The Sunlight Man moved only his eyes to study him. Luke’s jaw was tight, his speech thick and quiet, forced out by the lightning-fast pounding of his heart.
“Are you afraid of me?” he said.
Luke nodded.
“Why?”
“Because—” He changed his mind. With square Hodge fingers he touched his raw left forearm, looking at the floor.
“Because I’m crazy, you were going to say.”
“The way you walk—like you weren’t human, like something imitating the way human beings walk. And when you talk … all show. You have no feelings. You shuffle, and yet your feet don’t make any noise. A creature like you would kill in a wink if the mood came over it. How can we know what you think? If there were people from outer space—”
“Or inner space.”
“There. You make a point of speaking without talking. ‘Inner space.’“ His lips shook.
The Sunlight Man pursed his lips and looked up at the rafters. There were swallows’ nests. He remembered the swallows’ nests at Stony Hill. They were everywhere there—in the cowbarn, the garage, the smokehouse, even the wellhouse. Art Jr had knocked one down once, when he was twelve or so, and Will had put it up again—the eternal repairer—with old rags and bits of mud, and he’d put the baby birds back in. The mother, knowing his heart, had accepted his work. It was the kind of thing Luke too would do, you had a feeling, though he might not do it as well. For all his sharp tongue, his whining misery, his wrath, he too had eyes of the kind that must look sometimes at swallows. Like Kathleen. They would go out at dusk, the two of them, to watch the swallows ’ sharp-winged, arrowtailed flight against the sun’s setting, a lovely fragrance of new-mown alfalfa scattered across the farm. Blessed is he that has seen these things and goes under the ground.
Luke was turning away, and Taggert Hodge saw that he should not have let it pass—“speaking without talking.” He nodded, pretending he’d been thinking about it. “It’s true, yes,” he said as if just discovering it. “I avoid plain speech, communication. It’s interesting, now you mention it. I also do it when I talk to myself. I apologize.”
Luke said nothing.
“Suppose I say I do believe in the past? Suppose I say I once walked and talked like you?”
“But you don’t say it. You say ‘suppose.’ If you said it, it would be asking me to wonder what happened, what turns a human being into a monster. It would be talking as if we were both human. You can’t.”
He looked at the side of Luke’s jaw, and again he was tempted. But he said, ironic and tentative, “What made you decide to speak to me so frankly, my dear boy? It’s very strange, you know.”
“It was an impulse.”
“But you’d been thinking about it. Brooding on it, in fact That’s how impulses begin, as St. Augustine tells us. Suggestion, delectation …”
“Maybe.”
The Sunlight Man squinted. “Hunting for soft places in the dragon’s belly?”
“I’d expect you to think that.”
“I don’t, necessarily. Generally speaking, I think nothing.” He picked at his lip, unwilling to go farther until the uneasiness in his chest calmed down and he was sure of his voice. “What I think—” He paused once more. “As a matter of fact, I think you’ve made me a symbol. You’ve brooded too much, connected me with your mother and father and your childish frustration. I’m the enemy, inhuman. I mock your hot desires for things you scorn. Wife, children, house in the country, profession, even decency.”
Luke looked away, compressing his lips.
So you’re one of us, the Sunlight Man thought. He continued in a rush—“If I mock you, you suspect I may be right. You think what you love is probably not worth loving, no lasting significance, no derring-do, no bizzazz. And so you’ll test me, poke at me, turn me over and maybe in time you’ll assume me.”
Luke made no response.
The Sunlight Man leaned toward him, sly. “You’re toying with making me into an example for your life.” He smiled like a wolf. “You’ll grow a beard, stop washing your face and hands and first thing you know you’ll be learning to walk without noise, like one of us devils.”
“You’re paranoid.”
The Sunlight Man unfolded his arms and turned back to the bench. “And you, O child of midnight, are a liar.”
It was almost a minute before Luke said quietly, “You’re wrong. You teach me to admire stupid people and arrogant bastards who do no harm—unlike you.”
