I have to tell you I like this one quite a bit. There’s nothing like good strong meter to make a poem mind its manners. Show me free verse that nails a moment like this does:
Then each man felt the air go still; each felt a stab of dread;
Each heard the sound of danger in a dancing mustang’s tread.
They watched the horse come down the street; they watched the rider halt;
They watched him size them man by man, as if he knew each fault.
His clothes and hat were black as ink, his dancing mustang pale,
His eyes were blue and hard enough to make the sun turn tail.
He said, “You want to hang this man, I’ll give you each the same.
I don’t much like a mob,” said he, “and Sundown is my name.”
And it goes on: Sundown takes the payroll job, as you might expect, and gets bushwhacked by Valdez, who, it turns out, is smarter than anyone gave him credit for, and the ensuing chase leads into country where the sun is hot as madness and the ground crunches like cinders, there meeting “many a snake, and many a skull, and many a parched ravine.” I’ve kept a lot of Swede’s old verse. This one carries a note on the back from Miss Nelson, in her tranquil, feminine hand: Excellent! Next time you see your Mr. Sundown, tell him you know a schoolmarm who’d like to meet him.
Yes, yes sir—routine is worry’s sly assassin. It only took us till Wednesday night to get a little careless.
It was church night, of course. We went to a Methodist church, though not yet members; we’d switched from Roofing Lutheran the previous year, a move I didn’t wholly understand. The new minister wasn’t half the exciting preacher our old one was. Pastor Reach was slight, with a limp and a speech problem that altered some of his consonants. Swede and I had been used to oratory; our former pastor could exhort like everything and owned what Dad said must be a special edition of the Holy Bible, for it contained things omitted from our own—references to card-playing, for example, and rock and roll, and the Russian people. Our former minister had so much energy that simply pastoring wasn’t enough; he also wrote regular editorials for the paper in the county seat of Montrose, which riled up readers and made him a star. Pastor Reach had no such ambitions. He had a wife, Eunice, who played the piano and whom I’d once overheard praying aloud that the “fig tree might blossom.” He had a plain Bible, like ours, and preached right out of it. Always regretful of his sinful nature, Pastor Reach was a great advocate of forgiveness, in which he put a lot of stock. Thrilling he was not.
Yet this Wednesday night I was especially keen to be at church, for two reasons. A revival crusade was setting up in Montrose, and Pastor Reach had prevailed on the esteemed Reverend Johnny Latt to come over and preach; also, I suspected the blackhaired and winsome Bethany Orchard would be at the service.
I wonder yet what might’ve happened had Dad and I stayed home that night or had Davy and Swede gone with us to church. Wars escalate in mysterious ways, unforeseen by good men and prophets. The fact is, Swede didn’t come—the only time I remember being in church without her—which happened to be fine with me, on account I was hoping to talk to Bethany without my sister for an audience. Swede’s absence seemed, actually, pretty convenient.
So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.
In the car Dad said, “I suppose you’ve heard things about the Reverend Johnny.”
“Jeff Swanson called him a Bible-thumper,” I ventured. Actually, Jeff had started with Bible-thumper and warmed expansively from there.
Dad considered this. “Everybody thumps something, Reuben.”
“Do things happen, when he preaches?” Other things I’d heard: how at a word from Johnny people fainted down to the floor to twitch, while others spoke in strange babylike languages and prophecies flew through the air like bats. If you came on the right night, atrophied cripples were said to heave up out of wheelchairs and stagger forward in gratitude.
“I hope so, Rube,” Dad said. We pulled up to the church, which appeared crowded already. I opened my door but he put a hand on my knee. “Reuben. Do you know why Swede stayed home with Davy?”
“No sir.”
“Because I’m not sure Swede is ready for this. In fact, I’m not sure you are.”
“I am,” I said, a little abruptly; Bethany Orchard had just traipsed into the church and, a moment before the door closed behind her, had poked her head out and smiled at me. Dad said, “Goodness, what a cutie,” my ears heated up, and in we went.
