Braden Treasure’s favorite part of July Fourth was the dunking tank that stood on the southeast corner of the square. All sorts of town dignitaries volunteered to take turns taunting customers and getting wet, all the way from the owner of the Mangy Moose restaurant to Mrs. Roehrkasse, a fifth-grade teacher who always traveled with her students to the dinosaur dig near Thermopolis.
Whenever Braden made his way to the front of the line, the hapless victim in the chair would moan. Being one of the Little League players, even though not its most accurate pitcher, had its distinct advantages. He’d been training all summer long to throw hard and fast and with newfound precision. If only he could hit the target this time, the unfortunate person perched atop the tank would plunge into the icy water below.
Today Braden would take aim at Ken Hubner, his own baseball coach. “You’d better not hit that, young man!” Ken bellowed, swinging his legs and waving while everyone jeered at him from below. “You just try to douse me! You just try.”
Braden paid his dollar and was handed three baseballs. He wound up to throw while Wheezer and Jake and Chase cheered him on. But things didn’t feel right. He lowered the ball, lowered his chin, and readjusted the bill of his Elk’s Club cap.
That girl might come here. That girl who’s my sister.
Braden reared his elbow back and let fly the first ball. He stepped off to the left on his follow-through, just the way Coach Hubner had taught him not to do. He missed the bull’s-eye target by at least six inches.
“Ha!” Ken shouted. “You missed me, you missed me, now you gotta kiss me—”
“Hey, coach,” Braden hollered up at him, teasing. “You’re going down!” He started a wind-up on the second ball.
That’s why Dad wanted me to put all those posters up. So he could find her.
The second ball missed, too. It smashed against the backboard and bounced out of sight.
“Come on, Braden!” Hubner bellowed again. “Throw that last ball like you mean it. I dare you!” The coach grinned and raised his fists high into the air. “Hey, I’m your coach. I know what you can do.”
Braden adjusted his hat again. He hitched up his elbow, cocked his knee.
What if Dad finds my sister and he forgets about me?
The baseball smashed into the bull’s-eye target full bore as spectators cheered. With a clatter, the wooden platform burst open. Splash. Ken Hubner came up blubbering, with his clothes and what was left of his hair plastered to his skin. He spit water. “That’s the way to pitch it in there, Treasure. Right down the pike!”
But Braden didn’t stay for his coach’s accolades. He was too busy thinking about Samantha Roche.
Calvin Baxter kept glancing into his rearview mirror, which extended like an arthropod feeler from the side of his truck cab.
“What is it with all these tourists?” he said. “You’d think somebody would let me into the lane I need.”
“Honey,” his wife pleaded with him. “Watch the road in front of you. If we can’t get into the turn lane, you’ll go straight ahead and double back. Your pride isn’t worth risking our lives.”
“I’ve been signaling for two miles.”
Ahead of them, in the only lane where they could continue, three sawhorses loomed.
Calvin smacked the steering wheel with an open palm. “Oh, great. Look’s like they’re having a parade or something. No wonder everybody and their brothers are here.”
“Well, sweetie. It is the Fourth of July.”
“I’ve got to get over in that other lane.”
From the minuscule backseat where she’d ridden for five hundred miles, one little girl propped her chin on her father’s shoulder and said, “Daddy?” with the lilt in her voice she always used when she wanted to get her own way. “Aren’t we going to stop someplace in town?”
“With all these people? You’ve got to be crazy. Our plan was to visit the wilderness, not the corner of Hollywood and Vine.”
Before Tess Baxter could persuade further, Calvin threw on the brakes to keep from hitting sawhorses. Streams of bumper-to-bumper traffic on either side didn’t allow him to turn either way. Because he couldn’t think of any other avenue to communicate his frustration, he pounded on his horn. A police officer on horseback gestured wildly at them with his hands.
Calvin said, “That’s it, kids. Enjoy this trip. When we get home to Oregon, we’re going to sell this Jayco. I’m never going to drive like this again.”
“Well thank heavens for small favors, Calvin. That’s a relief to every one of us.”
“Daddy, let us get out somewhere. Please!”
With the officer’s rather reluctant assistance, Calvin Baxter managed to maneuver the huge camper into the left lane. He lumbered them along Cache Street for two blocks or so, following the green road signs to Yellowstone, while everyone with him begged to be let out. At last he gave up and turned into a gas station, jostling the huge rig over a dip in the driveway.
“Fifteen minutes, that’s all. That’s it; everybody out. I can’t stand it anymore.”
