Peace Like a River Page 8

  Warm regards

  So many letters came those first two weeks that one of the deputies, Walt Stockard, who’d managed to father four restive daughters before his twenty-seventh birthday, brought in a shoe box to hold them all. The shoe box was festooned with pink ribbons and all manner of brocade and peppermint swirls laid on with crayons, so that it looked like it ought to hold valentines; every day Stockard would replenish the box from that morning’s post and in slow hours would pull up a chair and prop his boots on the bars, dipping into the mail and reading aloud. “Here’s one from a Maggie in St. Paul.

  “Dear Davy,

  I am in the ninth grade at Washington School, we have just begun to read William Shakespeare, our teacher Mr. Willis demands we read Julius Caesar even though he knows it is Romeo and Juliet we all desire. I hope you will write back, I would like to have a pen pal, maybe we could tell each other our thoughts, I am only fourteen but everyone says I am mature for my age.

  “And say, Davy—it’s got perfume on it.”

  None of this was comforting to Dad, however. There arrived a day when the phone budged into our dinner-table quietude, informing us that Davy would be charged with two counts of manslaughter—that charge instead of murder because of Davy’s age and because the victims had entered the house bent on mischief. “Mischief?” Swede said. “Mischief?”

  I knew what she meant. Mischief was the word Dad used when we ventured into the timber with a hatful of firecrackers, meaning to explode cowpies. In fact we were now beset with a whole lexicon of legal applesauce; Swede and I eavesdropped on a man in a beard and a tan baggy suit who sat at the table drinking the coffee Dad so tiredly poured, the two of them talking in quiet voices about jury selection and presumption of innocence and change of venue, this plea and that plea, bail reductions, and judicial prejudices against violent youth. Salient to me in the visit of the bearded man was not so much his language as his expression, which was wise, guarded, and unencouraged by encountered fact. “Judge Raster lost his wife last summer,” he told Dad. “It has not made him soft.” And from this grave disclosure I drew my picture of Judge Raster; a blackrobed hulk, face like a shark’s, noose clutched behind his back.

  The bearded man, Dad told us next day, was Thomas DeCuellar. He was Davy’s defense attorney, appointed by the state. We knew he was a good man because he was on our side and had twenty years’ experience in various courts of law, and because he’d brought with him, from his wife, a quart jar of dill pickles she had put up herself, with cloves of bluish garlic and, DeCuellar said, somewhere in there, a jalapeño pepper.

  Days came, went. Davy sat; reporters left town in search of new misfortunes; the strange mail dropped off. One morning Swede didn’t come out of her room and foiled my snoopish concern by propping a chair beneath her doorknob. “I’m working,” she declared. “Don’t bother me.”

  Her tight-throated resolve gave me new wells of unease to plumb. “Working on what?”

  “Isn’t your business.”

  She was writing, of course; I could hear the whir of the typewriter carriage as she rolled in a sheet. The fact made me nervous in some abstruse way. What I wanted was for Swede to be Swede: that is, glad and funny and belonging to me, as usual. We’d always been an exclusive pair, she being smart enough for the two of us and never begrudging me her secrets.

  “Is it Sunny Sundown?” I asked—sounding, I know, like some dumb jealous boyfriend, but all the same you should’ve heard the passion she was pouring on those keys.

  She didn’t answer, so I moped away to the kitchen to eat cornflakes in solitude. Dad was back at work by now, having taken leave after the shootings, and by rights we ought to’ve been back in school; but Dad, though a believer in education, had never respected the glowing objective of perfect attendance (a goal set for kids, he said, “by adults with ruined imaginations”). Before returning to his job, he’d sat down with Swede and me and asked if we felt ready to undertake classes and sociability again, or whether we’d like another week at home.

  What do you think we were, idiots?

  Besides, I suspect Dad didn’t want us back in school yet. He was weathering quite a gale there himself, though we didn’t know it; Superintendent Holgren, first name of Chester, a man whose face was a minefield of red boils, had decided to “scour that janitor’s teeth” (his precise words, as told to me later by the daughter of a school board member who’d invited heinous old Chester over for rolls and gossip). I will give you an example of such scouring. Remember how, the night Finch and Basca broke in, the rain changed to snow? Well, it snowed two inches before changing back to rain the next morning, and the rain came cold and steady for some days thereafter, so that the gutters of Roofing ran with brown water, and runoff from the railroad grade sated the yards of trackside residents, and the boulevard maples and elms grew rank and black, their limbs swooning. Had the city been more carefully engineered—had the storm sewers been of greater capacity or the school been built on higher ground—this would’ve been harmless enough. And yet on Saturday afternoon, two days before Dad returned to work, the sewer system came full. It was stuffed! Squatting on its low plot the school became a living illustration of the properties of water, which, as you know, seeks its own level. How much detail do you need? How much can you stand? I’ll spare you beyond saying that when Dad got to school Monday morning he encountered a basement shin deep in evil, a swamp of soft terrors afloat and submerged, a furnace choked and dead, a smell to poise your wits for flight.

  Superintendent Holgren called off school, of course.

  But do you think he called a plumber?

