“It’s just awful,” Vanessa said. “You keep wondering—” She limped to the sink with her cup, lips clamped together with grief, and turned the water on. The pump started up in the cellar, thudding like a heart.
“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.
“Paxton’s dead,” he said as though his brother were there in the car with him.
But Tag would know by now. Millie still kept touch, that is, wrote to him, though she never got a letter back—fond of Tag because Tag was an ally, a fellow destroyer of the Congressman’s image, whether he wanted to be or not. She’d have written; maybe it was that that had brought him here. What was he thinking—that great, corrupted mountain of political and private craft, lying there staring with empty sockets at his coffin lid? The world will learn. Sure as day. But not from me.
Hodge grunted. “Well, poor Paxton,” he said aloud. He thought of Clumly.
There was a sharp, ugly smell in the downstairs hall, and he paused a moment, scowling. “Something burning,” he said. The smell was so thick it was impossible to know where it came from. “Hang,” he said fiercely. “I must’ve left the kettle on.”
He caught hold of the railing and went up the carpeted stairs to his apartment as quickly as he could pull his weight along, then hunted in the dimness of the hallway for his key. Puffing, still muttering angrily to himself, he got the door open and went in. But there was nothing on the stove in the kitchen. He stood scowling, jaw protruding, still holding the key in his hand. The sky beyond the kitchen window was darkened now—there was a shower of a rain building up—and it threw a green cast across the gray of the floor and the pale blue of the kitchen walls. “Must be downstairs,” he said. He pocketed the key and hurried back down, puffing, slapping his hand on the railing as he went. Mrs. Palazzo’s door was open. He stuck his head in and called to her. No answer. He called again. He wiped away the sweat that was dripping into his eyes. The smell was intense here, and he was afraid to wait longer. He went down the long hallway, calling “Hello?” ahead of him and came to the kitchen-dinette. That was it, all right. The saucepan on the stove was bright red and collapsing, the bottom melting into the burner. “Holy Crimus,” he said. He turned off the burner and went to the sink for a towel and caught hold of the melting handle to pull away the saucepan. “Consarned devil of a thing,” he said to himself. “Where the heck did that woman go?” The back door was open. He went over to close it, reflected for a moment, then stepped out onto the porch to look around. No sign of her. Smell of ozone in the air. Lights were on in the back windows of the houses on the next street. He went back into the house, muttering, and began to look through the rooms, snapping on the lights. His heart was racing now, and he was sweating rivers. The TV was on in the front parlor, but the sound was turned off. On the coffeecart there was a kitchen glass with wine in it. “Darned strange,” he said, lowering his eyebrows until his eyes looked like caves. Suddenly he was afraid. The house was dangerously quiet. He shuddered. He left the room at once and went across the yard to the next-door neighbors.
No one had seen her. But in the warmth of the toy-cluttered livingroom, with his neighbor on the lumpy yellow couch with a bottle of beer on his stomach—Joe something, Hodge had forgotten the name—the panic he’d felt seemed childish. “I just wondered if she might have come over here and got talking,” Hodge said.
“Nope,” his neighbor said.
The wife said, holding a baby in her arms, “Why don’t you try Faners? That’s probably where she is.” Her hair was black and stringy.
Hodge nodded. “Thanks. I’ll try there.” He watched Ed Sullivan waving his unfriendly arm at the glittering curtain. “Ladies and gentlemen—”
The wife said something and he missed the name of the performer, but it was a man, tall, with a fat face. He smiled and bowed all around and began to yell. He looked insane, and it made Hodge shiver.
“Want a beer?” Joe said.
“No thanks. I better run along.”
A boy with huge eyes and a dimple peeked from behind the ironing board piled high with clothes. He had a blond crewcut, and at first it looked as if his head had been shaved. Hodge nodded, said his thanks again, and went out.
The Faners, on the other side, had not seen her either. She probably went to the corner store, they said. She was probably right in the middle of cooking and she found she was missing something—cinnamon, you know, or salt, or something—so she ran to the store. Got talking. That’s probably what happened. Hodge saw that they were right. The truth was that the grim business down at the police station had shaken him about as badly as a man could be shaken—the blood in the hallway, and Clumly’s strange behavior, and then that Salvador woman throwing all the blame on him. He saw the picture in his mind again, more clear than the porch where he stood.
“You want me to come over with you, Will?” Bob Faner said, standing at the door. He looked up at the gathering clouds.
“No, no,” Hodge said. “Don’t trouble. I just thought I’d check. I’m sure everything’s all right.”
Faner looked at him and smiled vaguely, still willing. He was tall, silver-haired. Looked a little like a minister.
“Thanks again,” Hodge said.
“No trouble at all, Will,” he said. “If you need me just say the word.” He laughed. He was a good man, Faner. A dentist.
And so he returned. He entered the front door muttering crossly, annoyed that he’d gotten himself upset, and he went up the front stairs slowly this time and paused at the top for a full minute to catch his breath and quiet his jangling nerves. He opened his door. “Dang monkeybusiness,” he said to himself. He snapped on the light. The real point, it came to him in a rush of anger, was that Clumly’s tomfoolery was dangerous. If he did get hold of Tag … Who could know for sure what that Tag was capable of? Who knew what Nick himself might do, for that matter? He was a scared boy now. Again Hodge was shaken by a rush of mingled terror and guilt, as if every word the dead policeman’s mother had said were true. He made himself coffee at the kitchen sink, using hot water from the faucet, and started for the bedroom with it to change his clothes. Still the house was unnaturally quiet, as if hiding something. Through the livingroom window he saw a flash of far-away lightning. A shiver ran low on his back, between his shoulders. When he pushed open the bedroom door, the light from behind him broke across open dresser drawers and clothes strewn all over the floor.
“My God!” he said. The coffeecup rattled on the saucer in his hand. He put the cup down on the dresser quickly, without even stopping to snap on the light, and went for the phone beside the bed. There was no dial tone. It was cut. Hodge wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He was shaking and his hands were hot. When he looked back toward the lighted doorway he saw Mrs. Palazzo, like a propped-up doll, sitting against the darkness of the wall with her head tipped onto her shoulder. Her dead eyes shone.
But not from me, they said.
And now the house was full of noise, a roar like wind in a cavern, and he smelled her blood.
“Tag,” he whispered. “Tag! For the love of God!”
IV
Mama
The story seems to begin with the creation of mankind by the
goddess Mama.
—A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia
It was late afternoon. Every line of the enormous willow trees on each side of the road, every rut and tuft of grass and weedy pile of round gray stones on the hillside pastures, every crack and shingle on the black barn standing severe as the angel of death on the nearest of the hills—on its roadward side the sharp white warning: Chew Red Man Tobacco—was unnaturally precise, as though time and motion had stopped and the world were a corpse. Nothing moved but the truck, its shadow flying beside it like a monstrous owl hunting, dropping
for an instant where gullies fell away below the road, briefly rising where the macadam shirted a knoll, dangerously swift. The light on the hills was green. There was a storm coming.
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.