Tim owed me an hour, so I left early that afternoon. Dale and Peggy were gone by then, Dale’s Chevy easing out of town north, Peggy speeding home in the cleanest station wagon in Hawk Bend. Four washes, four spin cycles, four rinses, and afterward the Leikvold wagon soared from the humid wash bay wet and gleaming.
I needed to clear my head of Dale and Peggy, so I walked uptown to the library. A regular visitor, particularly in the summers, I had not been to the library since I began work at the station. I hardly read anything anymore—certainly not my Bible.
The Hawk Bend library had white columns with swallows’ nests mudded underneath the cornices, and tall honeysuckles growing up beside a flight of sharp-edged granite steps. I liked how it looked and felt inside: the deep silence; the even rows of books on their tall shelves; the rolling ladder with a greased track above and little wheels below; the long, heavy reading tables with sturdy oak chairs; the arched windows showing dusky daylight. I could see why people went to real churches.
“Hello there, Sutton,” said Miss Verhoven. She was the tall, square-shouldered head librarian, an unmarried woman in her late fifties. Her reddish-gray hair was cut like a helmet, and her imposing desk faced the main doors. From this central position she monitored all parts of the library, ensuring that readers did not stray from their sections. Books were arranged in the Hilda Verhoven alphanumeric system: “W.21+” meant books for women twenty-one and older; “M.21+” meant books for men twenty-one and older; “B.13+” meant books for boys over thirteen; “G.13+” meant books for girls over thirteen—and so on.
“You’re looking well today, ma’am.”
“Two books maximum, Sutton,” Miss Verhoven said. “You know the rules.” Her two-book rule was ironclad.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and flashed her a smile. “You’re always ahead of me.” I tried to butter her up whenever I could. I figured she liked the attention and this was why she let me read a couple years beyond my real age—though it was possible she felt sorry for me: there was a misconception in town that kids in the Faith were denied all books but the Bible.
“No, Sutton, I just have a good memory.” She rapidly riffled through a recipe box of 3 × 5 cards. “You still have two at home.”
“You’re absolutely right, ma’am,” I said.
“Newspapers or magazines today, then, Master Sutton,” she said.
“I’m looking for something in particular,” I said. “Gangsters in the 1920s in St. Paul?”
“Gangsters.” As she thought about that, her eyes squinted and crossed slightly. “The Minneapolis Tribune is your best bet.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I keep my newspapers in the basement storeroom,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” I’d never been permitted there. The basement, yes, which was where kids’ books were housed, but never the storeroom.
“If I let you down there, you wouldn’t get them in the wrong piles?”
“No, ma’am.”
“All right then, Sutton,” she said. She rattled her drawer, removed a large iron key on a brass ring, and reluctantly handed it over.
In the basement room, dim light shone down from the filmy windows grown over with ferns, or at least their image: past rains had overflowed gutters and splashed straight onto ferns, slapping their muddy fronds against the glass, leaving dried, fossil-like patterns behind. As my eyes adjusted, before me in the gloom were the newspapers—bales of them standing in rows, like Stonehenge. Each stack was tied neatly at the top with a butterfly knot of twine. At floor level were rusty tins, set at even intervals, of mothballs, rat poison, and nitrogen fertilizer. The fertilizer drew moisture from the air and kept the papers from molding.
I chose a bundle from 1925 and began scanning headline articles. The dust made me sneeze, and I glanced guiltily toward the stairs. But only a little way into the pile—beginner’s luck—I saw the name “Kid Can Blomenfeld.” The article was about bootlegging. It included other names such as Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, “Dapper” Danny Hogan, Homer Van Meter. An editorial objected to corrupt Twin Cities police; how out-of-town criminals from Chicago and New York were welcome to hide out in St. Paul. The writer called it the “St. Paul Layover,” and its rules, he wrote, were simple:
Check in on arrival, pay off the officials, and commit no crimes within the city limits. A gangster’s Mecca, some of whom are reputed to have bought lake homes in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota to be closer to the Canadian border. Life in the north allows gangsters to escape the heat—in more ways than one!
I let out a breath. There were more articles, but I would be late to meet my mother at the station. I marked the bundle, carefully retied the twine, and hurried upstairs to daylight.
“Find what you’re looking for, Sutton?” Miss Verhoven called.
“Mostly,” I said. “Though I’m wondering if you have any Chicago Tribunes.”
She gave me a long look. “Gangsters, the Chicago Tribune —you must be curious about Mr. Blomenfeld.”
My eyes widened.
She pursed her narrow lips. “It was just a guess. He’s one of our more famous—some would say infamous—citizens. He comes here to the library with regularity.”
“The gas station, too,” I said.
“And, Sutton?” she said.
I swallowed. Lowered my voice. “I was just wondering, you know, if what they say about him is true?”
“What do they say about him, Sutton?”
I lowered my voice still further. “That he was a gangster. That he once—”
“I believe that is all true,” she said evenly.
“It is?”
“Yes. But I ask you, Sutton, how has he treated you at the station?”
“Well, fine,” I said.
“Me, too,” she said. “I’ve always found Mr. Blomenfeld to be a gentleman. He reads a lot, and takes very good care of the books he borrows. He’s become a regular patron here, and I have every reason to believe that his past is behind him.”
I was silent.
“Now, I can order those Chicago Tribunes,” Miss Verhoven said. “If you still want them.”
I thought about it for a moment or two. “I guess not.”
For the first time ever, she actually smiled at me.
“Then be on your way, Master Sutton. We’ve both got work to do.”
Coming home after work, I saw a small plume of smoke rising by the garden, by the yellow peace van, whose parachute silk glowed in sunlight. There was a perfect ring of fieldstone around a campfire. “They prefer to cook outdoors,” my mother said.
