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

he, the most helplessly clumsy incompetent in the world, as he viewed himself, could do tricks that amazed his family and made even John Napper, who was really a magician, beam with pleasure. And so he had accepted without question what he read in Uncle George’s books about palmistry, and when he read, for the first time, John Ferndean’s palm, one afternoon in London, he looked at the lifeline and felt suddenly dizzy, terrified, as if the earth had swung off course. His eyes flushed with tears, and he couldn’t think what to say. Nadine Ferndean said, leaning hard toward him, a Taurus, a woman of mysterious psychic energy—as he knew because once he’d held a coin suspended from a string above her head, and it had spun wildly, exactly as it did when he held it above Dennis Ferndean’s head—“Tell us about the lifeline.” He’d sucked in his breath and said laughing, scared to death, “According to his lifeline he should be dead by now.” All of them had laughed, but Nadine had leaned hard at John Ferndean, saying—who knows what it meant?—“You see, John, you see?”

John Ferndean said to Martin: “I can’t help feeling I asked for it. It’s hard to believe you got no control whatever. I read these Indian mystics, and when they tell me a man dies by choice, I believe ’em. But ye know, it’s peculiar. I wake up in the mornin, and the sun’s shinin in, and I jump out of bed like a cockerel off ’is roost. I never knew anybody that liked getting up more than I do. I run out and feed the horses, and ye’d think I got some kind of electricity in me pants.” He grinned. Dying had no effect on his grin. “You, now, lad, if ye woke up dead some mornin it’d make you a Christian. ‘Praise God’s mercy,’ ye’d say.”

Martin Orrick would remember, mainly, one image. The Ferndeans came to supper, and Dennis and his mother came blazing in, noisy as a cyclone, faces shining, eyes wide. Martin walked out onto the pillared front porch to meet John. He wasn’t there yet. It was a night without stars, no light but the yellow light coming from the house and, out by the barn, the bluish white light of the security lamp. Then, in the darkness around the huge old maple, he saw John Ferndean coming, slowly, carefully, like an old, old man. He had the huge sculptor’s body he’d always had, the same wildly, generously curling hair; but cobalt treatments had made his stomach bad, and his muscles, for all their size, were no longer in tune. He came through the darkness cautiously, sadly, and it seemed he might have come to Martin Orrick’s views. But then, coming out of his absentminded daze, he grinned and said, “Hey, lad,” as if they’d all survive.

It was a ghastly time, and not the least of its horror was that Martin was soberly, desperately, in love, and much as he’d have liked to have kept that fact from his dying friend, it was a secret impossible to keep. Joan, recognizing a threat more serious than any she’d ever had to deal with before, fought more ferociously than usual to hold him. The scenes at the Orrick house became monstrous. Once, when he was so drunk he couldn’t walk ten feet without lurching and falling but insisted, all the same, that he was going to Sarah, Joan hit him on the head with a fireplace log, hoping to save him by knocking him out (also, as she’d readily admit, she was furious, half-crazy with jealousy). The sharp edge of the split log cut deep, but Martin chose, that night, to be indestructible. He turned and slugged her in the face with all his might—her cheek, the next day, would be enormously swollen, so that her eye was squeezed shut, and the whole right side of her face blue-black—and then, in a daze, blood rushing down his face and the side of his head, he ran out to the truck he’d bought just two weeks before and headed it down the driveway, the big Alsatian on the seat beside him. Because he was dazed, he couldn’t remember where Sarah Fenton lived—couldn’t remember her name in fact, though his heart ached for her kindness, her strange, all-forgiving reasonableness—and so he simply drove, urgently, on and on, crazily hunting. When he came to himself, he was in Indianapolis. Perhaps it was his parents in New York State that he’d meant to run to. He stopped for gas—he’d no doubt stopped before, but he couldn’t remember—and while the attendant filled the tank, Martin went into the men’s room and saw, in amazement, how he looked, caked blood on his forehead and running down the sides of his nose, his hair stiff and messy, his chin darkly stubbled. He washed the blood off, as well as he could, then grimly marched back to the truck, paid for the gas, and turned around, heading back toward Missouri. He’d reached his decision. He would end the marriage, choose Sarah; but first he would wait out John Ferndean’s death and would take John’s family and his own to Spain as he’d promised to do. It would be a fitting conclusion, a natural breaking point. He had no doubt that the decision was right, though the thought of losing his children made the tears run gushing down his cheek. As for Joan, he had no love left for her, he thought. It had finally happened, what he’d expected for years: she’d tried to kill him. “That’s not right,” Joan said hours later, weeping, “I was trying to knock you out. I was trying to save you.” And he realized in guilty confusion that no doubt that was true. Nevertheless, he told her his decision. “Martin,” she said, “don’t do it. Please.” He said dully, icily, “It’s done already.”

Joan searched wildly for a way to defend herself, make him