Peace Like a River

  We had him till dawn. By then Roxanna had got up and baked her great-uncle’s rolls, which Davy ate with energy to be envied, given no sleep; and finishing up we cleared our throats and armored our hearts and stepped out into the sunrise.

  Jape Waltzer was sitting beside the granary with a rifle. We didn’t see him at first, though he’d not worked hard at concealment. He’d simply picked a spot—in view of the house and shaded from morning sun—and sat still. He’d even entered the barn and retrieved an old straight-back chair to ease the wait.

  I am haunted yet by his patience in this business.

  Davy was standing by the car, fishing for keys, when Dad fell across the hood, his forehead smacking like an echo of the shot. From the porch I spotted Waltzer sighting through smoke. He fired and the Ford’s back-door windows sprayed across the gravel. As Dad skidded off the hood to flop by the front wheel, Roxanna clutched my shoulder and tugged me backward. No one screamed, though the air against my eardrums seemed beaten or flailed. As Roxanna got me to the door I heard Dad murmuring, broke her hold, and flung down off the porch.

  I suppose Jape led me, like a flaring goose.

  What I recall isn’t pain but a sense of jarring reversal, as of all motion, sound, and light encountering their massive opposites. I felt grass and dirt against my cheek, and sorrow that Dad was shot, and confusion that I couldn’t reach him.

  Here my terrestrial witness fails.

  I shut my eyes, the old morte settled its grip, and the next country gathered itself under my feet.

  Be Jubilant, My Feet

  I WADED ASHORE WITH MEASURELESS RELIEF. STAY WITH ME NOW. THE bank was an even slope of waving knee-high grasses, and I came up into them and turned to look back. It was a wide river, mistakable for a lake or even an ocean unless you’d been wading and knew its current. Somehow I’d crossed it and somehow was unsurprised at having done so. Near the shore the water appeared gold as on your favorite river at sunup, but farther out it turned to sky and cobalt and finally a kind of night in which the opposite shore lay hidden.

  At that moment I had no notion of identity. Nor of burden. I laughed in place of language. The meadow hummed as though thick with the nests of waking creatures, and the grasses were canyon colored, lifting their heads as I passed. Moving up from the river the humming began to swell—it was magnetic, a sound uncurling into song and light and even a scent, which was like earth, and I must’ve then entered the region of nests, for up scattered finches and cheeky longspurs and every sort of bunting and bobolink and piebald tanager. All these rose with sweet chaotic calls, whirling and resettling to the grass. More placid, butterflies clung everywhere to stems—some you would know, the monarchs and tailed lunas, but others of such spread and hue as to have long disappeared from the gardens of the world. The meadow was layered with flight. In fact it seemed there was nothing that couldn’t take wing. Seized with conviction I spread my arms and ran for it. Nope, no liftoff—but I came close! At times my feet were only brushing the ground.

  But I was drawn on. Conscious now that something needed doing, I moved ever higher on the land, here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, scattered in another, as though planted by random throw, but all were heavy trunked and capaciously limbed, and they were fruit trees, every one of them. Apples, gold-skinned apricots, immaculate pears. The leaves about them were thick and cool and stirred at my approach; touched with a finger, they imparted a palpable rhythm.

  It took a long while to traverse the orchard. I began to feel hungry but didn’t pause; though all this fruit appeared perfectly available, I felt prodded to appear before the master. The place had a master! Realizing this, I knew he was already aware of me—comforting and fearful knowledge. Still I wanted to see him. The farther I went the more I seemed to know or remember about him—the way he’d planted this orchard, walking over the hills, casting seed from his hand. I kept moving.

  And for how long? As we measure time, perhaps for weeks; but no sun shines in that sky, so days do not pass; as for the light, it seems a work of the air itself, and of all things illumined by it. Also, as many a prescient hymn suggests, a person doesn’t get tired there. I walked faster, pressing ahead as if obeying a beloved command. I weaved amid curlyhorn antelope and bison browsing fruit from the lower branches; through an enormous unwary herd of horses pulling up clover and bluegrass.

  Here in the orchard I had a glimmer of origin: Adam, I thought. Only the bare word. It suggested nothing. It was but a pair of syllables that seemed to belong to me. They seemed part of what compelled me. And now, far to my right across a valley, I saw a man afoot. His skin was dark and he wore the buckler and helm of a Spanish knight, and over his shoulder he carried a flag of arcane device. Though battered in appearance the man moved with spirit. He was like one going to his king, having served to his deepest ability. He was almost running.

  And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant.

  And now the orchard ended, and a plain reached far ahead to a range of blanched mountains. A stream coursed through this plain, of different personality and purpose than the earlier wide river. A narrow, raucous stream, it flowed upward against the gradient, and mighty fish arched and swam in it, flinging manes of spray. I meant to jump in—wherever this river went I wanted to go—and would’ve done so had not another figure appeared, running beside the water.

