Aberration of Starlight

~ ~ ~

He barely hears the soft whispering, the sighing, of the tall sweet grass of the churchyard as the twilight comes down and the first fireflies begin their slow erratic scribbling on the blue air. Should he come to mind, one sees him on the crumbling stone steps of the church across the road from the farmhouse, a curiously elegant figure in that decidedly inelegant boarding-house world, dressed in rumpled summer whites and old black-and-white spectators, luminous against the softer, chalky white of the wooden building. He is tapping a stick against the edge of the step on which he sits.

His head is slightly inclined toward the churchyard as if he is listening for the sound of women’s laughter as it was, faint and musical, during the Sunday evening church fairs of years before; swept now nervously away and up, into the dark leaves of the old elms, by a sudden damp gust that bursts out from behind the faded red of the farm buildings sprawled in thin gloom beyond the white house, so that there is left again but the sighing of the grass, of which he now becomes cognizant. He places his stick across his lap and he too sighs.

He is uncomfortably afflicted by an odd loneliness for his recently dead wife, yet he knows that he is better off without her and her claustrophobic oppression of him. That spirit which he still possesses within him is cruelly mangled; the rest rots in the ground of Holy Cross with Bridget. In a sense he is indeed but a white figure, nothing more, perfectly two-dimensional. He stands now, leaning his weight on his stick, looking past the farm buildings and across the fields rolling toward the smudged bluish foothills over which summer lightning shivers: Louis Stellkamp is driving the cows in, he hears their faint lowing and the barking of the mangy herd dog. His grandson is out there in the fields, running behind the cows, clapping his hands and grunting in imitation of Louis.

His daughter sits on the porch with three other guests in the soft mixed light of the evening and the lampglow from the dining room. Frieda and Eleanor are clearing the supper dishes from the tables. He looks across the road at his daughter, also in white, his chin up in reproach, but she does not see him, or she pretends not to see him. He bangs his stick sharply against a step, twice, then another time, the cracks sudden and decisive in the quiet. She still does not look at him, or, in any case, he cannot see whether she does or not. Ralph Sapurty, rocking slowly and smoking a cigar, raises his arm and waves, then lets it drop; the old man does not acknowledge him. The fool in his Weber and Fields plus fours talks so much he spits, and his wife with a face that would stop a clock! Grace Sapurty is there too, he knows, although he has left his pince-nez in his room: he can make out the bilious pink of one of her flouncy, silly dresses, and hear her high laughter as she tells another story about her wonderful son and his hardware store in Elizabeth. The fourth figure leans against the porch railing, half sitting; it is, of course, that of Tom Thebus. The old man feels a rush of helpless anxiety and anger and sits again. The mosquitoes will eat you alive over there! he hears Grace Sapurty call to him, and he waves toward the porch, dismissing her concern. The thin bitter sweetness of citronella is now apparent to him, the scent of summer, Bridget in her shapeless white dresses, the flash of her gold tooth.

He reaches into his breast pocket for a cigarette, but at that moment sees the flare of a match on the rapidly darkening porch and watches as Tom Thebus lights his pipe, the flame wavering and shifting, and he pushes the Camels back into his pocket. He imagines the heavy, false smell of his tobacco lacing the odor of citronella. How he loathes men who smoke pipes! He does not, or will not remember that he, as a young man, occasionally smoked one, but he refuses to remember almost anything of his youth — it seems a vast turmoil of sadness, wreckage, and waste. Bridget, her gold tooth, her white dresses, her false girlish voice when she was trying to make an impression.

The lightning shimmers again over the distant fields and hills, indistinct in the rain that pours down upon them, and the thunder booms closer. The wind is steady now in his face, the elms thrashing, and he rises to cross the road to the porch. Tom Thebus, he knows, will greet him with a pleasantry, and his daughter will avoid his eyes. Grace Sapurty will make a joke about sugar melting in the rain, as she has made the joke for eleven summers now, her fat arms a shocking white against the pink ribbons and pink bows and pink pleats. He descends the church steps as the first heavy, warm drops pock the dust of the road, his spectators raising little puffs of dust, there, and there, there, they hang in the air as if they might hang so forever.