We didn’t go back to school, by the way. Pretty manipulative on our part: Dad hadn’t the will to send us back if we truly didn’t want to go, and we knew it. Preying on his depression we made ourselves useful—we washed clothes, scrubbed floors, swept cobwebs, cooked soup (it is hard to ruin soup, unless you run short of salt, and anyway Dad wasn’t picky). When he approached us one day with the reluctant suggestion that we return to school after the Christmas break, Swede revealed a breathtaking bit of strategy, taking Dad into her room and displaying a stack of history and geography and arithmetic books more than a foot high. “From the library,” she said, adding this handsome flourish: “I certainly don’t want to lag behind my classmates.”
“Ah,” Dad said, looking at me over Swede’s head—he was on to her and wanted me to know it. He didn’t send us back, though, despite the fact that the schoolbooks were but props. It wasn’t as if we didn’t read; while at the library, Swede had also checked out every Frank O’Rourke on the shelves, having finished The Big Fifty long ago. O’Rourke, she confided, wrote much better Westerns than Zane Grey.
“It’s his women. They don’t talk all the time, and when they ride, they ride like men.”
While interesting, I didn’t see what difference this made to the story. As a reader I leaned more in the direction of pirates; Treasure Island simply didn’t have any women, except for Long John’s stanch negress, whom you never actually see.
“It makes all sorts of difference,” Swede said. She’s a professor now, have I told you that? “Every Western is a love story, you see. In Zane Grey, the hero always starts off with the wrong girl, and she has eyes that are too close together, and she has a bad attitude, like a problem horse.”
“The wrong girl is like a horse?”
“Usually a roan, a stubborn roan. The hero has had lots of horses, and this girl makes him remember that roan.”
So Westerns were love stories. Though I’d read several myself, I hadn’t realized the truth of this equation. I didn’t like the sound of it, either.
“Swede,” I said, “Sunny’s wife—she was the right kind of girl, wasn’t she? Like one of O’Rourke’s you were talking about.”
The question made her indignant. Sunny Sundown was no dummy, she said; he’d ridden some miles in his time; he would never have married a roan. I was glad to hear her say it. Last I’d read of Sunny, he had his hands full enough without that sort of problem:
Till late in the night he had fought the good fight
With his fear, and had kept it at bay;
And he dreamed of his wife, and their satisfied life,
And he woke to a wicked new day.
* * *
Then he rose in his shirt and he nodded to Bert,
Who was empty and mute as a hole,
But down on his knees Rennie wept aloud, “Please,
Have charity on a thief’s soul, Lord,
Forgive my poor dry-rotted soul.”
Three nooses swung loose as a clergyman prayed.
Three men were marched forward—and two were afraid.
Swede meant this to be suspenseful, of course, but even at eleven I recognized what had to happen next: Somehow, a woman had to come on the scene. You don’t need many Westerns under your belt to know that. And she had to be young and black-eyed and lovely, and touched by the bravery of the condemned hero.
Then up the tight street came a rider so sweet,
She was light as the dawn, and as free—
And her hair was as black as her stallion’s back,
And she parted the crowd like a sea.
“Is it Sunny’s wife?” I asked.
“Nope—just a woman.” She deliberated. “You know, that’s not an awful idea. But it’s a different woman.” This troubled me; for I saw straight off that the beauty on the black horse was about to attempt a rescue, and also that she was deep in love with our Sunny. And him married! It was a problem.
“Why don’t you change it,” I suggested, “make this girl his wife, see—they ride away together.”
“She wasn’t his wife!” Swede flared. Past tense, you notice—history, even the fictive kind, being beyond our influence.
The problem got worse when the girl actually pulled off the rescue; for then Sunny, though rushed in the moment,
Leaned down from the black and pushed her hair back
And kissed his deliverer twice, my lads,
He kissed his deliverer twice.
The last thing I wanted was to fight Swede, but this was terrible. “Now he’s kissing her,” I complained. “If she was his wife, it would be okay.”
“Reuben,” Swede said, holding herself back, “say you’re about to be hanged. The rope’s on your neck already! Then out of noplace this beautiful girl comes riding up and saves you—are you telling me you’re not going to kiss that girl?”
“Well—”
“Look, Reuben. Let’s say Sunny just thinks of her as a really great sister. Like me.”
I nodded, but in truth this picked at me for some little while. Hair “as black as her stallion’s back”—nuts, it would’ve been hard enough to think of that girl as a sister without throwing kisses into the deal at all.
By the Grace of Lurvy
CHRISTMAS 1962 LOOKED A LITTLE MEAGER GOING IN.
You understand: Kids of my generation grew up with stories of their parents’ deprivations—tales of treeless Christmases, cold kitchens, scrawny old stockings containing naught but a polished apple. In 1962, the Great Depression was a reach back of less than thirty years—surely a millennial distance for residents of a progressive city such as Minneapolis but not so far if you lived in Roofing, on the edge of the plains.
