Peace Like a River

by Leif Enger

  We pulled out after a frostbit sunrise, the twenty-second of January. I remember how the front end of the Plymouth heaved upward, surprised at its rearward weight. I remember how poor and strange the house looked among its neighbors as we eased away, chimney a heap of dead bricks, windows glazed with ice and dirt—already it seemed close in spirit to those weedy barns you see all gray and forgotten and sadly available to anyone who will pay the taxes. And cold, my goodness: For two weeks we’d been gripped by a cold snap which on the average night reached 30 below. Very dismaying to Swede and me, since we’d intended to ride in the plenteousness of the Airstream; how we’d planned to sprawl and stretch and scramble around! Yes, the trailer had a gas heater, but Dad couldn’t be persuaded to travel “lit.” Of course the Plymouth’s own heater was a foreseeable disaster—we probably weren’t much warmer in our backseat army blankets than we would’ve been in the trailer—or outside, for that matter, in the blistering wind.

  On the way out we idled at the post office so Dad could stop the mail. Swede and I stayed in the car; she was already in a book. I remember Roofing looked different that morning—smaller, dearer. Seized by romance I wished Bethany Orchard would walk by right then and see us, hitched to the Airstream, on the very sill of a long and perilous adventure the outcome of which remained in doubt. Oh yes: here she’d come, Bethany, sent for the mail by her cheerless father; a vulnerable elfin figure wrapped against the wind. Seeing my determined profile in the window she’d fly to me: “You’re leaving?” And she’d look away, that I might not see the water standing in her eyes.

  I’d have gotten to a goodbye kiss eventually—I could see it coming—except then a figure appeared coming up the walk: not Bethany but an old man in a ruinous corduroy barn coat. A listing bareheaded old man, undone and tattered, untrustful of his feet.

  “Swede, look at that guy.”

  He came on, fighting the wind. His hair was raked up and oily; his eyes were shut; his lips were moving.

  “I think he’s praying,” I told her. The old man’s hands looked like suet, hanging there out of his sleeves.

  “Maybe for balance,” Swede said. Sort of a cruel remark, wouldn’t you say? I glanced at her; she was watching the old bum’s rough go staying upright, skinny shoulders atilt, one hand swaying forward now, bumping the post office door. “It’s old Mr. Finch,” she pointed out. He was much more sorrowful to look at than he had been at Davy’s trial. Could he have even this day’s life left in him?

  “He’s freezing,” I said. Swede was back in her book. But I was held tight by the old man’s attempts to grip the handle, then to open that big glass door against the wind, his eyes still shut mind you and his mouth slack open—he looked dead, is what I’m telling you. Like a man so trampled of spirit he’d given over the strength of limbs. I watched his face and his futile, suety hands, and for the first time a question nipped at me: Was it possible that real loss had occurred at the death of Israel Finch? That real grief had been felt?

  Of course you could say old Mr. Finch was a helpless and habitual drunk and whatever was lost in him was lost long ago. You could say so. I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t have a strong case.

  From Roofing it is some eighty miles to North Dakota. We drove without talking for a good while; after weeks of anticipation, I’ll confess to feeling let down. It was so cold my limbs seemed heavy and far away. Dad drank coffee, looking at the frozen farmsteads we passed, clumped at the end of their long driveways. The Plymouth itself moaned as we drove, sounding perhaps not up to this long and heavy haul. We crossed the border late in the morning and Swede sat up blowing on her fingers and asked what that thing in the road was.

  “Can’t tell,” Dad said.

  “It’s moving.”

  It was a black shape in the road far ahead that seemed to grow and shrink. So small a thing we mightn’t have noticed elsewhere, but on the broad white flats of Dakota the eye goes to such specks. “Crow?” Dad said.

  “It’s moving wrong,” Swede replied.

  We drove on. The black object rose and dropped and assumed guessable size: about like a turtle.

  “Aw, it’s a piece of old trash,” Swede said—as if some hopes had been fastened to it—but getting closer we saw it was a crow after all, and dead. Struck by a car it lay all mashed to the road but for one free wing, which rose and fell by the gusts. It was a much more grievous sight than you’d think, a dead crow lying in the road out in the heart of noplace, and just before we reached it the wind brought up that wing again so it looked like a thing asking mercy.

  We drove on a mile or so. “I was just thinking,” Dad said. “All the years I spent in North Dakota, that’s the first crow I ever saw hit on the road.”

  We hadn’t anything to say to that.

  “They’re awfully smart birds,” Dad mused. “They get out of the way.”

  “What’s that?” Swede pointed to something else black, farther on.

  This time no one conjectured. We drove on and it was another crow, cruelly pasted and lying over at the edge, the second Dad had seen in all his years.

  “Well, imagine that,” he said.

  We reached August’s late afternoon. Having retreated to sleep I snapped from a dream in which Swede’s persistent badman Valdez had got into the Airstream and crawled into my bunk. I knew he was there but couldn’t tell anyone—not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t say the right words. Time after time I got Dad’s attention only to mumble some nursery rhyme instead of the evil fact. Meantime Valdez snored away in my bunk; he sounded like an Allis Chalmers, and no one could hear him but me.

