Our first night back Swede propped herself in bed, typewriter before her, listing in quilts. At first I worried she’d go back to fretting and banging the wall; but she whacked away steadily, and I soon dropped asleep in my room across the hall. Here’s what I found in the morning, laid neatly on the floor beside my bed:

The moon was black as a miner’s lung,
The sky was black as a shroud,
And deep in a cell that was black as a well
Two men lay moaning aloud.

And one was Rennie, who’d robbed a man,
And one was Bert, who had killed,
And the gallows outside hadn’t ever been tried
But its mission would soon be fulfilled, lads,
Its mission would soon be fulfilled.

Three nooses swayed loose in a breeze like a sigh—
But who was the third who was waiting to die?

Swede came in while I was reading and perched on my bed like a satisfied cat; she saw how breathless I was, it made her pretty confident. I said, “Is it Sunny?” But she only shrugged—she knew she had me.

He’d been awake in his room one night,
With his darling asleep by his side,
When the bold Reddick boys, hardly making a noise,
Pushed the front door open wide.

His bride they had threatened not once but three times,
When his travels had fetched him away.
They had followed her round as she walked through the town,
Calling names I would rather not say—no,
The names I would rather not say.

And what do you think any good man would do,
No matter what judges or laws told him to?

There was something about the poem—I almost felt I had read it before. “Swede,” I told her, “this is awful good!”

“Aw, don’t,” she said.

They opened the door and they crossed the broad floor
With their minds full of evil intent.
For in town they had heard the fortuitous word
That Sundown on business was sent.

And as they approached Sunny rose to his feet,
Like a spirit he made not a sound,
And his blood rose inside as they came near his bride
And he shot the bold Reddick boys down, lads,
He shot the bold Reddick boys down.

So may a good man who has spared his wife hurt
Face death with the likes of poor Rennie and Burt.

“That’s it?” I couldn’t believe it; there wasn’t any more! “He dies? They hang him with these two guys?”

“Reuben, how fast do you think I can write this stuff?”

“Oh—it’s not done?”

“Reuben!”

“Well, I’m sorry!” The truth was, old Sundown really tugged at me. Glad as I was that Swede was back in whatever groove made the verses click, this business of hearing half a story was insufferable. Cautiously I asked, “What about Valdez?”

She didn’t look at me. “What about him?”

“Well, what happened to him? Who are these Rennie and Burt fellows?”

She looked at me hard. I figured she was thinking I didn’t like the poem.

“Swede, it’s a great poem. You know it is. I was only wondering.”

She had tears in her eyes, just that quick!

“I love the poem, Swede!” I was desperate, pardner.

She said, “Sunny couldn’t beat him, Reuben. Valdez. I couldn’t write it.”

Now why do you suppose that made me feel so bad? A lump arose as if I were reading my own mawkish epitaph.

“So he got away?”

She didn’t answer. Her silence placed or revealed a nub of fear in me—an unreasoning fear that Valdez was no invention. That he was real and coming toward us on solid earth. A preposterous idea, wouldn’t you say? Yet it blazed up, so scary in its brightness that I made a wall against it in my heart, in the deepest place I owned.

The weeks wheeled along unbalanced. Swede leaned toward elation; she herself couldn’t have orchestrated Davy’s getaway in more fabled style. One day Walt Stockard reported to us that the Svedvig mare had come trotting home, whickering for oats but none the worse for wear. There was speculation that Davy’d ridden a dozen miles across country to the state highway and nabbed a ride. Swede also took satisfaction in the newspapers’ reversal of attitude, by now so complete that a stranger reading his first Davy Land article would’ve finished it believing the world was improved without these Finch and Basca characters anyway and that young Land ought merely to be thanked and let go. One columnist, Aaron W. Groap at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, was particularly susceptible to romance. I’ve saved a couple of his entries—here’s part of one.

RIDE, DAVY, RIDE

No fretting for the past for me, folks. I’m happy in the current century. Put me in a Lincoln Continental or a turboprop leaving frozen St. Paul; give me Huntley-Brinkley at six o’clock; meet me at Met Stadium for a ball game on a summer night. I’m a modern creature, friend, and I like it that way.

So how come I envy Davy Land?

He’s just a kid, after all, with an outdated sense of frontier justice. A kid who went too far and landed, most deservedly, in jail. A kid who’s exceeded the boundaries of our civilized lives. He ought to be locked up—isn’t that right?

So how come, when I arrive at work, the first thing I do is check the AP wire to see if Davy Land’s been caught? And chuckle on seeing he hasn’t?

He’s just a boy on a horse, after all. Just a skinny length of wire and persistence who still doesn’t know he can’t really escape. Such ignorance! For his face is known to every citizen. It’s pasted to the dashboard of every state cop and county hack. I mentioned Chet Huntley and David Brinkley? If you saw the news last night, you know they know him too.