Peace Like a River Read online

  Dad was working late, installing new floorboards on the basketball court where a light fixture had fallen the previous winter—it just worked loose and fell, interrupting a home game, injuring no one but thrilling the crowd with its descent and powdery detonation. Dewey Hall was the only building on campus not made of brick, and the tornado came for it in absolute maturity, no umbilical growth now but a strong slender lady hip-walking through campus—past the science hall, past English, jumping Old Main and the library with deliberate grace and lighting on the shallow roof of Dewey, where Dad toiled alone. He said it didn’t sound like a train, as the wisdom goes, but like a whole mountain breaking loose and skidding sideways over the ground, and looking up he saw shingles in the air, and bits of skylight glass hovering in slow circles; he saw incandescent fixtures likewise floating, torn from their sockets yet their filaments whole and gloriously charged by some storm-bent physics; and as he sprang for the basement steps—not fifty feet away—he heard the great slab of ceiling tear loose and felt himself move upward, ascending in bodily confusion out of the range of gravity and earth and earthly help.

  Meantime my mother, awakened in their third-floor garret by the hissing wind, leapt up in time to see the rotating head of the funnel coast overhead, lit municipally from below. Gusts of sand raked the panes. No accumulation of hard feelings can diminish my admiration for what she did then, which was to fly nightgowned into Davy’s tiny room, seize a folded quilt, and brace it against his window. Thus she stood while the noise rose from a hiss to a many-noted baying; thus she stood as all lights failed and glass burst elsewhere in the building and the noise became everything a mind could hold.

  As Dad told the story this was always the moment of triumph, the turn of the war toward winning: Mother is leaning against the window, standing between the gale and little Davy, and at the storm’s very crest, when it is like a war come seeking what it might devour, she feels the slightest easing in the glass. At the same time Davy stirs and smacks, he rolls to his stomach, the glass goes still beneath her hands, and by the time Davy’s settled back into sleep, the war’s moved on, to the north.

  (But do you think the worst is over? Remember, Dad is only now on the ascent—hammer in hand, he’s peeking at eternity—Mom’s tears of relief are just standing at the corners of her eyes. Nope, the worst, for Mom at least, is still to come.)

  First thing she did, Dad told us, after the storm moved on, was to run out groping for the hall telephone they shared with the third floor. To ring up Dewey, of course—to check on Dad. The line was dead, no surprise, but a strange thing; the handset was hot. Not warm as if from someone’s hand but hot, charged, voltage-goosed. Mother had it to her ear before her palm registered pain. Later she would say the scorched phone scared her more than the storm. It seemed outside of nature. It foretold evil. Dropping it, she felt her way back and pulled Davy from his crib and held him for comfort. I imagine them at the window she’d stood braced against, looking across campus, but you couldn’t see Dewey Hall from there, the lights were still out, and anyhow Old Main stood up between them.

  Within the hour, someone knocked. In the dark, wrapped in a robe, Mother opened the door to a small committee of men, their lanternlit faces the color of burning paper. The man in front said, “Mrs. Land, Dewey Hall is down.”

  And there it was: the worst. She heard them out, their descriptions of the torn building, the void where the roof had been, the twists of painted siding and electrical wire and ruinous plankage spread northward in a long littered swath. They’d taken lanterns and hoisted wreckage and found no sign of Mr. Land. Others were searching even now. They needn’t have told my mother she should prepare for still harder tidings, but they were clumsy fellows and no doubt completely at sea. Was there a right way to deliver the sort of news they carried?

  As to my mother’s state of mind in those next hours, I can only guess. Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long. I have to think my mother felt something like that. Maybe Davy woke and distracted her; maybe she was numb; maybe she had the reserves to begin planning even then how best to make her way in a world that had been so friendly only the night before. All I know for sure, from Dad’s telling, is this: She was at the kitchen table late that morning, having dressed and fed Davy and set him to riding his reined footstool, when the hall phone, restored to service, began to ring. She sat a long while, wanting someone else to get it, but the whole floor had emptied, gone to class and to work and to walk blinking round the former Dewey Hall. At last she got up and answered. A woman asked for Mrs. Jeremiah Land.

  “Speaking,” said my mother.

  “Did your car survive the storm, Mrs. Land?” the woman asked.

  My mother said, sharply, “What are you talking about!” Be patient with her, now; think of her long night.

  “Mrs. Land,” the woman said, “I’m Marianne Evans. Our farm is four miles north of town. I got a man here drinking coffee on my porch. He says he’s your husband.”

  Well, we all hold history differently inside us. For Swede such episodes retold themselves into a seamless and momentous narrative; she had a Homeric grasp on the significance of events, and still does; one of her recent letters asks, Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? (Perhaps it is, but I suspect she’s not actually counting on me for an answer.) Dad, he himself would say, was baptized by that tornado into a life of new ambitions—interpreted by many, including my mother, as a life of no ambitions. Finishing out that semester, he moved his family off campus and found work as a plumber’s assistant. This was the anticlimactic denouement to his whispered tornado story: Having been whisked through four miles of debris-cluttered sky, having been swallowed by the wrath of God and been kept not just safe but unbruised inside it, having been awakened midmorning in a fallow field by a face-licking retriever—Dad’s response was to leave his prosperous track and plunge his hands joyfully into the sewer. An explanation is beyond me other than to repeat what he would often say, the story ended, his hands tucking up the blankets, “I was treated so gently up there, kids.”

