So Brave, Young, and Handsome (30 page)

“Look at Joaquin there,” he said, in a dark tone. Joaquin had ridden his squat gelding to the event, humming redemption songs; now he was across the clearing keeping company with a surprisingly appealing woman who thought everything he said was droll. “Look at him laughing—he don’t care if he gets baptized or not,” said Glendon.

“Maybe he’s reconsidered the question of kissing,” I said. It didn’t really land, but I thought it was funny.

“No doubt that preacher’s on his way. He’s late, is all.”

“That’s probably it.”

“He’s sent no word to tell us otherwise,” said Glendon.

“True enough.”

“We’ll just wait awhile, then.”

So we waited. A little tribe of kids had driven a big pike up into the shallows. It was a striking fish with its leopard spots and thrashed menacingly in the gravel; once those kids glimpsed its sawtooth maw they backed away, and the pike finned off to the deeps without further discord. After a while Joaquin disappeared with his comely friend, and a boy spun a kite into a tree, and people devoured their picnics, though I did catch sight of one basket half sunk and tilting adrift down the river—you could see a heel of bread poking out. Eventually a genial man showed up begging to play his accordion. He was fresh from a few glasses of applejack but strapped the thing on with comprehensive decorum and performed with the pared dignity of a man who has lost everything else—which he had, for Glendon told me this was the bankrupt Mr. Pond. He played dance tunes and hymns until we all got sleepy, and soon people started filtering away.

“Hang that preacher!” said Glendon. I didn’t understand his exasperation—his eyes were damp, even.

Finally, we were the only two people left on the riverbank. We’d spent the whole day there. The sun declined, the air cooled, and there was Glendon still in his dunking clothes.

“Well,” said I, getting up, at which he seized my wrist.

“You do it,” he said.

“Do what?” I inquired, though I knew very well—I knew before he even asked, as certainly as the boy knows he is about to be asked to answer the arithmetic that has always puzzled him.

“You baptize me,” he said.

“No. Don’t ask it of me, Glendon.”

“I asked already. I’m asking again.” His eyes were alight. His fingers worked in edgy high spirits—he had looked exactly this way when talking of fast horses or the elephant at the Hundred and One.

“Please, no. The Almighty’s a mystery to me. I daydream in church, when I even go. Doubt is my usual condition! I’m not qualified for this.”

“I guess you aren’t, but do you see anyone else?”

He was resolute, not to say mulish. A new fear entered me. “Glendon, what if it’s wrong for me to do it? Suppose I imperil something?”

“Imperil what?”

I didn’t want to say it but there he stood with perked ears.

“My immortal soul,” I rather hissed.

“Why, Becket,” he said, with a warm familiarity I found irksome.

“I’m serious. What if He’s got a rule about this? What if He hates impostors?”

He looked bemused. “If you’re afraid, then I think you’re no impostor.”

So rarely had I quarreled with Glendon that his ease in whipping me was a surprise. In any case, evening was upon us and it was getting cool. There seemed to be nothing for it.

I said, “How did Crealock go about this?”

He didn’t remember many details. There’d been no audience that day, either: Crealock wasted few words but recommended Glen Dobie to Glory in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

I said, “I still maintain it held the first time.”

“I didn’t see it then. I got to give my right name.”

We waded out to the center of the Rienda. You wouldn’t think the river would be so cold—southern California, for goodness’ sake! There had been a hatch of large winged insects and the surface was beset with their drifting skins. Midstream I started to say something to Glendon about the cold or the hatch but he already had his eyes closed.

I said, “Lord, excuse me, I am Monte Becket and here is Glendon Hale.” I don’t remember what other words I used. They were not much to listen to I am sure. Glendon stood shut-eyed and now thought to remove his hat and hold it on his chest. The river ran around us. It
was an absurd situation for an ambivalent fellow like myself—numb to the eyeballs, dispensing a grace I couldn’t even describe. Then something moved in the water. Something large slid past my leg! Panicked to get out I said, “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” and laid Glendon down in the river.

