JUST PAST MIDNIGHT THAT HUNCHED BUNDLE BEHIND THE BARN WAS ME, Reuben Land, in deep regret. Skittish, that’s what I was, and unnerved about walking out into the dark. Here all day I’d imagined the glory of this act—waiting for a certain heaviness in the house, slipping on pants, ghosting down to the kitchen, pocketing ginger-snaps, easing shut the door, crossing some hundreds of yards into Davy’s night—just thinking of it beforehand slid me into the company of heroes. Sure, I foresaw some nerves. Dark is dark. But I remembered Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry, afraid that night in the graveyard. And David Balfour ascending the crumbly tower with his uncle downstairs listening for him to drop. And what about Odysseus, rowing down to Hell with a canteen of blood to slake the shade of Tiresius? Odysseus was scared, and look at all he’d been through. Wouldn’t I, too, defeat jitters and win out for Davy’s sake?
Yet I crouched against the barn. It was a moonless night and you get little light from stars, even the old familiars of which I now took stock: big Orion with his belt and slung sword, the hound Sirius at heel; the Dipper and its strayed member Arcturus. All were as bright as I’d ever seen, yet the world stood black in the void. In fact—say—no doubt it was too dark for Davy, too! How would he find his way horseback among the hills? I cupped an ear: no stamp or whicker. Relieved, I took a few steps from the barn. Even were he not waiting, I had to go some token distance to claim the attempt. I counted steps: fifteen, twenty. You mustn’t think I didn’t want to see Davy; I was only weak and afraid. At fifty steps I stopped. The barn was a starless hump in the night. I said, “Davy, you here?”
Nostrils jetted at a distance, loosening my guts. Then a tiny shine bobbed and went out and appeared again and arced into a horse’s liquid eyeball and Fry walked up heaving through the deep snow. He pushed his nose at my chest so hard I’d have sat down if not for grabbing his bridle. I smelled the steam from his skin, the sulfur of Davy’s clothes. How dumb I’d been to doubt his coming! Then Davy laid hold and yanked me up behind him, not saying a thing, patting Fry to encourage his silence, and he reined the horse about and we walked up into the hills.
As earlier, we didn’t talk right away. It was too dark and the going too lumpy. I leaned forward against my brother’s back, my arms about his waist. I could feel Fry angling upslope and my own rear slipping rumpward, a cumbrous type of riding demanding on my part a chronic forward scoot taxing muscles novel to me. In this way we continued so long I began to wonder at our direction. It had seemed at first we were following the path I’d broke earlier; now it seemed otherwise. We kept rising. I craned at the stars, thinking to take a bearing, but the duck and plunge of Fry whisked them up and I marked only a blue disk at low declivity; were it Venus or Jupiter it would mean we were moving west. It was poor information but something to think about besides slipping off the horse. Davy still seemed unwilling to speak. I could feel his attention directed frontward, a material frontward straining as though he and not Fry were carrying us and the work consumed all he could give it.
Cresting a long hill we stopped a moment while Fry blew and stooped and clipped at the snow as though for browse. I let go of Davy to sit straight. I can’t describe what we saw. Here was the whole dizzying sky bowled up over us. We were inside the sky. It didn’t make the stars any closer, only clearer. They burned yellow and white, and some of them changed to blue or a cold green or orange—Swede should’ve been there, she’d have had words. She’d have known that orange to be volcanic or forgestruck or a pinprick between our blackened world and one the color of sunsets. I thought of God making it all, picking up handfuls of whatever material, iron and other stuff, rolling it in His fingers like nubby wheat. The picture I had was of God taking these rough pellets by the handful and casting them gently, like a man planting. Look at the Milky Way. It has that pattern, doesn’t it, of having been cast there by the back-and-forward sweep of His arm?
“Up, Fry,” Davy said. “Let’s go. Rube, it’s pretty, isn’t it?”
I was pleased—it was okay to talk. “Do you picture God tossing them out there like that or setting them up one by one?”
We were heading downslope, a more comfortable job.
