“Are you all right, Will?” he asked. Almost a whisper.
“We’re fine,” Will said, and Ben understood that it was true.
In the kitchen Vanessa talked and talked, turning the whole thing over and over, trying to make out the sense in it. Ben and Will Jr were as quiet as two old rocks in the Genesee.
XXIV
Law and Order
Darum, ich bitte euch, wollt nicht in Zorn verfallen
Denn alle Kreatur braucht Hilf von alien.
—Bertolt Brecht
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Chief of Police Fred Clumly said—his hand was shaking violently and he knew before it fell that the note they’d handed him was going to fall, though he could not feel it as it slipped between his ringers, all his physical sensations squeezed down and focused to a burning white point at the pit of his throat, could not even know after it had fallen that it had, not even by the eyes of the people who sat silent, dutiful, and sleepy, his own eyes swimming (for he was, whatever else, good-hearted)—“ladies and gentlemen,” said Clumly, “I have the sorrowful duty to tell you the terrible, tragic news that one of our number is dead.”
Silence stood in the room like a barn owl watching, and then, little by little, the whispers began. He raised both arms. “Please,” he said, “please!” And once more it was silent. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “tonight, a little more than ten minutes ago, the Sunlight Man that we’ve all been reading in the papers about—” Again he raised his arms for silence and it came, “—the Sunlight Man was shot tonight, dead.” It was as if the silence grew in pitch and power until it roared. In any case, the people were all talking now, and after he’d held up his hands for a full minute, to no avail, he let his hands fall and bowed his head and waited for them to calm down. At last they did.
“I have the notes to a speech here,” he said, “which I don’t know whether I should give or not.” He leaned on the table looking down at where, somewhere in all that blur, he knew the notes would be lying, and, sad of heart, he waited for a sign. Someone coughed, out in front of him, and he took it for one and said gravely, “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to depart from my subject somewhat—” He stopped to think it out. “I’d like to deviate from my subject somewhat in order to communicate with you all here tonight, this crowd of friends and neighbors I’ve known all my life, good people, all of you, the kind of people that can sympathize with whoever gives them a fair chance, if you follow me, and can give the Devil his due, good farm people, the salt of the earth, as the Good Book says—” He frowned and stammered, trying to get the thread again. But he was grieved, he was grieved deeply, crying out in his mind “My God, my God! The injustice of it!” and the word injustice (printed like a headline in his mind) had a power over him even greater than the thing itself, as is the way of words, and tears brimmed over and fell on his cheeks and his throat tightened to a whimper. He whispered, “Friends,” and waited for control, for the help of the Lord, then said again, “Friends, I said I’d talk to you about Law and Order, but that’s a hard subject for me right tonight. It’s hard.” He bent over, put his hands to his wide mole’s nose and, unable to stop himself longer, sobbed. Someone put his hand on Clumly’s shoulder, he would never learn who. He knew very well how absurd he must look, oh yes, yes, he understood their bafflement—the Chief of Police standing there weeping, crying his heart out, for a man he’d been hunting Like a wild animal for days and days and days. Yes. He raised one hand, still standing with his head down. “Sometimes,” he said and paused and little by little knew he was in command again, would be able to speak like a responsible being. “Sometimes it seems as if there is no justice. A man dies—shot through the heart, the message said—a man dies and you think, Lord, Lord, where is your justice? Was that what he was born for? Or any of us was born for—to be mortally shot through the heart and killed? Do you think when he was a little baby they supposed he was going to be shot through the heart like that, mortally, and killed? Do you think when he was a child of say five or six years old he wasn’t just as fine looking and lovable as your children or mine, if I had any? Listen: We see people that are lucky and that live their whole lives in the shelter of Law and Order and the whole community looks up to them, and they work like any decent person and they start their family and buy a house pretty soon and they mature and prosper before Man and God, and one of these days they die and we go to their funeral, and we all say, ‘Rest in peace, Sam,’ or Henry, or whatever the case may be. And we go out there to the cemetery with his last remains and we stand by the graveside and our hats are off to him, and the minister opens his book and prays for him. You know what it’s like, all of you. Our hearts are full of sorrow, a time like that, but there’s a calm in it too, you all know that. All the man’s family there, standing around the grave, and his grandchildren standing there all dressed up, and his friends standing around crying and wringing their hankies and remembering all he ever said to them or did for them. That’s order. That’s right to the heart of what Order is. Because all his life he obeyed the law. And now all the people that ever knew him come together and give him the dignity of that last final order. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Order. Correct. It’s a beautiful thing, the order in a man’s life, and sometimes you wonder if that’s not the only time it’s visible, after he’s dead and it’s there beside his grave.”
