by Leif Enger
I was to have one last night in the hills: another starry one, as you will hear, but with a moist hush to the air that was like something at full draw—a breath, an arrow.
Jape Waltzer was busy shoeing Fry. Whoever’d built the place had left behind an anvil and a makeshift forge. Jape had tacked new leathers to a bellows and was working up a glow that lit the shed.
“Reuben, I thank you,” he said, when Davy had ushered me in and I’d said my piece. That was it. He thanked me for the information and seemed otherwise unconcerned.
“He said they’re getting close,” I reiterated, unsure whether Waltzer had understood. He stopped working the bellows. On the orange forge lay a horseshoe like a black cutout of itself. He picked it up with a set of longhandled tongs and looked it over doubtfully.
“Fry,” he said to the horse, who stood shortroped to a ring in the wall, “let’s try this on. Davy, his head.”
Davy took the bridle in both hands and whispered compliments to Fry while Waltzer leaned against the horse’s left hip and picked up his foot. In the glow I could see fresh scrapes where Waltzer had filed the hoof smooth. I could see nail holes from the previous shoe.
“It’s always the back left one he throws,” Waltzer said pleasantly, laying the hot shoe against the hoof. “I don’t know why.” It was plain he liked the work.
I said, “It’s just, he told Dad to stay by the phone.”
Waltzer set down the hoof and replaced the shoe in the forge. When he looked at me from under those brows I knew I’d said everything on the matter. Pumping the bellows he said, “Reuben, look at these coals.”
They were beautiful, a breathing black-webbed orange.
“When they’re like that, when they look like a jack-o’-lantern, they aren’t hot enough.”
“They aren’t?”
“No sir. Not hot enough to soften that shoe.” He nodded at a stack of cut boards in the corner opposite Fry. “If you’ll feed some of those to the fire while I’m working the bellows, believe me Reuben, we’ll make some heat.”
What else could I do? Forgetting Andreeson for the moment I gave myself to the allure of the forge. It had a small steel door that Waltzer swung open. The firebox was a mere cozy flame and I fed it full of boards. Waltzer slammed it shut and commenced pumping and shortly the wood hissed to incandescence and the wind blew in the forge until I heard voices inside it.
“Good, Reuben,” Waltzer said. He was panting. Steam came off his shirt. “You see what you’ve done? Look at the coals!”
There was now only the faintest orange about them—as the afternoon sun is orange. They were white. Still they breathed. Already the edges of the horseshoe were white too.
This time it smoked when he fitted it to Fry’s hoof. Fry snuffed and hopped but was well pinned. Waltzer wasted no time but laid shoe to anvil. A few strokes and he had it to size. He was dextrous for a man minus two left-hand fingers. Bent over Fry’s upraised hoof he reached to his mouth for a nail. He drew a small hammer from his boot top and tapped the nail till its point emerged from the hoof’s clean slope an inch above the shoe. He drove a second nail, spat the rest into his palm and looked me over.
“Reuben, come finish.” Waltzer beckoned, hoof locked in his knees, wool shirt rolled to the elbows. He was sweating in the red gloom.
“Nail it home,” he said. I took the hammer. He showed me how to set the nail at the proper outward angle. Davy told Fry he was a good horse, a handsome horse. To this I would add longsuffering. Aiming carefully at the nail I tapped faintly away until Waltzer said, “Do you do everything the same way you breathe? Whack it.” So I whacked it, grateful for Fry’s resignation and at the nail’s progress down and through. I set the remaining nails and Waltzer produced, again from his boot top, a set of snips and cut the nail points off flush with the hoof. He pocketed the points and set the hoof back on the ground, patting the ankle above it.
“Fry,” he said fondly; then, “Thank you, Reuben. Well done.”
I looked at Davy, who winked. The forge was ebbing; it must’ve been cold in the three-walled shed, but I was warm and glad to be there.
We ate a midnight supper in the shack and still Waltzer would hear nothing of Andreeson. His disinterest was stunning. He turned the conversation to politics, astronomy, the science of well drilling, the superiority of beaver felt over wool. He claimed to have been born with no sense of smell but with extraordinary and compensatory taste buds; he never salted his food but accepted it as given, its natural flavor being satisfactory.
“For example, your meat there. I suspect you find it bland.”
It was a little lump of gray meat on a tin plate. It and a boiled potato were supper. There they lay, all tired out.
“It’s fine,” I replied. Of course it wasn’t yams and sausages.
Waltzer said, “It’s bland. Pork is bland meat and people season it to their senseless palates. Take a bite, Reuben. Describe the flavor.”
I bit. The pork had been boiled a long time. Indeed it bore no trace of salt. It was like chewing a hank of old rope. Waltzer’s eyes were alight and curious. Desperately I sought the elusive civil adjective.
“It’s pretty good,” I told him.
