by Will Hobbs
21
“Sarah’s in the root cellar, Clay,” Mrs. Darling said, and pointed across the yard. Her eyes were asking how the early morning visit at the jail had gone, but she knew that’s why he wanted to see Sarah. “Clay, would you take that box of jars in the kitchen down to Sarah? Those tomatoes are heavy.”
In the shade of an immense cottonwood tree, steps led down to a door at the front of a long mound of earth. Sarah looked up when he came in. Her beautiful smile was mixed with worry.
“Tomato delivery,” Clay said as bravely as he could. Really, he wanted to cry. But he’d cried on his own outside the jail, and what was happening was sad enough, he’d better not think about it too much or he’d start crying again.
She was labeling a canning jar filled with some kind of long unsightly vegetables. “What is that stuff?” he asked, and wrinkled his nose.
“Pickled okra. We’re going to enter it in the fair.”
He picked up a jar of cherries she’d also labeled and set with other jars she’d singled out. “If they need tasters, I’ll volunteer for these, but I’ll pass on that okra stuff. My mom says I have a rule—if it sounds funny and looks weird, it can’t be good to eat.”
Remember, Clay told himself. You told your uncle how much you were looking forward to the dance, and you even told him about Sarah’s new dress. “This dance tonight is going to be extra special for Sarah,” Uncle Clay had said. Don’t spoil it for her was what he meant.
He was looking around at the shelves upon shelves of canned fruits and vegetables. It was staggering how much food her family had stored away. “It sure is cool in here,” he said absently.
“I like your new boots, Clay. Did your uncle see them?”
“No, I got ’em on the way home.”
She was placing the tomatoes on the shelves. “My father told me what’s happened,” she said. “How is your uncle Clay?”
He had to share his heart with her. His lip was quivering but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. If he couldn’t tell her how he felt, who would he ever be able to talk to? “My uncle was trying to be brave about it, but I could tell how bad he felt. I just don’t think you can lock up somebody like him. You know what he said? ‘Freedom’s the air I breathe.’”
“I know, I’ve been thinking what that would be like. There wouldn’t be anything more awful.”
“I feel so … useless.”
“You made him happy—you came all this way to find him. I’m sure you lifted his spirits this morning.”
Clay’s eyes returned to the pen in her hand. “I didn’t mean to keep you from labeling those.”
“I’m just about done,” she said, and wrote “August 1962.”
“I can’t believe how much food you have down here.”
“It’s part of being in our church,” she explained. “Every family has a year’s supply of food stored away. There’s flour in those barrels over there, cornmeal, and rice, and in the sawdust bins, apples and potatoes.”
“I guess you’ll be in good shape if there’s an atomic war.”
“That’s part of it,” she agreed. “Here, let me show you what’s back here.”
At the rear of the root cellar Sarah opened another door. It opened onto another room with four simple beds and a tiny kitchen with a counter, sink, and an old-fashioned cookstove.
“What’s all this?”
“Our bomb shelter. Behind the partition there, there’s even a little bathroom.”
He felt awful. “That’s nice,” he said uncertainly. “You won’t be able to go outside for a half a year or a year or something.”
“I know. Even if we’re not a target or anything, they say the radiation just falls out of the sky and poisons everything. But I don’t think it’s really going to happen, Clay.”
He looked at the shelter. It said otherwise. He was never going to have the chance to do something great, like one of the people in President Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage. “Seattle’s going to get blown to kingdom come,” he said.
Sarah said with conviction, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not, then?”
“It’s like last winter when John Glenn’s capsule was returning into the atmosphere, and for a few minutes there was no radio contact and they were wondering if the heat shield came off the capsule and he’d burned up. Did you think he was going to be okay or that he’d been killed?”
“I thought he was going to make it. I was praying like anything.”
“So was I, and I thought he was going to make it too. If we were always going around afraid … We wouldn’t even be able to go to Dance Hall Rock this evening. We’d have to stay close to our bomb shelter in case anything happened!”
