So Brave, Young, and Handsome (28 page)

“It felt like a robbery in progress—what would you have done?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

In the end he accepted a cargo of bare sticks bagged in salty loam. Seeing his aggravation, one of the crew confided that the trees had been healthy when the voyage began—the problem was fresh water. The bark’s drinking reserves had been compromised by leaky barrels, and the sailors resented having to water young trees when they themselves were thirsty.

“Why didn’t you just buy grafts?” I asked. “They could’ve been kept damp with little trouble and perhaps brought home successfully.” I knew an apple grower in Minnesota, a proud amateur geneticist, who was forever sending away for new grafts—he loved to confound people by showing them three or four obviously different fruits all hanging on the same tree.

“It wasn’t the bearing branches I wanted,” Claudio replied. “It was the rootstock. That is what you rely on. The rootstock is where a tree survives.”

He’d set the famished sticks immediately in crates of fresh damp soil and rigged canvas over them to prevent scorching on the ride home. It was months before he knew which ones would live and which would die. In the end, nearly two hundred of them made it. Since then they had survived several hard freezes while trees around them perished—a lucky development, Claudio said, since you wouldn’t expect hardiness from those tropic latitudes. Of course the Rarotongans hadn’t borne a crop yet, either.

“The past two seasons, no harvest at all. We sold most of our land. Ar
ā
ndano feeds us with her bookkeeping. If she were not solid with numbers we would be back in Oscuro, eating frijoles with her relatives. I like her relatives and frijoles but prefer to be here.”

“You’re a fortunate man,” I said.

He placed a lump of dough on a smooth board and worked it flat with a rolling pin. “When I was young and not as you see me now,” he said, “I used to have a little influence. I was listened to in chambers.
Once before a jury I argued the case of a neighbor accused of theft and won his acquittal, although I am not an attorney. Some people believed I should run for this or that office.”

“That’s not hard to believe.”

He laid a sheet of dough into a pie pan and turned to the next lump. “Now I am older, my clothes fit wrong. My work has gone out with the tide.”

“Tides turn. It won’t freeze every year. There are the Rarotongans,” I pointed out.

“You are kind to say so. All the same I am decreasing. There is a hard growth in my guts the size of a pigeon. I am told it will kill me.”

To hear this news in such a guileless tone deprived me of words. I could only sit back and watch him.

He said, “Fatigue is a rotten condition and entirely new to me. Energy was never my problem.”

“You’ve been to doctors, of course.”

“I felt something happening years ago, before the trees arrived—a pain like a faint taste in my center, a metallic taste. I thought it would disappear but instead it took hold. I picture it as a brave little colony. There is a craven doctor in Lury who diagnosed a frenzied imagination, as if I was too happy and must create myself an agony. In the meantime the colony prospered, it declared statehood. By the time the doctor could be convinced, it was too late for him to do much. He did recommend a priest, although I was friends with one already.”

“That’s unforgivable,” I said.

“Nothing is unforgivable, although I admit I have yet to pardon this doctor. I will have to do so before the end lest the Almighty rethink my standing. There are certain unfairnesses I don’t much like, but then it is His story to tell.” Suddenly Claudio looked up. “Do you smell the bread? Don’t let it burn!”

I went out on numb legs and indeed the loaves were brown as buckeyes. I removed them with the long paddle and wrapped them in sacking. When I returned with the steaming bundle Claudio was crimping the edges of fruit pies—dipping his hard fingertips in a cup of water, pinching the top and undercrusts together. He took a knife and slitted the crusts in a cordial geometry, dashed them with cane
sugar, and stooped to examine the pies one by one as though vigilant for things to fix. I could imagine him arguing the accused neighbor’s case—oh, yes. It was easy to see the defendant feeling at least reasonably confident with Claudio Soto walking to and fro before the jury. Aware of me watching he said, “Don’t feel bad for me, Monte. The smaller I get, the better I cook. If I am given another year I will shrink to the size of a large dog but my pies will be extremely famous. Here, help me put these in the oven.”

Ar
ā
ndano returned with Joaquin in the late afternoon. They drove a tall unsteady truck with thin tires aslant on their axles. The truck was Pond’s. Ar
ā
ndano was tired and kept blinking her eyes to make them focus—she’d spent the day cutting a path through a two-year jungle of Pond bookwork.

