A canyon dim and deep and cool was where he'd made his lair,
A labyrinthine cavern strewn with bits of bone and hair.
It smelled within of smoke and sin and blasphemy and dread,
And none would choose to walk that way who were not walking dead.
Yet down the quiet canyon wall a weary rider came—
A rider bent with grief yet bent on justice all the same.
And while the stormclouds rise on high, and ruin moans and grates,
The rider Sundown draws his Colt, and Valdez grins and waits.
SWEDE WAS ALONE IN THE HOUSE. DAD AND I WERE AT CHURCH, OF COURSE, and Davy was in the garage loft, working on a secret, Swede's ninth birthday being two days off.
Who could imagine someone would come to the door, in plain sight, such a lovely October evening, with evil in his heart? Who understands such hatred as bedeviled that doomed visitor? Who would believe his boldness as he knocked?
But Dad had spoken correctly: They did not know they'd already lost. Israel Finch didn't know it as he heard Swede running to answer the door; Davy didn't know it as he worked in the garage, soaping years off a stretch of braintanned leather. Swede certainly didn't know it as she scuffed and lurched across the yard toward a smoking Chevy with Tommy Basca at the wheel and Israel's hand against her mouth. Oh, no: Swede didn't know it at all. What Swede knew was that seconds ago she'd been writing down rhymes to describe the bandit king Valdez, daring eagle-hearted thief and he who of these hills is chief—growing a soft spot for the bad guy, like every other writer since Milton. Well, no more. The bitter taste of Israel Finch's palm, his unwashed smell, her own terror at the proximate unknown—all this took the sheen off villainy.
Thus does a romantic canyon hideout, an outlaw palace built of rock, become a smelly sinhole strewn with bits of bone and hair.
No more sympathy for Valdez, boy.
Now Sundown's wound is seeping and he's tilting as he rides;
His eyes are red and gritty as he scans the canyon's sides.
He hadn't known the nature of the man whose track he sought,
And it sickened him to death to see the things Valdez had wrought.
One day an upturned stagecoach and its driver's ghastly hue,
The next a blackened farmhouse and its family blackened too.
So many graves had Sundown dug, his hands were chapped and sore,
And now he prayed to God for strength to live and dig one more.
Israel made her sit on his lap in the Chevy. Tommy pulled away from the house, dumb as any good chauffeur, and when they'd gone a few blocks Israel took his hand from her mouth and said, "Now, you see how easy that was?"
I won't give a detailed account of the ensuing twenty minutes. I wasn't there. Later Swede would characterize the interlude as "a small and dirty time," and though in these days of abductions and mayhem and bodies turning up in ditches Swede's ordeal might seem almost innocuous, to think of it still hurts me, physically. I feel it churning yet.
A nine-year-old shouldn't be dragged from her house by someone who hates her.
Nor be forced to hear the language of the unloved.
Nor be jiggled in the laps of perverts.
A nine-year-old shouldn't be told, "We'll take you home now, but we'll be back. We're right outside your window."
And now, because a story is told for all, an admonition to the mindsick:
Be careful whom you choose to hate.
The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly.
Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.
The first Davy knew of Swede's capture was her return. Finishing his work in the garage he cleaned his hands on a rag and came in the house to make coffee, entering at the back door just as Swede slammed in the front. Her shoulders were bent forward and she crosscupped her elbows in her palms. She was not crying. Her face was white. Davy saw her looking thus and swept her up and smelled at that moment the oilsmoke rush of the departing Chevrolet.
That night I eavesdropped on the grownups again: Dad and Davy and Ted Pullet, the town cop, drinking coffee in the kitchen. Swede was asleep for real, which somehow made me fearful—that and Pullet's manner. He sat there talking to Dad in tones so reasonable I suspected he wasn't even on our side.
"I'll talk to those boys in the morning, Jeremiah. I swung over there after you called, on my way here. They aren't home, either of them."
You see what I mean? Those boys. I swung over there. I didn't understand how Pullet could be so casual. I slipped out of bed and peeked in the kitchen.
