Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  “Do it,” I said. I was making deals from one end of Hinton, Oklahoma, to the other.

  I drove back to the motel and bribed my daughter off the bed and into the Ronniemobile with the promise of soft-serve ice cream from the Sooner Superette. Amos came along for the ride and fell in love with the spacious velour backseat. Several people waved to us on our short drive to the bank on the square and we waved back.

  There we found Elbert Isley at his clerk’s window, a smiling grandfather who used my Visa card to debit eleven hundred dollars from my account. He counted out eleven mint-new hundred-dollar bills and showed us the clever anticounterfeit features on the new Franklin bill. He said some people didn’t care for them because they looked like Monopoly money.

  “Say,” he said, “y’all are the folks broke down from New England, aren’t you?” Word clearly traveled at the speed of an elderly Town Car in quiet Hinton, I thought, not denying it. “I love New England,” he went ahead. “Particularly Boston. My grandson Kevin is going to Harvard this year. He’s a wrestler, quite a young man. We’re very proud of him. I wish I could go with him. My wife and I were in Boston last year and met the nicest people. They say people in Boston are, you know, kind of rude. But we didn’t find that to be the case at all. In fact, we got lost tryin’ to get to Fenway Park and these nice people showed us not only where to park for free but also helped us get across the freeway.”

  “You need help to survive freeways in Boston,” I agreed with him.

  He stopped counting and leaned forward to whisper. “I really do love Boston but I have to say some of the drivers there leave a bit to be desired. If you know what I mean.”

  I nodded sympathetically and explained that we were really from Maine and told him how people from Maine sometimes called drivers from Boston “Massholes” due to their aggressive driving habits. Elbert smiled and blushed. “Having said that,” I added, “I love Boston, too. It’s my favorite big city in the world. Beautiful. Cultured. A regular shining city on a hill.” But put the mildest-mannered Bostonian brahmin behind the wheel of a car or in the cheap outfield seats at Fenway Park, I said, and he turns into a leather-lunged roadie for Sweaty Nipples.

  Elbert smiled. I realized he’d probably never heard of Sweaty Nipples, but at least he’d heard of Maine.

  As we had time to kill, I asked Elbert what sights we shouldn’t miss in Hinton and he said we really ought to see Red Rocks Canyon and the Hinton Historical Museum. There was a man who raised miniature ponies and if we were around till the weekend, he said, we could come visit the Pentecostal church Elbert pastored on Portland Avenue in Oklahoma City. I thanked him and said we just might do that. I congratulated him on his grandson’s success and thanked him for the new Ben Franklins.

  “Dad,” Maggie hissed as we left the bank, “I can’t believe you used a swearword in front of a minister.”

  We tooled out to see Red Rocks Canyon, which turned out to be a marvelous mini–Grand Canyon with fifty-foot-high red rock walls, several attractive campsites, a community swimming pool, and a fishing pond woefully low from the drought. The pool was already closed for the summer but we swung on the nearby swings for a while and played Beatle Challenge lying on our backs in the grass beneath the shade of a large oak tree.

  “Thanks for writing me that letter,” Maggie said.

  “My pleasure. What did you think?” I suppose I was trolling for a compliment about the pearls of wisdom I’d laid at her feet. She’d asked for a letter and I’d given her the Magna Carta of fatherhood. Suitable for framing.

  “Well, it’s kinda long. Do I have to read the whole thing?”

  “Nah.”

  “I want to,” she said, using her fingers to bracket a cloud floating overhead. “One thing I wondered, though….”

  “Hmm?” I felt a nap coming on.

  “You said life is frightening.”

  Ah, I thought. So she read the whole sucker.

  “I think I said it will sometimes frighten you.”

  “Is that true? Does it frighten you?”

  I thought about what she was asking. If I said yes she might think her old man wasn’t the fearless warrior every child hopes his or her father is; if I said no she might get the wrong impression that it was important to repress your fears rather than face them. In fact, a host of stuff scared me—cheap carnival rides, baby-sitters driving small cars, a fat letter from the IRS. It scared me to see an animal walking along the interstate or a bunch of nuns getting on the same airplane.

