DAD MARRIED ROXANNA ON A WIND-BLASTED SATURDAY IN MARCH. WE WERE back in Roofing, Pastor Reach officiating—I wish I remembered more about it. There was a photographer, a young man with dark wavy hair and enormous energy, setting us here and there, craning through the viewfinder, then popping up to say something amusing. I have one of the photos before me now: Roxanna in lace looking lustrous as a bride ever did; Dad standing calm, his eyes enjoying the commotion; Swede laughing—that photographer was a funny fellow. At Roxanna’s elbow stands her father, Mr. Cawley, the theater operator. I remember thinking he seemed terribly cautious for someone in such a happy line of work. Perhaps he owned misgivings about his new son-in-law, an unemployed janitor nearly his own age. I’m in the photo also, looking like an old man. Swede, on a recent visit, saw the photo on my desk. “Look at you,” she said, “little Methuselah.” Indeed, she’d gotten tall as me. How could I not notice?
We came back to Roofing at the end of February, the ride into the Badlands with Juval having tipped my lungs into steep descent. I won’t describe the buried and airless place I seemed to visit. Truth is it’s mostly gone from memory, and with my blessing. I can tell you the doctor returned—Nickles—listened with alarm, and insisted on hospitalization, never mind the chance of flu. For a few days, perhaps a week, they braced me up with pillows and adrenaline, then Nickles released me to Dad, saying, You take this boy home.
By now there was no question of Roxanna’s not coming. By my release her animals were at a neighboring ranch, a classified ad was in the nearest weekly, and a sign saying CLOSED stood out by the gas pumps. We left before daylight next morning. I recall she betrayed no sadness in parting from the place. She got in the Plymouth, leaned back over the seat to plump blankets around Swede and me, then turned and flounced up beside Dad in a most girlish motion. It then occurred to me that this leaving—which to me ached with failure and despair—was for her the commencement of a gallant endeavor. Who isn’t scared by as whole a redirection as that on which she now embarked? Adhering to us must’ve seemed a risk demanding the deepest reserves of joy and strength. Indeed you’ll see shortly how deep hers reached. Glad though I was to have her along, it would be years before my gratitude approached anything like proportion. She settled into the freezing Plymouth, humming a dance tune called “Queen Anne’s Lace.” She opened a thermos of coffee, which steamed in the glow from the dash. She was all but our mother now. I shut my eyes and slept.
We came into Roofing midafternoon as school was letting out. We drove past in silence. Swede and I knew every one of those kids walking home or bunching up in front yards—knew their conversation without hearing it. We passed a parked bus and knew every kid in the windows; yet I slouched in the car, unwilling to be seen. Swede did the same. They all seemed so little changed.
The house was warm and clean, thanks to Dr. and Mrs. Nokes, whom Dad had telephoned long-distance the previous day. As it happened the Nokeses then boarded Roxanna for a short time—as I recall we were home one week before the wedding—by which time Mr. Cawley had made the anxious drive east and Pastor Reach had met Roxanna and been assured of Dad’s soundness of mind. I’ll keep it quick: After the nearly guestless ceremony, Swede and I also put in a few days at the Nokeses’—Swede writing some verse it embarrassed me to listen to, all about doves in the nest and moonbeams falling on shimmering wheatfields and similar matters, as though something had happened to her mind.
The morning of our return Dad, looking like a man fed on strawberries and cream, asked about my breathing.
“It’s okay.”
“Excellent,” he replied. “You’re in charge of cleaning up the Airstream.” Turned out he’d sold it to Dr. Nokes, before we ever left—how else could he have paid three months’ rent in advance?
“All right,” I said. “Can Swede help?”
“Nope, I need her inside.” Dad grinned. “Cheer up, Rube, we’re moving today.”
Abruptly we crated our possessions into a borrowed trailer and pulled them seven miles north to a red farm on a hilltop. Unemployed, Dad explained, he could no longer afford town rent. The farm had belonged to Pastor Reach’s great-aunt Myrtle, who, I remembered, reluctantly gave up her seat at the organ at the age of a hundred and two. Not from sickness, she just couldn’t hear. In deepest January she’d given a tea for some neighboring widows, picking them up in her pristine Fairlane and dropping them off again before dark; back home she washed the dishes, read the Bible, wrote in firm script four thank-you letters and a grocery list, and died in her sleep, an end so satisfying it seems displaced in our age. The farm went to Pastor, who’d offered it to us at preposterous rent, at least until Dad found work.
It was a lovely place, the red farm. So called because house, barn, roost, and granary had been painted brick red to the furthest reaches of local memory, the farm seemed a place of order and rest, as the homes of great-aunts often do. The little house crested a meadowed hill rimmed by maple and oak. The barn was tall, with the plain angled roof of barns built farther east; in fact the whole structure lists eastward more now than in 1963, but otherwise appears the same. In coming years the red farm would prove every bit the paradise of work and exploration you might expect, but when we moved in it was a place to rest and to wait.
Because we were waiting—all of us, I believe, though my sense of it may have been strongest. The beast in my lungs kept me tied close. I remembered Dr. Nickles’s inflection when he told Dad to take me home; also the look they exchanged. Swede returned alone to school. Days passed during which I didn’t leave the window seat overlooking the meadow. The infirm wait always, and know it.
We waited foremost for word of Davy. With the disappearance of Mr. Andreeson, the hunt gained untold federal impetus. For months an irregular stream of investigators came knocking, asking mostly the same questions and once in a while a new one: Was Davy especially strong in mathematics? Had he frequented the movies? Had we acquaintances in South America? From the first Dad treated these visitors well, answering all questions transparently, summoning Swede and me on demand and enforcing our honesty—goodness knows what Swede might’ve sent those fellows chasing, for behind her eyes twitched every shade of herring. From the first Roxanna offered them fragrant breads or pastries and otherwise kept her silence. It is possible to imagine some loving aunt of Butch Cassidy’s doing the same. Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.
