So Brave, Young, and Handsome (2 page)

“Hmm,” said Redstart. He dawdled to his feet; he said “Well” a couple of times.

“Well, nothing,” I said. “We don’t even need the rolls. Let’s catch up with that old man. I want to talk to him.”

Redstart went to the door. Poor reluctant boy; long my joyous accomplice in distraction, he had lately been run to ground by his efficient and lovely and desperate mother. He didn’t want to shame me, but what choice did I give him?

“I guess we better not, Papa. You got to get your work done. Remember what Mama said?”

What Susannah said was, approximately,
If you don’t soon finish that book of yours, we’ll have to start selling the furniture
. Lest you read in her words a tone of panic, let me assure you there was none. She was only letting me know where things stood. The end of money didn’t mean the end of much—the end of our marriage, say, or even of Susannah’s obstinate confidence in me. At worst it meant the end of pretense. The end of my little run at distinction. To say it truly: the end of pride.

I was the one who panicked.

Here’s how I came to this sorry pass. In the fall of 1910 I published a short novel called
Martin Bligh
, which became so popular I quit being a postman and started calling myself an author. Who knows how these things happen? The book was just an adventure tale. Nothing ambitious. I only wrote it for entertainment and to gratify a sort of wistful ache—Martin Bligh was a postman too, though as a Pony Express rider he had a better shot at glory and peril than I in my tinctured cell at the Northfield P.O. It was a story to make a boy lean forward; it had Indians and great ships and the buried gold of Coronado and two separate duels, including one with sabers. I also added a black-haired senõrita because my own Susannah loves a romance, yet
Bligh
was reviewed in a Chicago newspaper as “disturbingly real,” no doubt because some of the Indians adorned their pintos with bloody blond scalps. That the haggard and venerated Buffalo Bill Cody read my story and praised it in newspaper interviews did not hurt the book at all, though it hardly explains why the first printing of three thousand copies disappeared in two weeks. My publisher, Hackle & Banks, New
York, was startled enough to wire me congratulations and print another four thousand, which sped from the warehouse in exactly twelve days. At this I received a second telegram:
BLIGH OUR FASTEST SELLER. THANK YOU. GRACE
. I was ignorant at the time that Grace was Grace Hackle, the generous and canny widow of Dixon Hackle, who had founded the publishing firm twenty years before.

Then letters began to arrive. I was still employed at the P.O. and was startled in the sorting room when envelopes bearing my name began crossing the desk. I rarely received mail—when I did it was apt to be from my mother, whose letters were straightforward offerings of gained wisdom. These on the other hand were praise from strangers who had read my little tale. To call these readers charitable doesn’t touch it. They were lavish and interpretive; they were “stirred.” The daunting and completely unforeseen fact was this: They had mistaken me for a person of substance! I blushed but kept the letters. When I did hear from my mother, sometime later, she suggested I cling to my place at the post office and not let publication make me biggity. Fine advice, you will agree, yet vanity is a devious monkey. While some labeled my story naïve or my diction purple, I clove to a review calling it “an enchanting and violent yarn spun in the brave hues of history.” A famous ladies’ journal claimed I’d crafted “the ideal popular tale.” By the time Mama wrote I was miles past her advice. By then Grace Hackle had sent me several elegant personal notes. She had paid for Susannah and me to ride the Great Northern from St. Paul to New York City, where she registered us in a hotel with frescoes and high ceilings. She had accompanied us to a stage play, then to a restaurant lighted the amber of sunsets, where we ate fresh sea bass and talked of books and authors.

“It is destined timing,” Grace declared. “You have dared paint a romance on the sterile canvas of our age.” She was a perfectly beautiful tidy small woman with the metropolitan habit of placing events in the big picture. She believed romance was no mere ingredient but the very stone floor on which all life makes its fretful dance. Having traveled once as far west as the Black Hills she still awoke from dreams of rock and prairie. She confessed to a fascination with the architecture
of tepees. William Howard Taft might be president, Grace noted, but who did not miss Teddy Roosevelt? “The strenuous life,” she sighed.

Looking back, I have to laugh. You know why Martin Bligh was strenuous? Whenever I didn’t know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!

“And now,” Grace added, “tell me you plan to write another book.”