Dad said, "You can do better than talk, Ted. You know Finch."
"You said yourself they didn't hurt your girl."
Davy hadn't wanted to call Pullet at all. This was Finch and Basca's third offense, and as far as Davy was concerned their woeful moon had risen. He had his jacket on and car keys in hand when Dad pulled rank and called the law.
Waiting, Davy asked, "How many times does a dog have to bite before you put him down?"
And now here came Pullet with his timid logic. "You gave them a pretty bad scare that night in the locker room, Jeremiah. They're just kicking back a little. Basca's aunt wanted you arrested, you know." Pullet smiled, but his fingers shook on the rim of his cup.
Davy got up from the table at this, set his coffee down, and left the house.
Pullet watched him go. "Jeremiah," he said, "you of all people should understand young men who might get overheated."
"They pulled her out of the house, Ted. Her own home. Threatened her, put their hands on her." A pause, then again: "You know Finch."
This referred to Israel Finch's departure from school the previous year. One day he'd got up to leave in the middle of Remedial Math. The teacher, young and uncertain of his authority, moved cautiously to block the door. Israel seized the teacher by the hair and bent him toward the floor. Wordless, on his knees, the teacher closed his eyes and Israel Finch let go the hair and stepped back and delivered a kick to the stomach that took the teacher's wind and ruptured something inside. The class went numb; the teacher slumped; the noise his head made hitting the floor started three girls crying at once. Israel left Roofing and went briefly to a reformatory, which failed to prove up to the name. By the time he returned Tommy Basca had quit school also, his options there seeming limited.
"I'll talk to them in the morning," Pullet said. But by now I recognized the fear inside his voice.
He was no good to us.
This he would verify the very next day, returning after visits with Finch and Basca to tell Dad that those boys were just playing—kicking around—had meant no harm. I remember the clear contempt in Davy's eyes and the set of his mouth as he listened to this folly. I remember hoping Ted Pullet wouldn't look up at his expression and take offense, though now I understand poor Ted must've known it was there, must've felt it. Must've chosen against seeing it.
Swede for her part said nothing to me about Finch and Basca. The day after it happened we went to school as always, and getting home she somewhat forcefully pulled out her little hardheaded doll with eyes that closed when you laid it down, a toy that hadn't seen daylight in months. She carried it about, changed its clothes impatiently, ran a brush over its stiff hair. But the doll had a grievous, unmothered expression, as if it knew its time was short. Once as Swede was rocking it her blouse rode up and I saw two black thumblike marks down low on her side. That night I went into her room and found her working fiercely at her tablet and the doll nowhere in sight.
"Just writing," Swede told me, but I knew she was doing more than that.
She was killing off Valdez.
And in the morning she turned nine years old, in a reckless celebration defying all dread. We sneaked early to her bedroom, where she lay awake pretending otherwise according to tradition. In the gray light I discerned her lips in a tight smile and her eyes fluttering behind the lids. Then Dad softly sang "Happy Birthday" and she sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes like some storybook child, a beautiful sight; I can't tell you how relieved I was to see her look so glad.
She wanted my present first, probably because it was smallest; the most I'd been able to come up with was a paperback western by one Frank O'Rourke. It was secondhand, which bothered none of us; I'd gotten it from the literate bachelor a block over, Mr. Haplin, who'd feigned haggling and accepted an Indian-head penny in trade.
"I'm sorry it's not a Zane Grey," I said. The fact was that Mr. Haplin, while an awfully good sport, collected Zane Greys; the Zane Greys stayed put.
"It's all right," said Swede, smoothing the cover. The book was called The Big Fifty.
"It's about a buffalo hunter." I'd paged through.
"It looks swell," she said, then, "Daddy!" because he'd laid on her bed an awkwardly wrapped package that came untaped with no help at all and revealed a great solemn typewriter, black as a Franklin stove, its round keys agleam.
"Daddy!" Swede said again, in disbelief.