Thus Swede and I felt certain we were about to live such a story ourselves. For Dad had found but irregular work—he repaired a furnace for the Lutheran church, mended furniture in the basement and, capitalizing on a rash of chimney fires in town, borrowed a brush and swept chimneys until he caught cold. “I’ll work through it,” he told Swede, sniffing the hot lemonade she handed him, but another day on the rooftops drove the cold lungward until he wheezed as badly as I did. I suspect he was almost grateful. I know we were—that chimney business was nasty work, the wind snapping his coat around, him up there in his janitor’s boots, traipsing on icy shingles.
Still, an unemployed father meant the sort of Christmas Swede and I had always heard of, or read about in books with titles like Days of Despair. We pictured ourselves waking Christmas morning to bowls of oatmeal unadorned by so much as a teaspoon of white sugar. (“Porridge,” Swede said. “Mush. Gruel.”) We wondered how well we’d do in front of Dad—how grateful we could appear for a gift of, say, a navel orange. In the books, kids were unfailingly thrilled by a Christmas orange; they never felt poor at the time, it only dawned on them later. What I really wanted that year was the Spartacus model. Remember Spartacus? I never actually saw the movie, which came out I believe in 1960, but in ’62 certain kids at school were still talking about its gory gladiator scenes. The dime store downtown had a model Spartacus—what a durable character he appeared, face like a badger’s, sword in hand. And what a noble cause he espoused, fighting against slavery, like Abraham Lincoln. What a boy really liked about the Spartacus model was that one of the plastic pieces was a severed hand, belonging, I guess, to the fellow he’d just got done fighting. You could lay the hand anywhere around Spartacus’s feet, or impale it on his sword, or paint it red and torment your sister with it.
Swede wanted something even more extravagant. “A trip,” she said, “out West. I want to ride west on a horse and find Davy.” She was sure he was out there, cosy under some rock, sitting on a blanket eating buffalo meat: holed up somewhere in the previous century. How great it would be to go find him! What a Christmas we’d all have!
A navel orange just seemed a little weak in comparison.
Then, ten days before Christmas, Dr. Nokes stopped by. Drinking tea—our coffee was long gone—he grew alarmed at Dad
’s deepening cough. He set his cup down and retrieved a stethoscope from his car.
“Jeremiah,” he said warily, “how long have you been croaking this way?”
“I actually think it’s getting better,” Dad said.
“How much do you bring up?” asked Dr. Nokes.
Dad cleared his throat and said he hadn’t been measuring. Then, “Swede, Reuben, is your homework done?” We hadn’t any homework, of course, but we went to my room anyway. I remember noticing a strange smell right then, a heavy staleness in the air. Why hadn’t I perceived it before? Air itself can rot, you know, turn lush as a forgotten peach. You want to throw open every window you see.
On the way to my room we heard Dr. Nokes ask, not fooling around, “What color?”
* * *
He’s told me since—Dr. Nokes has—that his main worry was not Dad’s pneumonia. He was confident antibiotics and Dad’s own constitution could handle that. What worried the doctor was that I might come down with it. A set of lungs like mine could turn to peat moss with very little prompting. Before leaving that night, Dr. Nokes stepped me aside and spoke in confidence.
“Reuben,” he said, “I’ve a hunch about your sister—that she has the makings of a doctor when she’s grown. So listen: You stay out of her way, let her take care of your dad. What do you say?”
I know: I should’ve been far too old to fall for this sort of ruse.
“I’ve given her instructions, and I’ll drop some medicine by. You let Swede give it to your dad. Your job is to stay out of his room. Swede should take him his meals, too.” He saw I didn’t understand. Glancing around he said, “Bedside manner. It’s where she needs practice—her bedside manner is a little rough.”
“Well, what can I do?” Two weeks Dad was supposed to stay in bed. “What about Christmas?”
Dr. Nokes said, “You know, I was talking to Mr. Layton today. He’s got a bad spine, did you know that?”
Talk about your conversational leaps. I blinked at Dr. Nokes, who went on, “He just can’t work anymore in certain ways. You’re familiar with that old eyesore of a corncrib back of his house.”
I didn’t understand what it had to do with Dad and said so. Dr. Nokes replied, “Mr. Layton would probably hire a boy to tear that corncrib down—if the boy had a strong back, Reuben.”
A strong back? I had never imagined myself with a strong anything. Even had I guessed that the doctor only wanted to remove me from the house, put my lungs outside in healthy air, I wouldn’t have cared. No words he spoke could’ve pleased me more.
Gerard Layton’s corncrib was indeed an artifact. Tall as a boxcar, nailed up of laths spaced on oak posts, it leaned back in time. I stood in front of it, holding a crowbar, not knowing how to begin.
