The Old Man knew the secret, that was all. He knew how to see into all of them, feel out their hearts inside his own, love them and hate them and forgive them: he understood that nothing devoutly believed is mere error, though it may only be half-truth, and so he could give them what they needed. That was what it meant, the line his father was always quoting . . . “There are always politicians. Good politicians. The people turn this way and that, unsure what they want, unsure how to get it, unsure whether it’s good for them . . .” Something like that. He got up outside himself to where he could act as though he himself, his own life, were irrelevant. That’s all it’s ever taken.
He was coming to the place he’d decided on, and was afraid. He felt as he’d felt a thousand times in his grandfather’s barn or his Uncle Ben’s, perched on a beam, uncertain whether or not he had the nerve to leap into the hay ten feet below—except that it was worse now, an uncertainty so violent his body rose up in revolt. Sweat ran like rain between his eyebrows and pasted his shirt to his back and trickled down his belly. He had a headache coming on, rushing over him faster than a headache had ever done before, sharp points pressing in through his skull from every side. He had to squint to tolerate the headlights. But in spite of all that, his mind was clear, it seemed to him, clearer than it ever had been before, and he knew he was not wrong, not fooling himself, not crazy. He was no Jesus Christ stretched on a rood for the salvation of mankind, but he understood the joy of that, and the terror and pain. He had no grand cause: a petty joy for a petty creature. Better than Ben Jr, who’d died in a war he didn’t like; better than Old Man Hardesty who’d gone down almost without knowing what had hit him.
Now he was there; the long bridge opened out ahead of him, an eighth of a mile away, silver girders reaching out across the silent pitch-dark valley, the black further side of it just beginning to come into view—up over his head, stars, motionless and perfect as the infinite span between the heartbeats of God. He bore down on the accelerator and flexed the fingers soaking wet inside his gloves. The bridge rushed toward him, and he was conscious of the rush and at the same time conscious of the infinite time it took the truck to reach the place, and now suddenly all his pain vanished as if by magic and he was reading the sign twenty feet from the bridge—35 MPH—as though he had all eternity to read it. He heard himself saying aloud—very loud in the hollow darkness of the cab—I’m sorry. Then a jolt, a tremendous tearing noise of steel behind him, and he was weightless, falling, hair flying in his eyes, the truck turning over and over like a lop-sided boulder. A shock of violent heat and light went through him and he saw the ground and a tree, and the same instant he was dead.
Nevertheless, the sacrifice was in vain. The Sunlight Man and Nick Slater were not in the truck. They’d jumped out in the last little village, taking the suitcases with them. The Sunlight Man could not have said himself why he did it. A hunch that pulled like a cable. Another piece—he might have said—of luck.
Except that the Sunlight Man wouldn’t have made that mistake, even for a moment. His luck had already run out long ago. Though he didn’t die in the crash, it was of course Luke’s crash that killed him.
XXIII
E silentio
1
The old man stood on the bridge, big as an elephant, shaking with sobs, staring down with tear-blinded eyes at where the lights were, the air around him still filled like a cup with the smell of the truck’s explosion in the bottom of the valley, and on the ground beside him lay the bloodsoaked gloves the police had brought up for identification, and the ridiculous Eagle Scout ring and the shoe and the half-burnt cap. He sobbed in great whoops. He was a huge and erect man, at least as ordinary mortals run, and his voice boomed out all the length of the night to beyond where August stars were falling like scratches. If he was guilty of limitations of foresight, or subtlety, or humor, or taste—if he had been foolish in his time and partly unworthy—his grief was anyhow absolute and most profound and better than justice or mercy or wisdom or any of the other great words of the ancient schools.
He knew all right why his son was dead, and who he had meant to protect and redeem, and why. Hodge waited, bellowing his grief at the night, until they brought him the certain word that there were no other bodies, only Luke. Then, little by little, his sobbing stopped and, empty of heart, indifferent to all but his grief, he was able to think in ways that had been closed to him before. He thought clearly now, with absolute indifference to himself, beyond the pleasure or pain of vengeance, beyond any taint of satisfaction or reward or even common dignity, beyond even shame at his having failed to act directly, impersonally before. His son’s sacrifice, however impure it may have been, had purified Will Hodge. He was indifferent to the hunt, indifferent to the crimes already committed or yet to be committed, whether the crimes of cops or of robbers: it was necessary, merely, that order prevail for those who were left, when the deadly process had run itself down; necessary to rebuild.
He said (he could not see the man he talked to, had only the blurry impression of a youngish face, a State Trooper’s cap, a cigarette), “He wasn’t driving on—business. He was helping your so-called Sunlight Man and the Indian boy escape. If they’re not in the wreckage, they’re somewhere on the road between here and Attica, or they’re riding with some travelling salesmen as hitchhikers. You’ll get them. It hasn’t been long.”
“You’re sure of all this?”
Hodge nodded. “Chief Clumly can tell you.” After a moment: “He’s been meeting with your Sunlight Man. Been having long talks.”
“Meeting him and doing nothing? Letting him go?”
