None of us, of course, was in a hurry to leave. Surely I wasn’t. The truth is my short history contained no such person as Roxanna Cawley. What must she have thought when Dad, yanking me up out of nightmare, held my shoulders and instructed her to pound my back? Yet she pounded as if not just mine but both our lives were reckoned by her strength.
As for Swede, every sentence Roxanna spoke presented her with something new to admire. A movie star had eaten at her table; her great-uncle had ridden with Butch Cassidy! Also she employed words like auspicious while cleaning behind goats, a positive indication of dignity.
Dad’s reluctance to leave, so far as I know, had little to do with Roxanna. It had more to do with Almighty God, who so far had issued no instructions about what to do next. And so we awaited some event or foretoken, a long line of which we could recount in our march toward Davy’s reclamation. The divine befuddlement of the North Dakota State Patrol. August Shultz’s inkling toward the Badlands. Mr. Lurvy’s bequest. Even Dad getting fired by the depraved Superintendent Holgren—why, we’d never have left Roofing otherwise! Yet here we sat at Roxanna Cawley’s in a most disturbing state of satisfaction. Every morning Dad studied the Scriptures; every afternoon we did Roxanna’s chores and were repaid by revelatory tales of her adventurous and profane and torchlit forebears. Nights Swede and I dozed in the comforting far-off resonance of adult conversation. We did not eavesdrop. Sometimes we’d hear Dad deepen his inflection—he was a very good mimic, a talent he would not practice before his children—and then we’d hear Roxanna laugh. She had a low beautiful laugh, and hearing it you could only wish you’d said the thing that brought it forth. Here’s a strange fact: By the time Dad declared with such candid bad timing that we could get out of Roxanna’s hair, I’d begun waking in the mornings with the sensation that I’d been born in her house. That I was as native there as the painted wainscoting and the clothes tree beside my bed. In all it was as pleasant a mirage as any I’d occupied.
But eventually the plow did arrive, against all yearnings; we wrapped in coats and scarves and stood on a snowridge to watch its tortured passage. The depth of the drifts hid all but its topmost parts, so that what we observed was a headlit monster crushing through nightfall with the tip of its V-shaped scoop borne up before it like the prow of an ice-breaking ship. To make any way at all, the plow needed a running start. It would back off fifty yards or more, then clutch into low and come roaring ahead, all chains and smoke, casting up backlit clouds that made us gasp. The whole effort was so heroic Dad grabbed Swede and put her on his shoulder as if at a parade. When the plow had at last gone by, it backed up once more and the two men inside it climbed out and stood on their running boards to wave and holler, and we whooped and jumped around in reply because it was thrilling, no matter what was to happen next—it’s not every day such liberators appear on your behalf, and we cheered them like Ulysses home from battle.
Then Dad said, “Swede, Reuben, in you go. Get your things together. Go on now,” and the great moment was over. Next morning we’d have to leave—in fact, Dad seemed so determined to leave I supposed he’d received orders from the Lord at last. Upstairs I offered this idea to Swede. I only meant it as comfort.
“Did he tell you anything?” She was crying mad, firing balled-up socks in her suitcase.
Well, he hadn’t, which Swede knew as well as I did.
“If God told him what to do next,” she said, “how come nobody else heard it?”
“Come on, Swede. Nobody else heard it with Moses. Nobody else heard it with Daniel, or Paul, or Jonah.”
“Jonah!” she said in disgust. Then, lumping in clothes, “If God told him what to do, how come he didn’t tell us?”
“Who, Dad or God?”
“Who cares. One of them ought to’ve mentioned it.”
She stomped away to the bathroom and returned with her toothbrush and poked it in the suitcase too.
“Don’t pack that yet, you’ll want it in the morning,” I told her, wincing then as she spun and threw the toothbrush at me—it missed. Though tantrums were not usual for Swede, I could see there was more where this came from. I said, “What if God told Dad where to find Davy? What if that’s why we’re leaving?”
This by the way was the first mention of Davy between us since the morning after the blizzard. You might remember it caused a brawl then. Not now, though. Now it just made a quiet in which Swede slitted her eyes and peeked into my heart of doubt.
“Okay, Reuben. Is that what you think happened?”
“Well, it might have.”
“Is it your true opinion God told Dad the whereabouts of Davy and we are going there in the morning?”
“No,” I had to confess.
“Then shut up about it,” she said.
Suitcases packed and rooms neatened and clothes set out for morning, we went downstairs to help with supper. It was our routine now and a busy one, Roxanna being a thorough cook. Generally I was sent to retrieve wax beans or yams or an acorn squash from the webby cellar while Swede sliced bread or laid out plates and glasses; we’d pour cider, mash potatoes, slice pickles. We did with conviction—devotion—all the things we’d done so gracelessly at home. Even as we tromped downstairs we felt the anger between us lifting, for there was something in Roxanna’s kitchen that dispelled trouble.
Usually.
This time, though, she was standing at the counter with her back to us, standing in a dark wool dress pulling tight across her shoulders. The kitchen was lit by one yellow bulb above the sink. Otherwise the house was dark. The dark flowed in through every window, as if they’d all been shot out and dark and cold were coming in, and I wondered where Dad was, for we needed him here.
