keep tearing ’em out, or tearing a lot of ’em out, that is—”

“And starting up more—?”

“That’s the hooker, of course.” Dr. Krassner shook his head, one brief, hard jerk, as if marvelling at nature’s destructive cunning.

Joan and Martin waited.

“It’s something we have to live with,” the doctor said. “No use lying to ourselves, it’s a losing battle in the long run, but at least you get a good, long run. It’s not like being told you’ve got inoperable cancer. People can live years and years with this thing. But it hurts a lot, of course. Aye, there’s the rub. Makes life no bed of roses. We have to try to learn to ignore it, that’s all.”

Martin stood up, went over to the window. “We,” he said acidly. He couldn’t see, as she did, the doctor’s look. He was a man of maybe fifty, very tired, for all his false heartiness. He was not personally to blame for the world’s illnesses, though that moment he seemed, despite the bluster, willing to accept at least part of it. He took her hand and squeezed it a little roughly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Orrick.”

She nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

He said, “The reason I say we have to learn to ignore it is there’s really no hope of getting rid of that pain, anyway not all of it. Kind of doses that would take, the drugs would get you quicker’n the other thing. You grasp my meaning?”

She nodded, just perceptibly, the faintest possible stirring of her head against the pillow.

“You’ll be feeling, by the way, a whole lot less pain for a while now—that is, after you’ve mended from the cutting—the operation. You may have—who knows? We never know about these things. Everybody’s different. Takes all kinds, they say.” He flashed his grin, then glanced over at Martin, who was staring out the window. Forest Park lay below them, where she and Martin and their families