Giovanni's Gift (37 page)

“I'll go with you,” I said, but Tate interrupted my own escape, saying, “Grant, can I have just another minute of your time?”

I shrugged at Helen, who left. Noah, too, took this hint and drifted away, leaving Graham Tate and me more or less alone at the periphery of this room of partyers. He spoke in a lowered voice as he handed me an envelope, “I want you to take a look at this when you get home tonight and consider carefully what's inside. You think you know what happened to Giovanni Trentas? What happened to him can happen to somebody else.”

“Did I just hear you confess?”

“You just heard me give you some very good advice, and I suggest you take it. Your welcome here has long since worn out.”

His smile, inappropriate and overbearing, backed me away from him. I said nothing. What more was there to say?

In the kitchen, Helen asked, “What happened? You look white as snow.” When she put her hand on my shoulder, it was as if I'd been shaken awake from yet another dream.

“Maybe Noah's right,” I said, lighting a cigarette with my now unsteady hand.

“About getting unlost?”

“Yeah, maybe he's right.”

“You're not lost, Grant. They're the ones who are lost.”

“And what about you?”

“Grant. You want to go home?”

“I'm all right,” taking a deep drag off the cigarette.

“You're sure?”

“I'm not sure about anything.”

“Look, you've done your duty. Edmé looked to me like she was ready to go, too.”

“We just got here.”

“You walk Edmé back to the ranch when she wants, and I'll catch up with you later.”

“But Tate's going to think—”

“Since when do you care what Tate thinks?”

She was right about Edmé, and maybe not wrong about me, and though we did stay on for another half hour or so, the two of us thanked the Lewises—Aunt Edmé embracing Jenn Lewis and genuinely wishing her nothing but best luck wherever she found herself in the future—and said good night. As she and I walked back up the creek road, we found again we needn't have brought the flashlight. The moon had risen, round and full and bright enough to cast shadows on the ground beside us. We stopped at the gate and stared at it for some moments before ascending that last meadow hill. There it soared, absolutely distinct in the cold spangled void above, so bright we could see its mountains, its luminous seas, its craters, its broken and irregular face, with such heightened clarity that it seemed impossible we couldn't reach out and impress our fingerprints on its dusty face.

Wesley Fulton, the man who had erected with his own hands the first structure at Ash Creek, had lived a long and decent life before he passed on to what he was certain would be an even longer and more decent life among kindred spirits above. The winter of 1965 was harsh, and the heavy blanket of snow which covered the fields and forests made it impossible to carry out his wishes to be buried on his own lands, beside his dead son, who would have been in his thirties by then had he lived, and who—he'd been convinced—would have stayed on the ranch, unlike his younger brother, Henry. For six weeks, then, the body lay in a temporary coffin, wrapped in winding sheets, and placed in the frozen barn until the snow should melt enough that Henry could come back and manage the burial.

Snow still clung in patches everywhere that March, but the time had come to put the poor man to rest, and so Henry and Edmé made the trip from the West Coast out to Ash Creek. With spade and fence-post digger, Wesley's only surviving son and Giovanni Trentas hammered their way down past the frostline, and got the plot ready. The funeral was attended by twenty stalwart souls, including Willa Richardson and her parents, a young, ambitious Graham Tate, and others.

After the funeral, Edmé returned to the coast. She and Henry had decided that she had best keep things going back home, while he stayed to help his mother put things in order, and figure out what to do about the administration of the ranch. What had passed between Willa and Henry at the funeral, an exchange of looks that ran deeper than anyone might have noticed, or some few words from Willa, which gave Henry the perilous impression that she and he shared this loss in a way that maybe Edmé and he did not—whatever had aroused them brought the beginnings of their affair to fruition much more quickly than even they could have expected, or desired.

Henry called her the night Edmé left, I learned later from Henry himself, when so much that had been dark became light, after those last few days of my own stay thirty years later at Ash Creek. The romance must have been impetuous and explosive. His judgment was surely mired by grief and obscured by the misgivings he must have felt at having the responsibilities of the ranch fall on his shoulders, since he went ahead with it, knowing he risked losing the love of his life in order to pursue Willa Richardson. Most details of their affair will always remain lost fragments in a secret story, but not all of them.