“Roxanna,” said Swede.
“Children,” Roxanna replied, turning to us. Though her eyes glittered she was not crying; in fact she pulled a smile from somewhere. Her hair was roped back in a French braid from which it was very winningly coming loose, and she held before her a picnic basket with a clasped lid. For heartening sights nothing beats a well-packed picnic basket. One so full it creaks. One carried by a lady you would walk on tacks for. Does all this make her sound beautiful to you? Because she was—oh, yes. Though she hadn’t seemed so to me a week before, when she turned and faced us I was confused at her beauty and could only scratch and look down at my shoetops, as the dumbfounded have done through the centuries. Swede was wordless too, though later in an epic fervor she would render into verse Roxanna’s moment of transfiguration. I like the phrase, which hasn’t been thrown around that much since the High Renaissance, but truly I suppose that moment had been gaining on us, secretly, like a new piece of music played while you sleep. One day you hear it—a strange song, yet one you know by heart.
Under the Gibbon Moon
YOU’RE MAYBE WONDERING ABOUT THE PICNIC BASKET. THOUGH NORTH Dakota with its wide views and variegated grasslands is a fine place to picnic, for most this holds only in summer. As Swede would later report in her short, scattershot, and extremely readable history, The Dakota Territory as I Recall It,
Few westward travelers since the emergence of internal combustion have attempted picnics in the Badlands in January.
Anyone who’s been there understands why.
But Roxanna Cawley was exempt from assumption. She knew, and her neighbors knew, that when the land lies buried in the miseries of winter, and loose boards twist with the cold, and the air hangs glassy and absolute over the world, that is when the merriest of all picnics happen. Anyone can tell you these are the times you need a picnic most, and the fact is, if you were lucky enough to live in the North Dakota Badlands in 1963, you could load up and have one at will.
We didn’t know where she was taking us. Dad, driving, just followed her directions. We were a quiet troop. Swede was curled away from me, and I couldn’t have spoken if asked, for my throat ached with coming departure and with the beauty I had perceived in Roxanna. So upright and calm she appeared, there in the front seat, and so
graceful, and so separate from Dad. Had the scene been mine to write she’d have scooted closer to him; she’d have reached for his hand. Were Dad’s heart my tablet I’d have taken it up and erased Davy’s name, so terribly did I wish to stay, and had it been whispered to me that all Roofing had burned, to the last toothpick, so that we had no home to return to, I’d have rolled down the window and shouted thanks to heaven without a thought for Dr. Nokes or Bethany Orchard or anybody.
We went round a bend and Roxanna suggested we park, a difficult trick because the road was so skinny. Dad eased to the right till doors and hubcaps scraped the hard snow wall left by the plow. We piled out left. The road was a trench with sides too high to see over; we had to climb onto the Plymouth, bumper, hood, roof, which was something to laugh about and made us all more comfortable. But it was cold, up on the snow! The moon was what Swede called a gibbon moon, meaning not quite full but oval like a monkey’s head, and it showed us a white hillside up which Roxanna led us, her wool dress whipping. I ran and took the basket from her and she put her mittened hand on my shoulder and so we climbed, topping the hill at last to look down at what seemed a garden of fire.
Fire, and rising steam, and specks of light—the specks pooling and runneling then blinking out to be replaced by others. The fire came from a split in the earth that had opened and zigzagged away through the hills. Smoke and heat and sporadic low flames issued from this crack and from others branching outward. It was a fearful sight for young readers of Scripture, and Swede clutched my arm even as I looked at Roxanna for reassurance. No, I didn’t think it was the genuine Hell; it was way too pretty. Yet Swede had read to me how the distinguished atheist Voltaire sat straight up on his deathbed, moments before acquiring the farm, and with horror in his eyes described in journalistic particulars a geography of firespouts and molten earth and dense smoke that moved in heaps along the ground—all in all, an account not far from the sight before us now. No doubt Voltaire had a moment or two of deep regret before departing into that country—I know I was nervous—but down we went, descending the hillside lit by orange snow, down into the lee of the hill where the wind couldn’t reach. And the snow as we walked got softer and wetter, and now we could see that the specks of moving light were streams of snowmelt, and the streams pooling and grading down into the crack were what created the steam and made the air so warm and sociable the lower down we went. Roxanna told us how generations ago lightning had sliced into an aged cottonwood whose roots ran across a vein of lignite. The vein was narrow and deep and the fire settled into the coal and spread inchwise until here, a hundred years later, it lay before us, a snaky glowing web reaching away into the evening. It was only our good fortune, Roxanna said, pulling her hood back from her face, that it had happened here and not in more populous country; for then it would be a famous attraction, like Hot Springs or Lourdes, where the multitudes of rich and feeble sat around in scalding mud with cotton up their noses; as it was, we were the only folks about, and though it might be zero and blowing a gale up on the hill, down here where the ground itself seemed coming unstitched we had to undo our coat buttons and loosen our scarves.
