by Leif Enger
Swede during this had been perched edgewise waiting to jump in. “I knew he didn’t get shot in Bolivia. It was a lie the whole time!”
“Yes, you can imagine how it pleased Uncle Howard. He felt bad about not offering Butch better hospitality, but he’d got his commission—”
“—and the train was imminent,” said Swede.
“Yes, there was no question of his not going,” Roxanna said, though she added how her great-uncle, when old and stove up, confided that he’d come about one whisker from chucking the U.S. Army and going off with Cassidy and likely would’ve done it had Butch just said the word.
“He should’ve!” said Swede.
And that was the last time Howard saw his friend. Cassidy confided he was taking a new name, Jonas Work, because he liked the honest sound of it. He told Howard to look him up when the war ended, possibly in Kansas, where he planned to enter the windmill business. Cassidy’s eyes were lit: he loved windmills, loved to watch them spin. Howard believed him earnest but incapable of commencing the honest life. He said, Good luck, Butch. Jonas, Butch replied.
Well—wouldn’t you agree exclusivity is the throbbing heart of news? Who else in the world knew the real ending to that story? Who knew of poor Mark and Pugger, of ambitious Jarave? We swelled up large with privileged facts. Think of standing alone on the beach when the shipwrecked survivor slogs ashore with his great tale; think of uncovering among your papers proof you are the clandestine longsought heir of something.
“But he died in ’thirty-six?” Swede inquired.
Roxanna rose smiling, went to a glass-front barrister, and brought out a scrapbook. It had burgundy covers and black pages bound with a riband, and it creaked when she laid it open.
“This came to Uncle Howard in the mail. The sender remained nameless.”
JONAS R. WORK
In Reece, Kansas, on the ninth day of October, 1936, at seven o’clock in the morning, died Jonas Robert Work, esteemed by his community and honored by his country.
Mr. Work was fifty-three years of age. Providence had bestowed on him a firm constitution and strong powers of mind. He was a veteran of the Great War and a member of the celebrated flying corps in Leon. After some dozens of missions his craft was struck by rifle fire; Mr. Work landed safely but was captured and held in a Prussian stockade, bearing in his left thigh a bullet which would forever impair his stride. After some months he escaped at great peril to his life and returned alone to friendly soil.
Mr. Work arrived in Reece in spring of 1918, having received an Honorable Discharge and decorations appropriate to his heroism. He entered straightway on a career in business with the Aermotor Windmill Company, for whom he was a sales representative. It may be confidently said that the majority of windmills standing in Reece as well as many in the surrounding Flint Hills were sold and installed by Mr. Work. He was known as expert in locating water and in this capacity was internationally sought. Thus he traveled from Kansas to various parts of the world, returning always with a fund of adventurous tales to instruct and amuse the flock of youngsters who were welcome visitors at his veranda.
On the morning of his death he was completing repairs to a windmill at the Howell Watts ranch. Though Mr. Work climbed to the mill with his usual geniality, Mrs. Watts in her kitchen perceived a shout, peered from the window, and beheld Mr. Work lying at the foot of the tower. She reported that though his pulse stopped within ten minutes of the fall, the muscular powers of his limbs remained in force for eight to ten hours afterward, such was the power of his constitution.
A member of Grace Baptist Church in Reece, Mr. Work died in the hope and faith of his Redeemer.
We supposed over that obituary for most of the day, Swede and I—mostly Swede, whose vaulting imagination revealed mine as miserly and torpid. When I supposed it was Longabaugh himself who mailed the clipping to Uncle Howard, she said no, it was probably Longabaugh’s valiant sweetheart Etta, who’d caught leprosy in Bolivia and spent her remaining years alone in a shadowy house writing sensational novels undiscovered to this day. When I credited Butch’s water-witching acclaim to using a forked stick cut from a hanging tree, Swede pointed out such sticks only worked that were cut from a tree on which an innocent man had hung—all of which was beside the point anyway since Butch’s yearly trips abroad were no water-locating expeditions but merry reunions with Harry Longabaugh, the two of them playing mischief with European railroads and financial institutions and bathrobed polygamous sheiks. One more? When I supposed Butch’s glee at inventing a glorious military reason for his gimpy leg, Swede reversed herself and suggested it was no invention whatever—that he really had joined the army, gimp and all, piloted a frail Jenny over the German lines, and been shot down and imprisoned and escaped. “He always did want to fly,” she said. “Remember the expatriate balloonist?”
“What about his limbs?” I asked. That part about his limbs still being strong after he died was creepy.
“Well, it’s not like he got up and was walking around,” Swede said.
“He could’ve—chickens do sometimes.”
“Please, Reuben,” she replied, exasperated at this disrespectful likening, “people would’ve fainted.” She considered the matter. “I suppose he just did a few sit-ups, out there by the windmill. Butch probably did sit-ups every day—he was a little vain about his physique.”