I drove past the garden. Is sat cross-legged, with back straight, and looked thoughtfully into the distance.
“I thought he was going to pull his engine today,” I said.
“He said he first needed to get his ‘psychic-terrestrial bearings,’” my mother said. At the sound of the pickup, Is looked up and gave us the peace sign.
Then Rising Moon stood up from among the thick tomato plants—and kept rising, and not one moon but two appeared: her great, bare breasts gleamed in the sunlight. She waved.
My mother made a brief croaking noise, then clamped a hand hard over my eyes. Blinded, and knowing the cattle fence and feed bunker were to my right, I steered left and sideswiped the caragana hedge. I batted away my mother’s hand and managed to steer the truck back onto the straight and narrow, and into the garage. Green stems clung to the driver’s side mirror. My mother stared at me—then began to laugh.
I could not have been more annoyed.
And she could not stop laughing.
“It’s not that funny,” I said.
After supper I went to the barn for my evening chores. Inside I saw her—Is’s older girl—at the calves’ pen, her lank long pale hair hanging down as she petted a black calf.
“Hi there,” I said.
She turned quickly. There was silence but for the thud and bump of the calves, who were hungry.
“Hi.”
“My name is Paul,” I said.
“Sorry about my mother,” she blurted. “She’s so embarrassing.” With that she hurried past me, leaving a contrail scent of fresh bath soap and shampoo, the same kind my mother used. I went to the door and watched her walk quickly across the yard to the van, where she went inside and pulled the curtains.
In the house, I said to my mother in an offhand, passing way, “The Is family has an older girl.”
“I know,” my mother said. “Janet. She’s sixteen.”
I looked at my mother. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She paused a moment. “I think it has something to do with a mother’s instincts.”
I let out an annoyed sound, and stomped back outside. It was nine o’clock now, the sun lower but still tawny yellow. My father was walking over to the peace van, so I joined him.
“Hello, friends,” Is greeted us, looking up from the campfire.
My father nodded.
“Some tea?” A copper pot hung from a tripod over the fire.
“No, thanks,” my father said.
“Sit,” Rising Moon said. She was dressed—mostly—in a long shift that had once been a man’s shirt. Her breasts moved freely as she bent to swirl the teapot.
My father looked about for something to sit on, then settled onto the ground. I followed suit.
“Tea, Paul?” Rising Moon said, offering me a handleless cup.
“Sure,” I said. The tea smelled like alfalfa and raspberries. As I held the rough pottery cup in my hand, my thumb kept reaching for a loop that did not exist. My eyes were on the van, its closed curtains.
“To the solstice!” Is said, holding up his cup to the summer sky. “Actually it’s three days until summer solstice, but the light here is most friendly.”
“Yes and no,” my father said. “The long days mean more work for farmers.”
“True,” Is replied, leaning back. Then he launched forth on the necessity to maintain harmony with the seasons and “mind time” rather than submit to the tyranny of “mechanical time,” which did not care about people but only the profits of industrial capitalism. My father glanced at me. From the rear of the van I heard rock music come on, and then the sudden crying of a baby. Rising
Moon swore sharply, unpeaceably, and went into the van. There was a brief muffled argument, then the music stopped.
“Speaking of things mechanical,” my father said to Is, “do you know the truth of what happened to your Volkswagen engine?”
Rising Moon, carrying the baby, Soybean, rejoined us at the fire.
“I have an idea,” Is said, with no change of tone. He stared, eyes closed, full into the setting sun.
“Paul can tell you,” my father said. “He saw it all.”
“No matter now. Recourse is long-term and karmic,” Is said.
“What goes around comes around!” Rising Moon added; she did not appear so forgiving.
“Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart,” Is said to her.
“Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbor, neither rob him,” Rising Moon shot back.
“Leviticus,” my father said.
“Very good,” Is said.
“Chapter 19, I believe,” my father added.
“Verse 16 or so,” Is added, still without opening his eyes.
“You know the Scriptures,” my father said. There was a new, lighter tone to his voice.
“All too well, I’m afraid,” Is replied.
My father did not respond.
The baby continued to fuss, and Rising Moon
hoisted her shirt. My father coughed briefly and politely shifted his stance away, toward Is. I didn’t. I watched the baby gurgle and suck, and I watched beyond, in the little porthole windows, for some sight of Janet. But she didn’t appear.
“How did you get the name Is,” my father asked.
“My given name was Israel Bronfman, but I changed it, legally, to Is.”
“Just Is?”
Is nodded.
“Why?”
“From a loss of faith and a secular epiphany,” Is said. “I came to believe that for the world to survive one of two things must happen. Either people must transform themselves or God must transform himself. And since God does not much manifest himself these days, then that is His sign—His implicit message—that we must change ourselves.”
“I don’t know that I’d agree with that,” my father said evenly. “I think God is manifest in many ways. The growth of seeds. A new calf. A good day of work and fellowship.”
“It’s a sentimental view of God, but all right,” Is allowed. “My main point is that people, not God, must save the world.”
My father narrowed his eyes.
“The irony, of course,” Is added, “is that to transform ourselves we must give up God and live strictly within the present—which for me, of course, is the ‘is.’”
Above us in the weakening light, some nighthawks dipped and chattered.
“This—how you live—is saving the world?” my father said, gesturing to the battered van, the shabby family.
“It’s a start,” Is said.
Rising Moon finished nursing and held the sleeping Soybean up to her shoulder.
“What about your name, Rising Moon?” my father asked.
“Throughout history, women have mainly been reflected in the light of men, but nowadays we are rising.” She looked pointedly at him.
My father stood up. “If you need help with the van, let me know. We don’t want to keep you from your journey.”