by Leif Enger
I dreamed Susannah was there and laughing. In the dream I’d made some appalling error and kept confessing and confessing, yet she refused to recriminate and would only laugh and suggest we go enjoy a nice picnic.
When I opened my eyes a massive snapping turtle lay relaxing not twenty feet away. Redstart would’ve been impressed—this brute was six times the size of our Cannon River painted turtles, with a ridged head and moss sprouting on his shell. He was also fearless to the point of disinterest. Recalling Glendon’s advocacy of turtles I found a decaying perch in the shallows and offered it to the snapper on a willow rod. He didn’t move. I flung the perch away and prodded the turtle’s snout with the rod. Nothing, though his round eye was upon me, his patient and calculating gaze. I backed away—I had no experience catching snappers, plus my hands hurt. As I headed back to the johnboat my dream of Susannah returned and I ached with remorse and grief that I was not with her.
When Glendon strode in he had a calico bundle under his arm. He said, “Here we are then—go ahead, open her up,” and immediately set about making a driftwood fire.
The sack contained half a loaf of wheat bread, molasses, butter, a brick of castile soap in white paper, and a jar of turpentine. Two pale squash and a glossy orange also rolled out at my feet.
I said, “Someone was kind to you.”
He didn’t reply but tore off a chunk of bread and opened the tin of molasses. His demeanor was businesslike and I thought he must regret my presence, a concern that faded when he poured molasses on the bread and handed it to me. It’s a better meal than you might think. By the time we finished, the driftwood had caught into a hot low fire and Glendon set a skillet over the flames. He sliced in butter and shavings from the soap. Seeing my look he said, “Don’t fret, this ain’t dessert I’m making,” stirring until the castile melted into the butter. When the skillet smoked he moved it onto the mud and poured in a little turpentine, stirring this mess until it thickened and cooled.
“Now bring me those poor soldiers,” Glendon said, nodding at my hands. I wanted none of his reeking homebrew but what could I do? Dipping it up in his palm he spread that combustible on my weeping blisters.
“Hey,” I said. Despite being warm from the fire, its effect was cooling. I flexed my cautious fingers—a few blisters did split, but the ensuing pain was clean and a sort of icy reprieve. “Hey!”
“Yes, what about that,” he replied. He picked up the calico and tore it in strips and wound it smooth over my hands, leaving the fingertips free.
“We’ll leave now,” he said, “but look, we can fish on the way,” pulling a coil of braided line from his shirt pocket, then a folded paper containing two fishhooks.
“Wait, Glendon—there’s a turtle up the shore,” I said. “A big one. He was there an hour ago, anyway. I didn’t know how to bring him in.”
“Whereabouts?”
I motioned upriver. There was a boulder on the sand shaped like a knee and the turtle was just beyond it.
“Thank you, Becket, good spotting, a turtle would serve us well.” He stooped to his pack and found a small sheath knife and a whetting stone. Whisking the dark steel back and forth over the stone he said, “You know, I’d lost track of the years since I took a thing not mine. Even that johnboat I bought off a youngster, the shrewd little customer. But this supper of ours, that medicine, these fishhooks—I am a thief again today.”
“I’m sorry. It’s on my account.”
“No, it’s what I always was.” With a pained smile he added, “It just weighs more, this time around.”
4
How much do you know of snapping turtles? Redstart knew a lot. They might reach a hundred pounds and a hundred years old. Their beaks and their wills are adamant: Once clamped on something, such as your heel, not even death will pry them loose. Redstart’s friend Clive Hawkins once killed a snapper by removing its head with a crosscut saw, and it still walked away and made it nearly half a mile to the river before it stopped. Butchering that stubborn pilgrim they found a Chippewa arrowhead embedded in its shell—a scrawny Hawkins boy must’ve seemed like no adversary at all, at least until that saw blade appeared.
So I was impressed when Glendon staggered into our tatty camp with the snapper alive and profoundly offended. He had it upside down by the tail. The turtle bent its neck this way and that to get its bearings. I’m sure the brute weighed sixty pounds.
