by Leif Enger
“Can you write another book?” she asked, rather baldly.
I thought about it. Martin Bligh had not been difficult to write; whatever I wanted to do, that’s what Martin did. He rode in all weathers, flouting night and blizzard; he defied the wicked; he kissed the pretty girl. How hard could it be to do something similar again? I said, “Indeed I can.”
Grace’s eyes were unconvinced. Perhaps she saw what I could not.
Wanting to please her I made a hasty claim. “I shall write one thousand words a day until another book is finished.”
“You dear man,” said Grace Hackle. In memory she blanches at my naïve pledge, but maybe not.
“Jack London sets down a thousand a day before breakfast,” said I. Why do the foolish insist? But I was thinking of the modest dimensions a thousand words actually describe—a tiny essay, a fragment of conversation. “How hard can it be?” concluded your idiot narrator, lifting his glass to the future.
3
We didn’t see our tipsy oarsman for weeks—I’d have forgotten him entirely if Redstart hadn’t kept bringing him up. “I bet he’s a vagabond. Clive says they get a vagabond at the door every week.”
Clive Hawkins was Redstart’s most stalwart friend. The two of them would spit on their hands and shake. They were presently in agreement that vagabonds were the most alluring terror locally available.
“Vagabonds don’t have rowboats,” I pointed out.
“He might be a new strain,” Redstart said. “He might’ve stole that boat just before we saw him. He was laughing about something, remember?”
“Maybe he recalled a good joke,” I said—I am one of those people who can never remember a joke, on the rare occasion I feel like telling one.
“That wasn’t a joke laugh. It was a pleased laugh. He was pleased by something clever he’d done. He probably stole that boat. Any vagabond would be happy to have a boat, after walking for weeks and weeks.”
“Well, Red,” said I, but on he plunged into the imagined joys and dangers of the life unfettered. What could I do but watch him talk? We’d named him for the vigorous passerines so plentiful in the yard the day he was born, but there was never a songbird as energetic as Redstart.
One evening he returned from a long ride on Chief, his oversized gelding. He’d been gone since morning—not unusual for that boy. He strolled into the house hungry and self-important with a whippy weal on one cheek from galloping through the trees.
“Well, I found the old boatman,” he announced, as though it had been Livingstone. “I went down to the river so Chief could drink and I could swim, and here he came rowing. Standing up like before. He almost fell over. His name is Glendon and he lives in a barn.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yes sir I did.”
“Was Glendon sober?” asked Susannah. She was at work on a painting—we never thought she was listening while standing intent at her easel, but she always was.
“He might of been,” said Redstart, in a vague way.
His mother looked at him. “You kept your distance, I expect.”
I said, “Well, let’s have it. Is he a tramp, as you believed?”
“No. He makes boats. He made that boat he’s always standing up in. He lived in Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas and in Mexico by the Sea of Cortez. He’s coming here for breakfast tomorrow.”
It was a fair haul of information. I was proud of Redstart.
“Breakfast?” said Susannah.
“That’s right,” said Redstart, “so you both get to meet him. I guess it’s a good thing I went riding today!”
Susannah set down her brush and came around the easel. She had a little stab of burgundy on one cheek like a warning. “Did he agree to come for breakfast, Red? Did he say he’s coming?”
“No,” said Redstart, who ignored warnings of all kinds. “But I told him to come, so I expect he will.”
“Unless he resists being ordered about by fractious infants,” I suggested.
But Redstart was adamant. “He told me his name. He didn’t want to say it, but I tricked him and out it came. You know what happens, once you get a person’s name.”
“Nope,” I replied. “You’ll have to tell me.”
“Why, then you have power over him,” said Redstart.
