by Leif Enger
* * *
December arrived as a cloudy mist aspiring to rain—hardly difficult conditions for people accustomed to biting snows—yet the season brought down a hush that was not unwelcome. Evenings we lit a fire in the grate and read the tales of Chekhov and O. Henry and occasionally verse by Amado Nervo, which Arāndano would translate as she read. When these turned melancholy we put them away and looked at pictures in the stereopticon. Claudio had collected several hundred of these images, their edges so crisp they were nearly in motion—sinking battleships, the Great Pyramids, famous racehorses with their puny saddles on. We mulled over the photographs, and we grieved for Claudio. Christmas came, and for all our stuffing and fowl it was a beleaguered holiday. Late that afternoon we went walking round the orchard—it looked pockmarked and infertile and even the islanders seemed trancelike and forgetful in their little frost pocket.
Mostly what we did that winter was work on the boat. Among Glendon’s board feet was a small cypress beam which we tapered into a sprit with a carved tip and iron bobstay. Claudio would have loved how that boat turned out; surely Arāndano loved it, for she ventured down evenings along with Susannah and ran her hands over its curved ribs. Sometimes she’d ask Glendon about joinery or design and he would answer her straightforwardly, in short complete sentences. Sometimes she smiled; if she did, Susannah and I might drift back to the mill house.
“She’s being good to him,” I might say.
“What do you hope for?” she might reply.
“Well, I hope for his happiness. And hers.”
“Poltroon.” Susannah could not endure the safe answer.
“What do you hope then, if you’re so brave.”
“All right: I hope she forgives him entirely, and mourns Claudio for as long as is right, and then I hope she falls for Glendon in a way that is just barely dignified and marries him, and that they live here on the orchard in perpetuity,” she might declare, and I would laugh, saying, “Yes, that’s it!”
So we indulged ourselves in romance; we wrote scenarios in which Glendon and Arāndano’s eyes met, and she forgave him at last his flight from the federales, his nonreturn, his years of thievery and shift. It was much to forgive, but we talked ourselves into believing it would happen—indeed, into expecting it. Why shouldn’t it happen? Weren’t we living in a valley of orchards? In a house like a castle keep?
But Arāndano was not to be rushed. In fact, the two of them didn’t talk much. Their conversations filtered down to formalized questions, to occasional citations of memories common to them both, or, more often, memories from their unconnected decades.
One night Glendon and I were at the nitpicky work of installing deckboards when he straightened and said, “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Do?”
“To make it up to Blue.”
I said, “Haven’t you done it already? You apologized. You worked here in the orchard as though it were your own. You stood by for Claudio while he was dying.”
“It ain’t enough, Becket.”
“Maybe it just takes more time.”
He walked to the door of the shed and looked around and came back in. “Monte, what is it you think I am trying for?”
The question made me nervous. I felt found out, I suppose.
“Go on,” he said.
“Why, I guess it’s the thing you didn’t dare hope for previously. The thing honor prevented while Claudio was alive.”
He smiled. “You mean I should win Blue back again. No. That is the very thing I must not do.”
I had nothing to say.
“Do you think because Charles Siringo is dead or dying someplace, I am no longer a wanted property?”
“But no one else is looking for you.”
He smiled. “Even if you’re right, does it remove my debt?”
“But wait, Glendon—you love Blue,” I said. “That is partial payment at least, I would think.”
“It’s as you say. But if she loves me back, it deepens what I owe. There ain’t no parity in that arrangement. That’s what I did not see coming.”
I still didn’t understand. He said, again, “I don’t know what to do next.”
So we worked on the deck of the boat, on its handsome coach-roof, but from then I understood that Arāndano’s reticence was only partly her own. Partly it came from Glendon’s refusal to allow her to come near.
17
Croplanders learn early to distrust good omens: A perfect planting invites epic drought; a burgeoning wheat field is a summons for hail. Arāndano had been examining the trees daily, awaiting nascent blossoms; when the first buds showed color in early January it put her in a precarious mood. A wet cloud descended and stayed most of a week and Arāndano became nearly hostile—mention the trees to her and she would look away, sometimes walk away while you spoke. When the cloud burned off we saw the buds emerging by such heavy thousands the limbs appeared to bend presciently. I wondered whether the brightening petals might actually drive Arāndano to violence, but instead she became precise and supervisory. Redstart and I set to cutting forked posts for later use supporting laden branches. Glendon and Joaquin took the wagon down-valley to rent honeybees and came back with a load of box hives, which they left covered until after dark and then stacked in the orchard. It was the bees that brought Arāndano around—you can’t walk through a humming orchard with sun dripping off the glossy leaves and not admit that something fine might be about to happen.
It happened slowly, the fruits gaining until they lay clumped along the boughs like tiny limes. As we filled the days until harvest, I unrolled Glendon’s boat sketches and made some adjustments that seemed appealing; Susannah completed her first California commission, of a priest’s Great Dane that would obey at least twenty commands including Sit still; and Redstart got sent home from school when his own latest pet, a coyote, entered the building and bit an administrator through the meat of his hand.
