It was half an hour later that Esther came home. He watched her come slowly up the walk, her white cane in one hand and, in the other, her sewing basket. She too, you would have said, had taken on weight. Esther had taken the tapes. Her reason was unimportant. When he heard her coming up the stairs toward the second floor he tip-toed out of the third-floor room where he’d been waiting and went up the splintery attic stairs to wait while she replaced the tapes, if she’d brought them back, or changed her clothes, if that was her intent. Nothing especially mattered but that she not see him just now, not trouble him with a confession of error, or with malice, or with freighted silence, or with anything ordinarily human. He heard her coming on toward the third floor now. Around him, rafters with cobwebs, boxes, trunks, the furniture from Aunt Mae’s sunporch—it had been here for years and years—lamps, mason jars, rope, his father’s violin. He’d forgotten about that, the violin. He’d sit in the kitchen in the gray shingled house they’d lived in then, on the Lewiston Road, and, bow lightly hanging from his plumber’s fist, he would play for hours and hours. He played well. Fred Clumly’s mother would sit under the clock darning, nodding her head. It was dark outside, and inside there was only the comforting yellow of the oil lamp’s light above his mother’s elbow. When she nodded her shadow would extend itself on the wall, then quickly retract. “Good luck,” he whispered to the dead.
When he was safely outside, with the tape recorder tucked inside his shirt, he hurried through the garden and around in back of his neighbors’ houses and came out on Oak Street, a hundred yards from where the Sunlight Man had weeks ago painted the word love across two lanes. Then, jaw set, he set off on foot toward Main and, eventually, the police station garage. He could not risk taking his own car from his own garage; Esther would wonder why he hadn’t spoken to her. Let her think he’d worked late, or let her think-be-cause he’d left his uniform and gun—let her think whatever she thought. There would, perhaps, be time for reparations. It did not matter.
The walk took him half an hour. He listened outside the garage door. They were not talking about him. He went in.
He drove slowly through town in the gathering dusk, and when he saw the funeral—Mrs. Palazzo, he thought—he did not pull in. The crowd was small. She had not had many friends. Her eyes were those of a cruel, self-pitying old witch, and the heavy wrinkles going down from her nose were black. Her hair was black, though she was old, and she had traces of beard and moustache. Manlike, she was. Like the nurse at the mental hospital, or like Salvador’s mother. Mrs. Palazzo was so ugly, in fact, that she made a man stop and think. She grew more manlike every year, just as he, Fred Clumly, grew more womanish. Her thought hardened like barnacles around her few selfish ideas as Clumly’s mind softened, expanded, grew lax. Was that the usual case with old women and men? A part of the general order? It was not the case with Esther. As she lost one by one all the outer signs of her womanhood she gained—if it could be called a gain—an increasing femininity of mind. Like the sea, he thought. He hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant by it. He had an image of a calm and placid sea where nothing stirred, where the water was clear and pointlessly beautiful, but always darker than a man imagined, and down inside its darkness things were stirring, omens and portents. To tell the truth, he did not know her. Never had. Clumly tipped down his black hat more and squinted. “Strange thoughts,” he said.
5
JUDGE: Clumly! Sir! You look like hell!
CLUMLY: That may be.
JUDGE: Well come in. Good Lord! Have a chair. Let me give you a whiskey.
CLUMLY: No need. I’m not a drinking man.
JUDGE: No of course. Sorry. What the devil’s happened?
CLUMLY: You heard about the informal investigation.
JUDGE: Why, no.
CLUMLY: I think you may have.
JUDGE: I give you my solemn word I had nothing to do—
CLUMLY: No matter. What’s done is done.
JUDGE: It’s not about that, then? I’ll tell you the truth, Fred-
CLUMLY: Never mind.
JUDGE: As you please.
(Silence.)
JUDGE: You looked over the article on Houdini? The one I brought by?
CLUMLY: No.
JUDGE: No?
CLUMLY: I was not very interested.
JUDGE: Ah! But I thought, since you’re dealing with this mad magician—
CLUMLY: And since he was the writer of the article …
JUDGE: You’ve found out, then.
CLUMLY: No thanks to you.
