This is Mrs. Marvel, and today I'm reading chapter 8 of Peace Like a River, A Boy on a Horse. The best of it, to Sweden in particular, was that day of the escape by Pony. We wouldn't know this for several days, however, nor would the disturbed sheriff, Charlie Pym, who'd showed up pounding the door in the wee hours. Over breakfast, Mr. Tickler told us how he'd wrapped himself in a tartan robe and peeked between curtains before opening the door.
Do you know who was up at four in the morning? Dairy farmers. Paperboys. Lunatics.
Mr. DeColor was not himself that morning. He was, in fact, grouchy. It was indecipherable to Swede and me to whom this news was cotton candy.
Sheriff Pym had insisted on entering. The night was wet and freezing and Pym stood dripping sleet on the rug, giving Mr. DeColor what he called the Onus Eye. I'm sure he meant the evil eye. The word Onus made Swede break into such unruly giggles she had to hunt Kleenex. The sheriff then inquired whether Mr. DeColor had slept well.
Thus far, Mr. DeColor replied. No visitors, the sheriff said. Mr. DeColor looked at the door, then at the soaked Pym.
He said, you can't possibly believe he would have come here. So all we knew that first morning was that Davey got out, maybe seven hours before. We hadn't details except that he'd taken with him a police-issue revolver and that a posse had been formed.
Twelve men in six cars were out parsing the county at this moment. We'll have him by lunchtime, the sheriff said, looking at Dad, who was standing in his long johns in the gloom. We'll try not to hurt your boy.
It was Sweet's contention, as the morning stretched on, that a posse of twelve hundred couldn't catch Davey. Let him try. Dad said, Sweet, if you can't talk sense, don't talk at all.
They were the harshest words I'd ever hear him speak. I watched him sipping his coffee, his face foreign with misgiving, how I wanted to understand him. But I was eleven, and my brother had escaped from the pit where my vanity had placed him, a vain notion itself, sweet has since pointed out, yet it was certain to me.
How could my father not be joyous over such a thing? Who in the world could ask for more? Nevertheless, the following days must have been excruciating for Dad, dreading Davy's recapture yet fearing worse. The state police were advised and locally the posse grew exponentially.
After early radio reports of the escape, 50 men appeared at the courthouse, every one of them armed. Such a profusion of goose and varmint guns and beaten up World War pieces you never saw, at least such was the description given us by Deputy Walt Stockard, whose unconcealed glee over the escape must have been repugnant to Sheriff Pym. Though the very word posse sounds archaic, it made all sorts of sense at the time.
For one thing, Davey was believed to be on foot. Since no one in Montrose County had reported a stolen vehicle, not a car, not a tractor, not so much as a schwin, it was assumed he was still nearby, shivering in some hidey hole. Unless he got to the highway and hitched a ride, Dad suggested. He was trying to sell Walt and calling off the posse, something Walt hadn't the authority to do anyways. It was Davey's second day out.
Walt was off duty and had come by the DeColors for coffee. No doubt the sheriff thought it was wise to keep an eye on Davey's family. He could be in Kansas City by now, Dad said. Possibility, Walt admitted, though Pym believes otherwise.
It was raining buckets, you know. How many folks are going to stop for some wet, muskrat-looking fellow in a rainstorm at that hour? Besides, he's got the best-known mug in the state right now. You think he'd try and hitch? It was a good point, and in fact, Davey's picture was on the front page of that...
that very afternoon's Minneapolis star. A shot of him relaxed and laughing, hands folded back of his head. I still don't know where they got that photo.
It was the one they'd used in their earlier stories, the ones extolling his bravery. Later, they'd replace it with police mug in which his chin looked dirty and his eyes gave you not one bit of hope or information. Now the flattering picture was back with this caption, bold outlaw Davey Land slips from jail, eludes manhunt.
Fellow inmate, he up and disappeared like smoke. Good grief, Dad said. Having up and disappeared, David clearly reacquired the allure that had evaporated so easily when people heard about Bubby. Now he was back to bold outlaw, and while I liked the change, I'd also learn a bit by now by public inconsistency. Not to mention Mighty Stinson's inconsistency.
