So we stuck with just the appalling oath. I’ve forgotten the exact parlance, but it was a rare and lofty oath, studded with illustrious and disused old words, such as treachery, and banishment, and leprous.

Roxanna was correct about the county snowplows; they weren’t up to the job. Days opened and filled with work and talk and closed early. My lungs relaxed; I was allowed in the barn and taught to candle eggs. Swede climbed to the loft and pitched down hay for the sheep. Following these modest chores we cinched on scarves and went walking atop snowdrifts so hard they stayed trackless. We walked out above the road and looked down the white horizon. We were good and stuck, and dangerously happy. Late in the fifth day we saw what looked like jets of smoke spurting from the ground in the east. We put back our hoods expecting the chuffs and growls of plow trucks, but they were still too far for sound.

Next morning Roxanna and Swede cleaned out the goatpen—in the bathroom, back of the cash register—while I investigated the pictures on the office walls.

“What’s this one of the town?”

Roxanna poked her head out the bathroom. “Main street of Lawrence. That’s Dad’s theater on the right. The Empress, see the marquee?”

Somehow when Roxanna had told about her father’s theater, I’d pictured something more conspicuous. Hadn’t it drawn notables Lee Van Cleef and Mr. Trumbo? But the marquee of the Empress was nothing but a flat storefront sign across which lay CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS in tilty letters.

A toilet roared, startling the goats, yet Roxanna was wise. If you’re going to stable critters inside a house, you can’t do better than right by a toilet.

“How come you’ve got this of the Wild Bunch here?” It was Cassidy and the rest posing in new suits—you’ve seen it, the one with the bullet holes.

“My great-uncle spent some time with Cassidy,” Roxanna called back.

Whatever Swede had in hand dropped to the floor; it didn’t make a very nice sound. “Your uncle knew Butch Cassidy?”

“Great-uncle. They were friends,” Roxanna said. “He’s not in the picture though, so you see they weren’t that close.”

A revelation of this nature might’ve rendered Swede paralytic until the whole story was told, but Roxanna said, “No, you don’t—you said you’d help, let’s keep at it,” so Swede scraped and moiled with a renewed sense of enterprise, no doubt to grease along any emergent history.

Roxanna’s great-uncle had been a gunsmith and doctor, a canny occupational blend for a young man in Casper, Wyoming, at the end of the nineteenth century. Taken to visit him by her father, Roxanna remembered a kitchen table spread always with bits of firearm: trigger assemblies, firing pins, bolts grooved silver for want of oil. She remembered his mounted vises, one large one delicate, and his magnifying lens like a jeweler’s fixed to the frame of his glasses. He had a workshop in the basement but preferred the kitchen; a lifelong bachelor, he baked himself cinnamon rolls almost every morning, setting the dough to rise before going to bed. When you stepped in his door, Roxanna remembered, you smelled pastry and coffee and oilswabbed steel.

Swede asked, a trace impatiently, how the great-uncle knew Mr. Cassidy; the answer was, Same way he knew all sorts of other people. You couldn’t ever visit Uncle Howard without shooing away a man in a suit. They were salesmen from the Remington and Winchester and Savage companies, or they were medical men come inquiring after his particular advice in the treatment of gunshot wounds. Running into Uncle Howard’s kitchen, Roxanna had once banged into the knees of a man wearing a white shirt and black vest and a watch-fob bellyslung as if from the foregone century. The man had helped her up. Tipped his hat. He was a Pinkerton detective and offered to fingerprint Roxanna to illustrate his craft, but Howard chased him away. Howard didn’t believe a person should be printed on a whim. He was an old man by this time and told his receptive great-niece that Pinkertons were honorable, as a rule, but from long habit he considered them to be on the other side of things from himself.

This was how he had met Mr. Cassidy. Arriving home from church on a lovely June Sunday, Howard had been surprised to find a boy propped spraddle-legged on his front step. That’s how the great-uncle described him, as a boy. The boy was leaned back on one elbow like any idler and had a piece of chalk in his hand and he was doodling with the chalk on the broad slabstone Howard used for stoop and entry. On seeing Howard the boy sprang up. He took off his hat and tucked it under his arm, coming down off the step with a warm smile and his hand out, so that Howard had the dreamlike perception of being welcomed to his own home by a stranger. The young man asked if Howard knew who he was. Nope. Disappointment rose in the young man’s face. He had a parcel in his jacket and wondered if Howard might have a look. Howard pointed out it was the Lord’s day. The young man asked him just to look—if he was interested, the parcel could be left till a day the Lord hadn’t claimed.

