She still didn’t reply. Out front we heard Roxanna enter the house with her customer, some happy gasbag slapping money on the counter. We heard the slide of the cash drawer, a goat bleat, the bell ding above the door, then Roxanna swept into the kitchen, her eyes bright from wind. “Reuben!” she exclaimed. “Where’d you go?” And she came and kissed my cheek, first time she ever did so.
“Exploring.”
“That’s good. Find anything?”
She was off hanging up her coat. Swede was preparing to frost the rolls, having beaten the stuff to paste. At this moment I wanted enormously to tell them about Davy—that would change the color around here. Knowing I couldn’t made me sore.
I yelled out, “Roxanna, how come Dad went?”
She came out of the mudroom and took the chair next to me. I remember she was wearing a deep green sweater with a high cowl neck, and I remember how she put her elbows on her knees to look in my eyes. “He felt he had to go, Reuben. He didn’t want you to be angry about it.”
“But how come?”
She measured me for a beat or two. “He was led to go.”
Led? This was supposed to mean the Lord was in charge and paving your way, such as letting you get fired so you’ll be free to leave town, or sending you an Airstream so you can go in comfort. Dad knew something about being led, I realized, yet this I could not buy.
“Led by who? That barf Mr. Andreeson?”
Roxanna turned briskly aside, as if deflecting my vulgarity. For a moment she seemed unable to look at me; when she did her eyes were so merry I was stumped indeed. She said, “I don’t think Mr. Andreeson could influence your father to clear his throat.”
“But he went with him!”
“Reuben, he stayed up all night. I woke and heard him. Do you know what he was doing?”
“I suppose praying,” I answered miserably.
“Yes—not like I ever heard anybody pray.” Roxanna stopped there, still not knowing what to say about it. I noted here a deep and elegant blush accompanying her search for words. “I got up,” she added, “and we talked awhile—Swede, don’t you think that frosting’s a little thick?”
It sure was; stuck to the spoon in a fist-sized gob. Roxanna showed her to thin it with coffee and a little warm butter. How we hate waiting for things to make sense! For I can tell you now what Roxanna held back at the time: how she woke to the sound of Dad’s voice raised to the pitch of argument. How she thought at first that Andreeson himself had come in the night and the two of them were having it out. Creeping from her room, she heard Dad articulating grievance against the putrid fed. She discerned adjectives, arrogant and foolish among others. Yet there was no reply. She listened to Dad pacing in his agitation. Sometimes he spoke; at intervals Roxanna heard him savagely racing through King James, as if to back up some contention. He doesn’t know You and doesn’t want to, Dad said, gasping then as though taking a blow. At this Roxanna covered her mouth, for it occurred to her with Whom he wrestled. Having long ago accepted the fact of God, Roxanna had not conceived of going toe to toe with Him over any particular concern. Make me willing if you can, Dad cried, a challenge it still shakes me to think of. What Roxanna heard next was a tumble like a man thrown. She’d have rushed in then, but her muscles went weak and she sat down in the hall at her bedroom door. She remembers yet the strange warmth that comforted her there; in fact, she fell asleep with her back against the wall, even as chairs tipped and Dad strove in the other room. Waking sometime later she rose without stiffness and found him at the kitchen table. He was at peace, his Bible closed, though his underwear shirt was torn across the chest. He smiled at her; he asked for coffee. When he stood he held to the back of a chair.
But Roxanna didn’t tell us all this at the time. All she said was, Dad was praying in the night in great distress over the Andreeson problem, and she got up to keep him company, and their talk ranged far and wide.
“He told me how you took down that corncrib,” Roxanna said. “He’s pleased how strong you’re getting.”
I figured she was trying to win my pardon for Dad. “That wasn’t so hard.”
“And then buying groceries with the money,” she added.
“I wanted a canoe.”
“He really did,” Swede affirmed.
“Well, maybe you’d reach down three plates,” said Roxanna, “and get out the milk.” As I did she said, “Buying those groceries, instead of the canoe? It broke your heart, I bet.”
“At first,” I admitted.
“Would you say,” she wondered, “that you were led to do that?”
I saw what she was getting at, but it only needled me, as the honest point so often does. “Well, sure—led by Swede,” I groused. “That’s her job, isn’t it?”
Which drew Roxanna’s low, beautiful laugh. “Come on, Reuben,” she said. “Come tell me if these rolls are as good as Mr. Cassidy thought they were.”
* * *
He actually didn’t die in Bolivia like everyone believed—Butch Cassidy. He died, Roxanna claimed, near the windblown hamlet of Reece, Kansas, in 1936. She knew because the outlaw had reappeared in her great-uncle’s doorway in Casper around the beginning of the First World War. Howard Cawley had received an officer’s commission, his skills as both gunsmith and doctor making him alluring to the U.S. Army; he was packed and sitting at the kitchen table, rolling cigarettes, when Cassidy banged on the door. Though sporting a limp and cane he retained the vitality that had so won Howard over—nope, he hadn’t been shot in the famed cantina; he got the limp when an embittered horse rubbed him off on a cottonwood tree. The poor fellows in the cantina? Friends of his, God rest their souls, two boys Mark and Pugger who’d ridden down from California to be vaqueros. It had been advantageous to a Bolivian lieutenant named Jarave to believe and report he had killed the notorious American badmen when in fact the dead were mere apprentices. Butch and Harry Longabaugh weren’t even in Bolivia at the time; they were riding south through Argentina to meet with an American genius, expatriate like themselves, who claimed to have constructed a balloon in which a man could circle the world. Longabaugh had some idea of investing in the genius’s proposed expedition, to what likely profit Butch never divined. Butch only went along, thinking he might get a balloon ride.