“Hold these wires,” the Sunlight Man said.
Luke obeyed.
The Sunlight Man said, “I believe in the past, and I once walked and talked like you. God’s truth. But I don’t want you to wonder about me. Let whosoever is without sin cast the first crumb.” In the filings on the bench he traced the word Youth, then smiled, showing teeth.
Luke said, “You haven’t understood. I was offering help.” His voice was quieter than before.
The Sunlight Man stood very still. At last he said softly and violently, “With what, boy? With love? Is Love your weapon?
Down pour’d the heavy rain
Over the new-reap’d grain;
And Misery’s increase
Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.”
It seemed pure, inexplicable rage, and Luke Hodge was hurled back into his cage of misery and confounded.
The Sunlight Man went back to his work. He wouldn’t say anything more.
3
In the milkhouse, where he was supposed to be washing the milking machines, Ben Hodge’s boy David was playing complicated rhythms on the milkcan covers. The farm around the milkhouse lay as quiet as a picture in a magazine, but because of the music it seemed nevertheless alive and sentient, like motionless stone imperceptibly trembling with a dance of atoms, or like a sleeping head full of dreams. Ben Hodge, greasing his corn-chopper on the hill behind the house, paused and squinted. Vanessa was in the kitchen cutting rhubarb into a burnt-black saucepan for lunch. She was breathing hard, as usual, and the gray curls at her temples were dark with sweat. Her paring knife stopped moving and she listened to the rhythms moving out from the milkhouse through breathless air to the hills and valleys and woods. Once she’d labored out to him when he was playing the milkcan covers, and the moment she’d touched the door he’d stopped. It was a shame, she felt, that he only played when alone, hiding his candle under a bushel. “Whooey!” she’d said, hand on her thudding heart (the walk to the milkhouse had tired her). He’d merely stared back with blank, deferential eyes, a trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth. She could not get him to play. He was a giant, standing black as coal in the white, low-ceilinged room, his glistening bare shoulders solid as a horse’s rump. He lay his hands on his hips and looked down at her with indifferent friendliness. And so she knew better, now, than to go and interrupt him. Besides, the heat out there would wilt her like lettuce. Well, she was grateful that the boy was so happy. She wished she could sometimes be as happy as that. She was grateful that they had happened to find him, so that now, working in the murderous heat, she could be uplifted by that wordless, glorious music of praise, forget herself for a moment and join him in spirit. She looked out the high, round-arched kitchen window at the brown grass of the lawn. She wiped her forehead with her arm. Poor Elizabeth, she thought. Poor Will—poor Fred Clumly—poor Esther—poor Mrs. Palazzo—the poor, poor Salvadors. She must get to her letter-writing this afternoon.
Sometimes the music was slow and thoughtful, sometimes wild with excitement.
Poor Vanessa, she thought, and smiled with a startled look. “Poor silly lummox,” she said to herself, “it’s from loneliness that he drums.”
The music fell away to silence, then after a moment began again, rapid and light.
Ben Hodge, still listening, went on now with his work. In the valley below him, beyond the house and barns, beyond the tamaracks—in the yellowgreen valley that thousands of years ago had been a glacial river, graveyard of fantastic beasts—his black
and white cows were sitting in the shade of the maple trees at the corner of the pasture. They too were the Negro’s instruments. He would stand in the cowbarn, when he thought he was alone, and would lightly drum on the cows’ backs and sides, getting sharp, thin notes from their upright hipbones, hollow, deep sounds from the hide around their lungs. He played tractors, too, and water pipes, old boards, stone walls; if he thought no one was there, he even tapdanced music out of the caked, yellow lime behind the gutters.