  But the whole thing bothered Davy, and with Dad out of earshot he’d say so. You couldn’t get blown around in a tornado, he said, and not get banged up. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t right.

  Swede challenged him. “Are you calling Dad a liar?”

  “Of course not. I know it happened. It just shouldn’t have. Don’t you see that?”

  “No,” Swede replied.

  But I saw what he meant, or I would eventually. Davy wanted life to be something you did on your own; the whole idea of a protective, fatherly God annoyed him. I would understand this better in years to come but never subscribe to it, for I was weak and knew it. I hadn’t the strength or the instincts of my immigrant forebears. The weak must bank on mercy—without which, after all, I wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes. History simply hadn’t equipped me as it had Davy. You had only to look at his hands to see it: His hands were hard as any man’s, and quick—quick as eyesight. They moved always as with a purpose long known. History was built into Davy so thoroughly he could never see how it owned him.

  And Mom? I can only believe she sat down and wept, after that phone call, as any loving wife might do. How she must have rejoiced, how frantically she must’ve driven to the Evans farm—and the clasping and shuddering of that reunion must’ve been a thing Marianne Evans would tell her neighbors about and remember in her heart on rainy evenings while her husband worked in the barn. Happily for Marianne, she would not see the changes that tornado wrought. She wouldn’t see my mother’s puzzlement as Dad surrendered his studies and his prosperous future; nor my mother’s attempts to make the best of it. These attempts lasted quite awhile, really—long enough to bear Swede and me—but she must’ve felt Dad had violated some part of the covenant between them. She departed without explanation or epilogue.
We heard, later, that she married a doctor after all, in Chicago, an older gentleman whose first wife had died; we heard they patronized the symphony and the theater and enjoyed choice memberships. But none of this did we hear from Mother, for no letter or call did we once receive; nor did we ever meet the gentleman on whose behalf we’d been erased.

  They put Davy in cuffs and drove him to the Montrose jail and the rest of us to a motel for the night. Easing away through the rain we saw an ambulance backed onto the lawn, a deputy stooped smoking on the porch, and the freeze and fade of windows struck with camera flash.

  The whole thing was no less a tornado than the other.

  Next day when we went to see Davy, Swede tried to kick him. She was crying and incensed and he reached to comfort her, and she gave it a stout try between the bars, only to clank her shin.

  “Good grief, it’s lucky I’m in here,” Davy remarked, as Swede hopped about, biting her lip. Grim as it was, I could see Dad was glad for the joke. Davy’d shaken off the concussed glaze of the night before. He was in a little cell with tan lighting and squashed flies on the wall, but he’d not grown fangs or become a creature changed beyond knowing. When Swede had got the mad out and hugged Davy through the bars, Dad told us to say goodbye and wait for him in the hall.

  That was the hardest thing—going out that door. It was so thick and closed so heavily we couldn’t eavesdrop through it, not even with the paper cup Swede swiped from the watercooler.

  Dad was quiet when he joined us. We walked out to the car, the wind flapping staleness off our clothes.

  “He seems all right, doesn’t he?” I said.

  “Sure he does,” Dad replied.

  It seemed a long ride home. We got there at suppertime, and Swede and I looked around in the cupboards. Normally Dad would’ve taken over and worked up some meal or other, or at least suggested that Swede and I do it, but instead he just sat in a kitchen chair and leaned back shuteyed.

  Thinking of supper, I asked, “You want us to do anything, Dad?”

  “Persevere,” he said.

  * * *

  It was a better answer than we wanted. What else to do when the landscape changes? When all mirrors tilt? That first week Swede rose as usual and demanded that I help her cook Dad’s oatmeal, but he could no more eat it than he could wave and run for Congress.

  Suddenly, lots of people we didn’t know were calling and dropping by. Reporters, yes: an apologetic writer from the county weekly in Montrose, a sad-mouthed fellow from the Star in Minneapolis, two different radio men, slumpshouldered from their big reel-to-reels, and the first TV correspondent ever sighted locally, which merited an article and photo of its own in the Montrose Observer. We also heard from certain bold and ambitious lawyers who’d read the early accounts and, for some reason, from a slew of young women who’d seen Davy’s tragic mug in the news and imagined him misunderstood.

  Meantime, a lot of people we did know, and whose cheerful encouragement I’ll bet Dad could’ve used, were staying away. A few examples? How about Harold Barkus, the gas and oil man who did all the repairs on our aging Plymouth, who once came to Dad drunk and weeping after his wife had left, and drooled a quart into our couch that night as he slept, and left next morning sober and galvanized, with a hot breakfast in him—Harold Barkus wouldn’t even fill our gas tank anymore, instead sending his gangly boy out to do it. Through plate glass we could see Harold, sitting in his office, not looking out.

