“Good grief, it’s lucky I’m in here,” Davy remarked, as Swede hopped about, biting her lip. Grim as it was, I could see Dad was glad for the joke. Davy’d shaken off the concussed glaze of the night before. He was in a little cell with tan lighting and squashed flies on the wall, but he’d not grown fangs or become a creature changed beyond knowing. When Swede had got the mad out and hugged Davy through the bars, Dad told us to say goodbye and wait for him in the hall.

That was the hardest thing—going out that door. It was so thick and closed so heavily we couldn’t eavesdrop through it, not even with the paper cup Swede swiped from the watercooler.

Dad was quiet when he joined us. We walked out to the car, the wind flapping staleness off our clothes.

“He seems all right, doesn’t he?” I said.

“Sure he does,” Dad replied.

It seemed a long ride home. We got there at suppertime, and Swede and I looked around in the cupboards. Normally Dad would’ve taken over and worked up some meal or other, or at least suggested that Swede and I do it, but instead he just sat in a kitchen chair and leaned back shuteyed.

Thinking of supper, I asked, “You want us to do anything, Dad?”

“Persevere,” he said.

* * *

It was a better answer than we wanted. What else to do when the landscape changes? When all mirrors tilt? That first week Swede rose as usual and demanded that I help her cook Dad’s oatmeal, but he could no more eat it than he could wave and run for Congress.

Suddenly, lots of people we didn’t know were calling and dropping by. Reporters, yes: an apologetic writer from the county weekly in Montrose, a sad-mouthed fellow from the Star in Minneapolis, two different radio men, slumpshouldered from their big reel-to-reels, and the first TV correspondent ever sighted locally, which merited an article and photo of its own in the Montrose Observer. We also heard from certain bold and ambitious lawyers who’d read the early accounts and, for some reason, from a slew of young women who’d seen Davy’s tragic mug in the news and imagined him misunderstood.

Meantime, a lot of people we did know, and whose cheerful encouragement I’ll bet Dad could’ve used, were staying away. A few examples? How about Harold Barkus, the gas and oil man who did all the repairs on our aging Plymouth, who once came to Dad drunk and weeping after his wife had left, and drooled a quart into our couch that night as he slept, and left next morning sober and galvanized, with a hot breakfast in him—Harold Barkus wouldn’t even fill our gas tank anymore, instead sending his gangly boy out to do it. Through plate glass we could see Harold, sitting in his office, not looking out.

How about Leroy Biersten, the principal of the school, who’d hired Dad and who’d sat grieving at our table when his daughter turned up pregnant by a fled serviceman? Do you suppose Leroy could think of a word of comfort?

Maybe it was fear, I don’t know; maybe embarrassment. Maybe these people put themselves in Dad’s place, figuring they’d wish for no one to say a word if their son had shot down two boys; if it were their son sitting all day all night in that courthouse cell.

Or maybe—could this be?—they just reasoned Dad was due some grief. That a man like him couldn’t be exactly what he seemed. Perhaps it relieved their anxious souls that the clock ran against Jeremiah Land as it ran against them all.

I think of Oscar Larson, who liked to take Dad fishing because it seemed the walleyes always gathered round when Dad was in the boat. And of Gary Sweet, the butcher, whose walk-in freezer Dad had fixed during the July hot spell the previous summer, saving the integrity of uncounted beeves. I think of Ron Simonson, the odd-jobs man, who could count on Dad for occasional work—sharpening mower blades, shingling the garage, doing such tasks as Dad would’ve been delighted to do himself had Ron not needed employment. And I think, can’t help it, of those friends of Job’s in the Old Testament, the men who came to Job as he lay there in his bed of ashes, all twisted with boils and the loss of his children, and said to him, Now what did you go and do?

Of course vindictiveness is an ugly trait and, yes, I do mean to forgive all these nice deserters; I mean, eventually, to say, to their ghosts if not their living faces, It’s all right. I understand. I might’ve done the same.

Not yet, though. Let me bear witness first.

Two men I remember who did not desert—no, three. They were the Methodist preacher James Reach, and Dr. Animas Nokes, and also Mr. Layton, first name of Gerard, the dimestore man who’d been struck of the spirit at the hand of Reverend Johnny Latt. Reach and Layton and Nokes: these three.

Strangely, it was Dad who seemed to suffer most, and Dad whom these few rallied round, while Davy—who had aimed and fired, aimed and fired, aimed and fired—Davy sat suspended on a county bench and seemed on the whole the same boy who’d always been my favored brother. Though some thinner; he didn’t eat much in there. I remember a moment when he rose from his seat against the cinderblock and put his arms around me through the bars, and I put mine around his narrow waist. Then I saw how dark he was beneath his chin, and how his skin looked rough and loose like a much older man’s. He grinned and wouldn’t let me cry. “Say, Natty”—his hands strong upon my shoulders—“don’t you eat those geese yet. You keep those in the deepfreeze till I get out. Just a little while.” At this I recall a stirring of the jailer who stood close by, a fleeting chuckle of his keys as if at Davy’s words, till I get out; a little while. But I held my eyes on Davy’s and saw a thing that jailer couldn’t: I saw the shine of certainty, of faith, of some knowledge inside my brother; and I knew in whom I could believe.