Out of the fifteen minutes allotted, Tess needed approximately three. She begged the key from her father, saying she’d forgotten her copy of Amber Brown Is Not a Crayon in her bunk.
“Hey,” she whispered once she got inside. “Sam. Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“You’d better do it quick.”
“Okay.”
Sam slithered out from her hiding place inside the bunk. Their faces met for the first time in five hundred miles. They gripped each other’s arms, still children, with a child’s plan, but with full-grown hope in their hearts. “I don’t want you to leave,” Tess said. “I want you to stay with us.”
“If I stay with you, I’ll never find you know who.”
“I want you to be careful, Sam. Really.”
For one frightening moment, footsteps crunched on the asphalt beside the door. Tess slammed her friend out of sight behind the thin trailer door. They waited one long excruciating minute, while Sam counted the kerthumps inside her chest.
“It’s okay.” A hushed whisper. “Nobody’s coming in here.” They gripped each other’s arms again. Tess whispered, “Be careful.” Up front, the truck door slammed. Tess could see her own father checking the road map. “Go,” Tess said. “Get out of here. If you don’t do it now, they’ll see you.”
David Treasure sat on the back row of the reviewing stand, which was really nothing more than a set of choir risers from Jackson Hole High School lined with a dozen of the Elk’s Club folding chairs. Even if he didn’t still feel such nearness and such reproach from Abby, even if he didn’t feel more helpless now than he’d felt when Susan Roche first met with him, he would be sitting in this exact same stance, with his chin raised and his shoulders set as square and firm as a rampart. He used his own body as a fortress against the world, against what seemed like absurd mirth on this day.
You know I wanted to save her, Lord. I made the sacrifice, and it’s come to nothing.
Abby would never have even needed to know.
He’d always liked July Fourth and the way folks celebrated it here, in his hometown. After the breakfast and the parade would come the music-festival orchestra concert on the middle school lawn, its appreciative, sunburned audience laden with blankets and sunhats and watermelon and picnic coolers. Then tonight, as soon as the sky above Snow King darkened to its perfect, infinite depths of navy blue, without announcement, a torchlight would come alive in the center of the ski run. Thousands on every corner in town would wait with their hopes in their throats. A ghost of a hiss, a small smoke projection into the air and, with a heavy, single sound that echoed from Rendezvous Mountain to Blacktail Butte, the first rocket would explode, red, green, gold, or blue, a chrysanthemum burst of sparkles that tinted the mountains and the groves of aspen and the faces of everybody watching. The torch on the mountain would glow more and more often. Another boom. Another echo. Occasionally a flurry on the hill while someone put out a small spot of fire.
And all over town, on every corner, people would applaud or laugh or sigh and wait for more.
The annual Jackson Fire-In-The-Hole would have begun.
But for now David was trapped in the celebration, his chest yearning and his nerves tingling with sorrow, head swimming while he baked in his best clothes.
“Here are your ballots.” A parade official handed him a thick sheathe of papers.
“Ballots?”
“For voting on the floats.”
I should be out looking. I should be out doing something to find Samantha. Not this.
He glanced west toward the Wort Hotel, where three sheriff’s Jeeps proceeded slowly, their lights flashing, leading off the march.
How can I be still? How can I just sit here?
He sat and watched a parade go by, the way he’d sat and watched his life go by. Sat and watched, while God pried everything he held dear out of his fingers.
He’d fought so hard for so long, to atone for what he’d done. He’d fought so hard for so long, to deserve everything he’d been given.
He’d fought, and lost. He’d lost more than he’d ever known he had.
Down the street came the groomed mule team from Grand Targhee National Forest, brown beasts of burden with velvet, off-white muzzles, tied tail to nose with panniers and twisted yellow ropes. Identical forest-service mulepacks jolted with each step. In front of the reviewing stand, the muleteer shouted Yah and snapped a quirt over the lead mule’s hindquarters. The team moved in synchronized formation, their hooves clattering on the pavement, their ears loose and listening for the next command.
Miss Rodeo Wyoming passed on her black Arabian barrel-racing horse, wearing a rhinestone tiara and a sash with glitter edges. Old Murphy, the red truck with its massive Spud Drive-In papier-mâché potato, rumbled by. A canvas-covered wagon with spoke wooden wheels carried guests from the Heart-Six Dude Ranch while they perched proudly on bales of hay.
Is this how You are, God? Leaving me helpless? Setting this up to fail?
