John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“In writing,” the Mayor said again.

Clumly nodded. Then: “How long will this take?”

“What take?”

“The investigation.”

The Mayor sneered, trembling a little with anger. “Not long, you’ll see. A day, two days …”

Clumly nodded. The Mayor walked away. With his hand on the doorknob he stopped and considered a moment, perhaps getting control of himself.

“Listen,” Mayor Mullen said then, forcing himself. “I’m sorry, you hear? I’m God damned sorry about this.”

Clumly nodded. It came to him that he was rattling the little white stones in his pocket, pleasantly clicking them together.

“You’ve been a good cop,” Mayor Mullen said, “and God knows I’m sorry we couldn’t—”

Once again Clumly nodded. “You have to do your duty,” he said. And again he almost smiled but forced a scowl. He looked out the window. Across the street they were washing the firetrucks. They often did that in hot weather. Uphill supervising it, very official. A couple of men stood talking to Uphill, looking over something on a clipboard. The firetrucks shone like Christmas tree balls in his childhood. (He would go swimming with his cousins, hot days like this. He would hold his hand up and let himself sink, showing the others how deep it was, and he would bend his knees and crouch to make them think it was over their heads.)

“Yes,” Mayor Mullen said, grim all at once, “my duty.”

Clumly hardly heard him. It was as though he too were across the street or farther, miles and centuries away. “So long, Walt,” he said. The Mayor said something more, and Clumly said nothing. He thought of the dreams he’d had and fell deeper into reverie. Now he distinctly remembered the door he’d gone through: the front door at Woodworths’, but the door as it had been long ago, when he was younger.

Poor old hags. No wonder no minister came to call on them! What did they do when there was no one there to visit? Not talk, probably; that was too laborious, and the older one would hear nothing. And not walk from room to room; too painful. They sat, then. Silent, patient as corpses. What would the old buzzard Willby say to that — the cop of the soul? Prying into their secret thoughts for their own good, would he find anything there at all? Memories of swimming or dancing or worshipping in pretty-ribboned hats a hundred years ago? Shadows, more likely. Indefinite sorrow and hate. Thank God it was Willby’s responsibility, not his own. — Except that they were Baptists, not Willby’s responsibility but that of the man who made no calls. Someone else’s responsibility then; some neighbor’s. Merciless God! The Reverend Woodworth, dead for half a century now, was remembered as a great caller on the poor and enfeebled — there was a plaque on the Baptist church lawn that told about it. Yet he too had had his building programs, his politics, not to mention his precious collections of paintings and silver and Seneca artifacts, now gone black, crumbling to dust.

Clumly! Clumly! Where are the Woodworth sisters?

Am I their keeper?

He shuddered. They came across the ocean from England and Scotland or over from Holland and up from Pennsylvania, and they cajoled the Indians, sometimes shot them, took the woods and the sloping meadowland and made an Eden out of it — and then moved on. And those who were guiltless of the cruel invasion came in behind them and bought from the Holland Land Office with honest cash, nursed what remained of the Indian nations, the old ones, the drunk and spineless, too sick of body and soul for defiance, much less flight, and they possessed the milk-and-honey land and were known for highborn saints.

We’re marching to Zion

Beautiful, beautiful Zion

We’re marching upward to Zion-n-n

The beautiful city of God.

Mormons, Shakers, Spiritualists, and Millerites; Covenanters and Brotherhooders and the Monroe County Lambs. And then came the Children of Physical Culture, and they too had their holy saints (Macfadden by name) and shrines and hymns:

A band of good fellows are we,

In this helpful club of P. C.

We pursue here our health

And our troubles they melt.

And orders we get to be slim or be fat.

Our consultant does guide us each day

The masseur rubs our toxins away.

And we all stick together

And we don’t care whether

The world is now round or is flat.

And there was money, O! and empire! Old Eastman’s house with its twenty-eight bathrooms and pipe organ, and the houses up and down from it on East Avenue — more Kodak profits, or Bausch Lomb, Hickey-Freeman, Adler Brothers, Stein-Block, or profits from Sibley Lindsay and Curr’s Department Store. All that was in Clumly’s father’s day, had been not his life but his model for life — no lord, Clumly’s father, but a dutiful servant who understood greatness by the complexity of its plumbing.

That was how it was in Western New York, in the Genesee Valley, where a longshoreman like Fingy Conners could get to president of Buffalo’s fanciest boating club, rise from the dead as surely as Jemima Wilkinson did in the Year of Grace, 1776, becoming the Publick Universal Friend (so Fred Clumly’s grandfather spoke, gray of beard and pale of eye, himself mysteriously no baron, no saint, a dutiful servant in plumbing, a keeper of other men’s sanctity) or as Joseph Smith rose from death-in-life to holiness in Palmyra, or like what’s-his-name Harris, prophet. Something about the land, or the York State land as it used to be — the near horizons lifting up their high-angled screens between folded valleys, the days full of clouds forever drifting, ominous and beckoning, sliding past green-gray summits and throwing their strange shapes over the tilted fields, sunny elms inexorably darkened by the march of shadow from the straight-edged slopes. “Stand up and seize,” the land said; “or rise and prophesy, cock your ears to the invisible.” At the edge of dark woodlots facing on swamps where no mortal trespasser could ever be expected, there were signs KEEP OUT: THIS MEANS YOU.

Was he another of them, this Sunlight Man — called, driven — spooked, more like — a man compelled to speak out, having nothing to say? It was possible. A terrible thought, that after God’s withdrawal into silence the ancient mechanisms which made prophets arise should continue working, like machines left on in an abandoned factory: so that bearded wild men strode forth as before, howling, to any who would hear, their inarticulate warning.

“A master criminal,” Clumly said. “Prophet of the Devil.”

Clumly! Clumly! Where is my Devil’s prophet?

“Sh!”

I’ll tell you something. A man can’t run a universe if he doesn’t trust his men. I’ll tell you something. My job is Law and Order. That’s my first job, and if I can’t get that one done, the rest will just have to wait. You get my meaning? I’ll tell you something:

He sat at his desk, chin on his fists, musing.

“You ok, Chief?” Miller said.

He waved it away, a slight movement of his right hand.

“You need a rest,” Miller said. “How long since you took a vacation?”

“Too late for that.” He spoke without interest. “What’s the Word?” He smiled.

Miller shook his head, then sat down across from him. “Nothing on the Indian or the Palazzo woman. We went out to the Reservation, combed it. Talked to the old man, Chief Bailey, and he let us in. Nothing. Checked out the places the Indian might head for — lady he use to live with, in Byron, couple high-school girlfriends we found out about from his brother, the Hodge places. Nothing suspicious. Little run-in with Will Hodge’s ex-wife. Kid’s sick as usual. Gets headaches — really something I guess. Anyway, she wanted us out of there, you could see, so we scrammed. It was true about the headaches. The kid looked dead. It’s all in the report.”