But if Davy didn’t get much reassurance in person—and you know, even Dolly didn’t go see him, not right away—he surely did get it through the mail. Especially those first days, when the newspapers leaned graciously in his direction. Not the Montrose Observer, which still had the Finch and Basca families to live beside and so took an almost ludicrous care with the story; but the Minneapolis daily’s first few headlines were the stuff of scrapbooks. TEENAGE SON DEFENDS HOME AND FAMILY. HELD WITHOUT BAIL AT SIXTEEN—DAVY LAND JAILED FOR SHOOTING ASSAILANTS. DAVY’S SISTER: “HE SAVED MY LIFE.” (This last was a triumph for the solemn fellow from the Star, who sat at a distance watching our house until Dad went into the backyard to rake; the reporter then sprinted to a phone booth, Clark Kentlike, dialed our number, and by pure good manners got a sentence or two out of Swede before Dad, hearing her voice through the screened windows, returned, rightfully suspicious.)

These stories lit fuses under an astonishing number of folks. They wrote letters as if impelled by nature; as if Davy embodied whatever it was they’d thought long-lost and wanted back.

Dear Davy Land,

In this Godless day of corrupt youth and permissiveness toward criminals it is reassuring to see a young man stand up in defense of hearth and home. That you are reading this in jail is no surprise to me but instead a sorrowful commentary on the way we treat those who dare to do what is right. Lest you begin to doubt yourself let me reassure you. Those fellows who broke into your house were cast from evil molds, they had in mind to hurt and kill, and they reaped what they had thought to sow. Your bravery gives us all new hearts,

Sincerely

Dear Davy,

I’m a widow (young) whose good husband died two months before our house was broke into by a bad boy from the neighborhood. Often I have wondered what my husband would of done had he been here and now I think I know. He was a strong man. He had eyes remindful of your own, as struck me when I saw your picture. I am sorry for you to be where you are right now but am praying for you daily. Will there be a trial? I am enclosing a recent photograph of myself.

Warm regards

So many letters came those first two weeks that one of the deputies, Walt Stockard, who’d managed to father four restive daughters before his twenty-seventh birthday, brought in a shoe box to hold them all. The shoe box was festooned with pink ribbons and all manner of brocade and peppermint swirls laid on with crayons, so that it looked like it ought to hold valentines; every day Stockard would replenish the box from that morning’s post and in slow hours would pull up a chair and prop his boots on the bars, dipping into the mail and reading aloud. “Here’s one from a Maggie in St. Paul.

“Dear Davy,

I am in the ninth grade at Washington School, we have just begun to read William Shakespeare, our teacher Mr. Willis demands we read Julius Caesar even though he knows it is Romeo and Juliet we all desire. I hope you will write back, I would like to have a pen pal, maybe we could tell each other our thoughts, I am only fourteen but everyone says I am mature for my age.

“And say, Davy—it’s got perfume on it.”

None of this was comforting to Dad, however. There arrived a day when the phone budged into our dinner-table quietude, informing us that Davy would be charged with two counts of manslaughter—that charge instead of murder because of Davy’s age and because the victims had entered the house bent on mischief. “Mischief?” Swede said. “Mischief?”

I knew what she meant. Mischief was the word Dad used when we ventured into the timber with a hatful of firecrackers, meaning to explode cowpies. In fact we were now beset with a whole lexicon of legal applesauce; Swede and I eavesdropped on a man in a beard and a tan baggy suit who sat at the table drinking the coffee Dad so tiredly poured, the two of them talking in quiet voices about jury selection and presumption of innocence and change of venue, this plea and that plea, bail reductions, and judicial prejudices against violent youth. Salient to me in the visit of the bearded man was not so much his language as his expression, which was wise, guarded, and unencouraged by encountered fact. “Judge Raster lost his wife last summer,” he told Dad. “It has not made him soft.” And from this grave disclosure I drew my picture of Judge Raster; a blackrobed hulk, face like a shark’s, noose clutched behind his back.

The bearded man, Dad told us next day, was Thomas DeCuellar. He was Davy’s defense attorney, appointed by the state. We knew he was a good man because he was on our side and had twenty years’ experience in various courts of law, and because he’d brought with him, from his wife, a quart jar of dill pickles she had put up herself, with cloves of bluish garlic and, DeCuellar said, somewhere in there, a jalapeño pepper.

Days came, went. Davy sat; reporters left town in search of new misfortunes; the strange mail dropped off. One morning Swede didn’t come out of her room and foiled my snoopish concern by propping a chair beneath her doorknob. “I’m working,” she declared. “Don’t bother me.”

Her tight-throated resolve gave me new wells of unease to plumb. “Working on what?”

“Isn’t your business.”

She was writing, of course; I could hear the whir of the typewriter carriage as she rolled in a sheet. The fact made me nervous in some abstruse way. What I wanted was for Swede to be Swede: that is, glad and funny and belonging to me, as usual. We’d always been an exclusive pair, she being smart enough for the two of us and never begrudging me her secrets.

“Is it Sunny Sundown?” I asked—sounding, I know, like some dumb jealous boyfriend, but all the same you should’ve heard the passion she was pouring on those keys.

She didn’t answer, so I moped away to the kitchen to eat cornflakes in solitude. Dad was back at work by now, having taken leave after the shootings, and by rights we ought to’ve been back in school; but Dad, though a believer in education, had never respected the glowing objective of perfect attendance (a goal set for kids, he said, “by adults with ruined imaginations”). Before returning to his job, he’d sat down with Swede and me and asked if we felt ready to undertake classes and sociability again, or whether we’d like another week at home.

What do you think we were, idiots?