by Leif Enger
“I am glad to have company, it has been a long while,” he said.
“My son wanted me to invite you back.”
He smiled at the floor. “That Redstart, I suspect there’s only one of him.”
“Thank you. Do you have any children?”
He said, “No, I never. I am told things happen for the best.” He turned away and peered at an upended block plane in the light of the window. Loosening the set screw he slid the blade up into the body of the tool and tightened it and ran his fingers along the bottom to make sure the edge wasn’t exposed.
I said, “Oh, a family is plenty of work.”
“That’s what I hear,” he replied.
Eventually we took the cedar planks out of the steaming trough and laid them up one at a time and bent them round the frames with jaw clamps. At this the shape of the boat began to be visible to my landsman’s eyes and I said, “What graceful lines.”
“They are decent lines,” Glendon remarked. “You can see the sheer now, the curve. A line only gets grace when it curves, you know.”
We boiled and bent planks until we ran out of clamps. “There are never enough of those,” Glendon remarked, as though this fact had long ago ceased to irritate. His eyes had lost their yellow cast. He poked around his shadowed workbench until he found a knob of bread wrapped in burlap. This he broke in two and gave me half. It was old bread of a coarse texture and I ate it with the happy feeling I had earned a meal for once. Brushing crumbs from our hands we stepped down to the river.
He said, “You’d best know I am unreliable, that I am a poor friend.”
“A poor friend is better than none,” I replied. It is strange to realize you have no friends outside your own family—in fact I hadn’t realized it until that moment.
“I have not always obeyed the law,” Glendon stated.
“Nor I my conscience.”
He considered me. “I have seen the inside of more than one jail cell. It is nothing I am proud of nor would mention except you have a fine family. Also, I take a drink of whiskey now and again.”
I said, “I am a fraud and impostor and for at least two years have lied regularly to many people, including my wife. Very soon now I will be found out and lose what small reputation I have managed to acquire.”
Glendon seemed taken aback. Though my confession was perhaps too specific for the occasion, I could’ve gone on and on. I had the urge to laugh.
He said, “Do you drink?”
“Not yet.”
“A fellow like you would find it inconvenient. With a boy around, and so on. It ain’t all that convenient even for me.”
“You could quit.”
“Yes I could, but I probably won’t. Goodbye, Becket.”
“Goodbye, Glendon.”
“Hale,” he replied. “It’s Glendon Hale.”
7
I didn’t want to lie to Susannah—I tried to be honest any number of times. In fact the very next evening I strode into the parlor intent on unburdening. When I opened the door she said, “Come see this, love.”
She was painting daffodils on a wide field, a handsome thousand or so yellow daubs. Susannah’s work was well thought of in Northfield—this one had been commissioned by a local college president.
“Howser offered me my job back today,” I said.
So help me this was the honest truth.
“Howser doesn’t deserve you.” Her paintbrush darted and stabbed like a hummingbird. “Here, look at my flowers.”
There are times with Susannah when it’s better to come back later, but my conscience had me, as Redstart liked to say, by the windpipe. “I saw him at the hardware store. I was looking at some rope and he came over and said hello.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said my wife.
“Two of his people have left in the past month.”
“You told him no, I assume.” Susannah cultivated a firm dislike of my former employer, who had told me several times I “didn’t tally well” with the vaunted postal efficiencies.
“I said we would talk it over. He seems rather harried.”
“He should be harried, to solicit a man he treated first with disdain and later with envy. A little harrying might improve him—in fact I am certain it will.” Though elegant as lace, Susannah was ever keen to set bridges alight on my behalf.
“I thought it gracious of him to ask.”
“Did you tell Mr. Howser your new book is nearly done?”
“No,” I admitted, and stopped there. You should know this about my wife: colors are as strong spirits to her. Yellow makes her insouciant, reckless, caustic. The brighter tints of orange render her nearly dangerous. If it’s a quiet, confiding talk you’re after, by all means wait until her palette is stocked with cooler, more seafaring shades. I said, “After all, it isn’t what you’d call nearly done.”
