The Sunlight Dialogues (29 page)

Will Hodge scowled. She made it sound like a soap opera.

Ben cleared his throat.

“Poor Elizabeth,” she said. “He was sitting in his pajamas and bathrobe, bolt-upright behind his desk. He was so shrivelled his face was like a skull. He was like a child in a grown-up’s red bathrobe, she says. How awful it must have been for her, coming in on him like that! Well, there’s sure to be trouble enough! It never was a happy family, Heaven knows, and you can be sure there’ll be a court case over the money. And how on earth they’ll manage to look after Kathleen—”

Will Hodge snorted.

“I wonder if Taggert knows,” she said.

Again no one answered. A pain forked up through Will’s belly and chest. Even if he did know, what was he to do? Kathleen wouldn’t know him—she no longer recognized anyone, as far as they could tell. And the family had no love for him. Even his relationship with the rest of the Hodges was touch and go. It came to him in a flash that Tag
did
know.
That’s the reason for all this. He knows. Half out of his mind.
He gave an involuntary jerk, and they looked at him. He made himself calm.

Before Will Hodge was fully aware that he’d stopped thinking about his brother, he found himself toying cautiously, as if at arm’s length, with a new idea. Clumly would be at the funeral. Fred Clumly made them all. It was one of his oddities. A man could see him there. Why it was that Hodge wanted to see him, watch him from a distance, was not clear to him; nevertheless, he felt the desire rising like a madness. He felt again the sting of the Salvador woman’s accusation and felt again the urge he’d felt then to defend himself, for once in his life take some bull by the horns, strike out, be rid of confusion. Tag, Luke, Will Jr. He saw him fixing the chair in the chickenhouse, hair light as down. The child’s face was a blur. With surprising clarity he saw himself standing in the crowd as he imagined Ben and Vanessa had stood at the cemetery, observing the wrinkled grub-white policeman at the side of the grave, police cap resting on his belly. It was like an image from the Devil, dreamlike, full of some unhealthy pleasure. So he’d felt—it must be three weeks ago now—sitting by the road in his car late at night, with fog spreading out from the marsh between the tarpaper house and the woods, his car full of the stink of old cigarettes, as he watched for the sordid lover of his client’s wife to come creeping to the house. He saw Tag sitting at the desk across from his own, feet up, expensive shoes polished like dark brown piano wood. Kathleen had a desk to the left of his. She worked on income tax forms. Will closed his eyes tight.

“Well,” Ben said loudly, in a tone that might have been Will Hodge’s own, except that Ben’s voice was musical, like a voice that might come from a big silver cup, and Will’s was like the voice of an empty barn at night, “time to milk the cows.” He stood up. Though the Negro didn’t move, his eyes came partway to life.

Will got up too. “I’d better get back to town. Thanks for the coffee.” His knees were weak.

Now Vanessa got up, awkwardly, as always. She almost knocked Will’s cup from the table. “Pooh!” she said. The near-accident upset her.

“Let’s go, boss,” Ben said. The Negro got up. And now, all standing, they were embarrassed. A calf bawled, down by the barn.

“What on earth made them do it?” Vanessa said. “Why did they have to
kill?”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she took one last cookie for comfort.

Ben mused.

Will, too, understood what she meant. It was fear, no doubt, that made them kill the guard. Not malice, exactly—but more like malice than what went before, the wreck of the Volkswagen. What next? And where would Nick Slater run? And Tag? He almost slipped and said it.

“They were such
strange
boys,” Vanessa said, weeping. “Nick especially. You never knew what he was thinking.”

“Time will tell,” Ben said.

Will Hodge looked at his vest-pocket watch. The numbers, even the hands, were too blurry to read. The face was all gray. “I better run,” he said. A whisper. He stepped back to reach behind the Negro to shake his brother’s hand. It was an awkward handshake. It wasn’t Ben Hodge’s nature to shake hands, nor Will’s either, for that matter, which was why Ben was looking at him.

“It’s just awful,” Vanessa said. “You keep wondering—” She limped to the sink with her cup, lips clamped together with grief, and turned the water on. The pump started up in the cellar, thudding like a heart.

“He won’t show his face around here,” Will Hodge said. “He’d be ashamed.”

“Well, we still have some of his clothes,” Vanessa said.

Ben mused on it, still watching.

The clock struck in the livingroom. Quarter-to-seven.

Will Sr began hunting for his hat and found it, after a moment, on the dish-drainer. “Well, take care,” he said. Then, with his hat on, a cookie in his hand, his eyes set thoughtfully on some point in space, he left.