A blackbird whistled, and again Ben Hodge looked up. It came a second time, a clean pure note on the crest of the drumbeat. There was a light breeze here on the hill, and a sound from across the lane of rustling corn leaves. All at once an idea for a sermon came: David playing for mad King Saul. The whole world is a kind of music, and everything living plays its part, either in tune or out of tune. Now when a man is out of tune …
He thought again of his brother Tag, and his face drew up to wince. Guilt rushed over him. What was there he could do? It came to him suddenly then that it was not because he was in tune with the world that the Negro boy played or the blackbird whistled or he, Ben Hodge, made up sermons. And not because he was in tune once more that Saul came out of his madness or Taggert came home. We’re more like organ pipes, then, he thought. Somebody pushes the right key and we’re filled with sudden music and can’t say why.
“so Saul was refreshed, and was well. …”
And the bitterness is, there are pipes and pipes—some pipes sweet and melodious, and others that tremble and howl like the Day of Doom. But either way, somebody pushes an unseen key.
(But a man is different from a cow: he ruminates by a different set of laws, and asks himself why.)
Not organ pipes, then, or tractors, waterpipes, boards, stone walls; not even the slime of the earth. A man is the player and the instrument in one, and most of the time he’s the composer, note by note.
There came into his mind the beginning of a new way of telling the story of Saul and the harper: “There was a king full of wrath and vindictiveness, the Bible says, and he was what you’d call a man with a demon in him. He was a powerful king, and whatever tune he called, why, the people danced to it. Well sir, there was a harper in that land, and though the Bible doesn’t record it, he was deaf. …”
But all the while, the Negro boy in the milkhouse played on, wincing from the effort, baring his teeth, his eyes clamped shut. His arms ached, and the sweat ran off him in rivers. The sounds shooting out from his fingertips and palms and knuckles and the heels of his hands were like things alive, like birds or bats, and they flew to the cinderblock walls and struggled and escaped.
And until he stopped, the mindless, sullen air was full of wings;
4
The paper in Clumly’s trembling fingers shook so badly he couldn’t read it. He didn’t need to. He’d gone over it a hundred times at least since the stranger had delivered it to Esther last night. (She whimpered with fright as she told it.) He’d come up on the porch just a little after midnight—she was certain of the time, or thought she was—when Clumly was hearing the monologue of the Sunlight Man at the Presbyterian church, and he’d knocked sharply, as only a policeman would knock, or an agent of the German Gestapo in one of those movies. She’d gotten on her robe and slippers and turned off the radio and hurried down. “Who is it?” she’d said. The deepest voice she’d ever heard had answered quietly, “Message for Chief of Police Fred Clumly, ma’am. My name’s Warner. Open your door an inch and I’ll slip my card in.” She opened the door and groped for the card and pretended to study it in the pitch-dark room. “All right,” she said, and opened the door somewhat wider. She had an impression (it was hard to know how she formed her impressions) of a huge man in a coat. He was tall, at any rate. His voice seemed to come from at least two feet above her, which would make him at least seven feet, eight inches tall. And one other thing was certain, too. He had a sickening smell. It was like hoofrot, she said, or like burning flesh. It was like a cancer smell and like a sewer on a hot, wet day. He smelled like a goat, like an outhouse, like fire and brimstone. She was frightened, half-convinced she was confronting some monstrous apparition. But when he spoke again his voice partly allayed her fears. “You have to sign for it ma’am,” he said. She took the pencil and pad he placed in her hands and signed where he showed her she must sign. The smell made her feel faint. At last he said, “Good. That will do. Here’s the message.” He handed her a paper airplane. Clumly had scowled furiously, sitting up in bed, hearing the nightmarish account. “You must have made a mistake about the time,” he said. But she wasn’t mistaken. She’d been sewing and listening to the midnight news on the radio when he came—she couldn’t sleep—and after he left she’d checked the clock. It had occurred to Clumly that perhaps his own watch had been wrong, perhaps the man had tricked him into going late to his appointment. But his watch was right now. He remembered all at once the Sunlight Man’s first words last night: You’re right on time. And so it seemed certain, it had not been midnight at all when he entered the church. (If anything was certain, it was certain that the Sunlight Man would lie.) “Well, thank you,” he’d said to his wife. Then, reassuringly: “You did the right thing.” He’d waited until she had left the room, then unfolded the paper airplane. It was a map, drawn by, one would have sworn, a child. A kind of pirate’s treasure map. Some roads, a railroad—DL—some words along the bottom, badly spelled.