In truth, Howard wasn’t in the habit of honoring the sabbath; he was more interested in honoring the pan of cinnamon rolls he’d set to rise just before leaving for church. But the young man was so engaging Howard allowed him into the kitchen, where some cattleman’s hopeless carbine lay dismembered on the table. The young man sat down and unstrung his oilcloth parcel. With great sadness he lifted forth a smashed revolver. The barrel was long enough to seem ungainly and had been flattened and twisted at the base. The grips were walnut; one had been split clean and might be repaired but the other was like a pulped apple. The cylinder had been knocked free and was the lone undamaged component. Howard looked at the young man, who was swallowing repeatedly in evident grief. He said a train had struck it—that he was doing some work near the tracks and must have dropped it and a train came along and rolled right over it. Howard said it was the most heartbroken firearm he’d ever seen. No, he couldn’t fix it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. The young man sat at Great-uncle Howard’s table looking down at his knees. It made Howard ache.

The cinnamon rolls were just browning up and he offered one to the youngster. The roll helped. Roxanna remembered her great-uncle’s rolls. His especial pride was the frosting—he ordered back East for confectioners’ sugar, fifty pounds at a time, and he added melted butter and a potion of strongbrew coffee and a dried vanilla bean ground fine with mortar and pestle. After several rolls the young man’s spirits lifted. He told Howard to call him Butch. He said the revolver meant a lot to him—he’d ordered it for its long barrel because he was a poor shot and wished to correct this deficiency. He had a friend Harry who could walk out at dusk and spook up a dove and drill it in flight right-handed or left. It was important to Butch that Harry respect him, as the two were working together. Moved by Butch’s earnestness, Great-uncle Howard assured him the revolver was an unfixable mess but offered to sell Butch a gun from his own armory. It was an 1860 Army he’d taken in trade from a retired Union captain. The captain had carried it through Antietam and a half-dozen other situations and had kept it in trim throughout. Howard had liked its action but not its dinged barrel and had refitted it with one from a brass-framed buffalo revolver circa 1855. Butch looked it over and aimed down its barrel, which similarly had that ungainly length. The modification had been cleanly done and Butch was interested but strapped. He waged negotiations upon which he was allowed to leave Howard’s kitchen with the gun at half its value, the rest to be delivered upon arrival of Butch’s next pay, which Butch affirmed was coming along soon.

By the time Dad stamped in—bathed in dirty oil and bits of straw—we’d learned that Butch Cassidy had indeed paid off the revolver, that Great-uncle Howard had liked the young man’s company enough to close shop occasionally and dabble in outlawry, and that he’d once had the strange experience of shooting an unruly trainman in the thigh then removing the bullet four hours later at his town practice, having not even changed his clothes. I thought it was odd, the trainman not recognizing him and raising a stink, but Swede pointed out this sort of thing happened all the time. How many times did Zorro gallop magnificently out of town, everyone watching, then show up five minutes later as Diego, still breathing hard? And no one ever figured that out.

Dad said, “Listen, can you hear the plows? They’ll have us clear by dark.”

“Now that’s auspicious,” replied Roxanna. “I’m out of milk.”

“Also, the Plymouth is running better. Plugs were pretty much a mess.”

Swabbing noises from the bathroom.

“So we’ll be able to settle up, Roxanna. We can leave tomorrow. Get out of your hair.”

I can hear him yet: Settle up. Get out of your hair. In that dread moment I realized some huge, imprecise, and desperate expectation had begun to form inside me. And so swiftly—I’d had no idea! Leave tomorrow. It left me empty and dumb. Swede too; I’ve talked to her about it. She wanted to run out where Dad stood picking straw off his coat and hit him in the stomach.

But clearly Roxanna was thrown for no such loop, for she emerged upbeat from the bathroom, hair kerchiefed back like Aunt Jemima’s, goatmuck thumb-swiped across one cheek, forearms crossed under rolled sleeves—the word majestic comes to mind. She smiled brightly at Dad, saying, “Are you in a hurry to leave, Mr. Land?”

None of us, of course, was in a hurry to leave. Surely I wasn’t. The truth is my short history contained no such person as Roxanna Cawley. What must she have thought when Dad, yanking me up out of nightmare, held my shoulders and instructed her to pound my back? Yet she pounded as if not just mine but both our lives were reckoned by her strength.

As for Swede, every sentence Roxanna spoke presented her with something new to admire. A movie star had eaten at her table; her great-uncle had ridden with Butch Cassidy! Also she employed words like auspicious while cleaning behind goats, a positive indication of dignity.

Dad’s reluctance to leave, so far as I know, had little to do with Roxanna. It had more to do with Almighty God, who so far had issued no instructions about what to do next. And so we awaited some event or foretoken, a long line of which we could recount in our march toward Davy’s reclamation. The divine befuddlement of the North Dakota State Patrol. August Shultz’s inkling toward the Badlands. Mr. Lurvy’s bequest. Even Dad getting fired by the depraved Superintendent Holgren—why, we’d never have left Roofing otherwise! Yet here we sat at Roxanna Cawley’s in a most disturbing state of satisfaction. Every morning Dad studied the Scriptures; every afternoon we did Roxanna’s chores and were repaid by revelatory tales of her adventurous and profane and torchlit forebears. Nights Swede and I dozed in the comforting far-off resonance of adult conversation. We did not eavesdrop. Sometimes we’d hear Dad deepen his inflection—he was a very good mimic, a talent he would not practice before his children—and then we’d hear Roxanna laugh. She had a low beautiful laugh, and hearing it you could only wish you’d said the thing that brought it forth. Here’s a strange fact: By the time Dad declared with such candid bad timing that we could get out of Roxanna’s hair, I’d begun waking in the mornings with the sensation that I’d been born in her house. That I was as native there as the painted wainscoting and the clothes tree beside my bed. In all it was as pleasant a mirage as any I’d occupied.