Grinning, he handed her another package: a ribboned ream of 20-pound bond. "Now put those cowpokes of yours in print."
She touched the keys, ratcheted the carriage, pinched the curling ribbon and waved inked fingers. I never saw Swede look happier than she did with that monstrous machine sinking in her bedclothes; as if her world were nothing but huge blue-skied future. But the smudges on her fingers made me think of the bruises I'd seen when her blouse rode up, and I wondered how much they hurt and how much she thought about them.
"Thanks so much," she said, and may we all be paid one day with looks such as she gave Dad.
Then Davy, who'd smiled silently through everything so far, knocked us all flat by stepping out of the room and back in with a Texas stock saddle fragrant and lustrous on his shoulder. He said, "Someday you're going to need this," and laid it on the floor beside her bed.
Swede opened her mouth and couldn't find a word in it. While loving all things Western, I doubt the facts of horse and saddle had ever occurred to her as real; they were simply poetry, though of the very best kind. Hammerhead roan and dancing bay pony and, now I mention it, Texas stock saddle—to Swede such phrases just loped along, champing and snorting and kicking up clover. And rightly so: Take away such locutions and who's Sunny Sundown? Just a guy out walking.
So the spell of the West, cast already by Mr. Grey, settled about Swede like a thrown loop. There's magic in tack, as anyone knows who has been to horse sales, and a rubbed saddle, unexpected and pulled from nowhere, owns an allure only dolts resist. Swede's was a double-rigged Texan with red mohair cinches, tooled Mexican patterns on fender and skirt, and a hemp-worn pommel. It was well used, which I believe gave all our imaginations a pleasing slap, and it had also arrived quixotically. Davy had bought it off a farmer who'd bought it off a migrant laborer who'd traded his horse for a windbroke Dodge truck on a dirt road north of Austin; the migrant had said good-bye to his loyal beast but kept the saddle out of sentiment. Days later under northern skies he understood that its presence in the pickup only made him heartsick and he unloaded it cheap to the farmer, who, though confused by Spanish, understood burdens and the need to escape them.
All this Davy told us with Swede astride the saddle on her bedroom floor. Davy's work had brought the thing back to near perfection; the smell of soaped leather, which is like that of good health, rose around us. It was flawed only in the cantle, where the leather had split and pulled apart. Davy acknowledged with frustration that this must've happened years ago and he was unable to mend it. "But it doesn't matter for riding," he said.
"That's true," Swede said practically, just as if there were a pony out waiting in the yard.
Well, the day defined extravagance. Though wisdom counsels against yanking out all stops, Swede did seem joyously forgetful of recent evils, and we kept the momentum as long as we could: waffles for breakfast, sugar lumps dipped in saucers of coffee. I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers. After lunch (toasted cheese sandwiches), Dad opened the coat closet and with great care unfolded something scarlet, crinkled, shroudlike. When he called it a balloon I was confused at first, thinking of the rubber kind. This one was of tissue paper and at least ten feet high. It had an open bottom weighted with a circle of wire. In the backyard Swede and I held the bottom of the bag while Dad lit a coffee-can mixture of gas and number-two fuel oil. Heat-fattened in minutes, the balloon commenced to tug. When it was pulling hard enough to lift a good-sized cat, Dad set a hubcap atop the can to quench the fire, and we let it go. It went up quickly—a light wind slipped in from the east and the balloon caught it, tilted a little, then righted into a smooth, angled ascent. When the balloon was a dark bug on a pale blue wall Dad jogged Swede with his elbow. "Ah, Swede," he said, "nine years!"
A car horn sounded out front. Davy trotted round and came back looking like he'd burped sour. He said, "Dad, it's Lurvy."
Swede looked aggrieved. She said nothing aloud, to her credit.
"All right," Dad said. His carriage drooped an inch or so, I won't say it didn't, but you couldn't have guessed a thing from his face. The horn honked again, and Dad went around front and laughed boldly once and told Tin Lurvy to come in for coffee.
