OF COURSE, FEAR AND DOUBT MUST FLEE WHEN SUCH GENTLE HOSTS AS August and Birdie take charge of you, and in fact a supper of creamed chicken and beans and sliced nutbread can go a long way toward the Devil’s discredit. Yet for all the Shultzes’ home-cooked beneficence, their most nourishing offerings were details.
“He walked into the yard just before midnight,” August said, leaning toward Swede, whom he’d placed on his right hand. “Ricky—” their Walker hound—“barking his dumb head off, all the sudden he stops, just his stumpy tail beating against the house. I turn on the porch light and there’s Davy sitting on the steps and that dog shivering all over him.”
Oh, we were starved for details! After all, there’d been but the barest crumbs since Davy’s escape; we’d no inkling of how he’d traveled—not counting a day or two on Nelson Svedvig’s mare—no whisper of where he might’ve stayed, nothing from which we might draw strength. Without a detail or two, even an imagination as mighty as Swede’s begins to atrophy. Memory calcifies. One day you wake up and your brother is a legend, even to you.
“Tell how he looked,” Dad said.
“Why, same as always, I guess,” August said, “just more grown up. He had a clean cut, right here, under his ear.” A shaving cut, it turned out; having hitched as far as Radduck, Davy’d walked into a drugstore and bought soap and a razor, employing them in the rest room of a Shell station close by. Then collaring up he stepped north into a quartering wind, meeting, as he told August, not one car on twelve miles of blacktop.
“He was dressed warm?” Dad asked.
“Why, I guess so,” August said; at which Birdie rolled her eyes and made amendment.
“He was underdressed,” she said, “wearing an old barn coat; I sewed on some buttons. Holed pants, no hat, cotton gloves. And, Jeremiah, he was awfully thin.”
“Then he assuredly came to the right place,” Dad replied, real comfort in his voice for the first time in many days, for it was good to imagine Davy appearing on the doorstep of those who loved him. No doubt Birdie had inventoried Davy’s scarcities even as she stood at the stove, reheating kielbasa; he had a glaze of dirt around his neck, she would tell Dad later, but was pink and clean on his face and ears. He ate, Birdie said, like a polite but famished baby hawk—said thank you, please, but barely chewed.
“Does he miss us?” Swede asked. “Did he say he missed us?”
“Well, now,” August said.
“Like sunshine,” Birdie put in. “He said it’s like having no sun in the sky, Swede—he misses you that much.”
I remember thinking that was a funny thing for Davy to say, him not being generally lyrical, yet Birdie looked so sternly at August I knew she must be remembering correctly. Swede teared up and put a hand over her mouth.
“August,” Birdie suggested, after a beat, “tell about that fellow who gave Davy the ride.”
What a tasty particular! Thumbing west, Davy’d been picked up by a man in an Oldsmobile full of musical instruments. They lay uncased in the backseat, a button accordion, saxophone, tin whistle rolling around in the back window, and more than one trumpet haphazardly swaddled in what appeared to be tattered suit coats. The driver told Davy he was from Wisconsin heading for Los Angeles, where he would certainly get on television. He said there were actually three trumpets and they were linked together by a machined brace of his own design. By holding them just so he was able to play all three at once. The man’s face was grained as an old board and he had a dark pompadour ideally groomed even at this hour. He asked Davy for money and offered to stop right there on the highway and play “The Bugler’s Holiday.” If the TV producers in Los Angeles didn’t like trumpets, he also had, in the trunk, an amplifier and a brand-new Danelectro guitar on which he could play recognizable pieces of Mozart.
“Show people,” August said, in wonder.
One more gratifying detail? Sure: Davy, retiring upstairs, had twice laughed in his sleep—a strange thing to hear, said Birdie, who lay wakeful all that night, a boyish laugh drifting down those stairs again.
I can’t describe the sort of peace this conversation gave me. Davy was practically in the room with us; every creak of the old house was like his footstep. I believe it was one of those rare nights Dad would’ve let us stay up late, but August said, “You kids can take the west room tonight,” and that was it for us, bedtime, never mind we’d both slept on the way. I looked an appeal at Dad but got no help. Being both guests and children, Swede and I were entirely at the whim of our hosts, who meant nothing but well.
“Okay,” Swede said, very pliably it seemed to me. Why, we’d barely got started! “I’m tired, Reuben,” she insisted, seeing my look.