  The first two days, Dad didn’t even come home. He telephoned to ask that I bring him a sandwich and a clean shirt; his voice betrayed the headache that had been riding him all week. When we reached the school Dad met us at the top of the basement steps. His hands were clean but you ought’ve seen his clothes. He tried leading us away but we looked past him and beheld what he was up against. Did you know that air can have a taste?

  “Where’s Mr. Ringman?” Swede asked suspiciously. Mr. Ringman was “second janitor,” meaning he didn’t have as many keys as Dad.

  “Well, he left.”

  “Couldn’t you come home?” I asked. “Mr. Ringman gets to go home.”

  Dad said, “Mr. Ringman quit.” Boy, his expression was hard to read. Then, “Swede, it’s all right. Don’t, now,” because she’d teared up and was leaning toward him, about to fling her arms round his waist. He glanced at me, alarmed; did I mention his clothes? So up I stepped and Swede laid her head against my chest to cry while I held ungracefully on to her, and Dad’s washed hands smoothed her hair and shielded her face and blessed her, it seemed to me, against all coming trouble.

  Of note, I think, is that Roofing Elementary actually had a contract with a pipe-and-furnace man in Montrose in order to deal with just such catastrophes. His name was Jack Benedict and he was accompanied always by a big and fractionally tamed raccoon, Roach, who would tangle his leash around your ankles and then bite you when you tried to unwrap him. Jack Benedict had paid many a slippery visit to Roofing Elementary, including the time Roger Capps, who would later join the army and die falling out of a helicopter, snagged his teacher’s wig off her head in a fire drill and zigzagged with it through the crowded hall, finding sanctuary in the boys’ washroom, whence was heard the inevitable flush. Not to lose my point here: The school had no compunction about calling on Jack Benedict until Superintendent Holgren decided Dad’s teeth needed scouring.

  As far as I was concerned, Mr. Ringman had the right idea. But Dad just bent to work, firing up a wide-mouth pump that sucked with a repellent sound and coughed organic matter through a window into a parked truck. He dismantled the furnace, cleaned it piece by piece; he mopped and disinfected, his fingers and lungs corroding from Borax. His lack of complaint must have provoked Superintendent Holgren, who came to our house after Dad finished up. It was eight in the evening; Dad was in the tub with his hea
d on a rolled towel. Holgren clomped up the porch and knocked, hard.

  I opened the door and stood there. He wasn’t coming in short of pushing me physically.

  “Evening, Mr. Holgren.” I hated him, I’ll admit, and would soon hate him more, but a person had to feel sorry about his face. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried a dish called tomato pudding. It’s cooked soft and is ever so red and lumpy.

  He said, “Your dad here?”

  “He’s taking a bath.” I stayed put. Seeing Holgren come up the steps, Swede had run to her room; now, faintly, I heard her call, “Did a skunk walk through our yard? Pee-yew.”

  “Well, tell him something for me.” Holgren was angry but thought I couldn’t discern it; he was one of those people who believes all kids have blunted senses. “I bet he’s forgot the parent-teacher meeting’s tomorrow night. He spent so much time cleaning up his basement mess, he never swept the classrooms for two days now. He’ll have to get to it before school tomorrow. Tell him I said to come in early.”

  “Good night, Mr. Holgren,” I said. From her room Swede hollered, “Oh, it’s getting worse! Awful, awful!” But Holgren didn’t get it. There was nothing in his eyes but spite.

  So home we stayed, Swede and I, for one more week. The lawyer, Thomas DeCuellar, came by several times. He said little to us about his hours spent with Davy, though he later remarked he had never represented anyone so unconcerned with his own defense. Patient enough in telling the facts, Davy balked at attempts to place him in too kind a light. Mr. DeCuellar saw the shootings as a clear and winnable self-defense in which Davy’s hand was forced to violence, a rhetoric that displeased my brother. He was not forced, he told Mr. DeCuellar; if he hadn’t wanted to shoot those fellows, he wouldn’t have done it. To say otherwise suggested that he, Davy, was not in control of his actions. Mr. DeCuellar suggested we are all forced at times; we are none of us wholly our own masters; otherwise, why couldn’t Davy simply leave his cell, walk out a free man? And Davy, who could be contrary, replied, Well, maybe I will. Nor could Mr. DeCuellar raise in Davy a suitably dramatic remorse. Though Davy allowed he felt bad, about Tommy especially, he couldn’t see what this had to do with his defense. Mr. DeCuellar said the court was sometimes inclined to mercy toward the contrite, to which Davy replied if contrition meant a soulfelt repentance born of wrongdoing, then it had yet to kick in. Poor Mr. DeCuellar! Even his petition to have Davy tried as a juvenile was slapped down, a decision that brought a few more calls from reporters who wanted reaction from the family. Speaking for myself, the notion of Davy as a juvenile never made sense anyway. Sixteen or not, Davy was an adult, and had been for a long time.

