I hadn’t a reply for that. The good thing about complete darkness is you can lie there quietly and let the other person rethink the smart-alecky thing they have just said. With any luck they’ll begin to regret it, or possibly they’ll believe you have a magnificent rejoinder in mind but are too well-adjusted to use it.
“I just thought,” Swede said, “that if Dad could pray and have something like that happen, then maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about finding a gas station open tomorrow.”
“You want him to pray the tank full?”
“Well—how’s it so different?”
It seemed like she never asked a question to which I had an answer. “I don’t even know if he prayed, Swede. Maybe it just happened. I don’t know if he ever prays for them, or if they just come.”
A brief cold moment and then she said, “What do you mean, if they come? What other ones are you talking about?”
“Well, like when I was born. You know what happened. You don’t call that a miracle?”
“Oh. Yeah.” You know how it is—you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It’s why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes. She said, “I thought you meant other times.”
Of course I’d meant other times, and it now seemed like some wretched betrayal not to say so.
“He walked a long ways one time on nothing but air,” I told her.
It was probably the wrong place to start.
Strange, isn’t it, that we’d never had such a conversation before? Strange that I could see my father step out supported on the void—and not go tell my sister? Or see him fired by his boss only to reach forth and heal the undeserving puke, or watch a pot of soup multiplied to satisfy the most impressive of appetites, and keep all my wonderment to myself?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Swede asked.
I didn’t know. Why does any witness keep shut about something? “You could’ve noticed some of this yourself, don’t you think? Like the saddle. I can’t believe you didn’t notice that.”
The saddle was a clincher of sorts for Swede. While I told the event to the best of my recall, she climbed over me out of the bunk and crossed the trailer in the dark, hands feeling out front, until she found it there aspraddle the sawhorse. There was silence while her fingers located the place high on the cantle. For a half second my mind swarmed with dread that I’d dreamed or imagined the healing of the leather—that she’d find it still torn and believe forever in my cruelty. Instead there came a hazy sigh. She whispered, “I’ve been sitting on it just like normal.” Cold as it was, she stood by that saddle a long while.
It’s been this part folks disbelieve—not that the saddle was made whole but that Swede had gone all this time without seeing it. Odd on the face of it, I know—I know. But we’re fearful people, the best of us. We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won’t even see it, though we look at it every day.
In the morning it was a brisk 19 degrees according to the Roofing Co-op thermometer Dad had rubberbanded to the bedrail. In case you were starting to think miracles were a convenience of mathematical dependability, we’d run out of propane during the wee hours, which also meant a cold breakfast of dry cereal and bread—the milk was a frozen cardboard cube. Outside, the wind still pushed and grieved round the trailer and we stumbled about inside it, snugging it down with an urgent quiet in our hearts, a fear strangled by cold and hurry. Dad’s head still ached, but he’d regained himself enough to stretch and shadowbox and chide us toward warmth. I remember moving through a sort of stupefaction. Kneeling atop the stove, putting the coffeepot away in its high cupboard, my numb fingers hit a stack of cups and down they all came to explode around my knees. At this Swede began inexplicably to weep. I remember how slowly this appeared to happen—the detachment I felt from the descending cups, the clamor of breakage coming almost before they hit, as if sound outruns sight in the glaciated mind. I remember the noise seeming to delaminate and rearrange into a distorted assemblage of crying and bursting ice. A few moments more and I’d have cried too from pure confusion, except then Dad began to sing. Not like Caruso or anything—he was generally uncomfortable in the same room with his own raised voice—he sang lightly, almost offhandedly, and what he sang was:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.
His truth is marching on.
This lovely warlike anthem Dad sang with increasing good humor straight to its end, steadying me with his hands, picking up wicked white shards,
I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps,
dropping the shards in a paper sack,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps,
sweeping up the glistening dust, my mind brightening the while and Swede’s grief fading to a series of exclamatory sniffs.
His truth is marching on!
Rarely have I felt such claim to a song. Certainly it was our battle hymn as much as the Republic’s.
All that morning we drove cold. We drove from town to town, all of them shut to us if we’d thought to buy gas or propane: wind-sacked, immobile towns with Presbyterians and Lutherans and secure Methodists standing around their church doors. Assured laymen, all of them, with no need for fuel, while we moved slowly through, wondering moment to moment when the last spoonful of gas would drain from the tank and leave us to wait on whoever might come by. Between towns we drove west between stubbled fields, the stubble sticking up through what poor snow had blown and dried and shrunk across the plains. In no place did we see a state trooper; in no place a gas station lit from within. We drove for hours. That we didn’t run dry may indeed have been the miracle Swede wanted. Nearing midday we began seeing what looked like mountains shorn off at the roots. Swede pointed them out as buttes or mesas and said it meant we were in the West for certain, a fact also evident in the presence of beef cattle and oil derricks, often in the same pasture. Swede said something about Teddy Roosevelt, her hero among all presidents, and how he’d ranched not far from here, and how the winters had been so bad in those years that ranchers sometimes lost a thousand head in a single storm. She had read a book about this, as you might expect. It was called Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail and was written by Mr. Roosevelt himself. Swede said he was not only the best cowboy ever to live in the White House but the best writer also. He was a friend to Owen Wister, to Frederic Remington. He credited the hardness of ranching in North Dakota with his recovery from asthma and numerous other griefs. This was good information but not new to me. You couldn’t be Swede’s brother very long and not know the profits of the strenuous life. Just at the moment I was too cold to care. I shrugged deeper into my army woolens and watched our entrance into mesa country. Here there was barely snow at all, though leaden cloudbanks brooded overhead. The mesas followed one another down the horizon north to south. We saw fences more and more rarely; the derricks worked alone in the matted grasslands. Once I asked Dad whether we were in Montana yet, but he said no, North Dakota was a big state.
