The Sunlight Dialogues (67 page)

Or was it that he himself was the dangerous beast? Who had triumphed, after all, old man or son-in-law?

“Better get some sleep, my boy,” he said.

The Indian lowered his head—not so much a nod, it seemed, as a gesture requesting blessing. Solemnly, Hodge made a sign of the cross in the air.

And they shall be afraid; pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth; they shall be amazed at one another; their faces shall be as flames.

Hodge said, “Thy will be done.” But he thought of Clumly, servant of law, and anxiety flared through his chest. He had to hurry, he would be late and, worse, unprepared.

2

He worked furiously, forcing Luke to help, since Nick was still asleep. Luke said nothing for a long time, merely obeyed, cutting rope, painting, sawing. His wrists were red and sore from the tight bonds, and he breathed by a kind of heavy sighing, like a man sick to death with sorrow. The Sunlight Man struggled to ignore it. Out of odds and ends—bits of wood, rope, wire, an old tarpaulin—the Sunlight Man’s huge, absurd contraption took shape.

“What is it?” Luke said. His voice was full of pressure, the light, fast beating of his heart.

“Prop for a happening,” the Sunlight Man said. He went on with his work.

Luke said, “There are no happenings. When things seem to happen it’s illusion.”

“Prop for an illusion,” he said. “Hand me the pliers.”

Mechanically, fingers trembling, Luke obeyed.

“What’s it all for?” Luke said after a while. It was like a sob, yet he labored at making it mere talk. “You make all these doo-dads, you go out and hold up some stupid store—”

“Nonsense. I don’t hold up stores.”

“Well, whatever.” A whisper. “Just the same, what’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything, you mean. Ah! That’s very philosophical.”

“Right, be a cynic.” Luke let it go, choked by emotion.

Taggert Hodge frowned, cross and threatened but tempted as well, and at last, because Luke had his father’s eyes, his father’s voice, something even of his father’s plodding goodness (however bent, dented by the batterings of his mother’s uncommon, unsensible wit and, worse yet, by experience too full of ambiguities for common sense to cope with)—because of all that but also because he could not endure the sight of such pain—he put down the pliers and turned around to lean on the workbench, folding his arms and lowering his bearded chin onto his chest. He said, “As a matter of fact, I do have answers to certain questions. Small ones. What was yours?” He spoke as if with scorn, but by accident.

“Nothing.”

They looked together at the clutter filling the garage. Beyond the open back door there were burdocks, motionless in the sunlight, their white and blue flowers singing with honeybees. The leaves were unnaturally large and their shaded stems were thick, fed by the sewer and not cut back in years.

Luke said, “My question is, Why do sinners’ ways prosper?” A whisper of rage.

The Sunlight Man forced a smile. “Another illusion. Nothing prospers but the soul. The universe is a great machine gun, and all things physical are riddled sooner or later with bleeding holes. You’re bombarded by atoms, colors, smells, textures; torn apart by ancient ideas, appeals for compassion; you twist, writhe, try to make sense of things, you force your riddled world into order, but it collapses, riddled as fast as you build, and you build it all over again. You put up bird-houses and cities, for instance, but cats eat the birds and cyclones eat the cities, and nothing is left but the fruitless searching, which is otherwise called the soul.”

Luke stood silent, throat and temples swelling.

“I’m serious, my boy,” he said. “Don’t be fooled by rhetoric. Even a master of illusion must have his defenses. Witness our Saviour.”

“You just talk,” Luke whispered. “You duck out of everything with talk.”

“Well, yes, perhaps. But I’ve also acted, from time to time. There has to be a convenient opening for action.”

“Yes. Like finding Nick in jail, so you could turn him into a killer.”

“No, I freed him.”

“It was vicious and you know it. Or I hope you do. Maybe you really meant to free him, but you didn’t know him.
That’s
for sure. Anyone who knew him would have guessed. We tried—me, my father, Uncle Ben. You wouldn’t understand. It was no use, anyway. Jail was the only hope left; maybe it would show him.” He gulped for air. “But there you were, believing in nothing, grabbing whatever little kick came along, exactly like the rest—an ‘existentialist,’ as my mother calls herself. There is no past, only the present; no future either, only the future-present. You know what I’m saying. You didn’t know him from Adam, you had no idea what direction he’d been heading before you came, and you set him ‘free,’ you say, like some new Jesus, as if anything might be possible if you said it was—as if a falling rock could change its mind and go upward at your command.”