  Swede meantime sat in her room, whacking at the typewriter and occasionally banging her palm on the wall in frustration. This went on for hours. It was unnerving. One afternoon I went out to shoot baskets at the wire hoop we’d bolted to the garage and was startled to see Dr. Animas Nokes standing at attention outside Swede’s bedroom window. He was carrying a sack that I knew by now would contain a loaf of Mrs. Nokes’s onion bread and, with luck, also a pie; seeing me he motioned for quiet and I went and stood with him. Swede’s windowshade was pulled and strange noises issued from behind it: typewriter keys, yes, but also a sort of desperate chant, Swede’s own voice rendered distant and tribal, searching for meter. Dr. Nokes looked a question at me.

  “Doggone poem is giving her trouble,” I said. I felt pretty resentful about it. We weren’t at school, after all; a lot of good free time was going down the drain.

  “Ah,” said Dr. Nokes, as if some great mist had parted; then, “Reuben, you look like a boy who understands how to treat a pecan pie.”

  That same night—I remember because the pie was still very much with me—Swede showed up in my room dragging her sleeping bag. It was one of those cheapies with a vinyl shell and I heard it crinkling all the way from the hall closet. She opened the door and pulled it in after her, vinyl and mold smell entering too, and she spread it on Davy’s bed and snaked down into it and thumped Davy’s pillow until it was comfortable and she was sure I was awake. I whispered, “Hi, Swede!” not caring a bit that I sounded overjoyed to see her. I was overjoyed; she’d been grousing in her room for days, and I’d started to wonder had I made some grave mistake.

  “Reuben, can I sleep in here?”

  “Sure.” There wasn’t much moon. All I could see of her looked like a white kitten crouched on the pillow.

  “From now on?” she said.

  “Till Davy gets back.”

  The white kitten leapt and hovered—Swede had sat up. “Reuben, you really think he’ll come back at all?”

  Now that was one of the worst questions I’d ever been asked. Out of nowhere my throat lumped; I kept still, to stop anything else happening.

  “Reuben?”

  But I couldn’t talk about Davy right then, and it made me cross how close I was to crying. A grouchiness emerged, which was no small relief. “How come you been in your room so much anyhow? Don’t you know others of us live here?”

  She was quiet a moment, during which I regretted being harsh; then she said, “Well, I’ll tell you about it if you want—you grump.”

  I sure had missed my sister.

  What happened to Swede, which I’ll admit didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time, was that she couldn’t kill Valdez. That is, Sunny Sundown couldn’t kill him. Bear with me. After Finch and Basca grabbed Swede that day, you might recall, old Sunny’s adventures turned a little grim. Remember how he kept trailing along after Valdez, finding worse and worse?

  One day an upturned stagecoach and its driver’s ghastly hue,

  The next a blackened farmhouse and its family blackened too—

  The day Swede sat me down and read me those lines I began to understand how truly scared she’d been. Till then I’d been picturing Valdez as one of those banditos in Zorro: sitting a scrawny horse, sneaky grin and eyebrows, the kind of villain who’d dig for earwax to groom his mustache. And you know, I’d liked him that way: sly, nasty, but certainly no match for any hero worth the name. Now, overnight, Valdez had come unbound. He’d grown personally. He was a monster. I worried that real damage had been done to Swede, something that might plague her not for weeks but years. I imagined her at twenty-five, hair gone white, skinny and ulcerated, a fearsome picture. Also, it bothered me that the poem now seemed likely to turn out wrong. One thing had to happen, and soon: That pig Valdez had to die, and Sunny Sundown had to kill him. Honorably and inevitably. With one shot. And Valdez had to fall down on his back and lie outstretched on the scorched earth, his eyes wide open in the noonday sun, so that we knew he was dead and not faking it.

  I said to Swede, “What do you mean, you can’t kill him?”

  “It doesn’t work. I’ve been trying and it doesn’t work. What can I do?”

  She sounded a little panicked. I thought something might be happening to her mind. I said, cautiously, “Can’t you think of a word to rhyme with dead?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’ll help you, Swede. Let me help you—how about head? Like he got shot in the head, and fell down dead. Or spread—he fell down dead, with his arms outspread. Or lead—say, lead is a natural—”

  “Reuben, that’s not what I mean.” How quietly she interrupted—out of respect, I judged, for the literary roll I was on. “It’s not that I can’t write it. I’ve written it already ten ways. More than ten.”

  If she could write it, what was the problem? I sat confounded. Mistaking my silence for doubt, Swede recited:

  “And as the gunshots echo back against the canyon walls,

  Valdez begins to totter—now he staggers—now he falls.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “yeah!”

  “And later, Sundown finds a match and lights it with a stroke;

  ’Cause graves in sunbaked ground come hard—a man can use a smoke.”

  “Swede, that’s great! He buries him and everything—now what’s the matter?” She’d f
lopped back on the pillow. So much weight my praise carried.

  “Just because I write it doesn’t mean it really happened.”

  I had to hold that in my head awhile. I knew she knew what she meant, and I hoped she’d assume I did too.

  She said, “It doesn’t matter if it sounds good. I can’t write it so he’s really dead.”

  You see what I mean. I said, “It’s just a poem, Swede. Here, tell me another ending.”

  Heavy sigh.

  “When judgment came as gunfire to determine bad from good,

  And Valdez lay all soaked in blood, and weary Sundown stood.”