The Sunlight Dialogues (50 page)
1
The Oliver Cleatrac howled and popped and whined and Ben Hodge sang, plowing up, the way it looked from where he sat, a field as big as the world. It was close to eleven at night; he plowed by the lights on the tractor. Where the hill rimmed, ahead of him, it looked like the edge of the flat earth; beyond it stretched immeasurable sky, in the center of it, poised like a dancer on one foot, towering Orion. The steel cleats slipped along at each side of him, gleaming and quiet as flowing oil, and against the light of the dashboard gauges the gloved fists closed on the left- and right-wheel brake handles, thumbs pointing upward, were huge and solid as churches. He came to the rim of the hill and dipped over, and the roar of the tractor lightened for a moment then steadied again, urging the five plows onward, hammering like a fast, steel and diesel-fuel heart in the tractor chest. He could see from here the security lights around Jim Hume’s barns and silos, beyond that the silver of the highway and the shaggy back of the woods. As he neared the lane fence a paintless and dented panel truck moved into the aura of his headlights. Merton Bliss.
Hodge stopped singing. The night went gloomy. When he came to the lane he pulled back hard on the left-wheel brake, pivoting sharply, tipped the plow out of the ground the same instant, and heaved in the clutch. He shut down the motor. Even idling it was too loud to talk above. He was deaf for a moment. Then he began to hear, faintly, the sound of frogs. He pressed the sides of his head, popping his ears open, and suddenly the sound of frogs, of light wind passing through the weeds, a sound of ducks far away were clear and pure. Bliss stood leaning on the fence in his loose bib-overalls.
“Od do,” Hodge said.
“Evening. Yer workin late.”
“Just ketchin up,” Hodge said. He leaned his forearms on the wheelbrake handles. It would take Merton Bliss a long time to get to what he’d come for.
“How’s the wife?” Hodge said.
“She’s fine, jest fine. Little spell of asthma this last few weeks. You can count on it, this time of year.” He talked about her asthma, told one of his stories, shook his head as if he too could barely believe it. They talked then of politics, in the age-old style of Western New York farmers, arguing shades of a point of view no longer remembered, much less believed, in most of the world; spoke, sorrowful and incredulous, of all that was falling apart in the world; to Bliss an outrage, a matter of plots and stupidity; to Hodge a subtle mystery. It was against his faith that the bulk of humanity was stupid or indifferent or selfish. Why the world was going as it was he could not fathom, but he could not think it was treachery. “Well yes, but then again,” Hodge said. He leaned into his right shoulder, pointing his huge gloved fist at his neighbor’s chest.
They spoke of Hodge’s sermon at the Bethany church.
“You make ’em sit up and take notice,” Bliss said, “and that’s the truth.”
Which was good, coming from Bliss. He too knew storytelling.
Hodge was having a hard time lately getting pulpits to speak in. It’s the ministers, he said. Bliss nodded, understanding. It was good to have a man you could speak to about it.
“They don’t preach the old way,” Bliss said. “It’s all full of reasoning, don’t you know. There’s too much of that in the world, that’s my opinion. You listen to one of those ministers, it’s all like multiplying fractions. It makes your head ache.”
“That’s the truth,” said Hodge. He said, “Been working out a sermon about punishing.” He slid his jaw forward, thinking. “I was thinking of telling the stories of some people that were stoned to death, in old Greek times, and what they were stoned for, and then some stories about people that were burned, and then some about hanging and electrocuting. I thought I’d mention what we do to people that write obscene books, and just mention some things you find written in the Bible, or in Shakespeare. I’ve been toying with it.”
Bliss shook his head. “You can’t get away from it though. Evil is evil. A man has a child—”
“That may be,” Hodge said. “I don’t know.”
They talked about next year’s crops, about the Cleatrac.
“That boy Luke,” Bliss said.
Hodge grinned. “Seems to me you got it in for that boy, some reason.”
“Ding right,” he said. “That boy’s owed me twenty-four dollars for going on a year. I sold him a ewe.”
“That’s too much for a ewe,” Hodge said.
“Mebby so, but he took the price.”
“You’ll burn in hell, Merton Bliss, and that’s God’s truth.” He grinned.
“Wal I’ll tell you, though. I went over to his house, place all lit up like Santa was coming, and that boy wouldn’t come to the door.”