The decision to place Ash Creek in Giovanni's reliable hands followed Rebecca Fulton's insistence that she had no intention of moving into town, as Henry'd suggested she do, at least during the rough winters. She wasn't all that old, she said, and between her and Giovanni, with the help of outside labor, they could maintain much of the basic functioning of the ranch. Henry's idea to call on Willa's father to seek his help with arrangements for partnering annual livestock sales and other such things—for a commission, Richardson's concern would oversee for a time most of the market transactions having to do with Ash Creek—was not, of course, based only on business.

After Richardson and Henry were finished with their talk, maybe Willa came into the room to bring them refreshments, or maybe she simply asked Henry if he would like to take a walk and see their family operation. Then the flirtation would have continued, the downward glances and thoughts in both their minds: Is this only happening to me or does he feel it, too, does she feel it? And I can imagine the guilty self-doubts would come forth like a pattern on the loom of this inevitable weave. Remorse, shame, sanity—none of these feelings ultimately could have restrained them from the greater one of passion. Willa had a fierceness that would be reborn in her daughter one day, and Henry was guided by an intelligence which understood how precious this woman was, and that these days and weeks were theirs to seize.

Death was temporarily vanquished in the swirl of love. They met as often as they could. They maintained as socially chaste a disguise as was possible to protect their sudden friendship. If anyone in their acquaintance wondered about the propriety of this married man going to a dance recital with Willa Richardson, while his wife awaited his return home, no one brought it to their attention. Rebecca Fulton hadn't a clue, nor did the Richardsons, that Willa wasn't merely being supportive of a friend who'd lost his father.

Two people did find out, however, as did eventually a third. Giovanni, I believe, gave them a place to be alone together after that dance. He would have conspired because Henry was his best friend, but reluctantly since his friendship with Edmé was also close. He and Margery had averted their gaze, so to speak, knowing that soon Henry would go back to his wife, and hoping when that time arrived, the lovers would come to their senses and realize the madness of allowing it to go any further. Tate was the third person who would know of this adultery, or at least suspect, but given he had no claim on Willa then, nor any power over Henry, there wasn't much he could do about his suspicions other than watch and wait. His designs for the future involved maintaining the good graces of Willa. He pursued a young woman who was blind to him, quietly, with strategic slowness, believing his day would dawn.

Giovanni's hopes weren't altogether misguided. By the middle of April, Henry had done everything there was to do at Ash Creek, and the moment had come for him to go back to work and to Edmé. Neither he nor his lover could have known on the last night they spent in one another's arms—down in the very cabin where I stayed those weeks in the fall—that Willa was pregnant with Helen. But when Henry and Edmé returned that summer, Willa understood all too well what had happened. Giovanni had become her confidant, and while she may have tried to keep up a good facade for some weeks as the four of them were reunited, the front couldn't last for long. Willa arranged secretly to meet Henry one afternoon up at the cemetery, a place which had the advantage of privacy, and which was where she felt their liaison began and so was an appropriate place for it to end.

She told him she was pregnant, then went on to say, —I love you enough to know that it wouldn't be right to put you in the position of having to make some awful choice, so I've made a decision for both of us.

Henry was petrified, no doubt. A chill must have gripped his heart as he listened.

—I'm going away to have the child. Don't even try to contact me. Let me do this my way.

—But then what? It's
our
child.

—We put it up for adoption, and we never say a word about any of this to anyone.

—What about your parents?

—I'm old enough to go away for a while; they're always trying to get me to go abroad; maybe I'll have it overseas. But you're already asking questions. When I come back we'll be friends like we were before, but never lovers again. I'm going to be married, too.

—You are—to who?

—I have another idea, too. Maybe it's something that will work and maybe not. But like I say, this is my problem now. Let me solve it and you go on with your life. Edmé is good and decent, and I won't be a part of hurting her. I should have thought of this before, but better to set things right later than never.

