So Brave, Young, and Handsome: A Novel

by Leif Enger

  “Hold on,” he said, and found a pencil.

  “Susannah Becket, Northfield, Minnesota.”

  Even now I am not sure why I asked them to come west, why I didn’t simply board a train for Minnesota. Maybe I wanted Susannah to prove her interest in me. Maybe I feared that old invisibility back home, or a return of the tepid fugue. What I’d have given for a dream or vision now, like Glendon had of Blue—in wavering times, a vision’s what you want! Instead I confess to the most unrefined and selfish longings. I wanted to walk with Susannah and be solid and foremost in her eyes. I wanted Redstart to discover from its roots upward this place where I might be of use.

  By noon I was back at the orchard helping Glendon and Joaquin—we had plenty of work before us, if not the wholesale clear-cut visited on Pond. My shoulder was still damaged so I drove the wagon while they cut lifeless trees and bucked them into pieces that Joaquin lobbed onto the flatbed. The stumps we pulled with the aid of the tolerant ox, King Richard, who leaned into the chains without grievance. Any trees with living green we climbed with ladders and relieved of dead limbs. We filled ourselves with sunlight and sawdust and the agreeable tumble of Spanish flowing always from Joaquin. He had a passable store of found English but rarely employed it. He sang in the mornings, narrated what seemed to be personal epics in the afternoon, and by evening was down to complaints and occasional confessions—Glendon got sick of Joaquin sometimes, but to me it was all just melody.

  “He says he’s getting baptized Sunday next,” Glendon remarked, as we fed a bonfire. “He’s having a picnic with some Protestants downriver, after which whoever wants can get dipped. Look at him—he’s all keyed up about it.”

  Joaquin looked over and said, for my benefit, “Hooray.”

  “Aren’t you Catholic, Joaquin?” I asked.

  He responded with a barrel of Spanish which Glendon did his best to reduce. He had been a Catholic but couldn’t maintain it. At fifteen he quit confessing because he couldn’t look at a pretty girl without wishing to kiss her. Also, he couldn’t look at a man without coveting one of his arms. Both these desires were sins, yet Joaquin couldn’t stop himself—the moment he exited the confessional, a pretty girl would stroll by, or a man with two arms.

  “Now he’s past the kissing part, or so he believes,” said Glendon. “He’s getting pain in the joints. He would prefer not to die wearing his sins.”

  I looked at Joaquin, who was scratching his smooth innocent stub of an arm while maintaining a stream of syllables.

  Glendon said, “I am going also.”

  “To get baptized?”

  He nodded.

  “I thought you were baptized already. By your friend Crealock, at Hole in the Wall.”

  “Well, I was.”

  “Isn’t once supposed to do the trick?” I was teasing, but curious all the same.

  “It is, yes.”

  “And you’re thinking it didn’t take the first time?”

  He answered, “Crealock dipped me under the wrong name. I never was baptized under Hale.”

  “If there’s a God,” I said, “don’t you guess He knows your true name?”

  And Glendon replied, “If there’s a God, then I better offer it up myself. Here, Becket, could you manage to talk and work at the same time, do you think?”

  The telegram was waiting for me back at the house where Claudio had roped the Western Union boy into the kitchen for a game of cribbage and a pint of nectar. The boy was fourteen or so, tall and stooped, a red-haired gangle. His brimmed hat rested on the table with the yellow paper sticking out of the hatband.

  “Here’s your man,” Claudio told him.

  “Mr. Becket,” the boy said, handing me the paper.

  “Thank you.”

  I opened the telegram while the boy made to leave.

  “Sit back down, nieto,” said Claudio, and, to me, “Well?”

  “It’s from my wife,” I said. “I asked her to come and bring our son Redstart, and she has agreed to do so.”

  At this Claudio became sunny and began to stand up—he changed his mind and sat again, but his face retained its light. Meantime I noticed minor electric tremors in my legs and lowered myself to a chair.

  The boy said, “I better go, Mr. Soto.”

  Claudio turned to the boy. His tone was vibrantly instructive. “That you have delivered good news does not release you from courtesy. I am a dying man. You may leave only when the game is over and you have finished your nectar, or else when it is clear that I am winning. Sit down.”