I looked at Susannah, who was squeezing my hand under the table. I had never thought about another book.

Grace sipped tea. “You have some ideas, I suppose.”

“Why, yes,” I said, though my lone idea at the moment was the fragile sweetheart Grace herself had just planted: that I was an Author now, that I had new Business upon the Earth, that the tedium of sorting mail might be exchanged for something more expansive or—dare I say it?—Swashbuckling.

“
Can
you write another book?” she asked, rather baldly.

I thought about it.
Martin Bligh
had not been difficult to write; whatever I wanted to do, that’s what Martin did. He rode in all weathers, flouting night and blizzard; he defied the wicked; he kissed the pretty girl. How hard could it be to do something similar again? I said, “Indeed I can.”

Grace’s eyes were unconvinced. Perhaps she saw what I could not.

Wanting to please her I made a hasty claim. “I shall write one thousand words a day until another book is finished.”

“You dear man,” said Grace Hackle. In memory she blanches at my naïve pledge, but maybe not.

“Jack London sets down a thousand a day before breakfast,” said I. Why do the foolish insist? But I was thinking of the modest dimensions a thousand words actually describe—a tiny essay, a fragment of conversation. “How hard can it be?” concluded your idiot narrator, lifting his glass to the future.

We didn’t see our tipsy oarsman for weeks—I’d have forgotten him entirely if Redstart hadn’t kept bringing him up. “I bet he’s a vagabond. Clive says they get a vagabond at the door every week.”

Clive Hawkins was Redstart’s most stalwart friend. The two of them would spit on their hands and shake. They were presently in agreement that vagabonds were the most alluring terror locally available.

“Vagabonds don’t have rowboats,” I pointed out.

“He might be a new strain,” Redstart said. “He might’ve stole that boat just before we saw him. He was laughing about something, remember?”

“Maybe he recalled a good joke,” I said—I am one of those people who can never remember a joke, on the rare occasion I feel like telling one.

“That wasn’t a joke laugh. It was a pleased laugh. He was pleased by something clever he’d done. He probably stole that boat. Any vagabond would be happy to have a boat, after walking for weeks and weeks.”

“Well, Red,” said I, but on he plunged into the imagined joys and dangers of the life unfettered. What could I do but watch him talk? We’d named him for the vigorous passerines so plentiful in the yard the day he was born, but there was never a songbird as energetic as Redstart.

One evening he returned from a long ride on Chief, his oversized gelding. He’d been gone since morning—not unusual for that boy. He strolled into the house hungry and self-important with a whippy weal on one cheek from galloping through the trees.

“Well, I found the old boatman,” he announced, as though it had been Livingstone. “I went down to the river so Chief could drink and I could swim, and here he came rowing. Standing up like before. He almost fell over. His name is Glendon and he lives in a barn.”

“You talked to him?”

“Yes sir I did.”

“Was Glendon sober?” asked Susannah. She was at work on a painting—we never thought she was listening while standing intent at her easel, but she always was.

“He might of been,” said Redstart, in a vague way.

His mother looked at him. “You kept your distance, I expect.”

I said, “Well, let’s have it. Is he a tramp, as you believed?”

“No. He makes boats. He made that boat he’s always standing up in. He lived in Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas and in Mexico by the Sea of Cortez. He’s coming here for breakfast tomorrow.”

It was a fair haul of information. I was proud of Redstart.

“Breakfast?” said Susannah.

“That’s right,” said Redstart, “so you both get to meet him. I guess it’s a good thing I went riding today!”

Susannah set down her brush and came around the easel. She had a little stab of burgundy on one cheek like a warning. “Did he agree to come for breakfast, Red? Did he
say
he’s coming?”

“No,” said Redstart, who ignored warnings of all kinds. “But I told him to come, so I expect he will.”

“Unless he resists being ordered about by fractious infants,” I suggested.

But Redstart was adamant. “He told me his name. He didn’t want to say it, but I tricked him and out it came. You know what happens, once you get a person’s name.”

“Nope,” I replied. “You’ll have to tell me.”

“Why, then you have power over him,” said Redstart.