I won’t spend too much time on Reverend Johnny because what happened there isn’t half as important as what was happening at home. But did you ever go to church and see the minister rise first thing with a trumpet in his hand? That’s what the Reverend Johnny did—oh, yes. Our mild Roofing Methodists were unused to musical instruments, except organs and pianos, but they took to this trumpet right away, and the reverend played like Gabriel, by which I mean loud and with the authority that comes of a good ear and large lungs. A great big fellow, Reverend Johnny Latt, had to be in his seventies, yet still so upright and wide in the shoulders and with such dark swept-back hair he could’ve walked without fear down your choice of midnight alleys. He had with him a saxophonist younger brother, an organist wife with a soft voice and a sweet shipwrecked expression at the eyes, and a heavy, weak-looking son who played of all things the flute and who you knew straight off wouldn’t be the one to carry the Latt crusades far into the future.
The music alone lasted as long as our normal Wednesday night service—fine music, I believe to this day, and well tuned, and performed to the glory of God, but all the same uncommonly loud. My head throbbed after half an hour. For relief I looked sideways, where through the rising heat Bethany looked cool as a May morning. On we bore through “He Leadeth Me” and “The Old Rugged Cross” and, shockingly, “When the Saints Go Marching In,” at which I felt (rather than heard) Dad chuckle. On through a trumpeted rendition of “Shall We Gather at the River?” at once so beautiful and so calamitously loud I could’ve wept for either reason. Peeking sideways, Bethany glimpsed my eye on her. “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Nearing the hour mark I closed my eyes and saw a picture of myself, from the side, a runnel of blood sliding out of my ear.
This, followed by a glance to find Bethany gone, and I rose from my seat and slouched from the sanctuary. Feeling Dad’s gaze I turned and sought his approval. Reverend Johnny was well into a bold rendering of “Amazing Grace,” standing tall, not leaning back as jazz trumpeters do but straight and wide as a Roman pillar, the sound growing out of him with no hint of approaching abatement. The reverend had chops not a jazzman in the world would have argued with. And as I pushed open the swinging door, still looking back, Dad rendered some grace of his own, winking at me to go ahead, take a break, understanding that the trumpet in its glorious proximity was hero enough for any mortal ears.
I found Bethany downstairs in the kitchen, peeling an orange from the Westinghouse drawer. When I put my head in at the door she said, “Reuben, are you hungry?”
“Sure.”
“Come on, I’ll share it with you.”
Bethany Orchard was twelve—only a year ahead of me at school, but in the universal race children run toward the doubtful prize of maturity she was leagues out front, a realization that arrived as I stood with her in the basement of Roofing Methodist and she fed me orange slices with her fingers. (Not my fault; I’d reached for the orange; she said, “No, let me. Here.”) As she peeled the sections away one by one, a locustlike buzz entered the back of my brain. I’d been pleased at first to realize I was slightly taller than Bethany, but her fingers—approaching with an orange slice—reaffirmed the gulf between us. Her fingers were long, capable, conversant: a woman’s fingers, slightly reddened from some recent scrubbing. Her fingers were the oldest part of her. I couldn’t think of a thing to do with this information. I couldn’t think of anything at all. The locusts neared. The bits of orange her fingers placed in my mouth were so ripe I barely chewed. Ov
erhead the music changed and slowed. When the orange was gone I dared look at Bethany, who showed nothing but a businesslike attitude, sweeping the cupped peelings into a palm and lobbing them into a wastebasket. She was without shame. Afraid she’d go back upstairs I said, “I cook meals at our house, sometimes.”
She looked at me, and I was like Kipling’s jungle beasts who couldn’t meet the eye of man. I commenced hunting about the kitchen, opening cupboards as if with a purpose, coming up at last with a box of Bisquick and a pound of butter from the Westinghouse.
Bethany said, “I think there’s some syrup over the stove.”
I am afraid we missed the Reverend Johnny’s sermon. Though I recognized full well when the music stopped and the preaching began, by then Bethany and I had moved on to whisks and bowls and eggs of ambiguous purity, and the gladness of being alone with this girl was stronger than the unease I felt at putting one over on Dad, who was expecting me back upstairs.
