“You tell him to come on back home,” the oldest girl said. “That’s what you tell him.”
“Yessum,” the messenger said. “I’ll shore tell him.
I’m going east to Indianny for a spell.
But I’ll see him soon as I get back.
I’ll shore tell him.
Oh, yes; I nigh forgot.
He said to tell you the woman and kid was fine.”
“Whose woman and kid?” the father said.
“His,” the messenger said. “I thank you kindly again.
And good-bye all.”
They heard from the son a third time before they saw him again.
They heard him shouting one day out in front of the house, though still some distance away.
It was in 1866.
The family had moved again, a hundred miles further west, and it had taken the son two months to find them, riding back and forth across Kansas and Missouri in a buckboard with two leather sacks of gold dust and minted coins and crude jewels thrown under the seat like a pair of old shoes, before he found the sod cabin and drove up to it, shouting. Sitting in a chair before the cabin door was a man.
“There’s father,” Nathaniel said to the woman on the buckboard seat beside him. “See?”
Though the father was only in his late fifties, his sight had begun to fail.
He did not distinguish his son’s face until the buckboard had stopped and the sisters had billowed shrieking through the door.
Then Calvin rose; he gave a long, booming shout.
“Well,” Nathaniel said; “here we are.”
Calvin was not speaking sentences at all.
He was just yelling, cursing.
“I’m going to frail the tar out of you!” he roared. “Girls!
Vangie!
Beck!
Sarah!”
The sisters had already emerged.
They seemed to boil through the door in their full skirts like balloons on a torrent, with shrill cries, above which the father’s voice boomed and roared.
His coat—the frockcoat of Sunday or the wealthy or the retired—was open now and he was tugging at something near his waist with the same gesture and attitude with which he might be drawing the pistol.
But he was merely dragging from about his waist with his single hand a leather strap, and flourishing it he now thrust and shoved through the shrill and birdlike hovering of the women.
“I’ll learn you yet!” he roared. “I’ll learn you to run away!”
The strap fell twice across Nathaniel’s shoulders.
It fell twice before the two men locked.
It was in play, in a sense: a kind of deadly play and smiling seriousness: the play of two lions that might or might not leave marks.
They locked, the strap arrested: face to face and breast to breast they stood: the old man with his gaunt, grizzled face and his pale New England eyes, and the young one who bore no resemblance to him at all, with his beaked nose and his white teeth smiling.
“Stop it,” Nathaniel said. “Don’t you see who’s watching yonder in the buckboard?”
They had none of them looked at the buckboard until now.
Sitting on the seat was a woman and a boy of about twelve.
The father looked once at the woman; he did not even need to see the boy.
He just looked at the woman, his jaw slacked as if he had seen a ghost.
“Evangeline!” he said.
She looked enough like his dead wife to have been her sister.
The boy who could hardly remember his mother at all, had taken for wife a woman who looked almost exactly like her.
“That’s Juana,” he said. “That’s Calvin with her.
We come home to get married.”
After supper that night, with the woman and child in bed, Nathaniel told them.
They sat about the lamp: the father, the sisters, the returned son.
There were no—ministers out there where he had been, he explained; just priests and Catholics.
“So when we found that the chico was on the way, she begun to talk about a priest.
But I wasn’t going to have any Burden born a heathen.
So I begun to look around, to humor her.