Fred Clumly put his hands on the table and he looked out at them but not at them, over their reasonable, patient heads, as if he were reading it all on the wall, from the angel’s hand, cut in the plaster like runes from a stylus. They sat motionless as rocks and stumps, as if they too were aware that the angel was there, or the angel’s hand, outrageously condemning them for doing nothing wrong. Clumly drew his breath. “Well this man won’t get such a funeral as that, and we all know why. He didn’t obey the laws. Our laws that we’ve put on the books for the benefit of all, or anyway the benefit of almost all, all of us, anyway. And in all fairness to the people who do obey the laws, or anyway don’t get caught disobeying, or got forgiven in time, at least, we can’t honor him with the kind of order we give those others. If he had any family (I don’t say he did and I don’t say he didn’t, because what will be will be, and you’ll find it in the papers the same as I will), if this Sunlight Man, as he called himself, had a family, they won’t lay him away in the earth with ceremony; they’ll be too ashamed. But I’ll tell you this: they’ll be sorry, some of them, or sorry in some ways, some of the time. It might be he was of good stock, as people say. It might be he was from one of the best old families in the country, maybe some family right here in Batavia, who knows? I can say this, anyway. I talked to him, and it was the finest mind I ever talked to, some ways. Sometimes you could hardly understand him when he talked, and sometimes you could understand him just fine and you grieved in your heart to hear the terrible way he was talking, so disrespectful of everything. I’ve seen that man do magic tricks as good as any magician I ever yet saw on the stage in all my life, and I’ve seen more than two or three, I can tell you that. And I’ve heard him quote foreign languages just as if he was born talking ’em, even dead languages that nobody knows how to speak any more or whether he’s saying the words correct or not. I don’t know if he was saying it right, I’ll admit that to you, but I’ll say this: if you heard him you’d believe him. That’s the kind of authority he spoke with. But now he’s dead with a bullet in his heart, mortally killed. Where was justice? you might ask. Well, I can’t answer.
“I can say this: I’m proud of my boys that tracked him down, insofar as they did, and I wouldn’t have it otherwise. They have a public trust, your police department, and I’m as proud of those boys as I could be of my own sons, if I had any. I know they did the best they could to see true justice triumphed, and justice did triumph, and we can be proud that we live in this great free country where that can happen. Yes! But also justice didn’t triumph, in a way, of course. I can’t explain that if you don’t see it in you
r heart, it’s just the way it is, maybe always was and always will be. You have to have laws, the best you can, and this is democracy, as we all know, and we’re dedicated to the idea of liberty …”
He paused again, muddled for the moment. “The boys in your police department are the Watchdogs of Society,” he said.
He paused again.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we all live in the hope and faith that, although there may still be some faults in our society, and sometimes things aren’t all we wish they might be, we’re trying to get better, doing our level best in that direction. It’s a little like the Einstein universe, as I understand it, which is reaching outwards and outwards at terrific speed, and the danger is—if I’ve got this right—the danger is, it can get cold. Turn ice. Ladies and gentlemen, we mustn’t let that happen, I feel. I feel we must all be vigilant against growing indifferent to people less fortunate …”
He bit his lip, pausing a moment, and hungered for a cigar. Would they mind? he wondered. Would they even really notice if he took out a cigar and lit it? When he looked at them this time they seemed to him farther away, as if the whole room were receding—not swiftly, but slowly, definitely, determinedly receding. He got out the cigar and, after a moment, lit it.
“Well things are getting better, some ways, we know. There are supermarkets in India now, or so I read—‘super bazaars,’ they call them. You can buy such things as pressure cookers, egg slicers, meat grinders, and packaged varieties of food—all made right in India. Everything’s got a price tag, which is very important as nobody knows better than the farmer (There! he’d got that in!), and it’s all self-service which, as we all know, is the best way to do it, and the truly American way. But then on the other hand there are signs that things are getting worse. A thousand people a day dying of famine right there in India for instance. Or for instance take the problem of advertising. It’s getting so advertising’s so plain outright obscene you wonder if it’s bad for children’s minds, such as, ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ and ‘Had any lately?’ and that shaving ad for Noxema where the lady is saying ‘Take it off, take it all off.’ And there’s the problem all over the world of juvenile delinquency, for instance, even in Russia. I forget the statistics on it, but they’re something staggering, believe me. And yet it seems like the worse things get the harder it is for us to arrest a criminal. In San Francisco, California, according to what I read, every time they arrest a person they have to hand him a card that tells him what his rights are. If that makes you nervous, well I can’t say I’m surprised. It does me too.”
He paused again. It was none of it exactly what he’d meant to say. It had nothing to do with his feeling about the man who’d been killed, and nothing to do with his own feelings either, for that matter, his own feelings about being here, talking with friends—He felt his mind fumbling, lost.
