Peace Like a River Read online

  “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 o
nward. 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?

  Peeking at Eternity

  NO ONE WOULD BE MORE ANNOYED THAN DAVY IF I TRIED TO RECAST THE predicament under some redemptive glow. Two boys were dead in our house and there was no bright side to the matter. I recall Davy sitting on the basement stairs under a yellow bulb, jacket dragged on over his T-shirt, his face oily with rain. He wouldn’t speak and his eyes showed a narcosis that was fearful to me. We waited together for Ted Pullet to arrive. Dad, far gone in prayer, held Swede in one arm and gripped Davy’s shoulder with the other. I recall a sensation of splitting in two, of becoming smaller. I babbled to Davy that it would be all right, that he had not meant to do it.

  Which woke him from wherever he’d been, for he turned and snared my wrist. “Don’t say it’s all right, Rube, don’t say it. I meant to do it. I meant to. You hear me?” I could only nod frantically. Cars had driven up while he spoke, and we heard doors thumping and voices and saw red lights bouncing off the windows.

  Davy said, “Here we go then.”

  He was always impatient with our family’s general insistence that things turn out for the best.

  True story: In the spring of Dad’s twenty-eighth year, he was raised up by a tornado, along with most of the roof above him and a few loose boards he was setting into the floor.

  This was when he was married to my mother, attending a little school in Iowa under the GI Bill. In those days Dad’s
love of books and scholarly quest kept him happily consumed—he was one of those honorably ambitious self-educated men loved by American folklorists, a Lincoln-hearted reader who might walk ten miles to borrow a volume of poetry by John Donne or a novel by Melville or, to be particularly honest about it, Owen Wister. Loving to study and possessed of unusual compassion he leaned naturally toward medicine, and I imagine my mother falling easily for this generous and handsome and obviously rising young man. (To this day, in fact, it is easy for me to conjure the look our lives might’ve had, if Dad had but held course: an unassuming farmhouse with a wide-swept porch, surrounded, I’m guessing, by a few head of Angus beef on a pastoral acreage, because a doctor needs his recreation, a couple good quarter horses in a painted corral, Mom coming out the back door slapping flour off her apron, calling us kids for supper, looking pleased and content. Surprising, isn’t it, how close such pictures lie beneath the surface?)

  From what I heard those were fine times. Davy was a year old and tottered roguishly around the gladhearted poverty of marriedstudent housing; Mother fed him and wore thin from the chase and read him to sleep from Robert Louis Stevenson. Dad studied the bones of the science department’s hanging skeleton, name of Yorick, a short scurvied fellow gone the color of weak tea. A professor of Dad’s told him Yorick was no conscientious volunteer but was instead a hard-luck Calcuttan who’d been dredged from the Ganges River and been boiled clean and had ridden the black market to the American Midwest. It made a person think. When not studying, Dad worked, sweeping and painting in the athletic building twenty hours a week, unknowingly getting all the education he was going to need right there in his coveralls. It was the athletic building, Dewey Hall, that the tornado struck, just past eleven one heatsoaked night in September. This, by the way, is the only story Dad ever told us in whispers: how the tornado came cruising up out of the south, birthed from a yellow cloud; how it touched earth at the fringe of town, a pale umbilical rope, to corkscrew almost shyly up College Drive, gathering dirt but little else. Next morning the first thing emergent residents noticed was their street, swept like never before, and all streetside grass combed and pointed as if in praise to some passing magnificence.