There she’d done it, she’d made him smile again. That long braid swung as she closed the door and turned toward her canning jars. He wanted to reach out and touch that braid, but he watched it go. “Let’s get back to work,” Sarah said. “Let’s box up these things we’re going to enter in the fair so they’re ready tomorrow morning. If you think I’ve got ribbons you ought to see Mom’s. If we’re lucky, maybe she’s made an extra pie while she was baking the ones for the fair.”
“Sarah, what will happen to the horses now, the ones we hid in Death Hollow?”
“I don’t know, Clay, I just don’t know. Maybe I’ll have to go back and let them go.”
Outside, Libby and Nora were riding Pal, and Burrito was trotting alongside. “Look Sarah,” Libby shouted. “Dad’s going to let us ride in to the fair tomorrow on Pal if it’s okay with Clay!”
“You bet it is,” he called.
Clay looked at Sarah. She sure was fond of her sisters. It seemed like the three of them should have a brother.
Wait a minute, he told himself. What am I thinking about! Not in a million years would I begin to feel for Sarah like a brother!
It was a goodly distance out to Dance Hall Rock. Clay was riding Starbuck alongside the chuck wagon, an old covered wagon full of the pots and pans and other paraphernalia needed to put on the big feed before the dance. Now and again Mr. Darling would cluck to the team of four horses and give the reins a snap. Like his daughter, that man knew how to cluck to a horse without coming off like a chicken.
A friend of Mr. Darling’s was seated on the wagon bench with him so Mr. Darling wasn’t lacking for company. In between them stood Curly with his little front feet up on Mr. Darling’s legs, commanding a view of the team and the road and panting as if he didn’t have that canvas shade over his head. Clay was happy to have the time to himself to think, to just let himself go with the rhythm of the saddle and drift off the way he liked.
He drifted off a couple different directions, but he would never drift very far until he returned to the man in the cell. Tomorrow Uncle Clay would be sent up to Salt Lake City and he’d be put in a jail that wasn’t like the Escalante jail at all. There’d be no Aunt Violet there who knew he wasn’t the kind who should be in jail and treat him kindly. How long would he be in prison? Pretty long, Mr. Darling had implied. You could see it written all over her father’s face. How long? Three years, five years, ten years? Even three would be forever.
In three years I’ll be out of high school, Clay thought. That’s so far away you can’t even begin to picture it.
What about the salmon fishing they were going to do? What about the boat up to Ketchikan, Alaska? When he’d found his uncle it felt like they were just getting started. His uncle had seen he wasn’t a little kid anymore.
Or was he a little kid? Growing tall, but still a kid.
There was something that was nagging at the edge of his memory like a raven squawking when you’re coming out of a nap in the shade. What was it? Something important. Oh, well.
Dance Hall Rock sits in some pretty country, he thought. Yucca and junipers, red sand, dunes and rolling slickrock, rock outcrops of red and pink and white sandstone. A lot like Monument Valley, really. He wondered if they’d ever made any Westerns here. Well,
they should.
It was something Mr. Darling had said, he realized. That’s what was nagging at him and demanding to be remembered. When her father had been talking about Uncle Clay, when he’d been talking about him getting caught—that was it. “He’d be all right as long as he didn’t come back to the state of Utah.” That was it, that’s what he’d said.
Uncle Clay needs to get out of there, Clay thought. That’s what he really needs. He needs a good old-fashioned escape. All he needs is to ride through these dunes and over this slickrock and out of this town and this state.
That’s what he should really be doing, figuring out how to bust his uncle out of jail.
But how would you pull it off? Could that even be possible?
He must have seen a thousand jailbreaks…. If he could only remember, one of them would show him the way. What would John Wayne do? How about hitching up Starbuck to the bars in Uncle Clay’s cell window, the little one at ground level in the window well? What if he hitched up Pal too? What if he used this team of four that Mr. Darling was driving?