Picture a fat man, suit full of sweatspots, knees pointing inward for support. Imagine the voice of a much picked-on yet somehow hopeful child. If John Calvin was right, destiny had a serious grudge against Tin Lurvy, a purple-faced, futile, tragically sociable traveling salesman. Had he only been pushy he wouldn't have been a problem; Dad never minded hurrying Fuller Brush men along. But Lurvy didn't push—in fact, he never mentioned what he was selling unless you asked. I suspect few people did. Merchandise didn't seem to matter much to Lurvy, except as conversation—garrulous conversation, too, because Lurvy preferred to run about one-quarter drunk. Along American turnpikes he had failed to peddle vacuum cleaners, saucepans, patent medicines, candy, cufflinks, hairpieces. (I didn't know all this at the time, but would learn it soon, gracefully worded, in his obituary.) Though he probably came through Roofing but once or twice yearly, it was more than enough to establish him as a kind of mean joke among us clannish kids. One Christmas Eve (the dishes done, the gospel of Luke read aloud, presents imminent), Davy looked out the window and said, "Oh, no, Tin Lurvy's driving up!" The bluff dropped my organs into my shoes. Worse, it turned prophetic: Lurvy really was driving up, except he was only as far as Michigan at the time. Come New Year's Eve (10 P.M., popcorn rattling in the pan, Swede and I looking ahead to the one time all year we'd see midnight), Lurvy drove up for real. Atop the stove were four glossy carameled apples, one for each of us to eat at the stroke of twelve. Lurvy ate Dad's.
The arrival of Tin always turned your day in unexpected directions. Here we'd been trying to give Swede a birthday to make her troubles flee; now we wanted to flee as well. It had to be done quickly if at all; otherwise protocol took hold, like the death rigor, requiring a person to respect company and sit and listen, in the case of Lurvy, to pointless recitations about people you didn't know, most of them Democrats. Illinois Democrats, Delaware Democrats, Ohio Democrats—gracious, how Lurvy admired them all. "The Democratic Party is the best family I got," Lurvy liked to declare, a truer statement than any of us knew.
So while Dad started a pot of coffee and hunted around for cookies, Swede gathered Davy and me behind the house. "It's my birthday," she said. "I didn't invite Mr. Lurvy!"
She never would've pouted so in Dad's presence; it was unacceptable form—and anyhow there was something about the fat salesman that brought out the Samaritan in Dad. We all recognized this, including Lurvy. The advantage was all his.
"Maybe if Dad bought something from him he'd go away," I suggested.
Swede was suspicious. "What's he selling?"
"Encyclopedias," Davy said. "World Book encyclopedias. They cost a couple hundred dollars."
From inside we could hear Dad setting out cups and opening cupboards, and also the cheerful insensibility of Lurvy's opening monologue—the sounds of hope landing facedown.
Swede said, "I'll just go in and help Dad find the cookies." Poor duty-wracked girl, she was almost crying.
"No. Let's go to the timber," Davy said. "Let him find the cookies, Swede. He knows where they are." The timber was a hundred-acre woodlot at the edge of Roofing wherein lay solace for the hard-hit.
"No, he doesn't," Swede said bitterly. "He doesn't."
"They don't need cookies anyway," Davy said; then, grinning, "Let 'em eat cake," which brought a giggle from Swede. There was a joke here I didn't get. But she shook her head and replied sagely, "The cake's what I'm trying to save." It was her birthday, after all—I suppose she'd baked that cake herself. Gathering all possible drama she said, "If I'm not back in two minutes, you guys go on without me."
And do you know, she wasn't back—not in two minutes, or five, or ten. Then Davy said, "Let's pull out, Rube," and peeking through the window I saw poor Swede installed at the kitchen table, tall glass of milk in front of her, a single desolate cookie lying untouched on a saucer and lament in her eyes. Dad by now looked not just patient but downright indulgent with Lurvy, whom I could hear talking through the glass: I tell you I ordered me an Airstream trailer? Twenty foot. Got a bathroom in it with running water. Even a pot! Ha-ha!
