The Sunlight Dialogues (78 page)

“Sh!” Ben said. The minister was praying. All the rest of the cemetery was hushed and solemn, the wide-boled trees dignified and calm (but behind one of them Freeman crouched) and the light came down through the trees in yellow stripes. The Paxtons were a tableau beside the grave, the old woman in her wheelchair, the sons calm as trees behind her. Clumly stood a little to their right, holding his handkerchief over his nose, blowing with hardly a sound. The Professor stood to the left of the wheelchair, shrunken head bowed, just perceptibly shaking with palsy. Between his huge white hands he had a leaf he was secretly tearing to tiny shreds.

When the prayer was over the people stirred, and some of them went closer to the grave, so that Will could not see any more.

“It was a terrible thing,” Will said. He told them how it had been, suddenly seeing her dead body sitting by the wall. “Then Clumly and his men came,” he said and winced. “Clumly insisted it was hooligans. He’s out of his mind.”

Ben was looking at the limbs of the trees. “Well,” he said, “someone tried to set Salways’ on fire last night. Clarence Pieman saw them—he was patrolling the alley. They’d put some papers up against the wall and lit them. They got away, because Clarence had to put out the fire, and by the time he’d finished they were gone like last year’s weeds. Been a lot of that lately. You never know.”

“Well in
this
case you know,” Will Hodge said. “They shot her with a gun wrapped up in a blanket—the blanket off my bed. Hooligans don’t do it that way, if they shoot at all. This was somebody knew what he was doing.”

“Blanket!” Vanessa said. “Not Grandma’s quilt!”

“No, another one,” he said. “One Millie left.”

She put her hand to her heart in relief.

“Strange things happening in the world,” Ben said. “That boy on the tower in Texas, shooting people for no rhyme or reason. Fellow that killed those nurses in Chicago. Nazis in Chicago carrying signs against the Negroes. It all—” He mused. “It makes you wonder.”

An old woman popped her head out beside him. “The Fifteen Signs,” she said.

Ben nodded and touched his hatbrim politely.

“It’s going to be an early winter,” Vanessa said. She sighed.

“Who was that?” Will said.

“Her?” Ben looked where the old woman had been a moment ago. She’d gone away into the crowd now. He shrugged.

“The Fifteen Signs,” Will said. It sounded ominous to him.

“Bill Hyde says there’s somebody in Oakfield saw an alligator,” Vanessa said.

“Wal now,” Ben said kindly, patting her hand, “Bill Hyde says a lot of things.”

She closed her eyes. “Poor Mrs. Palazzo,” she said.

They nodded. Elizabeth Paxton was coming toward them in her wheelchair, her sons and Professor Combs and Chief Clumly a little behind her. Clumly looked up, alarmed. “Afternoon, Will.”

“Hah!” Will said. He reached out to shake Clumly’s hand.

Behind Clumly, walking with his eyes rolled up and his hands pressed together like those of one praying, came Freeman. He gave them a solemn wink.

“Who was that?” Vanessa said.

Will Hodge blushed. “Who was who?” he said.

“Friend of the family, likely,” Ben said. He studied the ground and mused.

3

Will Hodge sat alone in his car, a block from the police station. Freeman had set off for Critic’s to get them some supper. They’d be able to drop their vigil soon. The light was still on in Clumly’s office, but any time now, unless he had still more lunacy plotted, he’d be going home to bed. If Freeman had his way, they’d have dropped the vigil already. He’d sat staring at the dashboard, shaking his head—refusing to look out at where Clumly crouched in the bushes like a toad, beneath Mayor Mullen’s window and he’d said, “I dunno,” and scratched his ear. “If
I
was in charge we’d cut out. Man starts falling apart, like, it seems to me you should let him do it in private. You got no pity?” But Hodge had said, “Do what you like,” and set his jaw. “You’re free to go when you choose.” Freeman had stayed, shaking his head. Hodge thought:
No pity!
A lifetime of pity was what he’d had, pity like a rope around his neck, and all of them tugging it—Will Jr, Millie, Ben, Luke. …
What would you know, a mere child, about pity?
It was dark now. Main Street was stinging with neon. There was a crowd in front of the Dipson Theater, the late show about to start.
The Russians Are Coming!
The traffic light over the middle of the street a little ahead of where Will Hodge was parked went mindlessly from red to green again and again, and in his memory of its changes time became as palpable as the shiny-topped cars passing under it or the dark upper stories of the buildings on each side of the street. On the sidewalk to the right of his parked car people walked past saying words to one another that Hodge couldn’t catch. Their heels clicked sharply for a time in the darkness and then grew faint, drawing away toward the cheerfully lighted fire-house with its dark red trucks, where there were firemen sitting on the sidewalk in front, on wooden folding chairs. Chief Uphill was there, standing with his hands folded in back of him, chin thrust forward, gazing toward the police station. Beyond him a tractor-trailer came onto Main Street, off the Walnut Street Bridge, brakes whooshing, motor growling at the stoplight like a tiger. On the door Hodge saw a white word he recognized without being near enough to read it:
PAXTON.