Then I understood and showed it by giving out a nice overdone stretch and a yawn. Birdie said, “Ah, you sweeties,” August nodding along indulgently.
Only Dad was not taken in; he looked me in the eye. “All worn out, uh?”
I couldn’t just look at him and lie, so I shrugged, assuming the guilty appearance of the habitual eavesdropper. What Swede had remembered, and Dad knew it, was a swell architectural feature of that upstairs bedroom: a ventilation grate, about a foot square, set into the floor. A curious visitor tucked up in that room could slide from bed and hear every syllable spoken in the kitchen below. Of course there was the chance the adults might decide to talk off in the parlor, which had soft chairs and a davenport and a huge round-shouldered Zenith radio against the wall, also Birdie’s collection of tiny spoons from all fifty states, also a set of Japanese swords August had procured while stationed in the Pacific; but the coffeepot was in the kitchen, and the action pretty much stayed there. Swede said no conversation in any room but the kitchen was worth overhearing anyway, something I’d guess is still true in much of North Dakota.
Boy, that west room was cold, though.
Minutes after Dad had tucked us in and listened to us pray and left us under fifty or so quilts, Swede said, “Can you hear what they’re saying from here?”
“No.”
We eyed the grate, some eight feet away. Light came up from it, and soft voices, and coffee smell. Heat was theoretically rising also; it was hard to tell.
“We could shove the bed over there,” I suggested.
“They’d hear.”
Laughter came up through the grate. Adults always start in with that as soon as the kids are in bed.
“Let’s just tough it out,” Swede said. “Hawkeye and Uncas wouldn’t even feel this cold. Huckleberry Finn wouldn’t even notice it. Come on.”
But I already had the covers tugged hoodlike round the top of my head. A wind had risen outside and was mourning in the eaves; the curtains were ghosting out from the wall, that’s how leaky those old windows were.
“Don’t tell me you want to go to sleep,” Swede said, between her teeth.
“We’ll freeze solid,” I told her. “August will come up tomorrow and we’ll be down there on the floor dead—we’ll be all purple.”
More laughter from below, quickly subsiding to a more serious tone.
Swede said, “I’m going,” and slid out and crouched at the grate. I can see her still—armwrapped knees, face resolute, lit from below.
I thought I heard Davy’s name. “What is it?” I whispered. “What’d they say?”
She waved at me to shush—you know what, I could see her breath. Finally I hopped out of bed and yanked off the two topmost quilts and heaved them over Swede like a tent and crawled in with her. She grabbed my hand. Hers was so cold it felt papery.
“—no notion at all,” August was saying, down in the kitchen. “It was hard to know how to talk.”
“I’m sure it was,” Dad replied. “I’m grateful to you for helping him.”
Birdie said, “Jeremiah, he doesn’t know the trouble he’s in. He didn’t know who Andreeson was.”
“What did you tell him?”
August said, “We talked to him the best we could. He seemed careless about it. Said he hadn’t read the papers or heard the radio.”
There was a long silence in which Birdie got up and poured coffee, and Swede leaned up to my ear and whispered ratfink in reference to the fed Andreeson—a word I hadn’t heard before; it almost gave me the giggles. Ratfink. It’s vulgar, I know it. One of those terms that makes it worthwhile having enemies.
“Jeremiah,” August said, “was it like the newspaper said? The way Davy shot those boys?”
Dad said, “Yes, pretty much as it said. He shot them down. Yes.”
At these words a thing happened I can’t explain—think of some small furry animal, say a vole, going right up your spine with its cold little claws. It shook me; Swede put both arms around me or I’d have gone back to bed.
“Just so,” August said, after waiting a moment. He wanted the story, of course, and why not? Being an old friend of the family doesn’t exempt you from curiosity. Though Birdie must’ve thought his mild pry undignified, because she said, “August”—just that, just his name.
“He shouldn’t have,” Dad said. “It’s true he shouldn’t have. That jury would’ve had to convict him.”
“You didn’t see it happen, though,” August said.
“No. Reuben saw it. I’d trade with him if I could.”
I didn’t understand this right away. Trade what?
“Poor boy.”
This from Birdie—speaking of Davy, I figured, out in the weather with his collar turned up. But she meant me, for Dad said, “You’d be surprised, Birdie. He’s been real grownup, he and Swede both. They’ve stood up better than I have,” he added.