“I thought you were going to kill it,” I said, when he dropped the snapper on the sand by the johnboat.
“I was, but it’s hot,” he pointed out. “As soon as we kill it we have to eat it; otherwise it’ll turn.”
The turtle poked its head up, sighted the river, and made three or four inches of getaway before Glendon stepped on its tail. He said, “Where do you think you’re going, uncle?”
That’s how we ended up sharing our slight johnboat with a snapper as broad as a barrel. Glendon heaved him up front and barricaded him there with half a dozen melon-sized stones. The turtle slewed around and tried getting up the sides, finally backing his tail into the bow and watching us resentfully.
“I’ll row,” said Glendon.
It was good of him to spare my hands, but the new arrangement wasn’t comfortable. The snapper forward meant I had to share the stern of the boat with Glendon’s pack and bedroll. Also there was a small leak; I had to keep repositioning the gear to keep it dry. By moonrise I was sitting in an inch of brown water, despite dedicated bailing with a tin cup.
I said, “We are not getting quickly to Mexico this way.”
“I was thinking that,” Glendon replied.
“At the next town we might find a car,” I suggested.
“That’s enticing, but I don’t drive, Becket. I never learned.”
“Why, driving’s a pleasure,” I said. “Everyone should drive.” Susannah had taught herself; she had an instinctive feel for the shifting mechanism and loved to accelerate through gut-tickling lifts and hollows.
I said, “I could teach you in ten minutes—think how impressed Blue will be when we show up and there you are, behind the wheel of a car.”
“I don’t imagine that would impress Blue,” he replied. “No, I don’t imagine she’d be too much impressed if I landed a Curtiss airplane in her yard.”
It was hard to hear his voice so downcast. “How long were you with her, Glendon?”
“Two years, a little more.”
“You never told me why you left.”
“I wasn’t a very good citizen down in Mexico—not till I met Blue, at least. After we married I built her a swift dory. That girl loved water. Then a neighbor liked the boat and wanted one too, so I made another and traded him for a couple of cows. That’s how it went. Two happy years, Becket.”
He’d been sculling steadily along but now missed the water with his right sweep and stopped a moment to recover. He said, “One day a man rode up and looked at our little casita. He sat on his horse a long time, looking. Then he rode away. Next day he was back knocking on the door. I stayed in the hall. He told Blue he had a job for me, but she said I wasn’t home. When the man left, I told her he worked for the provincial or even the central government and when he came back the conversation would not be about a job.”
“So you took off? You just left?”
He said, “I was afraid.”
“I bet she’d have gone with you.”
“Yes, she would’ve,” he agreed. “She wanted to go—we had quite a battle over it. Of course I couldn’t jeopardize her that way.”
“Didn’t you jeopardize her by leaving?”
“Either course was evil. I judged things would go easier for an abandoned wife than a complicit one.” Glendon picked up his pace with the oars. “I promised I’d send for her. She let me take her little dory, and I left in the middle of the night.”
“Was that the last time you saw her?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “Now you bring it up, Becket, it seems I am still in the jeo
pardizing business. Witness yourself, innocent as a tot, yet fleeing the law with me.”
He had a point, though I was somewhat affronted by his tot comparison. I was about to take issue when there came a forceful scraping sound. Glendon flailed and we heeled badly—my neck hit the transom and my feet were in the stars.
“Did we hit bottom?” I cried.
“No, it’s the turtle.” It had managed to crawl up over its rock fence and had tumbled into the midsection of the boat, where it scuffed about as if to bash the planks loose. “Where is he? I can’t see him!”
“Put him over the side and be done with him,” I shouted, over the thumping turtle.
“No—he’ll feed us for days.” Glendon had found the snapper with his oar and now, night-blind as he was, reached down and got it by the tail. “Here, help me block him up.”
Quite gently he set the turtle back in the bow while I crawled forward and rebuilt the barrier.