Then in late spring a man drove up and didn’t come to the door but walked out into the trees and began to grip the oranges. He put his nose to them and pressed with his plump fingers. He had a square-shouldered jacket on, a city hat, boots that looked much used and out of place with the rest of him. When Arāndano went out and confronted him he made a small accented bow, disarmed her fully, and asked after the character of the fruit. He was a wholesaler, not one she had met before. The oranges with their patina like verdigris beguiled him. “They might be a risk. There are prettier citrus,” he said. “They’re sweet, though, am I correct? Island trees, I believe. They’ll be sweet all right.”
Arāndano told him to come back in a few weeks and taste them himself. He wanted her to sign a contract but she said, “No. Come back.” So he drove away, looking over his shoulder.
Later that day Susannah brought her easel outside. She meant to walk down and have a go at the oranges, but she was diverted. We had the boat finished right down to its paint: cream decks, blue topsides and the bowsprit aglitter with varnish. It sat on its launch boards one shove from freedom with the cold river running behind it. Also that day the gelding Wardlaw was tethered close by—he was a curious animal who liked the smell of wood shavings and oiled tools and would come snuffing right into the shop if we didn’t prevent him.
Struck by something, Susannah set her easel down and laughed aloud. She prepared a vivid palette and began to paint a whimsical picture of our proud cutter. In the picture Arāndano is at the tiller wearing a green dress, and the speckled roan Wardlaw is on the boat too, his head peering out the companionway. Of course he would never have fit on the boat, but there was a curious appeal in the picture. It looked completely right and cheerful—Wardlaw’s great Roman neck arching up from below, the cutter with exaggerated almost storybook sheerlines reaching along under full sail below a cerulean sky; and above, as in myth or song, a sun that was no ball of flame but a perfect round orange with a coppery skin. When Arāndano saw that picture she at once began to exclaim with pleasure and took Susann
ah to herself as though they were blood sisters; when Glendon saw it he could only laugh; but when Redstart saw it he said, “That would be a good label for the new oranges.”
Susannah began at once to refine her painting, to produce in fact a number of versions from which Arāndano might pick the best for a lithographer’s run. In this excitement and as the oranges swelled, we saw Arāndano continue to soften toward Glendon, so that it became common to see them talking in evident comfort. An observer stepping in without background might have said, Here are two handsome people entering a courtship. But that observer wouldn’t have heard the sparring that went on, the tacit sparring of two people keeping themselves at a distance.
It seems to me now that if we did not witness the rebirth of a union, a clasping of souls after thirty years’ absence, we were at least privileged to behold a slow mutual rescue—slow in that Arāndano’s forgiving of Glendon Hale took some months and might never have happened if Charles Siringo, ancient and infirm, had not come into our lives one final time.
18
On the day in question a Wells Fargo truck rolled up to the house and deposited a crate of prints from a lithographer in Los Angeles. They were reproductions of Susannah’s painting of Arāndano at the helm of our delicate cutter, with Wardlaw’s noble head looking out curiously from the companionway. We had awaited these prints like a boy waits for snow. The size of book jackets, they were orange, green, azure. They were labels for the new brand of oranges, which Arāndano had named Claudios. When she pried open the crate and cut the twine and lifted out the little bale we all whooped, and Redstart carried in ginger beer, and we sliced down some cheese and summer sausage and raised a toast to the tough little islanders, which at that moment were bearing a promising load of the oranges to be so labeled. It was a moment that had been unimaginable only months earlier, and it surprised us all; up to our chests in victory, I looked over at Susannah, whose face was rapt in lament. Arāndano clung to her, and Glendon clinked his ginger beer to Redstart’s and said the name of the man we loved. So we ate and drank and mourned. I never enjoyed a party more, or so bitterly missed its absent host.
Then Redstart went to the window and announced that an old man was sitting in a car at the end of the yard.
When I looked at Glendon he was already looking at me.
“Let me talk to him,” I said.
I peered out the window. There sat Siringo behind the wheel of a black Chalmers automobile.
“I’ll go out to him,” said Glendon.
“Who is he?” cried Susannah.
“Siringo,” Redstart replied, who had gleaned my adventure to the last bronze nail and now owned it as though he had been there himself.
“Don’t, Glendon,” said Arāndano.
Recalling with what little ceremony the old Pinkerton had shot Hood Roberts I went out, not waiting for Glendon. As the door shut I heard Arāndano telling him to go out the back, to take the cutter.
The Rienda of course goes all the way to the ocean. I was thinking that myself, and of the boat, on which a man could neatly live.
Siringo saw me coming but didn’t get out of the car. He was holding a long-barreled revolver. The barrel was resting on the car door.
“Hello, Siringo. I’m a little surprised to see you up and about.”
“Pursuit,” said he, by way of reply.
“Glendon isn’t here.”
“Oh, he’s here.”
“He was here.”
At this Charles Siringo looked mildly downhearted. How frail he was! His left eye was sleeping and his skin looked as if it might not bleed if pierced.
I began to think it was possible, then, that he was capable of giving up.
“How do you feel?” I couldn’t not ask it, he looked so low. Under everything else, he was an old man.