It was hard talk to decipher. What was supposed to happen to you if you were present at a tragedy? Was there some sort of damage? I wasn’t sure. The fact is, beyond the occasional scary dream, my chief response to the shootings was a self-centered misery that Davy’d had to go away. I just missed my brother.
They talked awhile longer, in fact a long while, but most of it went by me. Swede could crouch forever, but my knees weren’t made for it. I started thinking about catchers, Earl Battey and so forth, guys who squatted that way nine innings a day. Also the cold was creeping in under those blankets, and when I tuned my ears back to the adults they were talking about wheat. The one detail I missed, which Swede told me about the next day, was that Davy had a toothache. He’d eaten his kielbasa all right but was careful about drinking the cold milk Birdie poured him; it pained a molar right down to the root. Birdie had suggested he stay long enough to see a dentist, an idea he politely turned aside. Then Birdie, her heart emboldened, pressed him to give up outlawry and return home and offer himself up for justice. In such public repentance, she said, lay his best chance for what might yet become a fruitful life. And this, Swede said, brought a great smile to Davy’s face, and in that smile the Shultzes saw the truth, that turning himself in would be the very last thing Davy would do in his life, however long it lasted. After relating this, Swede said, Birdie had sounded upset and gone to bed, so I suppose wheat came up soon thereafter.
I woke next morning smelling change. No metaphors here; something was different to my actual nose. The air felt heavy, the quilts too, as blankets feel on camp-out mornings. Rising I dressed by a closet light, shutting the door mostly to keep the brightness off Swede, who was a tough one to sneak out on, not to mention unforgiving afterward. I’ve always liked the feeling of being the first one awake in the morning; it makes you daring somehow. I went down to the kitchen and poked around carefully—didn’t turn on any lights for fear of rousting August or Dad. Lifting the coffeepot off the stove I found it half full. There were matches on the wall and I smouched one—to use a word Swede herself smouched off Mr. Twain—scratched it, and lit the gas. It made a lovely blue light in the dark kitchen; in no time the pot was ticking away, and I felt self-sufficient and borderline sneaky. Then August scuffed into the kitchen in his nightshirt. He had an electric candle in his hand, one of those which comes on by itself when you pick it up in the night.
“Feel better this morning, Rube? You coughed some in your sleep.”
“Yes sir. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Making coffee?”
“Just heating it—is that all right?”
He opened a cupboard and reached down a box of sugar lumps. I opened another and set out two cups.
“Saucers,” August said. I got them also. He moved to the table, a strangely discordant sight in that nightshirt of his. He walked always at a slight tilt—he had poor balance, particularly in the dark, since being struck on the ear by a draft horse he’d been shoeing years before. The horse, Mike, hadn’t meant harm but had swung his head round at the very moment August dropped a hoof and stood up. Mike was a Percheron of heroic dimension—his head probably weighed 120 pounds. August recovered quickly, he was no weakling himself, but it is a fact that he tipped over easily thereafter.
He said, “You smell that, this morning?”
He meant the change I mentioned earlier. “I don’t know what it is,” I admitted. What it smelled like to me was a shovelful of earth. A wet day in spring.
“It’s fog,” August said.
He put out the electric candle, and we sat there in the dark smelling the air. August was right. I recognized the smell once he’d identified it.
“It’s a thing about fog,” he continued. “Doesn’t matter when it comes, it smells like April. Birdie was born April twenty-second,” he confided. “Every time it fogs like this, I tell her, Happy birthday, love.”
On receipt of this intimate remark I suddenly understood what had been given me. Never before had I been with Dad’s best and oldest friend, the beloved August Shultz, without Dad present. Nor had I been old enough to appreciate it—why, it hadn’t been long since August referred to me as “my little man.” Now here we sat together, in his dark kitchen, the house asleep, talking about foggy mornings.
“Coffee hot?”
It was. August lifted the candle so I could see to pour. He showed me to tip a little coffee from cup to saucer and swirl it around to cool. We baptized a few sugar lumps. Abruptly August stood. “I’m getting dressed. Let’s take a ride.”
The fog lay rich and steamy over the barnyard. It was warm as manure; you could weigh it in a cupped hand. And it really did smell like April, though I noticed it also smelled like a wet dog; the two are not dissimilar. In the weeks previous we’d grown used to nights of 20 and 30 degrees below zero, so August’s yard that morning was a decent shock. He’d switched on the yard light; it showed fog draped all over everything, hanging over the snow.