“It’s worse than he knows,” she told Claudio. “He’s a poor bookkeeper, the ledgers are frantic. He is at the end of his funds.”

Joaquin and I were packing pies and bread into blanketed fruit crates in the truck bed.

Claudio said, “I’ll go along. Pond should have his friends there,” but his voice was changed from earlier. I was jolted to see him suddenly withered; the day’s baking had cost him his vigor and several inches of height.

“Joaquin will go to Pond’s,” said Ar
ā
ndano. “You will go to bed.”

He didn’t argue and in fact lowered himself onto the grass.

Ar
ā
ndano said to me, “Why don’t you help my spent hero into the house?”

Claudio’s eyes were closed. He said, “Hero, yes. Baker intrepid. Captain Bread.”

I took his hands and lifted him to his feet. We got him into the parlor where there was a bristly purple sofa full of pillows. These Claudio shoved onto the floor minutes before falling slack-jaw into a nap. His wife motioned me to sit in one of the armchairs nearby. I thought we would be quiet on account of Claudio but she spoke right up.

“He’s your neighbor then—Glendon.”

“Neighbor and good friend.”

“Does Glendon have many friends there?”

“Not many.”

“He used to have friends,” she said. “In Oscuro it seemed everyone was his friend. Tell me, what is it like where he lives?”

“He has a little place near our own on the Cannon River.”

“What kind of place—a farmstead? A shack?”

Encouraged that she wanted to envision Glendon’s home, I provided a few scenic details—how the structure sat on a bend of the river and so had water on three sides, how it rose out of the fog if you arrived early in the day. I emphasized Glendon’s orderly habits, his swept workshop, and omitted the fact that his house was a barn. “He has a little garden of herbs,” I concluded, “and always brings some fresh-cut when he comes for dinner.”

“So he didn’t go to drink,” she said. “I half expected he would go to drink.”

I made no answer and for a little while we sat listening to Claudio sleep. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, his lips making faint pops on the exhale.

She said, “What has Glendon said about me?”

Again I felt the need to choose well. “He told me how you met, while he was repairing your great-uncle’s boat.”

“He was a handsome boy,” she admitted. “He made that job last a long time.”

“He said it took him three weeks just to make you laugh.”

She smiled. “My uncle told me laughter encouraged young men. If I had laughed, he would’ve told my father about it. That would’ve been the end of things.”

“He told me about the casita where you lived.”

“It had a nice garden.”

I said, “It tormented Glendon, that he never came back to you.”

“He left for himself. I doubt he would deny it. He stayed away for himself. Now he has returned for the same reason.”

“He came back out of repentance,” I replied. “It would be generous of you to hear his apology.”

She turned to me with surprising tenderness. “Do I look angry to you?”

“No.”

“I was for a time, but Claudio is a man who turns away anger. Eventually I lost the habit. However, I am not silly enough to believe I owe Glendon anything. If he wants absolution let him seek it from God.”

“Maybe he wants it from you as well.”

Her voice was kind but without concession. “You’re his friend, Monte, so listen. His conscience doesn’t concern me. His apology does not benefit me. His work for us on the orchard is another matter—that’s real enough and comes at a good time. That is why we allowed him to stay. There is no other reason.”

I nodded. Sometimes it seems every woman I meet is more than a match for me.

In the morning I borrowed Glendon’s horse Sparrow and ventured down to Lury. Glendon had described the horse as temperate and amenable, but in fact he kept wanting to turn around and trot back to the orchard; I had to rein him up half a dozen times. On the other hand, he didn’t flare when a red fox abruptly appeared smiling in the tall weeds beside the road. One moment there was the fox’s grinning face, the next nothing but its white-tipped brush, and this horse kept its gait as if designed by the Swiss. I don’t understand these animals. Down we went into that scraggy mission town and I located the telegraph office, a scantly built room with a lean-to where the agent had a hand pump and a copper sink.

“I need to send a wire,” I told the agent. He was probably my own age but looked older, so I imagined, in his brim and banded sleeves.

“Hold on,” he said, and found a pencil.

“Susannah Becket, Northfield, Minnesota.”