Hodge scowled. He said, “No doubt he has his reasons.”
The trooper stood in front of him a moment longer, as if thinking about it, then took the cigarette from his mouth and went around the side of the car to his radio. Hodge turned, blinking the tears from his eyes, hands behind his back, and walked away. His mind was full of images.
Luke had been blond when he was a child. Beautiful and odd and unnaturally gentle. You could put him in a room …
Once—a matter of days ago, but it felt like centuries—it had seemed to him urgent that he do as he’d done, that he act, finally, take the bull by the horns, not simply gaze timidly from behind his tree as he’d done all those centuries upon centuries before. But now all that seemed trifling, a kind of delusion of grandeur. Not where it was at, Freeman would say. Because of course he had not acted, had merely put himself in position to act, watching them all, out-guessing them, growing fatter and fatter on his sense of power, unmoved by any argument for ending the hunt.
He stood with his hands in his coatpockets, studying emptiness.
To the stars he said, “You wanted to see me on my can, is that it?” It was all right, if that was what it was. What mattered was that it might be that and it might not, because it was possible that stars, too, had happened to notice how the world stretched out from a broken bridge—had seen it all in ant’s perspective—or that they knew beforehand, without ever having had to see from the bridge where Hodge had stood.
Freeman’s voice said, inside his mind, or Ben’s, maybe, “You can’t just walk out. But then again it’s no good to get up too close. You know what I mean.”
Hodge scowled, then got in the car. Little by little his system learned to tolerate what he’d seen. He stopped at a gas station and phoned his wife, that is, ex-wife, to tell her what had happened. He would know only long afterward that Tag had repaired the line no more than an hour before. After that, he drove to the police station in Batavia to wait. There he tried to phone Will Jr to tell him, but he was away. Hodge told the policemen, Clarence Pieman and Figlow, the news, wept and told the whole story, with all the details, and told how the troopers were hunting for them now, and wept, and moved beyond his vision of distances. His mind held, not as warring principles but as a solemn resolution, the length and breadth of the valley stretching out as if endlessly from the burning wreck, and the close-knit patter
n in the wallpaper of Will Jr’s livingroom. Figlow sat at his desk, silent, and the desklight shining on his tipped-down forehead made his eyes seem only shadows. Beyond him, Hodge could make out vaguely in imagination the hairy intellectual face of Freeman, who could walk out and who, also, had no doubt wanted to see Will Hodge, Attorney, on his can. Which was all words.
He looked at the clock over Figlow’s desk. He felt weightless. It was as if the earth had dropped from under him or had fallen, dragging him with it, off balance with the sun.
2
The phone rang, loud in the emptiness of the house, and Millie Hodge turned to stare at it. She had not known it was fixed. She thought a moment, eyebrows lowered, then raised herself carefully from the couch and crossed, turning the ice around and around inside the glass, to answer it.
The connection was bad, and at first she could not recognize the voice. The small of her back knew before her brain that it was Will. She half-closed her eyes.
“Millie?”
“This is Millie. Is that you, Will?”
“I have bad news,” he said.
“Talk louder.” She leaned over the phone and pressed her lips closer to it. “I can’t hear you,” she said. She had a weird sense that the Runian sisters stood listening behind the door.
She heard him clearly now. “Luke’s dead, Millie.”
She was silent. She heard, or imagined, the dead sisters’ sharp intake of breath. Oh my! No! The poor woman! The voices were clear and distinct. Was it only the wind?
“Are you there, Millie?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“Luke’s dead. Do you hear me?”
She nodded, silent.
“He ran his truck off a bridge. The others—”
She waited.
“They got out. They must have suspected. There was only one body.”
It wasn’t possible to cry.
One body? the sisters exclaimed. Only one? They tipped their heads together like weeds in a wind.
“Will,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Millie,” he said. That was all. The connection broke. She listened to the wind, and there were no ghosts’ voices now. No time for fantasy. The house was empty. She turned mechanically away from the phone. The room was cold, for the hot summer had at last broken, and autumn was descending in a rush, as always in Western New York. She drew the ragged old red and purple afghan from the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders. She stood at the window with her arms crossed over her bosom holding the makeshift robe in place. Stony Hill was burning, a red glow northeast of the prison’s flat white light. She stood looking. Her arms were white, her elbows like daggers. Her eyes were like emerald, her lips like amethyst, and in her mourning she was beautiful again; she was calm as stone.
3
She sat on the bedside wringing her hands while Clumly dressed. She could have told him, at least, she was thinking in anguish. But she hadn’t, and the anguish was pointless, not that that did a thing to make it less: She was not going to tell him even now, and she knew it. You can’t ruin a man after all those years of living with him and then tell him, “Oh, say, I ought to tell you something.” She had asserted her rights, had surrendered herself to whatever waves must carry them now; she would wait it out, and suffer with him or for him or from him whatever it was she must suffer, whatever was right. My duty, she thought. The word darted in and away again and hovered somewhere in the dark of her mind like a mysterious bird that could change its color, and there in the dark, outside her reach, she could feel it changing, teasing her toward a thought. She clenched her fists beside her knees, resolving to wring her hands no more, then instantly forgot. But he saw nothing of it as he dressed, lost in thought.