It grieved us, leaving Swede that way, but she'd volunteered, so off we tramped down county blacktop. The afternoon was still bright and smelled of wheat stubble and warm dust. Sometimes we stepped down into the high killed grass to spook hares out of the ditch—Davy had snagged his little carbine out of the garage—but we weren't really hunting and he didn't pull on any of the hares, just sighted down the barrel at them zigzagging away.
The timber, I should tell you, was one of the best places God ever made. The trees were mostly burroaks, wide knuckly giants whose leaves in autumn turned deep brown and beetleback shiny. Dried, those leaves were so stiff you could feel them through the soles of your shoes. A fellow named Draper owned the land then, a happy old crank, and he ran a few independent Jersey cows on it to keep the grass down. In the timber we'd seen badgers, mink, fox, an overconfident fisher stretched out smiling on a limb; these beyond the usual million gray squirrels and woodchucks. Also in spring and fall were crows by the dozens, shiny-eyed bellicose buggers swaying in the high branches, cawing and losing their balance and flapping languidly.
Abruptly Davy asked, "Did you see Swede's bruises?"
I nodded. "She didn't say anything. I just saw by accident."
"You think Dad knows?"
I didn't, really. "Maybe."
We kicked on toward the deepest part of the timber; the deader oak leaves get, the more noise they make. My lungs were getting a little stiff on the intake, and Davy was keeping a quick, frustrated pace.
"You think," he said, "that Dad is afraid?"
I stopped—had to—crouched for breath. "Afraid of what?" I'll admit my mind was occupied. Sometimes when the breathing goes it goes like that—like smoke filling a closet.
"Finch and Basca. Are you okay, Rube?"
I nodded, shut my eyes, took in as much air as I could and let it out slow, all the way out, down to the bottom. I said, "He's not afraid of those guys. He beat 'em up in the locker room that night."
Davy said nothing. Maybe that was what had him so irritable: he thought Dad was scared. Maybe it scared him in turn, or maybe he just thought it was weakness. Finally he said, "Are you scared, Rube?"
"Naw."
He watched me breathe awhile. "You think God looks out for us?"
"Well, yeah," I said.
And Davy asked, "You want Him to?"
I nodded, thinking, What an oddball question.
We had a strange encounter in the timber that day—we came across a tramp, curled up houndlike beside a ruined fire. We heard him snoring, is how it happened, sawing away like Sunday afternoon. Pushing through undergrowth we crept forward till we saw two shiny black things lying one atop the other; they turned out to be the soles of two shoes, which became attached to a set of ragged stockings, then the gray pants of some throwaway business suit. At last we stood in a tiny clearing amid dead brush, looking down at a small red-haired red-bearded fellow, sleeping away most desperately, his back propped against an army duffel. He hadn't a single gray hair that I could see—I suppose he was in his thirties, at most—but his legs were so thin the socks bagged, and the grit of decades seemed settled in his face. I remember the smells of cold fire, and old sandwich meat, and another that was new to me then—a sorrowful taint as of long disuse. The smell of a room not opened in years.
We left the tramp lying there, us boys a little stunned at such need for sleep; we backed away, and didn't speak, and moved a bit more quietly through the timber going home. We never saw the man again. I'm not even sure why I mention him here—it's not as if he pops up later, holding a clue or moral or other momentous piece of story. (It's tempting, certainly, to assign him the duty of harbinger. He'd make a good one, so worn and dessicated beside his sorry coals. But I doubt he was. A tramp can be just a plain tramp, you know; he can build a fire in someone's favorite woods, even ours. It was a strange moment, is all.)
But when we stepped out from the trees—stepped out into a peevish wind, the sky telling of winter, evening-colored at four in the afternoon—shouldn't I have felt something then? As we walked toward home, toward lighted windows, shouldn't I have sensed the Lands adrift, pushed off course, gone wayward?
