So Brave, Young, and Handsome (3 page)

“Tell one more western tale,” said Redstart, as I came up with them at the dock. “Just one more, Glendon, before you go.”

Glendon thought a moment, then with a quiet spark said, “I have been four different times on trains that got robbed, yet never lost a dime,” offering this tidbit as though it were a riddle.

“You were a train detective,” said Redstart. “You foiled the robberies!”

“Shan’t tell you,” said Glendon.

“You were a Pinkerton man!”

Glendon laughed aloud, saying, “I’m telling you nothing!”

Redstart frowned, then said darkly, “Why, you’ve got to tell me, if I say so—I know your name, remember.”

“Nope,” quoth the old sprite, raising his brows, “for you know me by first name only, while I have both of yours, Redstart Becket!” And stepping to his boat, he danced a short hornpipe of victory. Truly Susannah had it right, for he was Peter Pan before my eyes—shifting,
magnetic, a neat invitation to the curious and the lost and the needy. He twirled a line and was adrift, and we waved and shouted as he seized his oars. The captivating imp! How could I know he was indeed to take flight, and very soon, and that it would be I, and not Redstart, who went with him?

Back to the thousand words for a moment: How easily they came at first! I always liked mornings and it was a simple matter to rise at five and scratch down my daily measure. Giddily I wrote a long manuscript about an epicurean shipping tycoon who goes witless like Nebuchadnezzar and tears off his clothes to gallop apeknuckle through the countryside, eating the long-stemmed grasses beside the railroad tracks. I thought it both moral and comedic and even, occasionally, daring; if it rambled a little, Susannah and the boys didn’t mind. A funny story! Yet when I mailed it away to Hackle & Banks, a young editor named Bat Richards wrote back to me with polite candor that this might not be a proper follow-up to
Martin Bligh
. He believed it was discursive, aimless—
maundering
was his admirable word. Bat hinted that Grace Hackle, too, had been disappointed in my Nebuchadnezzar tale; he wondered what other romantic, thrilling, and (he added) concise adventures were trotting through my mind. Meantime he had some good news:
Bligh
was into its seventh printing. Rights had been purchased for publication in England! A bank draft would soon follow!

I burned Nebuchadnezzar in a milk pail, stirring the pages with a driftwood staff, and congratulated myself on enduring pain in the service of art. Soon Bert trotted up, and I tossed a stick, and Bert chugged away and brought it back. In this way we played for some time; afterward I felt decently propped up. I had a new story idea and went in the house to write it down.

This one was about a boy who shoots two intruders in the dead of night and straightaway flees the law. I had it in mind that the boy become a dangerous western hero along the pattern of Tom Horn. His
would be a life of wild horses, of slender escapes, of comrades laid in shallow graves! Then would come his arrest, his days of sorrow and despair; in the weeks before his hanging he would write his memoir as a lesson to youngsters everywhere who thought it romantic to “don the red bandanna.” I dashed off the first hundred pages of this project and sent them with a personal appeal to Grace, as I was still smarting over the snub from her subordinate Richards.

Yet Grace was not enthralled. Her reply agreed to “work with me” on the book though she believed it would take much editing. Frankly, the letter was a little terse. She confessed to having “flung pages about the room.” She said it was no
Martin Bligh
. If I was determined to continue “this undertaking” she would naysay it no further. There was a postscript, no doubt written later, in a softer mood. It contained a bit of news about the hallowed
Bligh:
Eleven printings and still rushing forward! Translations underway in Germany and France! Also, the eminent director D. W. Griffith was eyeing it for a moving picture! A bank draft would soon follow.

Well, I never finished the outlaw tale either—next to Susannah, there was no one I was more determined to please than Grace Hackle. She was a refined woman. It was disturbing to imagine her slinging my manuscript, goaded by my weak idioms.

I then wrote a breathless opening chapter about a man whose skin began to turn more transparent day by day. First he was merely pale, then indistinct at the edges. Gradually he could make out bones beneath his lucent hide. No one else could see this condition, which was both relief and misery; his wife loved him still, his children ran about with their noisy passions, but the man was vanishing, and his memory with him. He forgot his friends and his work and began to sit all day, aware of his bones and teeth and his gurgling organs. Poor Susannah! She wept reading this harrowing attempt, and then I went and got mad at her for it.