No pity. He who had watched their world falling board by board, who had patched toggled wheedled bullied wept in secret, cursed, had paid through the nose and gotten nothing. No pity.

He was a man who had understood too much, if anything, though not in Millie’s way or for that matter his father’s: not in words not in myths but by common sense and by that eldest-brother love and justice that ran in his veins instead of blood. He deserved nothing as far as he could know, and therefore he could not fight for his rights. They too deserved nothing, as far as he could know, but he loved them and so he must fight for them, raise them up when they fell, eternally forgive. Had gone to Paxton full of wrath knowing Paxton no more in the wrong than Taggert but undaunted by that because Taggert was his brother, and not even Millie’s predictable conviction that she’d forced him to go there could keep him from it (she’d be wrong, clear as it might seem to her; her scorn at his failure to go earlier had not driven him to it but had merely made it occur to him for the first time that he could go) and had stood in old Paxton’s office like a boulder, jaw slung forward, thumbs in his suspenders. “I’m bringing suit against you, Mr. Paxton,” he said. Clive Paxton, seated at his desk, still clean and efficient as an axe at sixty-one, showed only the faintest trace of irritation. The window to his right was bright with the snow’s reflection. He did not bother to ask what Hodge was suing him for. “You’ll have to talk to my lawyer.”

Hodge nodded. “I will. I also plan to ask for an injunction to keep your trucks off State Street Road after five p.m.”

Paxton’s white eyebrows lowered slightly. “You’ll never get it.”

Again Hodge nodded. “Maybe, but you’ll have to fight. And one thing more. I’m suing your wife for libel, and that one I’ll win for sure.” Elizabeth Paxton had told a woman named Briggs that all the Hodges were crazy, something congenital, and the Briggs woman had told half the people in the Presbyterian church. “I’ll have you tied up in the courts for the rest of your life,” Hodge said. He waited.

Paxton leaned back in his chair slowly and turned his head a little to look out the window (a view of big quonset huts, red and white gas pumps, a stack of old tires half-hidden in snow, flatbed trucks, big tractor-trailers, dirty green oil drums with snow mounded on the tops) and even now he showed no anger except that he was pale. It was sign enough. Will Hodge knew where he stood. He grew calm and ready as a switchblade fighter (or so he imagined in his overconfidence). He’d say this for Millie: live with that woman for five, ten years and you could take on God Himself.

But Paxton knew that he was ready (whatever else—private sorrows, weariness, righteous indignation—might be stirring behind that iron mask), and at last he said, “What are you after, Hodge?”

“Nothing but justice,” he said, and forced a rueful grin. “You trying to make me look like an extortionist?”

“All right all right,” he said. And now his anger rang clearly in his voice. He was tighter than new-stretched fence.

“It’s no joke,” Hodge said. “My complaints are legitimate; they’ll stand up in court. You’ll see. That’s all I came to say.” He turned then, abruptly, as if to leave.

Without hurry, Paxton stood up. “But you’ll settle out of court.” Not a question, a statement. The old man understood the game. He’d played it all his life, both fair and foul. If he was lucky he might get away without paying Will Hodge a red cent—and old Paxton would rather pay blood than money: his mediocre fortune was his love and his chilly god—but win or lose he would pay through the nose for the battle. He could afford it all right—and Hodge could too, as his own lawyer. Paxton could choose to fight, if he wanted, for righteousness’ sake. But when he’d won he’d have new fights to face, for Law is never spent, and when a man has decided to tie up your life in court contention he will kill you in the end, though he may perhaps kill himself as well. If the man means business, enough to devote a lifetime to it, you have only three choices: to settle, to murder, or to commit yourself to a tedious and unendable war of attrition. Paxton would not murder, though possibly he might have once, in the days when he was hiring scabs or trucking black-market hogs; and despite his anger at all Hodge’s house, he would not commit his old age to futile war, not even for righteousness’ sake. His predictable move was to try for the least painful settlement he could get.