“I commend your courtesy; but nonsense. I won’t take offense. Nor will Emil. Do it for Emil, hm?”
You remember Emil.
I peered at the pork. Waltzer said, “Go on. Assess the piquancy of Emil. It’s all the memorial he’s bound to get. Poor little Emil.” He was delighted the meat had a name; he couldn’t use it enough.
And yet, surprisingly, knowing the pale lump before me was Emil was not disturbing. In fact it freed me up somehow. I chewed him up and swallowed him. “It’s—stiff,” I said cautiously. “A little dry.”
Waltzer said, “Go on.”
“It’s dull. Blunt.”
“Yes, yes.” Waltzer liked this. A strange thing occurred: adjectives, generally standoffish around me, began tossing themselves at my feet. “It’s fibrous. Rough. Ropy.” I was faintly aware of insulting Sara’s cookery, but Waltzer was nodding, smiling. His favor was better than the alternative. I basked in it; and it was fun, for a change, having the words. “Dispirited, stagnant. Mortified. Vapid.” I wasn’t sure what that last one meant, having heard it from Swede in a discussion about her second-grade teacher, but it had a ring.
“Well said,” Waltzer declared—the only time I recall that compliment being applied to myself.
“It tastes like cartilage,” I added, wanting to get that one in.
“Yes. Good. Now me.” Waltzer took a small mouthful and worked it efficiently. “Mmm, yes.” He closed his eyes, swallowed, blew hard through his nostrils. “I taste corn—not so much corn as I’d like. Kernels and husks. I taste beans. Bread. Pigweed, grass, earth, quite a lot of earth. Salt.”
I realized he was describing Emil’s diet. He looked pained. “Unfortunately, I also taste slops. It’s a hard gift. I’ve encountered flavors in sausages it would be obscene to describe.”
Did I believe him? It doesn’t matter. All this time my lungs had worked tolerably well. I understand now this was a period of grace. Waltzer went on treating me as though my presence honored him; wary as I was, his manner was winning and his talk beguiling. Sara stayed apart from us behind her wall of quilts. Later we stood outside the cabin, Waltzer pointing out constellations while Davy went to saddle Fry.
“There’s the Great Ring,” he said. “And there is the Totem; there’s Hawk and Mouse, the Whale, Boy Ready.”
I could only nod. Having someone point out constellations is pleasant as long as they don’t insist that you actually see them. Aside from the Dipper and Orion and the Teapot, constellations tend to hide in the stars.
“I never heard of Boy Ready,” I said, as though the others were familiar to me; so he aimed at its points one by one and related the myth of a child who lived in a city of wood, and how one night the city caught fire and burned so fiercely that by morning nothing remained but a fiel
d of fine ash. Only the boy escaped. One day a passing pilgrim saw him crouched at the river pursuing fish with his hands. The pilgrim took the boy on his horse to the next city, where he was fed and then celebrated as the tale of his survival spread. The boy charmed all with his bravery and wit and was adopted by the king, and grew up trained in arms and letters; at last he became king himself and was wise and good. It was a passable story until Waltzer revealed that the boy had set the fire himself.
“He couldn’t have!” I said.
“Of course he could. Calm down, Reuben; it’s only a legend.”
But all Waltzer’s constellations told such turned legends. There was the Bowsprit, about another rotten boy who slew his father while he slept and later became a fire-breathing pirate who devoured his victims’ limbs and decorated the rail of his ship with their heads. This fellow tramped up and down the high seas challenging men and gods until a brave captain met him in battle, the two of them going sword and sword across decks for days without rest. At last the captain by superior craft cleft the other in two, at an angle, so that the pirate’s head with one arm and shoulder thumped on the deck with a terminal snarl. Job done, the captain returned to his ship to wash for dinner and looked in his polished brass mirror. You see what’s coming: The poor captain saw not his own face but the pirate’s, and the nastiest grin all over it. Following this all his noble impulses fell away like a mail shirt, and he developed a wild controlling lust for jeweled plunder and an appetite for boiled legs and arms. “So you can win the battle, Reuben”—Waltzer shrugged—“but the war is lost long ago.”
“Crumb,” I reflected morosely, as Fry and Davy trotted up.
Waltzer put his altered hand on my head. “Don’t let it bother you,” he said.
But it did.
The next day Martin Andreeson called. The fellow who’d given Davy a lift, name of Robinson, had promised to show Andreeson the place he’d dropped him off. They’d been going to meet at the Amidon cafe, but Robinson never showed. There were three Robinsons in the phone book; Andreeson reached two; the third’s telephone had been disconnected. Inquiring directions to the disconnected Robinson’s house, Andreeson drove eight rugged miles along the edge of the Badlands. The house he found there was cold and boarded.
“The situation, Martin,” Dad said, “requires prayer.”
I’d have given quite a bit to hear the fed’s response. Whatever it was, Dad said, “Of course—we’ll expect to hear from you,” then hung up and called me over.