Coming up he blinked and swept his eyes clear. He nodded to me but was silent. The water moved past, the last sunlight showing its skin of dust and insects. It seemed a long wade back to shore with our slow footing, our arms lifting the wings of our drooping sleeves.

Then: “Thank you, Becket,” he said.

When he offered nothing else I inquired, “Well?”

“Well what?”

After all this I wanted an answer. “Are you changed, from before?”

He smiled and for some reason I remembered him from that first morning when he came for breakfast. How he had charmed us all! “Yes,” he replied, the agile old sprite. “For one thing, I am quite a bit colder.”

And that was almost all I could get from him—a smile, a joke—though riding back to the orchard he kept a hand on the pommel of his saddle and seemed to ride like a younger man does, or an old man who remembers his youth.

The train was early, but I was earlier still.

Glendon came too and brought the wagon but refused to wait with me at the station, for which I was grateful. Instead he went to see about groceries and brandy for Claudio and copper rivets for himself. Letting me off at the depot he nodded at a distant jet of steam just climbing over treetops farther up the valley.

“Lucky man,” he said, and touched the horses, and moved away.

Redstart was first off the coach—moments after the screel and hiss, a door lurched and out he spilled as if he’d been leaning there for a hundred miles. The pug Bert was in his arms and the two of them fell down flailing on the platform. I ran up and collared Redstart to his feet and he was more of himself than ever, laughing and throwing punches at my hands. It takes time to settle a boy like that but time I did not have, for Susannah was being handed down by an appreciative old conductor.

“Thank you,” she told him, turning to me. She looked curious and tired and slightly undone. She had a shallow closed folio in one hand which I knew would contain paper and pencils and the drawings she had made on the trip.

As on the last time I saw her she was hatless—and as I reached for her she began to laugh.

“What is it?” I said, because she wasn’t laughing from discomfort or the relief reunion can sometimes bring—these were surprised and spirited laughs. I said, “Love, what is it?”

I tell you, she couldn’t even answer. A porter appeared with her luggage and she sat down on a steamer chest and rocked. It was not
what I’d hoped for. I’m not sure what I would’ve done had Redstart not cleared it up.

“It’s your clothes, Papa,” he said.

Claudio, swept up, had offered me a well-kept suit from his own closet. It fit nicely with its cuffs and tails, so I suppose I looked the part of a California citrus baron circa 1880. Again I’d cast my lot with sentiment, and again I was its monkey. Then I forgot my chagrin, or most of it, for Susannah stood and kissed me and asked was everything all right.

I said, “Besides the clothes, what do you see?”

“The man I have missed for a very long while,” she said, still smiling.

“I have not written anything except those few letters to you.”

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t.”

“That author business is all finished, you know. I am very much less than I once believed.”

She replied, “Monte, what did you think I wanted?”

I still wasn’t sure about that but said, “I am no one’s self-made man.”

“No,” she agreed, then her hands tightened on my arms and her eyes adjusted suddenly as though the light had changed. She said, “Monte, what work have you been doing here?”

“Cutting trees and lighting fires. We are building a boat. I baptized Glendon in a river of water.”

She put a hand to her mouth. Her eyes were wide and bright.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

She nodded, touched her forehead to my shoulder. Put her hands against my chest.

That was what I hoped for.

It was dark when we reached the orchard, but the house was lit like a cake. Every window on the upper story showed lamplight—I thought Claudio in a fever of hospitality had planned some grandiose reception.

But things were not that way.

“Oh, now—that’s the doctor’s auto,” said Glendon, as the horses drifted up into the yard. He handed the reins to Redstart, who had ridden beside him, and went up the steps at a run.

It transpired we’d no sooner left for the train station than Claudio began to gasp and tremble. His stomach was climbing around inside him—that’s what he told his wife, who fetched brandy and sent Joaquin racing up-valley for the doctor. His name was Fellows and he was the same doctor who had denied Claudio’s earlier complaints. It would be pleasant to say this Fellows arrived with renewed humility but he was surly and pompous. Redstart later asked had I noticed the doctor’s hands. Sure enough I had: weirdly small, soft, ductile hands with fingers tapering to witchy points. The only decency I saw in Fellows was his willingness to treat Claudio with morphine, which eased his twistings and set him breathing normally again.