“He’s not well,” Hodge said. “Passes out sometimes.” The night’s gloom came back.
“Not this time, by gol. I could see him setting there, and his mother too. They never batted an eyelash.” He pushed his head forward over the fence. “Gol ding, let me tell you. I went home all right, but I got to thinkin, and this mornin I went over to his mother’s place, going to lay it on the line. Wal, whattia think?”
Hodge waited.
“Not there. Wasn’t nobody there. I looked all around, and pretty soon I just happened to notice that cellar door was open. You want to know something, Hodge? There’s somebody been living there.”
“No,” he said.
“Wal I know what it could be, all right. People know pretty well how it is with her. No offense to your family. Just the same, it’s mighty ding strange, somebody living in a divorced woman’s cellar. You got to admit it.”
Hodge nodded.
“I was you, I’d look into it. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
Hodge took it in, no longer meeting Bliss’s eyes. “What kind of things were down there?” he said.
“Canned food, some little boxes with padlocks, shoes.”
“I’ll look into it,” he said. “Could be she doesn’t know.”
“Could be,” Bliss said doubtfully.
“Well, thanks for letting me know,” Hodge said.
“Sure thing. Just thought it’s my duty, being a friend of the family and that.” He drew back a little, preparing to leave.
“Thanks,” Hodge said.
“Sure thing.”
If there was something he’d come to borrow, he forgot to say.
Someone in the cellar. It had happened once before, the last time Tag had slipped back. It had been Will’s house then. Hodge ground on the starter and the Cleatrac exploded to life. He shoved in the clutch, shifted to third, and went clattering down the headland. At the furrow he pivoted left and dropped the plows. It must be midnight by now. The headlights inched forward toward the wide black silence and the stars. He could hear behind him, or thought he could, the whisper of the mollboards turning the black, firm earth, exposing old arrowheads, it might be, or pottery shards, or bits of murdered Indians’ skulls. He plowed on, silent. A crop of spring wheat to get in.
2
The Sunlight Man worked in haste, sawing, hammering, knotting, wiring at the bench in Luke Hodge’s garage. The pistol lay on the vise, where he could snatch it up in an instant. “Ridiculous,” he said to himself aloud once. But he could not let himself think about that. It was, for some reason not clear to him, necessary. He had meant to go to Ben, had instead gone to Clumly—had at any rate set up a meeting with Clumly. It was, he could only explain, necessary. What he must say he could not say to a brother; it must be to the coldly reasonable unreason of officialdom. It did not require all this lunatic equipment, of course. (The formless clutter of Luke’s garage was changing, little by little, to a clutter of toggled magician’s devices: false boxes, a bomb made of fertilizer and flour, a crudely fashioned thing of leather and cloth which, released in a dimly lit room, would be unmistakably a bird.) With a part of his mind he was resolved to go straight to the heart of the matter when he met with Clumly. Another part insisted upon preparation for jokes, the laughter of despair. He might not use them, he thought. But he understood he was fooling himself. He would use them. His prisoners were in the cellar, Millie gagged, full of bitchery and rage, Luke passive and despairing as himself, Nick silent as a snake, sunk into his mind. He would not think about them. The thought of Millie’s naked breasts, sharply revealed in the lightning flash, filled him with an obscene and bestial hunger that mocked his grief and disgusted him. In the gas chambers, no doubt, they copulated. But he would not. Nor would it be a gas chamber for him. He would make himself plain, knowing all along that what he had to say could never be plain to Clumly’s kind, and then, the absurd gesture finished, he would be gone without leaving a trace. Why he must make the gesture he did not know. He would make it, and afterward, “silence, exile, cunning.” He could escape easily enough. In Luke’s truck, perhaps; property of Paxton Corp.; a fitting irony. It was Kathleen’s father he’d have said it to, if destiny had allowed it.
The Old Man, not old then, stared at him with mindless eyes, comfortable in the leather chair, the magazine—Taggert’s magazine—closed indifferently over his finger.
“I’ll make you a proposition,” he said.
“You didn’t like the article?”
He ignored it. “I’ll put you on your feet. I owe you that. I’ll make an honest man of you, and you annul the marriage.”
“Bluntly spoken,” Hodge said.
“And I’ll assume all hospital expenses.”
“Because you owe her that.”
