by Leif Enger
“All right,” Dad said, “let’s take stock. Why exactly is Mr. Andreeson our enemy? Because he’s a bad fellow?”
“He wants to stick Davy in prison.”
“And how come?” Dad said. “No, quit that squirming. How come?”
“For what he did,” I replied eventually.
“Davy’s in the wrong, then?”
“He might be.”
A moment later: “You aren’t sure, though.”
I shook no.
Dad let me stew while he reversed the ratchet and let the trailer sink an inch. He checked the bubble again and returned to the jack and brought it up a millimeter or two, and while he messed thus Tommy Basca’s last moments reappeared to me, and the bafflement in his face as he scrambled bellywise over the floor.
“Okay,” I said.
“What?”
“Davy did a wrong thing.”
Dad raised his brows. “Yet you want him to escape consequences.”
“Yes sir.”
“Consequences represented by Mr. Andreeson, who becomes”—Dad caught my eye—“our enemy.”
This of course was the indefensible truth. It was also incomplete; having recently become acquainted with Davy’s new life and his compadre Jape Waltzer, I realized he hadn’t got away from consequences by any means.
But Dad said, “Look, Reuben. I want the same thing as you: Davy free and clear. If you like Mr. Andreeson better as an enemy, then keep him one. Maybe that’s your job as a boy—as a brother. My job is different.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m the dad. I have to heed the Lord’s instructions.”
I hadn’t any comment to this but felt myself opposite to the Lord in some way, which was worrisome.
Dad asked, “You remember what the Lord said about enemies?”
In fact I did remember some passages about enemies. Once, sick of whiners, the Lord caused the earth to crack open like an old bun and a crowd of them fell right in. And how about the prophet Elijah, slaughtering four hundred priests of Baal in one afternoon? Then there were the twisted fellows of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the time before that when God killed pretty much everyone in the world except Noah’s family. The Old Testament, boy, it suited me.
“Love your enemies,” Dad said. “Pray for those who persecute you.”
He would pick those verses.
“Rats, huh?” he said.
Davy came back that afternoon. I was on some errand and looked up to the hills; he was exactly where he’d been the first time, though he sat a different horse.
Again I didn’t dare wave. I did raise my hand to my eyes as though shading off sun. At this Davy turned the horse—a paint—and started working round the side of the hill as before.
That night he was waiting for me behind the barn.
“Hey, Natty,” he started, but I shushed him. Dad was sleeping in the trailer now; we couldn’t afford a whole lot of Nattying this close to home. If the nervous paint horse were even to nicker—
Davy gave me a hand and I slipped up behind him.
“Jape’s gone tonight,” he whispered, when we’d gained some distance.
To call this welcome news didn’t touch it. Glad as I’d been to catch sight of Davy, I dreaded seeing Mr. Waltzer again. Back in the house I’d gone to my room and at suppertime told the barefaced lie that my stomach was sick. Actually it was just empty, but I couldn’t go down and sit across from Dad with that man Waltzer in my proximate future. What if my pipes seized up? What if he tried teaching me to breathe again?
“He had to go pay a man,” Davy explained. “Some debt he owed. He won’t be back for a couple days.”
“Can you come home then—come home with us—since he’s gone?”
This brought a silence during which I remembered a salient fact: Davy wasn’t scared of Waltzer the way I was. Davy wasn’t his hostage but remained by choice. He called him Jape, for goodness’ sakes.
“Nope,” said my brother at last. “Besides, what about Sara? You think I should leave her alone?”
Sara was another fact I’d forgotten about. “Bring her along,” I suggested, hopelessly.
“That,” said Davy, grinning so I could hear it, “might be the worst idea you had in quite awhile, Rube.”
So we rode on. The paint horse took us up at a walk, round the first hill then on as before, through treed valleys and choked washes and across flanneled hillsides, none of which a person could honestly see on account of the clouds which had got between us and moonlight. I recall the quilted jolts of that ride, the radiant warmth of the horse’s rump and the sulfury odor of Davy’s coat, and I recall the black remorse that flapped down and perched on me as we rode, for this time I was sneaking out on Dad. You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.
What else exhausts like sustained deception? I don’t know how the true outlaw does it. In the coming weeks I was to make that ride with Davy three more times. Not once did I come close to being nabbed. Not once did Swede so much as roll over when I slipped past her door. One night skirting the barn I did hear Dad praying aloud in the Airstream—talking, laughing, asking questions of the Lord as though it had been you or me or Mr. DeCuellar in there—and I had to fight an ache to go straight to him and admit the weaselly nature I was fast developing. Yet even then Davy was waiting in the dark not a hundred yards away. I could hear the stamp of the paint, who seemed always a little goosey; now Davy would be leaning forward, rubbing the horse’s ears, giving to the animal of his own confidence; how could I not go out to him? I told myself we might yet reach a place where Davy would agree to come home. That the things I was learning at Waltzer’s table might be of value in my brother’s redemption. Also I had the common weakling’s fantasy, imagining myself venerated in some golden future—Say, that’s Reuben Land, who went into the Badlands at the age of eleven and found his outlaw brother. I thought of the admiration people like Bethany Orchard would bear me, the way they would seek my company, as if I were that pilgrim Sinbad come in off the water. Tell us about it, Reuben Land.
