by Leif Enger
The distant way he said the boy made me wonder whether Lewis even remembered Hood, or whether he was thinking of someone else.
“An old detective, Charles Siringo.”
Lewis hadn’t heard of Siringo either. He seemed a little impatient with me for stopping. But then he must’ve remembered who Hood was, because all at once he remarked that he never knew Hood’s family, that Hood just walked in off the plains one day with a grin on his mouth and a wrench in his hand. He asked Lewis for nothing except a job; he slept, Lewis said, in an empty cooper shack at the edge of town.
“Was Hood Roberts his real name?” I asked, for this had been picking at me. Lewis smiled at this strange question. “His one and only, so far as I know.”
No one was living in the shack when I found it—there was nothing inside but a few corrupt hogsheads and dusty brown bottles and a dime novel entitled Tom Knight and the Banditti of the Grasslands. I picked it up. It contained the adventures of a rambling cowpoke who always got more than he had coming. I put it in my pocket, being careful, of course—those cheap little booklets seemed calculated to disintegrate.
The other prominent incident on that return journey was marked by a column of smoke, sighted as we rolled through New Mexico. People were exclaiming, crowding to the left side of the train. There was a lot of sweaty speculation about what was burning, though I had a queasy feeling about it. I’d seen such an oily cloud before. When we stopped at the station in Harkin, sure enough, word was Pancho Villa had swept across the border with an army of one thousand Mexicans and burnt half the town of Columbus to ashes. To this day there is speculation as to why he did it. It’s hard to say. But if I were engaged in writing history, I would set aside for a day the darling motives of appetite and politics; I would search out and knock upon the front door of Art Ravel, erstwhile arms proprietor, who once shipped five thousand fraudulent bullets to General Pancho Villa. There might be no answer, for I’ve heard Art is shy about visitors, but it couldn’t hurt to go knock.
I did build a second boat, you may wish to know, and a third, and several more after that. I’m glad to report people seem to enjoy these Dobie Swift Cutters, and I am usually behind in production. While dreading overconfidence I can say they are decently wrought craft, with solid joints and kindly motion, and I mean to go on making them; they seem quite alive to me, and if I can become a bit faster there might be a living in it. But there’s this, too: After a while, a long while, without writing a word, why, a sentence arrived from nowhere. Not a great sentence—actually sort of a ragged one, in need of paring. I searched around for a pencil and wrote it down, a sentence about a white-haired man rowing upstream through the parting mists of the Cannon River.
“What are you writing?” asked Susannah. She was painting something, I couldn’t see what.
“Just a sentence.”
She lifted her head, a daub of orange below her lip. “Read it to me,” she said.
Acknowledgments
I am surrounded by friends, kept safe by generous people. So it has been for as long as I can remember. Maybe being the youngest of four acclimated me early to a pattern of kindness; whatever the reasons, a surprising number of people have given me the benefit of the doubt.
Therefore let me thank Elisabeth Schmitz, who saw instantly to the soul of this story, and whose questions, confidence, and wit helped me do the same; and Morgan Entrekin, who welcomed an outlaw tale and saved a spot for me in the lineup. Thanks also to Paul Cirone and Molly Friedrich, whose counsel is reliably clear-eyed and practical.
Mom and Dad used to put me to bed accompanied by an album called Songs of the West, a loving thing to do. There is no sweeter sorrow than “The Cowboy’s Lament.” Moreover, Dad’s friend Hood Roberts allowed me to borrow his name; I wish he was here to judge the result.
Ty and John spent hundreds of hours in my writing loft, talking, listening, making me laugh—without their vigorous distraction, I might never have finished.
Finally, thanks to Robin, for hearing my pages with persistent grace. Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.