Quoted at length by reporters, Mighty told the story as one smitten by legend. And when I looked back, he was flat out gone. I didn't hear a sound, like he was a ghost.
And worse. You know something? I knew he was going to do it.
Knew it when they first brought him in. Pretty e- responsible of Mighty since the truth, Walt said, was that Mighty had been sleeping like mortality itself when Davey made his move. But when else was anyone going to listen to a word Mighty said, much less put it in print?
What actually happened, and we got this from Walt, whose colleague Stube Range was on shift, was this. Shortly before 11, Stube was sitting at the night desk reading a paperback mystery. Subsequent research has revealed the book to be a Mike Hammer detective story.
Stube was reading it despite Sheriff Pym's disapproval of its author, Mickey Spillane. More research. The sheriff had met Spillane once, far back in memory, on a turboprop airliner, and Spillane had made a humorous remark about Charlie Pym's beard, which was sparse.
Suddenly, Stube was distracted from the story by a polite call from Davey. The toilet in his cell wouldn't flush, he said. Don't flush it then, Stube answered. There's a need to, Davey replied. Sorry about that, but there's a need.
Davey jiggled. the lever audibly no flush there was apparently some back and forth between them mighty stinson snorting in his sleep through everything because the dampness stopped his nose but finally stew put down his book grumpy grumping good-naturedly about it i'm sure let himself into davy's cell locked it behind him and peeked into the toilet no suspense here stew awoke propped against the wall of davy's cell his head was sore and his memory flawed The toilet, incidentally, worked fine. He had to use it before his replacement showed up at stroke of 12 and released him from the cell.
Swede would point out, rightly enough, that a man reading Mickey Spillane ought to have known better, but Stu Brange, as they say, had a good heart. At this crossroads in his life, he would in fact leave law enforcement to begin a new career as a school janitor over in Roofing. The district was hiring, you see.
we stayed at the decullers three days after davy's escape walt visited every morning asking jokingly whether we had seen davy lately and bringing us news of the county's frustration criss-crossing the area talking to farmers and rural deliverymen and others who might have noticed a bed-raggled boy slouching hastily elsewhere the posse had come up dry the chase paled posse members began to desert offering as excuses their wives and families and in rare cases their jobs who could blame them not only was the trail cold There hadn't really been a trail to start with. By the time a bloodhound could be borrowed from a neighboring county, the Great Rains had blotted out Davey's scent. They gave the bloodhound a try anyways. Poor, over-anticipated fellow. He couldn't smell anything but himself.
Through all this, Walt said, Sheriff Pym was losing his happy nature, justly or unjustly. Davey had grown a higher profile than any other desperado ever to sit in the Montrose County Jail. His escape only raised it higher. Pym, Walt cautioned us, felt that people were laughing at him. He'd been heard shouting blue language at the phone in his office.
A Minneapolis editorialist had thrown out the combustible phrase, Hambone County Rubes. He's touchy, what people think of him, Walt told us. So you see, that Mickey Spillane business rings true.
By Davies'third day, Sheriff Pym had become so out of sorts, Walt reported he was thinking of a house-to-house search. It scares me, Mr. Land. Do you know how long it would take to look in every closet in Montrose?
Mr. DeColour said, the sheriff is joking. It's unconstitutional. Coffee? The deputy accepted. I'm worried about Charlie, he said.
He's just sure somebody's got Davey down the basement. Some young lady, he says. He keeps saying that.
Bothers him awfully. Walt Stockard was beginning to look tired. A lot of people like that boy, you know. Yes, said Mr. DeColour, they do.
He was brisk this morning. There were times he seemed mad at Davy for getting away, or maybe he was just sick of house guests. It had been a pretty long visit. Walt said, my girls have been treating me like I'm on the wrong team.
They'll recover, said Mr. DeColor. Walt pinched the bridge of his nose. What a kind fellow he was.
He looked capable of forgetting just about anything. He said, say, Rube, hit me one of those bismarcks, would you? That afternoon, to everyone's relief, a farmer named Nelson Sved...
Svedivit... Svedvig came into Montrose and filed a complaint about a stolen horse, an Arabian mare taken from his south pasture. This would be less than two miles from Montrose. Taken when? Sheriff asked.
