John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Under her wide black brand-new hat, Millie Hodge sat erect and rigid as a stake, on principle showing no sign of leaning when the antique truck hurled into a curve — the right wheels spitting up gravel from the shoulder to strike at the floorboards like rattlesnakes at a pane of glass, the shuddering truckfenders barely missing the white triangular concrete posts — merely tensed the muscles of the arm lying flat on the window to the right of her and braced her left foot more firmly on the littered red rubber mat, her left leg a shaft of iron below the relaxed right leg crossing the left at the shin, the right foot casually tapping air with the deadly precision of a clock. Even if he were to roll the truck over the embankment into the Tonawanda, brown-green and motionless in August, thick as bad soup and faintly smelling of city sewage and horse- and cow- and pig-manure from the outer edges of Buffalo and the heart of Batavia and the villages, barnyards, hundred back pastures it slid down through — even if he were to slam the truck into a concrete abutment — she’d be outside the reach of her son’s childish anger, invulnerable even if he killed her, which he would not. Not on purpose. The narrow macadam road straightened out, falling away through an arch of darkening basswood trees toward the railroad underpass where long ago she had stood every Monday and Wednesday evening waiting for a lift to Batavia. Luke slowed a little, not bothering to pretend he had not sped up to scare her on the curve, then stepped on the accelerator again for the approach to the underpass and the hairpin curve just beyond. It was a blind curve, and if they came on some lumbering piece of farm equipment there they would be done for: he was not the expert driver he liked to think. She was afraid, all right. If shouting at him would have stopped him, she would have shouted; but it wouldn’t, and she did not waste her shouts or curses or tears on nothing. It was a cunning she had been born with, to know what she could do and couldn’t and when helpless to keep it hidden, watch and wait; or a natural cunning refined after fifty-two years into an art. She was a bitch. She made no bones about it. (So Millie Hodge, teeth clenched, her hat pinned firmly to her head, the wind snapping strands of her tightly pinned hair.) Bitchiness was her strength and beauty and hope of salvation. Luke’s bitchiness was inept and sentimental by comparison, mere callow petulance. He had no philosophy. He took it on faith that the curve would be free, that the truck would not be smashed to atoms against some cleat-track diesel tractor or buried under crazily tilting wings in the iron womb of a baler. She herself never made such mistakes, had not made them even when she was young.

But the curve was free, and the truck rushed on, past Webb’s and Burkmeister’s and Ford’s and Mahoney’s, the motor screaming like a buzzsaw cutting through ironwood, the rattles from every hinge and bolt filling the cab with a noise like chattering leaden bells or wasps stirred up to rage. She did not need to look at her son to know that his jaw was tightly set, his witch’s eyebrows slightly drawn in, his gray eyes glinting, unblinking, like a madman’s. Little bastard, she thought; and even though his troubles were unreal, mere play troubles, neurotic phantoms, she was sorry for him; coldly, objectively, but also bitterly sorry that he had to be young, if only for a time, and idiotic. His temper fits gave him splitting headaches — histamine headaches, according to the doctor in Rochester. (He’d diagnosed it even before he’d heard the symptoms, or so he claimed later, from no more than a glance at Luke’s painfully flawless handwriting. He was a cocky man, the doctor, red- and round-faced as a wino, and ugly, sitting with his legs apart, soft hand lovingly laid on his crotch.) They were half-day-long sieges of pain that would fill up Luke’s skull, more fierce than the fiercest hangover, until he could see, hear, think of nothing but the dry fire in his brain, and at last he would faint. He’d been born unlucky: he had an enormous tolerance for pain.

But he would not lose consciousness now, while he was driving. If the headache were that far along he would long ago have forgotten his anger, would have forgotten even what steering wheels were for; he would be clinging to her hand, his eyes clamped shut, beyond even praying that he might pass out, merely waiting for it, and she, Millie Hodge, with heart painstakingly fashioned of ice, knowing herself beyond any trace of ordinary motherly hate or love (crushed tight, until time if it moved all around her had nothing left to do with her), would be wishing with every nerve in her body that the burning brain were hers, not his. Not because he was her son and not for duty or charity or guilt. She’d been through it many times, a thing far worse for her than for him because Luke knew nothing, in that last hour, while her mind rushed on over thoughts as precise and sharp as the rods of an iron fence: had been through it and out of it to the light again, forced into the shabby role for which she had not the faintest desire and from which she drew, she devoutly believed, no satisfaction (she knew what satisfaction was, knew where she would prefer to be) — the role of God or archetypal mother or stone at the center of the universe — because by senseless accident she had borne sons. I exist. No one else. You will not find me sitting around on my can like some widow, or whining for the love of my children.

Half a mile from the old place he began to slow down, and the feeling of dread that had been waiting far back in her mind, closed off like a room ghoulishly sealed up after the death of a child, opened suddenly to her consciousness. Already they were passing the century-old stone wall half-buried in woodbine and purple nightshade, and pear and apple and cherry orchard, the remains of the vineyard now grown up to thistle and ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace. They came to where tamaracks stretched dead limbs across the road, throwing parallel arched shadows like the bones of a fish — the truck moving quietly now, and slowly — and she knew he was going to stop. Damn him to hell, she thought. As always in the light of a late afternoon before a storm, the place was unreal, a scene from some greenish, dimly remembered childhood dream that hovered between the hope of escape and nightmare. She compressed her lips, the rush of strong, indefinite emotions channeling efficiently into anger. She said, “Why are you stopping?”

He ignored her. “Stony Hill Farm,” he said. He smiled, lugubrious, and as always when he smiled the center of his forehead pinched down and the outer ends of his eyebrows lifted, making him look more than ever evil, witchlike (but artificially so: she had watched him practice it in front of their oval bedroom mirror as a child, and later, when Luke was in his teens, she had watched him put it on for girls, poor adorable Werther, born for woe — with ears sticking out like Dumbo’s) so that for an instant her anger became mingled pity and disgust. He said: “The dear old homestead of the Hodges. Will you look at that!” His voice was thin and intense. The headache was bad now, she knew, and she thought, Good. But the easy spite brought no pleasure. He had never lived there, and his reasons for wanting to have lived there or to live there now, claim Stony Hill for his barony, were repulsive to her; nevertheless his grief and indignation were as real as if their cause were real. Somehow, God knew how, she was to blame, and his anger was just. She felt a sudden, sharp desire to be somewhere thousands of miles away — in some German university lecture hall, or walking in London early in the morning, or sitting on worn old steps in Rome, with her shoes off, a scent of sewage and flowers in the air.