A 1932 Ford Tudor Sedan, with pearl ghost flames on its side and wide rodder wheels, revved its engine as it approached the reviewing stand. Behind it came a shiny black 1966 El Camino and a gleaming 1949 Mercury, chopped and shaved, with a Desoto grill. But David didn’t notice any of the polished front ends or the engineered chassis or the Flowmaster exhausts.
The parade marched past him in a jumble of hazy color, and all he could see was his pain.
Samantha Roche lowered her backpack to the ground with an exhausted sigh. She dropped it on the grass and stared at it. It wasn’t all that heavy, but carrying it exhausted her. She got tired all the time now, for the smallest of things, and she knew it was because of the leukemia. It made her mad. One minute she’d be fine, and the next she’d feel like she couldn’t stand up.
All she wanted to do this moment was sleep.
A man walked by with a bouquet of tiny American flags in his hand, and extracted one for her. “Here, little lady. You look like you could use something to wave.”
“Oh.” She took it from him. “Okay. Thanks.”
Its fabric was thin as parchment; she could see light through from the other side. She held it in front of her face, a limp, gauzy curl that she ought to have been pleased to have.
Only, she wasn’t pleased.
She was too tired and too uncertain and too alone to be pleased.
Sam thought of her mother, sixteen hours away and not knowing where she was. She wondered if anybody besides her mom might be looking for her. She thought of Camp Plentycoos where her counselor, Katherine Tibay, had said every morning, “Make it a great day or not. The choice is yours.”
She leaned her head against the tree trunk, closed her eyes, and felt with her fingers for the precious letter she carried there, from David Treasure.
She loved even the sound of his name.
Beside her on the grass, a father rocked backward with his baby in both hands, holding it aloft while he laid flat on the grass. He tickled the baby’s belly with the top of his fuzzy hat, the baby’s arms and legs flailing in midair with joy.
Over by the fence, a boy had just dropped chili dog down the front of his Jackson Hole T-shirt, and his dad was spit-shining his chin with a hanky.
Across the way, a dad and daughter opened the packaging on a plastic quiver of arrows and aligned one on a little plastic bow. Samantha watched as the dad showed the daughter how to cock her elbow and draw back the bow, shutting one eye and squinting down her nose to sight it.
Her whole life, as long as she’d been old enough to understand, Sam had never thought anything like that could happen to her. Having a dad to tickle her or to sight an arrow with her or to help fix things when she made a mistake.
All she wanted to do was to find him.
All she wanted was to say, “I’m glad you wanted to see me because I wanted to see you, too.”
Samantha felt a little better now, after stopping to rest. She decided she’d better get up and walk more, because walking helped her think.
She didn’t know what to do, being eight years old, when you needed to sleep over for the night and you didn’t have a place to stay.
She wandered. And looked at faces, to see if anybody looked like somebody she knew. But nobody did, and everybody was busy with their own families, as they skittered around or stepped in front of her and made her jog sideways to get out of the way.
Just when she thought she needed to sit down again, she came to a huge crowd lining a road. Just as she stood on tiptoe to see what was happening, a stranger approached, two huge hands extended toward her. She looked behind her, because she didn’t think he’d be talking to her.
There wasn’t anybody behind her.
“Just who I’m looking for,” the man said.
“I… what? Me?”
“Yeah. A pretty little girl with a flag.”
Her hopes skyrocketed. “Are you Mr. Treasure?” she asked, because her mom had taught her never to call grownups by their first names.
“No. That isn’t me.”
“Oh. I was just hoping—” She decided she ought not say any more.
“Are your parents here watching the parade?”
“Yes.” Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie because her dad could be around. “They’re here.” She pointed into the crowd at nobody. “Right over there.”
“I’m out scouting for extra kids. We’ve got a big float coming up and we’ll score better from the judges if we have a whole passel of people hanging from the sides, waving at everybody.”
“Really?”
“How’d you like to take a ride in a parade?”
“I don’t—”
He eyed the hoard of people where she’d gestured, maybe trying to figure out to which parents she belonged. “C’mon. We need you. If they’ll give you permission, there’s barbecue at the end of the run. Good food, too. Catered by Bubba’s.”
“I don’t know what they’d say.”
“Well, ask them. Tell them I’m Lester Howard, director of the community band, and they can pick you up at the rodeo grounds in an hour. That’s when we’ll be done.”
Five other kids came jumping up and raising their hands to volunteer. Because he wasn’t watching, she had her chance. She waited the right amount of time, disappeared into the milling people for three seconds, and came back to touch his wristwatch.