And indeed I did learn some things, many of which I’ve had to grow into.
“We saw old man Finch,” I told Davy, as we rode through the hills. “It was the day we left. He was out in the wind; he could just barely stand up.”
“Well, that old souse,” Davy cheerfully replied.
But after talking with Dad, it was plain to me Davy had done a grievous wrong. Don’t misunderstand, I backed my brother all the way. Yet it had come to mean something whether he felt anything like repentence. I pressed awkwardly in. “Couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.”
The paint horse stepped along at a bright pace. Davy said, “Don’t you do that, Rube. Don’t you recommend regret to me—it’s no help.”
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“Say I did regret it; what good does it do? I have to go on from here.” He kneed the paint to a quick trot; I grabbed his waist to stay on.
Another ride, we got talking about Sara.
“She’s not really Waltzer’s daughter. He got her from a fellow in Utah,” Davy said.
“Got her?” What was that supposed to mean?
“The fellow gave her to him.”
“So Mr. Waltzer’s like her godfather,” I said. We ourselves had godparents—August and Birdie Shultz, in fact. I’d often been comforted to think that should a boiler or something tip over on Dad at the school, we’d go live with August and Birdie instead of at some orphanage. Do you know how many times I read the Classics Illustrated version of Oliver Twist? Orphanages were a bad deal.
“I don’t think that’s it exactly,” Davy said.
“Well, fellows don’t just give their kids away.”
“This was five or six years ago,” he went on. “Sara remembers her dad.”
“Well—was he dying or something?”
We plodded ahead. This particular night was fair as you
could want, not cold, the sky glutted with stars, yet all felt stained, or soon to be.
“Was he dying?” I asked again.
“Far as I know he’s still alive.”
“He just gave her away?”
“Sara doesn’t seem to like him much.”
That I could believe.
“All I know,” Davy said, seeming way too dispassionate about it, “is that she is Jape’s daughter for now. When she’s old enough she’s supposed to marry him or something. That’s what he told me: ‘I’m raising myself a wife.’”
Raising a wife? I sat the paint’s rocking haunches and sifted that idea around. It was pretty abhorrent and only got worse as Sara came more fully to mind. I remembered her now in relentless detail: her red hair bound back under a kerchief knotted at her fuzzy nape, her tired voice explaining the accident with the pig Emil, her settled grace in serving us, moving around the cabin with a woman’s assurance. Now I’d gone and glimpsed her future, and it looked about as promising as Emil’s. It made me scared and hot.
“That’s the pukiest idea in the world,” I declared. “Raising a wife! Why doesn’t he go out and get one like everybody else does?”
Davy said, “Why don’t you ask him that yourself.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Nope.”
We walked a heavy fifty paces before I said, “So he does scare you.”
Davy pulled the paint horse to a stop. We were alongside a hilltop and the moon was just rising out. It sure threw a lot of light for less than half a moon.
“He doesn’t scare me,” Davy said. “I don’t think he scares me, Rube. I just listen close when he’s around.”
“You listen?”
The horse nickered and threw his mane a little.
“What for?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A sound to his voice. When he’s there I listen close,” Davy replied. He seemed about ten percent annoyed with me. “It isn’t the same thing as afraid.”
“Is Sara afraid?”
“Hard to say. Look there.” Davy pointed to our left. “See him? An owl hunting—look at that, you can see his shadow.”
“Mm, yeah,” I said. No, I couldn’t see him. Seemed like I couldn’t ever see what Davy saw. Nor hear the things he heard. It was the old story. I wondered again just what he listened for when Mr. Waltzer was around—Waltzer showing up in my mind just then, chewing a piece of red sausage.
“Hard to say,” Davy mused, as the paint got moving again—just in time, for the stillness was working the cold up my ankles—“but Sara’s real smart. She should be. I’d say she probably is.”
Afraid, he meant. But Davy was right, it was hard to say. You have to remember Sara had been raised these five years by Jape Waltzer and before that by a man degenerate enough to give away his little girl. She wasn’t accustomed to conversation as you and I think of it.
“Did Mr. Waltzer show you his fingers?” she inquired, during my second visit.
He hadn’t made a point of it, but I remembered—the index and middle fingers of his left hand gone from the roots up.
“He amputated those fingers himself,” Sara declared. Her eyes were an arresting unreadable green. Suspecting I was being made foolish I looked at Davy, who was tilting his chair back, holding coffee in an enameled cup.
“He did honestly,” Sara said. “He made me watch.”
“How come?”
“So I’d learn.”
“To cut off fingers?” Sure, my voice may’ve been a little high. It seemed radical instruction.
