John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“He won’t show his face around here,” Will Hodge said. “He’d be ashamed.”

“Well, we still have some of his clothes,” Vanessa said.

Ben mused on it, still watching.

The clock struck in the livingroom. Quarter-to-seven.

Will Sr began hunting for his hat and found it, after a moment, on the dish-drainer. “Well, take care,” he said. Then, with his hat on, a cookie in his hand, his eyes set thoughtfully on some point in space, he left.

7

The idea grew in Will Hodge’s mind — or fixation, maybe — as he wound his way up the Creek Road toward Batavia. “The old monkey,” he said aloud, but not quite crossly now. The Chief of Police had been sly, no denying that, and Will Hodge had been fooled. It wouldn’t have hit him in a hundred years that all Clumly’s suspicions of Will Jr and Luke were mere smoke in his eyes, the old man knew as well as he knew his own name who it was that had come and pulled out the floor from under him — from under Clumly. Except that he didn’t know the name, and mustn’t find out. It was sly and also ridiculous. How long could he hope to keep people confused by a fool trick like that? Except that Clumly was hardly even thinking about that, of course. Stalling for time, snatching at straws. Hodge slid his huge jaw forward and drew his eyebrows down. “Well you’ve snatched the wrong straw this time,” he said. Hodge the avenger. If Walt Cook’s dog had run out at him he might have run over him and never looked back. He sat erect as a walrus behind the wheel, his hands stretched out straight in front of him to steer — the spitting image of his father the Congressman, forty-odd years ago, driving his family to church in the great leather Phaeton. His horses were faster than the horses of his neighbors, huge dapple-grays with murderous checkreins and crotches white with nervous sweat. When he passed some neighbor in his country buggy, drawn along by the team he would plow with on weekdays, the Congressman would lift his beaver hat and boom, “Morning to you, Luther!” or whatever the name was, and, “Good morning there, Mrs. So-and-so!” And then, to his family, “Firm supporters,” he would say. “The salt of the earth.” Taggert was only a baby then, a face like an angel’s, a smile like all springtime, clean and sweet as an orchard full of apple blossoms. He’d be sitting on Ruth’s lap looking up at the blue and white sky as though he knew what his proper dominion was, their mother beside him — a redhead, most beautiful woman in the world, it had seemed to Will Hodge — and the three older brothers, Ben and Art Jr and Will himself, the oldest, would be sitting in the soft leather-cushioned back seat, half-asleep from the whirr of the hard-rubber tires. The horses cut the spring breeze like axes. They had the whole world before them. They commanded it as easily as the green stony hillsides commanded the Tonawanda Valley, or the Phaeton commanded the high-crowned dirt highway that fell away before them as yellow as a road in a picturebook. But subtly, so subtly that no one had noticed the thing as it happened, the might of the Hodges had sifted between their fingers. Betrayed by life itself. The richest farm country in New York State had mysteriously grayed: the land had quit; stone fences had fallen into disrepair; the Guernsey dairies — best dairies in the world — had begun to give way to Holstein dairies, quantity over quality; and then price supports came, and the hard-kernel wheat that grew nowhere else in America as it grew in New York State was swallowed up in the indifferent bins of Government to mold and fester as though it were common wheat. Then at night the wooden-wheeled milktrucks from Buffalo pulled over into the weeds and stopped, and the drivers got out at riflepoint, and bent-backed farmers in bib-overalls, with red farmers’ handkerchiefs over their noses, yanked out the bungs of the milktanks and the milk went back to the land. “It’s criminal! Monstrous!” said Hodge’s father. But he knew who they were, and he made not so much as a gesture toward naming their names. And then — Hodge’s father a blind old man now, baffled and lost — then came machines. The holy silence of the steam age passed, the enormous steam tractors that moved along on their ridged iron wheels with no sound but the bending of the grass, the slap of a beltseam striking the pulley, an occasional hiss like the sigh of a dinosaur dying. Instead of all that came the roar and clatter and pop of gas engines. He’d