Peace Like a River

by Leif Enger

  “I haven’t eaten.”

  “Mm.” Shallow breath. “Well, you’re going to like it.”

  And it’s funny, but I did. Sick food or not I had two bowls, and while I ate them Swede sat with me and agreed that the high desert was desirable and that we ought, when Dad got better, to go and at least have a good long look at it.

  It was the first time I ever persuaded her to my side of anything.

  * * *

  Back at the corncrib I was distressed to realize all my efforts of the morning had brought down only six lengths of lath. Elementary math revealed I would be working till Easter unless I got the hang of this. I chose a junction of oak and lath and wedged the bar in.

  A kid somewhere said, “Hey!”

  He was in the corncrib, crouched and peeking through laths. I had a slatted view of a boy in a corduroy coat, a fat grinning boy with plugged nostrils. You could see what was plugging them, too.

  “Who’re you?” I asked.

  “Raymond.” He said it Raymod, the n getting detained up in nostril country.

  “I’m Rube—why don’t you come out of there?”

  “Whatcha doig?”

  “Ripping this old thing down,” I told him. “Mr. Layton hired me. Come on out of there.”

  Outside the corncrib he was more of himself. The coat was unbuttoned and showed layers of shirt. His cheeks were rubbed scabby and looked like sallow Texas grapefruits glazed with effluent. Raymond was much shorter, but I’m guessing he had me by thirty pounds.

  “How old are you, Raymond?”

  “Six.” He twisted around and waved at a house across the alley from Mr. Layton’s. “That’s Gramma’s, we live with her, Mob an’ Dad an’ me.” He looked at me fearlessly. “Can I watch?”

  “What?”

  “Watch you rip her dowd?”

  Raymond was a good watcher. At first I didn’t want him there because I wasn’t adept at the work and feared notice. But Raymond was gifted in not noticing. He sat down in the deep snow and spoke wet, unrelated sentences. “We jus’ moved here las’ summer. Gramma’s house idn’t built good. My brudder heard a ghos’ last night—rhee, like a horse. My dad’s a buskrat trapper, got two hunderd buskrats last year.”

  A lath sprang free from the crib. I managed to stay on my feet.

  “I use to get beat up back hobe. There was a neighbor kid Pugger could bed his thub alla way back to here.” Poor Raymond, his passages were so obstructed he had his own dialect.

  About this time I discovered a principle of physics. Mr. Layton’s crowbar had been broken off and resharpened and so lacked the slight angle a crowbar needs at the business end. In my ignorance I worked without fulcrum, a lousy way to pry, until finally a loose lath fell down of its own accord, wedging itself between bar and post. I shoved, and the lath I’d been worrying for ten minutes squealed loose instantly. Thereafter I worked with purchase and things accelerated. Raymond sat in the snow talking away. I never saw a boy better built for cold. His coat was open wing and wing but he was radiant with talk, and the wind blew over his big besmirched cheeks and exposed earlobes with no effect. He was like a small, hot, talkative planet.

  “How strog are you?” he inquired bluntly.

  I tore down a lath and flung it on the pile. “I’m tearing down a building, aren’t I?” Boy, it felt good saying that.

  “You’re pretty strog.” Of course, he could’ve outpulled me in any contest you might name, but at six he was too kind to know it.

  I said, “Well, I’m older than you.”

  “Rube?”

  “Yup.” I was wrestling a tough one.

  “Is your brother a burderer?”

  One of my mitts slipped and the crowbar dropped into the snow. Clawing it out I regarded Raymond for malice. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Well, he shot those big kids.”

  “Didn’t you ever hear of self-defense?”

  He shook his head. I oughtn’t have been so sharp; he was only curious.

  “My dad said he was a burderer.” Then, “My dad’s really strog—I bet he could tear that shed down with his bare hads. Could your dad do that?”

  “Sure—not right now, though, he’s got pneumonia.”

