Dad let me stew while he reversed the ratchet and let the trailer sink an inch. He checked the bubble again and returned to the jack and brought it up a millimeter or two, and while he messed thus Tommy Basca’s last moments reappeared to me, and the bafflement in his face as he scrambled bellywise over the floor.
“Okay,” I said.
“What?”
“Davy did a wrong thing.”
Dad raised his brows. “Yet you want him to escape consequences.”
“Yes sir.”
“Consequences represented by Mr. Andreeson, who becomes”—Dad caught my eye—“our enemy.”
This of course was the indefensible truth. It was also incomplete; having recently become acquainted with Davy’s new life and his compadre Jape Waltzer, I realized he hadn’t got away from consequences by any means.
But Dad said, “Look, Reuben. I want the same thing as you: Davy free and clear. If you like Mr. Andreeson better as an enemy, then keep him one. Maybe that’s your job as a boy—as a brother. My job is different.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m the dad. I have to heed the Lord’s instructions.”
I hadn’t any comment to this but felt myself opposite to the Lord in some way, which was worrisome.
Dad asked, “You remember what the Lord said about enemies?”
In fact I did remember some passages about enemies. Once, sick of whiners, the Lord caused the earth to crack open like an old bun and a crowd of them fell right in. And how about the prophet Elijah, slaughtering four hundred priests of Baal in one afternoon? Then there were the twisted fellows of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the time before that when God killed pretty much everyone in the world except Noah’s family. The Old Testament, boy, it suited me.
“Love your enemies,” Dad said. “Pray for those who persecute you.”
He would pick those verses.
“Rats, huh?” he said.
Davy came back that afternoon. I was on some errand and looked up to the hills; he was exactly where he’d been the first time, though he sat a different horse.
Again I didn’t dare wave. I did raise my hand to my eyes as though shading off sun. At this Davy turned the horse—a paint—and started working round the side of the hill as before.
That night he was waiting for me behind the barn.
“Hey, Natty,” he started, but I shushed him. Dad was sleeping in the trailer now; we couldn’t afford a whole lot of Nattying this close to home. If the nervous paint horse were even to nicker—
Davy gave me a hand and I slipped up behind him.
“Jape’s gone tonight,” he whispered, when we’d gained some distance.
To call this welcome news didn’t touch it. Glad as I’d been to catch sight of Davy, I dreaded seeing Mr. Waltzer again. Back in the house I’d gone to my room and at suppertime told the barefaced lie that my stomach was sick. Actually it was just empty, but I couldn’t go down and sit across from Dad with that man Waltzer in my proximate future. What if my pipes seized up? What if he tried teaching me to breathe again?
“He had to go pay a man,” Davy explained. “Some debt he owed. He won’t be back for a couple days.”
“Can you come home then—come home with us—since he’s gone?”
This brought a silence during which I remembered a salient fact: Davy wasn’t scared of Waltzer the way I was. Davy wasn’t his hostage but remained by choice. He called him Jape, for goodness’ sakes.
“Nope,” said my brother at last. “Besides, what about Sara? You think I should leave her alone?”
Sara was another fact I’d forgotten about. “Bring her along,” I suggested, hopelessly.
“That,” said Davy, grinning so I could hear it, “might be the worst idea you had in quite awhile, Rube.”
So we rode on. The paint horse took us up at a walk, round the first hill then on as before, through treed valleys and choked washes and across flanneled hillsides, none of which a person could honestly see on account of the clouds which had got between us and moonlight. I recall the quilted jolts of that ride, the radiant warmth of the horse’s rump and the sulfury odor of Davy’s coat, and I recall the black remorse that flapped down and perched on me as we rode, for this time I was sneaking out on Dad. You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.
What else exhausts like sustained deception? I don’t know how the true outlaw does it. In the coming weeks I was to make that ride with Davy three more times. Not once did I come close to being nabbed. Not once did Swede so much as roll over when I slipped past her door. One night skirting the barn I did hear Dad praying aloud in the Airstream—talking, laughing, asking questions of the Lord as though it had been you or me or Mr. DeCuellar in there—and I had to fight an ache to go straight to him and admit the weaselly nature I was fast developing. Yet even then Davy was waiting in the dark not a hundred yards away. I could hear the stamp of the paint, who seemed always a little goosey; now Davy would be leaning forward, rubbing the horse’s ears, giving to the animal of his own confidence; how could I not go out to him? I told myself we might yet reach a place where Davy would agree to come home. That the things I was learning at Waltzer’s table might be of value in my brother’s redemption. Also I had the common weakling’s fantasy, imagining myself venerated in some golden future—Say, that’s Reuben Land, who went into the Badlands at the age of eleven and found his outlaw brother. I thought of the admiration people like Bethany Orchard would bear me, the way they would seek my company, as if I were that pilgrim Sinbad come in off the water. Tell us about it, Reuben Land.
And indeed I did learn some things, many of which I’ve had to grow into.
“We saw old man Finch,” I told Davy, as we rode through the hills. “It was the day we left. He was out in the wind; he could just barely stand up.”
“Well, that old souse,” Davy cheerfully replied.
But after talking with Dad, it was plain to me Davy had done a grievous wrong. Don’t misunderstand, I backed my brother all the way. Yet it had come to mean something whether he felt anything like repentence. I pressed awkwardly in. “Couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.”
The paint horse stepped along at a bright pace. Davy said, “Don’t you do that, Rube. Don’t you recommend regret to me—it’s no help.”
“I wasn’t saying anything.”
“Say I did regret it; what good does it do? I have to go on from here.” He kneed the paint to a quick trot; I grabbed his waist to stay on.
Another ride, we got talking about Sara.
“She’s not really Waltzer’s daughter. He got her from a fellow in Utah,” Davy said.
“Got her?” What was that supposed to mean?
“The fellow gave her to him.”
“So Mr. Waltzer’s like her godfather,” I said. We ourselves had godparents—August and Birdie Shultz, in fact. I’d often been comforted to think that should a boiler or something tip over on Dad at the school, we’d go live with August and Birdie instead of at some orphanage. Do you know how many times I read the Classics Illustrated version of Oliver Twist? Orphanages were a bad deal.
“I don’t think that’s it exactly,” Davy said.
“Well, fellows don’t just give their kids away.”
“This was five or six years ago,” he went on. “Sara remembers her dad.”
“Well—was he dying or something?”
We plodded ahead. This particular night was fair as you could want, not cold, the sky glutted with stars, yet all felt stained, or soon to be.
“Was he dying?” I asked again.
“Far as I know he’s still alive.”
“He just gave her away?”
“Sara doesn’t seem to like him much.”
That I could believe.
“All I know,” Davy said, seeming way too dispassionate about it, “is that she is Jape’s daughter for now. When she’s old enough she’s supposed to marry him or something. That’s what he told me: ‘I’m raising myself a wife.’”