October Light Read Online Free

could be uplifted by the conflict of recordings rasping through the snow-flurried air; hard to believe that the nodding, mechanical Santa in the Bennington Bookstore window could be drawn to the house by the magic of a Christmas tree cut with an axe on Mount Prospect’s crest and sledded, the children all squealing, to the woodshed door.
    He did not of course, when he stopped to think, believe in elves or believe that bees can talk with fairies or pigs with wind, or that bears are visitors from another world; did not believe in Jack Frost or even, with his whole heart and mind, Resurrection. Though he muttered spells from time to time—though for luck he spit left or made a circle to the right, and carried with him everywhere he went a small stick (a stick of ash) and a rattlesnake’s skull, protection against changelings—in even these he did not, when he considered carefully, believe. He believed in the most limited natural magic, the battle of spirit up through matter, season after season; and he believed that his ghosts, insofar as they were real or had the power of things real, were allies in the grim, universal war, as were the huge crayon paintings—the work of some nun of the Bennington Convent, years ago—that he liked to take people to see, now and then, at the Bennington Museum. He knew many such allies in the struggle toward ascent—church music, for instance, or Ruth Thomas’s poetry, even his own life’s work caring for dumb animals: horses, dairy cows, bees, pigs, chickens, and, indirectly, men.
    He glanced at the boy, feeling guilty, as if the child were his judge. “Never mind,” he said aloud. He thought of a phrase Estelle Parks used, one of Sally’s friends: “Very fragile, this world.” He nodded, full of gloom. His world, he knew for pretty sure, was beyond fragility. Smashed. Well, tell it to the bees. Yet he listened to the wind even now, unconsciously, for some faint suggestion of articulate speech, and he glanced uneasily at the ceiling again, imagining his sister asleep, sunk into an absolute loneliness like death, just short of oblivion, molested by dreams.
    He was reminded of his wife, then of her tombstone, down in the village cemetery, glossy. “Oh James, James,” she would say to him. He sighed. His anger was foolishness, tonight as always. All life was foolishness, a witless bear exploring, poking through woods. He couldn’t remember very well how his wife had looked when they were young. Even when he studied the picture album—a thing he rarely did—it was no help. He remembered one single moment—picking her up in his buggy one afternoon; an instant of emotion like a snapshot. The air had been yellow.
    He gazed into the fire, hunting some sharper recollection in its flickering light.
    Concerning his sister, as it happened, the old man was wrong. She had paused above the table beside the bed, weeping hot, pinkish tears of indignation and spite, planning out her definite and terrible revenge—she was a demon for revenge, he ought to know that by now—and happening to look down when she’d just rubbed the tears away, pushing her hankie past the bottoms of her blue plastic spectacles to her eyes, she had noticed on the floor below the table, and had bent down to pick up for closer inspection, a dog-eared paperback with what looked to be pinpricks or possibly tooth-prints and ugly bits of grit and dark stain on the cover—coffee grounds, or maybe wet-and-then-later-dried-out bits of oat-grist. It was torn half to pieces, as if it had been run over, and the binding glue was weakened so that the pages were loose and great chunks of the story were fallen away. It was probably one of her niece’s books, the boy’s mother’s, she supposed—though why the girl had saved it, ruin that it was, only the good Lord knew. Anyway this was where the niece had fixed her make-up, before leaving for her