Jake and I sat down. Jake picked up one of the Hot Stuff comic books which was about a little devil whose temper was always getting him into trouble. Me, I picked up a magazine called Action for Men that had on the front cover an illustration of a guy in a safari outfit holding a powerful looking rifle and with a voluptuous blonde at his side who wore a very short khaki skirt and a blouse ripped away enough to show a lot of bare skin and a little bit of her bra and they both were facing a lion that looked pretty damn hungry. The woman was clearly scared. The guy looked cool of nerve, exactly how I imagined myself reacting in that situation. I opened to an article that was supposed to be true about a man who’d been attacked by killer spiders in the Amazon. But I didn’t read much because within a couple of minutes Gus was finished and striding out the door with Jake and me at his heels. On the street he turned to us.
“So what did you want to tell me?”
“Mom left,” I said.
“Left? What do you mean?”
“She’s gone, went to stay with our grandparents.”
Gus ran a hand over his newly clipped hair. “How’s your dad?”
“He went to his office, so I don’t know.”
“All right,” Gus said, thinking. “All right.” He looked toward the Flats. “You guys want a ride back?”
And of course we did.
Gus threw a leg over his motorcycle. I hooked up behind him on the seat and Jake settled into the sidecar. It took only minutes to reach the church lot where Gus parked the Indian Chief. He nodded toward our house and said, “You guys go on and have some lunch. I’ll be over in a bit.” He headed into the church and we crossed the street to home.
We threw together a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ate them with potato chips and cherry Kool-Aid in the kitchen. Then we headed to the living room to watch television. I thought that with our mother gone the place wouldn’t feel drowned in despair but breathing the dark air of that room full of the stale smell of cigarette smoke was like breathing death. Mother in her grieving had forbidden us to open the drapes. My father and Emil Brandt both had tried to talk reason to her but she was almost vicious in her resistance. In truth we often kept the drapes closed in summer during the worst of the heat but my mother’s desire for the dark had nothing to do with that. Jake flopped on the sofa and turned on the television. I went to the south window and yanked back one of the drapes and then the other and July brilliance caromed off the floor and smacked the wall. Jake jumped up and looked stricken, as if I’d broken one of the Commandments, then he realized the freedom that had suddenly become ours and he ran to the east window and threw back the drapes there. It wasn’t just sunlight that flooded
in. The good scent of summer came with it. I was sure I smelled the wild daisies in the pasture behind our house and the fresh wet of the laundry Edna Sweeney had hung on her clothesline and the grapes in the arbor of the Hansons’ house two doors down and the almost sweet aroma of the grain in the elevators beside the tracks and even, I swore, the luscious mud smell of the river two blocks away. Jake stood in the sunlight that poured in. He glowed as if electrified and he wore a smile that stretched his cheeks until they nearly snapped.
Gus came in the front door and put his hands on his hips and looked at us keenly. “What are you two up to now?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, thinking he was going to chew our rear ends for what we’d done with the drapes.
“Not anymore.” He held up the keys to my family’s Packard. “We’re going for a horseback ride.”
• • •
We drove north out of the valley and onto rolling farmland. We followed back roads that were a mystery to me and that threaded between fields of corn and soybean and cut alongside farmyards and skipped through towns that were there and gone in less than a breath and finally we dipped into a valley much smaller than the one carved by the Minnesota River and filled with emerald alfalfa fields outlined by clean white fences. We turned off the main road onto a long dirt lane that led to a house with a big barn and several outbuildings all canopied by the leaves of a dozen great elms. A woman stood in the shade near the house watching us come and when Gus pulled up she stepped forward to greet us.
“Gentlemen,” Gus said after we’d piled out, “I’d like you to meet Ginger French. Ginger, my friends Frankie and Jake.”
We shook her hand and I thought Ginger French was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen, tall and willowy, with long brown hair that fell straight down over her shoulders. She wore a light blue shirt that I thought of as Western because it had pearl snaps and she wore black leather riding boots.
She kissed Gus on the cheek and said to us, “You boys care for some lemonade before we hit the trail?”
“No, ma’am,” I replied. “Let’s ride.”
She laughed and Gus did too and she took his arm and led the way to the barn where she had horses saddled and waiting.
Ginger—she insisted we call her by her first name—I learned that afternoon had not grown up in Minnesota but was raised in Kentucky and had come west with her husband, a man who’d worked for a company called Cargill. They’d lived in the Twin Cities but she’d been lonesome for the horse country so her husband had bought the land in the little valley and they’d started a kind of ranch there where they spent weekends and much of the summer. Her husband had died two years earlier of a heart attack and she’d moved permanently to the ranch and ran it by herself. Gus, she said, had been a big help during the first haying that year, doing most of the alfalfa baling by himself. Fine muscles, she’d said and she’d given him a long smile.
I knew some things about Gus. I knew that what living he made was done by working odd jobs all over the county. He did maintenance on the churches in my father’s charge, dug graves for the cemetery in New Bremen and helped keep the grounds, got calls sometimes from Monk’s Garage when they needed motorcycle work done, cleared jimsonweed from cornfields, strung wire for fences, put up rip rap along creeks prone to flood erosion, worked occasional construction jobs. And now I knew he did haying as well. Hell I’d’ve done haying for Ginger too and never asked a dime.
I rode a mount called Smokie and Jake got a horse called Pokey. Gus rode a big tawny beast named Tornado and Ginger rode, of course, Lady. We followed a trail along the creek that threaded the bottom of the little valley. We passed a small tractor that had no wheels but was mounted on blocks. A belt ran from the back axle to an irrigation pump that drew water from the creek for the alfalfa fields.
“Gus’s creation,” Ginger told us and reached out and touched his arm gently.
Gus and she rode up front side by side, talking quietly. Jake and I brought up the rear. We’d been on horses before, a couple of summers when we both attended a church camp, and we figured that made us experienced riders and we wanted to gallop, but Ginger said that it was better to take things easy this time around and let the horses get to know us and for us to get to know them. I didn’t really care that much anyway. I loved being out on that beautiful day with butterflies like snow flurries over the alfalfa and the hills humped green against the blue sky and the air cool with the mist from the sprinklers that watered the fields. When we came back Ginger served us lemonade and sugar cookies on her porch and told us about the Kentucky Derby which she went to every year and it sounded to me like the most exciting thing imaginable. And too quickly it was time to go.