That, too, he ignored. “Take it or leave it.”
“And if I leave it?”
“You’ll take worse.”
“I believe it,” he said. “I know your history. Just the same, I think I’ll chance it.”
Paxton leaned forward, put the magazine on the chair-arm with distaste, and stood up. “I won’t debate my history with you.”
“Of course not,” Hodge said. “Even if you won, it would be vulgar, and a man like you can’t afford vulgarity. That’s for old families.” A nasty cut. He’d been a master of the nasty cut in those days. “But then, no need for debate. I know why you work as you do, the rationalizations. A thousand old saws in defense of shooting an organizer through the head. To the victor belong the spoils. He who hesitates is lost. Finders keepers losers weepers. In Rome do as the Romans do. Let sleeping dogs lie—you being, in this case, the sleeper. And above all, It’s a Free Country.”
“I should like to leave now.”
Hodge remained in front of the door, leaning on his arm. “Shouldn’t you, though. To push buttons, pull strings. A man of influence.”
Paxton stood waiting, patient. He had curly gray hair around his ears; the rest was black.
“You don’t care to debate it, naturally. I must defend all points of view myself, my own antagonist. It’s my training, however. The defense insists, ladies and gentlemen of the jury—”
“You’re unbalanced.” He showed, as usual, no sign of emotion.
“Yes. The defense insists that this gargantua you see before you has his reasons. This cyclops. This grendel. He was poor in his youth. He suffered much. He saw those around him—his fellow poor—tossed blindly on the current of their uncertain emotions, saw them reach out in all directions, undecided, feeble. It came into his mind that a man must have a purpose—some single, undeviating, divinely inexorable purpose. Purity of heart. He must get power, seize it come hell or high water and cling to it. And he has done so. Whom has he opposed? The kind of people he has known since childhood—working people, businessmen unsure of their positions, the weak, the scatterbrained. He has prevailed, and there can be only one reason: he was right. He has done much good. He has given men jobs when there were no jobs to be had. That is a fact. I ask, I implore, I demand that this man be given justice!”
Paxton closed his hand around his lapel and looked at the floor. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”
Only then was Hodge furious. For all his power over men, over his family, even over Kathleen, Paxton was not worth the opposition of a Hodge. He was not cunning enough to know viciousness when he heard it, so idiotic that he believed in full confidence that his antique saws were parries. He had no brain, had not even physical strength in which Hodge might spark some fire to answer his own. He had nothing but his monstrous righteousness. His daughter had married against her father’s choice, and now, going mad, must be saved from her demonic husband—a man known to be dishonest in business (what wonder if the poor child raved, set fires to curtains?).
Hodge said, “Are you really blind to it?—that it’s you who drove her mad?”
“I will not discuss it.”
“No, of course. Will merely correct it. Find her a pretty garden, perhaps. Buy her keepers.”
“Mr. Hodge, I have engagements. I’ll see you in court.”
Hodge calmed himself. He could understand the Old Man’s side. That was the horror. So one understood Germany, or the Chinese Communists, or Africa. The clear head’s burden. Thus by abstraction he fought the urge to murder his father-in-law, because she loved him. He stepped back from the door, letting him through. “I’ll see you in hell,” he said calmly.
The Old Man nodded—a strange thing, now that Hodge thought about it. Soberly nodded as if to say, “That’s so.”
He’d been working faster and faster, as if in flight from the memory burning in his head.
From the magazine, too, he had debts. They were slight, compared to the rest. They were among the debts he had meant to pay off, because Mollman was a friend of sorts, a former classmate, and besides that, a rare printer, the kind who took on obscure magazines from faith in them, gave honest prices and did a first-rate printing job. He even made a go of it—the riskiest business in the world, not even a business, as a matter of fact. No arty little journal really paid. You supported them by sweat and begging and living off the hog’s toes. So Hodge had planned to pay, the same way others paid, by sacrifice. But he had not gotten to it; never would. Whatever bills came, month by month, he threw out with the trash. He would read them, pay up, when his ship came in. So he’d told himself. But his ship was sunk. He admitted that now. He would have to start all over, maybe Argentina. He must not think about it.
Deadly Opinions,
he’d called it. A subscription list of two hundred, mostly unpaid. He had somewhere card-catalogs of names, a bundle of unreturned manuscripts, packets of galley proof.