7

The idea grew in Will Hodge’s mind—or fixation, maybe—as he wound his way up the Creek Road toward Batavia. “The old monkey,” he said aloud, but not quite crossly now. The Chief of Police had been sly, no denying that, and Will Hodge had been fooled. It wouldn’t have hit him in a hundred years that all Clumly’s suspicions of Will Jr and Luke were mere smoke in his eyes, the old man knew as well as he knew his own name who it was that had come and pulled out the floor from under him—from under Clumly. Except that he didn’t know the name, and mustn’t find out. It was sly and also ridiculous. How long could he hope to keep people confused by a fool trick like that? Except that Clumly was hardly even thinking about that, of course. Stalling for time, snatching at straws. Hodge slid his huge jaw forward and drew his eyebrows down. “Well you’ve snatched the wrong straw this time,” he said. Hodge the avenger. If Walt Cook’s dog had run out at him he might have run over him and never looked back. He sat erect as a walrus behind the wheel, his hands stretched out straight in front of him to steer—the spitting image of his father the Congressman, forty-odd years ago, driving his family to church in the great leather Phaeton. His horses were faster than the horses of his neighbors, huge dapple-grays with murderous checkreins and crotches white with nervous sweat. When he passed some neighbor in his country buggy, drawn along by the team he would plow with on weekdays, the Congressman would lift his beaver hat and boom, “Morning to you, Luther!” or whatever the name was, and, “Good morning there, Mrs. So-and-so!” And then, to his family, “Firm supporters,” he would say. “The salt of the earth.” Taggert was only a baby then, a face like an angel’s, a smile like all springtime, clean and sweet as an orchard full of apple blossoms. He’d be sitting on Ruth’s lap looking up at the blue and white sky as though he knew what his proper dominion was, their mother beside him—a redhead, most beautiful woman in the world, it had seemed to Will Hodge—and the three older brothers, Ben and Art Jr and Will himself, the oldest, would be sitting in the soft leather-cushioned back seat, half-asleep from the whirr of the hard-rubber tires. The horses cut the spring breeze like axes. They had the whole world before them. They commanded it as easily as the green stony hillsides commanded the Tonawanda Valley, or the Phaeton commanded the high-crowned dirt highway that fell away before them as yellow as a road in a picturebook. But subtly, so subtly that no one had noticed the thing as it happened, the might of the Hodges had sifted between their fingers. Betrayed by life itself. The richest farm country in New York State had mysteriously grayed: the land had quit; stone fences had fallen into disrepair; the Guernsey dairies—best dairies in the world—had begun to give way to Holstein dairies, quantity over quality; and then price supports came, and the hard-kernel wheat that grew nowhere else in America as it grew in New York State was swallowed up in the indifferent bins of Government to mold and fester as though it were common wheat. Then at night the wooden-wheeled milktrucks from Buffalo pulled over into the weeds and stopped, and the drivers got out at riflepoint, and bent-backed farmers in bib-overalls, with red farmers’ handkerchiefs over their noses, yanked out the bungs of the milktanks and the milk went back to the land. “It’s criminal! Monstrous!” said Hodge’s father. But he knew who they were, and he made not so much as a gesture toward naming their names. And then—Hodge’s father a blind old man now, baffled and lost—then came machines. The holy silence of the steam age passed, the enormous steam tractors that moved along on their ridged iron wheels with no sound but the bending of the grass, the slap of a beltseam striking the pulley, an occasional hiss like the sigh of a dinosaur dying. Instead of all that came the roar and clatter and pop of gas engines. He’d mowed hay—Will Hodge—with the quiet team, no sound in his ears but the creak of the harness and the clicking of the sicklebar. But now he careened on a high gas tractor with spiked iron wheels, and the sound in his ears was like mountains falling in. There was no more use for thrashing gangs, or those big thrashers’ meals, or the talk. There were combines, balers, cutting-boxes; the time was coming when a farmer could work his land all alone, as solitary as the last living man in the world. So that not only had the land gone bad, the heart had gone out of it, too. Only Ben had stuck with it, that world that had seemed to lie splendidly before them. Ben the mystic. Art Jr, inheritor of the old man’s gift for tinkering, had become an electrician, a supervisor now at Niagara Electric: a good man, gentle, not a mystical bone in his great square body, with opinions as straight and severe as wires, a sad man, however unbent and unbroken, weighed down by his whalish wife and family as cruelly as a man pinned under a tree. And their sister Ruth, inheritor of the Old Man’s gift for organizing, had run away with a teletypist, a union organizer as full of rage as an iron stove: who had baited them all, in his younger days, scorned all their Upstate Republican opinions, knew curious facts and doubtful figures, could cut like a knife—a man no more willing than a knife to hear reason and who felt no need to, omniscient as God—but grew older, for all he could do to prevent it (for all his two-hundred-dollar suits, that sharp handsome face that made the Hodges in the room seem as blunt as old turnips, for all his knowledge of baseball and football, or the grayblue Porsche or the pointed shoes) grew older in time, and even mellow, so that the last years of Will Hodge’s mother’s life, he would come to visit her, more welcome even than her sons by blood, for he understood women as no Hodge could, not even the Congressman himself, and more welcome for other reasons too: because he came by choice, by an act of will, a decision of kindness, and if they too were kind it was the kindness of nature: only in staying away could they have acted by choice. The hundredth lamb. Also, he loved her. Now Ruth had a nursery school, the best in Rochester. As for Taggert, the child with the angelic face, the most brilliant of the lot, a mind as wide as the Congressman’s, one would have said, if he only could have gotten himself collected, and a heart no less gentle than his father’s was—he was gone, for all practical purposes dead. (His fire-blasted face rose up again in Hodge’s mind and shocked him cold.) Tag had half-ruined the practice their father had left them—it had taken Will Hodge ten years to rebuild it—and had fled the state, could never return, must waste his mind and all his learning as a janitor in a public school, or a salesman of used cars, or a peddler. Lord be with us. There had been no way to help him, and it wasn’t safe to try, Will Hodge had found. He’d come back just once, to hide in Will Hodge’s house and see his children, and before Will Hodge was aware of what was happening his brother Tag had vanished with his boys, taking Will Hodge’s car. He’d mailed back the keys from Cleveland. Not that Hodge blamed him. “You’d have done the same thing yourself,” Ben had said, and Hodge had thought about it. He wasn’t sure one way or the other. In any case, Tag had been their hope, or at any rate so it seemed now to Hodge, and Tag had failed them, or rather, life had failed Tag. His malpractice was no matter of choice. Poor devil had been driven half out of his mind and, hard as he worked (except that that wasn’t quite right either), it wasn’t enough. His wife was a sick woman, losing her mind, and because he was Tag—inheritor of the Old Man’s vanity, too—he could not tell them about it, ask for help like an ordinary man. Millie had said—Will Hodge Sr’s wife had said—oh a thousand times she must have said it: “You knew. You
must
have known.” And the truth was, Hodge had known. “You
destroyed
him,” she said. Her face shone with twenty-five years’ worth of hate, a face as beautiful and cold as a diamond on a drill-bit, and Hodge said, “Faugh.” He had destroyed him. Yes. Had helped, or not helped against it. But Tag had little by little rebuilt what he could from his rubble. He’d remarried, brought up his children, transplanted to Phoenix; a cartoon of their father’s identity. He’d even borrowed the Old Man’s name. Poor devil. Christ forgive us.

