THE EXCITEMENT DIDN’T QUIT WHILE I WAS AWAY: JAPE WALTZER FIRED three more unhurried rounds at the Ford, where Davy was burrowed in the backseat. He also plugged the house a few times—five times, according to Swede’s obsessive reconstructions. Four loads blew windows all over the main floor and a bed upstairs, which pretty well discouraged peeking, and one came straight through the wall into the living room, where it smacked a brass pony given Swede by a former teacher. Amid this ruin Roxanna called the sheriff, Dr. Nokes, and the Lord, doubtless in the opposite order, and shouted at the girls to stay down. Later she would find Sara concealed under blankets in a cedar chest dusted with burst glass, but Swede was busy ripping Dad’s closet half to shreds, hunting his shotgun. She found it, but no shells. By then all was quiet. She joined Roxanna and they opened the front door. The Ford was gone and Davy with it. Waltzer’s chair lay tipped in the shade beside the barn.
Dad was propped on an elbow on the gravel, bleeding abundantly from a hole in his right side.
I was on my face in the lee of the porch.
Here’s what I’ve been told of the next few minutes. Roxanna attended to Dad while Swede pushed me over and explored for heartbeats. Nine years old, kneeling in blood and foam, she grabbed my wrist, my neck; she felt the big dripping cave of my chest. I’m sorry still for what this must’ve cost her. Dad, tired but lucid, told Roxanna to quit stanching the hole in his side; when she pressed too hard he couldn’t breathe. Let it flow, he told her. Let the blood wash it clean. It put Roxanna in an awful bind, for she saw the wound better than he did—its neat bird’s-eye entry and gaping egress. She knew he might shortly bleed dry. She has told me how she prayed aloud while wrapping her fist in her dress and jamming it in that wound; she did her best, I know it, for a great long time, Dad coming in and out the while. Then the sound of Swede crying registered on Dad, and she went to him covered in pink froth so that he started up, thinking she was dying; but she told him it was me, I wasn’t breathing, or answering, or blinking my eyes. And right about here Dr. Nokes drove up; I imagine his big car bottoming out in our bumpy yard, a train of blue smoke behind.
His best turned out to be no better than Roxanna’s. Ascertaining that I was gone—for my lungshot chest no longer bled, no rhythm moved anywhere, and I lay cooling under his hands—Dr. Nokes turned to Dad, who looked him over without evident recognition and rolled up his eyes. By the time a county car rolled in, and a second behind it, there was, Roxanna tells me, an atmosphere of crystalline despair in which the doctor broke and sobbed. Through this scene stepped the sheriff and a speechless deputy, over their heads for certain; yet before an official word was spoken the deputy, Galen Max, yipped, “Look there!” For I had bucked suddenly, as though kicked in the back. “He done it again!” yelped Galen Max; and then, reports Swede, I was seized with coughing, and blood and water spouted from my mouth and nose—sorry for the detail, but it’s quite glorious to me—and Dr. Nokes bolted to my side and set about my recovery in a sort of delirium. It was hardly the first time I’d come awake to someone whacking my back, but it seemed a wholly new experience and one I’d come a great distance to try.
“I don’t know what you were using to breathe,” Dr. Nokes told me.
It was some weeks later, and he was beside my bed at the red farm.
“Not your lungs,” he declared.
At first I didn’t know what he meant; my lungs felt as large and light as a May afternoon. They felt like they had in the next country, as I ran up through the orchard—except over there I hadn’t given them a thought. Back here I woke each morning to the shock of perfect breathing. Had I opened my mouth and spoken Portuguese, the surprise couldn’t have been more complete.
“Look,” I told Dr. Nokes, inhaling an unbelievable quantity of air. It went right in!
“Yes, yes—leave some for the rest of us.”
For weeks there wasn’t a day Dr. Nokes didn’t come by. Though professing worry over the chance of infection or of some undissolved clot cruising my arteries, he came for other reasons also. He came so we could miss Dad together, all of us, and he came because of my lungs, which posed a mystery.
One day he said, “Your father should not have died, Reuben. Did you know that?”
I nodded, but he said, “Not just because it’s terrible to be without him, though God knows—” and here Dr. Nokes seemed to slip, somewhere in his mind, then catch himself. “I mean, injured where he was. I examined him, you know. No organs were damaged. Blood vessels, yes. But he actually shouldn’t have died.”
And I, conversely, shouldn’t have lived. Though I sensed this was the case, it was only years later Dr. Nokes would explain why in detail. His forbearance is to his credit. What eleven-year-old should be told that his lungs only recently lay in literal shreds inside his central cavity? Dr. Nokes saw this fact with his two eyes. He felt it with his fingers. Yet mere hours later it was revealed at the hospital in Montrose that my lungs had not only endured an explosive chest wound but, in fact, seemed none the worse for wear. In fact, reported a perplexed emergency-room physician, it was as though they hadn’t been touched.
Of course they had been touched; that was the very point.
Goodness, I miss Dad.
But here, let me finish quickly. Swede, who would know, says drift is the bane of epilogues. You should know that Roxanna, married to Jeremiah Land three months before he died, became as much our rock as though God Himself had placed her beneath our lives. Certainly her sacrifice was no less than Dad’s. Who could’ve poured more courage into us? Who could’ve given as selflessly as she? For we were a demanding crew. Sara herself could’ve emptied the stores of a dozen wise parents. Oh, yes—Sara stayed with us, though at a distance she’d acquired from living with Waltzer. To begin with, it was rare to hear Sara join more than three sentences; though when she did, Swede pointed out, it was clear she would make a fine newspaper editorialist were she so inclined. For many months none but Roxanna closed the distance, and she on tiptoe; as for me, I mostly left Sara alone, admiring her strengths from across the family. A practiced eavesdropper, I’d not have listened to her talks with Roxanna for any reward; though I did overhear a visit or two with lovestruck town boys, in which she babbled with forged conviction about classmates, teachers, and popular music, so it’s not as if I believed we had an angel on our hands.