When I thought about it, a dead fellow doing sit-ups in your yard might make you faint just as handily as one strolling. I imagined Mrs. Watts, running out to help poor Jonas Work—feeling in vain for his pulse—probably she was weeping at his side when he started sitting up! Probably she thought he was all right! At first, anyway.
“How many sit-ups do you suppose he did?” I wondered.
“Well, it says his muscles were in force for eight to ten hours.”
In that case, he was probably still at it when Mr. Watts came in off the pasture. I imagined him coming through the front door, all tired out. “Honey,” he’d have said, “what do you suppose Jonas is doing out there?”
Eight to ten hours. Boy, that was an awful lot of sit-ups.
The Little Man’s Country
JUST PAST MIDNIGHT THAT HUNCHED BUNDLE BEHIND THE BARN WAS ME, Reuben Land, in deep regret. Skittish, that’s what I was, and unnerved about walking out into the dark. Here all day I’d imagined the glory of this act—waiting for a certain heaviness in the house, slipping on pants, ghosting down to the kitchen, pocketing ginger-snaps, easing shut the door, crossing some hundreds of yards into Davy’s night—just thinking of it beforehand slid me into the company of heroes. Sure, I foresaw some nerves. Dark is dark. But I remembered Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry, afraid that night in the graveyard. And David Balfour ascending the crumbly tower with his uncle downstairs listening for him to drop. And what about Odysseus, rowing down to Hell with a canteen of blood to slake the shade of Tiresius? Odysseus was scared, and look at all he’d been through. Wouldn’t I, too, defeat jitters and win out for Davy’s sake?
Yet I crouched against the barn. It was a moonless night and you get little light from stars, even the old familiars of which I now took stock: big Orion with his belt and slung sword, the hound Sirius at heel; the Dipper and its strayed member Arcturus. All were as bright as I’d ever seen, yet the world stood black in the void. In fact—say—no doubt it was too dark for Davy, too! How would he find his way horseback among the hills? I cupped an ear: no stamp or whicker. Relieved, I took a few steps from the barn. Even were he not waiting, I had to go some token distance to claim the attempt. I counted steps: fifteen, twenty. You mustn’t think I didn’t want to see Davy; I was only weak and afraid. At fifty steps I stopped. The barn was a starless hump in the night. I said, “Davy, you here?”
Nostrils jetted at a distance, loosening my guts. Then a tiny shine bobbed and went out and appeared again and arced into a horse’s liquid eyeball and Fry walked up heaving through the deep snow. He pushed his nose at my chest so hard I’d have sat down if not for grabbin
g his bridle. I smelled the steam from his skin, the sulfur of Davy’s clothes. How dumb I’d been to doubt his coming! Then Davy laid hold and yanked me up behind him, not saying a thing, patting Fry to encourage his silence, and he reined the horse about and we walked up into the hills.
As earlier, we didn’t talk right away. It was too dark and the going too lumpy. I leaned forward against my brother’s back, my arms about his waist. I could feel Fry angling upslope and my own rear slipping rumpward, a cumbrous type of riding demanding on my part a chronic forward scoot taxing muscles novel to me. In this way we continued so long I began to wonder at our direction. It had seemed at first we were following the path I’d broke earlier; now it seemed otherwise. We kept rising. I craned at the stars, thinking to take a bearing, but the duck and plunge of Fry whisked them up and I marked only a blue disk at low declivity; were it Venus or Jupiter it would mean we were moving west. It was poor information but something to think about besides slipping off the horse. Davy still seemed unwilling to speak. I could feel his attention directed frontward, a material frontward straining as though he and not Fry were carrying us and the work consumed all he could give it.
Cresting a long hill we stopped a moment while Fry blew and stooped and clipped at the snow as though for browse. I let go of Davy to sit straight. I can’t describe what we saw. Here was the whole dizzying sky bowled up over us. We were inside the sky. It didn’t make the stars any closer, only clearer. They burned yellow and white, and some of them changed to blue or a cold green or orange—Swede should’ve been there, she’d have had words. She’d have known that orange to be volcanic or forgestruck or a pinprick between our blackened world and one the color of sunsets. I thought of God making it all, picking up handfuls of whatever material, iron and other stuff, rolling it in His fingers like nubby wheat. The picture I had was of God taking these rough pellets by the handful and casting them gently, like a man planting. Look at the Milky Way. It has that pattern, doesn’t it, of having been cast there by the back-and-forward sweep of His arm?
“Up, Fry,” Davy said. “Let’s go. Rube, it’s pretty, isn’t it?”
I was pleased—it was okay to talk. “Do you picture God tossing them out there like that or setting them up one by one?”
We were heading downslope, a more comfortable job.
“Are you waxing poetic on me now?” Davy said.
“No—I don’t think so.”
“Well, you’re waxing something.”