  How about Leroy Biersten, the principal of the school, who’d hired Dad and who’d sat grieving at our table when his daughter turned up pregnant by a fled serviceman? Do you suppose Leroy could think of a word of comfort?

  Maybe it was fear, I don’t know; maybe embarrassment. Maybe these people put themselves in Dad’s place, figuring they’d wish for no one to say a word if their son had shot down two boys; if it were their son sitting all day all night in that courthouse cell.

  Or maybe—could this be?—they just reasoned Dad was due some grief. That a man like him couldn’t be exactly what he seemed. Perhaps it relieved their anxious souls that the clock ran against Jeremiah Land as it ran against them all.

  I think of Oscar Larson, who liked to take Dad fishing because it seemed the walleyes always gathered round when Dad was in the boat. And of Gary Sweet, the butcher, whose walk-in freezer Dad had fixed during the July hot spell the previous summer, saving the integrity of uncounted beeves. I think of Ron Simonson, the odd-jobs man, who could count on Dad for occasional work—sharpening mower blades, shingling the garage, doing such tasks as Dad would’ve been delighted to do himself had Ron not needed employment. And I think, can’t help it, of those friends of Job’s in the Old Testament, the men who came to Job as he lay there in his bed of ashes, all twisted with boils and the loss of his children, and said to him, Now what did you go and do?

  Of course vindictiveness is an ugly trait and, yes, I do mean to forgive all these nice deserters; I mean, eventually, to say, to their ghosts if not their living faces, It’s all right. I understand. I might’ve done the same.

  Not yet, though. Let me bear witness first.

  Two men I remember who did not desert—no, three. They were the Methodist preacher James Reach, and Dr. Animas Nokes, and also Mr. Layton, first name of Gerard, the dimestore man who’d been struck of the spirit at the hand of Reverend Johnny Latt. Reach and Layton and Nokes: these three.

  Strangely, it was Dad who seemed to suffer most, and Dad whom these few rallied round, while Davy—who had aimed and fired, aimed and fired, aimed and fired—Davy sat suspended on a county bench and seemed on the whole the same boy who’d always been my favored brother. Though some thinner; he didn’t eat much in there. I remember a moment when he rose from his seat against the cinderblock and put his arms around me through the bars, and I put mine around his narrow waist. Then I saw how dark he was beneath his chin, and how his skin looked rough and loose like a much older man’s. He grinned and wouldn’t let me cry. “Say, Natty”—his hands strong upon my shoulders—“don’t you eat those geese yet. You keep those in the deepfreeze till I get out. Just a little while.” At this I recall a stirring of the jailer who stood close by, a fleeting chuckle of his keys as if at Davy’s words, till I get out; a little while. But I held my eyes on Davy’s and saw a thing that jailer couldn’t: I saw the shine of certainty, of faith, of some knowledge inside my brother; and I knew in whom I could believe.

  But if Davy didn’t get much reassurance in person—and you know, even Dolly didn’t go see him, not right away—he surely did get it through the mail. Especially those first days, when the newspapers leaned graciously in his direction. Not the Montrose Observer, which still had the Finch and Basca families to live beside and so took an almost ludicrous care with the story; but the Minneapolis daily’s first few headlines were the stuff of scrapbooks. TEENAGE SON DEFENDS HOME AND FAMILY. HELD WITHOUT BAIL AT SIXTEEN—DAVY LAND JAILED FOR SHOOTING ASSAILANTS. DAVY’S SISTER: “HE SAVED MY LIFE.” (This last was a triumph for the solemn fellow from the Star, who sat at a distance watching our house until Dad went into the backyard to rake; the reporter then sprinted to a phone booth, Clark Kentlike, dialed our number, and by pure good manners got a sentence or two out of Swede before Dad, hearing her voice through the screened windows, returned, rightfully suspicious.)

  These stories lit fuses under an astonishing number of folks. They wrote letters as if impelled by nature; as if Davy embodied whatever it was they’d thought long-lost and wanted back.

  Dear Davy Land,

  In this Godless day of corrupt youth and permissiveness toward criminals it is reassuring to see a young man stand up in defense of hearth and home. That you are reading this in jail is no surprise to me but instead a sorrowful commentary on the way we treat those who dare to do what is right. Lest you begin to doubt yourself let me reassure you. Those fellows who broke into your house were cast from evil molds, they had in mind to hurt and kill, and they reaped what they had thought to sow. Your bravery gives
us all new hearts,

  Sincerely

  Dear Davy,

  I’m a widow (young) whose good husband died two months before our house was broke into by a bad boy from the neighborhood. Often I have wondered what my husband would of done had he been here and now I think I know. He was a strong man. He had eyes remindful of your own, as struck me when I saw your picture. I am sorry for you to be where you are right now but am praying for you daily. Will there be a trial? I am enclosing a recent photograph of myself.