  The list of rational and irrational fears, if I thought about it, could probably roll like the credits of a Freddy Krueger slasher film or at least keep a good Portland shrink safely employed for the summer: Phone calls after midnight. Manhattan cabdrivers who didn’t speak English. My temper. Rupert Murdoch. The idea of something bringing harm to my children. Global warming. Chat rooms. Baseball salaries. That inexplicable numbness in my right middle toe. The coming death of Amos. Tall buildings. El Niño. My mother being alone. The popularity of Yanni. Freight elevators. Bosnia. Lost phone messages. Trent Lott. People who use “impact” as a verb. Hitchhikers who might be escaping prisoners. Fenway’s bleacher seats. Africa’s famines. I was a bit frightened—“anxious” was probably a better word—about the new kind of expanded family unit we were supposed to be upon our return to Maine, and worried about the number of droughts and what Japanese beetles back home might be doing on my roses. She probably didn’t need or wish to hear all this mind clutter, though.

  “Sure,” I said, “but you know what? A curious thing. The older I get the less I’m afraid of stuff I used to be afraid of—like being alone in the dark or getting old and dying. Maybe that’s because you and Jack worry about those things for me and I now worry about the stuff that frightened my father.”

  She turned her head in the grass and I could see she was surprised. I also saw she’d picked a wildflower and was holding it in her teeth. For a moment I was afraid it might be poisonous but then realized it was nothing to be frightened of. Just a wee Oklahoma dandelion.

  “What scared him?” she wondered.

  “Not much,” I said. “At least by the time you knew him.”

  —

  We ate supper at the Family Restaurant and chatted with several friendly people from Hinton, all of whom knew of our plight. A woman told us we ought to drive over to see Indian City at Anadarko and a man pointed out that nearby Binger was the birthplace of Johnny Bench, though he admitted there wasn’t a whole lot to see there. I asked him where the best fishing was and he said, “Normally the Canadian. But it’s dang near dried up,” and shook his head regretfully. “Best bet would be some of the farm ponds. Nice catfish round here.” He told me a couple spots.

  We left a nice tip and went to the Sooner Superette for ice cream. As we were coming back out to the car, a middle-aged woman with hair curlers peeking from under an aqua hair net stopped me and pointed to the Ronniemobile. “Say, how’s that thing runnin’?” she wanted to know. I told her it was running real nice, excellent air, nice smooth ride—I was beginning to sound like Rick England—a steal for somebody who really liked mustard.

  “My cousin Nora almost bought that car,” she said with a serious expression, and then cackled merrily. “Till she decided it was uglier than a cross-eyed baby.”

  Maggie plopped on the bed with a ring pop to watch Hook on The Disney Channel and I took Amos out for his evening constitutional. The sun was a bloodred disk hovering above Jim Seurer Field, where the Hinton Comets were finishing their afternoon football practice. I watched the final scrimmage and paused and chatted with a man whose son was playing guard for the team. He said his son was small but had legs like a bull, just what you need to play pulling guard. His son had his heart set on going to Oklahoma State but he’d have to grow something awful this winter and get through advanced algebra first. He was going to eat nothing but steak and potatoes. I asked him how the winters were out here on the Oklahoma plains.

  “Long and
lonely,” he admitted with a low smile. “Good time for puttin’ on weight.”

  The son jogged over, puffing. He was sweating profusely and appeared to have no neck, legs like a bull. His eyes flicked at me, then back to his father behind the grillwork of his face mask. “Dad,” he grunted. “Can I have the truck after practice? Jen wants to go over to Weatherford.”

  His father considered a moment, then nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Thanks.” The baby bull jogged away.

  “Who’s Jen?” I asked, knowing already.

  “His new girlfriend.” His father shook his head, lit a Marlboro Light. “She’s about all that kid can talk about lately.”

