Something Warm
IT’S TRUE: THE POLICE WERE AFTER US. I BELIEVE DAD KNEW IT IN HIS GUT when he saw the first of them. Swede knew it too—tell you how in a minute. Later, the putrid fed himself would confirm the fact: He’d twisted the arm of the weak-willed chief of the North Dakota State Patrol, a man named Muriel whose picture I’ve seen since—with that name, that little dimpled chin, what chance did he ever have? And Muriel had ordered a disproportionate measure of his force to Mandan, plus a few more spots along the route Andreeson had guessed, correctly, we would choose. An easy assignment, wouldn’t you think? Stopping a family in a green Plymouth wagon, pulling a twenty-foot Airstream trailer?
They didn’t get us, though; not one of them even saw us, though we saw them, as I’ve described; we tiptoed through that town like a fat boy through a wolf pack. Make of it what you will. It gives me satisfaction yet, thinking of that evening—how each trooper must have dutifully reported to Muriel of the State Patrol that the day had passed without event. It pleases me to think of poor soft Muriel then garnering up courage and laying hold of the phone and dialing Martin Andreeson to inform him he’d misguessed.
“He’s like Moses,” Swede declared of Dad, when we lay in bed that night under a hissing gas-mantle lamp. “It was like going through the Red Sea!”
“Well, now,” I said, riffling, at her insistence, through the Old Testament. Having witnessed her very first miracle, she’d got the idea of ranking Dad among the prophets, a notion that disquieted me.
“You don’t think he’s up there with Moses?” Swede demanded.
I fudged. “What about Obadiah?”
“Low.”
“Malachi?”
“Oh, come on. I don’t even know what those fellows did—no disrespect.”
I saw it was going to have to be somebody famous. “What about Jonah?”
Swede shook her head. “Such a griper. Whine all day long. Probably God sent the whale so He could get three days of peace and quiet.”
But I was troubled. How could we place Dad, or any other living person, among these Old Testament gentlemen? These prophets who’d got up every day and heard from the Lord, regular as setting your table? These who’d struck water from dry rocks? I wished Swede had just slept through Mandan.
“It worries me,” I said.
“How come?”
I couldn’t put words to it, but Swede, as usual, could.
“Afraid we’re being impertinent?”
“Yes.”
“Presumptuous? Arrogant? Blasphemous?”
This still happens with Swede and me. I’ll lack a word, and she’ll dump out a bushel of them.
“You called Jonah a griper—”
“Well, you read about him. After the whale he goes to Nineveh and tells the pagans to repent or God’ll burn them to death, and their cows too. So the pagans repent—ashes and gunnysacks from the king on down! And you know what Jonah does?”
“No,” I admitted. Actually, I thought the book ended when he got coughed up.
“He mopes! He marches off in the desert and asks God to burn those pagans anyway, and their cows.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be fair,” I said.
“That’s what God said too, but Jonah sat there pouting. Lip out to here! He didn’t want those pagans to repent; he wanted a barbecue.”
I looked at her dumbfounded. Who would’ve thought? I hoped the other great prophets hadn’t any such childish flaws—Elijah or Daniel. Peaceful old Daniel down in that lion hole, I just couldn’t have stood it if he’d turned out to be a pouter.
“Besides, he didn’t do miracles,” Swede went on. She had Jonah down now and was pounding him good.
“Well,” I said, “he wrote a whole book and it’s in the Bible.” Even Dad, much as I loved him, didn’t have anything in there.
“It’s a short book. Jonah didn’t even want to be a prophet. He probably wanted to be a handyman.”
We left it there, thankfully. The last thing I wanted was to bad-mouth Jonah. As far as I was concerned, getting past the State Patrol had been miracle enough, even if nobody knew about it but us.
One thing bothered me, though: that Andreeson had gone to such exertions. Hadn’t he come to talk, right in our own trailer, just the previous night? And hadn’t he gone away with nothing worse from us than passive defiance? What cause had the putrid fed for hounding us?
“I was actually expecting it,” Swede said.
“Well, bully for you.” Sure, I was a little sour. “You know, Andreeson’s still looking for us. Now I guess everybody else is too.”
“Andreeson’s back in Linton.”
“He wouldn’t still be in Linton, you know. He’d be—he’d be someplace else.”
“He’d of had a hard time getting out of Linton.” Swede looked up, itching to tell me something now—a thing she’d been saving.
“Come on, then, say it while your mouth is open.”
“I crept over there,” she declared, “and spoiled his car. It was an act of sabotage—don’t tell Dad!”
This was so far outside what I expected, it rendered me perfectly stupid.
“Maple syrup down his gas tank,” she explained. Oh, how scared and proud she looked! Then the strangeness of that morning came clear. No wonder she’d been so agitated, trying to get us out of town. No wonder she’d rousted us out of bed!
And the previous night: Remember how she entered the trailer, just as Andreeson was leaving?
“I used the whole bottle, to make sure,” she confessed.
Well.
