Because we were waiting—all of us, I believe, though my sense of it may have been strongest. The beast in my lungs kept me tied close. I remembered Dr. Nickles’s inflection when he told Dad to take me home; also the look they exchanged. Swede returned alone to school. Days passed during which I didn’t leave the window seat overlooking the meadow. The infirm wait always, and know it.
We waited foremost for word of Davy. With the disappearance of Mr. Andreeson, the hunt gained untold federal impetus. For months an irregular stream of investigators came knocking, asking mostly the same questions and once in a while a new one: Was Davy especially strong in mathematics? Had he frequented the movies? Had we acquaintances in South America? From the first Dad treated these visitors well, answering all questions transparently, summoning Swede and me on demand and enforcing our honesty—goodness knows what Swede might’ve sent those fellows chasing, for behind her eyes twitched every shade of herring. From the first Roxanna offered them fragrant breads or pastries and otherwise kept her silence. It is possible to imagine some loving aunt of Butch Cassidy’s doing the same. Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.
Andreeson, by the way, stayed missing. What happened to him is no secret, for I revealed my conviction repeatedly: Waltzer put him in the vein of burning lignite that ran past the cabin. It used to wake me sweating, the truth of it glowing inside my bones. Yet the investigators who listened to the idea seemed to give it little credit, which frustrated me until I complained about it to Swede.
“There’s no proving it,” she said shortly. “There’s nothing in it for them,” she added, disappearing before I could grouse further.
Because this, you understand, was something else I was waiting for: Swede’s forgiveness.
She wasn’t nasty, that wasn’t it. There were no more recriminations invoking Benedict Arnold or Ramón Murieta. In fact I came to miss even those. Instead it was as though she simply couldn’t think of anything to say to me. Plainly the fact had dawned: As compadres go, I was neither trustworthy nor interesting.
Of course I tried to win her back, using all sorts of bait—wondering aloud whether we might get a horse, now that we lived on a farm, or asking about some adventure of Sunny’s. To none of it would she rise. I grew to expect the minimal response. Dad and Roxanna noticed, but what could they do? Swede bore no indignation, called no names. She answered questions. She passed the potatoes.
One night in deep contrition I went to her room and knocked.
“Swede,” said I when she opened the door, “can’t you ever forgive me?”
“Sure,” she replied.
“Well, I wish you would. You act like I’m some old leper.”
“All right—you tell me how to act, and I’ll act that way.”
Can a person be both furious and penitent at once? “Swede, please!”
“You’re forgiven,” she said, but in a voice still miles removed, and with eyes still regarding me as an abstract thing.
One thing I wasn’t waiting for was a miracle.
I don’t like to admit it. Shouldn’t that be the last thing you release: the hope that the Lord God, touched in His heart by your particular impasse among all others, will reach down and do that work none else can accomplish—straighten the twist, clear the oozing sore, open the lungs? Who knew better than I that such holy stuff occurs? Who had more reason to hope?
And yet regarding my own wasted passages it seemed a prospect I could no longer admit.
The well appeared dry, for one thing. Though begrudging Roxanna nothing, neither could I recall a single wonder arriving through Dad’s hands since we banged on her door that first Sunday. Blanketed in my window seat I puzzled it through, concluding that God, feeling overworked on our behalf, had given us Roxanna as a parting gift—a wonderful one, you understand, just what we’d always wanted, but accompanied by the end of the miraculous. Was it unjust? I’d have thought so once, and not long ago. But these activities—whining about what’s fair, begging forgiveness, hoping for a miracle—these demand energy, and that was gone from me. Contentment on the other hand demands little, and I drew more and more into its circle. It seemed good to sleep. My clothes got slack and hangy. Mornings I watched the deer that came up through the hardwoods to paw the snow by the corncrib. Evenings Dad played the guitar, and the hymns and ballads and antique waltzes that emerged from the instrument seemed all the marvels I required.