  —

  The next morning we drove to the Hinton Historical Museum and found Elsie Gray, the volunteer host, just opening up. She seemed to be the only person in town who didn’t know who we were and who hadn’t waved but she quickly led us on an escorted tour of the museum, a delightful pink Victorian house with white gingerbread railings. She showed Maggie old photos of the town, French bed dolls, and dresses made from flour sacks. “That’s what those of us who grew up out here wore as kids way back then.”

  Elsie was seventy. She could remember the Dust Bowl years of the Depression like it was yesterday. “The crops dried up; it was so blamed hot and dry and dusty you just wanted to die. My mother used to wet down sheets and hang them over the windows to try and cool off our place. People were leaving this place right and left but she was some tough lady and not about to give up.”

  Elsie’s father died when she was sixteen and her mother gave birth to her baby sister eight days later. “There were farm men round here who wanted to marry my mother but none of them were good enough for her children. That’s what she used to say. We were so poor we didn’t even know it and this land out here looked nothing like it does now. Talk about a desolate place. This was it—when that drought finished with it. There were no trees in sight. Just burned-out grass and dust. Edge of the world. You really felt for some of the Indian families, poor things, who had even less than we did. We lived on faith and scraps. I think that’s why Hinton has so many churches now. We’re so grateful. Nine at last count.”

  I asked what changed it, what brought back trees and people.

  Elsie smiled. “Funny thing, really. It was like a miracle. One evening there was this big gray cloud approaching. You could just see it coming. Guess what it was?” She looked at Maggie.

  “Rain clouds?”

  “Nope. Birds. Migrating birds. They just set down one evening and were gone the next morning. The rains came not long after that and a year later we started to notice all these little trees growing around town. Cedar trees and hardwoods, mostly. Those birds had come down from Missouri on their way to the Gulf. Their droppings had seeds in them. Those trees are huge today. People always remark how lovely our trees are. Those trees, I tell ’em, are our blessing from the Lord.”

  She asked if we’d seen Red Rocks yet and I said we’d seen and admired it from one end to the other.

  “You know, that was where the Dalton gang used to hide out from the law,” she said. “And, speaking of outlaws, I’ll tell you another true story.” I could see how interested Maggie was; Elsie Gray had a gift for keeping an audience. “My grandmother came here from Missouri, where their closest neighbor was Jesse James.”

  I saw Maggie’s confusion and interjected, “He was the most famous outlaw in American history.”

  “Maybe so,” said Elsie, “but you better not say an unkind word about Jesse James in my grandmother’s presence. She thought the world of him, as most people did who knew him. He may well have done the awful things they said he did but my grandmother said he was the soul of politeness and gentleness. He had superb manners and treated his wife royally and raised his children to be proper. He gave money to his neighbors, they say, and helped anybody who really needed help. Funny how history sees a man one way and the people who really knew him see him another way.”

  She led Maggie off to show her a turn-of-the-century bake oven and I wandered around looking at pictures of rawboned farmers and the Hinton of Dust Bowl days. I knew a fair amount about Jesse and Frank James and wondered if the militia groups that were their spiritual descendants and had possibly blown up the federal building in Oklahoma City knew they were attempting to lay claim to the same hard mythological turf as Jesse James.

  Products of the sectional violence that turned the Missouri-Kansas border into a scorched battleground, the James boys began their dubious ascent to fame in the last days of the Civil War under the tutelage of Confederate guerrilla fighter William Quantrill, killing Union soldiers, looting farms, and shooting at least as many innocent civilians as they did Yankees. After the war, other Confederates went home but the James gang turned to robbing banks and trains, sometimes handing out press releases to startled victims denouncing northern atrocities. An influential Missouri newspaper editor and unreconstructed southerner named John Newman Edwards portrayed the James boys and their partners in crime, the Youngers—Cole, Bob, and Jim—as American Robin Hoods, not ruthless outlaws but victims of Yankee oppression, creators of a “Chivalry of Crime.”