With that, Willa strode across the field and out of Henry's life for over a year. Everything she promised to do, she did. She gave birth to a baby girl, married Graham Tate, and, unable to give the child up for blind adoption, arranged clandestinely for Giovanni Trentas and his wife to raise her in guise as one they had adopted. Time passed, healing some wounds, leaving some scars. For the most part, Willa's plans worked well. She did her best to right wrongs, put the world she'd unwittingly been drawn to destroy back together as carefully as she could. She supported Giovanni's parenting of her daughter by helping him financially, always in absolute secrecy. She watched Helen grow at a remove, always grateful that she was able to follow her progress and her life as closely as she did. Giovanni often shared with her all the little stories that go along with childhood, so that Willa knew when she first spoke, first walked, first went to school. A silent mother, she managed to find ways to participate in Helen's upbringing—enough so that she felt like Giovanni's tacit partner, she acting more like the traditional father, the distant breadwinner, while he performed the role of mother, nurturing and immediate.

Henry and Willa kept their promise and their distance, and Giovanni, Margery, and Tate, each for different reasons, kept their silence. The only dilemmas Willa had not been able to predict and thereby preclude arose from Helen's own suspicions as she got older, and the slow rage Willa's husband would come to nurture toward the true father of her only child. Henry Fulton's ruin became so dear to Tate's heart that if he
did
have a child, he couldn't have loved it any more than he loved, cherished, cultivated this bitterness.

And when Giovanni Trentas, so many years later, sensing that his own mortality was soon to have some impact on Helen, told them he wanted her to know these truths, Willa couldn't have foreseen that, either. Giovanni's abruptly being silenced, before he'd been able to force the issue further, was not the end but rather the beginning of a new allegory none of them seemed to be able to govern.

Here was a piteous howling, shrieks that seemed neither human nor bestial, but from some other world, one that no one should ever be obliged to visit. They came from across the creek, cutting the soft, chilly night air as concertina wire might slash the supplest flesh; came in barrages, heaves of pain, bursts of breathless anguish.

I looked around me and found that I'd dozed off in the kitchen of the ranch house, waiting up for Helen. The porch lights were on, and so was the light above the table on which I'd laid my head down in my hands like some small boy might. Upstairs, I heard the frantic whispers of my aunt and uncle, and even as I rose to my feet, lifted the loden coat from where I'd placed it over the chair back, and threw it on, Henry was coming downstairs, and erupted into the kitchen, shotgun under his arm and a rifle, too.

“Here,” he said, handing me the latter. “It's loaded. Only shoot up in the air, you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Unless you need to protect yourself. This is the end. This is it.”

With that, he got on his own coat and hat, and went to the door.

As we made our way quickly down the hard stone stairs from the porch into the yard, and ran past the garden and the stick figure of the scarecrow, which looked in the moonlight like some emaciated angel, I wondered what time it was and how long I had slept. Could that party down at the Lewises' still be going on? Had Helen gone to the cabin to meet me and, not finding me there, decided to look for me at the studio? No, that couldn't be right. But, still, I thought, Please God, don't let it be Helen.

By the time we crossed the creek, the excruciating howls had ceased. The creek rustled along beneath my feet, the moon glowed brightly overhead, having risen to its apogee and swollen to a fullness that seemed impossibly great. Hard to believe the moon was only a couple thousand miles in diameter, so huge it was tonight. I stayed on Henry's heels, wasn't about to fall behind, or get lost. His urgency, and the urgency of those screams, gave me my own sense of need. Whatever lay ahead had to do with me now, too. It wasn't that I was here any longer in the role of patronizing nephew or fool or fuck-up—this had to do with
me
tonight. Where such exigency suddenly came from, I wouldn't have been able to say. But it was there, in my legs and arms, in my lungs and beating heart. Henry shouted something inarticulate upon arriving at the studio, near the doorway. “Get back, Grant,” he seemed to say. But it was too late. I was beside him, looking down at the image captured within the periphery of whiteness cast by his flashlight.