A boy on a horse can’t outride the law. Not in 1962. The police tell us so, and perhaps they are right. America is a grown-up place, after all. It’s been a long while since we loved our outlaws. Perhaps the songs we knew as kids—about Jesse James, and Billy the Kid, and the Dirty Little Coward Who Shot Mr. Howard—have no place in a world full of television and helicopters and rock and roll. Perhaps this is all for the best.

Today is December 5. Davy Land escaped from jail twelve days ago. I’ve just checked the wires, and he is still free.

Excuse me while I chuckle.

You had to take Aaron Groap for what he was, of course; all but the very best columnists grab their causes with such operatic choke holds. Anyhow, as Swede said, this sort of thing beat the pants off the Bubby story.

There was no comfort in it for Dad, though. He seemed to believe he had lost his son forever, and the popular melodrama of it only made it worse. He stopped answering the telephone; he became restive and joyless. Many a night I woke to the murmur of paper and knew he was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James—oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder. I remember creeping out once when my breathing was poor and there he was, holy Bible on the tabletop and himself bent to it, his back cupped as a weasel’s; when I tapped his arm he sat up straight, his breath seizing a moment as if the motion hurt. I told him my lungs were tight.

“All right, Reuben.” But he sat still, not rising to put water on the stove.

“What you reading?”

“Ninety-first Psalm.”

“Does it help?”

He went to the sink and held a pan under the tap. He didn’t answer and I thought he wasn’t hearing me. I repeated the question.

Dad lit a burner. There must’ve been something on the bottom of that pan, for smoke and burnt smell twined up its sides. When the water boiled he threw in baking soda, which foamed and subsided. I said, “You could read me a psalm if you want to, Dad.”

But he said, “Not tonight, Reuben, my head hurts so.”

In early December a blizzard swept in off the plains and struck with what was measured on the flats as twenty-seven inches of snow. This was the first in what became nearly a weekly cycle of snowstorms, some of them riven by lightning, a confounding phenomenon. Dr. Nokes, a medical student through much of the Great Depression, said he recalled lightning and snow mixed only once before, during a week of examinations; he said the snow came down not in flakes but the approximate shape and size of corn kernels, and he said it preceded a spring that brought neither rain nor hope of rain, so dry were most midwestern souls.

I thought that was an awful lot to remember from something as simple as lightning in a snowstorm, but Dr. Nokes laughed and said one day I too would remember hard winters in detail more voluminous than anyone would care to hear. I suppose he was right and you don’t give a chipped dime for December of ’62, but it was an epic season all the same, the drifts rising eventually past the kitchen window and up to the very eaves. In the afternoons Swede and I, in layers of pants, would step from the highest snowbank onto the roof of the single-story addition, then climb to the peak and go skidding down the other side to land with a poof in the front yard. How we missed Davy! In such snow he’d have led us into all sorts of thrilling and jeopardous traps—our backyard would’ve been veined with tunnels and candlelit caverns; our snowball wars would’ve been prolonged and ferocious. I remember one dream I had that winter, that Davy was home and climbing the roof with us, his leaps from the peak wondrously high, and in the dream the salesman Tin Lurvy was lying on his back in the snow, watching, admiration all over his face, and Lurvy was saying Oh, my, look at him—goodness’ sake, what leaping! And here is why I remember that dream in particular: because Lurvy said—and this woke me up laughing—I want to try that! Hey, kids, can I try that?

We didn’t go back to school, by the way. Pretty manipulative on our part: Dad hadn’t the will to send us back if we truly didn’t want to go, and we knew it. Preying on his depression we made ourselves useful—we washed clothes, scrubbed floors, swept cobwebs, cooked soup (it is hard to ruin soup, unless you run short of salt, and anyway Dad wasn’t picky). When he approached us one day with the reluctant suggestion that we return to school after the Christmas break, Swede revealed a breathtaking bit of strategy, taking Dad into her room and displaying a stack of history and geography and arithmetic books more than a foot high. “From the library,” she said, adding this handsome flourish: “I certainly don’t want to lag behind my classmates.”