“Are you waxing poetic on me now?” Davy said.
“No—I don’t think so.”
“Well, you’re waxing something.”
I shut back up. Fry was rustling along downhill just as though he could see. Presently the sound changed under his hooves and the air turned cushiony. It took me a few minutes to realize we were among trees.
Davy said, “Was it hard, not telling?”
“Nope.”
“Dad didn’t ask where you’d gone?”
“Nope.” Davy hadn’t any idea, of course, where Dad had gone. I’d wondered whether to tell him and now decided to wait. Roxanna might be entirely comfortable with Dad’s decision, but I wasn’t up to defending it to Davy.
“You get out of there easy enough?”
“Yup.” In fact, Dad’s absence, plus Swede’s absorption in the revealed history of Butch Cassidy, had made my exit a piece of cake. Swede after supper had gone to her room and shut the door, seeming so pleased I knew this was no fearsome pout. Just before bedtime I called through the keyhole. I heard her bound off the bed, tearing paper; then a few sheets from her tablet slid under the door—the latest Sunny Sundown. She had it going, as you will see. “I smouched some gingersnaps,” I told Davy.
“Yeah?” He was interested—probably hadn’t had a cookie in months. He reached a hand behind his back and I set five gingersnaps in his palm. Mouth full he said, “Got some left for you?”
“Yup.”
We rode through a treed valley where the snow seemed less and Fry eased into a smoother walk. I expected momentarily to get where we were going, to see some sign of Davy’s life—the glow of a fire through canvas, say.
“Is it a tepee?” I asked.
“What?”
“You and Jape. Do you live in a tepee?”
At that he pulled Fry to a stop. He turned in the saddle. “Rube, there’s one thing; listen to me, now. Call him Mr. Waltzer.”
“Well, sure.” I was taken aback. I wasn’t about to be too familiar with some grown man I’d never met. What did Davy think I’d turned into since he left?
“It’s a weighty thing to him, how he’s addressed.”
You know something? I’d never before heard Davy speak about someone else as though that person and not he himself were in charge. Even at home, even with Dad, he seemed to obey pretty much because he wished to.
“I’ll say mister.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“What do you call him?”
Davy turned forward. “Jape.”
Fry resumed trudging under the stars.
“And the girl is Sara,” he added.
The rest was a silent ride. Weary travel induces a kind of vacuum. Surely we climbed and descended many times, yet for me it was all a glide. My impression was of being pulled along, attracted, called. We came up finally into a saddle between two hills looking down at the same sort of fiery valley where Roxanna had taken us to picnic—a great deal less impressive, however. There was one main fissure wide as an automobile but glowing only in occasional patches with the cool radiance of a candlelit pumpkin. Flames showed from a few spotty cracks webbing away, but it wasn’t a place to make anyone think of Hell or Voltaire. It looked, I would say, beyond its prime, though no doubt someone less inveterate than myself would’ve been impressed.
Davy said, “Here we are.”
I saw the shape of a lighted window set well back from the glowing vein. “You built a cabin?” I probably sounded let down. There is something about a tepee.
He clicked at Fry, who trotted down whickering and was answered by at least one horse below. I kept my eye on the window. Then beside it a door opened and a man stepped out of it and stood straight and formally in the thrown box of light. We rode to him and he clasped his hands behind his back and looked at me as though I were money.
“Little brother Reuben,” he said. “It is my honor.”
“Hi, Mr. Waltzer,” I said.
He took hold of my arm above the elbow and guided me off the horse. Despite all I was to learn about this man, he knew how to make a boy welcome—that is, he took entire control in a way to make you feel older and soldierly. Hands on my shoulders he turned me toward himself, amended my posture, tugged at my coat, removed my stocking cap, and tucked it in my sleeve, where it lay without making a line, all this without a word; then he stood opposite me and again clasped his hands behind him. I looked round for Davy, but he was gone with Fry. Waltzer said, “Look at me, Reuben.”