No wonder she’d been against having pancakes.
Meantime, we still hadn’t got gas. We’d stopped ten miles out of Mandan and parked in the lee of a shelterbelt, poured in our spare ten gallons, and driven west until Dad said he had to lie down. He had a headache: another monster, or maybe the same one never truly gone away. His face was lined like a Renaissance painting. He pulled off the road beside a great empty misplaced-looking barn, no house around it and none visible in any direction. The barn was paintless and built of square-hewn timbers joined at the corners in mammoth handcut dovetails. This in a part of North Dakota where such timbers never grew and will not grow. I don’t know how that barn came to be there but will bet you it’s there still. Dad shut off the car, saying he believed we had propane enough to keep the Airstream tolerable until morning. Swede asked in alarm whether we shouldn’t get farther along tonight, and he replied in a tone of declining patience that if he didn’t lie down his head would fall off and land in his lap.
“It’s Saturday night,” Swede informed him.
“I know it,” Dad said.
“Gas stations’ll be shut tomorrow.”
Dad nodded. He’d lit the heat and tucked us in—both of us in Swede’s bunk; we all knew it was going to get cold. He said, “Swede, are you going to pray tonight?”
She nodded.
“I’m going to as well. One thing I mean to ask Him is to save us some gas. Will you do the same?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Stay warm then,” Dad said. “Lamp out in fifteen minutes.” He didn’t kiss us good night but bent near us, then pulled away—as though you could catch a headache.
“Are you tired?” Swede asked, when Dad had gone into his room and slid the door shut.
“Nope.”
“I bet it’s not eight o’clock.”
“I’m awake,” I said.
“I bet it’s not even seven!”
Dad’s door slid open. In the amber gloom he looked scary and sunk-eyed. A man looks like that in the daytime and you’d glance around for a phone. “Pretend it’s midnight,” he said. “Whisper.” His door slid shut.
“Wow,” Swede said—whispering.
“Are you warm enough?” I knew neither of us was; I just didn’t want to talk about Dad—how awful he looked.
“No.”
We still had the lamp on and quilts piled up. My nose was running and my cheeks felt like litt
le blocks of pine. Outside the wind had picked up; it was bumping the trailer around gently. It felt like a huge pig was out there scratching his back.
“Look, I can smoke.” Swede feigned a cigarette in the V of two fingers, raised one brow, and blew out a long strap of steam. She said, “I am zoooo cold, dahlink,” which gave me the giggles, which made my nose run faster, which lacking a hanky led to my desperate use of a remote corner of the uppermost quilt—well, not so remote—actually a corner fairly close to Swede, a horror that goosed our giggles into full-tilt hysterics, additional nonsense being thrown in whenever one of us could find the breath to speak. You know what we did? We laughed ourselves warm.
“Reuben,” Swede said—whispering, later, when we’d turned the light out and gone quiet in a sudden spell of conscience. “How come we even have to worry about buying gas?”
“Because we used the ten gallons already.”
“No. I mean how come we need more?”
The question didn’t make sense; I lay in the dark windbumped trailer trying to figure it out.
“What I mean is,” Swede said, “we had that thing happen today.”
“With the police.”
“Yes, that.” See, she didn’t want to use the word. “That was impossible, wasn’t it? That they all missed us.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think Dad prayed for that to happen?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t shut his eyes that I noticed.”
“Well, you can’t shut your eyes while you’re driving.” Her lecturesome tone was annoying. Before today, what miracles had she ever seen?
“Well, maybe you can if you’re praying for a big enough thing. If it’s really something gigantic, and you’re driving, maybe God just throws in that you don’t get in a crash. Like at the bakery, Mrs. Bushka gives you thirteen doughnuts, even though you only ask for twelve.”
“That’s a disrespectful comparison, Reuben.”
“I just meant, if God hears you praying and He looks down and notices you’re driving through town with your eyes shut, talking to Him, maybe He won’t let you run into anything.” I gave this some thought. “Maybe He’d take it as proof you have faith. Maybe He’d be more likely to answer your prayer.”
Swede said, “So anytime I really want something from God I should kneel out in the street and ask Him, so He knows I’m serious.”
I hadn’t a reply for that. The good thing about complete darkness is you can lie there quietly and let the other person rethink the smart-alecky thing they have just said. With any luck they’ll begin to regret it, or possibly they’ll believe you have a magnificent rejoinder in mind but are too well-adjusted to use it.
“I just thought,” Swede said, “that if Dad could pray and have something like that happen, then maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about finding a gas station open tomorrow.”
“You want him to pray the tank full?”
“Well—how’s it so different?”
It seemed like she never asked a question to which I had an answer. “I don’t even know if he prayed, Swede. Maybe it just happened. I don’t know if he ever prays for them, or if they just come.”
A brief cold moment and then she said, “What do you mean, if they come? What other ones are you talking about?”
“Well, like when I was born. You know what happened. You don’t call that a miracle?”
“Oh. Yeah.” You know how it is—you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It’s why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes. She said, “I thought you meant other times.”