“Ah,” Dad said, looking at me over Swede’s head—he was on to her and wanted me to know it. He didn’t send us back, though, despite the fact that the schoolbooks were but props. It wasn’t as if we didn’t read; while at the library, Swede had also checked out every Frank O’Rourke on the shelves, having finished The Big Fifty long ago. O’Rourke, she confided, wrote much better Westerns than Zane Grey.

“It’s his women. They don’t talk all the time, and when they ride, they ride like men.”

While interesting, I didn’t see what difference this made to the story. As a reader I leaned more in the direction of pirates; Treasure Island simply didn’t have any women, except for Long John’s stanch negress, whom you never actually see.

“It makes all sorts of difference,” Swede said. She’s a professor now, have I told you that? “Every Western is a love story, you see. In Zane Grey, the hero always starts off with the wrong girl, and she has eyes that are too close together, and she has a bad attitude, like a problem horse.”

“The wrong girl is like a horse?”

“Usually a roan, a stubborn roan. The hero has had lots of horses, and this girl makes him remember that roan.”

So Westerns were love stories. Though I’d read several myself, I hadn’t realized the truth of this equation. I didn’t like the sound of it, either.

“Swede,” I said, “Sunny’s wife—she was the right kind of girl, wasn’t she? Like one of O’Rourke’s you were talking about.”

The question made her indignant. Sunny Sundown was no dummy, she said; he’d ridden some miles in his time; he would never have married a roan. I was glad to hear her say it. Last I’d read of Sunny, he had his hands full enough without that sort of problem:

Till late in the night he had fought the good fight
With his fear, and had kept it at bay;
And he dreamed of his wife, and their satisfied life,
And he woke to a wicked new day.

* * *

Then he rose in his shirt and he nodded to Bert,
Who was empty and mute as a hole,
But down on his knees Rennie wept aloud, “Please,
Have charity on a thief’s soul, Lord,
Forgive my poor dry-rotted soul.”

Three nooses swung loose as a clergyman prayed.
Three men were marched forward—and two were afraid.

Swede meant this to be suspenseful, of course, but even at eleven I recognized what had to happen next: Somehow, a woman had to come on the scene. You don’t need many Westerns under your belt to know that. And she had to be young and black-eyed and lovely, and touched by the bravery of the condemned hero.

Then up the tight street came a rider so sweet,
She was light as the dawn, and as free—
And her hair was as black as her stallion’s back,
And she parted the crowd like a sea.

“Is it Sunny’s wife?” I asked.

“Nope—just a woman.” She deliberated. “You know, that’s not an awful idea. But it’s a different woman.” This troubled me; for I saw straight off that the beauty on the black horse was about to attempt a rescue, and also that she was deep in love with our Sunny. And him married! It was a problem.

“Why don’t you change it,” I suggested, “make this girl his wife, see—they ride away together.”

“She wasn’t his wife!” Swede flared. Past tense, you notice—history, even the fictive kind, being beyond our influence.

The problem got worse when the girl actually pulled off the rescue; for then Sunny, though rushed in the moment,

Leaned down from the black and pushed her hair back
And kissed his deliverer twice, my lads,
He kissed his deliverer twice.

The last thing I wanted was to fight Swede, but this was terrible. “Now he’s kissing her,” I complained. “If she was his wife, it would be okay.”

“Reuben,” Swede said, holding herself back, “say you’re about to be hanged. The rope’s on your neck already! Then out of noplace this beautiful girl comes riding up and saves you—are you telling me you’re not going to kiss that girl?”

“Well—”

“Look, Reuben. Let’s say Sunny just thinks of her as a really great sister. Like me.”

I nodded, but in truth this picked at me for some little while. Hair “as black as her stallion’s back”—nuts, it would’ve been hard enough to think of that girl as a sister without throwing kisses into the deal at all.