Swede, whom you know reasonably well by now, quit school in frustration at seventeen to write a novel. It didn’t publish, much to her later relief, but won her a sort of watchful uncle at a venerable New York publishing house. Now—after four novels, a history of the Dakota Territories, and a collection of poetry—she gets adoring letters from strangers. Her poetry book is flat-out perfect. It all rhymes! One ballad seems inspired by my own somewhat unique future. (My favorite lines: Drat, thought dying Lazarus, / This part again.) Others, yes, involve cowboys. Reviewers could only gape. One wrote that Swede was “setting verse back a century,” and “mining ground long ago found barren”; he called the book a “blazing song of innocence.” His was not the only review of its kind, but it was the one that vexed Swede. Against writerly protocol she returned fire, writing the reviewer a long and personal critique impugning his education, prose, honor, and masculinity. You poor man, it started, proceeding in such readable fashion the periodical printed it whole, along with the reviewer’s aghast rebuttal. There followed three or four additional exchanges, revealing my sister as the better wit, “though flawed,” she admitted to me with a rueful spark, “in the humility department.” Incidentally this public feud impelled Swede’s poetry onto several best-seller lists—alien surroundings for rhyming verse.
You should know that Jape Waltzer proved as uncatchable as Swede’s own Valdez. No doubt he went on to mischief elsewhere. Well: the farther elsewhere the better. Maybe he’s dead, prancing across some pockmarked landscape trying to keep the flames off, or maybe he’s just old, and a more sulfurous poison than before. Maybe he’s even old and repentant. Anything is possible. I only know he is apart from us and that, as Mr. Stevenson wrote of Long John, we’re pleased to be quit of him.
You should know that Andreeson did indeed perish in the Badlands, and that it was Waltzer who bludgeoned him and rolled his poor corpse into the lignite to hiss. Having this information from Davy I could hardly volunteer it officially, but there came a day when a couple in late middle age drove up to the red farm. The man came knocking, his wife stayed in the car. He had Andreeson’s high forehead but none of his confidence. We sat on the porch awhile. I was twenty-five then and far too young to impart the kind of comfort these people sought. The aimlessness and sorrow in their steps would make a terribly long story, but that is another’s book to write, another person’s witness.
Finally, you should know this. One Thanksgiving we were all of us home, all but Davy. Swede had returned from a writing residency in Wyoming, Sara from nursing in St. Paul; I was working for a carpenter in Roofing, putting up Sheetrock and a little proud of my big shoulders. We held hands round the table for a prayer of gratitude. When Roxanna reached Amen, Swede released my left hand, but Sara held on to my right.
Or maybe it was I who didn’t let go.
And Davy? Listen: There’s a small town in Canada, a prairie town. A place along the broad North American flyway where in autumn the geese move through by the hundreds of thousands. Since August Shultz died—following Birdie by two hard winters—I’ve gone north to witness that migration. The glory of a single Canada goose gliding in, trimming its angles this way and that, so close you can feel the pressure of its wingbeats—multiply this by ten or twenty thousand across a morning, and you too might begin creeping into frozen rockpiles before dawn. In any case, once I rose in the small hours and walked down from my rented bed to a pine-bench cafe, which in season is full of hunters sociably forking down eggs by five in the morning. Outside, leaves beat past in a wet wind. What I wanted was pancakes and sausage, so I ordered and took a clean cup and helped myself to coffee.
Davy came in the door before my short stack arrived. He wore a down jacket and new lace-up boots. At last, some decent gloves. He sat down. “You hunting alone, Rube?”
It’s not the easiest way to keep up with your brother. Some years he coasts into that town in my shadow—he’s the next man in the cafe, the voice behind me at the gas station. Some years he doesn’t show at all. Exile has its hollow hours. Some years I’ve noticed odd tilts in his speech. No doubt he has lived among accents, I hope in pleasant places, but he tells me painfully little. He asks and asks.
So I give him the news. He reads all of Swede’s work; he sends regards and comments. It drives her wild that he never appears in the midst of what she’s doing, but she knows he’s crazy about her. Twice Swede has accompanied me, hoping to see him, neither time with success.
Possibly he dreads what she might ask of him.
“You got awfully big,” he told me, that first morning, in the cafe.
So I told him what happened—about my foray into the next country, and Dad catching up with me there.
Belief is a hard thing to gauge where Davy is concerned.
“And he sent you back?”
I told him Dad didn’t exactly send me, but that I could go no farther. That it seemed a transaction had taken place on my behalf.
“Breathe,” Davy said. “Let’s see you breathe.”
Well, that was the easy part. Harder was describing that land itself: its upward-running river, its people on the move and ground astir with song. For just as that music stays outside the pattern I would give it, so does my telling fall pitifully short of what the place is. What mortal creations are language and memory! And so I sound like a man making the most marginal sense—as if I were describing one of those dreams that seemed so genuine at the time.
“Don’t you ever doubt it?” Davy asked.
And in fact I have. And perhaps will again. But here is what happens. I look out the window at the red farm—for here we live, Sara and I, in a new house across the meadow, a house built by capable arms and open lungs and joyous sweat. Maybe I see our daughter, home from school, picking plums or apples for Roxanna; maybe one of our sons, reading on the grass or painting an upended canoe. Or maybe Sara comes into the room—my darling Sara—with Mr. Cassidy’s beloved rolls on a steaming plate. Then I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers.
Is there a single person on whom I can press belief?
No sir.
All I can do is say, Here’s how it went. Here’s what I saw.
I’ve been there and am going back.
Make of it what you will.