“Well. Soon it will be.” She looked at me, the brush hovering over daffodils. “You haven’t read to me in some time. How is that rogue Mr. Dan faring?”
That’s right—I hadn’t yet told her Dan Roscoe had been shelved. Nor that I’d begun a new tale about a pirate with a glaring birthmark and a strange halfheartedness about his career. I was forty pages in. Already there were signs of decay.
She set the brush down. “Monte, is the work going slowly?”
“Yes.”
“But there’s progress, isn’t there?”
“A thousand words a day.”
She took my hands in hers. “As you love me, there is progress?”
There is no excuse for lying, but that very morning I’d read over her shoulder while she wrote to her mother: My darling is still at work on his second book, which none can doubt will exceed his first in reach and power.
“Oh, good progress,” I assured her, and leaned down for a kiss, and then, as if to seal my deception, peered in at her daffodils. I was amazed to see not only yellow and orange in those petals but also blue and violet and a spicy russet that somehow fit. “Why, sweet, that’s exactly right. That’s better than real.”
“Then I will finish it,” she said, clearly pleased, “and you will finish Mr. Dan, and we’ll throw ourselves a party.” With that she let go of me, and her brush took flight again.
Do you see how it was that I could not bear to fail in front of her? Do you see why I deflected?
And so I rose each day and dipped my nib. I filled my hopeless quota. I was the Dickensian halfwit who composes letters by the hour, only to make them into kites and fly them up to God.
8
Glendon began taking supper with us once or twice a week. He kept an orderly greenplot and never arrived minus chard or kale or chives in wet burlap. At first he was a quiet and somewhat formal visitor, yet the whole house lightened with him there. I admired his plain language and courtesy and the way he found everything interesting but himself. Redstart of course was polite as a pry bar.
“Tell about the lightning strike when all your buttons liquefied,” he’d say, or “How about the boy you met tossing knives in the street,” and Glendon would push himself back from the table and yield up a trail drive or desperado or other narrow shave. Truly if not for Redstart I doubt he’d have come so often.
But it was Susannah who seemed in some ways to best understand Glendon. Halfway through another cow-oriented narrative she saw an opening and interposed gently, “How did you meet your Blue, then, if I may ask it?”
He gave her a look both stricken and grateful. “Why, I met her on the seaside, ma’am. On the Gulf of California.”
“The Sea of Cortez,” Redstart quietly amended. It is the Gulf of California on most maps, but for poetry’s sake Redstart preferred to credit the brazen conquistador.
“That’s where I met her, anyway,” said Glendon.
“Please tell about that, if you will,” said my audacious wife.
Glendon blew through his nose, reached in his vest pocket and withdrew a briar pipe. He would never build a cigarette in the house but a pipe
is a courtly smoke. He packed it and scraped a kitchen match against the stovetop.
“Well, I was fresh out of work, ma’am. I had a gelding named Ribbon and fifty biscuits in a saddlebag. We were drifting west from the rancho country. One day we climbed a hill and there was the sea. My goodness—did you ever go to the ocean, Redstart?”
“Nope.”
“There ain’t any preparation for it. It was so pretty I lost my head and galloped Ribbon into a state of resentment. The sea is always farther than it looks. We didn’t get there till the next night. When I took his saddle off he reached down and bit me on the knee.”
“Chief wouldn’t of bit me,” said Redstart.
“I camped by a spring and watched the sea until a little sail hove up from the south. A fishing rig, an old man working a net and a youngster bailing water off the bottom. I hailed them and they come ashore. ‘You are lucky to have that horse, brother,’ the boy says to me.”
“Honest? He was the one with the sailboat,” Redstart pointed out.