I got a few visitors. Peter Emerson’s folks brought him over one day and sat in the kitchen with Dad and Roxanna, while Peter came in with a wrapped box. He told me Superintendent Holgren was mean as ever, though not as scary since his face healed up. Peter’s little brother Henry had been sent to Holgren’s office for eating boogers during class, a habit beyond his teacher’s ability to curtail. Holgren sat Henry on a low chair and told him kids who did this grew into cheats unable to meet the gaze of authority. Some might evade imprisonment but none achieved meaningful rank—you could see adult booger-eaters shuffling through city dumps all over America, salvaging vegetables ignored by vermin. Henry went home weeping to confess his destiny to his brothers, of whom there were three besides Peter, two of them with strong personal resentments against Holgren. This next part is like a favorite song. In mere days they located the sleepy den of a skunk family near the railroad tracks. A healthy youngster was selected. I love to imagine Josie, the eldest brother, moving through twilit Roofing toward the Holgren residence, the burlapped animal yawning in his arms. Released through a basement window it curled beside the furnace, where it woke in the morning feeling anxious and vengeful. What an awful time for the superintendent to go downstairs after a winter squash! It took the game warden three days to coax the skunk into a live trap baited with fish heads; by then Holgren was living out of a suitcase in Alsop’s Motel, wearing, according to Peter, the same undies every day for a week.
After that a present was almost beside the point, but I opened it anyway. It was the Spartacus model—the one with the hand.
“Look, paints,” Peter said.
In May the Orchards came with a blueberry pie. Bethany carried it in, the first I’d seen her since we made pancakes together. The memory plainly embarrassed her. She wore a dusk-blue dress and rose collar and had ripened to a supremacy that scotched conversation. It wasn’t her fault. She asked how Davy was doing, and what it was like riding a horse in the Badlands. I gave it an abbreviated try; how often I’d dreamt of this girl in thrall to my adventures! But I saw that her interest was nominal and engendered by my lousy health; and anyway my voice had become a spare, unpleasant sound. Not a thing I could do about it—despite all chest-beating and operatic gestures it remained like wind through bones.
“Thanks for the pie,” I told Bethany, who fled to the kitchen and the company of grown people.
Now, it may be Swede spied on this most humble talk. Maybe she even had some notion where Bethany had stood inside my untaught thinking. I only know when evening came she slipped under my blanket on the couch, listening to Dad working up some thankful psalm. She sat beside me cross-legged, like a Sioux, and held my hand again, as though we would wait together for whatever was moving toward us through the night. At that moment there was nothing—no valiant history or hopeful future—half worth my sister’s pardon. Listening to Dad’s guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.
On a wide purple evening in June, a ’41 Ford drove up to the red farm. We were all on the porch and so share this memory among us. The car was covered with pale dust and jounced slowly into the yard as though cresting surf. It came right to the house and stopped. Then Swede squealed and flew off those steps, for Davy was standing from the Ford, laughing and genuine and abruptly powerful before our eyes, scooping Swede up like some wee twerp; and as we knotted round he said, Wait, wait, and the other door opened and Sara also stood out, clearly withholding expectation, one hand atop the car as though she might
duck back in. How could she foresee the warmth awaiting? How predict the radiant comfort that was Roxanna’s gift? What I remember is clutching my brother’s side as we walked up the porch, and Swede’s feet scissoring in the air; and I remember a strange melodic sound that was Sara’s laugh as she entered the house, and I hoped to hear it more.
And did—much more, as you will see. Though neither of them said Waltzer’s name, what had transpired was clear enough to me. The man decided Sara had been his daughter long enough. I could shut my eyes and see him. He wanted a wife.
You think my brother Davy would’ve let that happen?
So they bolted one morning—just five days previous—in a car Jape had bought off a farmer in a corner of Wyoming, where they landed after fleeing the Badlands. Having no better opportunity than Jape stretching his legs they walked calmly to the Ford, scanned the foothills against detection, “and motored on out of that frying pan,” Davy said, the wicked old maxim evidently not worrying him at the time.