“Poor bugger,” Glendon said. “Poor old uncle. Listen how quiet he’s got, Becket. How awful he feels. You were never in jail, I suppose.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, it ain’t any good. You don’t ever wake up and say to yourself, What a pretty day, I feel good today. No,” he reflected, “a jail ain’t nothing but a collection of corners.”
5
We struck no town that night and laid up at dawn on a sandy shore under a cottonwood tree. The tree would’ve provided superior shade, but by noon the sky turned to funeral wool and November came hissing through the grass. There are people who “predict” the weather, but on the Great Plains these are a fragile and disappointed little group. Glendon opened his kit and threw me a knitted sweater and donned an oilskin himself. We dragged the boat to high ground and knocked a few dead limbs off the cottonwood.
“Becket, I’m hungry. Go kill the turtle.”
I must’ve looked blank.
“Stick this branch in front of his nose. When he takes hold, pull him out of the boat. Pull his head as far out as you can and cut it off.” He handed me his knife.
“My hands are still pretty bad,” I said, despising my faint heart.
“I rowed us all night, I guess you can kill an old turtle,” he replied. His voice had a grouchy rasp I hadn’t heard before.
I returned to the johnboat. The snapper appeared relaxed. Warily I held out the stick, which he refused to notice.
“He won’t bite,” I called out.
“Tap his beak, that’ll fetch him.”
I tapped away but the turtle just blinked and drew his head into his cave.
“He isn’t coming out.”
Glendon came over and gave the snapper an admiring look. He said, “You been reading our mail.” To me he added, “Good luck, Becket,” then off he went and started digging an earthen pit under the cottonwood tree. He had in mind to build a fire in the pit and drop in the turtle and roast him slowly in the shell, along with the squash. We’d had nothing since the bread and molasses—in this cold breeze a roasted turtle sounded like Christmas dinner.
I laid the tip of the stick against its beak and tried to pry it open but nothing. You don’t expect restraint from these beasts, you expect reflexive violence. Instead this snapper refused to snap and in fact looked canny and patient.
Soon enough Glendon had the pit dug and a vigorous fire inside it. He came over to watch my futile coaxings.
“You sound impatient. Look at his face—he doesn’t like your tone,” Glendon said, amused.
“If that was my toe instead of a stick, he wouldn’t show such control,” I complained. “Why don’t we just put him in the fire and cook him alive? That’s what they do with lobsters.”
But Glendon was displeased. “Cook him alive? Look at him. He’s probably older than me. It would be impertinent.”
“Well, you kill him then. I tried, and he won’t come out.”
“Cook him alive—for shame, Becket.”
This attitude of Glendon’s struck me as impractical and possibly priggish. We were hungry. It was cold. Nobody ever thought it was impertinent to steam a lobster.
Climbing the riverbank I walked out onto the meadow where an upstart wind whipped the grasses into confusion. I didn’t look at the sky until a cold gust struck my face—only then did I see the black storm front riding in from the west. It rolled forth in a toppling motion. Even over the wind I could hear the sizzling noise of water striking earth.
I turned and bolted, reaching the river with the first raindrops. They spanked the weeds, tore leaves off the cottonwood. Determined to cook something, Glendon had thrown the squash on the coals and covered the pit with dirt; without a word between us we turned the boat upside down and crawled under. The turtle was in there too, and together the three of us watched the rain turn to hail. It began as fingertips but changed to knuckles and fists. Amid this deafening rumpus the turtle decided to escape. Forward he plowed—the gunwale lifted against his ridged back, hailstones thumped his mossy shell plates. I caught Glendon’s eye as the snapper moved out into the storm. Neither of us tried to stop him.
6
Luckily for the boat, it only hailed about ten minutes. Not many vessels could’ve stood up to more than that—some of those hailstones were as broad as my hand, and they fell in bunches. Peering out from under, all the land we could see turned white in a hurry. Even the river was lathered in the churn inflicted by that storm; the turtle left a dirty track through the ice as it shambled away, but that was quickly covered.