4
It’s an old business, it turns out, this notion that learning a person’s true name gives you leverage; I have since found it in Indian and Nordic tales and I suppose it goes back like so many good ideas all the way to the Tigris and Euphrates. Nothing is new under the sun. Anyhow Glendon appeared in his white dory next morning about an hour past sunup. Our pug Bert saw him first and stood on the dock barking and slobbering. Bert doesn’t truly bark but says oof, oof, like a disappointed farmer. Glendon drifted up, putting his oars to rights while I went down to greet him.
“Monte Becket,” I said, holding out my hand. He grasped it and stepped up out of his dory and immediately let go like a nervous child. He was a short one, trim as a leprechaun and not as old as his white hair had led me to assume. He wore a long split-back jacket such as dressy horsemen used to wear, and he had vivid green eyes that might believe anything at all. I’d rather not say I smelled whiskey so early in the morning; nevertheless, there was an evaporating haze around our visitor. He nodded to me but said nothing and kept glancing toward the house as though it were a place of dread.
I said, “I’m glad you’ve come, and I surely beg your pardon if Redstart overstepped his bounds—he can be bossy. Come on up. Susannah’s made rolls.”
Glendon said, “What did you call that son of yours?”
“Redstart.”
“Aha, Redstart. Thank you, Mr. Becket.” And up we went, his anxiety flown off with the breeze.
The first thing Redstart did was lay claim on him—yes, it was Sit by Me Glendon, Pass the Rolls Glendon, Tell About Mexico Glendon! Both Susannah and I began to stop our imperious child, but the old fellow shook off these attempts and weathered Redstart with dogged grace. People ask, what was he like? Had I invented Glendon myself I could not have introduced a more puzzling guest to our table. He was formal in the way of men grown apart, yet energy teemed behind his eyes and in some ways he seemed a boy himself. He might laugh abruptly at one of Redstart’s childish jokes; he was pleased by the simplest plays on language; and, like a boy, he kept eating rolls as long as there were rolls to be eaten. To Susannah he gave all possible deference, rising whenever she got up for more coffee or frosting, saying thank you in reverent tones and with averted eyes. These manners endeared him to Susannah straightaway, so that she looked round the table to make sure Redstart and I were noticing how a gentleman acts. He gave his story in bright shards. Raised in Michigan, he had traveled west to become a cowboy, a memory that still excited him. He had been twice up the Chisholm Trail with herds of steers, had sung to them and swum rivers in their midst, and had a horse gored from under him during a stampede. Once in the Montana Rockies he had stumbled on a shady cleft where fifty hapless livestock had bunched up in a blizzard. The snow was still melting when Glendon found the place in July and he beheld a shrunken grimy snowfield with dozens of hooked tapers slanting up from it, the horns of steers growing rapidly into the sunshine like Satan’s idea of horticulture.
“Redstart says you built that boat of yours,” I said, wanting to get him off cowboying. He’d left home at twelve—already Redstart was realigning his own future.
“Yes, I love a boat,” Glendon said. No one made comment and he seemed quite willing to leave it at that, but then he abruptly added, “My wife loved them too. She believed they were alive in some ways.”
“Your wife?” Susannah inquired.
“Yes, my Blue,” Glendon said. “Arāndano’s her name—that’s blueberry, in the Mexican tongue.”
“But you are alone now,” said Susannah tenderly.
“Yes, we have been apart more than twenty years. She has another man, I understand.” Glendon looked suddenly as downhearte
d as if the estrangement had happened hours ago, instead of decades.
“Why, I’m sorry,” said Susannah, and we fell into one of those spreading defeated moments from which there is no right recovery.
“Well, I’ll be going, thank you for breakfast,” Glendon said, and this time he did not wait for Susannah to rise but was up and gone glimmering. Redstart scooted after him and there we sat, Susannah and I, perplexed.
“He’s like Peter Pan,” she whispered, which happened to be the stage play we’d attended on that first heady trip to New York City.
“Then I’d better go see him off,” I replied, “lest he fly away with our son.”
I followed them to the river, not really trying to catch up because Glendon appeared lighthearted again away from the house and the breakfast table and Susannah; he walked with his hands in his pockets, Bert rolling about his ankles, and he said something that made Redstart laugh and look at me over his shoulder.