  “Wake up, Rube,” Dad said, as we bounced into August’s yard.

  Relieved, I was nonetheless unbalanced by the dream and stumbled up to the house with it still attached. Unbundling us in her hot kitchen Birdie teased, kindly, “Somebody’s too sleepy to say hello.”

  But that was only part of it. In truth I was a little scared, and preoccupied about where we’d go from here. For I had asked this of Dad the previous night, asked it straight out: Where do we go from August’s? He didn’t know. We’d simply go forth, he said, like the children of Israel when they packed up and cameled out of Egypt. He meant to encourage me. Just like us, the Israelites hadn’t any idea where they’d end up! Just like us, they were traveling by faith! Indeed, it did impart a thrill, yet the trip thus far, in the frigid and torpid Plymouth, had reminded me what a hard time the chosen people actually had of it. Once traveling, it’s remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else—ignorance, for example. Same thing happened to the Israelites. Sure it’s weak, but sometimes you’d rather just have a map.

  The Last Thing He Would Do

  OF COURSE, FEAR AND DOUBT MUST FLEE WHEN SUCH GENTLE HOSTS AS August and Birdie take charge of you, and in fact a supper of creamed chicken and beans and sliced nutbread can go a long way toward the Devil’s discredit. Yet for all the Shultzes’ home-cooked beneficence, their most nourishing offerings were details.

  “He walked into the yard just before midnight,” August said, leaning toward Swede, whom he’d placed on his right hand. “Ricky—” their Walker hound—“barking his dumb head off, all the sudden he stops, just his stumpy tail beating against the house. I turn on the porch light and there’s Davy sitting on the steps and that dog shivering all over him.”

  Oh, we were starved for details! After all, there’d been but the barest crumbs since Davy’s escape; we’d no inkling of how he’d traveled—not counting a day or two on Nelson Svedvig’s mare—no whisper of where he might’ve stayed, nothing from which we might draw strength. Without a detail or two, even an imagination as mighty as Swede’s begins to atrophy. Memory calcifies. One day you wake up and your brother is a legend, even to you.

  “Tell how he looked,” Dad said.

  “Why, same as always, I guess,” August said, “just more grown up. He had a clean cut, right here, under his ear.” A shaving cut, it turned out; having hitched as fa
r as Radduck, Davy’d walked into a drugstore and bought soap and a razor, employing them in the rest room of a Shell station close by. Then collaring up he stepped north into a quartering wind, meeting, as he told August, not one car on twelve miles of blacktop.

  “He was dressed warm?” Dad asked.

  “Why, I guess so,” August said; at which Birdie rolled her eyes and made amendment.

  “He was underdressed,” she said, “wearing an old barn coat; I sewed on some buttons. Holed pants, no hat, cotton gloves. And, Jeremiah, he was awfully thin.”

  “Then he assuredly came to the right place,” Dad replied, real comfort in his voice for the first time in many days, for it was good to imagine Davy appearing on the doorstep of those who loved him. No doubt Birdie had inventoried Davy’s scarcities even as she stood at the stove, reheating kielbasa; he had a glaze of dirt around his neck, she would tell Dad later, but was pink and clean on his face and ears. He ate, Birdie said, like a polite but famished baby hawk—said thank you, please, but barely chewed.

  “Does he miss us?” Swede asked. “Did he say he missed us?”

  “Well, now,” August said.

  “Like sunshine,” Birdie put in. “He said it’s like having no sun in the sky, Swede—he misses you that much.”

  I remember thinking that was a funny thing for Davy to say, him not being generally lyrical, yet Birdie looked so sternly at August I knew she must be remembering correctly. Swede teared up and put a hand over her mouth.

  “August,” Birdie suggested, after a beat, “tell about that fellow who gave Davy the ride.”

  What a tasty particular! Thumbing west, Davy’d been picked up by a man in an Oldsmobile full of musical instruments. They lay uncased in the backseat, a button accordion, saxophone, tin whistle rolling around in the back window, and more than one trumpet haphazardly swaddled in what appeared to be tattered suit coats. The driver told Davy he was from Wisconsin heading for Los Angeles, where he would certainly get on television. He said there were actually three trumpets and they were linked together by a machined brace of his own design. By holding them just so he was able to play all three at once. The man’s face was grained as an old board and he had a dark pompadour ideally groomed even at this hour. He asked Davy for money and offered to stop right there on the highway and play “The Bugler’s Holiday.” If the TV producers in Los Angeles didn’t like trumpets, he also had, in the trunk, an amplifier and a brand-new Danelectro guitar on which he could play recognizable pieces of Mozart.

  “Show people,” August said, in wonder.

  One more gratifying detail? Sure: Davy, retiring upstairs, had twice laughed in his sleep—a strange thing to hear, said Birdie, who lay wakeful all that night, a boyish laugh drifting down those stairs again.