What brought us up at last was a case of alarm—a hard thump from overhead, as if the Reverend Johnny had received some coronary visitation. A light fixture wobbled. We froze and heard the reverend’s voice, jagged and intermittent. A second thump rattled the fixture. Somebody shouted “Amen,” and then it was as if Armageddon opened out above us, such salvos of thumps and whacks shook the church. Imagine a storm hailing whole arms and legs! Did we zip! Up the steps and a sliding stop at the sanctuary door, where I heard an urgent voice say, approximately, bahm, toballah, sacoombaraffay; straight off a different voice raised up to translate: “I am among you tonight, my children,” it said, amid blooming amens. Cracking the door we saw the Reverend Johnny Latt reach out to touch a man on the forehead. It was Mr. Layton, who’d stood behind his dime-store counter these endless years, an egregious miser and congenital grouch. The reverend’s eyes were shut, and as his fingers touched Mr. Layton’s bright scalp Mr. Layton fell backward without utterance, slipping between the ineffectual arms of the younger Latt brother, who’d crept up behind to make the catch. The impact had no visible effect on Mr. Layton, who lay at peace in a room littered with supine Methodists. Reverend Johnny opened his eyes and peered around for others in range.
There was a pressure on my arm that I recognized as Bethany’s hand. I looked into her face—her close, scared face. She asked in a whisper if they were all right, these folks lying about. It’s true the place raised neckhairs. “They’re fine,” I said, looking for Dad, who’d know.
Therianus-dequayas-remorey-gungunnas, a man called out, plus a paragraph or so more. I’m not making fun; the language was complicated and musical, an expression outside human usefulness. Expectant silence followed. The Reverend Johnny surveyed the room. At this moment I noticed that the smell of our pancakes—Bethany’s and mine, and they’d been good ones—had floated upstairs, a fabulous smell. It occurred to me we might get into some small trouble for using the kitchen during service.
Then Reverend Johnny spoke up. “Does someone have the interpretation? Who’s hearing the word of the Lord tonight?”
Nobody said a thing.
Johnny Latt persisted. “Someone’s fighting obedience tonight! Speak up, for no prophecy goes untold. Joe, is it you?”
And Joe, a bull-shouldered patriarch whose shirt stretched wet across his back and who looked to be in deep communication with the Almighty, rose without hesitation and gave it a shot. “O my sons and my daughters, how I love thee! How I wish to provide for thee! Yea, I long to surround thee with delicious smells, heavenly smells! How gladly will I sit thee down in my banquet hall, for beauteous are the cakes therein! Oh, golden is my syrup! And unto me shall gather the hungry from every nation—”
What a shame Swede wasn’t there. She’d have adored that prophecy; who knows what commentary she’d have whispered in my ear? But my wheels turn a beat or two slower than Swede’s, and anyhow Bethany’s hold had whitened on my arm. “Oh, Reuben,” she said, “your dad’s down!”
He was stretched on his back right up by the pulpit, as if he’d been first to go. I had a fleeting sense of forsakenness. I was marooned; though I knew most everyone here, the sight of Dad out cold on the floor momentarily tipped bedrock. I pushed open the door and went to him, stepping, I’m afraid, on some innocent hands. It was like walking out of a plane crash. Dad looked comfortable, though: arms above his head, feet pointed inward. Some of the others’ eyes were twitching beneath the lids. Not Dad’s. He looked exactly like he did on the odd sleep-late Saturday morning when he’d worked long at school the night before: appreciative, vaguely surprised, and above all unconscious. I knelt at his side.
But how do you wake a man knocked cold by love? Because, as he told me later, that’s what it was: the electric unearned love of the great Creator, traveling like light down the nerves of the Reverend Johnny’s arm, crackling out the tips of his fingers. I looked at Dad’s face—at creases I’d never noticed, the nap of loosening skin at his throat. In that instant it seemed to me he deserved to rest this way for days and days. Then a jolt hit my shoulder and I felt hands shaking me as if jarring something loose. Lights snapped in my eyes, my ears plugged and opened, and there was a sudden easing in my lungs that showed me how hard I’d been working to breathe. Charged with fear and oxygen I turned to see who had hold of me. No one did. No one in fact was near me except the Reverend Johnny, now talking casually with his younger brother. He wasn’t even looking at me.
