The Sunlight Dialogues (76 page)

“Life’s strange,” Hodge said grimly.

Freeman agreed. He took off his hat and put it on the box and waited seriously, with his long, violin-shaped nose tilted.

Hodge said, “A woman was murdered in my apartment last night.”

“No!”

“Mm,” Hodge said. But he frowned. That was not the point.

“My father was a Congressman,” he said. “That’s not directly related—” He frowned again. Freeman nodded encouragingly, not pressing. His wide-open eyes were like a doe’s, or like one of the Congressman’s German shepherd cowdogs. “Nevertheless,” said Hodge, “he was a Congressman; good one. He represented—embodied, in fact—almost everything that was, for his time and place—” He winced. He was making a fool of himself with all this talk, he knew well enough. But he said, “Where was I?”

“He embodied.”

Hodge nodded, remembering, and glanced over to see if he was being mocked. “Embodied all that was good. For his time and place. Or at any rate, he had a theory.” His stomach made a turn. “That is, it was my father’s belief that society is made up of disparate parts, if you know what I mean—elements, different groups, so to speak—and that they did not have any one single end. Each wanted, that is, his own special—” He searched for the word; his heart was beginning to race. He felt foolish, or stuffy; clumsy as a thing of wood.

“Thing,” said Freeman.

Hodge nodded, dubious. “For instance, he believed that the Jeffersonian ideal of the politician was unsound.” He cleared his throat, formal. “Believed that a man who tried to work out by his own lights what was best for mankind would inevitably come up with what he himself thought best, and that this was against the welfare of the whole. The spirit of Democracy. My father believed in pressures. Checks and balances. Like Spinoza. He would have been annoyed by the modern idea of getting out the vote—having Boy Scout parades and all the rest, to make people who have no real interest in government go to the polls and pull levers. He’d argue that those who have something at stake are the people who ought to vote, so that the Negro would vote when he finds himself—”

“Raped,” said Freeman.

“Yes,” said Hodge, uncomfortably, “or the farmer would vote when a specific program—you see what I mean.”

The young man solemnly nodded.

“I’m boring you,” Hodge said. And he knew it was true, or ought to be—Millie, at any rate, would be bored, and rightly, rightly. So would a reader if this were all a novel. He screwed up his face and glanced in the rear-view mirror.

“No,” the boy said.

“The theory was …” Hodge said. (Incredible talk, Hodge recognized, on a blue country road through yellow fields, beneath a blue, blue sky. Some of the houses were paintless and overgrown. There would be owls in them, and woodchucks under the floor. But there were hollyhocks in the rank yards, and grapevines thick with bitter grapes—mindless, pale survivors.) “The ideal politician, from this point of view, was not a man with some special insight into justice but simply a man talented at sensing, dispassionately, the specific desires of the people around him—experienced enough to guess what people from somewhere else would think about that specific desire, what roadblocks their representatives would throw up—and, finally, most important of all, shrewd enough to guess what would happen to the whole fabric if that desire were … met. Met. That was the theory.”

“Yeah. Great!” He nodded enthusiastically. But he was paying attention not to the words but to something else. To Hodge, Hodge had a feeling.

“Well, straying from the point. I have a son: he’s been active in all this. That’s why it’s on my mind. He’s an attorney too—like me. I think I said. Point is, my father’s theory is not as comforting as it used to be, not that I disavow it. It’s not so easy to be sure any more. The whole thing so big and complex … I read in the paper about how youth is following a man named Ginsberg. Who is Ginsberg? How is a man to keep up?”

“Ginsberg,” said Freeman. He tipped up the hat and scratched in through his hair.

“But that’s not it,” Hodge said thoughtfully. He saw again the dead woman in his bedroom. “The idea of pressures—order establishing itself that way—as if society were a pond in a field, where natural balance comes about by itself—so many tadpoles, so many water bugs, so many thises, so many thats—that is to say …” He paused, searching. “Tnings kill each other,” he said at last. “You look at a pond and you think, ‘How calm,’ but things are eating things all the time. Take my father’s family. He was a talented man. Everything he did, he did as if he was born to it. But he had a brother who committed suicide, and another one was ordinary all his life. And as for his sons, well, none of us—” He reflected on Ben’s falling barns.