Walt was standing right there listening. That's how I know. Not sure, Nelson Svedvig admitted.
I hauled a load of hay out last week and she was there then. He saw the sheriff looking at him and added defensively, Those ponies kind of look after themselves this time of year. Are your fences okay?
Could she be ran off? Nelson replied, she fouled in the spring, and the foul is still there, adding with rising dignity, and you know my fences, Charlie. That night, the sheriff paid off what remained of the dispirited posse, and we took our leave of the decolors. Oh, it was good to get home.
Our first night back, Swede propped herself in the bed, typewriter before her, listing in quilts. At first, I worried she'd go back to fretting and banging on the wall, but she whacked away suddenly, and I soon dropped asleep in my room across the hall. Here's what I found in the morning, laid neatly on the floor beside my bed.
the moon was black as a miner's lung the sky was black as a shroud and deep in a cell that was black as well two men lay moaning aloud and one was rennie who'd robbed a man and one was bert who had killed and the gallows outside hadn't ever been tried but its mission would soon be fulfilled lads its mission would soon be fulfilled three nooses swayed loose in a breeze like a sigh but who was the third who was waiting to die Swede came in while I was reading and perched on my bed like a satisfied cat. She saw how breathless I was. It made her pretty confident. I said, is it sunny?
But she only shrugged. She knew she had me. He'd been awake in his room one night with his darling asleep by his side when the bold reddick boys, hardly making a noise, pushed the front door open wide.
His bride they had threatened not once but three times when his travels had fetched him away. They had followed her around as she walked through the town. Calling names I would rather not say.
No, the names I would rather not say. And what do you think any good man would do, no matter what judges or laws told him to? There was something about the poem. I almost felt I had read it before. Sweet, I told her, this is awful good.
Ah, don't. They opened the door and they crossed the broad floor with their minds full of evil intent. For in town they had heard the fortuitous word that sundown on business was sent. And as they approached, Sonny rose to his feet, like a spirit he made not a sound. And his blood rose inside as they came near his bride, and he shot the bold reddick boys down.
Lads, he shot the bold reddick boys down. So may a good man, who has spared his wife hurt, face death with the likes of poor Renny and Bert. That's it? I couldn't believe it.
There wasn't any more. He dies? They hang him with these two guys?
Reuben, how fast do you think I can write this stuff? Oh, it's not done? Ruben! Well, I'm sorry.
The truth was, old Sundown really tugged at me. Glad as I was, Swede was back and whatever groove made the verses click, this business of hearing half a story was insufferable. Cautiously, I asked, what about Valdez? She didn't look at me.
What about him? Well, what happened to him? Who are these Rennie and Bert fellows? She looked at me hard.
I figured she was thinking I didn't like the poem. Swede, it's a great poem. You know it is.
I was only wondering. She had tears in her eyes. Just that quick. I love the poem, Swede.
I was desperate. Pardon her. She said, suddenly couldn't beat him, Ruben. Valdez, couldn't write it. Now why do you suppose that made me feel so bad?
A lump arose as if I were reading my own mawkish epitaph. So he got away? She didn't answer.
Her silence placed or revealed a nub of fear in me, an unreasoning fear that Valdez was no invention, that he was real and coming toward us on solid earth. A preposterous idea, wouldn't you say? Yet it blazed up, so scary in its brightness that I made a wall against it in my heart, in the deepest place I owned. The weeks wheeled along, unbalanced.
Swede leaned toward elation. She herself couldn't have orchestrated Davy's getaway in more fabled style. One day, Walt Stockard reported to us that the Svedvig mayor had come trotting home, wickering for oats, but none the worse for wear. There was speculation that Davy had ridden a dozen miles across country to the state highway and nabbed a ride. Swede also took satisfaction in the newspaper's reversal of attitude, by now so complete that a stranger reading his first Davy Land article would have finished it believing the world was improved without these Finch and Bosca characters anyway, and that...
Young land ought merely to be thanked and let go. One columnist, Aaron W. Gropp, at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, was particularly susceptible to romance. I've saved a couple of his entries.
Here's part of one. Ride, Davey, ride. No fretting for the past for me, folks. I'm happy in the current century.