JUDGE: Don’t be harsh, now. I’ve been close to the family for years. As long as there was a chance the boy would do the sensible thing, disappear, you know—
CLUMLY: Naturally.
JUDGE: It’s been hell on you, I can see. But it’s a funny thing. It’s done you good. No doubt that seems unfeeling, but it’s a fact. It’s changed you. Made you, I don’t know—
CLUMLY: Ferocious.
JUDGE: Yes. (Thoughtfully.) Yes. It’s ironic. Just when it’s time to step down, you become—
CLUMLY: “Step down.” Yes.
JUDGE: Pardon?
CLUMLY: A funny world.
(Silence.)
JUDGE: It’s made a better man of you. I wasn’t sure of myself, at the beginning of all this. But I must admit, it’s turned out, some ways. Though it’s terrible, of course.
CLUMLY: So you always say. Your schemes have always turned out, since the beginning. However terrible.
JUDGE: You’re angry. That will pass.
CLUMLY: Yes, I’ll forget.
JUDGE: We all forget.
CLUMLY: That’s Nature. It’s no respecter of persons.
JUDGE: Ha ha. (Silence.) Well, you’ve brought that worse news I predicted. You recall?
CLUMLY: I recall. It was a guess.
JUDGE: A judgment of character, more like.
CLUMLY: A guess about character, maybe. Not a judgment. From an old drunk?
(Silence.)
JUDGE: It’s made you bitter.
CLUMLY: Tired.
(Silence.)
JUDGE: You’re wrong, Fred, those suspicions. I defended you. I refused to act. They wanted me to, all right. They couldn’t move me.
CLUMLY: More’s the pity.
XX
Winged Figure
Carrying
Sacrificial
Animal
After these first warnings, signs of death will
quickly multiply, until, in obedience to
immutable laws, stark winter with its ice
is here.
—The I Ching
She had underestimated hate.
For three days, off and on, he’d kept them in the wet and dark of the cellar, in dark water where rats swam, bound tightly hand foot and waist. An act of madness, partly—of monstrous sadism. But when she said to him, “Why are you doing this?” he said, “Because I’m busy. Otherwise engaged. Do you imagine I have nothing else in all the universe to take care of except you?” True and irrelevant, though he believed it. It was his only possible alternative to killing them, yes, assuming the course he’d embarked on. When he was out doing whatever it was he was doing—something increasingly urgent and increasingly unbalanced, she knew by his eyes—he could not be troubled with worries over what they were up to at the house. And it was not any longer strange to her that even Nick should be tied in the cellar. Voluntarily, for reasons no longer mysterious to Millie, the Sunlight Man had taken up Nick’s cause; voluntarily he had brought him out of jail to his present freedom; but he never made Nick his equal, and never would: their minds were worlds apart, as differently built as the minds of an elephant and a horse. And so they were here, half-starved, in pain, frightened, heads drooping, miserably bound to their three splintery cellar posts. She believed she caught, sometimes, the Runian sisters’ voices, ghostly echoes from an earlier violent time.
Sometimes Luke would twist his head over his shoulder and roll his eyes at her. ??
?So explain why he simply buried Hardesty without a word,” his furious eyes said.
“Because,” she said in her mind. She heard chickens outside. She was surprised that Luke still had any. They ran in the yard, she remembered. He never fed them.