  I can’t describe the sort of peace this conversation gave me. Davy was practically in the room with us; every creak of the old house was like his footstep. I believe it was one of those rare nights Dad would’ve let us stay up late, but August said, “You kids can take the west room tonight,” and that was it for us, bedtime, never mind we’d both slept on the way. I looked an appeal at Dad but got no help. Being both guests and children, Swede and I were entirely at the whim of our hosts, who meant nothing but well.

  “Okay,” Swede said, very pliably it seemed to me. Why, we’d barely got started! “I’m tired, Reuben,” she insisted, seeing my look.

  Then I understood and showed it by giving out a nice overdone stretch and a yawn. Birdie said, “Ah, you sweeties,” August nodding along indulgently.

  Only Dad was not taken in; he looked me in the eye. “All worn out, uh?”

  I couldn’t just look at him and lie, so I shrugged, assuming the guilty appearance of the habitual eavesdropper. What Swede had remembered, and Dad knew it, was a swell architectural feature of that upstairs bedroom: a ventilation grate, about a foot square, set into the floor. A curious visitor tucked up in that room could slide from bed and hear every syllable spoken in the kitchen below. Of course there was the chance the adults might decide to talk off in the parlor, which had soft chairs and a davenport and a huge round-shouldered Zenith radio against the wall, also Birdie’s collection of tiny spoons from all fifty states, also a set of Japanese swords August had procured while stationed in the Pacific; but the coffeepot was in the kitchen, and the action pretty much stayed there. Swede said no conversation in any room but the kitchen was worth overhearing anyway, something I’d guess is still true in much of North Dakota.

  Boy, that west room was cold, though.

  Minutes after Dad had tucked us in and listened to us pray and left us under fifty or so quilts, Swede said, “Can you hear what they’re saying from here?”

  “No.”

  We eyed the grate, some eight feet away. Light came up from it, and soft voices, and coffee smell. Heat was theoretically rising also; it was hard to tell.

  “We could shove the bed over there,” I suggested.

  “They’d hear.”

  Laughter came up through the grate. Adults always start in with that as soon as the kids are in bed.

  “Let’s just tough it out,” Swede said. “Hawkeye and Uncas wouldn’t even feel this cold. Huckleberry Finn wouldn’t even notice it. Come on.”

  But I already had the covers tugged hoodlike round the top of my head. A wind had risen outside and was mourning in the eaves; the curtains were ghosting out from the wall, that’s how leaky those old windows were.

  “Don’t tell me you want to go to sleep,” Swede said, between her teeth.

  “We’ll freeze solid,” I told her. “August will come up tomorrow and we’ll be down there on the floor dead—we’ll be all purple.”

  More laughter from below, quickly subsiding to a more serious tone.

  Swede said, “I’m going,” and slid out and crouched at the grate. I can see her still—armwrapped knees, face resolute, lit from below.

  I thought I heard Davy’s name. “What is it?” I whispered. “What’d they say?”

  She waved at me to shush—you know what, I could see her breath. Finally I hopped out of bed and yanked off the two topmost quilts and heaved them over Swede like a tent and crawled in with her. She grabbed my hand. Hers was so cold it felt papery.

  “—no notion at all,” August was saying, down in the kitchen. “It was hard to know how to talk.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Dad replied. “I’m grateful to you for helping him.”

  Birdie said, “Jeremiah, he doesn’t know the trouble he’s in. He didn’t know who Andreeson was.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  August said, “We talked to him the best we could. He seemed careless about it. Said he hadn’t read the papers or heard the radio.”

  There was a long silence in which Birdie got up and poured coffee, and Swede leaned up to my ear and whispered ratfink in reference to the fed Andreeson—a word I hadn’t heard before; it almost gave me the giggles. Ratfink. It’s vulgar, I know it. One of those terms that makes it worthwhile having enemies.

  “Jeremiah,” August said, “was it like the newspaper said? The way Davy shot those boys?”

  Dad said, “Yes, pretty much as it said. He shot them down. Yes.”

  At these words a thing happened I can’t explain—think of some small furry animal, say a vole, going right up your spine with its cold little claws. It shook me; Swede put both arms around me or I’d have gone back to bed.

  “Just so,” August said, after waiting a moment. He wanted the story, of course, and why not? Being an old friend of the family doesn’t exempt you from curiosity. Though Birdie must’ve thought his mild pry undignified, because she said, “August”—just that, just his name.

  “He shouldn’t have,” Dad said. “It’s true he shouldn’t have. That jury would’ve had to convict him.”

  “You didn’t see it happen, though,” August said.

  “No. Reuben saw it. I’d trade with him if I could.”

  I didn’t understand this rig
ht away. Trade what?

  “Poor boy.”

  This from Birdie—speaking of Davy, I figured, out in the weather with his collar turned up. But she meant me, for Dad said, “You’d be surprised, Birdie. He’s been real grownup, he and Swede both. They’ve stood up better than I have,” he added.