But eventually the plow did arrive, against all yearnings; we wrapped in coats and scarves and stood on a snowridge to watch its tortured passage. The depth of the drifts hid all but its topmost parts, so that what we observed was a headlit monster crushing through nightfall with the tip of its V-shaped scoop borne up before it like the prow of an ice-breaking ship. To make any way at all, the plow needed a running start. It would back off fifty yards or more, then clutch into low and come roaring ahead, all chains and smoke, casting up backlit clouds that made us gasp. The whole effort was so heroic Dad grabbed Swede and put her on his shoulder as if at a parade. When the plow had at last gone by, it backed up once more and the two men inside it climbed out and stood on their running boards to wave and holler, and we whooped and jumped around in reply because it was thrilling, no matter what was to happen next—it’s not every day such liberators appear on your behalf, and we cheered them like Ulysses home from battle.

Then Dad said, “Swede, Reuben, in you go. Get your things together. Go on now,” and the great moment was over. Next morning we’d have to leave—in fact, Dad seemed so determined to leave I supposed he’d received orders from the Lord at last. Upstairs I offered this idea to Swede. I only meant it as comfort.

“Did he tell you anything?” She was crying mad, firing balled-up socks in her suitcase.

Well, he hadn’t, which Swede knew as well as I did.

“If God told him what to do next,” she said, “how come nobody else heard it?”

“Come on, Swede. Nobody else heard it with Moses. Nobody else heard it with Daniel, or Paul, or Jonah.”

“Jonah!” she said in disgust. Then, lumping in clothes, “If God told him what to do, how come he didn’t tell us?”

“Who, Dad or God?”

“Who cares. One of them ought to’ve mentioned it.”

She stomped away to the bathroom and returned with her toothbrush and poked it in the suitcase too.

“Don’t pack that yet, you’ll want it in the morning,” I told her, wincing then as she spun and threw the toothbrush at me—it missed. Though tantrums were not usual for Swede, I could see there was more where this came from. I said, “What if God told Dad where to find Davy? What if that’s why we’re leaving?”

This by the way was the first mention of Davy between us since the morning after the blizzard. You might remember it caused a brawl then. Not now, though. Now it just made a quiet in which Swede slitted her eyes and peeked into my heart of doubt.

“Okay, Reuben. Is that what you think happened?”

“Well, it might have.”

“Is it your true opinion God told Dad the whereabouts of Davy and we are going there in the morning?”

“No,” I had to confess.

“Then shut up about it,” she said.

Suitcases packed and rooms neatened and clothes set out for morning, we went downstairs to help with supper. It was our routine now and a busy one, Roxanna being a thorough cook. Generally I was sent to retrieve wax beans or yams or an acorn squash from the webby cellar while Swede sliced bread or laid out plates and glasses; we’d pour cider, mash potatoes, slice pickles. We did with conviction—devotion—all the things we’d done so gracelessly at home. Even as we tromped downstairs we felt the anger between us lifting, for there was something in Roxanna’s kitchen that dispelled trouble.

Usually.

This time, though, she was standing at the counter with her back to us, standing in a dark wool dress pulling tight across her shoulders. The kitchen was lit by one yellow bulb above the sink. Otherwise the house was dark. The dark flowed in through every window, as if they’d all been shot out and dark and cold were coming in, and I wondered where Dad was, for we needed him here.

“Roxanna,” said Swede.

“Children,” Roxanna replied, turning to us. Though her eyes glittered she was not crying; in fact she pulled a smile from somewhere. Her hair was roped back in a French braid from which it was very winningly coming loose, and she held before her a picnic basket with a clasped lid. For heartening sights nothing beats a well-packed picnic basket. One so full it creaks. One carried by a lady you would walk on tacks for. Does all this make her sound beautiful to you? Because she was—oh, yes. Though she hadn’t seemed so to me a week before, when she turned and faced us I was confused at her beauty and could only scratch and look down at my shoetops, as the dumbfounded have done through the centuries. Swede was wordless too, though later in an epic fervor she would render into verse Roxanna’s moment of transfiguration. I like the phrase, which hasn’t been thrown around that much since the High Renaissance, but truly I suppose that moment had been gaining on us, secretly, like a new piece of music played while you sleep. One day you hear it—a strange song, yet one you know by heart.