By now I had left the post office and spent a little money. Bad judgment, oh, yes, but Mr. Bligh apparently had “legs” and I was certain another story would come along, and the words to tell it with. We sold our unpretentious bungalow and took a big foursquare beside the Cannon River. I bought a horse for Redstart, Queen Anne chairs for
Susannah, and a painted rowboat for myself. It was flat-bottomed and homely with leaky seams, and I loved it so much I would creep out past midnight and go down to the river to scull and bail and blink at the stars. Some believed the boat a mere trinket I desired having purchased a house on the Cannon. The truth, though I didn’t know it at the time, was opposite. I bought that house to get the boat. You are no failure, on a river. The water moves regardless—for all it cares, you might be a minnow or a tadpole, a turtle on a beavered log. You might be nothing at all.

A week after Glendon came to breakfast I rose before dawn and launched my porous skiff.

I was curious about him, that’s all.

It was a calm morning with no wind and a comforting primordial smell; a sizable fish swirled beside the boat, a tetchy bittern shuddered up out of the reeds. No one heard me leave except Chief who trotted whickering to the fence.

Some miles downriver Glendon’s barn appeared in the first rays of daylight. I knew it from his description: a plain Mennonite barn thirty feet from the river. No house on the place. No shack or corncrib. It had sooty little windows and smoke trickling out its tin chimney and a black fat-bellied pot slung over cold ashes in the yard. Two hardwood rails were set in the ground like train tracks from doorway to water’s edge. The square door was slid open and there sat Glendon inside, leaning against a stack of lumber. I nearly called to him but noted his tilted head and slack limbs—he was asleep. I beached the skiff on a patch of sand and tied up to a willow.

Normally a person wouldn’t presume to enter a man’s house with the man draped unconscious just inside the threshold, nonetheless I stepped in and slid the door shut. I nearly fell over Glendon’s stipply ankles but he didn’t wake or come close to it. There was a bottle beside him with an inch of smoky business in the bottom, yet there was something innocent in the way he slept. Maybe it was his big easy lungs, for his chest rose and fell with barely a sound. I leaned down to shoo away a mosquito on his cheek. He reminded me of Redstart, who could drop asleep on a flint pile.

Now you are asking,
What were you doing in there?
I wasn’t sure either but sat on a sawhorse and gazed around. A rowboat lay in progress before me, graduated half-moon frames on a timber strong-back. There was a black cookstove, a porcelainized Hoosier cupboard wiped clean. No table or chairs, no food lying around—the drinking bachelor is often a renowned pig, but Glendon’s barn could accurately be called tidy. Even fastidious. The floor was of unpainted planks over sand, swept bare except for drawknife shavings under the rowboat.

The craft itself was beamy with a square undercut stern. Its planks were red cedar. From its shallow rocker this was a boat you could stand up in to row or to cast a fly across a stream. I bent down and put shavings to my nose.

When I looked at Glendon he was looking back. His eyes were yellow at the edges. A small-caliber revolver lay on the floor next to the bottle. I hadn’t noticed that before.

“Glendon, hello, it’s Becket,” I said.

And he said, in that mild voice of his, “Hello, Becket. I expect you’re here to help me work.”

He had me build a fire under the iron pot, filling it by bucketfuls from the river. Meantime he set up a long tin trough and stacked inside it a dozen lengths of milled cedar. He removed the blades from two block planes and shined them on a pumice stone and rinsed the blades under a hand pump. By the time he’d dried and replaced the blades I had so much wood on the fire he laughed and looked away.

While the water heated he handed me a block plane and showed me how to remove, by long angled strokes, curls of wood from the bow’s rough stem. Paying no heed to my apprehension he set me working downward on the left edge, himself working upward on the right; stroke by stroke the bow grew more fluid and proportionate while curls slid down like ringlets and dropped in aromatic heaps. I could have shouted, could have wept, but Glendon was all business and wanted that stem just so. There was no talking for many minutes. When we finished my forearms were covered with shavings and I felt the weariness of a better man.

