So Brave, Young, and Handsome (6 page)

“I’d rather not extend! What is this about?”

“Nothing at all, I suspect. It’s a matter of checking on your association with the nimble Mr. Dobie.” He put his elbows on the table and looked me over. “He’s rather the old desperate, you know—been out of view for some time.”

It does not flatter me that my skin took a peppery chill at his words, nor that I bridled, saying, “I told you, I barely know the man.”

He gave me a kind look. “And yet you confirmed to that newspaper fellow, Mr. Cobb, that the two of you were traveling together. Now, here comes the station. Don’t worry, I pledge you a comfortable stay.”

“Are you arresting me, Mr. Davies?”

“I am inviting you to my home,” said he, “until a sharper detective than myself can ask you this and that. It may take half an hour; it may slow you down a day. In the meantime, it would please my Emma if you would come write your name in her book. Don’t make more of this than it is, Mr. Becket.”

His small speech set me at ease again and made me remember something important, that is, my own innocence. I thought of Glendon’s hazy identity—his duplicity, it began to appear, toward me, his friend. I suppose my feelings were injured. In any case this Royal looked steady and responsible with his trim whiskers and weary gaze. I said, “Where is your other charge?”

“Sleeping, chained to his seat. If he had got more sleep to begin with, he mightn’t have robbed the till. Tired people assess their chances unwisely.”

I smiled at that and Royal Davies nodded. “You’re doing these youngsters no service, you know,” he said, looking tired himself. He got to his feet and braced as the train huffed to a sooty platform. “You authors, I mean—this world ain’t no romance, in case you didn’t notice.”

“So I am discovering,” I replied. It was, I suppose, the expected wry answer, and made my host chuckle, but now I am taking it back. I take issue with Royal, much as I came to like him; violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is.

Royal Davies’s brave wife suffered with a brutal arthritis, so much of the labor in that house fell to Emma, the granddaughter. Her parents had moved to San Diego and she was to join them in a few weeks; it was plain to me her grandparents viewed her approaching departure with dismay. I can testify she roasted a beautiful mallard hen that night, with stuffing and candied yams, and cleaned up afterward—an obliging girl.

As for Mrs. Davies, she kept me under the reptile eye while listening to her husband’s presentation of contemporary Chicago, of his sister’s health, and of the bothersome train ride home. He was a bright observer, and I soon saw he had to be, for Mrs. Davies asked him a chain of incisive questions which built one upon the other until she had in her mind a satisfactory portrait of her husband’s absence. You’d think it might abrade, to be probed that way by your spouse, but Royal Davies seemed to shine and grow younger under her spotlight, and he leaned toward her, his language and whole manner becoming honed and precise.

She then turned to me and said, “Very well, Mr. Author, it is your turn.”

“I am at your service, Mrs. Davies.”

“You are a man of letters,” said she. “Tell me, what do you think of Boyd Singleton Ample?”

I said, “I think he is very good, yes, a very important writer.”

There are any number of reasons to tell this sort of lie. As a well-treated guest, I didn’t wish to seem critical of her taste. Worse, I didn’t
wish to appear jealous—every one of Mr. Ample’s books sold much more briskly than
Martin Bligh
had.

“Go on,” she said, nodding.

“Well, his insights on human miseries are salient,” I ventured. It didn’t seem like a weak limb to climb out on—it was a common opinion among people who were serious about Literature and the phase it was in, whether of ascent or decline, and What It All Meant for Society. In his most recent novel he had sallied out with a number of momentous ideas, namely that war is difficult, and that poverty is difficult too; in fact, that much of human experience is marked by difficulty. I don’t remember who is at fault.

“Horse puckey,” said Mrs. Davies, an excellent glint in her gaze.

“Pardon?”

“He is boresome. Humorless as a mole. Tell me, are you familiar with
The Pestilence of Man
?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” I was mortified, because in my politic reply I’d set myself to defend a novel I hadn’t even finished. I tried! But it’s a long book.

“And did you laugh much, reading it?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Davies.”

“Call me Celia, please. Did you get much good from it?” she persisted.

“Why, I think so—Celia.”

“And what particular good would that be?” said my rigorous hostess.