“I thought,” he added, “maybe Sara could stay with you.”
“Of course, and welcome,” said Roxanna.
“What about you—are you staying?” Swede asked Davy; having weaseled onto his lap, she wasn’t about to throw him easy ones.
“I can’t,” he replied, after a moment. “You know that, Swede.” He looked, right then, for the first time in years, his age, which was seventeen.
Back home he was our leader again, however briefly. He told us how the night he broke jail he walked to and fro wearing Stube Range’s jacket against the freezing rain; how on the edge of town he located a one-ton Chevy with the key in the ignition; how, when he’d climbed in the cab, he glimpsed a police car moving laterally in the rearview mirror, combing a cross street. Shortly more police and county cars entered the vicinity. Davy crouched low in the truck until what seemed a ripe moment, then bobbed upright and turned the ignition, to find it dead.
Swede said, “Reuben and I would’ve broke you out if you hadn’t beat us to it.”
“Thanks, Swede, I knew you would,” Davy said cheerfully, putting an end to my sudden dread Swede would bring up our silliness with the DeCuellars’ steak knives.
With nothing to do but put up Stube’s hood and walk, Davy cut across fields, navigating by farmyard lights until a horse nickered to him out of the dark—Nelson Svedvig’s mare, you may recall. Encountering barbwire he reached into Stube’s front pocket and withdrew a candy bar, a Salted Nut Roll. The horse trotted up without suspicion. It led him to a fence gate. For two days Davy and that horse were best friends.
There followed on demand more details of this sort: of meanders alone or with troubled companions, meals rendered almost mannalike in hard circumstances, narrow spots departed in the nick of time. Three days after leaving August Shultz’s he’d stopped at a bakery and been recognized by its grandmotherly proprietor. She gave him four loaves of bread, a bag of currants, and a fruitcake, and admonished him about shopping for groceries in plain daylight. Nights later in an alley in Mandan he fed the fruitcake to a choleric hound, then slid through the back window of a grocery store. Walking the dark aisles he pocketed tins of sardines and deviled ham until every light in the place suddenly snapped on, rendering him briefly sightless, while a door squealed open and slapping footsteps approached. Slapping, that’s right; for into view walked a naked fellow, streaming wet, colossal annoyance in his eyes and a baseball bat in his knotty hands: no doubt the store owner, roused from his tub in the residence upstairs. Straight for Davy he pranced, picking up speed, while Davy went leaping away toward the window. Had the man not opted for a late soak my brother’s career might’ve ended on the spot, but wet feet and wood floors make jeopardous allies, and the storekeeper went down in a sensational and profane tangle as Davy’s shoulders were clearing the sill. Yes, he went out head first, thumping onto his chest in the alley. Backing out the Studebaker in the truest spirit of retreat he saw the storekeeper arrive at the window upright and purple; the baseball bat came twisting out, snaked over the hood and laid a long silver crack across the windshield.
In all these things Davy was expansive and good at the telling; despite the hour Roxanna served juice, brewed coffee. Yet he mostly kept quiet about Waltzer and the Badlands cabin, out of consideration, it seemed, for Sara. She’d lived with the man for years, after all. She owed him little, but not nothing.
He did allow they’d had a hard scrape getting out of the place. He and Sara had scratched a checkerboard on the dirt floor and were outwaiting a blizzard when Waltzer rode up on Fry. His nostrils were iced, his skin burnt with cold, his eyes prophetic. A vision had come to him out of the snow, a glimpse of horse soldiers. He feared staying put. Following the vein of smoking lignite he’d arrived at a capacious hole in the native sandstone. He brooked no complaint but packed the disbelieving horses and drove them toward this haven at a pace so fast it was nearly a rout. Here they all spent a whole day and more, eating bread from their pockets, sitting until the cold made them stand blanketed beside the animals. The wind died, the sky cleared. Still Waltzer would not let them return. Once they heard a rifle shot far off—a barbed sound, a long decay. Dusk of the second day Waltzer sent Davy to scout. The cabin was full of boot marks, the snow around it sacked with hoof tracks and horse manure.