Hodge had missed his turn. He slowed down, scowling, and turned in at the first farm lane, backed out, and started east again, Freeman seemed hardly to notice. “All right,” Hodge said. “So you begin to think what’s needed is an ordering intelligence.” He nodded to himself, and the boy riding with him waited, reserving judgment. “You begin to think pressure alone’s not enough. What’s needed is a king. A benevolent despot. And the same in the family—the old idea of the father, the judge and punisher, so on. A wife that keeps her place except when things get extreme. In my father’s family now. There’s a story they tell, when he was trying to learn Greek.” He told the story. For the first time the story came clear, or anyway clear in a new way. They came in sight of the steeples and chimneys of Batavia, and almost without interrupting himself, Hodge turned around and headed, once more, west, back toward the woods.

“So that’s what it is,” Hodge said. “All my life I’ve been patching up, trying to keep machines running that were worn out already. I suppose I should have asserted myself and invented a new machine. But I wasn’t an inventor. And yet you have to. There it is.” He told the story of Taggert.

Freeman shook his head, drumming his fingers on his hat. “The times are out of joint,” he said.

Hodge puckered his lips and brooded on the possibility that it had always been so, since the first age. Since Cain. “You have to do something, whether you’re fit for it or not,” he said.

“That’s it if that’s how you feel about it,” the boy said.

“Dad burn it!” Hodge said. He shoved on the brake and backed up and made the turn. “Almost missed it again,” he said.

“Well shit,” Freeman said encouragingly.

The car jounced over ruts and pebbles and clattered over the wood and old iron bridge, but Hodge hardly noticed. “Well all right,” he said, collecting his thoughts. “You have to be an ordering intelligence, whether you’re fit for it or not, whether or not you can see any kind of order.”

“Right,” said Freeman, “could be.”

“Vietnam, now. People say we shouldn’t be there. All over the world there are people that say that. Well maybe we shouldn’t, I’ve heard the arguments. But somebody has to be responsible. And who’s more fit for that than the United States?”

Freeman scratched his chin through the beard. “Hmm,” he said. He had a guilty look.

“We’ve exhausted every honorable alternative, isn’t that so?”

“Hmm,” Freeman said.

They had begun to pass Indian houses now. You could tell by the names on the mailboxes—Steeprock, Blue-eyes, Black. It was hilly country, and the houses were like houses anywhere, but odd. Some were far back from the road, indifferent to winter, set on the crowns of hills above driveways that would be impassable after the first of December; some were log cabins with elaborate extensions—new sections of tarpaper or asbestos shingles; one was no bigger than a large doghouse, a scale model of a real house but in fact a toy, like the houses set up on the Blind School lawns at Christmas—but there were people inside and a man sitting on a rocker on the porch, his bent head scraping the porch ceiling as he rocked. Hodge drove on, and when he came out of the woods he was in sight of the Long-house, where the meetings were, and beyond that stood the U.S. Government Activities Center, just off Indian land, where the troopers could get at it. He pulled up in front of the Activities Center and parked under the willows. He was still talking. There was a man in a felt hat with a hole in it, sitting on the long porch in front. Hodge’s rider leaned toward the windshield to look the place over, but he was still listening, nodding from time to time, shaking his head.

“All right,” Hodge said. “It’s not my fault that it’s part of my profession to give the criminal the full benefit of the law. And it’s not my fault that the Chief of Police is a half-senile old coot who’s got no more business in his job than a scarecrow’s got in church. My hands are clean of the whole thing. But it’s got to be somebody’s fault.”

The Indian had put down his comic book and was coming over toward them, shirttail hanging out, long, thin shoes untied. He had a face that looked run over. “Don’t think I’m doing all this because I like it,” Hodge was saying. “If the police would do their job there’s nobody would be happier about it than me. Just the same, it’s a fact that the boy’s got something to do with me—because of Ben, that is. Ben, my brother, the one on the farm.”

Freeman nodded.

“And because of my boy, Luke. They wash their hands of him, the Indian I mean, Nick, and there he is out roaming the countryside with a gun in his possession—what am I supposed to do?”

The Indian tipped back the hat and put his hand on the fender and looked at them. “Hod do,” he said.