Swede during this had been perched edgewise waiting to jump in. “I knew he didn’t get shot in Bolivia. It was a lie the whole time!”
“Yes, you can imagine how it pleased Uncle Howard. He felt bad about not offering Butch better hospitality, but he’d got his commission—”
“—and the train was imminent,” said Swede.
“Yes, there was no question of his not going,” Roxanna said, though she added how her great-uncle, when old and stove up, confided that he’d come about one whisker from chucking the U.S. Army and going off with Cassidy and likely would’ve done it had Butch just said the word.
“He should’ve!” said Swede.
And that was the last time Howard saw his friend. Cassidy confided he was taking a new name, Jonas Work, because he liked the honest sound of it. He told Howard to look him up when the war ended, possibly in Kansas, where he planned to enter the windmill business. Cassidy’s eyes were lit: he loved windmills, loved to watch them spin. Howard believed him earnest but incapable of commencing the honest life. He said, Good luck, Butch. Jonas, Butch replied.
Well—wouldn’t you agree exclusivity is the throbbing heart of news? Who else in the world knew the real ending to that story? Who knew of poor Mark and Pugger, of ambitious Jarave? We swelled up large with privileged facts. Think of standing alone on the beach when the shipwrecked survivor slogs ashore with his great tale; think of uncovering among your papers proof you are the clandestine longsought heir of something.
“But he died in ’thirty-six?” Swede inquired.
Roxanna rose smiling, went to a glass-front barrister, and brought out a scrapbook. It had burgundy covers and black pages bound with a riband, and it creaked when she laid it open.
“This came to Uncle Howard in the mail. The sender remained nameless.”
JONAS R. WORK
In Reece, Kansas, on the ninth day of October, 1936, at seven o’clock in the morning, died Jonas Robert Work, esteemed by his community and honored by his country.
Mr. Work was fifty-three years of age. Providence had bestowed on him a firm constitution and strong powers of mind. He was a veteran of the Great War and a member of the celebrated flying corps in Leon. After some dozens of missions his craft was struck by rifle fire; Mr. Work landed safely but was captured and held in a Prussian stockade, bearing in his left thigh a bullet which would forever impair his stride. After some months he escaped at great peril to his life and returned alone to friendly soil.
Mr. Work arrived in Reece in spring of 1918, having received an Honorable Discharge and decorations appropriate to his heroism. He entered straightway on a career in business with the Aermotor Windmill Company, for whom he was a sales representative. It may be confidently said that the majority of windmills standing in Reece as well as many in the surrounding Flint Hills were sold and installed by Mr. Work. He was known as expert in locating water and in this capacity was internationally sought. Thus he traveled from Kansas to various parts of the world, returning always with a fund of adventurous tales to instruct and amuse the flock of youngsters who were welcome visitors at his veranda.
On the morning of his death he was completing repairs to a windmill at the Howell Watts ranch. Though Mr. Work climbed to the mill with his usual geniality, Mrs. Watts in her kitchen perceived a shout, peered from the window, and beheld Mr. Work lying at the foot of the tower. She reported that though his pulse stopped within ten minutes of the fall, the muscular powers of his limbs remained in force for eight to ten hours afterward, such was the power of his constitution.
A member of Grace Baptist Church in Reece, Mr. Work died in the hope and faith of his Redeemer.
We supposed over that obituary for most of the day, Swede and I—mostly Swede, whose vaulting imagination revealed mine as miserly and torpid. When I supposed it was Longabaugh himself who mailed the clipping to Uncle Howard, she said no, it was probably Longabaugh’s valiant sweetheart Etta, who’d caught leprosy in Bolivia and spent her remaining years alone in a shadowy house writing sensational novels undiscovered to this day. When I credited Butch’s water-witching acclaim to using a forked stick cut from a hanging tree, Swede pointed out such sticks only worked that were cut from a tree on which an innocent man had hung—all of which was beside the point anyway since Butch’s yearly trips abroad were no water-locating expeditions but merry reunions with Harry Longabaugh, the two of them playing mischief with European railroads and financial institutions and bathrobed polygamous sheiks. One more? When I supposed Butch’s glee at inventing a glorious military reason for his gimpy leg, Swede reversed herself and suggested it was no invention whatever—that he really had joined the army, gimp and all, piloted a frail Jenny over the German lines, and been shot down and imprisoned and escaped. “He always did want to fly,” she said. “Remember the expatriate balloonist?”
“What about his limbs?” I asked. That part about his limbs still being strong after he died was creepy.
“Well, it’s not like he got up and was walking around,” Swede said.
“He could’ve—chickens do sometimes.”
“Please, Reuben,” she replied, exasperated at this disrespectful likening, “people would’ve fainted.” She considered the matter. “I suppose he just did a few sit-ups, out there by the windmill. Butch probably did sit-ups every day—he was a little vain about his physique.”
When I thought about it, a dead fellow doing sit-ups in your yard might make you faint just as handily as one strolling. I imagined Mrs. Watts, running out to help poor Jonas Work—feeling in vain for his pulse—probably she was weeping at his side when he started sitting up! Probably she thought he was all right! At first, anyway.
“How many sit-ups do you suppose he did?” I wondered.
“Well, it says his muscles were in force for eight to ten hours.”
In that case, he was probably still at it when Mr. Watts came in off the pasture. I imagined him coming through the front door, all tired out. “Honey,” he’d have said, “what do you suppose Jonas is doing out there?”
Eight to ten hours. Boy, that was an awful lot of sit-ups.