“Oh, but Ribbon was impressive,” Glendon replied. “One of the faster geldings in that part of Mexico. Not quite the fastest,” he added. “Anyway they lived up the shore a ways and asked me to supper. I let the boy ride Ribbon home and I went in the boat with the old man. That’s where I met Blue,” he said to Susannah. “She was his great-niece.”
Susannah said, “What was she like?”
“Oh, a quick step, lively eyes, you know the things that draw a young man. But awfully quiet,” Glendon said. “I had some Spanish, you know—I’d say something to her and she’d only nod. I wanted to hear her voice but she didn’t let me, not at first.”
“How old was she then?”
“Sixteen or thereabouts. She lived with her mother in the town of Oscuro and walked over every day to look in on the old man. Air out his rooms, make supper. I don’t think I heard her voice for a week.”
Susannah smiled. “Monte wasn’t such a patient suitor as yourself.”
“Maybe I was too patient,” Glendon replied. “Once I knew her voice, you see, I couldn’t leave. No, then I had to hear her laugh. Another long wait. She’d come watch me work on the old man’s boat. It was coming apart, you could poke your thumb through it in places. He was too stiff to do the repairs himself, but he was a good teacher. I bent new planks and pounded oakum in the seams while Blue came and watched. Every day I tried to make her laugh. I told jokes, made faces—but no, I didn’t get to hear that particular music till I finished the boat and took her out in it. Up went the sail in a rowdy breeze and away we flew. Then she laughed, all right!”
“I don’t wonder that she fell for you,” said Susannah, her cheeks bright as poppies. She’d fallen for Glendon herself. We all had.
“Oh, now, it wasn’t entirely me that got to her,” said Glendon, abashed. “A sailboat’s a terrible advantage—everyone knows that, I guess.”
9
At last I commenced to cheat. I slashed my goal to 500 words a day, then 300. Some days I didn’t reach even that; when the sun was high I would stack my pages in a drawer and head downriver. Like a boy I began to hang around Glendon’s barn, sometimes trimming or steaming planks but more often sweeping up or just watching. Mainly he built two designs: an elfin peapod and the longer vessel he called the Dobie Swift. They were only rowboats, it is true, yet Glendon was a master: He never worked from a drawing but eyeballed lines and measured with a waxed thread.
“You should ask more money for these boats,” I told him. He had confided to me his price for the Swift now under construction. He was building it for a dairy farmer whose world, I suppose, wanted a little splendor.
“Why is that?”
“You must be barely meeting expenses.”
“Look at this copper, ain’t it glad?” He held up a bright sheet. It pleased Glendon to make shiny inlaid sections in the small foredeck of his Dobie Swifts. He generally shaped copper or bronze to the profile of a bird in flight—aglow with polish, they were pretty and simple as sonnets.
“You might be able to produce more boats,” I remarked, “if you cared to take on some help.” I said this cautiously—it won’t surprise you I had begun to imagine myself in such a role. Not that I was any sort of hand with the work as yet, but it’s true the contours of Glendon’s rowboats had begun to settle and sing in my mind. I pictured sheerlines and tumblehome, rocker and lift; I woke from dreams where my hands shaped gunwales instead of sentences. Who doesn’t long for the door in the air?
I said, again, “Did you ever think of that, Glendon? Did you ever think you might want an associate?”
“A partner? I don’t know, Becket.” He ran the back of his hand over the hardwood keel of the upturned Swift. “Boats are a solitary enterprise, generally. They don’t care to be hurried.”
10
“What do you think of visions, Becket?” Glendon inquired one night. He’d come to dinner preoccupied, agreed to a few hands of whist at which Redstart was almost unbearably competitive, and stayed later than usual—Susannah had left the porch and gone off to bed, freeing Glendon, I saw now, to lower his voice and ask his unsettling question.
“Visions,” I said, my heart sinking.
“Dreams, apparitions. Do you reckon them credible?”