Supper that night was Swede's favorite, a red-potato chowder Dad mixed up with hunks of northern pike. Seasoned with vinegar and pepper this was our king of soups; a person didn't even want to put crackers in it. My heart sank when I entered the kitchen and saw Dad standing at the stove, nodding and stirring while Lurvy talked on. His senses roused by the aroma of creamed pike and reds, Lurvy was expounding on his most cherished road meal of all time, a bowl of Fisherman's Stew he'd ordered in Seattle at a place called Ivar's Acres of Clams. Yes, Ivar knew his mollusks. Proficient biologist as well as canny gourmet, Ivar knew where the best clams resided—stalked the beaches himself, daily, to shovel them up fresh, and so on. I felt we were being set up; that no matter how delicious Dad's batch of chowder, we would all be subjected, during its consumption, to a comparison with Ivar's wondrous clams, in which our king of soups would be reduced to something along the lines of a jack. I saw this coming and perhaps Davy did too, because he said, with mild impertinence, "Where's your next stop, Mr. Lurvy? Do you have a long way to go?"
But Lurvy only smiled. "No scheduled stops, son. It's thoughtful of you to ask. Interested in traveling, are you? Let me tell you about a little seafood place I found up in the Cascades—"
Meantime I peeked into the pan Dad was stirring and became alarmed; why, he'd only made a regular batch. With Lurvy at the table he ought to've tripled it, even I knew that. Lurvy could eat this much all by himself, without noticing! Inside my mind we all sat down, Lurvy to our prized soup and the rest of us to bread and butter; I imagined Lurvy slurping joyously, pausing only to denigrate the broth; I saw the final spoonful vanish; I heard his belch of conquest.
"Something wrong, Reuben?" Dad said. I looked stricken, I guess.
"Is this all the soup?"
Dad grinned, saying, "Well, of course," and for a moment I understood Davy's chronic impatience. Sometimes it really was as if Dad had no clue at all.
Lurvy said, "Better wash your hands, kids. No dirty fingers at this table," and then, without rising to wash his own, reached for the napkins Dad had laid out and tucked two of them into the top of his shirt.
The soup, I must tell you, was peerless. The beloved Ivar himself must have authored no such broth, for Lurvy said nothing of clams, or Seattle, or anything that might detract from the present delectation. He ate a bowl in owlish silence, confounded I guess by excellence, and seeing this we kids all ate the faster, comparing the man's appetite with the humble size of the soup pot.
"More, Tin?" Dad offered, and Lurvy held up his bowl.
With that second helping, the silence broke. Lurvy had found joy at our table and settled in as though home from the wars. Spooning up soup, he looked benevolently around at the four of us. He said, "I had my appendix out last month; they showed it to me when I come to; it was yellow as paint and six inches long. Your normal appendix goes about three and a half. Did you know that?"
Well, none of us had known it until that moment. Perhaps if we'd owned World Book we would've, but there commenced an education on appendixes and their ailments and removal, Lurvy's in particular, that speaking for myself I'd rather have heard after supper. Between spoonfuls Lurvy told us how your appendix is shaped like a worm and hangs leechlike on to your large intestine; how it can go bad with no warning whatever and land a normal happy person in a world of hurt. He told how his own appendix had grown beyond its intended duty (the nature of which eludes doctors to this day) until it almost did him in. He was sitting in a tavern in Pennsylvania, talking to a purveyor of dark German ales—a good Democrat, incidentally—when he felt faint and stood to clear his head. Next thing he was on his back, conscious only of a fertile nausea and an awful groaning, such as sick cats make, and of the ale man kneeling above, pinching Lurvy's nose shut and kissing him like the world would end. ("Did you kiss him back?" Swede said, aghast; Lurvy held up his bowl; Dad ladled in soup.) Resuscitating cloudily, his mind befogged, Lurvy could only assume that the ale man had lost his wits, and also that the prolonged and strangely pneumatic smooch was the source of the nausea. What would you do? Lurvy asked us. Wouldn't you lurch upward, trying to get away? And if your forehead happened to crack the ale man's nose and knock him colder than a Catholic mackerel, was that your fault? He told how, when the ambulance arrived, it was obliged to cart them both off, the pending appendectomy and the sleeping ale man, whose nose, Lurvy said, lay dead flat against his face. ("Who'd like more chowder?" Dad asked. "Me," Lurvy answered.) The operation had gone well enough, except the anesthetic hadn't been applied appropriate to Lurvy's great size, and he'd remained frowzy throughout, asking the surgeon what that thing was, and whether he'd washed his hands, and once believing he was eight years old again, having his tonsils out.