“Tell one more western tale,” said Redstart, as I came up with them at the dock. “Just one more, Glendon, before you go.”
Glendon thought a moment, then with a quiet spark said, “I have been four different times on trains that got robbed, yet never lost a dime,” offering this tidbit as though it were a riddle.
“You were a train detective,” said Redstart. “You foiled the robberies!”
“Shan’t tell you,” said Glendon.
“You were a Pinkerton man!”
Glendon laughed aloud, saying, “I’m telling you nothing!”
Redstart frowned, then said darkly, “Why, you’ve got to tell me, if I say so—I know your name, remember.”
“Nope,” quoth the old sprite, raising his brows, “for you know me by first name only, while I have both of yours, Redstart Becket!” And stepping to his boat, he danced a short hornpipe of victory. Truly Susannah had it right, for he was Peter Pan before my eyes—shifting, magnetic, a neat invitation to the curious and the lost and the needy. He twirled a line and was adrift, and we waved and shouted as he seized his oars. The captivating imp! How could I know he was indeed to take flight, and very soon, and that it would be I, and not Redstart, who went with him?
5
Back to the thousand words for a moment: How easily they came at first! I always liked mornings and it was a simple matter to rise at five and scratch down my daily measure. Giddily I wrote a long manuscript about an epicurean shipping tycoon who goes witless like Nebuchadnezzar and tears off his clothes to gallop apeknuckle through the countryside, eating the long-stemmed grasses beside the railroad tracks. I thought it both moral and comedic and even, occasionally, daring; if it rambled a little, Susannah and the boys didn’t mind. A funny story! Yet when I mailed it away to Hackle & Banks, a young editor named Bat Richards wrote back to me with polite candor that this might not be a proper follow-up to Martin Bligh. He believed it was discursive, aimless—maundering was his admirable word. Bat hinted that Grace Hackle, too, had been disappointed in my Nebuchadnezzar tale; he wondered what other romantic, thrilling, and (he added) concise adventures were trotting through my mind. Meantime he had some good news: Bligh was into its seventh printing. Rights had been purchased for publication in England! A bank draft would soon follow!
I burned Nebuchadnezzar in a milk pail, stirring the pages with a driftwood staff, and congratulated myself on enduring pain in the service of art. Soon Bert trotted up, and I tossed a stick, and Bert chugged away and brought it back. In this way we played for some time; afterward I felt decently propped up. I had a new story idea and went in the house to write it down.
This one was about a boy who shoots two intruders in the dead of night and straightaway flees the law. I had it in mind that the boy become a dangerous western hero along the pattern of Tom Horn. His would be a life of wild horses, of slender escapes, of comrades laid in shallow graves! Then would come his arrest, his days of sorrow and despair; in the weeks before his hanging he would write his memoir as a lesson to youngsters everywhere who thought it romantic to “don the red bandanna.” I dashed off the first hundred pages of this project and sent them with a personal appeal to Grace, as I was still smarting over the snub from her subordinate Richards.
Yet Grace was not enthralled. Her reply agreed to “work with me” on the book though she believed it would take much editing. Frankly, the letter was a little terse. She confessed to having “flung pages about the room.” She said it was no Martin Bligh. If I was determined to continue “this undertaking” she would naysay it no further. There was a postscript, no doubt written later, in a softer mood. It contained a bit of news about the hallowed Bligh: Eleven printings and still rushing forward! Translations underway in Germany and France! Also, the eminent director D. W. Griffith was eyeing it for a moving picture! A bank draft would soon follow.
Well, I never finished the outlaw tale either—next to Susannah, there was no one I was more determined to please than Grace Hackle. She was a refined woman. It was disturbing to imagine her slinging my manuscript, goaded by my weak idioms.