I did not tell him no. I did not say to him, Visions are a writer’s stock-in-trade but that cupboard is bare for me.
“I keep picturing my girl Blue, on a horse, on the other side of the river.” He brightened. “Maybe it’s just my grubby conscience.”
“What’s she doing on the horse?”
“Trotting to and fro. I seen her several times now. She’s got a muslin dress on and my black coat over it. Horse is a little Tobiano.”
“That’s precise, for a dream.”
“Seems like she’s looking for a place to ford. The horse won’t cross over. She rides knee-deep into the river and looks across at the barn.” He reached in his pocket for cigarette makings and rolled one on his knee, watching me wonder what to say next. Gently he said, “You think I am simple, Becket? Think I’ve got one wheel in the sand?” He scratched a light for his cigarette—his eyes were firefly green and nearly merry.
“You might,” I replied.
He laughed softly. “She’s still pretty. Got a rifle in a scabbard. I ain’t sure whether she’s come to forgive me or shoot me.”
“What do you mean to do, Glendon?”
He shrugged. “I’m nervous she’ll get that mare to swim across, next time. Blue always knew how to talk to a horse.”
We sat quiet while he smoked the tobacco down and stubbed it out on his boot heel. He said, “Monte, I didn’t ever ask her forgiveness. I was a stupid youngster, you understand. My reasons for leaving seemed good, but they weren’t. They were poor and selfish.”
My insides shrank. I sensed a bad ending on the way.
“I am shortly bound for Mexico,” he said.
“But she is remarried, you said.”
“I don’t aim to win her back. No—to try would be another wrong against her.”
“After so many years, does it matter if she forgives you?”
“It matters that I ask.”
Do you remember my forlorn mood when Glendon first rowed past in the fog, the time he didn’t stop to visit? It returned to me now, with a bitter flavor.
“Well, I’ll be sorry to see you go.” I tried not to sound petulant but certainly failed. “When will you leave?”
“Saturday. I’d go sooner but there is a boat to deliver.”
I didn’t reply. His mention of boats brought back to me the idea I’d begun to nurture, the notion of us as partners in trade. I saw it now for foolishness, for a nonsensical flight from all I could not do. Yet I hated to give it up.
He said, “You want to come along, Becket?”
“What’s that?”
“Come along to Mexico.”
My throat lumped straightaway. I was pleased, you see; of course I couldn’t go, but didn’t
say so straight off.
He said, “I’d be glad of the company. You would be back in six weeks. I understand if you can’t do it, though—why, you’ve got Susannah to think of, and Redstart. I hate to leave them myself, and that’s a fact.” There was a little hiatus while both of us thought it out. He may have been having doubts, as he added, “Also, you got them thousand words a day to perform.”
Shame climbed my face. In my thoughts I drifted through what Susannah might say to this offer. Why is it our failures only show us more clearly the people we are failing? For I saw Redstart laughing at some sparkly fact added to his hoard of knowledge; I saw him on Chief, turning tight circles, raising dust from the grass.
I said, “I’d like to go, Glendon, but you’ve hit it exactly—my responsibility’s at home.”
He nodded, rose and slapped his legs awake, and picked his way to the river. He had more than a touch of night blindness, so it took him awhile to get there. Then I heard his footsteps on the dock, then for a while his oars thumping in the locks. Then quiet. Far off on the river a match flared briefly.
11
Susannah was still awake when I went in. It had to be done. I said, “Love, I’m going back to the post office. I’ve done my best. I can’t write a book anyone will want to read.”
She sat up in the darkened room. “Monte, you can. I’ve never doubted you.”
“I tried and can’t. I’ll talk to Howser tomorrow.”
“What about Mr. Dan?”
“Dead alas and his grave unmarked.”
She lit the lamp and we sat together on the bed. If anything is harder to watch than the face of the person you have deceived, please tell me what that is.
She said, “What about your thousand a day?”
“Not worth much, as it turns out.”