  “Oh,” Raymond said. “I had a uncle with pneumonia. He died and had a funeral, but we didn’t go.”

  * * *

  That corncrib represented the hardest work I’d ever done; still, I suspect Swede had the tougher job back home. Not the cooking and washing and sweeping, which she’d been doing since we left school, but hearing Dad wrack and hawk and bits of his lungs hitting whang in the pan. When I arrived from Layton’s those late afternoons, brimming with my own success and breathing deep as I ever had, Swede seemed frighteningly burdened. Of course with Swede you got used to periods of deep thought, but this was different; for she was Dad’s nurse, and anyone knows a downhearted nurse signifies a sinking patient. This didn’t register with me right away—by the time I got home, Dad was usually sleeping quietly, which seemed a good omen—until I crept in one evening, hoping to find him awake. I don’t recall what I wanted to tell him, probably how well the corncrib was going, how much money I figured to earn off it, how generally strong and immortal I was feeling now. I stood beside him, wishing he’d awaken, a boy just wanting his dad’s attention; and then standing there I had the dreamlike thought that he’d become me—his breathing something you had to listen hard to hear at all. This was more terrifying than any night I’d spent battling my own lungs; I grabbed Dad’s shoulder and brought him awake.

  “Reuben.” He was startled; his hands came up and took hold of my arms. “Is everything all right?”

  I was startled right back. “Ah—you want me to boil some water and soda? Loosen you up?”

  He sat upright and breathed as deeply as he could. Oh, but he was bound tight. “Look, Reuben. I don’t think steam’s the thing. Maybe you’d pound my back a little.”

  So I sat on the edge of his bed and he braced up best he could and I whacked him between the shoulder blades—first as hard as I dared, never having touched my father in this strange way before, and then, as he nodded encouragement and his lungs began to respond, as hard as I could. How I whacked! His back was bony as a fowl’s, for the pneumonia had consumed his surplus; he couldn’t shore up against even my feeble thumping for more than a minute. But when he sagged back onto his pillow his breathing was discernibly easier. He smiled.

  “That corncrib work is helping you, boy.”

  * * *

  I finished December 20, a huge day for me; the crib had a roof of sheet tin held tight by a thousand galvanized nails, and I had to haul the ladder in and hammer upward to loosen it. Deafness threatened. When finally the tin slid away and whuffed to earth, I tilted into a snowbank to rest. I wished Raymond would show up. Nothing remained of the crib but its black upright timbers, which for frozen steadfastness seemed a jury of puritans. I wasted some minutes heaving and grunting, then shoveled to bare earth and sheared them off flush with a crosscut saw. It took all afternoon. When the last post toppled I dragged it to the stack by Mr. Layton’s garage, missing Raymond’s six-year-old admiration for my modest strength. Had he flattered me then I’d have swallowed it whole. I stretched the day out long, picking nails and bits of lath from the snow and finally horsing the noisy sheet of tin up so the whole stack lay recovered by its own roof. Stars were appearing, Venus in the east. I seemed to breathe buckets of air, whole arctics of it! I set the crowbar over my shoulder, thinking of the great Crockett slinging up Betsy at the end of the day.

  When I got home Swede was chafed beyond reason. She clattered out the bowls for supper, poured the cornflakes, made Dad’s hot water with a spoonful of lemon juice, and slapped it all on a metal tray. Recalling what Dr. Nokes had said regarding her bedside manner I said, “Are you mad about something, Swede?”

  She stayed clammed, entered Dad’s room to lay supper across his lap and returned somewhat mellowed with his praiseful thanks. Still
, she didn’t speak to me. I was certain I’d done something thoughtless until she finished the dishes and sat down and began to blink. I had a stick of candy in my jacket pocket, a present from Raymond.

  “Want to split a candy cane?”

  She nodded and I broke it in two and gave her the crook. She stuck the long end in her mouth and in a few minutes pulled it out and pointed it at the hallway door.

