Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

asked herself—or meekly asked God—how many parents (not that she’d dream of mentioning her opinion to a living soul) had a daughter like their Joan?

Joan’s father’s religion—or at any rate so Martin Orrick would describe it in one of his later, more unreadable novels—was “of a sort virtually impossible to defend in a world which finds its fundamental verities in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch”—the world Martin Orrick would howl at with all the volcanic rage of his convulsive, misanthropic soul (much to his profit, ironically, so that the rage would grow more fierce, more unjust and cruel, the prose more eccentric and bizarre).

Joan’s father was a more or less classic Midwestern Protestant. He’d been raised in the Coldwater Baptist Church not far from Possum Hollow, a house of rabid Scotch-Irish fundamentalists where even those who were inclined to moderation must sooner or later be swept into the current of avid self-righteousness and cowering self-hate by loose talk of heaven and the slime of the earth, God’s abundant love and wild-animal rage against all who offended his dignity or law. Martin Orrick would write: “Such churches have grown rare in America; not, one suspects, because people have grown wiser but because the weather has changed. Such churches thrive—not cynically, but in answer to ancient human needs—on extreme poverty, ignorance, and the unhealthy certainty that can come from living too far from books, too close to nature, whose laws are not ours; they thrive on a high rate of infant mortality—cholera, diphtheria, scarlet fever, plague—and a profound distrust of strangers. It is a curious fact that for the most part the warnings and admonitions of such a church, however dire, however vivid the imagery that engulfs and enflames them, are not aimed at the present congregation at all but at those who have stayed home on a given Sunday morning, breaking the community’s phalanx wall, or the warnings are fired, like shots into a woodlot in the middle of the night, at the prowling, potentially dangerous unfamiliar—the German, the Frenchman, the Negro, or the sharp-eyed Injun boy over by the woodshed. It was the stranger, not the Baptist, who drank, swore oaths, and did no work. It was marriage to the stranger that led to madness or idiocy or the rolling-eyed human mule. It was only when they slipped into the stranger’s ways, taking to drink, or taking into bed some gentile wife (as an earlier breed of intransigeants had it) that the wrath of the Fundamental Church came down like an axe on the heads of its own. When Donald Frazier set his mind on marrying a Catholic, the staddle on which his mother’s church was built had already begun to crumble, the walls inclined to lean, the dark-stained windows were beginning to crack and let light in. In short, he understood what they were saying, but did not believe them.

His father, it was said, had been in his youth a happy-go-lucky, footloose man who might have come to no good; but he married Lulu Thompson, who seems to have been, judging by old photographs, a stunningly beautiful woman except that she had deep-set, evil eyes. (Joan and Buddy, when they visited—she was then over ninety—would hear from her stories of hammer murders and the lynching of “coloreds.”) But photographs lie, and country wisdom is sometimes worth crediting. The children she reared, with John Frazier’s help, were all secure, decent people. The eldest died a hero in World War I, and John Elmer, the least successful of the sons financially, was a man Martin Orrick would years later describe, borrowing from Homer, as a man “such as men were then and are not now.” She was a religious fanatic, apparently; but she lived in harsh times. A central story in the family legend is that once they had a neighbor, a no-’count Frenchman, who would go on drunken benders and come shoot at the house with his gun, also at their chickens, sheep, and mules. According to one version—the version Joan Orrick was inclined to believe (her father wouldn’t speak of it, would only chuckle and blush and look down and say, “Well, you hear a lot of stories”)—the neighbor came one night into her grandpa’s pitch-dark barn, and her grandpa was up in the mow with his rifle, waiting, and shot him through the head when he walked through the door. Then her grandpa took off on the horse he had waiting and rode to the house of William Burke, a mile away, who was sheriff at the time, and turned himself in. “What John,” William Burke is supposed to have said, blinking the sleep away, rubbing at the roughness of his thick red neck, “you didn’t, John! Aw shit!” and got out of bed and woke up his sons, and while John Frazier sat smiling, sipping at William Burke’s whiskey (to calm his nerves), they rode half the night, to every neighbor for miles around, and they all congregated at John Frazier’s farm and shot holes upon holes into the dead man. Though they might’ve lawed John Frazier, they could hardly law the whole county, so they left the thing lie.

It can be said in defense of Joan’s evil-eyed grandmother that it was mostly thanks to her that Joan’s father and his brothers and sister got whatever education they got, whatever feeling they developed for hard work and duty, and a good part of whatever notion, mostly generous, they got of God. Though Donald and John Elmer were as afraid of their mother as were Emmy and Cora of the Catholic Church, they put their fear behind them with the same abandon their father had showed, the night he shot the Frenchman, and turned to Methodism. Joan’s father, all through the years of her childhood, listened to the sermons with gentle tolerance and no particular interest, viewing them simply as the opinions of one man (and a man with the