“Paxton’s dead,” he said as though his brother were there in the car with him.

But Tag would know by now. Millie still kept touch, that is, wrote to him, though she never got a letter back—fond of Tag because Tag was an ally, a fellow destroyer of the Congressman’s image, whether he wanted to be or not. She’d have written; maybe it was that that had brought him here. What was
he
thinking—that great, corrupted mountain of political and private craft, lying there staring with empty sockets at his coffin lid?
The world will learn. Sure as day. But not from me.

Hodge grunted. “Well, poor Paxton,” he said aloud. He thought of Clumly.

There was a sharp, ugly smell in the downstairs hall, and he paused a moment, scowling. “Something burning,” he said. The smell was so thick it was impossible to know where it came from. “Hang,” he said fiercely. “I must’ve left the kettle on.”

He caught hold of the railing and went up the carpeted stairs to his apartment as quickly as he could pull his weight along, then hunted in the dimness of the hallway for his key. Puffing, still muttering angrily to himself, he got the door open and went in. But there was nothing on the stove in the kitchen. He stood scowling, jaw protruding, still holding the key in his hand. The sky beyond the kitchen window was darkened now—there was a shower of a rain building up—and it threw a green cast across the gray of the floor and the pale blue of the kitchen walls. “Must be downstairs,” he said. He pocketed the key and hurried back down, puffing, slapping his hand on the railing as he went. Mrs. Palazzo’s door was open. He stuck his head in and called to her. No answer. He called again. He wiped away the sweat that was dripping into his eyes. The smell was intense here, and he was afraid to wait longer. He went down the long hallway, calling “Hello?” ahead of him and came to the kitchen-dinette. That was it, all right. The saucepan on the stove was bright red and collapsing, the bottom melting into the burner. “Holy Crimus,” he said. He turned off the burner and went to the sink for a towel and caught hold of the melting handle to pull away the saucepan. “Consarned devil of a thing,” he said to himself. “Where the heck did that woman go?” The back door was open. He went over to close it, reflected for a moment, then stepped out onto the porch to look around. No sign of her. Smell of ozone in the air. Lights were on in the back windows of the houses on the next street. He went back into the house, muttering, and began to look through the rooms, snapping on the lights. His heart was racing now, and he was sweating rivers. The TV was on in the front parlor, but the sound was turned off. On the coffeecart there was a kitchen glass with wine in it. “Darned strange,” he said, lowering his eyebrows until his eyes looked like caves. Suddenly he was afraid. The house was dangerously quiet. He shuddered. He left the room at once and went across the yard to the next-door neighbors.