REMEMBER AUGUST SHULTZ, IN WHOSE BARLEY I MADE THE MOST PANICKED job a boy ever did of shooting a wild goose?
At the bottom of a January cold snap we received a three-cent postcard from August:
Hello All
Old friend Speedy came by last night. I wondered if he would and By Goodness he did. Weaselly skinny but strong, sends regards, we were glad to have him, Birdie had kielbasa, it went fast!
Aug & Birdie
PS: Best to your friend Andreeson
Do you think that put Dad in an excellent humor? Swede came from the post office in high color, flagwaving that card, which confirmed what she’d been feeling for weeks—that Davy was all right; that he was gone west in the persistent fashion of outlaws; that he remained the big brother who loved us all, Christmas card or no. Wickedly satisfying to Swede was August’s postscript; the hated fed must’ve made himself apparent to our friends in North Dakota, the louse.
Well, Swede was ready right then to step into the Airstream and ride to the western sun. Dad himself was close to ready. The day after Christmas he’d begun preparing to leave. Understand, this was done on faith alone. Keep in mind we hadn’t yet heard from August Shultz; keep in mind we’d had no word at all, no hint of eye nor ear nor tingling spine as to where our boy was aimed. And yet Dad began to stock up. Cash was a difficulty, so he commenced to lay hold of unattached items around the house and sell them, doing so with an impish glee. His bedroom mirror went first, a useless piece of furniture given who owned it, and it brought three dollars, which turned into fifteen cans of pork and beans from the Red Owl. The beans went into the deep, mesmerizing pantry of the Airstream; a monstrous and comforting hole, you could stack food in there all morning. Dad next sold two pine dressers for five dollars each—he bought a case of Dinty Moore, two canned hams, some hash. He sold a creeper long used to get under the Plymouth and change the oil—one dollar, eight cans of chicken noodle. Each day familiar things went away from us; each day Dad, normally lackadaisical about commerce, tallied up the take and what food it might procure. Faith brought this about. Faith, as Dad saw it, had delivered unto us the Airstream trailer, and faith would direct our travels.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dr. Nokes demanded. I think he feared the sickness had touched the part of Dad’s brain in charge of good sense. “What do you have for directions?” he asked.
And Dad, eyebrows raised in delight with his forthcoming answer, said, “I have the substance of things hoped for. I have the anticipation of things unseen.”
Dr. Nokes told him point-blank he was out of his mind. Dad laughed aloud. Ten minutes later with the doctor looking on he sold his own bed, minus the putrescent mattress, to a couple who appeared stuttering on our porch. They’d just bought their first home, a neat shack with red paint faded to a newlywed’s blush; impoverished by this bold purchase they’d slept on the floor until the young man, killing salamanders with a spade in the dirt basement, found a mildewed linen bag strung up in the joists. The bag contained seven Liberty dollars. They loaded Dad’s bed on a creaking trailer and drove off, waving as if we were fond relatives. Dr. Nokes walked away in disgust. Chuckling, Dad spread the silver dollars before us to admire. He wrote a list and told us to pull the toboggan up to Otto Schock’s: noodles, tuna, bouillon, dry milk, salt, crackers, hard storage apples, chocolate bars. We elbowed and noogied all the way to the store. We were swept up, I tell you. Infected with something. Events seemed a wide water into which we’d stepped only to be yanked downstream toward some joyful end. We piled food into the trailer while Dad did the things necessary to go away for who knew how long: he drained pipes, rope-caulked windows, and otherwise buttoned down the house; while we watched from inside he dragged his mattress to a backyard snowbank and soaked it with kerosene and stood back in his canvas parka and threw on a match. It was well past dark and flames poured up showing the whole orange snowbound yard, the paintless garage, the fingery misshapen hackberry tree, the black straightup shape of Dad. How could we not believe the Lord would guide us? How could we not have faith? For the foundation had been laid in prayer and sorrow. Since that fearful night, Dad had responded with the almost impossible work of belief. He had burned with repentance as though his own hand had fired the gun. He had laid up prayer as if with a trowel. You know this is true, and if you don’t it is I the witness who am to blame.
We pulled out after a frostbit sunrise, the twenty-second of January. I remember how the front end of the Plymouth heaved upward, surprised at its rearward weight. I remember how poor and strange the house looked among its neighbors as we eased away, chimney a heap of dead bricks, windows glazed with ice and dirt—already it seemed close in spirit to those weedy barns you see all gray and forgotten and sadly available to anyone who will pay the taxes. And cold, my goodness: For two weeks we’d been gripped by a cold snap which on the average night reached 30 below. Very dismaying to Swede and me, since we’d intended to ride in the plenteousness of the Airstream; how we’d planned to sprawl and stretch and scramble around! Yes, the trailer had a gas heater, but Dad couldn’t be persuaded to travel “lit.” Of course the Plymouth’s own heater was a foreseeable disaster—we probably weren’t much warmer in our backseat army blankets than we would’ve been in the trailer—or outside, for that matter, in the blistering wind.