When the hail ended the rain resumed, a soothing noise after that unseemly pounding. I actually dozed awhile. When I crept out later, the smaller hailstones had all melted and the large ones lay shrinking in their craters.
Glendon sat under the cottonwood on the only dry patch in sight. Pale smoke drifted up from the mound where he had covered the fire. I could smell the squash cooking in the earth—my stomach lurched with desire.
“Look here, Becket,” said my friend.
Next to the mound, almost on top of it, lay the snapper. His feet were withdrawn but his head was extended and he looked curious and stately.
“What’s he still doing here?”
“I guess he likes the warmth,” Glendon replied. He took his knife and uncovered the two squash. They were ruddy from cooking and steamed when he pierced their skins. We still had a little butter and Glendon produced the salt in a milk-glass shaker. He said grace in an apologetic voice, given he had stolen the entire meal; my fingers shook while I ate, and my eyes watered, and it was a remarkable supper right down to the seeds and the ropy core. I even considered eating the rind, but noticed Glendon laying his rind on the earth in front of the turtle. Instantly its beak flashed out—it wasn’t faster than sight, as people will say, but it was certainly quick as a flinch, and the report of that beak popping was impressive. In seconds our snapper bolted the squash rind, then retracted his head as if to contemplate its effects.
“Goodness,” Glendon said—we were both a little shaken. “What do you suppose he’s thinking about in there?”
“Fingers.”
“I had the same theory,” he replied. “Look at him, he’s disenchanted. Well, go on and feed him that rind, Becket—let’s see if he’ll do it again.”
Glendon changed my bandages before we left and was pleased to see no infection; my fever had disappeared as well, and I didn’t protest when he suggested I take a short stint at the oars. The only protest I did make was on behalf of the turtle, who, I argued, had earned a reprieve. Also, I confessed to a growing feeling it might be ill luck to kill the brute, even if I proved clever enough to do the job. But Glendon only laughed, saying, “Nonsense, he was lucky today. We’ll eat him tomorrow.” So we made a bed of sand in the bow for the turtle to sit on and poured water on the sand so he would be cool and content. At dusk we shoved off under emerging stars.
Rowing went better this time. I’d gotten used to the motion of the johnboat and the length of the oars, and the bandages guarded my palms fro
m further damage; after an hour or so Glendon said I’d done enough and we switched places. I straightaway fell asleep in the stern.
I woke to Glendon’s voice. He was talking—praying, it turned out, though I couldn’t tell at first since he didn’t speak in the fraught inflections common to prayers, at least my own. It was more as if he were relating to a good listener the details of his day. He told in brief about the farmhouse he had robbed for our supper, its drafty construction and air of paucity. He told of peering round a corner to see the farmer close by in the field, encouraging his draft horses in a clay-dust haze. In Glendon’s tone were sadness, acceptance, and finally humor—this as he told about the snapping turtle escaping in the hailstorm, only to take warmth and comfort from the very fire on which we’d planned to roast him. The irony made me chuckle.
“Monte, you’re awake.”
This may have been the first time he used my Christian name.
“Yes. I’m sorry to eavesdrop. I didn’t know you were devout,” I said.
“Oh, no.” He was much entertained. “Devout, ha! Nope, I got no such claim. Though I did get myself baptized, once upon a time.”
“As a boy, I suppose.”
“No, later, when I was staying at Hole in the Wall,” he said, so offhandedly you might’ve thought it was a colorfully named hotel and not the infamous lair of Cassidy and Longabaugh plus dozens of less likable bandits. “I know what you’re thinking,” he added, eyeing me.
“Hardly a spot for church doings,” I admitted.
“That’s true, and the fellow who dipped me was hardly church material. Crealock was his name; he’d been a thief, then a preacher, then came back around to thief again. But he’d preach sometimes at the Hole. He had a firm grip on Hell, yes he did.”