“I am glad to have company, it has been a long while,” he said.

“My son wanted me to invite you back.”

He smiled at the floor. “That Redstart, I suspect there’s only one of him.”

“Thank you. Do you have any children?”

He said, “No, I never. I am told things happen for the best.” He turned away and peered at an upended block plane in the light of the window. Loosening the set screw he slid the blade up into the body of the tool and tightened it and ran his fingers along the bottom to make sure the edge wasn’t exposed.

I said, “Oh, a family is plenty of work.”

“That’s what I hear,” he replied.

Eventually we took the cedar planks out of the steaming trough and laid them up one at a time and bent them round the frames with jaw clamps. At this the shape of the boat began to be visible to my landsman’s eyes and I said, “What graceful lines.”

“They are decent lines,” Glendon remarked. “You can see the sheer now, the curve. A line only gets grace when it curves, you know.”

We boiled and bent planks until we ran out of clamps. “There are never enough of those,” Glendon remarked, as though this fact had long ago ceased to irritate. His eyes had lost their yellow cast. He poked around his shadowed workbench until he found a knob of bread wrapped in burlap. This he broke in two and gave me half. It was old bread of a coarse texture and I ate it with the happy feeling I had earned a meal for once. Brushing crumbs from our hands we stepped down to the river.

He said, “You’d best know I am unreliable, that I am a poor friend.”

“A poor friend is better than none,” I replied. It is strange to realize you have no friends outside your own family—in fact I hadn’t realized it until that moment.

“I have not always obeyed the law,” Glendon stated.

“Nor I my conscience.”

He considered me. “I have seen the inside of more than one jail cell. It is nothing I am proud of nor would mention except you have a fine family. Also, I take a drink of whiskey now and again.”

I said, “I am a fraud and impostor and for at least two years have lied regularly to many people, including my wife. Very soon
now I will be found out and lose what small reputation I have managed to acquire.”

Glendon seemed taken aback. Though my confession was perhaps too specific for the occasion, I could’ve gone on and on. I had the urge to laugh.

He said, “Do you drink?”

“Not yet.”

“A fellow like you would find it inconvenient. With a boy around, and so on. It ain’t all that convenient even for me.”

“You could quit.”

“Yes I could, but I probably won’t. Goodbye, Becket.”

“Goodbye, Glendon.”

“Hale,” he replied. “It’s Glendon Hale.”

I didn’t want to lie to Susannah—I tried to be honest any number of times. In fact the very next evening I strode into the parlor intent on unburdening. When I opened the door she said, “Come see this, love.”

She was painting daffodils on a wide field, a handsome thousand or so yellow daubs. Susannah’s work was well thought of in Northfield—this one had been commissioned by a local college president.

“Howser offered me my job back today,” I said.

So help me this was the honest truth.

“Howser doesn’t deserve you.” Her paintbrush darted and stabbed like a hummingbird. “Here, look at my flowers.”

There are times with Susannah when it’s better to come back later, but my conscience had me, as Redstart liked to say,
by the windpipe
. “I saw him at the hardware store. I was looking at some rope and he came over and said hello.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said my wife.

“Two of his people have left in the past month.”

“You told him no, I assume.” Susannah cultivated a firm dislike of my former employer, who had told me several times I “didn’t tally well” with the vaunted postal efficiencies.

“I said we would talk it over. He seems rather harried.”

“He should be harried, to solicit a man he treated first with disdain and later with envy. A little harrying might improve him—in fact I am certain it will.” Though elegant as lace, Susannah was ever keen to set bridges alight on my behalf.

“I thought it gracious of him to ask.”

“Did you tell Mr. Howser your new book is nearly done?”

“No,” I admitted, and stopped there. You should know this about my wife: colors are as strong spirits to her. Yellow makes her insouciant, reckless, caustic. The brighter tints of orange render her nearly dangerous. If it’s a quiet, confiding talk you’re after, by all means wait until her palette is stocked with cooler, more seafaring shades. I said, “After all, it isn’t what you’d call
nearly done
.”

“Well. Soon it will be.” She looked at me, the brush hovering over daffodils. “You haven’t read to me in some time. How is that rogue Mr. Dan faring?”