Freeman tipped the hat and smiled. “Good morning.”

“Help you people?” the Indian said. He had a wrinkled cigarette between the first two fingers of the hand he leaned on.

“My son Luke, now,” Hodge stared past his fists on the steering wheel. He mused.

The Indian said, “You looking for somebody?” He took a drag on the cigarette. Behind him the sky was sharply blue. One of the willows was dead.

“We want to see somebody?” Freeman said.

Hodge leaned toward the window. “You seen any sign of Nick Slater?” he said.

The Indian showed nothing. “Slater?”

“You know him,” Hodge said. “A young fellow, thin.” He tried to think how to describe him. But he was thinking of Luke.

The Indian scratched his stomach.

“There’d be a bearded man with him,” Hodge said.

The Indian drew his mouth down, then slowly shook his head.

Hodge looked toward the willows. At last he said, “Chief around?”

“Lives in the woods,” the Indian said. He frowned. “You mean Nicodemus?”

“Who’s Chief?” Hodge said.

“Two chiefs,” the Indian said. “Nicodemus is the Chief according to him. According to the old women Sun-on-the-Water’s the Chief.”

“Well, whichever you think,” Hodge said.

Freeman nodded, satisfied.

“Sun-on-the-Water’s in the woods,” the Indian said.

“Well,” Hodge said. He waited.

The Indian thought about it. After a minute he said, “Wait here.” He walked slowly back toward the porch. As he opened the screen door he glanced back, sharp-eyed.

Hodge turned off the motor and spoke of his sons. After a long time (not long to Hodge) the screen door of the Activities Center opened and a boy came out—a lanky Indian in jeans and glasses and a red shirt. He came to the car.

“Hi,” he said. “Welcome.” He bowed.

Hodge nodded.

“This is the Activities Center,” the boy said. “We have many exhibits.”

Freeman said, “It’s nice!”

Again the boy bowed. “You’re looking for Nick Slater, I understand. The Chief will be glad to help, I’m sure. So therefore follow me and I’ll take you to our leader.” A second too late, he grinned.

Freeman laughed. Hodge pretended to smile.

“Concerning Chief Sun-on-the-Water there are many stories,” the boy said. “If you prefer, I will tell you some as we walk to where he is.”

“Great!” Freeman said.

Hodge felt for the doorhandle and took a deep breath, preparing to get out and walk.

Inside the woods of the Old Part it was dark and still musty from last night’s rain. The woods were full of brush, and there were young saplings everywhere, pushing against each other, struggling upward. In the old days, the boy said, the Indians used to burn out the brush and leaves every year, but no one bothered any more. No one lived here now except Sun-on-the-Water and some of the old women. The others lived in the new houses toward the edge of the Reservation, where they could get out to the gypsum mines and the tannery when they wanted to. The children went to school in Akron now, and when they were through a lot of them left the Reservation. The older girls went to colleges, and the older boys got jobs down south toward Olean or moved to Idaho. Nobody spoke the old language any more. Some of them could if they had to, but they never did. The trail was so narrow they had to walk single file, and Hodge was now too far back to hear more than a phrase now and then. It was just as well. The heat of his indignation at Clumly had passed and had left behind it a gloom like the gloom of the woods, a memory of pleasant times so long gone he could no longer believe in them, memories of hopes proved years ago to be ashes in the wind. He saw again in his mind the performance Chief Clumly had put on last night, trying to distract them from the truth. One could see well enough what he was up to. Before you knew it he would be saying there had been no escape at all, maybe even believing it. Yet a good man once. He’d spoken to the Lions Club sometimes, and it was a pleasure to hear him. But now you could never be sure he would even remember to come, and if he came you could not be sure he would have his speech ready or, if the speech was ready, whether the facts would be even approximately right. Hodge felt more and more depressed. Let Miller worry about it, he thought. But Miller had pretended to go along with it, standing there nodding like a puppet, and who could blame him? Ordering intelligence, he thought. One of Will Jr’s phrases, something he’d picked up in college. He sighed. His shoes squished in the mud. The sticks across the path seemed to have lain here for years; they were soft as bread. But he could see the greenish light of a clearing ahead of them, and as they came closer he saw what appeared to be a cabin.