“Well, a broader understanding of human darkness, I suppose,” I said, seizing a trite phrase from a review I’d seen somewhere. Oh, I was on thin and melting ice now!

Celia Davies said, “At this minute many people are reading books by that man; I will tell you how to identify them. They own a furtive brow, men and women alike; they bend their slight shoulders, they tug their lips and fret. Mr. Becket, do you find yourself improved for your new understanding of human darkness?”

I adjusted my own shoulders. I had a new admiration for Royal Davies, that he could be a match for her. “Few things have managed
to improve me, Celia,” I admitted, “although a day or two of your company might.”

Then she laughed, which was the youngest thing about her; Royal took her hand with an expression of delight, and I was released from that table.

I think often of Celia Davies. She could squeeze a conversation to its rind, leap it east to west, or change its axis wholly. Her wits were as supple as her fingers were rigid. I don’t know her story, for she was an adept evader of questions, but her life would be a giddy crossword, working down from some clues and across from others.

By dusk I felt in the home of friends. I had ceased to dread my forthcoming interrogation, and Royal suggested with some pride that I go down to his dock and enjoy a little evening on the river.

People who live on riverbanks understand one another. If you can’t be on a boat, a dock will do. Royal Davies’s dock was wide with a bench on the end where you might sit in contentment with the ponderous Kaw slipping under you, and beside the bench Royal had bolted an iron post on which you could hang flowers or a kerosene lantern.

“What are you writing, Mr. Becket?”

It was the granddaughter, Emma, holding a slip of paper and her copy of
Bligh
.

“A letter to my wife.” Though a poor one, awkwardly composed.

She blushed brightly at this and said, “Is it a love letter?”

“Yes,” I replied, which renewed the blush. She had an ungainly gallantry—I found myself thinking of Redstart, who would’ve ignored her even as he stood on his hands to catch her eye.

“Is Mr. Davies coming down?” I asked, for she seemed out of words.

“No, he is rubbing Grandma Celia’s hands. He has a balm he uses every night.”

“They’re going to miss you when you move to California,” I said.

“Oh, no!” she replied, dismissing the notion.

I scratched away at my letter in the dying light.

“Mr. Becket?”

“Yes?”

“Did you love writing
Martin Bligh
?”

“I did, yes.”

“I wanted to show you my bookshelf, but Grandpa said not to trouble you,” she said, then with disarming practicality, “I like you better than Spearman, but not so well as Alcott. Here.”

She had taken the time to copy down the titles of all her books, some two dozen of them, and she handed me this inventory; thus I was given a peep into her life, which was a rich one, for there was
Lorna Doone
, and
The White Company
, and
Last of the Mohicans
, and
Life on the Mississippi
, and
Kidnapped
. Of course there were also lesser titles, such as
Her Prairie Knight
and
Nevada Juliette
.

“It’s a winsome collection, Emma,” I said, squinting down the list. And it was—a most gaudy parade, and she loved it all. I said, “Have you a favorite character among all these?”

Without delay she answered. “Alan Breck, who kills his enemies in the roundhouse and writes a song about it before the bodies cool.”

It is a recurring sorrow to me never to have raised a daughter.

She said, “Will you read to me from your book?”

“It’ll be getting dark,” I observed, and she fled in her skirt for the lantern.

There is a scene where Martin is being pursued by Chiricahuas—his horse has run itself to death and Martin has strapped the mailbags to his own back and is running full claw through a mesquite thicket. Probably such a thing is not possible—I’d never seen a mesquite thicket to know. Martin anyway dives and scuttles and is a clever jackrabbit, but these are the scheming Apaches so you would have to say the outlook is bad. It’s a tense scene, if I say so, and Emma drew her knees up and hugged them, and I bent to the page in the yellow light and gave Emma my best production, because I had no daughter, and because even as I read I recognized the coming time when Emma would laugh at my little story and take up with Mr. B. S. Ample or a similar concerned citizen.

“Oh, read some more!” Emma cried, when Martin had got safely away.

“No, not now. You go up to the house.”

“Thanks, Mr. Becket,” she said, and went.