The Sunlight Man moved only his eyes to study him. Luke’s jaw was tight, his speech thick and quiet, forced out by the lightning-fast pounding of his heart.

“Are you
afraid
of me?” he said.

Luke nodded.

“Why?”

“Because—” He changed his mind. With square Hodge fingers he touched his raw left forearm, looking at the floor.

“Because I’m crazy, you were going to say.”

“The way you walk—like you weren’t human, like something imitating the way human beings walk. And when you talk … all show. You have no feelings. You shuffle, and yet your feet don’t make any noise. A creature like you would kill in a wink if the mood came over it. How can we know what you think? If there were people from outer space—”

“Or inner space.”

“There. You make a point of speaking without talking. ‘Inner space.’“ His lips shook.

The Sunlight Man pursed his lips and looked up at the rafters. There were swallows’ nests. He remembered the swallows’ nests at Stony Hill. They were everywhere there—in the cowbarn, the garage, the smokehouse, even the wellhouse. Art Jr had knocked one down once, when he was twelve or so, and Will had put it up again—the eternal repairer—with old rags and bits of mud, and he’d put the baby birds back in. The mother, knowing his heart, had accepted his work. It was the kind of thing Luke too would do, you had a feeling, though he might not do it as well. For all his sharp tongue, his whining misery, his wrath, he too had eyes of the kind that must look sometimes at swallows. Like Kathleen. They would go out at dusk, the two of them, to watch the swallows ’ sharp-winged, arrowtailed flight against the sun’s setting, a lovely fragrance of new-mown alfalfa scattered across the farm.
Blessed is he that has seen these things and goes under the ground.

Luke was turning away, and Taggert Hodge saw that he should not have let it pass—“speaking without talking.” He nodded, pretending he’d been thinking about it. “It’s true, yes,” he said as if just discovering it. “I avoid plain speech, communication. It’s interesting, now you mention it. I also do it when I talk to myself. I apologize.”

Luke said nothing.

“Suppose I say I do believe in the past? Suppose I say I once walked and talked like you?”

“But you don’t say it. You say ‘suppose.’ If you said it, it would be asking me to wonder what happened, what turns a human being into a monster. It would be talking as if we were both human. You can’t.”

He looked at the side of Luke’s jaw, and again he was tempted. But he said, ironic and tentative, “What made you decide to speak to me so frankly, my dear boy? It’s very strange, you know.”

“It was an impulse.”

“But you’d been thinking about it. Brooding on it, in fact That’s how impulses begin, as St. Augustine tells us. Suggestion, delectation …”

“Maybe.”

The Sunlight Man squinted. “Hunting for soft places in the dragon’s belly?”

“I’d expect you to think that.”

“I don’t, necessarily. Generally speaking, I think nothing.” He picked at his lip, unwilling to go farther until the uneasiness in his chest calmed down and he was sure of his voice. “What I think—” He paused once more. “As a matter of fact, I think you’ve made me a symbol. You’ve brooded too much, connected me with your mother and father and your childish frustration. I’m the enemy, inhuman. I mock your hot desires for things you scorn. Wife, children, house in the country, profession, even decency.”

Luke looked away, compressing his lips.

So you’re one of us,
the Sunlight Man thought. He continued in a rush—“If I mock you, you suspect I may be right. You think what you love is probably not worth loving, no lasting significance, no derring-do, no bizzazz. And so you’ll test me, poke at me, turn me over and maybe in time you’ll assume me.”

Luke made no response.

The Sunlight Man leaned toward him, sly. “You’re toying with making me into an example for your life.” He smiled like a wolf. “You’ll grow a beard, stop washing your face and hands and first thing you know you’ll be learning to walk without noise, like one of us devils.”

“You’re paranoid.”

The Sunlight Man unfolded his arms and turned back to the bench. “And you, O child of midnight, are a liar.”

It was almost a minute before Luke said quietly, “You’re wrong. You teach me to admire stupid people and arrogant bastards who do no harm—unlike you.”

“Hold these wires,” the Sunlight Man said.

Luke obeyed.