It’s an old business, it turns out, this notion that learning a person’s true name gives you leverage; I have since found it in Indian and Nordic tales and I suppose it goes back like so many good ideas all the way to the Tigris and Euphrates. Nothing is new under the sun. Anyhow Glendon appeared in his white dory next morning about an hour past sunup. Our pug Bert saw him first and stood on the dock barking and slobbering. Bert doesn’t truly bark but says
oof, oof
, like a disappointed farmer. Glendon drifted up, putting his oars to rights while I went down to greet him.

“Monte Becket,” I said, holding out my hand. He grasped it and stepped up out of his dory and immediately let go like a nervous child. He was a short one, trim as a leprechaun and not as old as his white hair had led me to assume. He wore a long split-back jacket such as dressy horsemen used to wear, and he had vivid green eyes that might believe anything at all. I’d rather not say I smelled whiskey so early in the morning; nevertheless, there was an evaporating haze around our visitor. He nodded to me but said nothing and kept glancing toward the house as though it were a place of dread.

I said, “I’m glad you’ve come, and I surely beg your pardon if Redstart overstepped his bounds—he can be bossy. Come on up. Susannah’s made rolls.”

Glendon said, “What did you call that son of yours?”

“Redstart.”

“Aha, Redstart. Thank you, Mr. Becket.” And up we went, his anxiety flown off with the breeze.

The first thing Redstart did was lay claim on him—yes, it was Sit by Me Glendon, Pass the Rolls Glendon, Tell About Mexico Glendon! Both Susannah and I began to stop our imperious child, but the old fellow shook off these attempts and weathered Redstart with dogged grace. People ask,
what was he like?
Had I invented Glendon myself I could not have introduced a more puzzling guest to our table. He was formal in the way of men grown apart, yet energy teemed behind his eyes and in some ways he seemed a boy himself. He might laugh abruptly at one of Redstart’s childish jokes; he was pleased by the simplest plays on language; and, like a boy, he kept eating rolls as long as there were rolls to be eaten. To Susannah he gave all possible deference, rising whenever she got up for more coffee or frosting, saying thank you in reverent tones and with averted eyes. These manners endeared him to Susannah straightaway, so that she looked round the table to make sure Redstart and I were noticing how a gentleman acts. He gave his story in bright shards. Raised in Michigan, he had traveled west to become a cowboy, a memory that still excited him. He had been twice up the Chisholm Trail with herds of steers, had sung to them and swum rivers in their midst, and had a horse gored from under him during a stampede. Once in the Montana Rockies he had stumbled on a shady cleft where fifty hapless livestock had bunched up in a blizzard. The snow was still melting when Glendon found the place in July and he beheld a shrunken grimy snowfield with dozens of hooked tapers slanting up from it, the horns of steers growing rapidly into the sunshine like Satan’s idea of horticulture.

“Redstart says you built that boat of yours,” I said, wanting to get him off cowboying. He’d left home at twelve—already Redstart was realigning his own future.

“Yes, I love a boat,” Glendon said. No one made comment and he seemed quite willing to leave it at that, but then he abruptly added, “My wife loved them too. She believed they were alive in some ways.”

“Your wife?” Susannah inquired.

“Yes, my Blue,” Glendon said. “Ar
ā
ndano’s her name—that’s blueberry, in the Mexican tongue.”

“But you are alone now,” said Susannah tenderly.

“Yes, we have been apart more than twenty years. She has another man, I understand.” Glendon looked suddenly as downhearted as if the estrangement had happened hours ago, instead of decades.

“Why, I’m sorry,” said Susannah, and we fell into one of those spreading defeated moments from which there is no right recovery.

“Well, I’ll be going, thank you for breakfast,” Glendon said, and this time he did not wait for Susannah to rise but was up and gone glimmering. Redstart scooted after him and there we sat, Susannah and I, perplexed.

“He’s like Peter Pan,” she whispered, which happened to be the stage play we’d attended on that first heady trip to New York City.

“Then I’d better go see him off,” I replied, “lest he fly away with our son.”

I followed them to the river, not really trying to catch up because Glendon appeared lighthearted again away from the house and the breakfast table and Susannah; he walked with his hands in his pockets, Bert rolling about his ankles, and he said something that made Redstart laugh and look at me over his shoulder.