During this discourse Lurvy ate at least five bowls of soup. Could've been six; things run together under the spell of epics. I myself had only one bowl, the last spoonful of which had just entered my mouth when Lurvy took off describing his diseased appendix, all yellow and foul, like some pusworm dropped in a doctor's pan. The image stopped my supper then and there but had no effect on Swede, who ate, I believe, three bowls, probably out of principle, it being her birthday. Later, after cake, when Lurvy had gone, Dad admitted he'd had two bowls of soup despite the morbid narrative. He was a little wide-eyed at the integrity of his own broth, asking Swede, "What did I put in it? Did we fix this batch differently? My goodness."
All this from a pot of soup meant to feed the four of us and no more. A small pot of soup. Was I the only one who noticed how many bowls were served, how the pot was replenished as though from a well, how there was somehow enough again and again to fill the ladle? Cleaning up the dishes after supper I felt a surprising weight in the faithful vessel and, lifting the lid, beheld a pot still more than half full of our king of soups.
Make of it what you will.
But onward. Between supper and what came later I remember a cold rain dripping off the eaves as Lurvy's taillights eased away. I remember Swede's head against my shoulder and her saying, "You think it'll turn to snow, Reuben? Oh, I hope it turns to snow!" I remember Dad moving slowly in the house, a terrible headache having taken him almost the moment Lurvy departed. Walking stooped, reaching to turn off lights that hurt his eyes, Dad tripped over Swede's saddle, which she'd dragged into the living room. When she ran to him he said, "Don't worry—don't worry," and picked up the saddle and carried it to her bedside. But his head was ringing with a pain visible at the edges of eyes and mouth.
Swede and I went to bed early. Davy slung on a coat and left the darkened house. I lay wakeful, conscious of breathing, discomforted at Dad's stumble, at the pain that blinded him. And I wondered again about Swede's bruises, how much they'd cost her in fear alone. Rising I looked out the window: Davy's lit tobacco was an orange dot in the rain. I crossed the hall, whispering, "Swede, are you awake?" But she was already far gone into night, mouth open, her breathing faintly snotty. I was pleased to see The Big Fifty turned on outspread pages beside her bed; she'd gotten a ways in before the day overtook her. Beneath the rainshot window the saddle camped in a pearly glow. It drew me. I knelt and touched the leather: the soft polish of long miles, the gentle orderly smell of horse and paste soap. There is magic in tack, as I said before, and it's no embellishment to say that saddle seemed almost to breathe and sigh in some easy creaking dream of the West, just as Swede was likely doing. I ran my hand down the slope of the horn, down the slick sitting place and up the swept cantle, and that's when I noticed that the flaw—the pulled-apart leather Davy had been unable to fix, that he'd apologized for—was gone. I felt with both hands, though the saddle in its luminosity showed me well enough that the breach in the leather had closed. The wound had simply healed up. I felt a comfortable strangeness, as if smiled upon by someone behind my back; I sat on my haunches there in Swede's cool room and remembered how Dad, after stumbling over the saddle, had picked it up in his patient hands and carried it here and set it down again. I touched the cantle: just smooth leather, not even a seam.
Make of that what you will.
Sometime past midnight the rain turned to snow. I could tell by the difference in the sound against the window: a less sharp, wetter sound. At first I thought that was what wakened me.