Put me in a Lincoln Continental or a Turbo Prop leaving frozen St. Paul. Give me a Huntley Brinkley at six o'clock. Meet me at Met Stadium for a ballgame on a summer night. I'm a modern creature, friend, and I like it that way. So how come I envy Davy Land?
He's just a kid, after all, with an outdated sense of frontier justice. A kid who went too far and landed, most deservedly, in jail. A kid who'd ex- He did the boundaries of our civilized lives.
He ought to be locked up. Isn't that right? How come when I...
So how come when I arrive to work, the first thing I do is check the AP wire to see if Davyland's been caught and chuckle on seeing he hasn't. He's just a boy on a horse, after all. Just a skinny length of wire and persistence who still doesn't know he can't really escape.
Such ignorance. For his face is known to every citizen. It's pasted to the dashboard of every state cop and county hack.
I mentioned Chet... Chet Huntley and David Brinkley? If you saw the news last night, you know they know him too.
A boy on a horse can't outride the law, not in 1962. The police tell us so, and perhaps they are right. America is a grown-up place, after all. It's been a long while since we loved our outlaws.
Perhaps the songs we knew as kids, about Jesse James and Billy the Kid and the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard, have no place in a world full of television and helicopters and rock and roll. Perhaps this is all for the best. Today is December 5th. Davey Land escaped from jail 12 days ago. I've just checked the wires and he's still free.
Excuse me while I chuckle. You had to take Aaron Grove for what he was, of course. All but the very best columnists grab their causes with such operatic choke holds.
Anyhow, as Sweet said, this sort of thing beat the pants off the Bubby story. There was no comfort in it for Dad, though. he seemed to believe he had lost his son forever and the popular melodrama of it only made it worse he stopped answering the telephone he became resistive and joyless many a night i woke to the murmur of paper and knew he was up sitting in the kitchen with frayed king james ah but he worked that book he held to it like a rope ladder i remember it creeping out once when my breathing was poor and there he was holy bible on the table-top and himself bent to it his back cupped as a weasel's When I tapped his arm, he sat up straight, his breath seizing a moment as if the motion hurt.
I told him my lungs were tight. All right, Reuben. But he sat still, not rising to put water on the stove. What you reading? 91st Psalm.
Does it help? He went to the sink and held a pan under the tap. He didn't answer, and I thought he wasn't hearing me. I repeated the question.
Dad lit a burner. There must have been something on the bottom of the pan for smoke and burnt smell twined up its sides. When the water boiled, he threw in baking soda, which foamed and subsided. I said, you could read me a psalm if you want to, Dad.
But he said, not tonight, Reuben. My head hurts so. In early December, a blizzard swept in off the plains and struck with what was measured on the flats as 27 inches of snow. This was the first in what became nearly a weekly cycle of snowstorms, some of them riven by lightning, a confounding phenomenon. Dr. Noakes, a medical student through much of the Great Depression, said he recalled lightning and snow mixed only once before during a week of examinations he said the snow came down not in flakes but the approximate shape and size of corn kernels and he said it preceded a spring that brought neither rain nor hope of rain so dry were most midwestern souls i thought that was an awful lot to remember from something as simple as lightning in a snowstorm but dr noakes laughed and said one day i too would remember hard winters in detail more voluminous than anyone could care to hear I suppose he was right and you don't give a chipped dime for December of 62, but it was an epic season all the same, the drifts rising eventually past the kitchen window and up to the very eaves.
In the afternoon, Swede and I, in layers of pants, would step from the highest snowbank onto the roof of the single-story addition, then climb to the peak and go skidding down the other side to land with a poof in the front yard. How we missed Davy! In such snow, he'd have led us into all sorts of thrilling and jeopardous traps. Our backyard would have been veined with tunnels and candlelit caverns.
Our snowball wars would have been prolonged and ferocious. I remember one dream I had that winter, that Davy was home and climbing the roof with us, his leaps from the peak wondrously high, and in the dream the salesman, Tin Lurvie, was lying on his back in the snow, watching, admiration all over his face, and Lurvie was saying, oh my, look at him, goodness sake, what leaping! And here is why I remember that dream in particular. Because Lurvie said, and this woke me up laughing, I want to try that. Hey kids, can I try that?