  “Look at ’em all,” she said.

  She was talking about the Christmas cards she’d taped up, ten or twelve of them, a bumper crop. Because we hadn’t much family (one uncle, no aunts, two older cousins whose wild doings we heard about secondhand), we’d never received more than six or seven Christmas cards a year. This time around there were new ones, from the DeCuellars, the Stockards, a few others.

  “Don’t you like them?”

  “’Course I do.”

  “What’s the matter then?” I was thinking how happy she seemed mornings—how excited she always was, pulling on her boots to head up to the post office. Dad would be sitting up with his tea by then and I’d be going out the door to Mr. Layton’s, and Swede would run the few blocks and rifle the PO box, a responsibility I envied, particularly now so close to Christmas.

  “We haven’t got nothing from Davy,” she said.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that Davy might send us a Christmas card, him being a fugitive from justice. Was there even precedent for such a thing? Mentally I ran down a few examples. Cole Younger? Butch Cassidy? John Wesley Hardin? Maybe these fellows were just flush with Christmas spirit, but I’d never heard about it. I mentioned these doubts to my sister.

  “Wesley was illiterate,” Swede said, casually using the middle name as if on personal terms with the outlaw. “Also, he was a skunk. He wouldn’t have sent cards to anybody and he never got any either.”

  “Well, what about those others?”

  “Cassidy was romantic, you know that.” In fact, I did know it. The romantic quality was something he had acquired while vacationing in Bolivia. Swede had read all about the heroic Butch, how he had a fondness for the afternoon siesta, also for the words Pardon, Señorita, and other poetical phrases. It was easy to believe Cassidy would’ve sent off his Christmas cards, and on time too.

  I was going to ask about Cole Younger, but someone stepped up on the porch and knocked. It was Mr. Layton. He stood out there like a big hunched beetle and wouldn’t come in.

  “Boy,” he said, “you finished her, come out here and settle up.”

  This was the first I’d seen of him since he’d handed me the crowbar; he’d been sitting at his dime-store counter the whole time I tore down his crib. I had wondered how this part of the deal was to happen and now here he was, bad spine and all.

  “You done a good job,” he said, when I’d slipped on my boots and stepped out.

  “Thank you sir.”

  “Do you know how long that thing has needed wrecking?”

  “No sir. How long?”

  He said, “The old man who sold me the place kept horses. Percherons, great big drafters.”

  I thought of Raymond and the houses across the alley. “Where’d he keep them? Isn’t the yard sort of small?”

  Mr. Layton chuckled. “It was big then, boy.”

  I hadn’t anything else to ask, and Mr. Layton reached for his bill-fold. He pulled out two ten-dollar bills and a five and said, “You done a good job,” then patted another pocket and came out with two chocolate bars. Mr. Goodbars—you know that yellow wrapper. “One for you and one for your sister,” he said, and I accepted them and watched him go down the porch steps, needing the railing right the way down.

  Two whole days I dreamed with Swede about the things twenty-five dollars could buy. The bills were straight voltage, juicing all sorts of hallucinations. Could you buy a Hiawatha bicycle for twenty-five clams? Swede thought you could, and moreover figured there was room for her on the handlebars. I was also tempted by the thought of water. I knew a kid, his name is gone, who’d gotten hold of a sweet-natured canoe framed up in cedar and covered with watertight canvas. The boat smelled like a humidor and floated so light the kid claimed to have followed to its source the nameless creek adjoining the Bright River. He claimed to have paddled up through brushlands where burnt tamaracks poked from the surface of the creek and the water slowed to rest and the quiet was broken by the protruding fins of frantically spawning carp. All this magic from a wooden canoe that had been sitting disused in a barn. The kid—Alfred something, I believe, red-haired and double-jointed—had procured the boat in payment for a few days’ picking rock in the spring.

  “I think a canoe,” I told Swede.