I mentioned the snow. This was December 16—the birthday, Swede informed me, of Ludwig Beethoven, the great band director—and already we’d logged three or four notable snowstorms. Winter was a train crawling north. I walked all round Mr. Layton’s corncrib, up to my hips every step. It seemed an odd time of year for this particular job, but Mr. Layton was peculiar and everyone knew it. I remember thinking the corncrib looked about ten minutes from falling over on itself, but when I poked the crowbar through its ribs and leaned down, nothing happened. The crib flatout did not notice me. I heaved to and fro. I had on Davy’s chopper mitts with wool liners but felt that bar as if barehanded. At last, after extravagant effort, a nail squealed and dropped me into a drift.
Swede fretted over me appreciatively when I came in at noon. “Oh, you’re frozen! Hurry and get some dry socks on; I’ll hang those on the radiator. Come on, Reuben, I’ve got soup ready!”
She squared me up at the table and set down a bowl of something white—not what you think of as soup, though dumplings bobbed on the surface. “It’s villing!” she announced.
I knew what it was. It was hot milk with a little sugar stirred in, also some butter and a shake of cinnamon.
“Dad told me how to make it. I always liked it,” Swede said. I didn’t mean to hesitate, but I’d been out all morning doing a man’s work. Villing was sick food.
“Isn’t it okay?” Swede said.
“Do we have any cheese?”
She shook her head. Off in his bedroom Dad hawked something up, a dispiriting sound. I looked at the villing: If you skimmed the dumplings off you had only to pour it over toast. Presto, milk toast. More sick food.
“Well, let’s eat.” By this time I felt poorly used and didn’t care how gruff I sounded. To work all morning in snow to my waist, to pit my muscles and manly crowbar against an edifice as stout as Mr. Layton’s corncrib, to come home all dissipated and ravenous and have to sit down to a bowl of hot milk—
“Dad’s worse,” Swede said, abruptly.
“What’s the matter?”
“He’s in there pounding his chest—hear him thumping? He’s been doing it all morning.”
It was strange. My fingers started to tremble when she said that.
“It’s his lungs, they’re filling up—like yours do, Reuben. He’s trying to knock it loose.”
“Be right back,” I told her.
“Wait, Reuben, you aren’t to go in,” Swede said, but I was compelled by the whacking noise. Who knew constriction better than me? How many times had I thrashed my own chest—thrashed it like you would a snake, to make it slack its coils?
Dad stopped pounding when I opened the door. Sitting up in a flannel shirt, blankets over his lap and on them an aluminum pan, his face when he saw me filled with chagrin. “I sound like a threshing crew. Ack.”
“Is it hard to breathe?”
“Reuben,” he said, “is this what you feel like in the night?”
His breathing was like ripples on a sand beach.
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded—exhausted but watching me, it seemed, more closely than usual. “What would you think of moving, Reuben? Dr. Nokes has told me”—he paused, breathed, “of people who have this trouble; they’ve gone to dry climates.” He breathed again. “New Mexico. He says all this plumbing works better out there.” He slapped his chest.
“New Mexico?”
“High desert,” he said. And those words did sound magnificent, spoken as they were in a close, moist, ill-smelling room. High desert. It came to me as beautiful rolling wastes of sagebrush and grama grass and air through which you might see an antelope top a rise six miles away. Just thinking of it relaxed me. Who could not breathe in such a landscape?
Then Swede, who’d come in behind me, said: “What if we move and then Davy comes back and we’re all gone?”
Dad said, “Well, we don’t have to make our minds up right now.”
“It would be like forsaking all hope of his return,” Swede said. I know, the sentence deserved an accompanying swoon, but this was how she got sometimes and by now you oughtn’t to be surprised.
“He’d find us,” I argued. I was excited. I’d never seen high desert but the thought of it seemed suddenly imperative. “Don’t you think we ought to? It’s out West, Swede.”
I watched her thinking it out: imagining Davy returning—probably on horseback, knowing Swede’s turn of mind—Davy finding us gone and turning his big black into the sun and walking away; but she was also thinking of us out West, the three of us riding across prairies, siding each other, like a family invented by Frank O’Rourke, and I watched her thinking how Davy would rejoin us there and we’d become the four of us again, and possibly even the five of us, an O’Rourke woman appearing now on a strong bay mare alongside Dad.
That last was a shock, and I looked at Swede and wondered if she’d really thought it or if I’d come up with it myself.
“How about,” Dad suggested, “if you let me get back on my feet before you both start packing?”
Then I realized I’d gone into Dad’s room scared for him, but once inside hadn’t even asked how he was or what I could do. Instead he’d asked, his chest filling with junk, if this was how things were fo
r me in the difficult times.
I said, “Can I get you anything, Dad?”
“Well, let’s see. Yes, a glass of water.” He slapped his pillow into shape and lay back against it. “Say, Reuben, what did you think of Swede’s villing? Good, wasn’t it?”