Who was he fooling? He’d seen those bars. The ones they use for the movies must be hollow or something.
What about dozing deputies? More than any other ploy, that was the one that seemed to work the most often. Figure out how to sneak the keys right off a dozing deputy or from right under their nose. With a broom handle and a little nail bent at a right angle sticking out of the end of it, he could lift that big key ring right off the end of the dozing deputy’s sleepy fingers….
Wait a minute! The deputy in this case was Aunt Violet, and she was never dozing. She was always sweeping or mopping or cooking or something. Not only that, she didn’t have one of those big old movie key rings with all the giant keys. She only had an ordinary little key ring with four or five keys on it, probably her car key and house key and her jail keys. And she didn’t keep them where you could send Curly after them or snag them with your fishing line and a hook—she always kept them in her dress pocket.
“There it is,” Mr. Darling called.
“What?” he replied, half-startled.
“Dance Hall Rock. Say, did you fall asleep on your horse?”
“Just kind of daydreaming,” he replied.
To himself, he added: “As usual.”
Clay helped unload the chuck wagon, and then he had a chance to inspect the “dance floor.” It was easy enough to picture those pioneers at this natural slickrock pavilion, and it was easy to imagine how perfectly the huge sandstone backdrop projected the sounds of the instruments back to the dancers.
In a minute Clay had an ax in his hands and he was helping to make kindling and to lay it into the barbecue pits. Right on cue a pickup pulled in full of seasoned scrub oak and he helped to get the fires going. In another half hour the folding tables and chairs arrived and he went to work setting them up on the slickrock. The men and the boys were dressed in their newest jeans and best shirts, dress boots and go-to-church Stetsons. They were kind of shy about talking to him, but they were happy to have him working alongside. It was good to have something to do, to keep his mind off tomorrow.
Some of the younger boys couldn’t keep their eyes off his jewelry. That’s what set him apart from them, and the fact he was a stranger of course. Everybody around Escalante knew everybody else. He heard several whisper, “That’s Clay Jenkins’s nephew.”
The meat was brought out soaking in barbecue sauce, in dozens and dozens of deep metal pans.
It was late afternoon now and the whole town was driving in, the whole county. He had a giant pair of gloves on and a huge fork in his hands, and he was helping tend the beef over the red-hot coals. It felt awful good working alongside Mr. Darling. It felt good to see all the women arriving with their colorful dresses and their hair all done up, and going right to work spreading out tablecloths on the tables and laying out more food on the buffet lines that he’d ever seen in one place. There were kids running around, excited as baby burros, hundreds of kids.
He asked Mr. Darling, “How many cows are we cooking up here?”
Before Clay heard an answer, his eye caught Libby and Nora and Mrs. Darling and a fourth with them, a young woman with wavy dark hair all down her back and a flower in her hair. All were wearing long dresses and carrying dishes of food toward the buffet tables. Who was that young woman, or was it a girl, in the rose-colored dress….
Then he realized—Sarah! You fool, it’s Sarah, with her hair all combed out down her back. That’s Sarah, in the dress she made!
22
They sat down right across the picnic table from one another. At first Clay was so taken with how different Sarah looked, he could barely look at her. All he could do was eat; he was good at that, and he’d heaped his plate high. He was beginning to feel he didn’t know her at all, didn’t belong here, when Sarah said, “I wish you could see the colors next month up around Cyclone Lake, when the aspens are turning.”
What a relief to hear her speak. She was still the same Sarah. She was real, not someone he’d dreamed up. Now he couldn’t take his eyes off her, this girl in the rose-colored dress with the embroidered flowers at her neck, this girl with the long wavy dark hair all glistening. He was going to miss her so badly, it hurt already. How much longer could he stay? Another week?
“There’s Uncle Dave,” Libby said, pointing out the man in the starched uniform returning from seconds at the grill.
The sheriff, Clay realized. He looks so stiff, and so official. It was hard to imagine he’d been sympathetic with Uncle Clay.