The Sunlight Man said, “I believe in the past, and I once walked and talked like you. God’s truth. But I don’t want you to wonder about me. Let whosoever is without sin cast the first crumb.” In the filings on the bench he traced the word
Youth,
then smiled, showing teeth.

Luke said, “You haven’t understood. I was offering help.” His voice was quieter than before.

The Sunlight Man stood very still. At last he said softly and violently, “With what, boy? With
love?
Is
Love
your weapon?

Down pour’d the heavy rain
Over the new-reap’d grain;
And Misery’s increase
Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.”

It seemed pure, inexplicable rage, and Luke Hodge was hurled back into his cage of misery and confounded.

The Sunlight Man went back to his work. He wouldn’t say anything more.

3

In the milkhouse, where he was supposed to be washing the milking machines, Ben Hodge’s boy David was playing complicated rhythms on the milkcan covers. The farm around the milkhouse lay as quiet as a picture in a magazine, but because of the music it seemed nevertheless alive and sentient, like motionless stone imperceptibly trembling with a dance of atoms, or like a sleeping head full of dreams. Ben Hodge, greasing his corn-chopper on the hill behind the house, paused and squinted. Vanessa was in the kitchen cutting rhubarb into a burnt-black saucepan for lunch. She was breathing hard, as usual, and the gray curls at her temples were dark with sweat. Her paring knife stopped moving and she listened to the rhythms moving out from the milkhouse through breathless air to the hills and valleys and woods. Once she’d labored out to him when he was playing the milkcan covers, and the moment she’d touched the door he’d stopped. It was a shame, she felt, that he only played when alone, hiding his candle under a bushel. “Whooey!” she’d said, hand on her thudding heart (the walk to the milkhouse had tired her). He’d merely stared back with blank, deferential eyes, a trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth. She could not get him to play. He was a giant, standing black as coal in the white, low-ceilinged room, his glistening bare shoulders solid as a horse’s rump. He lay his hands on his hips and looked down at her with indifferent friendliness. And so she knew better, now, than to go and interrupt him. Besides, the heat out there would wilt her like lettuce. Well, she was grateful that the boy was so happy. She wished
she
could sometimes be as happy as that. She was grateful that they had happened to find him, so that now, working in the murderous heat, she could be uplifted by that wordless, glorious music of praise, forget herself for a moment and join him in spirit. She looked out the high, round-arched kitchen window at the brown grass of the lawn. She wiped her forehead with her arm.
Poor Elizabeth,
she thought.
Poor Will—poor Fred Clumly—poor Esther—poor Mrs. Palazzo—the poor, poor Salvadors.
She must get to her letter-writing this afternoon.

Sometimes the music was slow and thoughtful, sometimes wild with excitement.

Poor Vanessa,
she thought, and smiled with a startled look. “Poor silly lummox,” she said to herself, “it’s from
loneliness
that he drums.”

The music fell away to silence, then after a moment began again, rapid and light.

Ben Hodge, still listening, went on now with his work. In the valley below him, beyond the house and barns, beyond the tamaracks—in the yellowgreen valley that thousands of years ago had been a glacial river, graveyard of fantastic beasts—his black and white cows were sitting in the shade of the maple trees at the corner of the pasture. They too were the Negro’s instruments. He would stand in the cowbarn, when he thought he was alone, and would lightly drum on the cows’ backs and sides, getting sharp, thin notes from their upright hipbones, hollow, deep sounds from the hide around their lungs. He played tractors, too, and water pipes, old boards, stone walls; if he thought no one was there, he even tapdanced music out of the caked, yellow lime behind the gutters.

A blackbird whistled, and again Ben Hodge looked up. It came a second time, a clean pure note on the crest of the drumbeat. There was a light breeze here on the hill, and a sound from across the lane of rustling corn leaves. All at once an idea for a sermon came: David playing for mad King Saul.
The whole world is a kind of music, and everything living plays its part, either in tune or out of tune. Now when a man is out of tune …

He thought again of his brother Tag, and his face drew up to wince. Guilt rushed over him. What was there he could do? It came to him suddenly then that it was
not
because he was in tune with the world that the Negro boy played or the blackbird whistled or he, Ben Hodge, made up sermons. And not because he was in tune once more that Saul came out of his madness or Taggert came home.
We’re more like organ pipes, then,
he thought.
Somebody pushes the right key and we’re filled with sudden music and can’t say why.