“They said it’s okay,” she lied to him, her voice gone soft and careful. “They said they’d pick me up later, where you said.”
“Good. That’s settled. What’s your name?”
“Sam.”
With no further ado, his huge hands wrapped around her. He lofted Samantha so high over the side of the wagon, she felt like she was flying. Next thing she knew, she was sitting on a bale of hay with a man playing a tuba right beside her head.
“Thanks for helping us out!” Lester Howard waved them off. “Oh, wait.” Out of his pockets he pulled fistfuls of hard candy and piled it into her hands. “Throw lots of candy when you see other kids! That’s the way to be the most popular float in the parade.”
“You aren’t marking your score sheet.” Edna Clements, who was sitting next to David on the grandstand, elbowed him and directed his attention to the papers in his lap. “How can you pick a winner if you aren’t giving them any points?” The muscles of Edna’s mouth were stiff with reproach.
“I don’t need to mark them,” David said, feeling ashamed. “I can remember it in my head.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you think that float from the Jackson Hole Playhouse was best? Don’t you think it should be given the award?”
“Which one?”
“The one with the player piano on it.”
“Oh. I don’t remember that one.”
Edna settled back in her seat, her face gone slack now that she’d proven her point. “That’s exactly what I thought.” She crossed her arms with pride in her lap.
David struggled to focus on the task at hand. Directly in front of them this moment paraded Deanna Banana the clown, with her big painted grin, her beautiful dark eyes and her rainbow striped hair. She walked along in long, slappy shoes, tying balloon animals without even having to watch her own hands. Whenever she finished one, she handed it out. Behind her a dog-sled team, made up of eight yipping huskies with red felt stockings on their paws, mushed against their harnesses and yanked a Volkswagen along.
“I like that one,” David said smugly to Edna. “I think it should win.”
“You think so? That one?”
“Yes.”
“All it is, is a bunch of dogs pulling a car. That’s their job. Those dogs run in Alaska in the Iditarod. No effort put forth to decorate the car or make anything festive.”
“I like them, Edna. They’re impressive.”
But even as he argued halfheartedly with Edna Clements, the sight in the street sent David reeling deeper into his uncertainty. Perhaps it was the sight of those huskies barking and straining against their fitments. All their combined effort as they followed a master’s command, and all it got them was another few inches up the road.
Over and over the dogs gathered their strength and struggled forward. Over and over they surged and rested, surged again.
David saw himself in them, the way he’d made such effort to pull himself ahead of what he’d done, to drag himself away from the wrongfulness that had for years held him back and weighted his soul. The same way that Volkswagen held back those huskies.
Lord.
Ridiculous. A grown man talking in his head to thin air. Who had he been following all these years? A figment of everybody’s imagination. Something that Nelson and the men on the presbytery committee and his own parents had said would change his life.
Well, it hadn’t.
How is it that everything everybody else seems to do with You works, Lord, and every time I try to listen to You, something else falls apart?
This moment, as he sat in a chair with his tie bound like a hangman’s noose around his neck, watching a parade going by, his faith made him feel like an outsider looking in, wiping the fog from the window, seeing everyone else inside without him.
His final shred of hope and purpose, that Braden might have been able to save Samantha, gone. Gone. With Susan’s latest phone call, even that remaining shred had been ripped away.
He felt so entirely isolated from God this moment that all his years of belief might have been a game.
I don’t want something in my life that’s empty. I don’t want this, if I’ve only been wasting my time. I don’t know if anybody really hears You, Lord, even when they say they do.
Up Broadway rolled one of the old standbys of the parade, gleaming green trucks from the Teton County Volunteer Fire Department, lights pulsing red and blue. The firemen aimed their giant water hoses skyward, and streams of water arced and rained down on the hapless people below. Behind that, still in the distance, David heard the beginning strains of the sparse but zealous Jackson Hole Community Band.
The band float was in sight by now and, behind it, the town street sweepers. The massive round brushes revolved on the pavement, with a light hiss of water, cleaning up the dropped remnants of horses and mules.
“That’s the one I’m pushing for.” He elbowed Edna. “The street sweepers get my vote every year.”
The Jackson Hole Community Band passed before them, its brassy music making people extend their arms, jump sideways, and cheer along the curb. On the rear fender, two children held spinning disco balls high, the reflection of the July sun flickering over the bystanders with light.
I am light, Beloved. In Me, there is no darkness at all.
But, Lord. There is darkness all around me.
The lone tuba oom-pahed while children from the wagon threw fistfuls of candy onto the street.