Not one of us asked about Andreeson, though he lit on my heart, staying there like a guest on the porch you hope will give up and leave.
Sara was asleep in her straight-back chair. It was past eleven. When Dad went upstairs to see about her room, I tagged along.
“It’s great, isn’t it, Dad?” I asked. The truth is I could’ve wept, such sadness hung about us. I fought it back. My brother was returned; exultation was called for. Why couldn’t we have the fatted calf and tambourines? A little insouciant rejoicing?
“Why, of course it is, Rube. Here, grab the corner,” he added, spreading a spare blanket on Sara’s bed. It was chilly, that spare room; we’d kept the door closed until now.
“He seems real good, don’t you think?”
“Yes, he does. Yes.” Dad shook up the pillow, leveled the dresser mirror on its pivot, pulled down the windowshade. He wound an old clock on the bedside stand, remarking on the hour.
“Do we have to go to bed, Dad? Can’t we stay up?”
He held out his arm toward me and I went and put my head against his chest. He felt strong and thin—I could feel his pulse in my ear. He said, “Well, of course, stay up—unless Davy wants to sleep. Then we’ll let him be, right?”
I nodded. It should have been the best of nights.
Downstairs we found the others subdued as well. Roxanna sleepwalked Sara to bed and turned in also; Dad asked Davy would he rest, and Davy replied no, he’d be going shortly. Repairing to the front room we doused lights and sat in comfort while the moon rode up over the farm. Strangely, we talked little of present quandaries. There was no speculation on Davy’s plans. Andreeson hovered but was not mentioned. Davy said he sure liked Roxanna, he was happy for us all. They talked about Sara, where she’d come from, her fears of this revised future; then conversation dove and resurfaced in history, picking up happenings from the great long ago like curiosities from a ruin. Therefore Davy remembered the time, in North Dakota, when a red fox came fearlessly toward us as we lay in a fencerow awaiting geese. It was full daylight and the fox performed stilted circles as it approached. Its head seemed askew. As Davy recalled I stood and would’ve tottered out to meet this doglike and sorrowful spook, but Dad put me behind his back and shot it. Along these lines, Dad remembered the time he was a boy and a neighboring farmer walked rabid through his yard. This fellow, name of Hensrud, got bit on the ankle by a spring skunk, quit worrying when the wound healed clean, and was taken by fits months later, after harvest. What Dad recalled was Hensrud walking between house and barn, nothing on but a union suit, an early snow curling round him. Poor Hensrud’s neck cords stood forth like pump rods. Later that day, gone blind, he stumbled off a bank into the Ge
orge River to drown—a merciful turn preventing some unlucky neighbor’s having to shoot him.
“The Lord protects us,” Dad said.
Davy didn’t reply. It was deepest night. I remember his shape in the stuffed chair next the window: clean map of chin and cheekbone, cup of coffee under drifting steam. He was watching the meadow and after some silence rose and stood close to the glass. A herd of deer had come out from a black tangle of trees. They were crossing the meadow, so shapeless at this distance seeing them was an act of faith.
“Well,” Davy said.
Then Swede, desperate to keep him and honor him, begged that he wait; off she ran, returning with her tousled binder. With remarkable bravery she turned on a lamp and read aloud all there was of Sundown, beginning to end. Davy was a better listener than me—he loved it all, Sunny’s doleful intervals as well as his triumphs. He wondered over plot, exclaimed at turn of phrase. He was particularly attentive to her treatment of the bandit king Valdez, who he said was exactly right: savage, random, wolflike—and also probably uncatchable, right down through time. Though, he amended quickly, if anyone living were up to the job, Sundown was that man.