Raising a wife? I sat the paint’s rocking haunches and sifted that idea around. It was pretty abhorrent and only got worse as Sara came more fully to mind. I remembered her now in relentless detail: her red hair bound back under a kerchief knotted at her fuzzy nape, her tired voice explaining the accident with the pig Emil, her settled grace in serving us, moving around the cabin with a woman’s assurance. Now I’d gone and glimpsed her future, and it looked about as promising as Emil’s. It made me scared and hot.
“That’s the pukiest idea in the world,” I declared. “Raising a wife! Why doesn’t he go out and get one like everybody else does?”
Davy said, “Why don’t you ask him that yourself.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Nope.”
We walked a heavy fifty paces before I said, “So he does scare you.”
Davy pulled the paint horse to a stop. We were alongside a hilltop and the moon was just rising out. It sure threw a lot of light for less than half a moon.
“He doesn’t scare me,” Davy said. “I don’t think he scares me, Rube. I just listen close when he’s around.”
“You listen?”
The horse nickered and threw his mane a little.
“What for?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A sound to his voice. When he’s there I listen close,” Davy replied. He seemed about ten percent annoyed with me. “It isn’t the same thing as afraid.”
“Is Sara afraid?”
“Hard to say. Look there.” Davy pointed to our left. “See him? An owl hunting—look at that, you can see his shadow.”
“Mm, yeah,” I said. No, I couldn’t see him. Seemed like I couldn’t ever see what Davy saw. Nor hear the things he heard. It was the old story. I wondered again just what he listened for when Mr. Waltzer was around—Waltzer showing up in my mind just then, chewing a piece of red sausage.
“Hard to say,” Davy mused, as the paint got moving again—just in time, for the stillness was working the cold up my ankles—“but Sara’s real smart. She should be. I’d say she probably is.”
Afraid, he meant. But Davy was right, it was hard to say. You have to remember Sara had been raised these five years by Jape Waltzer and before that by a man degenerate enough to give away his little girl. She wasn’t accustomed to conversation as you and I think of it.
“Did Mr. Waltzer show you his fingers?” she inquired, during my second visit.
He hadn’t made a point of it, but I remembered—the index and middle fingers of his left hand gone from the roots up.
“He amputated those fingers himself,” Sara declared. Her eyes were an arresting unreadable green. Suspecting I was being made foolish I looked at Davy, who was tilting his chair back, holding coffee in an enameled cup.
“He did honestly,” Sara said. “He made me watch.”
“How come?”
“So I’d learn.”
“To cut off fingers?” Sure, my voice may’ve been a little high. It seemed radical instruction.
“No. It was my fault,” she said, apparently in explanation.
“But how come he did it?”
“They got mangled up in a chain.” Now that she’d started she seemed against continuing. She used short, reluctant declaratives. “We were towing a car to a lake. He wanted to dump it in. He had me driving. The chain came loose. My foot slipped off the clutch while he was hooking it back up.”
Talk about abstaining from detail. Can you imagine the mileage someone like Swede would’ve gotten from such a grim episode? Except, as Sara’d already pointed out, her penalty for the slipped clutch was being forced to watch Jape Waltzer take a hatchet and lay the ruined fingers across a stump. Perhaps the sight depressed narrative ardor. Urged, she revealed these particulars: Jape rolled his left sleeve to above the elbow. He laid the hatchet blade first in a saucepan into which he’d uncorked whiskey. Sara he stationed with paper sack on a three-legged stool next the stump. He took the fingers separately with two clean strokes, pausing to blow after the first but not cursing or making utterance. He sweated plenty but it was only sweat, not blood, nor did his hair turn white or his mood turn permanently for the worse.
He did make Sara dispose of the fingers, though. She had to pick them up in her own and drop them in the paper sack. She didn’t want to, but Jape told her to get it done before he was finished or there would be punishment. He was busy at that moment with needle and suture. She picked up the canceled digits and threw them sack and all in the crackling stove.
I woke close to noon short of breath and with reinstated fever—woke from a rolling-mutter sleep when Dad came in my room and took my hand.
“Let me hear you breathe,” he said.
I sucked up what I could.
“Pretty short, my friend. Let me get some water boiling.”
“Do I have to?” I was hot; steam would poach me alive. I could breathe well enough to smile and did so like some begging dog.