We didn't go back to school, by the way. Pretty manipulative on our part. Dad hadn't the will to send us back if we truly didn't want to go, and we knew it. Preying on his depression, we made ourselves useful.
We washed clothes, scrubbed floors, swept cobwebs, cooked soup. It is hard to ruin soup unless you run short of salt. And anyway, Dad wasn't picky. When we approached... When he approached us one day with the reluctant suggestion that we return to school after the Christmas break, Swede revealed a breathtaking bit of strategy, taking dad into room displaying a stack of history and geography and arithmetic books more than a foot high.
From the library, she said, adding this handsome flourish. I certainly don't want to lag behind my classmates. Ah, Dad said, looking at me over Sweet's head.
He was on to her and wanted me to know it. He didn't send us back, though, despite the fact that the school books were but props. It wasn't as if we didn't read. While at the library, Sweet had also checked out every Franco work on the shelves. having finished the big 50 long ago.
O'Rourke, she confided, wrote much better westerns than Zane Grey. It's his women. They don't talk all the time, and when they ride, they ride like men.
While interesting, I didn't see what difference this made to the story. As a reader, I leaned more in the direction of pirates. Treasure Island simply didn't have any women, except for Long John Stanch, whom you never actually see.
It makes all sorts of difference, we'd said. She's a professor now, have I told you that? Every Western is a love story, you see. In Zane Grey, the hero also starts off with the wrong girl, and she has eyes that are too close together, and she has had a bad attitude, like a problem horse.
The wrong girl is like a horse? Usually a roan, a stubborn roan. The hero has had lots of horses, and this girl makes him remember that roan.
So Westerns were love stories. Though I'd read several myself, I hadn't realized the truth of this equation. I didn't like the sound of it either. swedes i said sonny's wife she was the right kind of girl wasn't she like one of our works you were talking about the question made her indignant sonny sundown was no dummy she said he'd ridden some miles in his time he would never have married a roan i was glad to hear her say it last i'd read of sonny he had his hands full enough without that sort of problem till late in the night he had fought the good fight with his fear and had kept it at bay And he dreamed of his wife and their satisfied life, and he woke to a wicked new day. Then he rose in his shirt and he nodded to Bert, who was empty and mute as a whole.
But down on his knees, Renny wept aloud, Please have charity on a thief's soul, Lord. Forgive my poor, dry-rotted soul. Three nooses swung loose as a clergyman prayed.
Three men were marched forward, and two were afraid. Sweet meant this to be suspenseful, of course, but even at eleven, I recognized what had happened. what had to happen next. Somehow, a woman had to come on the scene. You don't need many westerns under your belt to know that.
And she had to be young and black-eyed and lovely and touched by the bravery of the condemned hero. Then up the tight street came a writer so sweet. She was light as the dawn and as free. And her hair was as black as her stallion's back. And she parted the crowd like a sea.
Is it Sunny's wife? I asked. Nope, just a woman, she deliberated.
You know, that's not an awful idea, but it's a different woman. This troubled me, for I saw straight off that the beauty on the black horse was about to attempt a rescue, and also that she was deep in love with our sonny. And him married was a problem. Why don't you change it, I suggested.
Make this girl his wife, see? They're right away together. She wasn't his wife, Swede flared.
Past tense, you notice. History, even the fictive kind, being beyond our influence. The problem got worse when the girl actually pulled off the rescue, for then Sunny, though rushed in the moment, leaned down from the black and pushed her hair back and kissed his deliverer twice, my lads.
He kissed his deliverer twice. The last thing I wanted was to fight Sweet, but this was terrible. Now he's kissing her, I complained.
If she was his wife, it would be okay. Ruben, Sweet said, holding herself back, say you're about to be hanged. The rope's on your neck already. Then out of no place this beautiful girl comes up riding and saves you. Are you telling me you're not going to kiss that girl?
Well, look, Ribbon, let's say Sunny just thinks of her as a really great sister, like me. I nodded, but in truth, this picked at me for some little while. Hair as black as her stallion's back. Nuts, it would have been hard enough to think of that girl as a sister without throwing kisses into the deal at all.