“Yes,” the boy would say. “I can’t help but hear you. Get on to bed and let me sleep.”
He was no proselyter, missionary. Save for an occasional minor episode with pistols, none of which resulted fatally, he confined himself to his own blood. “Let them all go to their own benighted hell,” he said to his children. “But I’ll beat the loving God into the four of you as long as I can raise my arm.” That would be on Sunday, each Sunday when, washed and clean, the children in calico or denim, the father in his broadcloth frockcoat bulging over the pistol in his hip pocket, and the collarless plaited shirt which the oldest girl laundered each Saturday as well as the dead mother ever had, they gathered in the clean crude parlor while Burden read from the once gilt and blazoned book in that language which none of them understood. He continued to do that up to the time when his son ran away from home.
The son’s name was Nathaniel. He ran away at fourteen and did not return for sixteen years, though they heard from him twice in that time by word-of-mouth messenger. The first time was from Colorado, the second time from Old Mexico. He did not say what he was doing in either place. “He was all right when I left him,” the messenger said. This was the second messenger; it was in 1863, and the messenger was eating breakfast in the kitchen, bolting his food with decorous celerity. The three girls, the two oldest almost grown now, were serving him, standing with arrested dishes and softly open mouths in their full, coarse, clean dresses, about the crude table, the father sitting opposite the messenger across the table, his head propped on his single hand. The other arm he had lost two years ago while a member of a troop of partisan guerilla horse in the Kansas fighting, and his head and beard were grizzled now. But he was still vigorous, and his frockcoat still bulged behind over the butt of the heavy pistol. “He got into a little trouble,” the messenger said. “But he was still all right the last I heard.”
“Trouble?” the father said.
“He killed a Mexican that claimed he stole his horse. You know how them Spanish are about white men, even when they don’t kill Mexicans.” The messenger drank some coffee. “But I reckon they have to be kind of strict, with the country filling up with tenderfeet and all.—Thank you kindly,” he said, as the oldest girl slid a fresh stack of corn cakes onto his plate; “yessum, I can reach the sweetening fine.—Folks claim it wasn’t the Mexican’s horse noways. Claim the Mexican never owned no horse. But I reckon even them Spanish have got to be strict, with these Easterners already giving the West such a bad name.”
The father grunted. “I’ll be bound. If there was trouble there, I’ll be bound he was in it. You tell him,” he said violently, “if he lets them yellowbellied priests bamboozle him, I’ll shoot him myself quick as I would a Reb.”
“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. But first one thing and then another come up and I couldn’t get away to meet a minister; and then the boy came and so it wasn’t any rush anymore. But she kept on worrying, about priests and such, and so in a couple of years I heard how there was to be a white minister in Santa Fe on a certain day. So we packed up and started out and got to Santa Fe just in time to see the dust of the stage that was carrying the minister on away. So we waited there and in a couple more years we had another chance, in Texas. Only this time I got kind of mixed up with helping some Rangers that were cleaning up some kind of a mess where some folks had a deputy treed in a dance hall. So when that was over we just decided to come on home and get married right. And here we are.”
The father sat, gaunt, grizzled, and austere, beneath the lamp. He had been listening, but his expression was brooding, with a kind of violently slumbering contemplativeness and bewildered outrage. “Another damn black Burden,” he said. “Folks will think I bred to a damn slaver. And now he’s got to breed to one, too.” The son listened quietly, not even attempting to tell his father that the woman was Spanish and not Rebel. “Damn, lowbuilt black folks: low built because of the weight of the wrath of God, black because of the sin of human bondage staining their blood and flesh.” His gaze was vague, fanatical, and convinced. “But we done freed them now, both black and white alike. They’ll bleach out now. In a hundred years they will be white folks again. Then maybe we’ll let them come back into America.” He mused, smoldering, immobile. “By God,” he said suddenly, “he’s got a man’s build, anyway, for all his black look. By God, he’s going to be as big a man as his grandpappy; not a runt like his pa. For all his black dam and his black look, he will.”