“All right, let me see if Roxanna’s got an aspirin somewhere.” He smiled back and I saw he was wearing good clothes: his suntan khakis and a blue chambray button-down. He was clean-shaven and his hair was combed back and he looked better tended than usual, though at this moment he also looked anxious, leaning forward to lay a hand on my brow.
“Dad, is it Sunday?”
“Nope, Thursday.”
“You’re all dressed up.”
“Oh. Well.” He looked at me as though I’d thrown him a hard one, which surprised me, as did his decision a moment later to swing away.
“Reuben, I’ve decided to court Roxanna. What do you think of that?”
I thought it was perfect, of course, though a foregone conclusion, even to a dull study like myself.
He seemed pleased with my approval. “You understand, as a courting man I ought to look my best.”
“You look great,” I told him. He did, too—his shirt cuffs were rolled back smooth and his hands and forearms looked ropy and fast, even at rest.
“All right then,” he conjectured, “what do you think of my chances?”
“Your chances?”
“Of winning her hand.”
That he would put such a question to me so directly—well, it sat me right up. I felt older, packed with consequence, and also cautious lest I say something dumb. “How’s it going so far?”
Straight-faced but with a shine back of it he said, “I believe she regards me respectfully.”
Well, he had to gauge his chances better than that. He had to remember how happy she’d been when he got back from his outing with Mr. Andreeson. He had to remember the press of her hand when he came in the door—I sure remembered it, and it wasn’t even my hand that got pressed.
“Oh, it’s more than respectfully,” I said, and started to tell about the exchange we’d had when Roxanna was making the pie—how Swede said she wasn’t going to let us leave no matter what, and Roxanna replied Neither am I—but Dad fended off this encouragement with a question.
“Did you like being here with her, while I was gone? You and Swede?”
I nodded.
“I thought you did. I’m glad.” He stood up. “I like it myself.” He really did look good, a clean-shaven courting man with quick arms and steady eyes. He had to know that Roxanna loved him already, but he wouldn’t have me pointing it out. Who could blame him? No doubt Dad had thought his pursuing days long over. Why sprint through such sweet country? How often does a man get to use phrases like “winning her hand”? And it wasn’t just talk; he truly meant to win it. He set himself toward her like an athlete. He slept in the cold trailer and spent most of each day there. He stopped entering the house casually. He knocked for admittance. Swede and I missed his constant presence, yet when he arrived the very light seemed to change—like light bouncing in off June maples. And Roxanna, always lovely now, Roxanna at his knock would look around at Swede and me as though all this were as unnecessary as it was wonderful, and she’d go to the door and there Dad would be in his best clothes, suit coat, often a hothouse carnation in hand. He assumed nothing. There was a poor nursery west of Grassy Butte, an old man’s hobby, a little morgue of a Quonset greenhouse. A feeble flower is better than none, and it was my impression, for I accompanied him there more than once, that even that greenhouse became better lit and warmer for Dad’s frequent visits. The old man, in baggy brown pants and suspenders, liked to tell Dad he was nuts. That romance was a detour men took from whatever work was theirs in life. Dad agreed with everything in the most cheerful fashion, and the old man sold him flowers for next to nothing.
One day we walked in from a blistering wind and there was a ruined guitar propped in a corner like a dead plant. Though scaly and fretworn, its top had a courtly arch like a violin’s, with S-shaped holes each side of the strings. The old man asked was Dad a musician. No. The old man picked up the guitar in his blemished hands and turned it on its axis. He pointed out a wide crack running the length of the back, also a place where the binding at back and side had pulled apart. Dad admired the instrument, repeating he was no musician. The old man informed us the guitar had been made by a revered Spaniard late in the previous century. The top was carved from a piece of clear cedar. Rotating it again he displayed yet another crack, a hairline fault high on the neck. He’d been playing songs for his wife, the two of them picnicking the summer of 1922 on a broad rock in the middle of a stream—there’d been drought but no one knew the term dust bowl then or had any notion what was coming—and he’d stooped for a bottle of soda and smacked the guitar headfirst on the rock. Fearing the neck would break off entirely he’d unstrung the instrument and not played it since. A timid decision, the old man said. He regretted it. He flexed the guitar in his two hands. The neck seemed strong. Fix the back and side, he told Dad, and the guitar would play.
Dad replied for the third time that he was no musician, though now his face was alight, and he held the guitar carefully and looked at the old man as though he were some gruff uncle who couldn’t be bothered to look back.