On the way out we idled at the post office so Dad could stop the mail. Swede and I stayed in the car; she was already in a book. I remember Roofing looked different that morning—smaller, dearer. Seized by romance I wished Bethany Orchard would walk by right then and see us, hitched to the Airstream, on the very sill of a long and perilous adventure the outcome of which remained in doubt. Oh yes: here she’d come, Bethany, sent for the mail by her cheerless father; a vulnerable elfin figure wrapped against the wind. Seeing my determined profile in the window she’d fly to me: “You’re leaving?” And she’d look away, that I might not see the water standing in her eyes.
I’d have gotten to a goodbye kiss eventually—I could see it coming—except then a figure appeared coming up the walk: not Bethany but an old man in a ruinous corduroy barn coat. A listing bareheaded old man, undone and tattered, untrustful of his feet.
“Swede, look at that guy.”
He came on, fighting the wind. His hair was raked up and oily; his eyes were shut; his lips were moving.
“I think he’s praying,” I told her. The old man’s hands looked like suet, hanging there out of his sleeves.
“Maybe for balance,” Swede said. Sort of a cruel remark, wouldn’t you say? I glanced at her; she was watching the old bum’s rough go staying upright, skinny shoulders atilt, one hand swaying forward now, bumping the post office door. “It’s old Mr. Finch,” she pointed out. He was much more sorrowful to look at than he had been at Davy’s trial. Could he have even this day’s life left in him?
“He’s freezing,” I said. Swede was back in her book. But I was held tight by the old man’s attempts to grip the handle, then to open that big glass door against the wind, his eyes still shut mind you and his mouth slack open—he looked dead, is what I’m telling you. Like a man so trampled of spirit he’d given over the strength of limbs. I watched his face and his futile, suety hands, and for the first time a question nipped at me: Was it possible that real loss had occurred at the death of Israel Finch? That real grief had been felt?
Of course you could say old Mr. Finch was a helpless and habitual drunk and whatever was lost in him was lost long ago. You could say so. I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t have a strong case.
From Roofing it is some eighty miles to North Dakota. We drove without talking for a good while; after weeks of anticipation, I’ll confess to feeling let down. It was so cold my limbs seemed heavy and far away. Dad drank coffee, looking at the frozen farmsteads we passed, clumped at the end of their long driveways. The Plymouth itself moaned as we drove, sounding perhaps not up to this long and heavy haul. We crossed the border late in the morning and Swede sat up blowing on her fingers and asked what that thing in the road was.
“Can’t tell,” Dad said.
“It’s moving.”
It was a black shape in the road far ahead that seemed to grow and shrink. So small a thing we mightn’t have noticed elsewhere, but on the broad white flats of Dakota the eye goes to such specks. “Crow?” Dad said.
“It’s moving wrong,” Swede replied.
We drove on. The black object rose and dropped and assumed guessable size: about like a turtle.
“Aw, it’s a piece of old trash,” Swede said—as if some hopes had been fastened to it—but getting closer we saw it was a crow after all, and dead. Struck by a car it lay all mashed to the road but for one free wing, which rose and fell by the gusts. It was a much more grievous sight than you’d think, a dead crow lying in the road out in the heart of noplace, and just before we reached it the wind brought up that wing again so it looked like a thing asking mercy.
We drove on a mile or so. “I was just thinking,” Dad said. “All the years I spent in North Dakota, that’s the first crow I ever saw hit on the road.”
We hadn’t anything to say to that.
“They’re awfully smart birds,” Dad mused. “They get out of the way.”
“What’s that?” Swede pointed to something else black, farther on.
This time no one conjectured. We drove on and it was another crow, cruelly pasted and lying over at the edge, the second Dad had seen in all his years.
“Well, imagine that,” he said.
We reached August’s late afternoon. Having retreated to sleep I snapped from a dream in which Swede’s persistent badman Valdez had got into the Airstream and crawled into my bunk. I knew he was there but couldn’t tell anyone—not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t say the right words. Time after time I got Dad’s attention only to mumble some nursery rhyme instead of the evil fact. Meantime Valdez snored away in my bunk; he sounded like an Allis Chalmers, and no one could hear him but me.
“Wake up, Rube,” Dad said, as we bounced into August’s yard.
Relieved, I was nonetheless unbalanced by the dream and stumbled up to the house with it still attached. Unbundling us in her hot kitchen Birdie teased, kindly, “Somebody’s too sleepy to say hello.”
But that was only part of it. In truth I was a little scared, and preoccupied about where we’d go from here. For I had asked this of Dad the previous night, asked it straight out: Where do we go from August’s? He didn’t know. We’d simply go forth, he said, like the children of Israel when they packed up and cameled out of Egypt. He meant to encourage me. Just like us, the Israelites hadn’t any idea where they’d end up! Just like us, they were traveling by faith! Indeed, it did impart a thrill, yet the trip thus far, in the frigid and torpid Plymouth, had reminded me what a hard time the chosen people actually had of it. Once traveling, it’s remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else—ignorance, for example. Same thing happened to the Israelites. Sure it’s weak, but sometimes you’d rather just have a map.