John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Or was it that he himself was the dangerous beast? Who had triumphed, after all, old man or son-in-law?

“Better get some sleep, my boy,” he said.

The Indian lowered his head — not so much a nod, it seemed, as a gesture requesting blessing. Solemnly, Hodge made a sign of the cross in the air.

And they shall be afraid; pangs and sorrows shall take hold of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth; they shall be amazed at one another; their faces shall be as flames.

Hodge said, “Thy will be done.” But he thought of Clumly, servant of law, and anxiety flared through his chest. He had to hurry, he would be late and, worse, unprepared.

2

He worked furiously, forcing Luke to help, since Nick was still asleep. Luke said nothing for a long time, merely obeyed, cutting rope, painting, sawing. His wrists were red and sore from the tight bonds, and he breathed by a kind of heavy sighing, like a man sick to death with sorrow. The Sunlight Man struggled to ignore it. Out of odds and ends — bits of wood, rope, wire, an old tarpaulin — the Sunlight Man’s huge, absurd contraption took shape.

“What is it?” Luke said. His voice was full of pressure, the light, fast beating of his heart.

“Prop for a happening,” the Sunlight Man said. He went on with his work.

Luke said, “There are no happenings. When things seem to happen it’s illusion.”

“Prop for an illusion,” he said. “Hand me the pliers.”

Mechanically, fingers trembling, Luke obeyed.

“What’s it all for?” Luke said after a while. It was like a sob, yet he labored at making it mere talk. “You make all these doo-dads, you go out and hold up some stupid store—”

“Nonsense. I don’t hold up stores.”

“Well, whatever.” A whisper. “Just the same, what’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything, you mean. Ah! That’s very philosophical.”

“Right, be a cynic.” Luke let it go, choked by emotion.

Taggert Hodge frowned, cross and threatened but tempted as well, and at last, because Luke had his father’s eyes, his father’s voice, something even of his father’s plodding goodness (however bent, dented by the batterings of his mother’s uncommon, unsensible wit and, worse yet, by experience too full of ambiguities for common sense to cope with) — because of all that but also because he could not endure the sight of such pain — he put down the pliers and turned around to lean on the workbench, folding his arms and lowering his bearded chin onto his chest. He said, “As a matter of fact, I do have answers to certain questions. Small ones. What was yours?” He spoke as if with scorn, but by accident.

“Nothing.”

They looked together at the clutter filling the garage. Beyond the open back door there were burdocks, motionless in the sunlight, their white and blue flowers singing with honeybees. The leaves were unnaturally large and their shaded stems were thick, fed by the sewer and not cut back in years.

Luke said, “My question is, Why do sinners’ ways prosper?” A whisper of rage.

The Sunlight Man forced a smile. “Another illusion. Nothing prospers but the soul. The universe is a great machine gun, and all things physical are riddled sooner or later with bleeding holes. You’re bombarded by atoms, colors, smells, textures; torn apart by ancient ideas, appeals for compassion; you twist, writhe, try to make sense of things, you force your riddled world into order, but it collapses, riddled as fast as you build, and you build it all over again. You put up bird-houses and cities, for instance, but cats eat the birds and cyclones eat the cities, and nothing is left but the fruitless searching, which is otherwise called the soul.”

Luke stood silent, throat and temples swelling.

“I’m serious, my boy,” he said. “Don’t be fooled by rhetoric. Even a master of illusion must have his defenses. Witness our Saviour.”

“You just talk,” Luke whispered. “You duck out of everything with talk.”

“Well, yes, perhaps. But I’ve also acted, from time to time. There has to be a convenient opening for action.”

“Yes. Like finding Nick in jail, so you could turn him into a killer.”

“No, I freed him.”

“It was vicious and you know it. Or I hope you do. Maybe you really meant to free him, but you didn’t know him. That’s for sure. Anyone who knew him would have guessed. We tried — me, my father, Uncle Ben. You wouldn’t understand. It was no use, anyway. Jail was the only hope left; maybe it would show him.” He gulped for air. “But there you were, believing in nothing, grabbing whatever little kick came along, exactly like the rest — an ‘existentialist,’ as my mother calls herself. There is no past, only the present; no future either, only the future-present. You know what I’m saying. You didn’t know him from Adam, you had no idea what direction he’d been heading before you came, and you set him ‘free,’ you say, like some new Jesus, as if anything might be possible if you said it was — as if a falling rock could change its mind and go upward at your command.”

The Sunlight Man moved only his eyes to study him. Luke’s jaw was tight, his speech thick and quiet, forced out by the lightning-fast pounding of his heart.

“Are you afraid of me?” he said.

Luke nodded.

“Why?”

“Because—” He changed his mind. With square Hodge fingers he touched his raw left forearm, looking at the floor.

“Because I’m crazy, you were going to say.”

“The way you walk — like you weren’t human, like something imitating the way human beings walk. And when you talk … all show. You have no feelings. You shuffle, and yet your feet don’t make any noise. A creature like you would kill in a wink if the mood came over it. How can we know what you think? If there were people from outer space—”

“Or inner space.”

“There. You make a point of speaking without talking. ‘Inner space.’“ His lips shook.

The Sunlight Man pursed his lips and looked up at the rafters. There were swallows’ nests. He remembered the swallows’ nests at Stony Hill. They were everywhere there — in the cowbarn, the garage, the smokehouse, even the wellhouse. Art Jr had knocked one down once, when he was twelve or so, and Will had put it up again — the eternal repairer — with old rags and bits of mud, and he’d put the baby birds back in. The mother, knowing his heart, had accepted his work. It was the kind of thing Luke too would do, you had a feeling, though he might not do it as well. For all his sharp tongue, his whining misery, his wrath, he too had eyes of the kind that must look sometimes at swallows. Like Kathleen. They would go out at dusk, the two of them, to watch the swallows ’ sharp-winged, arrowtailed flight against the sun’s setting, a lovely fragrance of new-mown alfalfa scattered across the farm. Blessed is he that has seen these things and goes under the ground.

Luke was turning away, and Taggert Hodge saw that he should not have let it pass—“speaking without talking.” He nodded, pretending he’d been thinking about it. “It’s true, yes,” he said as if just discovering it. “I avoid plain speech, communication. It’s interesting, now you mention it. I also do it when I talk to myself. I apologize.”

Luke said nothing.

“Suppose I say I do believe in the past? Suppose I say I once walked and talked like you?”

“But you don’t say it. You say ‘suppose.’ If you said it, it would be asking me to wonder what happened, what turns a human being into a monster. It would be talking as if we were both human. You can’t.”

He looked at the side of Luke’s jaw, and again he was tempted. But he said, ironic and tentative, “What made you decide to speak to me so frankly, my dear boy? It’s very strange, you know.”