The Sunlight Man never slept, and his eyes were as baggy as an ape’s; yet what it was he was busy at, no one knew. All day long they could hear him sawing and hammering up in the garage. And at night after he’d brought them their supper he would dress up as if to give a concert or attend a formal ball. Sometimes he would come down the cellar steps and bend over, near the foot of the stairs, hands on his knees, to look at them as though they were animals he was tending. (The Runian sisters watched timidly from the shadows.) Then again sometimes he would take off his socks and shoes and wade toward them, holding up his pantlegs, his bearded and longhaired head thrown forward, eyes squinting like an inventor’s, and would scrutinize their faces, one after another. Once, twice, he had taken them all upstairs for an hour and a half, to give them a rest, he said. When Luke and she were seated on the couch, numb and weak, he’d sent Nick upstairs with a snap of his fingers (and Nick had gone, dutifully, too weak to chance fighting), and when Nick came back he was wearing a gold vest and gold slippers and a turban. They were made of what looked like the cloth from an ironing board. The Sunlight Man clapped with a grotesque parody of delight, twirled away from them and out to the kitchen, then emerged not more than a second later, as it seemed to her, in a black and red cape, with a high silk hat balanced on his ratiocination-colored hair. “You’re hungry?” he asked with an obscene leer. “Eggs, Nicodemus!” Nick bowed from the waist as if to leave, then straightened again, and when he extended his hands to the Sunlight Man he had four eggs between his long fingers. “Hah!” the Sunlight Man said. He took the eggs quickly and nimbly but not nimbly enough: one fell to the rug and broke. He shrugged and looked sheepish. Then he snatched off his hat and held it up like a bowl and with one hand cracked and dumped the remaining eggs down inside it, and tossed the shells to Nick. He snatched a plain lightbulb from his suitcoat pocket—he was babbling all the time—”Observe! Watch closely! We proceed to step C of our experiment!”—held the lightbulb under the hat, where it went on, as if from electricity inside his hand, then triumphantly held out the hat to them. Down inside there was an omelette. “Take, eat!” he said. “Et cetera.” There were hairs in the omelette, but Luke seemed not to notice them. As for herself, she was so sick with hunger she could barely get the stuff down.
When they’d taken a bite or two he said, “Pick a card, any card! Superb! Beautiful! The seven of farts! Tear a corner off! Marvellous! You’ll recognize the card? You’ll know, when I’ve put it through fire and water, that the corner you hold in your hand fits the mutilated card?” He snatched it from her, matched the two pieces, thrust the card back. “Beautiful!” He spun away, cape whirling out, and when he turned back to them he was holding the gun. “Now!” he said. “Allah, the incinerator!” Dully, full of hate, Nick handed him a small stone dish, and the Sunlight Man tore the card to bits, dropped the pieces in, sprinkled something like lighter fluid on them, and lit them. They burned to ashes. (Luke went on eating the omelette, stubbornly not watching. He breathed in awful gasps. The Sunlight Man glared.) “Very good,” he said. “Would you kindly hold the pistol, madam? Upright. That’s it. We’ll pour the ashes down the barrel, you see. Hah!” He conjured a funnel and poured in the ashes. “Nicodemus,” he said, “you may dispose of the incinerator now.” He went away to the kitchen with it, then on out into the woodshed. “Now behold,” said the Sunlight Man. She heard him moan. “You see before you a common nail, except of course that it’s solid gold, or a reasonable facsimile. (For all is illusion, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing is as it seems. All tricks out of hell!) Will you mark it, kind sir. With a cross, if you don’t mind. A powerful symbol, and we need, in this dark pass, the most powerful of symbols! Excellent! Sublime! You are an artist, young man! A very Giotto of crosses! I kneel to you! Good. Now madam, your kind cooperation. Would you drop the nail in the pistol? Fine!” Then turning, aiming the pistol at the wall: “Nicodemus, you fool, the fishbowl!” He came with it, drew the coffee table over by the wall, set the fishbowl on the coffee table a foot from the edge of the drape, then stood back and bowed. The water in the bowl moved from side to side, and the Sunlight Man waited for it to settle, not saying a word now, dangerously silent, aiming straight at the bowl. Then, deafeningly, the gun went off. The same torn card was nailed through the drape to the wall. “Bring it here,” the Sunlight Man said, and Nick brought it. The two pieces matched. Outside, there was a sound of running. The Sunlight Man smiled, bending toward her, and his dark ringed eyes showed mysterious satisfaction. “Praise the Lord of hosts,” he said, but he was listening, “in whose name these miracles are performed. And applause for Nicodemus, who is His prophet.” He turned suddenly to the door, holding the gun, and snatched it open. There was no one there, or so he said. She could no longer trust her wits.
After that he did tricks with handkerchiefs, tricks with rings, more tricks with cards—“Take a card, any card!” He dealt her a living mouse. He worked more swiftly, as if in frenzy. He made a chair stand unsupported in empty air, put a spell on a rooster so that even the blowing of a trumpet would not awaken it though with a snap of his fingers he could bring it back. And then when her mind was swimming he said, “For my next trick, I will do the resurrection. Dear lady, let me borrow your bird.”