“Chest tight?” he asked—a rhetorical question, for he could hear what had become the usual wheeze.
“Yes sir.”
“What can I do?”
He’d begun approaching it this way ever since Dr. Nickles threw cold water on the vinegar treatment.
“Just pound a little.”
He turned me by the shoulders and I braced against the door-jamb while he worked my back. Except for the thumping it was a quiet morning, and when he stopped I could hear Roxanna humming in the next room.
“Better?”
“Yes sir.”
He listened. “Sounds about the same.”
“It’s better.”
“Reuben,” he said out of nowhere, “is there something you ought to be telling me?”
My insides jelled. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re looking peaked,” he said. “It wears, this whole thing, doesn’t it.”
So it was only my health he was worried about.
“I’m going to the trailer and pray for your brother,” he said, such sadness in his face it was as though he knew something I didn’t, instead of the reverse.
No word arrived from Andreeson that day. Or the next. What did arrive was a northwest wind that sang against the house. In the Dakotas it needn’t snow to blizzard. The wind came low and fast, peeling the drifts. From her window upstairs Swede and I watched a cavalry charge minus the horses; wide chunks of snow tore themselves off the ground and flung forward, tumbling to white sand that coiled and rushed like Huns. It was a ground wind, a ground blizzard. Picture a storm to match any in wildness but only eight feet high. From Swede’s window it was like looking down on a violent cloud. The barn protruded—its door invisible down inside the storm—and the handle of a snow shovel stuck in a drift, and Roxanna’s red birdhouse on a tilting pole. Above the storm it was actually sunny; we could see the gleaming tin dome of a neighbor’s silo miles away. But when we went downstairs drafts came from everywhere, and the light was gray and discouraging, and on the west wall an electrical outlet glowed with frost, a foot from a ticking radiator.
The wind lasted two days. Thinking of the cabin in the hills, with its shrunk chinking and corroded stove, I worried for Davy. Also for Sara.
“Swede,” I wondered, “how long till you’d freeze to death in a wind like this?”
“You mean with your clothes on?”
I bridled. “Well, what do you think? How many people are going to go out in this with nothing on?”
“Nobody goes out with nothing on. It’s something that happens when you begin to freeze; the thermometer in your brain gets turned around. You start thinking you’re hot, got too much on; you figure you’ll cool off.”
I was buying none of this. Couldn’t afford to. Picturing Davy all bundled up in this wind was bad enough.
“It’s true, Reuben. It’s like a mirage, the snow turns to desert. Once, two college boys snowshoeing out in Wyoming—they found ’em froze solid, standing up. Snow to their waists, nothing on but boxer shorts, police couldn’t fit ’em in the car so they tied ’em on top, like in deer season—”
Goodness knows how long Swede might’ve continued in this way, so I said, “What if you were in a rotten old cabin, cracks in the walls and the wind blowing through?”
Well, that set Swede on another track even more horrific. She related a story about some troop of outcasts running out of food at the onset of a recordbook blizzard; and how hungry they all got, eating their belts and boottops, though not their lone horse, which had sensibly escaped; and how the weaker among them skidded away from reality and started gnawing their own limbs, smacking their lips yet making, you’d have to say, no nutritional gain.
As a tale of grue it was badly timed; Waltzer, too, had spoken of cannibalism, and in fact it seemed a thing he might practice without remorse. I descended to morbid reflections. Suppose the storm lasted a week? How much firewood did they have in that cabin—and how much food? With both Davy and Sara on hand, I was certain Waltzer would eat Davy first; he had other plans for Sara. I spent a vicious wish on Andreeson: if only he were out there with Waltzer. Then bring on a blizzard! But this bit of drama didn’t satisfy as I’d supposed it might; the fed, to my puzzlement, seemed less putrid than he once had. Sitting by Swede as she read silently on the couch, I counted six of my breaths to each of hers. What I wanted was a great big inhale or, failing that, a little peace. I ventured out to the Airstream.
Dad was playing the antique guitar. Stepping into the dimness of the barn I heard its soft strings humming one lovely chord and then another. He was playing slowly yet precisely, for I heard no orphan notes. I stood listening while he played any number of quiet hymns, stopping sometimes to tune a string up or down. I don’t mean he was already Segovia or anything; it was only days since he’d repaired the instrument with a tube of airplane glue and a Spanish windlass tied up from long johns. Still, he had worked out many of the songs we loved in those days, “Amazing Grace,” and “Cast Your Eyes upon Jesus,” “It Is Well with My Soul”; also “Happy Trails,” and “The Cowboy’s Lament.” Sometimes Dad sang, sometimes hummed; sometimes there was a long search for this or that desired chord. I could’ve listened all day. When he stopped and I heard him moving about inside the trailer, I eased from the barn and shut the door.