“No. It was my fault,” she said, apparently in explanation.
“But how come he did it?”
“They got mangled up in a chain.” Now that she’d started she seemed against continuing. She used short, reluctant declaratives. “We were towing a car to a lake. He wanted to dump it in. He had me driving. The chain came loose. My foot slipped off the clutch while he was hooking it back up.”
Talk about abstaining from detail. Can you imagine the mileage someone like Swede would’ve gotten from such a grim episode? Except, as Sara’d already pointed out, her penalty for the slipped clutch was being forced to watch Jape Waltzer take a hatchet and lay the ruined fingers across a stump. Perhaps the sight depressed narrative ardor. Urged, she revealed these particulars: Jape rolled his left sleeve to above the elbow. He laid the hatchet blade first in a saucepan into which he’d uncorked whiskey. Sara he stationed with paper sack on a three-legged stool next the stump. He took the fingers separately with two clean strokes, pausing to blow after the first but not cursing or making utterance. He sweated plenty but it was only sweat, not blood, nor did his hair turn white or his mood turn permanently for the worse.
He did make Sara dispose of the fingers, though. She had to pick them up in her own and drop them in the paper sack. She didn’t want to, but Jape told her to get it done before he was finished or there would be punishment. He was busy at that moment with needle and suture. She picked up the canceled digits and threw them sack and all in the crackling stove.
I woke close to noon short of breath and with reinstated fever—woke from a rolling-mutter sleep when Dad came in my room and took my hand.
“Let me hear you breathe,” he said.
I sucked up what I could.
“Pretty short, my friend. Let me get some water boiling.”
“Do I have to?” I was hot; steam would poach me alive. I could breathe well enough to smile and did so like some begging dog.
“All right, let me see if Roxanna’s got an aspirin somewhere.” He smiled back and I saw he was wearing good clothes: his suntan khakis and a blue chambray button-down. He was clean-shaven and his hair was combed back and he looked better tended than usual, though at this moment he also looked anxious, leaning forward to lay a hand on my brow.
“Dad, is it Sunday?”
“Nope, Thursday.”
“You’re all dressed up.”
“Oh. Well.” He looked at me as though I’d thrown him a hard one, which surprised me, as did his decision a moment later to swing away.
“Reuben, I’ve decided to court Roxanna. What do you think of that?”
I thought it was perfect, of course, though a foregone conclusion, even to a dull study like myself.
He seemed pleased with my approval. “You understand, as a courting man I ought to look my best.”
“You look great,” I told him. He did, too—his shirt cuffs were rolled back smooth and his hands and forearms looked ropy and fast, even at rest.
“All right then,” he conjectured, “what do you think of my chances?”
“Your chances?”
“Of winning her hand.”
That he would put such a question to me so directly—well, it sat me right up. I felt older, packed with consequence, and also cautious lest I say something dumb. “How’s it going so far?”
Straight-faced but with a shine back of it he said, “I believe she regards me respectfully.”
Well, he had to gauge his chances better than that. He had to remember how happy she’d been when he got back from his outing with Mr. Andreeson. He had to remember the press of her hand when he came in the door—I sure remembered it, and it wasn’t even my hand that got pressed.
“Oh, it’s more than respectfully,” I said, and started to tell about the exchange we’d had when Roxanna was making the pie—how Swede said she wasn’t going to let us leave no matter what, and Roxanna replied Neither am I—but Dad fended off this encouragement with a question.
“Did you like being here with her, while I was gone? You and Swede?”
I nodded.
“I thought you did. I’m glad.” He stood up. “I like it myself.” He really did look good, a clean-shaven courting man with quick arms and steady eyes. He had to know that Roxanna loved him already, but he wouldn’t have me pointing it out. Who could blame him? No doubt Dad had thought his pursuing days long over. Why sprint through such sweet country? How often does a man ge
t to use phrases like “winning her hand”? And it wasn’t just talk; he truly meant to win it. He set himself toward her like an athlete. He slept in the cold trailer and spent most of each day there. He stopped entering the house casually. He knocked for admittance. Swede and I missed his constant presence, yet when he arrived the very light seemed to change—like light bouncing in off June maples. And Roxanna, always lovely now, Roxanna at his knock would look around at Swede and me as though all this were as unnecessary as it was wonderful, and she’d go to the door and there Dad would be in his best clothes, suit coat, often a hothouse carnation in hand. He assumed nothing. There was a poor nursery west of Grassy Butte, an old man’s hobby, a little morgue of a Quonset greenhouse. A feeble flower is better than none, and it was my impression, for I accompanied him there more than once, that even that greenhouse became better lit and warmer for Dad’s frequent visits. The old man, in baggy brown pants and suspenders, liked to tell Dad he was nuts. That romance was a detour men took from whatever work was theirs in life. Dad agreed with everything in the most cheerful fashion, and the old man sold him flowers for next to nothing.
