John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

For fear that the barn would collapse on top of him, he fled across the lawn and around the trailer to the front of the house and climbed in one of the open windows. Here the storm was noisier than ever, but at least the rain could not get at him, part of the house roof still held. The draft going through here, not to mention the wetness of his clothes, would give him a case of pneumonia, no doubt, but better pneumonia than be buried alive under the barn. And this, dear God! was what he had come to, a man fifty-six years old, with a known bad heart. (He seized the word boldly, like a penance, and seized it again.) A known bad heart! He had brought it on himself, all of it. There was no question about that. None! And were there people dying somewhere in the night because of him, because of Walter Benson? Horrible! he thought. He covered his face with his hands and crouched in the corner, sick with the burden of his wickedness. “Asleep since the day he was born,” the Sunlight Man had said. How true! Precious Mother of God, how true! He would call the police first thing in the morning and tell them all he knew. As for Ollie Nuper …

The lightning flashed again and the thunder boomed, but Walter Benson was tremendously at peace, weeping with joy and terror. “Bless them,” he whispered, thinking of the man and woman in the trailer. “Praise God,” he whispered. He thought of the Indian boy with the broken jaw and whispered, “Bless him too, and God be with him, and with all of us! While we obey His commands we are at peace!”

When he awakened in the morning he had the beginning of a very bad cold and the roomer’s car was gone from the orchard. The road was full of mudpuddles. It was a long way home. He stood hugging himself and shivering and working his throat. “The Lord is just,” he thought hopefully, sick at heart. “Praise the Lord.”

He shuddered once, so violently that he nearly fell down, then climbed out through the window and started toward the road. His Pocket Book of Favorite Poems was ruined, but Walter Benson was never at a loss for poetry. He swung his thin arms to keep the blood moving and tipped his face up and straightened his humpback as much as possible, and recited aloud to himself as he walked:

“These joys are free to all who live,

The rich and poor, the great and low:

The charms which kindness has to give,

The smiles which friendship may bestow,

The honor of a well-spent life,

The glory of a purpose true,

High courage in the stress of strife,

And peace when every task is through …”

The blue morning ahead of him danced with sunlight.

1

The Sunlight Man could not afford to waste more than a few hours on sleep. It was four in the morning when he got in. Roosters were already beginning to crow, though the sky was black. His prisoners in the cellar were asleep upright, sagging in the ropes that tied them. The gray light falling on their necks and shoulders from the bare cellar bulbs, the blackness of earth and rock wall behind them, gave them the look of the closed-off, uncommunicating dead. Luke hung with his head fallen forward, shoulders drawn inward as if he’d passed out while in agony. In the darker shadows to his right, the Indian hung in the same position, but with his back to the stairs and his shoulders slumped, relaxed. Millie Hodge, on the other side of Luke, slept with her head fallen back and to one side, and at last she showed her age. The gag biting into her mouth and cheeks was wet with spittle, and at the edges of the gag her gray face was discolored by a dark bruise. Two lines of black, like rainwater stains on a white wall, ran down from the corners of her eyes. The roots of her hair were silver. The Sunlight Man smiled, unconsciously cringing a little, showing his teeth. “O blynde world, O blynde entencioun!” he murmured in the hollow dimness. He raised his hand in blessing, like the Pope.

“How often falleth al the efect contraire

Of surquidrie and foul presumpcioun,

For kaught is proud, and kaught is debonaire!

This Mrs. Hodge is clomben on the staire,

And litel weneth that she moot descenden;

But alday faileth thing that fooles wenden!”

He looked again at Luke, but for all his gleeful bitterness, he could not mock him. His arms and shoulders were thick as a man’s, the iron-toed shoes, rising out of the water on the cellar floor, enormous; but his face (the Sunlight Man observed, moving closer, stirring the sluggish lake) was like that of a suffering child, some ravished half-wit virgin. The Sunlight Man stood pigeon-toed, with bent knees, wringing his fingers. “I find no fault in him,” he said, and grotesquely rolled up his eyes.

He saw then that Nick Slater’s eyes were open, watching, shiny as a rat’s. After a moment the Sunlight Man went over to him and, without a word, untied him. The boy made no move either to resist or to help. His legs were unsteady, and he opened and closed his two hands slowly to get back his circulation. The Sunlight Man helped him through the water to the stairs, still without a word of explanation, and left the others as they were. He began the slow climb, supporting Nick as he would an invalid. Upstairs at last, he whispered with a leer, “You see why I had to do this to you, my boy.” He cocked his head, eyebrows lifted. Then he sat Nick down in the kitchen to put salve on the boy’s sore wrists and ankles, and to wash his feet — bluewhite from the dirty, cold seepage in the cellar — and wrap them in hot towels. “I suppose I can trust you to stand guard, now that I’m back?” he said. Nick Slater said nothing, merely stared, puzzled and full of hostility. “If anything happens,” the Sunlight Man said, “don’t stir, don’t even think; just wake me. If I find I can’t trust you—” He pointed to the cellar, smiling. Still Nick said nothing, but it was answer enough, at the moment, for the Sunlight Man. He had a great deal to do before afternoon if he was to meet again with Clumly. First, he must sleep.

As a rule he was a man who could snatch more sleep in an hour than most men could in three. He knew the art of what had been called in his father’s day “concentration.” But not this morning. He was of many minds, as excited, as tangled in his wits, and as full of daring schemes as a young man in love. Not even he could say why, nor did he ask. “A new lease on life,” the expression went. Why he should get a new lease on life from teasing, perplexing, confounding an old man who sat half-asleep, witless and innocent as an ancient bull with a ring through its nose — who could tell? Nevertheless, he felt like a man reborn. If his head was filled with images of fire, his heart, for all its churning excitement, was precariously serene. Somewhere even now Clumly would be sitting with his hands around his nose, his tiny bullet-eyes half-shut, listening with all his poor clumsy wits to the Sunlight Man’s grand tirade, or walking back and forth in a locked bedroom, puffing fiercely at his green cigar, going through in his mind all the subtle twists of the Tale of the Negro in the Cellar.

And so now, like a man on the verge of embarking on some shrewd course of action for the good of all humanity, the Sunlight Man lay huddled in his bed, still in his clothes, his hands pressed between his thighs, his knees drawn nearly to his chin, trying to concentrate on sleep but racing all the while from scheme to scheme, from one dazzling trick to another, plotting grand gestures and cadences, concocting metaphors and puzzling allusions, a splendid, unheard-of entertainment. Half-waking, half-sleeping, he would laugh sometimes at things he couldn’t make sense of a moment later. When at last he was more asleep than awake, the Indian sitting stock-still at the window, he had curious, frightening dreams.