Sometime after noon the Plymouth began to miss. Not like your small cars, bless their dainty hiccups, when the Plymouth missed the whole car seized backward, cousin to a bucking horse. You had to hold your head against whiplash. Dad pulled over and Swede laid the road atlas across her knees and judged us close to a town called Grassy Butte.
“We’ll stay there,” Dad said. “Grassy Butte. I wonder if there’s a garage—say, you two, let’s get something warm there!” And you know, in that moment I loved the old Plymouth and its cranky ticker, for something warm was just ahead, and we were heading for it. Already I could imagine a cafe, that rare pleasure, with cocoa in a thick white cup. And the cafe would be so warm we’d all take our coats off—honestly, Swede and I were so pleased we got giddy, poking each other as the wagon bucked along.
Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE’S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, “I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?”
“Prevail on Dale,” I repeated to Swede.
“To make a sale,” she added.
“And if we fail, we’ll whale on Dale—”
“Till he needs braille!”
“Will you guys desist?” Dad asked.
No one answered his knock, though we could hear voices inside. He knocked again, and this time the voices got louder and the door opened and a woman was standing there with a baby goat in her arms, just a little goat suckling at a bottle she held. She looked surprised at the three of us.
“It’s Sunday,” she said. “We’re shut.”
“Is Dale here?” Dad inquired.
“Sir,” the woman informed him, “Dale has not been here since November.”
It’s hard to look back and describe Roxanna to you as she was when we first saw her. Big-boned, yes, but not in the cushiony sense people often mean; tall; dirt-road blond hair in a back-swung braid; windburned in the face. She looked like some woman from a polar dogsled expedition recounted in the Geographic. She looked, I would say, built to last.
“My sympathies,” Dad said.
“Appreciated but gratuitous,” the woman replied—and Swede would have loved her forever for that phrase alone—“Dale left November twenty-fifth. Every day since has been Thanksgiving.”
Well, what does a person say to that? I watched Dad look down at his feet, smiling, one hand rubbing the back of his neck. The woman stood there holding her goat, which was yanking single-mindedly at the bottle. It let go once to bleat and bump her chest with its blunt nose.
Dad looked up. “Ma’am, I sure hope you’ll sell us some gas. I know you’d rather not on a Sunday.”
At this moment a better observer than me would’ve seen some acquiescence in the woman’s eyes, some raising of the gate. I saw nothing of the kind, but Dad must have, for when she abruptly shut the door he stayed right where he was. Swede started to talk but he shushed her. The wind snapped our coats around our legs, and now it carried a few gnats of ice. From far inside the house we heard the goat’s voice. Then the door opened again and the woman came out in a parka with the fur up round her ears and walked fast ahead of us to the pumps.
“Check your oil?” she said, while the tank filled.
“It’s fine,” Dad said. Swede and I had climbed back in the Plymouth, under our blankets.
“You mind if I don’t do your windshield,” the woman said.
“What’s your name, if I may ask?”
“Roxanna.”
The pump clicked off and she finessed it a little.
“You should change the sign to Roxanna’s Oil,” Dad said.
“When it warms up, I’ll do that.” Roxanna’s eyelashes and her furry hood were studded with icebits, which strangely enough had a softening effect on her appearance.
“I’d think you’d do more business. It’s a more attractive name, if I may say it.”
You should’ve seen Swede during all this—sitting straight up, head tilted—a more transfixed rubbernecker you never saw.
“Five-fifty,” Roxanna said.
Dad said, “I don’t guess you’d have any propane.”
Roxanna Cawley did have propane, in a bulk tank behind the house. We waited inside while she filled our cylinder. There was a glass counter with boxes of Butterfinger and Three Musketeers alongside some Dutch Masters cigars and a clip display of Dr. Grabow’s pipes. There was a gumball machine, a framed print of the Wild Bunch, the famous one where Butch sits happily on the far right, nearest the bullet holes, and there were two goats, kid and nanny, stabled in a bathroom behind the counter. Seeing us gawk Roxanna opened the door to show the satisfied mother standing on a hummock of straw, the kid curled asleep by a claw-foot tub. There was a basin of water and a crockery jar. It wasn’t as dirty as you’d expect. The billy lived in the barn out back—Roxanna said he didn’t deserve to be in the house, he made smells only he himself seemed to enjoy, and anyhow he’d be rejoined by his family as soon as the kid, Beth, got stronger.
“What’s wrong with Beth?” Swede asked.
“Born blind. Randy kept pushing her away from Momma; he wouldn’t let her eat. So I moved them in here.”
Dad said, “Who?”
“Randy—the billy.”
“Ruffian,” Swede said. “Thug. Miscreant.”
Roxanna smiled at Swede, who no doubt had been exerting herself toward that exact result. “Knave,” Roxanna said.
“Scapegrace,” my sister replied—oh, she was beaming. I had to take a step back and look at her. No showoff by nature, Swede seemed actually leaning forward toward this Roxanna Cawley. I believe you could’ve dropped a plumbline and proved it. “Brigand,” she sang out.
At which Dad in extreme befuddlement herded us out the door, saying something about finding a place for the night. Turning back to Roxanna, he asked whether Grassy Butte had a garage or a motel.
“Garage is closed; the owner’s drunk. The Hi-Way Motel is right by the water tower.”
Dad held up a hand in thanks and shut the door.
We hadn’t made it back to the car when we heard it open again. Roxanna Cawley was standing there looking thistly; did I mention her knuckles before? This woman had worked.
“Or, if you’d like,” she said, “I have a couple of rooms.”