John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

It came to her then that Nick Slater’s brother was still in jail. They’d been arrested at the same time, and if the brother had escaped with him, she surely would have heard. Was it possible then that it really was Will Jr who’d helped him escape? But she knew it wasn’t. Who, then? And where was he now?

“Millie, don’t be a fool,” she said aloud. “Keep your famous wits.”

She gathered up the dishes and filled the sink with hot water and soap. The house was full of creaking noises, thumps, scrapings. It made her skin crawl. She closed her eyes, listening, close to tears, and all at once she remembered something. Her father stood in the church doorway, smiling and holding out his arms to her. She ran to him, still crying. She had believed he had forgotten her, had driven home without her, but now he was here, red-faced and beaming, beautiful to her child-eyes, though his pants were baggy, his shirt unpressed, and when she reached him he caught her and lifted her up to hug her, laughing. “Poor baby,” he said, “my poor, pretty little girl.” And she’d been overwhelmed with the joyful knowledge that her father loved her and she was pretty. She tried to think what had made the memory come, but now again she was hearing the ancient creaking of the house, the rain rattling in the grass and rumbling in the downspout. “Forgive me,” she said earnestly, hardly knowing what she meant. She thought she heard Luke moan, and she went over to the door into the livingroom to look in. He lay as before, but she was terrified. A second ago, she was somehow absolutely sure, there had been someone with him in the room.

It was not mere nerves. After half an hour of kneeling on the floor beside Luke, almost not breathing, she was still dead certain that there was someone here in the house. There were perhaps sounds of movement in the adjoining room, or somewhere upstairs, but in the noise of the storm mere sound meant nothing. The creaking of the floor, the slamming once of a door upstairs, meant no more than wind. What was definite was the smell. It was subtle, but it was as surely there as the fireplace or the full-length windows that showed her only her own drawn face. Her terror had calmed to a numbness now. She tried to think. She was afraid to go to the phone and call the police. (She had now forgotten that it was dead.) The intruders might be standing, listening, behind the nearest door. And she was afraid, too, to run out for help and leave Luke alone. At least she wasn’t in immediate danger. They knew she was here. It was her return from the kitchen that had made him — them perhaps — flee from the room. Perhaps what she ought to do was stretch out on the couch and sleep, let them take what they wanted and go. But it was impossible. What she really ought to do was get a drink. She thought about it for a long time — there was still no definite sound of their movement in the rooms around her — then got up and started toward the kitchen. She moved slowly, talking to herself as she walked — in order to let them know, if they were there, that she was coming. No telling what they might do if she were to startle them. She paused at the kitchen door to say “What was I after? Oh yes, a drink.” Oyez, oyez, oy came senselessly into her mind. She took a deep breath and went in. The room was empty. She went to the refrigerator, got out the ice-tray, and dropped four cubes into a glass. She filled the glass nearly to the top with bourbon and, after a moment’s reflection, decided to carry back both the glass and the bottle to the livingroom. She amazed herself. Her hand was absolutely steady, and despite the whiskey she’d drunk already, earlier tonight, her mind was as clear and sharp as a day in winter. Because of Luke, she thought. If it had happened at her place and she were all alone, she might have been half-crazy with fear. But he lay there unconscious and vulnerable, defenseless as a baby. If they were to kill him, murder him in his sleep like some poor sick animal … She thought, Am I really afraid of that?

She frowned, leaning on the sink, with the bourbon bottle in one hand, the glass in the other, ice-cold against her palm and fingers. And still she would swear it was not because she was his instinct-ridden Mama, though it somehow had something to do with his being her son. And not because she loved him, either. She knew what she loved. She loved strength, a body like Ben Hodge had had once, taller than Will’s, and quick and graceful: strength that had something to do with beauty (not the stocky power and indifference to height that had moved up and down the barn roofs at Stony Hill, shouldering easily a tarpaper roll or a bundle of sunlit shingles: not that) and something to do, more important, with freedom. When a leak appeared in the cowbarn roof or the chickenhouse roof or the roof of the towering, square wooden silo, it was a law of Will Hodge’s existence that it must be patched, even if the barn was not used any more and never would be. It was not a law for her. There was something fine about a roof that let the sunlight in through a thousand chinks, or a buckled wall, a concrete foundation splitting open to the roots of trees. For she, Millie Hodge, put her money on sunshine, the restless power of the hay pushing outward, and slow, invincible roots. All her life she’d been breaking down roofs and walls — intransigent gray Presbyterian stone, the brittle beams of dry legalism, vows and rules and meticulous codes — exploding them as a white shoot cracks a stone, though she was a woman, held down revoltingly to earth. “Look!” she’d said. They were leaning on the railing. The falls roared like thunder, and the earth shook. “That’s the Bridal Veil,” Will said, pointing. She was as angry as the river, repelled by his pettiness and pedantry, his flight from the furious truth of the place to the name of a paltry trickle. Without bothering to answer she pointed again, forcing Luke to see what she saw, the tons on tons of hurtling water at the heart of it all, and Luke said, “I want to go home.” Will was grinning, with his jaw slung out. “Hah,” he said. “Don’t be a sissy,” she said. But Will took his hand.

How strange that all that should come back to her now, when any moment the intruders might come, murder them both! Yet not strange, either. For though her chest was calm, as though it had found out some way to survive with her heart turned stone, the storm was raging as the Niagara had raged, howling and plummeting down like the dead through time. “God is physical,” she’d announced once to Warshower, after one of those incredible sermons of his. “The trouble with all your sermons,” she’d said, “is that you’ve never wrestled with a bear, only with angels. How can you lose?” He was baffled, of course. No doubt he’d believed she was crazy.

It came to her suddenly that Luke’s shotgun would be standing in the woodshed. She took two steps toward the door, then changed her mind. They were men, and Nick Slater, at least, had had experience with guns. She’d be dead before she knew what hit her. She raised the glass and half-emptied it, then started back to the livingroom, not bothering, this time, to talk to herself, but clicking her heels down firmly to make a noise.

They were seated, waiting for her, and for an instant, as if all this time they had been drilling secretly at the base of her mind, terror went through her like an underground shock and she felt blasted out of her reason. But only for an instant.

“Hello,” she said. She gave them a smile she knew to be brilliant, baffling them, she hoped, smashing their outlaw defenses.

Nick Slater stared, his yellow face pale. He was soaking wet and sitting close to the fire. It was Nick, she knew, who’d killed the guard, but it was the other one that frightened her. He had a black thing over his face — a cut-off stocking, it looked like. It came down to below his nose and over the moustache to the beard. His clothes, like Nick’s, were soaking wet. A dark blue suit, too large.