  The boy sat. He looked uncertain and concave. No doubt he had had a long day.

  9

  When Arāndano heard the news she was slightly indignant at my proposal to stay with Susannah and Redstart at the lone hotel in Lury. A friend had stayed there once and suspected dicey margins.

  “Your wife will be disappointed,” she said.

  The alternative was to stay at the orchard. Besides the bunkhouse, already occupied, there was a disused sawmill built many decades earlier when the property was first cleared. I’d seen the structure at a distance through a reach of dead trees—a story of quarried limestone with a timbered loft.

  “The wood part leans, and the rain blows through it,” said Claudio, but when Glendon and I rode out to examine it we found the tin roof sound. The stairs and beams were white oak and solid, though some of the floorboards had rotted and dropped. The river ran a few feet from the limestone and the loft faced what must’ve once been the handsomest part of the orchard, the very hillside where Glendon and Joaquin and I had done the bulk of our work. Also, you could just glimpse a corner of the remaining healthy grove, the Rarotongans filing round the edge of a rise, though with their pursed leaves and warped trunks they resembled no one’s idea of deliverance.

  The mill became my mornings. Poised on joists I tore up what was rotten while Glendon drove the wagon to town for new. The bankrupt Pond gave us four sheets of virgin glass once meant for his own house and we spent a panicked few days fitting headers and sash. Arāndano even provided me with numerous pails of whitewash which I spread across the stickly walls, doing three or four coats in my anxiety.

  “What’s scratching at you, Becket?” Glendon finally asked. “Your wife and boy are coming before long. This place is pretty and snug; there’s the river just paces away. You ought to be merry, that’s what I think.”

  “I’m nervous about seeing Susannah,” I admitted.

  “Now, what kind of sense does that make?” he inquired. I guess it made none to Glendon, who in the name of atonement had braved an absence of decades. Compared with that, what cause had I to worry?

  And yet I did. Recently it often seemed as if Susannah were looking at the moon while I looked somewhere else—say, at a lake. If I saw the moon in the lake I believed we were looking in the same place, but let anything disturb the water and we were two people standing alone. We needed to look at something the same way, as we once had, or as it seemed to me we once had. I didn’t know how to do it.

  “You will know what to say when you see her,” Arāndano told me, while I fretted on their porch the next evening.

  “No, that is not what will happen,” said her husband. “No, Monte. You will be mute when you see her. Entirely lost for words! Speechless is what you’ll be.”

  “Contrary man,” said Arāndano.

  “I am never contrary. No. Because this silence itself will speak to her on his behalf. Words pile up like a wall, but quiet will win back her heart for him—can you see it, Becket?”

  He said this partly to tease his wife and partly because he really was a rhapsodist of the first order. He slapped his hands together. Good thing for him I’d come along, with my romantic burdens!

  That was the first night I spent at the mill, on a cedar-framed mattress borne up from the house by King Richard. Despite the serene composition of waxing moon, the Rienda ambling past and leaf gossip on a subtle wind, no sleep arrived, so I rose and went down the cool stairs. The l
imestone breathed like castle walls. Emerging to moon and stars I stood by the river watching a large mink play among the rocks. Redstart had trapped a mink the previous summer, after it pried into our hutch and made an untidy meal of Redstart’s docile rabbit—vengefully he laid traps for the predator who replied with glee, stealing bait nightly and defiling the traps, but Redstart polished up his wits and at last the mink misstepped. Redstart found it one morning afroth with pain. He had no choice but to kill it with a whip stick across the bridge of its nose. He cried into his sleeve most of that day, though later he skinned the mink and tanned the hide with gunpowder and salt and wore it like Davy Crockett.

  Moving through the maimed grove I glimpsed a light and followed it. Night confounds your compass, or mine at least, so I was surprised to stroll out from the trees and find the light coming from the main house. From a second-floor window—the bedroom, I assumed.