“I’ve been better.”
Something kind, I am sure of it, dwelt behind his eyes. I’d have even tried his grasp now, if he had only put down the revolver and offered me his hand.
“Is that your woman?” said he, for Susannah had come out on the porch in her blue dress.
“Yes.”
“Lord Almighty,” said Siringo. “Well, you don’t deserve any such thing.”
He reached down, set the gun on the seat beside him. He was short of breath. He swung around and looked behind him and put his hand on the shifter.
At this point Glendon stepped out of the house. He had his hat on, a vest. He had a little duffel and came down off the porch in our direction.
Siringo picked up the revolver again. He looked at me with his old snap, admiring me, I think, for lying.
Glendon said, “Charlie.”
“Glen Dobie,” said Siringo, and this is the oddest part of it: yes there was triumph in his face, yes the thrill of success at long last and all the rest of it. But there was also a longing there, as though he’d missed Glendon, as though he were meeting an old comrade—which, of course, he was.
Siringo said, “It has taken me longer than usual.”
“But here I am,” replied my friend.
“Let’s go, then,” said Siringo.
Glendon nodded. He shook my hand and tossed his duffel into the back of the car. He said, “Goodbye, Monte.”
I had no hold on this. I looked round and saw the thin-shouldered form of Arāndano at the window, Susannah on the porch holding tight to Redstart.
“Goodbye,” I said.
He nodded again and in his open face and the grip of his hand, flexible and strong as my own, I saw again the remarkable difference in the two men—the one archaic and closing fast, the other seeming to get younger.
Glendon walked round to the passenger door while Siringo kept the revolver trained on him. The hammer was cocked. When Glendon opened the door Siringo actually dropped the gun. It landed on the floor of the automobile—somehow, it didn’t go off. Siringo dug for it but he couldn’t bend very well. A string of saliva came off his lip as he felt around for the gun.
Glendon got in the car, leaned down and retrieved the gun, uncocked it, and handed it back to Siringo.
Siringo said, “You are not winning.”
“No. You win, Charlie.”
Siringo put the car in reverse. He said again, “You are not winning.”
They drove out of the yard and up the road.
19
What am I to say here? I don’t know that I ever saw a stranger event than Glendon’s surrender to Charles Siringo, for at the same time that he lost everything—the very direction of his own steps—he won the thing he’d held so precious he wouldn’t approach it in words.
He won Blue.
She didn’t say so, even to Susannah; she gave no outward clue, except that she wrote to the Governor and to the California Board of Corrections; she packed up and spent time in Sacramento to lobby clemency for this man who had deserted her in order to go rob trains and shoot a politician in the face. It didn’t make her popular, and if you read the newspapers of the day they are filled with the usual righteousness of the press: TREACHEROUS FELON CAUGHT AT LAST! As for Siringo, he was once again the man of the hour, though it’s telling that in none of the articles does a current photograph appear. There is instead an old picture, the same one you may see today inside the covers of his books, a handsome devil with a mustache and in his eyes the ways of acquisition. JUSTICE TRIUMPHS, cried the newspapers, for there is no statute of limitations on murder, and murder is what Glendon confessed to; representing himself, he would plead nothing less than guilty and was handed eighteen years in the Los Angeles pentitentiary.
From time to time, he wrote us letters.
Here is part of one from that first year. I won’t reproduce it all. I know the pains it took him.
Dear Blue & Monte & Susannah
Thank you for writing it is all fine here. They have given me my 1st spectacles which are a true surprise, also a fellow here provided me a book it is Don Quixote should keep me busy til I get out. No complaints. Hello Joaquin, how i
s that Maria? Red you forgive that principle for it was his hand & not your own.
I went back to Minnesota at last that spring and sold the Cannon farmstead. The buyers showed up on a Saturday. They were a young couple locally famed for having produced triplets several years earlier—now those endearing babes were inquisitive rascals bent on conquest, their parents tattered refugees clawing at the door.
“Come in,” I said. The truth is I was glad to have so many lives flood into that house at once, for I had spent two whole days in rooms never meant for silence.
We didn’t bicker but agreed almost at once on a price. They were glad to get the furniture and especially glad to have a barn—I think they envisioned the horde out there at play, and a glimmer of privacy for themselves.
In one thing only were they disappointed. One of the rascals came pounding up to where we stood, discussing wells or windows. He was slick with snowmelt and mud to his kneecaps. He poked my leg until I squatted down and then said, “’Ant the horse.”
“Sorry, amigo,” I had to say. “Chief is going with me.”
It took me two weeks to finish it off—to sell what would sell, arrange train passage for Chief, and pack the rest. On the day I said goodbye to the lovely Cannon the weather was cold and the river ran below its sheath of ice, sometimes breaking through in patches to show its deep green self. I left the keys on the porch table, where I had made and abandoned so many words.
20
The trip back west was memorable for two reasons. First, I arranged to stop in Revival, hoping to find someone who could tell me more of Hood Roberts—who he was, where he came from. The car dealer, Lewis, had not heard of Hood’s death and didn’t seem overly affected by the news.
“Who killed the boy?” he asked.