  A man in pants. Flapping colorless pants and a shirt, dismal things most strange in this place. He was running upslope by the boisterous stream. Despite the clothes his face was incandescent, and when he saw me he wheeled his arms and came on ever faster. Then history entered me—my own and all the rest of it, more than I could hold, history like a heavy rain—so I knew the man coming along was my father, Jeremiah Land; and all that had happened, himself slipping down the hood of the Ford, Roxanna’s hard grip on my shoulder, the air drumming in my ears like bird wings, came back like a mournful story told from ancient days.

  He was beside me in moments, stretching out his hands. What cabled strength! I remember wondering what those arms were made for—no mere reward, they had design in them. They had some work to set about. Meantime Dad was laughing—at my arms, which were similarly strong! He sang out, You’re as big as me! How had I not noticed? We were like two friends, and I saw he was proud of me, that he knew me better than he’d ever thought to and was not dismayed by the knowledge; and even as I wondered at his ageless face, so clear and at home, his eyes owned up to some small regret, for he knew a thing I didn’t.

  Let’s run, he said. It’s true both of us were wild to go on. I tell you there is no one who compels as does the master of that country—although badly as I wanted to see him, Dad must’ve wanted to more, for he shot ahead like a man who sees all that pleases him most stacked beside the finish. I could only be awed at his speed, which was no effort for him; indeed he held back so that we traveled together, he sometimes reaching for my hand, as he’d done a thousand times in the past; and the music and living language swept us forth across the plains until the mountains lay ahead, and up we climbed at a run.

  Is it fair to say that countr
y is more real than ours? That its stone is harder, its water more drenching—that the weather itself is alert and not just background? Can you endure a witness to its tactile presence?

  We attained a pass where the stream sang louder than ever, for it swelled with depth and energy the farther it rose. Dad reached it first; I saw him mount a shelf of spraysoaked stone and stand waiting for me, backlit, silverlined, as though the sky had a sun after all and it was just beyond this mountain.

  But it wasn’t a sun. It was a city.

  Joining Dad on the rock I saw it, at a farther distance than any yet conceived; still it threw light and warmth our sun could only covet. And unlike the sun, you could look straight into it—in fact you wished to, you had to—and the longer you looked, the more you saw.

  Turrets! I exclaimed. I couldn’t wait to get there, you see.

  Then Dad pointed to the plains below, at movement I took at first to be rivers—winding, flowing, light coming off them. They came from all directions, streaming toward the city, and dust rose in places along their banks.

  They’re people, Dad said. And looking again, looking harder, I could see them on the march, pouring forth from vast distances: People like I’d seen everywhere and others like I’d not seen, whole tributaries of people with untamed faces you would fear as neighbors; and most were afoot, and a few were horseback, and many bore standards with emblems strange to me. And even these who were wild were singing a hymn that rose up to us on the mountain, and it was as though they marched in preparation for some imminent and joyous and sanctified war.

  We listened a long time. Dad held my hand, and I felt the music growing in his fingers.

  Take care of Swede, he said.

  From this pass the stream threw itself over a sheer face, where mist drifted up and was struck gold by the light of the city.

  Work for Roxanna, Dad told me.

  Now I saw the stream regrouped below, flowing on through what might’ve been vineyards, pastures, orchards bigger than that described. It flowed between and alongside the rivers of people; from here it was no more than a silver wire winding toward the city, yet I made out the clean glitter of rising fish upon its surface.

  I thought, Lord, can’t I be among them? Can’t I come in too?

  Tell Davy, Dad said. He sat down on the rock and swung his feet in the stream—it was deep and swift; it would take him in a moment. I seized his arm.

  Please, I said.

  Soon, he replied, which makes better sense under the rules of that country than ours. Very soon! he added, clasping my hands; then, unable to keep from laughing, he pushed off from the rock like a boy going for the first cold swim of spring; and the current got him. The stream was singing aloud, and I heard him singing with it until he dropped away over the edge.

  The Curious Music That I Hear

  THE EXCITEMENT DIDN’T QUIT WHILE I WAS AWAY: JAPE WALTZER FIRED three more unhurried rounds at the Ford, where Davy was burrowed in the backseat. He also plugged the house a few times—five times, according to Swede’s obsessive reconstructions. Four loads blew windows all over the main floor and a bed upstairs, which pretty well discouraged peeking, and one came straight through the wall into the living room, where it smacked a brass pony given Swede by a former teacher. Amid this ruin Roxanna called the sheriff, Dr. Nokes, and the Lord, doubtless in the opposite order, and shouted at the girls to stay down. Later she would find Sara concealed under blankets in a cedar chest dusted with burst glass, but Swede was busy ripping Dad’s closet half to shreds, hunting his shotgun. She found it, but no shells. By then all was quiet. She joined Roxanna and they opened the front door. The Ford was gone and Davy with it. Waltzer’s chair lay tipped in the shade beside the barn.

  Dad was propped on an elbow on the gravel, bleeding abundantly from a hole in his right side.

  I was on my face in the lee of the porch.