He stood now, in the murderous heat, pressing the map against the semaphore post to steady it enough that he could read it. He hadn’t much farther to go. He glanced at his watch. It was five after three. In ten minutes he was supposed to be there. He had no way of knowing whether he’d recognize the place of the appointment when he finally got there, and no way of knowing that the Sunlight Man would be waiting. But he had no choice. That is, he had chosen.
He trudged on, trying not to think. His ankles ached from turning and twisting on the cinders and stones of the railroad bed, and the raw place on his left foot, from a cinder he’d gotten inside his shoe and not stopped to take out until much too late, was stinging now. His brown police shirt was soaking wet—it couldn’t have been wetter if he’d jumped in the creek that wandered in and out along the railroad embankment—and his crotch was chafed and raw. His ears would be blistered by sunset. He had burdock leaves hanging out of his hat now to shade his ears and neck, but he hadn’t thought of it until the sun had already done its work. The heat was incredible. Had the devil known it would be like this? The woods to his left stood motionless, wilting and steaming in the heat. To the right he looked down on fields and pastures where cows lay unmoving beside dried-up creekbeds or stood huddled in the shade of locust groves. The rails of the track gleamed blindingly, and Clumly had no sunglasses with him. When he closed his eyes and gently pressed the lids to soothe them he saw the rails in red-vermillion, as bright as the arc of a welding torch. The world stretching out all around him was enormous—dry, hot, dull, and, above all, indifferent as the Sunlight Man’s wooden gods. It did queer things to his mind. He felt like a man out walking against his will on some desolate mountainside. He could see for miles, behind him, in front of him, and off to the right—piles of smooth round stones, white as bone in the sunlight; smoothly nibbled pasture; here and there a lacy grove that gave no particular shade; a solitary pine tree; a row of dead elms; overhead, blue sky, white clouds, the sun burning down like a pure white, sightless eye. As far as one could see in any direction, there was scarcely a house or a barn. In all this silence and emptiness, the slightest tricks of his mind took on ludicrous importance. A song came into his head and refused to leave:
Old Molly Hare,
What you doin’ there?
Sittin’ in the fireplace
Smoking my cigar.
It was the only verse he knew.
And this, even more infuriating: when he’d first come up onto the tracks, miles ago now—he’d parked on the Creek Road and climbed up where the Little Tonawa
nda went under the railroad bridge—he’d watched a freight train pass. It had entered his mind that one might put a bullet on the tracks, the train would fire it. It was a foolish thought, a child’s whimsical reflection that would have entered and left almost unnoticed at any other time. But now as he walked through the seemingly endless afternoon he could not get the idiotic thought out of his head. He tried to distract himself with memories of the days long ago when he’d stood on the deck of the Carolina, soaking up heat like this but smelling the water and getting, now and then, a tingle of spray. “That was the life,” he said aloud. But to no avail. He had to do it, and at last, craftily, looking all around him first—he bent over, slipped a bullet from his belt, and placed it on the track. Then he hurried on. He felt relieved, and the relief, like everything else, was exaggerated. He felt, crazily, like a new man entirely. Then he began to believe he was being followed. It became for him almost a certainty. He even thought he caught a glimpse, once, of a man with snow white hair peeking out from behind a tree.
Then Clumly stopped, and his fists closed tight. The place he’d been told to come stood directly in front of him, a hundred yards down the track. “Idiot!” he thought in a rage. The Sunlight Man’s map had made one omission: it did not include the Francis Road. Incredibly, Clumly had not noticed. He had walked miles to a point that he could have reached by car. He touched the burning-hot handle of his revolver and for a moment found he was thinking, with perfect seriousness, of murder. He got hold of himself.