When I accompanied the doctor to his car it was late, the wind bullying treetops, the moon at three-quarter. He looked about and touched my arm with those spooky fingers.

“A month at most,” he said.

It was only when Fellows had driven away that I noticed Redstart. He’d left his mother up at the house and had been standing close all along, in a clutch of black aspens. He came alongside now and
walked with me. Against the cool moonlight his shadow was nearly as long as mine.

It was closer to two months—eight arduous weeks—yet at times Claudio’s pain dwindled and he had access to his full mind and would talk about art or oranges or history or baseball with anyone available. His shortening span made him decisive. He decided instantly to love Susannah like a daughter and invited her to set up her easel in the parlor where he resided in his blankets. She sometimes painted whole evenings while Ar
ā
ndano read aloud. Of course there was no telling how long his intervals of sturdiness would last, but Ar
ā
ndano believed they stretched longest with Susannah humming and daubing at her canvas.

At first she made the paintings you would expect—the orchard at sunset, cattle in the distance, sometimes an invented sheep placed for effect where the sun could touch its glossy feet—but as weeks passed she began to paint other subjects, such as Claudio himself. She painted his face in variegated planes—in blues and shadowy grays, as of a man dying—but these somber tones were tempered by the lively reds and golds that described Claudio’s essential jubilance as clearly as a poem. Though she had never painted portraits before, she embarked on them as though called. Her easel followed everywhere. She painted Joaquin who couldn’t rest long but would get up and march around then come back and sit with his good arm crossed over his chest; she painted Pond when he came with his accordion.

Redstart she couldn’t paint in the usual manner but had to do so in quick dashes as he raced by. In less than two days he had found the burrow of a young raccoon and enticed the tricky beast into friendship with sugar lumps provided by Claudio. Boy and raccoon resided together in the peace enjoyed by creatures who recognize the same delights, in this case sweetmeats and an urge to move nocturnally over the countryside. For a short time there was little separation between Redstart and this small mammal, whom he named Lupin after the caped thief of French society; if Susannah were to paint the boy she must paint the raccoon also and thus discovered her skill with animals.
She painted Glendon aboard one of Claudio’s bright geldings, name of Wardlaw, who had the habit of curving his neck like a Roman horse and prancing sideways as if to make the person riding him look noble and skilled. He didn’t seem like a gelding, Wardlaw, for he had an eye always on the mares—Claudio admitted he had lacked the heart to geld the youngster at the proper age and had let him turn five before letting one-armed Joaquin do the trick with his soft words and his clever knife. Thereafter Wardlaw was somewhat more ridable yet retained the arched neck and thought habits of stallions. He was a beautiful creature; Susannah even painted his portrait riderless in tones of burgundy and purple, which played up his undaunted character. Ar
ā
ndano laughed, declaring the picture actually frightened her, but Claudio prized it so highly he asked Redstart to pound a nail and hang it on the wall of their bedroom.

One night when we were walking next to the river, a warm night, Redstart far downstream fishing or dam building, Susannah said, “Do you think we ought to go back home?”

I was considering ways to evade her question when a lantern emerged from the house. Ar
ā
ndano carried it. She walked steadily toward us over the dewy grass. When she neared, her eyes shone in the lantern light, her stricken eyes. She came and stood with us and put the lantern down in the grass and laid her head on Susannah’s shoulder to weep. Looking at the house I saw Glendon come out and sit on the porch steps. His head was in his hands, and sometimes he looked about aimlessly, as though he were lost out on the prairie after a bad dream, or as though casting about for some work that he might do.

There was little ceremony at the funeral. Joaquin was upset about it, telling Glendon at length about the worthy funerals he’d attended in Guerrero, with solemn corteges and black ribbon and guitars played with such grief the fingers bled. It frustrated Joaquin that Claudio had forbade this business for himself. In fact, Claudio had promised to return as a shade and haunt Joaquin if he tried to organize any drama whatever.