mowed hay — Will Hodge — with the quiet team, no sound in his ears but the creak of the harness and the clicking of the sicklebar. But now he careened on a high gas tractor with spiked iron wheels, and the sound in his ears was like mountains falling in. There was no more use for thrashing gangs, or those big thrashers’ meals, or the talk. There were combines, balers, cutting-boxes; the time was coming when a farmer could work his land all alone, as solitary as the last living man in the world. So that not only had the land gone bad, the heart had gone out of it, too. Only Ben had stuck with it, that world that had seemed to lie splendidly before them. Ben the mystic. Art Jr, inheritor of the old man’s gift for tinkering, had become an electrician, a supervisor now at Niagara Electric: a good man, gentle, not a mystical bone in his great square body, with opinions as straight and severe as wires, a sad man, however unbent and unbroken, weighed down by his whalish wife and family as cruelly as a man pinned under a tree. And their sister Ruth, inheritor of the Old Man’s gift for organizing, had run away with a teletypist, a union organizer as full of rage as an iron stove: who had baited them all, in his younger days, scorned all their Upstate Republican opinions, knew curious facts and doubtful figures, could cut like a knife — a man no more willing than a knife to hear reason and who felt no need to, omniscient as God — but grew older, for all he could do to prevent it (for all his two-hundred-dollar suits, that sharp handsome face that made the Hodges in the room seem as blunt as old turnips, for all his knowledge of baseball and football, or the grayblue Porsche or the pointed shoes) grew older in time, and even mellow, so that the last years of Will Hodge’s mother’s life, he would come to visit her, more welcome even than her sons by blood, for he understood women as no Hodge could, not even the Congressman himself, and more welcome for other reasons too: because he came by choice, by an act of will, a decision of kindness, and if they too were kind it was the kindness of nature: only in staying away could they have acted by choice. The hundredth lamb. Also, he loved her. Now Ruth had a nursery school, the best in Rochester. As for Taggert, the child with the angelic face, the most brilliant of the lot, a mind as wide as the Congressman’s, one would have said, if he only could have gotten himself collected, and a heart no less gentle than his father’s was — he was gone, for all practical purposes dead. (His fire-blasted face rose up again in Hodge’s mind and shocked him cold.) Tag had half-ruined the practice their father had left them — it had taken Will Hodge ten years to rebuild it — and had fled the state, could never return, must waste his mind and all his learning as a janitor in a public school, or a salesman of used cars, or a peddler. Lord be with us. There had been no way to help him, and it wasn’t safe to try, Will Hodge had found. He’d come back just once, to hide in Will Hodge’s house and see his children, and before Will Hodge was aware of what was happening his brother Tag had vanished with his boys, taking Will Hodge’s car. He’d mailed back the keys from Cleveland. Not that Hodge blamed him. “You’d have done the same thing yourself,” Ben had said, and Hodge had thought about it. He wasn’t sure one way or the other. In any case, Tag had been their hope, or at any rate so it seemed now to Hodge, and Tag had failed them, or rather, life had failed Tag. His malpractice was no matter of choice. Poor devil had been driven half out of his mind and, hard as he worked (except that that wasn’t quite right either), it wasn’t enough. His wife was a sick woman, losing her mind, and because he was Tag — inheritor of the Old Man’s vanity, too — he could not tell them about it, ask for help like an ordinary man. Millie had said — Will Hodge Sr’s wife had said — oh a thousand times she must have said it: “You knew. You must have known.” And the truth was, Hodge had known. “You destroyed him,” she said. Her face shone with twenty-five years’ worth of hate, a face as beautiful and cold as a diamond on a drill-bit, and Hodge said, “Faugh.” He had destroyed him. Yes. Had helped, or not helped against it. But Tag had little by little rebuilt what he could from his rubble. He’d remarried, brought up his children, transplanted to Phoenix; a cartoon of their father’s identity. He’d even borrowed the Old Man’s name. Poor devil. Christ forgive us.