“There’s been a lot of talk,” he said. “About me, about the Mayor, about the people over there in the fire department …” He felt himself getting angry, and he wasn’t sure why. “We do the best we can. You know that. And I want to say I know you do the best you can too, or anyway some of you do, and I have the utmost confidence that the people of Batavia will not go off half-cocked about a lot of false rumors.” He wished they would turn the lights up more. He could hardly make out the people at the table beside him. “There may be those—” he said. He squinted. Someone was whispering. “There may be those who condemn what happened tonight with the Sunlight Man. I won’t hide it from you. I’ll tell you right out. He came barging in there to give himself up and the man at the desk got panicky and shot him, that’s all there was to it. A terrible mistake, plain murder, you may say. And it was. But let me tell you this: It ain’t easy, sitting in there listening to the radio crackle and knowing there’s crimes going on in this city and you can’t be everywhere at once. It ain’t easy to know they’re gunning for you—following you around, dogging your footsteps, ready to topple you the first time you go and put your foot down wrong. Think of it! You’re sitting at the desk, nothing happening, mind full of stories of the Sunlight Man-murdering, robbing, scaring people in their beds, so the rumors have it anyhow—and all of a sudden WHOP!!”—he banged the table—”he’s right there in front of you like magic! You know what you’d do. Don’t you fool yourself, mister. It’s the same all around us. The Negro problem! Or the China problem! Face the truth! Juvenile delinquents setting fire to your store, or dogs hunting children in the streets of the city, or somebody poisoning your calves with paint, or lightning striking, or the end of the world!” whop!! It filled him with exhilaration and he banged the table again and then again, whop!! WHOP!!!
Then he put his hands down, shaking all over, collecting his thoughts.
“We may be wrong about the whole thing,” he said. “The whole kaboodle. If we could look at ourselves from the eyes of history—” His voice trembled. He squinted, panicky, momentarily believing they had all disappeared and the hall was empty. But they were there, leaning on their knees, listening, eyes as bright as the eyes of birds of prey, far in the distance. He wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“We may be dead wrong about the whole kaboodle,” he said wearily. He thought of the Sunlight Man shot through the heart, how he’d said when the Universe told him to jump he would jump; and now—because Luke was his nephew, it came to him: Luke was his brother’s son, and he would be alive today if it weren’t for the anarchist Taggert Hodge—now, because Luke was his nephew and had died on account of him—he had jumped. “We may be wrong,” he said. “We have to stay awake, as best we can, and be ready to obey the laws as best as we’re able to see them. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.” His face strained, struggling to get it all clearer, if only to himself. He thought of Esther. “Now there’s a fine model for us all,” he said emphatically, pointing at the ceiling. They all looked up, and he was flustered. He should go home. Then they were watching him again, as wide-eyed and still as fish. “Blessed are the meek, by which I mean all of us, including the Sunlight Man,” he said. “God be kind to all Good Samaritans and also bad ones. For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Then, abruptly, Clumly sat down and scowled.
No one clapped, at first.
The silence grew and struggled with itself and then, finally, strained into sound, first a spatter and then a great rumbling of the room, and he could feel the floor shivering like the walls of a hive and it seemed as if the place was coming down rattling around his ears but then he knew he was wrong, it was bearing him up like music or like a storm of pigeons, lifting him up like some powerful, terrible wave of sound and things in their motions hurtling him up to where the light was brighter than sun-filled clouds, disanimated and holy. The Mayor was there at his side, surging upward, it seemed to Fred Clumly, and crying happily, “Bravo, Clumly!” and the Fire Chief said happily, “Powerful sermon! God forgive us!” And Clumly, in a last pitch of seasickness, caught him in his arms and said, “Correct!” and then, more wildly, shocked to wisdom, he cried, “Correct!”
All this, though some may consider it strange, mere fiction, is the truth.
A Biography of John Gardner
John Gardner (1933–1982) was a bestselling and award-winning novelist and essayist, and one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, are noted for their intellectual depth and penetrating insight into human nature.
Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for t
he rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977). After graduating from high school, Gardner earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1958, after which he entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life, including a period at Chico State College, where he taught writing to a young Raymond Carver.
Following the births of his son, Joel, in 1959 and daughter, Lucy, in 1962, Gardner published his first novel, The Resurrection (1966), followed by The Wreckage of Agathon (1970). It wasn’t until the release of Grendel (1971), however, that Gardner’s work began attracting significant attention. Critical praise for Grendel was universal and the book won Gardner a devoted following. His reputation as a preeminent figure in modern American literature was cemented upon the release of his New York Times bestselling novel The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). Throughout the 1970s, Gardner completed about two books per year, including October Light (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the controversial On Moral Fiction (1978), in which he argued that “true art is by its nature moral” and criticized such contemporaries as John Updike and John Barth. Backlash over On Moral Fiction continued for years after the book’s publication, though his subsequent books, including Freddy’s Book (1980) and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), were largely praised by critics. He also wrote four successful children’s books, among them Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales (1975), which was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the New York Times.
In 1980, Gardner married his second wife, a former student of his named Liz Rosenberg. The couple divorced in 1982, and that same year he became engaged to Susan Thornton, another former student. One week before they were to be married, Gardner died in a motorcycle crash in Pennsylvania. He was forty-nine years old.