Peace Like a River Read online

  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 w
ho’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?”