I then wrote a breathless opening chapter about a man whose skin began to turn more transparent day by day. First he was merely pale, then indistinct at the edges. Gradually he could make out bones beneath his lucent hide. No one else could see this condition, which was both relief and misery; his wife loved him still, his children ran about with their noisy passions, but the man was vanishing, and his memory with him. He forgot his friends and his work and began to sit all day, aware of his bones and teeth and his gurgling organs. Poor Susannah! She wept reading this harrowing attempt, and then I went and got mad at her for it.
By now I had left the post office and spent a little money. Bad judgment, oh, yes, but Mr. Bligh apparently had “legs” and I was certain another story would come along, and the words to tell it with. We sold our unpretentious bungalow and took a big foursquare beside the Cannon River. I bought a horse for Redstart, Queen Anne chairs for Susannah, and a painted rowboat for myself. It was flat-bottomed and homely with leaky seams, and I loved it so much I would creep out past midnight and go down to the river to scull and bail and blink at the stars. Some believed the boat a mere trinket I desired having purchased a house on the Cannon. The truth, though I didn’t know it at the time, was opposite. I bought that house to get the boat. You are no failure, on a river. The water moves regardless—for all it cares, you might be a minnow or a tadpole, a turtle on a beavered log. You might be nothing at all.
6
A week after Glendon came to breakfast I rose before dawn and launched my porous skiff.
I was curious about him, that’s all.
It was a calm morning with no wind and a comforting primordial smell; a sizable fish swirled beside the boat, a tetchy bittern shuddered up out of the reeds. No one heard me leave except Chief who trotted whickering to the fence.
Some miles downriver Glendon’s barn appeared in the first rays of daylight. I knew it from his description: a plain Mennonite barn thirty feet from the river. No house on the place. No shack or corncrib. It had sooty little windows and smoke trickling out its tin chimney and a black fat-bellied pot slung over cold ashes in the yard. Two hardwood rails were set in the ground like train tracks from doorway to water’s edge. The square door was slid open and there sat Glendon inside, leaning against a stack of lumber. I nearly called to him but noted his tilted head and slack limbs—he was asleep. I beached the skiff on a patch of sand and tied up to a willow.
Normally a person wouldn’t presume to enter a man’s house with the man draped unconscious just inside the threshold, nonetheless I stepped in and slid the door shut. I nearly fell over Glendon’s stipply ankles but he didn’t wake or come close to it. There was a bottle beside him with an inch of smoky business in the bottom, yet there was something innocent in the way he slept. Maybe it was his big easy lungs, for his chest rose and fell with barely a sound. I leaned down to shoo away a mosquito on his cheek. He reminded me of Redstart, who could drop asleep on a flint pile.
The craft itself was beamy with a square undercut stern. Its planks were red cedar. From its shallow rocker this was a boat you could stand up in to row or to cast a fly across a stream. I bent down and put shavings to my nose.
When I looked at Glendon he was looking back. His eyes were yellow at the edges. A small-caliber revolver lay on the floor next to the bottle. I hadn’t noticed that before.
“Glendon, hello, it’s Becket,” I said.
And he said, in that mild voice of his, “Hello, Becket. I expect you’re here to help me work.”
He had me build a fire under the iron pot, filling it by bucketfuls from the river. Meantime he set up a long tin trough and stacked inside it a dozen lengths of milled cedar. He removed the blades from two block planes and shined them on a pumice stone and rinsed the blades under a hand pump. By the time he’d dried and replaced the blades I had so much wood on the fire he laughed and looked away.
While the water heated he handed me a block plane and showed me how to remove, by long angled strokes, curls of wood from the bow’s rough stem. Paying no heed to my apprehension he set me working downward on the left edge, himself working upward on the right; stroke by stroke the bow grew more fluid and proportionate while curls slid down like ringlets and dropped in aromatic heaps. I could have shouted, could have wept, but Glendon was all business and wanted that stem just so. There was no talking for many minutes. When we finished my forearms were covered with shavings and I felt the weariness of a better man.