  “Telescope,” she replied. She’d read some poem about a farmer who so loved the stars that he arsoned his place for the insurance money and bought a glass through which the Pleiades became a scatter of diamonds on a velvet cloth.

  Then again, it was almost Christmas. What about presents? Shamefully, the first person who came to mind was neither Dad nor Swede but Bethany Orchard, whom I hadn’t seen in weeks. What did Bethany want for Christmas? I would’ve given half the money just to know.

  “What’re you thinking about?” Swede demanded. Such a joyous, greedy talk we’d been having, she didn’t want me adrift.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I faltered badly. Though you couldn’t have dragged the truth from me—Bethany Orchard—in fact I had a sudden ache to say her name out loud.

  “Reuben? You worrying about Davy?” Swede asked; and she looked so motherly and worried that I nodded and put on the gravest face I owned. To my enormous surprise and guilt she got me in a bear hug and kept me there awhile. Poor Swede, she always did think better of me than I had coming.

  The next day—December 23—Dad got out of bed. I woke from dreams of a gravel road along which I walked shoeless, picking up nuggets of gold the size of baby turtles. We had in our bathroom a hot-water tap that squeaked persistently when turned, and I heard it plainly as I stooped for nuggets. On and off it squeaked, and then I was awake and though fiscally disappointed knew Dad was up and shaving, and that the tapping I heard between squeaks was him knocking his razor against the sink to get the whiskers off. Bounding up I rapped at the bathroom door and was admitted to the sight of Dad standing at the mirror, soap on half his face and a grin showing where he’d thumbed through lather.

  “Morning, Reuben.” His voice was quiet, tired, but free of the congestion that had so shortened his sentences of late.

  “Are you well?” I couldn’t believe it; just last night I had heard him coughing.

  “Reuben, you look starved. Go off and start some oatmeal, why don’t you?”

  So off I went rejoicing, banging around the kitchen until Swede awoke and came in to issue instructions. Stirring the pot she told me it was a big day and to get the maple syrup out of the back cupboard. I looked. The syrup was gone.

  “Brown sugar, then,” she said. “Above the toaster.”

  I shook my head. “We used it up.”

  “White sugar.” But that bowl too was nearly empty, and when I got out the ten-pound canister in which we kept reserves, the scoop inside rattled sorrowfully.

  Swede was disgusted. “Well, get out some apples.”

  We had a bag of old apples in the refrigerator, long ignored on account of their soft flesh and wrinkly complexions. But I peeled them down and chopped them small and Swede found some Karo syrup and poured it in the oatmeal and told me to round up Dad.

  He’d finished shaving and was in his bedroom. I knocked and getting no response went in. As I did he stepped from the closet where he’d been rummaging and I glimpsed him upright and as he truly was. A scream formed in my gut and emerged as a whimper. When shaving he’d worn a big T-shirt that fell below the waist of his pants, disguising his exsiccated frame just as the lather disguised his face—so obscured he might’ve been a healthy man, if thin. Now he came out of the closet barefaced and barechested. His torso was not his but someone else’s—a drawn mar
oon’s from some sea story. His face too was bereft of all extra so that suddenly I barely recognized him. How had this escaped me? Even his eyes had the transparency of incarceration, and he looked at me out of them with a mercy and pain that confused me beyond what small troubles I’d ever thought to know.

  He nodded slightly, I suppose wondering what to say. “You and Swede get that oatmeal ready?”

  “Yes sir.” I couldn’t stop looking at him, at the way his khakis were belted across his hip bones.

  He said, “I’m a little surprised myself, you know.”

  In retrospect it’s hard to believe I didn’t see instantly what to do with that money. But when it’s the first you’ve earned by sweat you see it as special and by golly not to be spent on less than the desire of your grasping heart. The more I thought about old Alfred and his cedar canoe, the more I saw myself paddling one just like it. Convinced similar exquisite vessels lay concealed in dairy barns all over the county, I told Swede of my decision.