by Leif Enger
Sometime after noon the Plymouth began to miss. Not like your small cars, bless their dainty hiccups, when the Plymouth missed the whole car seized backward, cousin to a bucking horse. You had to hold your head against whiplash. Dad pulled over and Swede laid the road atlas across her knees and judged us close to a town called Grassy Butte.
“We’ll stay there,” Dad said. “Grassy Butte. I wonder if there’s a garage—say, you two, let’s get something warm there!” And you know, in that moment I loved the old Plymouth and its cranky ticker, for something warm was just ahead, and we were heading for it. Already I could imagine a cafe, that rare pleasure, with cocoa in a thick white cup. And the cafe would be so warm we’d all take our coats off—honestly, Swede and I were so pleased we got giddy, poking each other as the wagon bucked along.
Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE’S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, “I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?”
“Prevail on Dale,” I repeated to Swede.
“To make a sale,” she added.
“And if we fail, we’ll whale on Dale—”
“Till he needs braille!”
“Will you guys desist?” Dad asked.
No one answered his knock, though we could hear voices inside. He knocked again, and this time the voices got louder and the door opened and a woman was standing there with a baby goat in her arms, just a little goat suckling at a bottle she held. She looked surprised at the three of us.
“It’s Sunday,” she said. “We’re shut.”
“Is Dale here?” Dad inquired.
“Sir,” the woman informed him, “Dale has not been here since November.”
It’s hard to look back and describe Roxanna to you as she was when we first saw her. Big-boned, yes, but not in the cushiony sense people often mean; tall; dirt-road blond hair in a back-swung braid; windburned in the face. She looked like some woman from a polar dogsled expedition recounted in the Geographic. She looked, I would say, built to last.
“My sympathies,” Dad said.
“Appreciated but gratuitous,” the woman replied—and Swede would have loved her forever for that phrase alone—“Dale left November twenty-fifth. Every day since has been Thanksgiving.”
Well, what does a person say to that? I watched Dad look down at his feet, smiling, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. The woman stood there holding her goat, which was yanking single-mindedly at the bottle. It let go once to bleat and bump her chest with its blunt nose.
Dad looked up. “Ma’am, I sure hope you’ll sell us some gas. I know you’d rather not on a Sunday.”
At this moment a better observer than me would’ve seen some acquiescence in the woman’s eyes, some raising of the gate. I saw nothing of the kind, but Dad must have, for when she abruptly shut the door he stayed right where he was. Swede started to talk but he shushed her. The wind snapped our coats around our legs, and now it carried a few gnats of ice. From far inside the house we heard the goat’s voice. Then the door opened again and the woman came out in a parka with the fur up round her ears and walked fast ahead of us to the pumps.
“Check your oil?” she said, while the tank filled.
“It’s fine,” Dad said. Swede and I had climbed back in the Plymouth, under our blankets.
“You mind if I don’t do your windshield,” the woman said.
“What’s your name, if I may ask?”
“Roxanna.”
The pump clicked off and she finessed it a little.
“You should change the sign to Roxanna’s Oil,” Dad said.
“When it warms up, I’ll do that.” Roxanna’s eyelashes and her furry hood were studded with icebits, which strangely enough had a softening effect on her appearance.
“I’d think you’d do more business. It’s a more attractive name, if I may say it.”
You should’ve seen Swede during all this—sitting straight up, head tilted—a more transfixed rubbernecker you never saw.
“Five-fifty,” Roxanna said.
Dad said, “I don’t guess you’d have any propane.”
Roxanna Cawley did have propane, in a bulk tank behind the house. We waited inside while she filled our cylinder. There was a glass counter with boxes of Butterfinger and Three Musketeers alongside some Dutch Masters cigars and a clip display of Dr. Grabow’s pipes. There was a gumball machine, a framed print of the Wild Bunch, the famous one where Butch sits happily on the far right, nearest the bullet holes, and there were two goats, kid and nanny, stabled in a bathroom behind the counter. Seeing us gawk Roxanna opened the door to show the satisfied mother standing on a hummock of straw, the kid curled asleep by a claw-foot tub. There was a basin of water and a crockery jar. It wasn’t as dirty as you’d expect. The billy lived in the barn out back—Roxanna said he didn’t deserve to be in the house, he made smells only he himself seemed to enjoy, and anyhow he’d be rejoined by his family as soon as the kid, Beth, got stronger.
“What’s wrong with Beth?” Swede asked.
“Born blind. Randy kept pushing her away from Momma; he wouldn’t let her eat. So I moved them in here.”
Dad said, “Who?”
“Randy—the billy.”
“Ruffian,” Swede said. “Thug. Miscreant.”
Roxanna smiled at Swede, who no doubt had been exerting herself toward that exact result. “Knave,” Roxanna said.
“Scapegrace,” my sister replied—oh, she was beaming. I had to take a step back and look at her. No showoff by nature, Swede seemed actually leaning forward toward this Roxanna Cawley. I believe you could’ve dropped a plumbline and proved it. “Brigand,” she sang out.