“Oh, the community band isn’t getting my vote this year,” Edna commented beside him. “I hate this song so much, if they played it at my funeral I would stand up and walk out.”
David turned away from the float and shot his neighbor a wide grin. “Edna, I doubt seriously that anyone would ever play ‘The Macarena’ at a funeral.”
“With all the new people who keep moving into this town, you never know.”
David’s attention fell to his knees. He tamped his float ballots there, fingered his pen, and made several notations. It was high time he made some decision about the parade. “I want those huskies. They’re really good.”
I am good, Beloved. My love endures forever. I am faithful through all generations.
Oh, Lord. Are You? Are You?
If you can bring good from this, Father, what could You have done with me if only I had remained faithful?
David wrote two words before he laid down his pen and looked up. Directly in front of him, an eight-year-old girl with long brown hair flying over her shoulders shyly tossed a Tootsie Roll to a tiny girl holding her father’s hand on the sidelines. Because the child on the sidelines was too little and the parade too big and the girl on the float hadn’t thrown the candy quite far enough, the father dashed out, retrieved it, and handed it over.
The girl on the float grinned with pleasure, revealing a dimple beside the left corner of her mouth and a teasing jut of her chin.
My, but she looked like…
David’s heart leapt as high as the knot in his necktie. He felt as if his breath would never come again.
The child on the float—the exact image on a poster that Braden and his friends had tacked on every telephone pole and every fence in town.
She was the exact likeness of the small school picture that had tormented him ever since Susan had opened her wallet and let him see it.
David stumbled up from his chair; his parade ballots scattered into Edna’s lap and he didn’t even notice. He tried to get around the man in the folding chair one step down from him, but it couldn’t be done. He moved sideways, crashing into John Teasley, who threw an arm sideways to keep himself from being pushed off the side of the reviewing stand.
David didn’t notice. “Sam.” Frantically, he tried the name on for size as she passed directly below him. “Sam.” The band crescendoed below him. When the child didn’t respond, he yelled louder. Louder, still. “Samantha!”
She turned toward the sound of her name. He saw her eyes searching, full on. And, he knew.
Every doubt in David Treasure’s mind fled at that moment.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized to the man in front of him who was right in his way. He fumbled and kicked and pushed, trying to get around. “I’ve got to get down from here,” he said to John Teasley as he shoved the man’s metal chair aside.
“You’re knocking me off, David. Can’t you wait until the end of the parade?”
“No, I can’t.” He almost shouted it in his frustration. “I’ve got to get down to the band.”
Sideways he went, and a chair clattered to the ground. Three steps forward, between two people where there wasn’t any room. As a final resort, he climbed over the top of somebody’s head.
“I’m sorry, sir.” A policeman on horseback cut him off. “The street sweepers are coming. No one is allowed in the road during the parade.”
“But that’s my… that’s my…” David couldn’t get it out; he was breathless from fighting his way through people and chairs. “That little girl is lost,” he gasped. “She’s my daughter.”
The officer followed David’s desperate gesture. He brought his horse around, and stared, peering from below his hat brim. “She’s that one, isn’t she?” he asked. “The one that’s all over town in all the pictures.”
“Yes.”
The officer reined in his mount. “Don’t let me hold you up. I’ll help if you’d like. Me and this horse, we can stop that float. You’d better not let that young lady out of your sight.”
David ran, catching up, falling back, catching up again, until he reached with his hand and seized the lip of the wagon. By that time, the officer had drawn to the front and the horses were slowing. David passed the pounding bass drum. He passed the trio of uplifted trumpets and the lady who tooted her piccolo.
“Sam?” he cried, gasping out her name before he’d quite gotten to her. His sweat-stained shirt had come untucked. The shoulders of his sport coat had worked their way down to his forearms as he ran. His necktie flew to one side like a sail.
She looked at him.
“Samantha?”
She’d been doling out candies to the littlest kids along the route, who looked like they weren’t big enough to get much, and wanted it most. The candy scattered to the ground when she heard him calling her name. Tootsie Rolls and Jolly Ranchers and Atomic Fireballs bounced on the pavement like pearls, crunching to pieces beneath the wagon wheels.
“Is it you?” she whispered. “David Treasure?” He could read her lips even though the music played too loud for either of them to hear.
“Are you Samantha Roche?”
She nodded.
With no hesitation, he lifted his arms up for her. “With all due respect,” he said with a good amount of reverence in his voice, “I think you’re somebody I know.”