  A laugh of pleasure drifted down from the yellow square. Aware of my bad form I got a bit closer. Now came Claudio’s voice, portentous and wry, and more of his wife’s deep laughter. You never know what drama will spring from lit windows, but iambic pentameter was not what I expected. He was reading English poetry—farcical verses, it turned out, about a clever old manservant who ran the household while his lordship fled from aggressive women. It was funny, though maybe not quite as funny as Arāndano thought it was—I missed the ending, she was giggling so.

  There was a pause, a flipping of pages; Claudio resumed reading but in a softer tone. This was neither farce nor English but Spanish and sinuous. It swirled and drove. Here was poetry of different intent. It made me wish I knew the language and also made me realize how humid the night had suddenly become. Warm and lonely I slipped away. When I told Susannah about it later she didn’t reproach me for rubbernecking but only replied, “Those people know how to live.”

  10

  While awaiting my family’s arrival I worked with Glendon and Joaquin. Few trees remained, except those South Seas youngsters—for that matter, none could guess whether their robust health was owed to breeding or their fortunate placement in a fold or frost shadow in the hills. In any case they looked like the future if future there was. We examined their branches for blights and pawls; we pointed the crooked ones straight and tied them up with wrapped cotton. In the grip of these chores Glendon appeared to slide backward in time. His eyes seemed to regain some clarity, or perhaps he just learned his way around. His bucksaw procedure was efficient and tireless; when a bough gave way he stepped lightly aside and was busy on the next before it settled in the grass.

  In the afternoons Arāndano slung cold canteens across her horse and rode out to see our progress. Then we’d release King Richard, who never roamed far, and Joaquin would unfold the thick saddle felt he always brought with him and disappear into a bottomless nap, and Arāndano would sit in the grass talking to Glendon and me about the Rarotongans. She was ardent about those trees, and why not? Three hard winters had threatened her assumption that the orchard would outlast her husband.

  Several times I tried to leave the two of them alone, but when I made to disappear Arāndano got up also and I understood that to leave her with Glendon imperiled her need for propriety. Therefore I stayed put and watched my friend grow more and more agitated. One day he could bear it no more and, twisting his hat, divested himself right out in the open.

  “I’m sorry, Blue, I got no defense and ought not have left,” he said—with me reclining in the shade not ten feet away! He went on. “My reasons were shabby, we both know it. You were the only right bearing my life ever had.”

  Arāndano was abruptly on her feet. Much as I’d feared transparency I wanted some just then. “Why have you come now?” she said, with a kind of fierce blush. “Can I make you innocent again? How am I supposed to answer this?”

  Mortified, Glendon replied, “Why, I don’t know—you were always the one who had the language, Blue.”

  “You shouldn’t call me that. I don’t care to hear it,” she replied.

  About this time I slipped toward King Richard, who was off some yards away enjoying a little grass. An ox enjoying a little grass is like a large chemist standing beside you grinding minerals with mortar and pestle—I didn’t hear much, is what I’m saying. It would seem they talked guardedly of their courtship and marriage; it is strange to hear the word “devoted” spoken in bitterness. In a bizarre moment I saw Joaquin crawl out from his own shady siesta on two knees and a hand, fleeing his front-seat perspective.

  “You could’ve come back later, to stay or take me with you. Why didn’t you come back?” Arāndano said.

  There was a long silence while King Richard considered the anemic grass before him. When at last he dropped his head for a mouthful I dented his flank with a sharp stick.

  Glendon replied, “I was scared to death of prison, you see.”

  She had no reply to that; his simple admission didn’t gain him mercy but did reduce the temperature a little. Finally she said, “Of course you were afraid,” her voice yielding a yard or two of the high ground.

  “Claudio was better for you, anyway. Now you know that’s true.”

  “That is not in dispute. I am only trying to discover why you never returned.”

  “Why, Blue—a bandit’s of no value. I shot a fellow on a train. I couldn’t come back—to you or to anybody I loved.”

  Absorbed, I forgot about the ox. He picked up another mouthful and started again with the mortar and pestle. Of Arāndano’s lengthy rejoinder I heard only the color, which was one of rebuff. Glendon said, “I will be on my way tomorrow. I only came to apologize.”