“Mr. Land, right here,” Roxanna said, and Dad took a folded blanket off his shoulder and flung it across a flat rock by the flames. The rock was bare and dry, and for radiant warmth it was like sitting on a rooftop. Before us the crack was more than a yard across and the fire pranced up out of it a foot high. Did you ever burn coal? It makes a white-gold flame with a clean cerulean core. We leaned back on the blanket and were too warm—to our joy and disbelief—even unbuttoned.
“Roxanna,” Dad said, “it’s a miraculous place. I never saw better.” He was sitting beside her. The firelight had restored his face to healthy color and she, all Frenchbraided, scarf unslung, resembled an opportunity missed by Rembrandt. I looked at Swede and saw hope showing in her face, and felt it in my own.
“Come on, Reuben,” she said, “let’s explore!” So off we went with not so much as a caution from Dad, for he was looking at Roxanna through what I fancied were new eyes, she having worked a fairy tale in bringing us to such a place. It was indeed miraculous. How else to describe a valley where in deepest winter steam plumes as if from a battlefield, where boulders crouch warm as artillery, where spreading fire wakes frozen salamanders with which to scare your sister? We ran all over that piece of ground. We forgot the picnic. We jumped over narrow places in the crack and dumped armloads of snow down it for the thrill of the hiss. Once, resting against a heated stone, we witnessed the ignition of a dead juniper, a lacy brown juniper not ten yards away—it gasped, incandesced, roared into flame and departed forever. For a moment Swede and I had the same thought, that things in this realm were subject to spontaneous combustion (try that on for an idea to give you the crawling heebies), but running over she peered down the hole where the tree had rooted itself. Below lay the vein of glowing lignite; the event we’d seen must’ve happened here a thousand times before.
Returning, we saw a covered pan jetting steam beside the fire, also a small Dutch oven set a bit farther back. Dad and Roxanna were talking lightly in the way adults do who’ve just shifted gears to accommodate children—an infuriating tone for kids attempting to sound the future. Though Swede pried skillfully, Roxanna was more than a match for her sidelong queries; we had to be content with the hearty smells from the pots and with noticing how Roxanna sat, her back against a boulder, cushioned by Dad’s folded coat. Were there time for it, I’d here describe the delicacies we later spooned up: the heavily salted beef stew with pearl onions and, from the Dutch oven, a golden gingerbread sweetened with canned fruit, a caramelly mixture Roxanna called Brown Bear in a Cherry Orchard. But time was short. Dad was gazing downvalley with a flummoxed expression.
“Is that Martin Andreeson?” he inquired, pointing at a man in a coat picking his way toward us through the rocks.
Roxanna said, “Who?”
“Martin Andreeson,” Dad replied. “Government man. Is that him, kids? I can’t quite tell.”
The fellow was wearing a kneelength coat belted at the waist and he was stepping carefully alongside the firevein. He hadn’t any picnic basket and his hands were pocketed. Then out came one hand and he waved at us like some old friend.
“It’s him,” I said.
Dad sighed.
“What’s he want? Who is he?” Roxanna wondered.
Dad didn’t answer; where was he supposed to start?
“Jeremiah?”
“Well—you’ll see.”
“Hello,” said Martin Andreeson, walking up. “Hello, Jeremiah—Reuben. Say, where’s your girl?”
Dad looked round. Swede had disappeared as briskly as that juniper tree. “Exploring, I guess. You’re in time for supper, Mr. Andreeson.”
“Thank you. I ate.” The putrid fed picked a boulder and sat himself down. He popped loose a cigarette and lit it from groundfire, then took a big puff and winked at me through the smoke. He always acted like he was your favorite uncle visiting from India—boy, it was aggravating.
“Roxanna, this is Martin Andreeson,” Dad said. “Martin, Roxanna.”
“My pleasure, Mrs. Cawley.”
It was quiet a moment while Andreeson smoked and looked around. You couldn’t help but notice he was kind of a handsome jerk, sitting there in the glow. He looked extremely tickled, also. I figured we were in serious trouble on account of staying hid so long.
“Well?” Dad inquired.
“I’m pleased,” Andreeson replied, “to have run across you again. Do you know, I had some car trouble back in Linton.”
“Looks like you’re fixed up now.”
“I’ll be honest, Mr. Land. We are getting close to Davy. And the closer we get, the more dangerous for him. I’m not threatening anyone, it’s just the truth.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m asking for your help. I understand your reluctance.”
“I can’t help you. If you’re close, as you say, you already k
now more than I do,” Dad replied, adding, after a moment, “Just for the sake of discussion, how close do you suppose you are?”
“He’s in the Badlands,” Andreeson said.
“You appreciate the Badlands are fair-sized.”
Andreeson smoked a little, appeared to decide on forthrightness. “A rancher not far from here keeps a few pigs in his barn. Last week the daughter went out to do chores and her favorite of these pigs was missing—yes, her favorite. Pen closed, barn door shut. Well, these mysteries happen sometimes. Pigs are smart, I understand. So they didn’t call the sheriff till they lost a second pig the same way. Vanished from a shut pen.”
Dad said, “Wait a minute. You think it’s Davy, taking these animals—that he’s here?”
“Not far from here.”
“Did somebody see him?”
Andreeson said, “I expect he’d be taking them for food, don’t you?”