Of course I’d meant other times, and it now seemed like some wretched betrayal not to say so.
“He walked a long ways one time on nothing but air,” I told her.
It was probably the wrong place to start.
Strange, isn’t it, that we’d never had such a conversation before? Strange that I could see my father step out supported on the void—and not go tell my sister? Or see him fired by his boss only to reach forth and heal the undeserving puke, or watch a pot of soup multiplied to satisfy the most impressive of appetites, and keep all my wonderment to myself?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Swede asked.
I didn’t know. Why does any witness keep shut about something? “You could’ve noticed some of this yourself, don’t you think? Like the saddle. I can’t believe you didn’t notice that.”
The saddle was a clincher of sorts for Swede. While I told the event to the best of my recall, she climbed over me out of the bunk and crossed the trailer in the dark, hands feeling out front, until she found it there aspraddle the sawhorse. There was silence while her fingers located the place high on the cantle. For a half second my mind swarmed with dread that I’d dreamed or imagined the healing of the leather—that she’d find it still torn and believe forever in my cruelty. Instead there came a hazy sigh. She whispered, “I’ve been sitting on it just like normal.” Cold as it was, she stood by that saddle a long while.
It’s been this part folks disbelieve—not that the saddle was made whole but that Swede had gone all this time without seeing it. Odd on the face of it, I know—I know. But we’re fearful people, the best of us. We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won’t even see it, though we look at it every day.
In the morning it was a brisk 19 degrees according to the Roofing Co-op thermometer Dad had rubberbanded to the bedrail. In case you were starting to think miracles were a convenience of mathematical dependability, we’d run out of propane during the wee hours, which also meant a cold breakfast of dry cereal and bread—the milk was a frozen cardboard cube. Outside, the wind still pushed and grieved round the trailer and we stumbled about inside it, snugging it down with an urgent quiet in our hearts, a fear strangled by cold and hurry. Dad’s head still ached, but he’d regained himself enough to stretch and shadowbox and chide us toward warmth. I remember moving through a sort of stupefaction. Kneeling atop the stove, putting the coffeepot away in its high cupboard, my numb fingers hit a stack of cups and down they all came to explode around my knees. At this Swede began inexplicably to weep. I remember how slowly this appeared to happen—the detachment I felt from the descending cups, the clamor of breakage coming almost before they hit, as if sound outruns sight in the glaciated mind. I remember the noise seeming to delaminate and rearrange into a distorted assemblage of crying and bursting ice. A few moments more and I’d have cried too from pure confusion, except then Dad began to sing. Not like Caruso or anything—he was generally uncomfortable in the same room with his own raised voice—he sang lightly, almost offhandedly, and what he sang was:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.
His truth is marching on.
This lovely warlike anthem Dad sang with increasing good humor straight to its end, steadying me with his hands, picking up wicked white shards,
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps,
dropping the shards in a paper sack,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps,
sweeping up the glistening dust, my mind brightening the while and Swede’s grief fading to a series of exclamatory sniffs.
His truth is marching on!
Rarely have I felt such claim to a song. Certainly it was our battle hymn as much as the Republic’s.
All that morning we drove cold. We drove from town to town, all of them shut to us if we’d thought to buy gas or propane: wind-sacked, immobile towns with Presbyterians and Lutherans and secure Methodists standing around their church doors. Assured laymen, all of them, with no need for fuel, while we moved slowly through, wondering moment to moment when the last spoonful of gas would
drain from the tank and leave us to wait on whoever might come by. Between towns we drove west between stubbled fields, the stubble sticking up through what poor snow had blown and dried and shrunk across the plains. In no place did we see a state trooper; in no place a gas station lit from within. We drove for hours. That we didn’t run dry may indeed have been the miracle Swede wanted. Nearing midday we began seeing what looked like mountains shorn off at the roots. Swede pointed them out as buttes or mesas and said it meant we were in the West for certain, a fact also evident in the presence of beef cattle and oil derricks, often in the same pasture. Swede said something about Teddy Roosevelt, her hero among all presidents, and how he’d ranched not far from here, and how the winters had been so bad in those years that ranchers sometimes lost a thousand head in a single storm. She had read a book about this, as you might expect. It was called Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail and was written by Mr. Roosevelt himself. Swede said he was not only the best cowboy ever to live in the White House but the best writer also. He was a friend to Owen Wister, to Frederic Remington. He credited the hardness of ranching in North Dakota with his recovery from asthma and numerous other griefs. This was good information but not new to me. You couldn’t be Swede’s brother very long and not know the profits of the strenuous life. Just at the moment I was too cold to care. I shrugged deeper into my army woolens and watched our entrance into mesa country. Here there was barely snow at all, though leaden cloudbanks brooded overhead. The mesas followed one another down the horizon north to south. We saw fences more and more rarely; the derricks worked alone in the matted grasslands. Once I asked Dad whether we were in Montana yet, but he said no, North Dakota was a big state.