“My bird?” she said.
He took from just inside her collar, as it seemed to her, a living bird, a sparrow. “You have heard it said that not a sparrow shall fall?” he said. “Behold!” He put the sparrow on the coffee table, produced the pistol and, with the barrel not a foot away from the bird’s breast, shot it dead. “A trick, you think?” he said with a wild look. “Touch it, dear lady! Do not pick it up with your coarse earthly hands, but touch it. Your fingertips know the feel of death. Touch!” She obeyed. The bird was unquestionably dead. He went nowhere near it. “Bird,” he whispered. “My beloved, my leman, O symbol of the soul’s eternity, rise! Rise!” After a long moment, the bird seemed to move. There was blood on the coffee table. “Stop it,” she whispered. Nick was bending close, wringing his hands, but he too went nowhere near it. “Rise!” the Sunlight Man whispered, and now there was violence in his eyes, all the violence of thunder and rage. There was no mistake. The bird was coming to life. “Stop!” she said. A shout, this time. The bird twitched violently and struggled to stand up and at last succeeded. It stood trembling, bleeding and twitching and completely alive. The Sunlight Man bowed his head. “Resurrexit,” he said.1
Sometimes it was in the middle of the afternoon that he would leave. Once, perhaps twice, he took Nick with him. “Where do you go?” she said. “About my father’s business,” he said. “My real father.” He winked.
Down in the darkness of the cellar, where there was never a sound except the occasional stirring of a rat, an almost unheard plosh as one of them slipped from the edge of some moldy shelf into the black, still water, she sometimes believed she was losing her mind, that that was in fact his purpose. For she did not believe, as Luke did, that he had no purpose. She stood hour after hour, or hung limp from the binding ropes she could no longer feel, trying to think, remembering trifles of no sense or significance. She remembered Will’s snoring, Will Jr’s preaching to the others in the orchard—poor, pitiful Will Jr!—remembered darning socks for her mother, children’s socks so worn there was hardly a place sturdy enough to hold the thread. (She remembered the smooth, heavy darning ball, lovely to the touch.)
Sometimes, with their eyes, she and Luke fought, or so she imagined.
Luke’s eyes said, “So make love to him. That’s the trick. Love conquers all, et cetera, et cetera. All you want, anyway.”
“Stop it,” she hissed in her mind.
He stood relaxed against the post, no longer resisting the ropes that bound his hands and
feet and chest, the gag biting into his cheeks. Nick Slater stood tied to the post beyond, with his back to them. To look at them he had to twist his head over his shoulder, and that was too hard. He simply stood hour after hour with his head dropping, still and silent as the moldy stone wall. For Nick it had not been so long as for them, because sometimes when he came back the Sunlight Man would untie him and take him upstairs with him, whisper and laugh and teach him tricks, sometimes striking him when he turned sullen. At times the Sunlight Man would talk to him as though nothing had happened.
“Me,” Luke’s eyes said, “I like it as much here as anyplace—though I wouldn’t mind getting some dinner now and then.” They couldn’t tell how long it had been since they’d eaten. Maybe as much as a day. The casement windows were so dirty you couldn’t tell morning from afternoon. “That’s the advantage of being a poor crippled bastard, you know.” He laughed shrilly with his eyes. “You learn to ask for nothing. No delusion. You, now. You’ve had the illusion of being free as a bird; but me, I’m used to where I am—I almost like it.”
“You whine too much,” she said. She’d have struck him if she could.
“Yes, yes! Say it cheerfully then. What does she want? Power she wants. Vroom vroom! Be her own boss! She goes to college and gets her a paper. Self-supporting now. Vroom! She wants ice-cream, she goes out and buys herself ice-cream. She wants sex, she goes out and buys herself—”
“Luke!”
“Yes, yes! Quite right. Talking that way to his own shitass mother! But that’s the price, you know. Price of liberty! You collects the merchandise, you gotta pay the fee. I was quiet a long, long time, after all. But the lesson finally got through to me. Yes. Think of Number One. From you I learned it. Now I think of Number One, which from my point of view is me, and I guess Number Two will just have to smart a little. Which is you. C’est la vie.”