  Big-city newspapers back East quickly picked up the story and turned the James boys into living legends, the darlings of pulp novels and Brooklyn stage dramas. After an aborted bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, during which three gang members were killed and the Youngers were captured, public sentiment turned against the Jameses, who escaped and stayed on the run until two new members of the gang, Bob and Charley Ford, shot an unarmed Jesse dead at the Missouri home where he was living under an assumed name with his wife and two children. Six months later, a weary Frank James turned himself in to authorities, but a sympathetic Missouri jury refused to convict him. A rough-cut intellectual who read Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, Frank drifted through a succession of meaningless jobs—as a race starter at country fairs, a shoe salesman, a doorman at a strip joint, even a detective at a department store for a while—and finally returned to his mother’s home, where he ended his days by conducting paid tours of the house. Rumors continued to circulate that his brother was still alive—sightings of Jesse were reported all over America—and Frank became so worried Jesse’s corpse would be stolen by robbers, he instructed that his body be cremated and his remains kept in a bank vault.

  —

  I called Silent Sam later from the Sooner Superette. The sun was going down, Maggie was watching Babe, and teenagers were gathering out front to palely loiter in the dusk. He asked how the trout were biting. I explained that our fly rods were idle; we were waiting for an engine transplant and seeing the sights of western Oklahoma. Earlier that day, I said, we’d rambled over to see Indian City and driven back through Binger, birthplace of Johnny Bench. I threw in just for fun that we’d also met a woman whose grandmother knew Jesse James and told him that the citizens of Hinton still waved and that I’d waved to everybody in town at least once, some twice.

  “Hope you’re still laughing when you get fifty miles out of town and the engine blows up again,” he said. “That’s the oldest scam in the book. Sawdust in the driveshaft.”

  “Ye of little faith,” I said.

  “No. I’m a lawyer.”

  I asked how he was feeling.

  “I don’t know,” he said, dismissing his ordeal almost offhandedly. “Comes and goes. But my headshrinker told me a funny thing yesterday. I guess it’s funny. It’s kind of like a Zen question. If a man is walking alone in the woods talking to himself, and no woman is present…is he still wrong?”

  Sam chortled. He sounded like a man who’d either seen the light or made peace with his madness.

  “I get the impression you’re pretty happy out there in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

  “I guess I am,” I admitted. “It’s not every day you meet a woman whose granny knew Jesse James.”

  “Remember, though, that’s twister alley. Nothing in the world to match an Okie twist
er, they say.”

  “Oh yes there is,” I said. “A Maine divorce.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Either way the trailer’s gone just like that.”

  Sam laughed again. He liked our college-boy badinage. But I wasn’t kidding. Given his improved mood—or maybe mine—it seemed like the opportune time and place to tell him about my busted-up marriage. So I told him.

  He seemed deeply surprised and genuinely sorry.

  “Man, that’s tough,” he said with feeling. There was a pause and he asked if he needed to be worried about me driving into a bridge abutment. I told him I was fine, no chance of that, I had two kids to live for and a garden to get home to and a surfeit of trout and was strangely getting better with each passing mile though I couldn’t really explain why. Maybe our trip had been just the thing for what was ailing me.

  “How’s Maggie taking it?”

  “I thought she was doing beautifully with it. Then I learned she wasn’t. Now I think she’s just okay and happy to be going home.”

  “Yeah. Time and distance always helps.” He was quiet again, then cleared his throat as if about to make a summation to the jury.

  “It’s weird,” he said, almost offhandedly “I’m going to an AA meeting this Thursday.”

  “Good for you,” I said. I hadn’t known he had this problem. Perhaps it explained something. It was good to hear he was willing to face his demon. Maybe it would be good for his marriage, or at least his life, though both of us were apparently learning there was no quick fix, no magic pill you could take.

  I told Sam I had to run. I had to walk an old dog and go catch the end of Babe with a girl who wouldn’t be one for much longer. He seemed reluctant to let me go.