He was of unimposing height, under six feet. A practical build, big up top, one of those men you realize why it’s called a chest—you had the feeling he had all the tools he needed in there and all in working order and daily use. His hair was dark and tied back in a short bob, and he had a high forehead and two rapscallion eyebrows—upswept, pointed, and mobile.
“Mm,” he muttered. Those brows of his scared me—they were like flipped goatees.
“Tired from the ride?”
“No sir.”
“Cold?”
“No sir, just my toes.”
“You mean to do right by your brother, I expect.”
“Yes sir,” I replied, remembering the ratfink threat I’d made to get here in the first place. Waltzer must know about that, yet didn’t seem predisposed against me.
“Hungry, are you?”
“I don’t need anything, Mr. Waltzer. Thank you.” But he wasn’t listening. His attention was on something else. He leaned down to me.
“If I were to tell you that those hills you rode over will be shaken to dust, and that waters will rise up in their place, and that creatures like none you can think of will swim in that sea—what would you say to that, Reuben?”
He posited this as though it were imminent and as though I were alone with him in the knowledge; and so far was it from anything I’d expected, I didn’t even know to be careful.
“I guess I’d want to know what day, Mr. Waltzer.”
He searched my eyes, straightened, and blew out hard through his nostrils, like a horse. “Come in and eat.”
The cabin was a clean ruin. I have since seen photos of its ancestors, which were the slave and sharecropper shacks strung beside dirt fields in southern states. It hadn’t stud walls but was built up of chinked vertical boards held by stringers top and bottom—four warped walls laced together to approximate a box. It had a sooty tin roof and a floor of boards over earth, except where some had been removed for a barrel stove. The dirt under the stove was baked black. Yet for its poverty the place was livable. The stove flung heat nobly and was topped by a coffeepot and a Dutch oven that smelled of brown sugar. The Dutch oven had a lipped cover holding several fist-sized stones as if to keep in some rebellious meal. There was a tin drum of water with PERFECTION OIL, ALL ITS NAME IMPLIES painted on it. A corner of the cabin had been enclosed by means of strung ropes, from which sheets hung like laundry to the floor.
Waltzer took a stool at the table under the single window. “Sit down.”
I didn’t want to—not without Davy there. I angled against the wall and worked at my overshoes.
“He’ll be in forthwith,” Waltzer said. “A horse isn’t a car. Come sit down.”
I hung my coat on a peg and sat. He leaned forward on an elbow, looking at me. “So you found the errant brother,” he said. “Good for you, uh?”
“I guess so.”
“Davy doesn’t tell me about his family. You’re a surprise.”
“I’m sorry.”
His eyes were bright as a badger’s. “Sorry doesn’t matter. We should be honest with each other. I have some questions for you, and you’ve a few for me. Go ahead.”
He was so direct I could only doubt his meaning. He wanted me to grill him? Right now? And then he was going to grill me?
He looked at me with pity and impatience—certainly he’d expected better of Davy’s brother. “Well? What do you want to know?”
“Why you live here,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.
His eyebrows went way up—with pleasure, I noted, to my relief. “Sara,” he called, “come meet Reuben, pour him some coffee.” Before the sentence ended a sheet was pulled back and she moved across to the stove, a redhead girl about fourteen in pants and a man’s flannel shirt. Green plaid flannel. When she brought the coffeepot I saw she had green eyes too, though she didn’t aim them at me particularly.
“Davy’s brother Reuben,” Waltzer said, as she set down three enameled cups and poured. “This is Sara. Thank you, daughter.”
She nodded to him and retired behind the sheets without revealing her voice. I’d have liked to hear it.
“I live here because it is a cheap safe place to wait for the world to change,” Waltzer declared. “Sit straight there, Reuben. Carriage matters.”
I sat straight. “Is it changing the way you like, Mr. Waltzer?” He’d spoken, after all, of crumbling hills and rising seas; it might be a pretty long wait.
“Yes,” he said. “I go out from time to time and have a look. It’s coming around, Reuben. I take encouragement.”