At which Dad in extreme befuddlement herded us out the door, saying something about finding a place for the night. Turning back to Roxanna, he asked whether Grassy Butte had a garage or a motel.
“Garage is closed; the owner’s drunk. The Hi-Way Motel is right by the water tower.”
Dad held up a hand in thanks and shut the door.
We hadn’t made it back to the car when we heard it open again. Roxanna Cawley was standing there looking thistly; did I mention her knuckles before? This woman had worked.
“Or, if you’d like,” she said, “I have a couple of rooms.”
The Skin Bag
IT MAY SURPRISE YOU, AFTER THE GOATS IN THE BATHROOM, THAT ROXANNA Cawley set a pleasant and even cultivated table. Against the grassy barrens she managed to coax forth string beans and acorn squash and to put them up in quantities reaching to late January—though of course everything lasted longer with old Dale gone. She also had sweet corn of a white variety I’d never seen before, a strain she liked for its tenderness and because it froze well right on the cob. Did you ever sit down to white cobbed corn, freshened with butter and salt, snow meantime beating the windows on the coldest evening of a cold new year? Faced with such fare I couldn’t even begrudge Roxanna her advocacy of pickled beets, a bowl of which she set down with restrained pride and expectation. Fortunately Dad proved fond of beets. You never know. We dined beneath a bronzed corona in which remained but one good bulb. We ate roasted chicken, raised out back the previous summer, and tender potatoes brought by train from the Red River Valley, and gravy stirred up from the cracklings. I suppose it was a meal intended to impress, though you don’t think of a woman like Roxanna worrying about how her hospitality comes off; she hadn’t seemed at all ashamed about the goats. But she went to a lot of trouble for us, who were after all just one small family paying a few dollars for a night’s room and board. During that meal I saw Dad lean back in his chair and smile over and over again, an expression that grieved me somehow; Swede looked often at the windows, and I knew she was growing the storm in her mind, abetting it until the world should be slowed and the roads stopped and us buried at some happy length in the warmth and contentment of this house.
A
nd what things we learned around that table, what lessons we had in the ways of independence! For Roxanna Cawley had started life on a ranch in a valley of northern Montana, a ranch like many of its neighbors given up in the Dust Bowl years and sold for the unpaid taxes. While moving into town she’d ridden with her father in the rented truck and watched a maddened ribby steer stagger across the road. The steer was blind with disease and Mr. Cawley evaded it with an artful swerve, but Mrs. Cawley—following in their Chevrolet—struck it broadside and was killed in that moment. Roxanna, seven and waiting in the cab, first believed it was her mother screaming, then that it was her father bellowing in grief, but actually it was the steer, which lived a few more minutes.
Thus did Roxanna grow up motherless, just as we were doing; thus by necessity did she learn from her father the principles of business. Having failed at ranching he borrowed from an uncle to purchase a clapboard theater on the main street of Lawrence, Montana. The previous owner had closed years before, having carelessly screened newsreel footage taken during the Pancho Villa troubles near the Mexican border. The jumpy newsreel displayed a line of dark-skinned peasants falling before a firing squad, citizens Mr. Villa considered to be of faltering loyalty. The people of Lawrence were unprepared for such realities played out before them. Ladies swooned in their seats; husbands began a commotion. A high-placed council of indignants resolved that motion pictures had no business in the community. The local newspaper called it small loss. Therefore Mr. Cawley’s resurrection of the movie house was viewed as a risk, even decades later. Roxanna remembered the care her father practiced in choosing films; he got most of Lawrence on his side with selections like Tarzan the Fearless and Tarzan Escapes. Johnny Weissmuller, Mr. Cawley informed young Roxanna, was a man who could be counted on. Maureen O’Sullivan too, despite all the swimming she did with Tarzan; wives didn’t mind their husbands watching Maureen O’Sullivan. Marlene Dietrich would’ve been another matter.
Swede wondered if running a theater had often put Roxanna in the proximity of movie stars. Roxanna replied not many, but once after a showing of Kitty Foyle her father turned up the lights and there sat Dalton Trumbo, right in the audience. I asked who Dalton Trumbo was and learned he’d written the film. You’ll laugh, but I’d never known films were actually written; weren’t they just actors up there talking? However, Roxanna’s father, whom she called Daddy, seized the attention of the departing crowd and introduced Dalton Trumbo, the great screenwriter. It got in the paper, a superb moment for Mr. Cawley, though it went hard for him later when Dalton got jailed. Had he robbed a bank or shot someone there might’ve been forgiveness, but he got jailed for liking communism, which was a disgrace. Mr. Cawley had to take down the photo of himself and Dalton shaking hands in front of the marquee. It had hung in the lobby for years.