  Here’s what I’ve been told of the next few minutes. Roxanna attended to Dad while Swede pushed me over and explored for heartbeats. Nine years old, kneeling in blood and foam, she grabbed my wrist, my neck; she felt the big dripping cave of my chest. I’m sorry still for what this must’ve cost her. Dad, tired but lucid, told Roxanna to quit stanching the hole in his side; when she pressed too hard he couldn’t breathe. Let it flow, he told her. Let the blood wash it clean. It put Roxanna in an awful bind, for she saw the wound better than he did—its neat bird’s-eye entry and gaping egress. She knew he might shortly bleed dry. She has told me how she prayed aloud while wrapping her fist in her dress and jamming it in that wound; she did her best, I know it, for a great long time, Dad coming in and out the while. Then the sound of Swede crying registered on Dad, and she went to him covered in pink froth so that he started up, thinking she was dying; but she told him it was me, I wasn’t breathing, or answering, or blinking my eyes. And right about here Dr. Nokes drove up; I imagine his big car bottoming out in our bumpy yard, a train of blue smoke behind.

  His best turned out to be no better than Roxanna’s. Ascertaining that I was gone—for my lungshot chest no longer bled, no rhythm moved anywhere, and I lay cooling under his hands—Dr. Nokes turned to Dad, who looked him over without evident recognition and rolled up his eyes. By the time a county car rolled in, and a second behind it, there was, Roxanna tells me, an atmosphere of crystalline despair in which the doctor broke and sobbed. Through this scene stepped the sheriff and a speechless deputy, over their heads for certain; yet before an official word was spoken the deputy, Galen Max, yipped, “Look there!” For I had bucked suddenly, as though kicked in the back. “He done it again!” yelped Galen Max; and then, reports Swede, I was seized with coughing, and blood and water spouted from my mouth and nose—sorry for the detail, but it’s quite glorious to me—and Dr. Nokes bolted to my side and set about my recovery in a sort of delirium. It was hardly the first time I’d come awake to someone whacking my back, but it seemed a wholly new experience and one I’d come a great distance to try.

  “I don’t know what you were using to breathe,” Dr. Nokes told me.

  It was some weeks later, and he was beside my bed at the red farm.

  “Not your lungs,” he declared.

  At first I didn’t know what he meant; my lungs felt as large and light as a May afternoon. They felt like they had in the next country, as I ran up through the orchard—except over there I hadn’t given them a thought. Back here I woke each morning to the shock of perfect breathing. Had I opened my mouth and spoken Portuguese, the surprise couldn’t have been more complete.

  “Look,” I told Dr. Nokes, inhaling an unbelievable quantity of air. It went right in!

  “Yes, yes—leave some for the rest of us.”

  For weeks there wasn’t a day Dr. Nokes didn’t come by. Though professing worry over the chance of infection or of some undissolved clot cruising my arteries, he came for other reasons also. He came so we could miss Dad together, all of us, and he came because of my lungs, which posed a mystery.

  One day he said, “Your father should not have died, Reuben. Did you know that?”

  I nodded, but he said, “Not just because it’s terrible to be without him, though God knows—” and here Dr. Nokes seemed to slip, somewhere in his mind, then catch himself. “I mean, injured where he was. I examined him, you know. No organs were damaged. Blood vessels, yes. But he actually shouldn’t have died.”

  And I, conversely, shouldn’t have lived. Though I sensed this was the case, it was only years later Dr. Nokes would explain why in detail. His forbearance is to his credit. What eleven-year-old should be told that his lungs only recently lay in literal shreds inside his central cavity? Dr. Nokes saw this fact with his two eyes. He felt it with his fingers. Yet mere hours later it was revealed at the hospital in Montrose that my lungs had not only endured an explosive chest wound but, in fact, seemed none the worse for wear. In fact, reported a perplexed emergency-room physician, it was as though they hadn’t been touched.

  Of course they had been touched; that was the
very point.

  Goodness, I miss Dad.

  But here, let me finish quickly. Swede, who would know, says drift is the bane of epilogues. You should know that Roxanna, married to Jeremiah Land three months before he died, became as much our rock as though God Himself had placed her beneath our lives. Certainly her sacrifice was no less than Dad’s. Who could’ve poured more courage into us? Who could’ve given as selflessly as she? For we were a demanding crew. Sara herself could’ve emptied the stores of a dozen wise parents. Oh, yes—Sara stayed with us, though at a distance she’d acquired from living with Waltzer. To begin with, it was rare to hear Sara join more than three sentences; though when she did, Swede pointed out, it was clear she would make a fine newspaper editorialist were she so inclined. For many months none but Roxanna closed the distance, and she on tiptoe; as for me, I mostly left Sara alone, admiring her strengths from across the family. A practiced eavesdropper, I’d not have listened to her talks with Roxanna for any reward; though I did overhear a visit or two with lovestruck town boys, in which she babbled with forged conviction about classmates, teachers, and popular music, so it’s not as if I believed we had an angel on our hands.