Then the door handle turned—the back door, off the kitchen. I knew that little squeal. How I wanted it to be Davy coming in, smoky and quiet and shaking off water, but Davy was inside already, sleeping not five feet from me, breathing through his nose in satisfied draughts. Nor was it Dad, for I could hear him too, rolling to and fro in sleep, wrestling his headache.
I heard the dry complaint of the kitchen floor, of the place beside the broom closet where joists groaned underfoot, and if I'd had any doubt that someone had got inside the house it vanished when a damp current of air came in and touched my ears and forehead.
Davy smacked, swallowed, sank to yet more earnest sleep. My lungs shrank with expectation; my whole surface hurt; I ached to creep across and wake him but felt benumbed, crippled. Now for the first time I heard real footsteps. They crossed the living room. A shoulder bumped the mantelpiece. My windowpane filled with a burst of driven snow and I abandoned myself to the knowledge that I'd waited too long to wake Davy. What would happen now would happen.
The steps came forward. They stopped at my door. I felt, more than heard, someone's hand upon the knob.
Then Davy spoke from beside me—"Switch on the light"—his voice so soft he might've been talking in his sleep. But he wasn't. He was talking to whoever stood incorporeal in the doorway. "Switch it on," he commanded, and next thing we were all of us brightsoaked and blinking: me beneath my quilt, and Israel Finch standing in the door with a baseball bat in one hand and the other still on the switch, and poor stupid Tommy all asquint behind his shoulder. Davy was sitting up in bed in his T-shirt, hair askew. Somehow he was holding the little Winchester he'd carried in the timber that afternoon. And holding it comfortably: elbows at rest on his knees, his cheek against the stock, as if to plink tin cans off fenceposts.
It is fair to say that Israel had no chance. I'm not saying he deserved one. He stood in the door with his pathetic club like primal man squinting at extinction. How confused he looked, how pinkeyed and sweaty! Then he lifted the bat, the knothead, and Davy fired, and Israel went backward into Tommy Basca, and Davy levered up a second round and fired again.
Did you ever hear a rifle shot inside a house? Inside a plastered room? You may imagine how the place came alive, even while the opposite was happening for Israel Finch. (He had no last murmur that I could detect; the round made a bright black raindrop above and between his two eyebrows so that Swede, much later, would write that his corpse lay painted like a Brahmin maid.) He was on his back in the hallway with that dot on his forehead and no exit wound behind (a good argument, Dr. Nokes would bluntly note, for small calibers) when Swede came flying from her room. She saw, besides Finch, Tommy Basca on his stomach with hands aquiver toward the door, and Davy stepping up behind him. And she saw me, I suppose: me watching the end of all our lives as we had lived them heretofore. I remember the sound of Swede's gasping voice and her exhaled huff as Dad yanked her into the bathroom and slapped the door shut. I looked at Tommy Basca, who was shot too, though not cleanly as was Finch. Tommy clawed the floor, bawling incomprehensibly, and his eyes rolled, and there was genuine terror inside his voice, and I knew with certainty he was seeing all the devils waiting for him, whetting their long knives, that he could hear their gabbling shrieks, that the smell of sulfur so quick in the room issued from some dim mouthlike chamber panting after his soul. Standing above him, Davy levered up a third cartridge.
I ought've looked away but couldn't.
He lowered the barrel to the base of Tommy Basca's skull. For an instant my brother seemed very small—like a stranger seen at a clear distance. He showed no tremor. He fired. Tommy relaxed. The house went quiet except for Swede, sobbing behind the bathroom door. The sulfur smell hung a moment, then faded. Davy straightened, not looking at me or at Dad, who emerged with arms scratched red from restraining Swede. Davy wiped his face, said, "Well—" then stepped over Tommy and out the door.
And when did he know just what he'd done? We've wondered that, Swede and I. When did it come to Davy Land that exile is a country of shifting borders, hard to quit yet hard to endure, no matter your wide shoulders, no matter your toughened heart?