I shut back up. Fry was rustling along downhill just as though he could see. Presently the sound changed under his hooves and the air turned cushiony. It took me a few minutes to realize we were among trees.
Davy said, “Was it hard, not telling?”
“Nope.”
“Dad didn’t ask where you’d gone?”
“Nope.” Davy hadn’t any idea, of course, where Dad had gone. I’d wondered whether to tell him and now decided to wait. Roxanna might be entirely comfortable with Dad’s decision, but I wasn’t up to defending it to Davy.
“You get out of there easy enough?”
“Yup.” In fact, Dad’s absence, plus Swede’s absorption in the revealed history of Butch Cassidy, had made my exit a piece of cake. Swede after supper had gone to her room and shut the door, seeming so pleased I knew this was no fearsome pout. Just before bedtime I called through the keyhole. I heard her bound off the bed, tearing paper; then a few sheets from her tablet slid under the door—the latest Sunny Sundown. She had it going, as you will see. “I smouched some gingersnaps,” I told Davy.
“Yeah?” He was interested—probably hadn’t had a cookie in months. He reached a hand behind his back and I set five gingersnaps in his palm. Mouth full he said, “Got some left for you?”
“Yup.”
We rode through a treed valley where the snow seemed less and Fry eased into a smoother walk. I expected momentarily to get where we were going, to see some sign of Davy’s life—the glow of a fire through canvas, say.
“Is it a tepee?” I asked.
“What?”
“You and Jape. Do you live in a tepee?”
At that he pulled Fry to a stop. He turned in the saddle. “Rube, there’s one thing; listen to me, now. Call him Mr. Waltzer.”
“Well, sure.” I was taken aback. I wasn’t about to be too familiar with some grown man I’d never met. What did Davy think I’d turned into since he left?
“It’s a weighty thing to him, how he’s addressed.”
You know something? I’d never before heard Davy speak about someone else as though that person and not he himself were in charge. Even at home, even with Dad, he seemed to obey pretty much because he wished to.
“I’ll say mister.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“What do you call him?”
Davy turned forward. “Jape.”
Fry resumed trudging under the stars.
“And the girl is Sara,” he added.
The rest was a silent ride. Weary travel induces a kind of vacuum. Surely we climbed and descended many times, yet for me it was all a glide. My impression was of being pulled along, attracted, called. We came up finally into a saddle between two hills looking down at the same sort of fiery valley where Roxanna had taken us to picnic—a great deal less impressive, however. There was one main fissure wide as an automobile but glowing only in occasional patches with the cool radiance of a candlelit pumpkin. Flames showed from a few spotty cracks webbing away, but it wasn’t a place to make anyone think of Hell or Voltaire. It looked, I would say, beyond its prime, though no doubt someone less inveterate than myself would’ve been impressed.
Davy said, “Here we are.”
I saw the shape of a lighted window set well back from the glowing vein. “You built a cabin?” I probably sounded let down. There is something about a tepee.
He clicked at Fry, who trotted down whickering and was answered by at least one horse below. I kept my eye on the window. Then beside it a door opened and a man stepped out of it and stood straight and formally in the thrown box of light. We rode to him and he clasped his hands behind his back and looked at me as though I were money.
“Little brother Reuben,” he said. “It is my honor.”
“Hi, Mr. Waltzer,” I said.
He took hold of my arm above the elbow and guided me off the horse. Despite all I was to learn about this man, he knew how to make a boy welcome—that is, he took entire control in a way to make you feel older and soldierly. Hands on my shoulders he turned me toward himself, amended my posture, tugged at my coat, removed my stocking cap, and tucked it in my sleeve, where it lay without making a line, all this without a word; then he stood opposite me and again clasped his hands behind him. I looked round for Davy, but he was gone with Fry. Waltzer said, “Look at me, Reuben.”
He was of unimposing height, under six feet. A practical build, big up top, one of those men you realize why it’s called a chest—you had the feeling he had all the tools he needed in there and all in working order and daily use. His hair was dark and tied back in a short bob, and he had a high forehead and two rapscallion eyebrows—upswept, pointed, and mobile.
“Mm,” he muttered. Those brows of his scared me—they were like flipped goatees.
“Tired from the ride?”
“No sir.”
“Cold?”
“No sir, just my toes.”
“You mean to do right by your brother, I expect.”
“Yes sir,” I replied, remembering the ratfink threat I’d made to get here in the first place. Waltzer must know about that, yet didn’t seem predisposed against me.
“Hungry, are you?”
“I don’t need anything, Mr. Waltzer. Thank you.” But he wasn’t listening. His attention was on something else. He leaned down to me.
“If I were to tell you that those hills you rode over will be shaken to dust, and that waters will rise up in their place, and that creatures like none you can think of will swim in that sea—wh
at would you say to that, Reuben?”
He posited this as though it were imminent and as though I were alone with him in the knowledge; and so far was it from anything I’d expected, I didn’t even know to be careful.