“Only if the terms are fair,” Hodge said.

Paxton bent his head, looking at the desktop, touching it lightly with the tips of two fingers. Without looking up, still thinking, he said, “I ought to fight you.”

Hodge said nothing. He understood, but he wasn’t budging. If Hodge gave an inch, the old man would no doubt boast of it later, would believe like Millie that he’d won by craft what had fallen to him as a gift. Face reddening to flame, Paxton opened the desk drawer—for an instant Hodge had the ludicrous fear that like one of those villains on television he was reaching for a gun—and took his checkbook from it. Then he slid the drawer shut and sat down again. The redness of his face faded. He looked up. He seemed totally emotionless now. “How much?”

Hodge bent his head and looked up-from-under at him through his shaggy eyebrows. He slid his jaw out. “Write it to Taggert Hodge,” he said.

The old man blanched. Hodge had expected something like that, had more or less expected the jerk of the lips, too, and the closing of the checkbook. “My lawyer will be in touch with you,” Paxton said.

Hodge nodded. “Fine.”

But as once more he turned to leave, the old man said, “What’s your game, Hodge? You knew I wouldn’t do that.” Eyes mere slits.

Hodge pursed his lips. At last, slowly, as if thoughtfully, watching his stubby, scuffed shoes as he moved, he crossed to Paxton’s desk. The old man waited, and though he seemed in command as usual, Hodge could sense that all his power was drained from him now, because for once in his life he couldn’t tell which battlements to defend. That was what Hodge was counting on, though now he was already suspecting he’d made a mistake. But Paxton’s hands were liver-spotted, his mouth pale. Wolf without teeth. It could work, he thought, and doubted it. He put his hands in his suitcoat pockets and balled them to fists. He said, “You control grown sons like babies. They haven’t got a dime of their own.”

“That’s my business,” Paxton said, baffled. He wasn’t confident of it. You could see the wheels spinning in his head.

Hodge met his red-veined eyes as still as dust and pressed quickly. “Set them up in something. Put them on their feet.”

“You know I can’t do that. What in hell are you talking about?”

“Why can’t you?”

Paxton hung fire. “My sons hired you?”

It was a question he’d forgotten to expect. He said again, “Why can’t you?”

After a moment, quietly, the old man said, “Because they’re sick, irresponsible, and dumb.”

Hodge nodded, panicky. “I’ll see you in court.” The phrase, totally unplanned, pleased him and gave him a feeling of hope.

But Paxton shook his head. “Wait up.” He took a deep breath and then another, the deep breaths of a man very sick himself. “What have they promised you?” he asked.

“Nothing.” It was the truth, strictly speaking, but he was on bad ground. The sons had said they couldn’t help Taggert with Kathleen’s treatment, because the old man held the pursestrings. He’d thought at the time,
They’re weaklings. They’d do it if we found the right pressure.

Still the old eyes searched him, cunning and baffled and something else too; after an instant Hodge caught what it was: wounded.

“Little fools,” he said. “Going to you of all people! I never would have believed they had the guts.”

“But you’ll take the deal,” Hodge said. He had lost.

Paxton shook his head, but it didn’t mean no; not yet. “They’re fools,” he said. There was pity in it as well as disgust. Then, icily: “You should have advised your clients they’ll be disinherited. You warned them?”

Hodge had gone too far—the old man would talk to his sons and the whole shabby trick would be out. “My clients?” he said, clumsily. “Your sons are no clients of mine. You jump to conclusions.”

Paxton’s rage flared up and died away again in an instant. A semi came rumbling past the window, and whatever it was that the old man said to himself Hodge missed. The phone rang on the desk. Paxton ignored it. He closed his eyes for a moment, frowning, and breathed deeply again. “I see,” he said at last, and Hodge knew it was true. Assuming all motives in the world were hate and selfishness, Paxton had guessed right again. “You think you can get them to support their sister.” He did not bother to look up for confirmation. He was himself again, firm and full of lightning. “You miscalculate. They’ll be bankrupt inside six months.” He remembered the checkbook. As if in terrible weariness or worse, he opened the desk drawer with his right hand and with his left slid the checkbook over and let it fall in. He got up and went to the window to look without interest at his trackbarns. “You all think I’m wrong,” he said. “All of you. Even her.” Hodge couldn’t tell if he meant Kathleen or his wife.