“Their family always sits with us,” Libby said. “How come they didn’t this year?
“The election’s coming up soon, and he has to campaign,” Mrs. Darling said. “He has to mix with everybody.”
“And there’s that Mr. Barlow,” Nora sang out. “He’s worse than Liberty Valance.”
“Shush, now,” Mrs. Darling said. “Nora, see if your father’s got enough help so he can come sit down with us yet.”
“Clay, let’s get some dessert,” Sarah suggested.
The sun had set. The slickrock in the distance, out toward the Colorado, was rimmed with orange. Guitars and fiddles were tuning up, a banjo too.
They ran into Aunt Violet dishing out slices from the homemade pies. She was wearing one of those ruffled dresses and she had her gray hair piled up extra high with a purple ribbon to match the dress. She broke into a big smile when she saw him. This felt like running into somebody you knew from home. “You look great tonight, Aunt Violet,” Clay told her.
“I’m going to take some of these back to your uncle,” she said. “One of each kind, so he can take his choice and eat as much as he wants. I hope you came to dance, Clay—you’re going to see quite a shindig here tonight.”
He could tell she was trying to cheer him up. She knew too, what was going to happen in the morning.
The band looked like they were ready, but then they set their instruments aside. “There’s going to be a few speeches,” Sarah explained.
They drifted away from the speeches toward a nearby rock formation, where they sat and watched quietly. The moon was just about to rise across the Colorado. He reached for her hand as they watched the moon lift huge and orange from those slickrock badlands between the two rivers. The full moon freed itself from the rock ocean and buoyed up enormous and bright and orange into the night sky. She squeezed his hand. They looked at each other, knowing each other’s hearts. Curly appeared from the busy rounds he’d been making and jumped up on their laps, offering his moist black nose.
The speeches were short, and the band soon launched into a full-speed-ahead “Orange Blossom Special.” Sarah’s feet began to tap. It was easy to see she was looking forward to dancing, and Clay guessed it wasn’t going to be any sort of dancing he could manage. They walked over closer to the dance floor and watched.
The next number slowed things down some, and the people didn’t wait to be invited to commemorate the dances that the pioneers had he
ld on this very spot so many years before. Clay and Sarah stood to the side and watched the men twirl their partners gracefully. The petticoats were flying. A harmonica player joined in and Clay thought of his friend Russell and the Midnight Flyer and the campfire that night when he’d tried to dance their way and only ended up creating his own unique style. This kind of dancing was just as foreign to him as Navajo dancing.
Her parents joined in at the next dance. Aunt Violet was out there too, and she was quite a dancer. To Clay’s horror, a boy came up and asked Sarah for the next dance. To his everlasting relief she shook her head, and the boy disappeared. “That was George Winchell,” she said, “from school.”
“Sarah,” he said. “I’m not sure I can do this kind of dancing, but I’ll give it a try.”
“Let’s practice a little right here, first. I’ll teach you.”
“Really, right here?”
He concentrated hard. With your hands on her hips, or with your fingers entwined, you signaled what you were going to do, and then you just did it. She was making it seem easy. Before long he was twirling her too, and those layers of pink and white ruffles were swirling like a top. Then they joined the other dancers. Her long hair was flying, and she was looking into his eyes. It didn’t matter if he lost the beat; he could find it again. It was so crowded, nobody was really watching anybody else and there were collisions besides the ones he caused. It all seemed to be part of the fun. “You’re so lucky to live here, Sarah … ,” he said all out of breath. “Everyone in town must be out here tonight.”
“Escalante’s deserted,” she agreed.
Except for my uncle, he thought. In the basement of the Escalante courthouse. One man down there very much alone.
Aunt Violet swept by with an elderly gentleman a head shorter than she. She was having the time of her life.
Aunt Violet’s not at the jail, he thought. Aunt Violet’s here. She’s your dozing deputy…. She’s the key…. She’s got the keys!