Even now I am not sure why I asked them to come west, why I didn’t simply board a train for Minnesota. Maybe I wanted Susannah to prove her interest in me. Maybe I feared that old invisibility back home, or a return of the tepid fugue. What I’d have given for a dream or vision now, like Glendon had of Blue—in wavering times, a vision’s what you want! Instead I confess to the most unrefined and selfish longings. I wanted to walk with Susannah and be solid and foremost in her eyes. I wanted Redstart to discover from its roots upward this place where I might be of use.

By noon I was back at the orchard helping Glendon and Joaquin—we had plenty of work before us, if not the wholesale clear-cut visited
on Pond. My shoulder was still damaged so I drove the wagon while they cut lifeless trees and bucked them into pieces that Joaquin lobbed onto the flatbed. The stumps we pulled with the aid of the tolerant ox, King Richard, who leaned into the chains without grievance. Any trees with living green we climbed with ladders and relieved of dead limbs. We filled ourselves with sunlight and sawdust and the agreeable tumble of Spanish flowing always from Joaquin. He had a passable store of found English but rarely employed it. He sang in the mornings, narrated what seemed to be personal epics in the afternoon, and by evening was down to complaints and occasional confessions—Glendon got sick of Joaquin sometimes, but to me it was all just melody.

“He says he’s getting baptized Sunday next,” Glendon remarked, as we fed a bonfire. “He’s having a picnic with some Protestants downriver, after which whoever wants can get dipped. Look at him—he’s all keyed up about it.”

Joaquin looked over and said, for my benefit, “Hooray.”

“Aren’t you Catholic, Joaquin?” I asked.

He responded with a barrel of Spanish which Glendon did his best to reduce. He had been a Catholic but couldn’t maintain it. At fifteen he quit confessing because he couldn’t look at a pretty girl without wishing to kiss her. Also, he couldn’t look at a man without coveting one of his arms. Both these desires were sins, yet Joaquin couldn’t stop himself—the moment he exited the confessional, a pretty girl would stroll by, or a man with two arms.

“Now he’s past the kissing part, or so he believes,” said Glendon. “He’s getting pain in the joints. He would prefer not to die wearing his sins.”

I looked at Joaquin, who was scratching his smooth innocent stub of an arm while maintaining a stream of syllables.

Glendon said, “I am going also.”

“To get baptized?”

He nodded.

“I thought you were baptized already. By your friend Crealock, at Hole in the Wall.”

“Well, I was.”

“Isn’t once supposed to do the trick?” I was teasing, but curious all the same.

“It is, yes.”

“And you’re thinking it didn’t take the first time?”

He answered, “Crealock dipped me under the wrong name. I never was baptized under Hale.”

“If there’s a God,” I said, “don’t you guess He knows your true name?”

And Glendon replied, “If there’s a God, then I better offer it up myself. Here, Becket, could you manage to talk and work at the same time, do you think?”

The telegram was waiting for me back at the house where Claudio had roped the Western Union boy into the kitchen for a game of cribbage and a pint of nectar. The boy was fourteen or so, tall and stooped, a red-haired gangle. His brimmed hat rested on the table with the yellow paper sticking out of the hatband.

“Here’s your man,” Claudio told him.

“Mr. Becket,” the boy said, handing me the paper.

“Thank you.”

I opened the telegram while the boy made to leave.

“Sit back down,
nieto
,” said Claudio, and, to me, “Well?”

“It’s from my wife,” I said. “I asked her to come and bring our son Redstart, and she has agreed to do so.”

At this Claudio became sunny and began to stand up—he changed his mind and sat again, but his face retained its light. Meantime I noticed minor electric tremors in my legs and lowered myself to a chair.

The boy said, “I better go, Mr. Soto.”

Claudio turned to the boy. His tone was vibrantly instructive. “That you have delivered good news does not release you from courtesy. I am a dying man. You may leave only when the game is over and you have finished your nectar, or else when it is clear that I am winning. Sit down.”

The boy sat. He looked uncertain and concave. No doubt he had had a long day.

When Ar
ā
ndano heard the news she was slightly indignant at my proposal to stay with Susannah and Redstart at the lone hotel in Lury. A friend had stayed there once and suspected dicey margins.