A meeting, he said. A speech to the Dairyman’s League. Was it true? But whether it was true or not no longer mattered. He had a life of his own, it was none of her business. A life to spend or squander as he saw fit, as independent of her as she was of him. That was what she’d learned, a startling and terrible but also exhilarating discovery that brought with it a sudden sense of vaulting joy, of freedom—an escape into wilderness and boundless time: she could kill herself if she pleased, she had realized, standing at the open window dreaming of it; because the pain was hers, not her husband’s, whatever pain of his own he might feel. The decision was hers, and if she chose against it for his sake, she did it voluntarily, as his equal. So he too, long ago, might have chosen to stay out of weakness, from dependence on her dependence on him, yes, but even then, his weakness: she was not, after all, his prison. She felt prepared almost for joy, but first she had tonight and tomorrow and perhaps next year to stumble through.
He was mumbling something as he dressed, and she closed off the back of her mind to listen.
“My friends, I’d like you to think back to the story of Cain and Abel,” he was saying. “I know that sounds like a minister talking, and I know a man’s known by the company he keeps—” Something was wrong with it, he seemed to think, and he muttered it again, with a slightly different expression. More heavy-handed, in her personal opinion.
“Should you really say that, Fred?” she said.
“Esther, please,” he said.
She sighed.
“—and I know a man’s known by the company he keeps,” he whispered.
Well anyway, he does have a speech to make. It’s not likely he’d stoop to an outright lie. Something wrong with a marriage where people can’t help but suspect each other. She thought of all those years when again and again she’d wondered with an aching heart if perhaps there was someone else he loved more than her. The Indian girl with the blue eyes. And others, a girl he stood talking to once at a School Board meeting. The waste of it all, she thought dismally.
But that was wrong, of course. There was always some waste, it was the method of Nature, and besides it was none of her business. She listened to him swallowing, pulling his tie snug, and then the almost inaudible yet to her ears distinct scrape of stiffly starched cloth as he put his cufflinks on. He went over to the closet in his stocking feet and she heard the squeak of coat hangers: then he came back, and the suit came down on the bed beside her and she caught the clean smell. She heard him straightening the trousers, then putting them on. He drew in his breath, slipping the belt on, buckling it. Then he leaned toward her again for the coat. “You look tired,” he said.
Before she could answer, the phone rang. She touched her forehead with the fingers of her left hand, meaning to get up for it, but Clumly put his hand on her shoulder gently. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Don’t trouble.”
“It’s no trouble, Fred,” she said. But she didn’t get up.
He carried the phone from the hallway into the bathroom and closed the door, and when he spoke it was too softly for her to hear. She sighed. Her heart felt drained and withered. But after the first words he no longer kept his voice at a whisper. “Dead?” he said. A moment later: “Go on.” He listened again, and then he said, “You’ve got everything in control then? I’m supposed to give—” Another long pause. “Ok. Check. I’m supposed to give a speech, so if you need me I’ll be at the Grange. Right. Ten-four. Right. G’bye.”
He hung onto the receiver a moment before he put it in its cradle. Then he came slowly back down the hall, put the phone on its shelf, and came back into the room. “Luke Hodge is dead,” he said. “It looks like suicide.”
“No,” she said. The room was full of distances, sounds farther off than they ought to be, as though it were the room, not the news, that was not to be believed. She could feel Luke’s presence distinctly, unquestionably alive; but she knew he was dead.
“He drove his truck off a bridge,” Clumly said. “The State Police are there, and Miller’s going over. His father’s at the scene, too, Figlow says.”
“The State Police reported it?”
A silence. At last he said, “Funny you should ask that. No, as a matter of fact. Luke’s mother reported it. Got it from his father. The
troopers—” He stood thinking, staring into space perhaps.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing. Kept it under their hat, that’s all. Not even on the radio. Funny.”
She nodded. If there was something wrong, something mysterious going on, she was to blame. Such is the language of the blood.
But Clumly had his shoes on now, and the suitcoat, and he was getting out his good wool coat, though the night was warm.
“Do you really think you should wear that?” she said.
“Now Esther,” he said, “you just leave that to me. There are some occasions when a uniform just isn’t needed, and tonight is one of ’em.”
She was startled. It was not what she’d meant, and his misunderstanding after all these years in the same house, saying the same words at the same time, thinking the same very thoughts, made her suddenly suspect—oh, more than that, know—that they’d struck something. They expect him to come in his uniform, she thought. He refuses. She said, “Dead. I can’t believe it!”
A silence.
“It’s tragic,” Clumly said.
She nodded.
They held their silence like years stretching backward and forward out of sight, like a vast space of quiet ocean at night. He put his hand on her shoulder and, strange to say, with the thought of death enclosing them like the space beyond the farthest stars, like the shell of an empty house, Esther felt safe.
“Be home early,” she said.
“I always do the best I can,” he said.
“I know that,” she said. She patted his hand. She could feel how old it was.