October Light Read Free

stared with nothing worse than a malevolent leer into the fireplace. “They was a rough, ill-bred lot, for the most pot, them glorious foundling fathers. But one thing a man can say of ’em that’s true: they wasn’t fat pleasure-loving self-serving chicken-brained hogs such as people are nowadays.”
    He looked at the ceiling, and the boy looked up too. The old woman had stopped pacing. The old man squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his head, then opened them, staring in the direction of his knees. He pursed his lips and sucked at his teeth, and his bushy white eyebrows were red in the glow of the firelight. Perhaps for an instant he felt a touch of remorse, but if so he got rid of it. He nodded in thoughtful agreement with himself. “They was a rough, ill-bred lot—‘filthy rabble,’ as General Geahge Washington called ’em—but there was things they believed in, a sma’ bit, ennaway: a vision, you might say, as in the Bible. It was that they lied for and fought for and, some of ’em, croaked for. What will people lie for now, eh boy? Soap and mattresses, that’s what they’ll lie for! Coca-Cola, strip-mines, snowmobiles, underarm deodorants! Crimus! Thank the Lord those old-timers can’t be hollered back to life. There’d be bloody red hell to pay, believe you me, if they saw how we’re living in this republic!”
    He groped for the glass beside his foot and chuckled, still full of lightning but maliciously pleased at the ghastly idea of the foundling fathers coming staggering from the graveyard—hollow-eyed and terrible, their blue coats wormy, musket-barrels dirt-packed—and starting up a new revolution. He glanced at the boy and saw that, hands still folded, he was looking up timidly at the ceiling. Not meaning it quite as an apology, though it was, the old man said: “Never mind, do her good,” and waved his long hand. “She be asleep by now.” He sipped his whiskey, and when he’d lowered his glass to the carpet beside his iron-toed shoe again, he discovered his pipe was out. He reached into the pocket of his shirt to get a match, struck it on a stone of the fireplace, and held it to his pipebowl.
    The boy could not help understanding that the rant was serious, nor could he help knowing—though he couldn’t understand it—that he himself was in some way, at least in the old man’s eyes, in alliance with what was wrong. Staring at the flames, finding forms in the logs—an owl, a bear with its arms extended—the two were not seeing the same thing at all. The old man had been born in an age of spirits, and lived in it yet, though practically alone there, and filled with doubts. When the windows of his house, on a cold winter morning, were adazzle with flowers, forest-scapes, cascades and avalanches, he believed—except if he stopped to think—that Jack Frost had done it, best painter in the world, as James Page’s sharp-eyed old uncle used to say. The grandson, who lived in a warmer house, had never seen such windows. The old man believed, except if he stopped to think, in elves and fairies, in goblins and the Devil, in Santa Claus and Christ. The boy had been told since he was small that such things were just stories. And in the exact same semidark level of his mind, the old man believed in that huge old foul-mouthed bear of a man Ethan Allen, whose spectacles lay yet in the Bennington Museum, along with his account at the Catamount Tavern, which he’d lived next door to, the brown writing firm and unmythic as the writing of Jedediah Dewey, hellfire preacher, whose great-great-great-great-grandson Charles built fine eighteenth-century furniture for friends and could be seen here and there throughout New England with his matched black team and one of his buggies or his high, polished sleigh, sitting there grinning in the forty-below weather when cars wouldn’t start. The old man