Swede looked disappointed at this, because after all who was Dalton Trumbo? It was only much later we learned he’d also written Spartacus, and by then gladiators had lost some of their shine, at least for me. But Roxanna hated to let Swede down and said that once, talking of movie stars, Lee Van Cleef had showed up. Keep in mind Van Cleef was still several years from his famous badman roles opposite Mr. Eastwood—in fact, Mr. Cawley almost didn’t know him but had screened The Big Combo just a few weeks before. Van Cleef wasn’t threatening in person and as he was vacationing at a mountain cabin seemed relaxed and content. He came for a showing of Tarzan’s Savage Fury. After the movie Mr. Cawley invited Van Cleef for dinner; Roxanna remembered he wore a lavender shirt and a string tie and didn’t think much of Lex Barker—as Tarzans went he was no Johnny Weissmuller.
To this bit of talk Dad added nothing but leaned back in a ticking-covered chair with his hands clasped behind his neck and his legs crossed as though at home. You could see he knew zero about Spartacus or the great screenwriter Trumbo or, for that matter, Lee Van Cleef, and you could see that his ignorance in these matters worried him not at all. Roxanna Cawley was talking to us in a warm fashion we couldn’t have guessed at when we pulled in for gas. To Dad—so long without his wife—the particular formula of meal, woman, and conversation must have seemed like a favorite hymn remembered. I’m ashamed to recall thinking it was too bad Roxanna Cawley was not lovely. I recall believing if she were only beautiful she would somehow come to spend the balance of her life entertaining us in just this way. Wrapping us in just this sort of comfort. My selfishness should no longer surprise you. Rather, the surprise might be that I thought of Dad at all; for it came to me that he was regularly alone after Swede and I went to bed at night. That he would one day be alone when we’d gone away. I watched Dad lean back shuteyed in his chair, looking tired and pleased. We were warm, finally, and I rose to the window, where hard snow was spatting against the glass.
“Reuben,” Dad said, “how’s the breathing?”
“It’s okay.” Boy, I wished he hadn’t mentioned it in front of Roxanna.
“Sounds a little ropy,” he said.
“I’m tired. Can I go to bed now?” I asked, aware Swede would view this as betrayal.
“Of course. I’ll be up soon too. Go on, you two.”
I dreamed a devilish little man came and stole my breath. He stepped through the door with a skin bag strung limp over his shoulder and with dispassionate efficiency crouched back and slugged me in the stomach. Such an incredulous exhale! And so complete; not a wisp of air remained. In that agonized vacuum I rolled my eyes upward and beheld the stranger tying up the bag with a leather thong. He had the opening squeezed shut in one fist and was throwing half-hitches around it and yanking them tight. Now the skin bag was stretched and seamed. It was barrel-sized and taut as a blimp. Inside it was all my breath. The little man crouched again and looked at me closely. He was a pale one, a horror. Years later I would describe him to Swede and she would point him out to me, or his close cousin, in a book containing the works of Francisco Goya. When he straightened and went out the door with the taut bag on his shoulder, I saw that my breath was gone. Anyone would panic. I thrashed and lurched and arched my back. On waking I saw Dad kneeling bedside, holding my upper arms; I heard Swede crying distantly; someone I couldn’t see was thumping my back. I’d never felt such thumps; they were like car wrecks. But I got a little breath back, and with each painful thump a little more. Confused, still afraid of the man with the skin bag, I tried to tear loose; in my perplexity I thought it might be he who was socking my back. You don’t emerge from these episodes thinking clearly. I managed to turn enough to glimpse Roxanna Cawley in a flannel nightgown hammering my corporeal self with the strictest resolve. It was a convincing sight. In fact I felt quite rightly convinced I would live through the night. Dad continued to hold me in place. It was a joyous bruising that bit by bit knocked glue from my lungs. I pictured it coming away in gobs. You need to understand Roxanna was hitting me with the flat of her hands, not her fists, but even so it felt like Sonny Liston was back there dealing it out. I’ll bet she stayed with it twenty minutes. She was panting hard when she stopped. She sat beside me on the bed while Dad asked the usual questions. Yes I was better. Yes I was still wheezy. Yes I thought steam might help. Roxanna asked if she should go heat some water and Dad said to put some baking soda in it and a little white vinegar if she had it. Before leaving she bent and put her cheek to mine. Her hair was in a single thick braid and moist coils of it had come free—they clung to my face as she pulled away.
Next morning all geography lay snowbound. Roxanna’s gas pumps stood hipdeep. The road was an untried guess. Maybe two feet of snow had fallen, or maybe six, you couldn’t say. The wind had whipped it into dunes and cliffs. It was a badlands of snow.
Swede’s bed was empty. I hollered for her even while realizing the whole house sounded empty. Crossing the hall into Dad’s room I heard muffled scrapings and ran to the window. Sure enough, all three of them were out back. The sun was out so hard on the snow I could barely look—it was like we lived on the sun. Dad and Roxanna were clearing a wide path to the barn. They w
ere just finishing. Now Roxanna and Swede were heaving at the big square barn door, trying to slide it open.
