John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

6

They sat in Ben’s bright yellow kitchen. (Mary Lou wasn’t home, in the front part, and there was no pie, but there were cookies.) Outside the window, to Will Hodge Sr’s left, the yard was like a lot outside Walt Mullen’s farm machinery store. To Will Hodge’s eye every detail outside was unnaturally distinct, the way things look in your childhood or after a death in the house. There was a big red self-propelled combine parked under the tallest of the tamaracks, beside it a yellow self-unloading wagon of newly combined wheat, beyond that a rusty corn chopper, two old tractors, a Gravely lawn mower, the school bus Ben had bought from the Alexander Central system, Ben’s motorcycle, the truck. There were also two bicycles leaning on a tree, and a teeter-totter on a sawhorse. Beyond the machinery and toys, the hillside sloped toward pastureland, the broad valley, the basswood-shaded farther hill. The basswoods were yellow-green where the sun struck them, its light breaking in wide shafts through glodes in the overcast sky. It was beautiful, sad and unreal, where the sunlight struck. You felt as though life would be different there, the air lighter and cooler, the silence more profound.

They could see that his eyes were red, but they didn’t speak of it. He had known he could trust them to wait for a sign from him.

Ben’s kitchen was close and crowded. Once it had been huge, built in the days of another kind of farm life, when there were thrashing crews to be fed in August, and hay crews in June and July, maple-syrup crews in the early spring, and in the winter, woodcutters who’d come in from their week in the black-oak and maple and pine woods a mile south of the house and would be full of tall tales of their week in the cabin, their faces bright red and greasy from the cold and the diet of fatty pork. The woodshed would be wet with the snow of their boots. But now the kitchen had been broken up, a large square right in the center of it sealed off to make a downstairs bathroom for the Old Woman, the last year she lived. The wide iron woodstove was gone, replaced by a small, more efficient stove run on butane. The wide wooden table was gone, too, replaced by scalloped aluminum and formica, cluttered always with Ben Hodge’s bills and books and equipment manuals, and with Vanessa’s papers from school. The kitchen walls were littered with more papers — calendars, more bills, papers for taxes — tacked or tucked wherever they could be, from armlevel almost to the ceiling.

Ben said, “It’s terrible, all right.” He polished his tinted glasses.

Will Hodge nodded, emptied of emotion, and, wanting a cigarette, took another cookie.

The Negro boy who worked for Ben sat stirring his coffee, the spoon going around and around mechanically. You never knew what he was thinking or how much he heard. His round, coal-black face hung forward from his slumped shoulders, and his eyes might as well have been the kind a taxidermist uses, yellow-brown and devoid of any hint of depth.

“Poor devil,” Ben said, shaking his head, thinking.

“Well, Salvador never felt a thing at least,” Will said. “Dead instantly, doctor says.”

The Negro boy sipped his coffee, looking at nothing.

Ben nodded, but he had been thinking of Clumly, not Salvador. He said, “We saw Fred Clumly at Al Hubbard’s funeral. Worn to a frazzle. It’s funny he didn’t mention that bearded fellow to you — the one he calls the Sunlight Man. It was all he could talk about when we saw him.”

They looked at each other, frowning, then looked away. Ben knew Will had left something out, Will could see. Will slid his lower jaw forward and said nothing.

“Poor devil,” Ben said again, accepting Will’s silence. He put his glasses back on, brushed a crumb from his cheek, then leaned his red, stiff hands on the edge of the table. “He’s having kind of a time of it, I’ve heard. Who knows. Maybe it scares him to think it might’ve been that Sunlight Man that came and let Nick out of jail. It’s bad enough letting a prisoner escape. Whole lot worse if he comes walking back in afterward and lets out another one.”

“Mmm,” Will said. Excitement was building up in him, dull and slow in its beginning. That was it, all right. Ben had put his finger on it. Will said, “So he tries to fool people into thinking Will Jr—”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ben said, not understanding what he’d caught in Will’s voice, merely knowing there was something there. “Put yourself in Clumly’s place. Even if he does think that bearded man did it, that’s not your business, far as Clumly’s concerned.” He spoke a little too slowly, casting around for what was wrong. “He comes to your office and finds out that just by coincidence Will Jr’s been there that morning. That might not be odd, some other time, but it’s true Will Jr’s been a friend to the boy. You and I may be sure Will Jr wouldn’t go and set a prisoner free, and maybe Clumly’s pretty much the same opinion. Just the same, there it is, here he was in town on a Sunday morning, and alone, too, family not with him. It’s queer enough that he can’t overlook it, whatever his opinion is. Clumly’s a policeman. He can’t afford to trust his private opinions.” But Ben was not convinced himself of what he was saying.

Will nodded guiltily.

They could hear Vanessa starting down the stairs, on the far side of the bathroom in the kitchen. Will leaned forward and poked the tabletop with one finger. He said, keeping himself very calm, “He’s covering himself, that’s what he’s doing. He let that little Redskin out just as sure as if he opened the cell door himself. He let … the bearded one … slip through his fingers. …” He lost track of what he was saying and had to concentrate, leaning over and covering his eyes with one hand. “That was bad enough all by itself,” he said then, “but it’s a whole lot worse if it was just the beginning, if the one that got away was — a maniac.” He bit his lip, listening to the silence. He said then, fiercely, “Clumly’s hiding the connection. Covering himself.”

“Well, maybe,” Ben said. He didn’t like the conversation, it was clear. He knew Will too well. Will was aware that he’d spoken much too loudly.

Vanessa appeared at the foot of the stairs, sweating and puffing hard. “Will!” she said. “I thought that was your voice.” She was pleased, smiling her crooked alligator smile.

“Afternoon, Vanessa,” Will said still more loudly.

“Well what have you heard?” she said. “What a horrible thing!” She came over and, though it was bad for her, took two cookies. “Mmp!” she said. Grick, grick. She was a loud chewer.

Again he told his story, all but the picture. The truth came clearer and clearer as he told it, as though it were Ben who was telling it. Vanessa sat now squeezed between the table and the bathroom wall, hands leaning on the edge of the table, exactly as her husband’s were, except when she reached to the cookie plate. Her cotton-colored hair flew around her head like fire.

“We saw him at Hubbard’s funeral, you know,” she said, meaning Clumly. “He acted odd, we thought.”

“So Ben was saying.”

“I can tell you I know just how he feels,” she said. She sighed, thinking of herself, and took a bite. “I remember how Eva Thompson was, toward the end. It was such a sad thing. She was a wonderful teacher before she got old. But then she got to falling asleep in her classes, and the children were just too much for her. So baffled she used to look sometimes! Poor dear. And she smelled, everyone said.” She paused to chew. Then: “Terrible.”

“Fred Clumly’s hardly to that point,” Ben said. He sounded annoyed.

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” Vanessa said. “But he was peculiar, at the cemetery. And you know as well as I do what people say.” She compressed her lips, then licked.