John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He could have explained. Mary Lou and her husband were good tenants for Ben. They didn’t complain when the well went dry or a crack opened up in the old brick wall, and they didn’t object to the wasps in the attic or the honeybees that lived in the bricks around the chimney. They fixed their own plumbing every time it went out, which was time after time, and put up with the leaks where the rain came in, and jacked up the floors when they sagged. Their boys helped out with the farm work, and if their father was lazy — which maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t — he was a downright genius with motors, and that was a fact. He could tear down one of Ben Hodge’s tractors in an hour and a half and put it together again — whether it was one of the new ones with the latest gadgets or some old Farmall or John Deere twenty years old — so that it was better when he got finished than when it was bought.

All right.

No reason Will Hodge should defend himself against Merton Bliss or Mickey Salvador’s mother or anybody else. “Never complain, never explain,” Millie used to say. Something she’d learned from a man she’d had an affair with once. Rich man, she thought. Lived with a wife and their one sickly daughter in a great big house in Amherst. Millie had told Hodge many a time about all the books her lover read, all the companies he had, how he couldn’t take a job because he was so “wealthy”—her word, not Hodge’s — that if he earned any more his taxes would run him bankrupt. Hah! “You think I’m lying?” she’d said. “I think you’re a little misled,” was how he put it. It progressed. She flaunted the thing, as she always flaunted those affairs of hers, knowing how deeply Will Hodge was shocked. On an impulse, he’d hired a detective, it cost him two hundred dollars. And he’d proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that the man was exactly what Will Hodge had guessed, a fraud. And what did she say to that? “You monster!” she said. He saw for a fact he was a monster.

Now, his wide chest bubbling with violent confusion, he was sick to death of it. Sick of being blamed for things, the faults of his sons, the crime of an Indian he hardly knew, the waste that teemed and rumbled around his brother. Blamed by all of them. Blamed by himself.

“Well I guess it’ll cost me plenty, talking to you the way I am,” Bliss said. “That’s how it is. A man gets too old for just sitting around with his mouth shut. Your father would turn in his grave if he saw it, old family place been sold to niggers, and Ben’s place turned to a motorcycle shop, that son of yours tearing down the Brumsteads’ wooden fences and the other son up there in Buffalo working with the Communists. Ding! Well, you just figure up your bill and I’ll pay it. Man can’t beat his attorney, Lord knows, I’m just tired, that’s why it gets my dander up. Seems like the whole darn world must be tired. Vietnam there, all them little yellow fish-head devils in the woods making traps for our boys out of poisonous snakes and nails with pee on them, the way I hear, and these people back at home having marches in praise of the Vietnams. And De Gaulle over there making friends with the Russians, no more grateful for all we been doing for him than a mad dog with the rabies, and the English no better with all their talk, pure Communists theirselves, just playing in the enemy’s hands. Well shoot. You can’t ask for common sense, Lord knows. It’s never been and it never will be. But when I think how it’s going I get sick to my stomach. Truth. Some the best families in Western New York going downhill by tail over tincup. And nobody cares. It makes you sick. How much this cost me, your work?”

“Fourteen dollars,” Hodge said.

“Fourteen dollars.” He rolled his eyes up.

“Don’t you fool yourself,” Hodge said. “You’re getting a dang good bargain.” Angrily, he wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“Lord knows,” he said. “You could just as easy have said five hundred dollars. I never could stop you.” He looked toward the house, the veranda dark and cool in the shadow of the maples. “I guess you want it now.”

“Any time,” Hodge said, meaning yes. He slid his lower jaw beyond his upper and smiled, businesslike, his eyebrows drawn in toward the wide, dented bridge of his nose.

Bliss turned around and got onto his hands and knees and felt behind him with the toe of his shoe for the ladder. As he made his way down he said, “Justice. What a world.” He stopped to scratch his armpit.

Hodge went on smiling like a man about to be shot. He stood with his legs planted wide apart, his head tipped forward as if for balance, his folded arms resting on his monumental belly.

At the kitchen door, handing him the check, Merton Bliss said, “Hottest summer I ever seen. It’s a hundred and ten by the thermometer on the barn. So hot in the goll-dern chickenhouse the shells won’t harden. That’s the truth. Franny Buckenmeyer filled up that silo of his with some hay ensilage, and the weather got so hot it just turned into ashes. You drive by in your car and you can see it. Ashes blowing from the top of the silo and scattering over the pastures till they’re whiter than snow. Fact. And the milk! The cows lie out in the sun all day and when you put your hands on their tits you got to use gloves, that’s how hot they git. The milk comes out powder. You ask anybody. All the water’s just boiled right away. This last two weeks we been shippin our milk in paper boxes. That’s the truth.”

Hodge held out his hand and Bliss read the check over, blew on the ink, then gave it to him.

“No hard feelings, Will?” Bliss said. He smiled.

Hodge read the check.

“Too bad Eleanor ain’t here. She’ll be sorry she missed you. She’s off somewheres hellin around for the fool Red Cross.”

“G’day, Merton,” Hodge said.

“So long, Will. See here, I’m sorry about that boy.”

Hodge said nothing, outwardly calm as a tree.

“Sometimes these things’ll just happen,” Bliss said. “It’s just Nature. Nothin you can do about it. It’s like the time Glen Westbrook slept out on his porch all night. You heard about that. Woke up in the mornin and his wooden leg had been chewed off clean at the stump. Beavers had got it. That’s Nature.” He shook his head. “But I’ll tell you something.” He poked Hodge’s belly. “Say a word to that boy of yours. Thing about a lawyer, he makes his money getting people off on some technicality, and pretty soon he don’t know there’s a right and wrong. And that’s the truth.”

Hodge swallowed.

“No hard feelings,” Bliss said.

“G’day,” Hodge said. Like a dazed horse he went toward his car.

He drove by Brumsteads’. The white board fence had been broken down and run over on both sides of the barn. So it was true about Luke. He drove on down Putnam Settlement Road toward his brother’s place. At the crest of the hill he could look across the valley past the slow green creek and the meadowland with Queen Anne’s lace and wild mustard and daisies scattered through it, and he could see on the crest of the farther hill the square wooden silo, the paintless barn with its rusted tin roofs, the tamarack trees, the house. Ben’s. His grief whelmed up in him again and threatened to overcome him. The air grew less breathless, and the shadows of the yellow-green apple trees of the side-hill orchard intensified his sorrow. Poor Ben. Maybe he’d stop and say hello, and then visit his daughter Mary Lou, in the front part of Ben’s house. Could he manage it? Apple pie came into his mind. Pale country pie, with crusts as flaky as the day is long. Mary Lou made the best apple pies in New York State.

Tears came in a rush and he pulled to the side of the road until it was over.