But his hand, his right hand, was brushing my shoulder.
I can feel it still, that sizzling jump inside my organs. It didn’t feel good, not as I would’ve suspected the touch of the Lord might feel, but I wouldn’t say it felt bad either. It only felt powerful, like truth unhusked.
Once torched by truth, Swede wrote years later, a little thing like faith is easy.
Had I her gift for getting to the core, I’d be tempted to chew on this awhile—on truth and its odd conduits. But a witness must obey his strengths, and mine, forgive me, lie in keeping the story moving. So here is where my father wakes. He sits upright, and his eyes are wide and troubled, and “Son,” he says, “we have to leave.”
Because he knows, somehow, what we have done: We’ve stayed too long at church.
So let us leave. Let us get to the Plymouth with an impolite quickness—let us fly, as witnesses of eras past might say. Because at home, the hard and escalating war has paid a visit. And it’s Swede, my darling sister, who has met it at the door.
Your Toughened Heart
A canyon dim and deep and cool was where he’d made his lair,
A labyrinthine cavern strewn with bits of bone and hair.
It smelled within of smoke and sin and blasphemy and dread,
And none would choose to walk that way who were not walking dead.
Yet down the quiet canyon wall a weary rider came—
A rider bent with grief yet bent on justice all the same.
And while the stormclouds rise on high, and ruin moans and grates,
The rider Sundown draws his Colt, and Valdez grins and waits.
SWEDE WAS ALONE IN THE HOUSE. DAD AND I WERE AT CHURCH, OF COURSE, and Davy was in the garage loft, working on a secret, Swede’s ninth birthday being two days off.
Who could imagine someone would come to the door, in plain sight, such a lovely October evening, with evil in his heart? Who understands such hatred as bedeviled that doomed visitor? Who would believe his boldness as he knocked?
But Dad had spoken correctly: They did not know they’d already lost. Israel Finch didn’t know it as he heard Swede running to answer the door; Davy didn’t know it as he worked in the garage, soaping years off a stretch of braintanned leather. Swede certainly didn’t know it as she scuffed and lurched across the yard toward a smoking Chevy with Tommy Basca at the wheel and Israel’s hand against her mouth. Oh, no: Swede didn’t know it at all. What Swede knew was that seconds ago she’d been writing down rhymes to describe the bandit king Valdez, daring eagle-hearted thief and he who of these hills is chief—grow
ing a soft spot for the bad guy, like every other writer since Milton. Well, no more. The bitter taste of Israel Finch’s palm, his unwashed smell, her own terror at the proximate unknown—all this took the sheen off villainy.
Thus does a romantic canyon hideout, an outlaw palace built of rock, become a smelly sinhole strewn with bits of bone and hair.
No more sympathy for Valdez, boy.
Now Sundown’s wound is seeping and he’s tilting as he rides;
His eyes are red and gritty as he scans the canyon’s sides.
He hadn’t known the nature of the man whose track he sought,
And it sickened him to death to see the things Valdez had wrought.
One day an upturned stagecoach and its driver’s ghastly hue,
The next a blackened farmhouse and its family blackened too.
So many graves had Sundown dug, his hands were chapped and sore,
And now he prayed to God for strength to live and dig one more.
Israel made her sit on his lap in the Chevy. Tommy pulled away from the house, dumb as any good chauffeur, and when they’d gone a few blocks Israel took his hand from her mouth and said, “Now, you see how easy that was?”
I won’t give a detailed account of the ensuing twenty minutes. I wasn’t there. Later Swede would characterize the interlude as “a small and dirty time,” and though in these days of abductions and mayhem and bodies turning up in ditches Swede’s ordeal might seem almost innocuous, to think of it still hurts me, physically. I feel it churning yet.