  “You’ve done so.”

  “I thank you for hearing me out.”

  She turned from him and found the empty canteens and looped them up on her saddle. As she mounted the horse Glendon walked over and untied its lead rope from a limb and coiled it and handed it up to her.

  Grudgingly she said, “You shouldn’t go yet.”

  “How come?”

  “Because of Claudio. He isn’t strong enough to do this work.” She shrugged. “Besides, he enjoys your company.”

  11

  In fact, Arāndano’s current and former husbands got along so easily I believe it was rough on Arāndano. Yet soon enough Glendon appeared to sense he was in the way. He and Claudio might laugh and revise their histories over cribbage if she were away in the evening, repairing the books of a builder or blacksmith; but once she rode in, Glendon would get up to check on the horses, to make sure a burn pile hadn’t flared up, to work on this or that project. “I got a little project,” he’d say, in believable fashion, and it turned out to be true.

  Two nights before Susannah and Redstart were due, I entered the bunkhouse to find Glendon with a twig of charcoal, drafting up a boat on a sheet of newsprint.

  “Hello, Monte, see what you think.” He’d found six or eight oil lamps and scoured their chimneys so the light was adequate. “It’s the first I ever drew. Do you like it?”

  As a drawing it probably wasn’t great, but as a foretaste of beauty it was at least persuasive. The boat was a stretched version of the Dobie Swift. He’d marked the length at twenty-two feet, the beam at seven. There was a short raked mast set well back with a gaffed mainsail and an unfussy jib, a low square coachroof, and round portholes with the word BRASS penciled below.

  “See the tidy cabin? A fellow could just about live on it,” he said. Nodding toward the window he said, “Here’s the best bit, Monte. That old tack shed’s all but empty, except for a box of chisels and a block plane as thick as my elbow. And it ain’t twenty yards from the water.”

  “Have you talked with Claudio about this?”

  “It was his idea. I been to the sawmill in Lury—the manager’s an astute horseman, he’ll take Sparrow in trade for plank oak and cedar. What do you think of this sheerline?”

  When I left the bunkhouse Claudio saw me and hailed me to the porch for a glass of cold water and lime. I’d barely sat d
own when his wife stepped out. She was in skirmish mode. “You invited him to stay and build a boat? Why not a house? I hear he is going to the baptism Saturday, maybe he could stay and build a church!”

  Claudio laughed. “My dove, he has worked like a bond servant. You know it’s true. To offer him no return is poor treatment.”

  She answered this with a brisk good night and pushed into the house with such ferocity I remembered Glendon’s vision of her armed and horseback. Her husband was unperturbed, however—he felt better that night, his stomach was sound, he’d enjoyed a beefsteak for supper. He invited me to a hand of gin rummy that he won in five turns, then another that he won in eleven. He told me he liked having more people on the orchard—he’d once planned to enlarge the house to include Arāndano’s shrinking parents, but things turned a different way. His appetite vanished. His stomach retreated and reshaped itself as a knob of pain. His in-laws prayed for him diligently but moved in with Arāndano’s sister.

  Now Arāndano said, through an open window, “How long does it take to make a boat? A long time, I remember. Monte, how long will it go on?”

  It took me a moment to locate her, looking fretful and alone in the blowsy curtains of the window.

  “Well, he’s only got evenings,” I replied. “I suppose it will take him two or three months.”

  “Months!” cried Arāndano.

  “To build a whole boat—that’s not so bad,” said her husband.

  12

  We later learned the clergyman who’d planned to baptize converts was hosting a houseful of in-laws so contentious he received for his goodness a case of the hives, and that is why he didn’t show up. For most people his absence was no heartache—it was a lovely morning on the Rienda. The place was near a ford where the water thinned and riffled and zippy little trout gathered in the pools. Some dozens of orchard people and ranchers were on hand, with a few autos and many picnic baskets containing marmalade and brown bread and the occasional well-found ham. Everyone was in a fine mood except for the few folks who had actually showed up to get baptized; these had come in broadcloth trousers or other clothes designed to withstand a wetting and now felt disappointed and self-conscious.