Andreeson, by the way, stayed missing. What happened to him is no secret, for I revealed my conviction repeatedly: Waltzer put him in the vein of burning lignite that ran past the cabin. It used to wake me sweating, the truth of it glowing inside my bones. Yet the investigators who listened to the idea seemed to give it little credit, which frustrated me until I complained about it to Swede.
“There’s no proving it,” she said shortly. “There’s nothing in it for them,” she added, disappearing before I could grouse further.
Because this, you understand, was something else I was waiting for: Swede’s forgiveness.
She wasn’t nasty, that wasn’t it. There were no more recriminations invoking Benedict Arnold or Ramón Murieta. In fact I came to miss even those. Instead it was as though she simply couldn’t think of anything to say to me. Plainly the fact had dawned: As compadres go, I was neither trustworthy nor interesting.
Of course I tried to win her back, using all sorts of bait—wondering aloud whether we might get a horse, now that we lived on a farm, or asking about some adventure of Sunny’s. To none of it would she rise. I grew to expect the minimal response. Dad and Roxanna noticed, but what could they do? Swede bore no indignation, called no names. She answered questions. She passed the potatoes.
One night in deep contrition I went to her room and knocked.
“Swede,” said I when she opened the door, “can’t you ever forgive me?”
“Sure,” she replied.
“Well, I wish you would. You act like I’m some old leper.”
“All right—you tell me how to act, and I’ll act that way.”
Can a person be both furious and penitent at once? “Swede, please!”
“You’re forgiven,” she said, but in a voice still miles removed, and with eyes still regarding me as an abstract thing.
One thing I wasn’t waiting for was a miracle.
I don’t like to admit it. Shouldn’t that be the last thing you release: the hope that the Lord God, touched in His heart by your particular impasse among all others, will reach down and do that work none else can accomplish—straighten the twist, clear the oozing sore, open the lungs? Who knew better than I that such holy stuff occurs? Who had more reason to hope?
And yet regarding my own wasted passages it seemed a prospect I could no longer admit.
The well appeared dry, for one thing. Though begrudging Roxanna nothing, neither could I recall a single wonder arriving through Dad’s hands since we banged on her door that first Sunday. Blanketed in my window seat I puzzled it through, concluding that God, feeling overworked on our behalf, had given us Roxanna as a parting gift—a wonderful one, you understand, just what we’d always wanted, but accompanied by the end of the miraculous. Was it unjust? I’d have thought so once, and not long ago. But these activities—whining about what’s fair, begging forgiveness, hoping for a miracle—these demand energy, and that was gone from me. Contentment on the other hand demands little, and I drew more and more into its circle. It seemed good to sleep. My clothes got slack and hangy. Mornings I watched the deer that came up through the hardwoods to paw the snow by the corncrib. Evenings Dad played the guitar, and the hymns and ballads and antique waltzes that emerged from the instrument seemed all the marvels I required.
I got a few visitors. Peter Emerson’s folks brought him over one day and sat in the kitchen with Dad and Roxanna, while Peter came in with a wrapped box. He told me Superintendent Holgren was mean as ever, though not as scary since his face healed up. Peter’s little brother Henry had been sent to Holgren’s office for eating boogers during class, a habit beyond his teacher’s ability to curtail. Holgren sat Henry on a low chair and told him kids who did this grew into cheats unable to meet the gaze of authority. Some might evade imprisonment but none achieved meaningful rank—you could see adult booger-eaters shuffling through city dumps all over America, salvaging vegetables ignored by vermin. Henry went home weeping to confess his destiny to his brothers, of whom there were three besides Peter, two of them with strong personal resentments against Holgren. This next part is like a favorite song. In mere days they located the sleepy den of a skunk family near the railroad tracks. A healthy youngster was selected. I love to imagine Josie, the eldest brother, moving through twilit Roofing toward the Holgren residence, the burlapped animal yawning in his arms. Released through a basement window it curled beside the furnace, where it woke in the morning feeling anxious and vengeful. What an awful time for the superintendent to go downstairs after a winter squash! It took the game warden three days to coax the skunk into a live trap baited with fish heads; by then Holgren was living out of a suitcase in Alsop’s Motel, wearing, according to Peter, the same undies every day for a week.
After that a present was almost beside the point, but I opened it anyway. It was the Spartacus model—the one with the hand.
“Look, paints,” Peter said.
In May the Orchards came with a blueberry pie. Bethany carried it in, the first I’d seen her since we made pancakes together. The memory plainly embarrassed her. She wore a dusk-blue dress and rose collar and had ripened to a supremacy that scotched conversation. It wasn’t her fault. She asked how Davy was doing, and what it was like riding a horse in the Badlands. I gave it an abbreviated try; how often I’d dreamt of this girl in thrall to my adventures! But I saw that her interest was nominal and engendered by my lousy health; and anyway my voice had become a spare, unpleasant sound. Not a thing I could do about it—despite all chest-beating and operatic gestures it remained like wind through bones.
“Thanks for the pie,” I told Bethany, who fled to the kitchen and the company of grown people.
Now, it may be Swede spied on this most humble talk. Maybe she even had some notion where Bethany had stood inside my untaught thinking. I only know when evening came she slipped under my blanket on the couch, listening to Dad working up some thankful psalm. She sat beside me cross-legged, like a Sioux, and held my hand again, as though we would wait together for whatever was moving toward us through the night. At that moment there was nothing—no valiant history or hopeful future—half worth my sister’s pardon. Listening to Dad’s guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.