John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“It was an impulse.”

“But you’d been thinking about it. Brooding on it, in fact That’s how impulses begin, as St. Augustine tells us. Suggestion, delectation …”

“Maybe.”

The Sunlight Man squinted. “Hunting for soft places in the dragon’s belly?”

“I’d expect you to think that.”

“I don’t, necessarily. Generally speaking, I think nothing.” He picked at his lip, unwilling to go farther until the uneasiness in his chest calmed down and he was sure of his voice. “What I think—” He paused once more. “As a matter of fact, I think you’ve made me a symbol. You’ve brooded too much, connected me with your mother and father and your childish frustration. I’m the enemy, inhuman. I mock your hot desires for things you scorn. Wife, children, house in the country, profession, even decency.”

Luke looked away, compressing his lips.

So you’re one of us, the Sunlight Man thought. He continued in a rush—“If I mock you, you suspect I may be right. You think what you love is probably not worth loving, no lasting significance, no derring-do, no bizzazz. And so you’ll test me, poke at me, turn me over and maybe in time you’ll assume me.”

Luke made no response.

The Sunlight Man leaned toward him, sly. “You’re toying with making me into an example for your life.” He smiled like a wolf. “You’ll grow a beard, stop washing your face and hands and first thing you know you’ll be learning to walk without noise, like one of us devils.”

“You’re paranoid.”

The Sunlight Man unfolded his arms and turned back to the bench. “And you, O child of midnight, are a liar.”

It was almost a minute before Luke said quietly, “You’re wrong. You teach me to admire stupid people and arrogant bastards who do no harm — unlike you.”

“Hold these wires,” the Sunlight Man said.

Luke obeyed.

The Sunlight Man said, “I believe in the past, and I once walked and talked like you. God’s truth. But I don’t want you to wonder about me. Let whosoever is without sin cast the first crumb.” In the filings on the bench he traced the word Youth, then smiled, showing teeth.

Luke said, “You haven’t understood. I was offering help.” His voice was quieter than before.

The Sunlight Man stood very still. At last he said softly and violently, “With what, boy? With love? Is Love your weapon?

Down pour’d the heavy rain

Over the new-reap’d grain;

And Misery’s increase

Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.”

It seemed pure, inexplicable rage, and Luke Hodge was hurled back into his cage of misery and confounded.

The Sunlight Man went back to his work. He wouldn’t say anything more.

3

In the milkhouse, where he was supposed to be washing the milking machines, Ben Hodge’s boy David was playing complicated rhythms on the milkcan covers. The farm around the milkhouse lay as quiet as a picture in a magazine, but because of the music it seemed nevertheless alive and sentient, like motionless stone imperceptibly trembling with a dance of atoms, or like a sleeping head full of dreams. Ben Hodge, greasing his corn-chopper on the hill behind the house, paused and squinted. Vanessa was in the kitchen cutting rhubarb into a burnt-black saucepan for lunch. She was breathing hard, as usual, and the gray curls at her temples were dark with sweat. Her paring knife stopped moving and she listened to the rhythms moving out from the milkhouse through breathless air to the hills and valleys and woods. Once she’d labored out to him when he was playing the milkcan covers, and the moment she’d touched the door he’d stopped. It was a shame, she felt, that he only played when alone, hiding his candle under a bushel. “Whooey!” she’d said, hand on her thudding heart (the walk to the milkhouse had tired her). He’d merely stared back with blank, deferential eyes, a trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth. She could not get him to play. He was a giant, standing black as coal in the white, low-ceilinged room, his glistening bare shoulders solid as a horse’s rump. He lay his hands on his hips and looked down at her with indifferent friendliness. And so she knew better, now, than to go and interrupt him. Besides, the heat out there would wilt her like lettuce. Well, she was grateful that the boy was so happy. She wished she could sometimes be as happy as that. She was grateful that they had happened to find him, so that now, working in the murderous heat, she could be uplifted by that wordless, glorious music of praise, forget herself for a moment and join him in spirit. She looked out the high, round-arched kitchen window at the brown grass of the lawn. She wiped her forehead with her arm. Poor Elizabeth, she thought. Poor Will — poor Fred Clumly — poor Esther — poor Mrs. Palazzo — the poor, poor Salvadors. She must get to her letter-writing this afternoon.

Sometimes the music was slow and thoughtful, sometimes wild with excitement.

Poor Vanessa, she thought, and smiled with a startled look. “Poor silly lummox,” she said to herself, “it’s from loneliness that he drums.”

The music fell away to silence, then after a moment began again, rapid and light.

Ben Hodge, still listening, went on now with his work. In the valley below him, beyond the house and barns, beyond the tamaracks — in the yellowgreen valley that thousands of years ago had been a glacial river, graveyard of fantastic beasts — his black and white cows were sitting in the shade of the maple trees at the corner of the pasture. They too were the Negro’s instruments. He would stand in the cowbarn, when he thought he was alone, and would lightly drum on the cows’ backs and sides, getting sharp, thin notes from their upright hipbones, hollow, deep sounds from the hide around their lungs. He played tractors, too, and water pipes, old boards, stone walls; if he thought no one was there, he even tapdanced music out of the caked, yellow lime behind the gutters.

A blackbird whistled, and again Ben Hodge looked up. It came a second time, a clean pure note on the crest of the drumbeat. There was a light breeze here on the hill, and a sound from across the lane of rustling corn leaves. All at once an idea for a sermon came: David playing for mad King Saul. The whole world is a kind of music, and everything living plays its part, either in tune or out of tune. Now when a man is out of tune …

He thought again of his brother Tag, and his face drew up to wince. Guilt rushed over him. What was there he could do? It came to him suddenly then that it was not because he was in tune with the world that the Negro boy played or the blackbird whistled or he, Ben Hodge, made up sermons. And not because he was in tune once more that Saul came out of his madness or Taggert came home. We’re more like organ pipes, then, he thought. Somebody pushes the right key and we’re filled with sudden music and can’t say why.

“so Saul was refreshed, and was well. …”

And the bitterness is, there are pipes and pipes — some pipes sweet and melodious, and others that tremble and howl like the Day of Doom. But either way, somebody pushes an unseen key.

(But a man is different from a cow: he ruminates by a different set of laws, and asks himself why. )

Not organ pipes, then, or tractors, waterpipes, boards, stone walls; not even the slime of the earth. A man is the player and the instrument in one, and most of the time he’s the composer, note by note.

There came into his mind the beginning of a new way of telling the story of Saul and the harper: “There was a king full of wrath and vindictiveness, the Bible says, and he was what you’d call a man with a demon in him. He was a powerful king, and whatever tune he called, why, the people danced to it. Well sir, there was a harper in that land, and though the Bible doesn’t record it, he was deaf. …”