I set down my notebook and watched a johnboat move down the Kaw toward its confluence with the great Missouri. The johnboat had no lantern at its bow and was a flat graceless box like a wagon bed.

It bothered me that I hadn’t been able to talk better sense to Glendon. I kept seeing him heave his gear and then himself off that Great Northern train. Why had I not persuaded him to try the law? Certainly I could’ve worked on him, chipped away, swayed him from folly.

Susannah could’ve done so, had she been along.

Well, I’d be back in Northfield in three days. Perhaps it would be easier to tell these things to Susannah in our own sunny kitchen over cinnamon rolls.

I stood and doused the lantern and was startled to hear a chuckle nearby, out on the river. The chuckle came from the johnboat, which had drifted quite near. Staring out I saw a silver waterline, a dab of silver above it.

A man in a boat, standing up.

Read the confessions, the memoirs, the courtroom transcripts: There is always a line the scoundrel steps across and becomes a wanted thing. Sometimes the line is theater and robbery and kicking the fellow off the bridge; sometimes it’s simply a signed sheet of paper.

Perhaps it is fitting that my own line was merely the end of a dock.

“Becket, again,” said Glendon in a low voice, tossing me a rope. “What do you suppose are the chances?”

“Glendon!”

“You were reading to a little girl as I went past. I knew your voice, you see.”

I looked up at the lit windows. “This is Royal Davies’s place. A police detective and a kind host.”

“Are you in trouble on my account?”

“I don’t think so.”

He nodded. He looked small and exhausted and melancholy, and hope awoke in me.

The porch door opened and Emma came out and shouted into the dark, “Mr. Becket? Come up for pie!”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I called. To Glendon I said, “Come with me.”

“If I do that, I will miss Blue.”

“It is what’s right,” I told him.

“Imagine it were Susannah, and you twenty years gone.”

He looked away and grasped the dock post as if to shove off.

I said, “Glendon, it might be your final chance to give up on easy terms. Davies is a good man; you will get fair treatment.” For you see, the moment he appeared there arose a picture of the skilled lawyer, the kindly judge, the life restored. Suddenly it seemed clear—Providence had given us this opportunity. “Don’t you see? We have met again here for exactly this purpose!”

Glendon replied, in his blunt fashion, “Nope, that ain’t it.” He squinted out at the water. “Fog is coming in, I feel it on my face. Can you see far in this? What can you make out?”

“I see a bow wake where that barge is passing,” I said. Fom the shuffling and lowing there were cattle on the barge, heading down to the Kansas City stockyards, I expect. It was a great long barge.

“I don’t see it, I hear it only,” he replied. He went quiet; fatigue lay on him like blown dirt. Then “Becket,” he said, “I’m sorry to ask, but I’m going to anyway. Won’t you come along? It’s shabby of me, and there’s not a thing in it for yourself, or your sweetheart, or your cunning lad. In fact I suppose it will prove the most expensive thing you ever do, and you are bound to live with regrets and have no kind forgiving thoughts for Glendon Hale; still Blue comes before me, and I am asking you to come along and help me see this through.”

Sighing I replied, “Davies says you’re an old rogue. A bandit of tolerable rank. ‘Nimble Mr. Dobie,’ he called you.”

“I was obliged for a while to use names besides my own. I am sorry to have deceived you, Becket.”

“He claims you kept outlaw company for a long span of time.”

“Almost a decade.”

“Did you kill anyone?”

He turned from me and looked into the southern sky. “You have every right to be a hard customer, Becket. Will you come, or no?”

“Glendon,” I said, “what I am supposed to think of you? I wish you’d tell me that.”

I heard the porch door open again, and this time it was Royal. He called out, like an old friend, “Say, Monte, are you coming?”

Glendon said nothing. He stood relaxed and balanced—
contrapposto
, my artist wife would say, a hand on a hip. I could feel the draw of his silence, the draw of his naïve and weak-eyed quest for
atonement; no doubt even his shifty past was a draw, for his life seemed a curving line, capricious, moment by moment inviting grace.

“Monte?” Royal called again.

“Of course,” I replied. “Of course, I’m on my way.” And off the dock I stepped, into that heartbroken vessel.