Fifty yards down the highway the blue-gray sliver of Tamarack Creek comes winding into Norway Valley. When Dale’s car rolled across the rusting little metal bridge, the bridge said, This is it!, and the casually but expensively dressed man in the passenger seat, who looked as though all he knew of farmland had been learned through the windows next to first-class seats on transcontinental flights and in fact was incapable of telling wheat from hay, felt his heart shiver. On the other side of the bridge, a road sign read NORWAY VALLEY ROAD.
“This is it,” said Dale, and made the right turn into the valley. Our friend covered his mouth with his hand, stifling whatever sounds his shivering heart might cause him to utter.
Here and there, wildflowers bloomed and nodded on the roadside, some of them audacious and bright, others half-hidden in a blanket of vibrant green. “Driving up this road always makes me feel good,” Dale said.
“No wonder,” our friend managed to say.
Most of what Dale said failed to penetrate the whirlwind of emotion roaring through his passenger’s mind and body. That’s the old Lund farm—cousins of my mother. The one-room schoolhouse where my great-grandmother taught used to be right over there, only they tore it down way back. This here is Duane Updahl’s place, he’s no relation, thank goodness. Buzz blur mumble. Blur mumble buzz. They once again drove over Tamarack Creek, its glittering blue-gray water laughing and calling out, Here we are! Around a bend in the road they went, and a wealth of luxuriant wildflowers leaned carousing toward the car. In their midst, the blind, attentive faces of tiger lilies tilted to meet our friend’s face. A ripple of feeling distinct from the whirlwind, quieter but no less potent, brought dazzled tears to the surface of his eyes.
Tiger lilies, why? Tiger lilies meant nothing to him. He used the pretense of a yawn to wipe his eyes and hoped that Dale had not noticed.
“Here we are,” Dale said, having noticed or not, and swerved into a long, overgrown drive, hedged with wildflowers and tall grasses, which appeared to lead nowhere except into a great expanse of meadow and banks of waist-high flowers. Beyond the meadow, striped fields sloped upward to the wooded hillside. “You’ll see my dad’s old place in a second. The meadow goes with the house, and my cousins Randy and Kent own the field.”
Our friend could not see the white two-story farmhouse that stands at the end of the last curve of the drive until the moment Dale Gilbertson swung halfway into the curve, and he did not speak until Dale had pulled up in front of the house, switched off the engine, and both men had left the car. Here was “the nice little place,” sturdy, newly painted, lovingly maintained, modest yet beautiful in its proportions, removed from the road, removed from the world, at the edge of a green and yellow meadow profuse with flowers.
“My God, Dale,” he said, “it’s perfection.”
Here we will find our former traveling companion, who in his own boyhood knew a boy named Richard Sloat and, once, too briefly, knew yet another whose name was, simply, Wolf. In this sturdy, comely, removed white farmhouse we will find our old friend, who once in his boyhood journeyed cross-country from ocean to ocean in pursuit of a certain crucial thing, a necessary object, a great talisman, and who, despite horrendous obstacles and fearful perils, succeeded in finding the object of his search and used it wisely and well. Who, we could say, accomplished a number of miracles, heroically. And who remembers none of this. Here, making breakfast for himself in his kitchen while listening to George Rathbun on KDCU, we at last find the former Los Angeles County lieutenant of police, Homicide Division, Jack Sawyer.
Our Jack. Jacky-boy, as his mother, the late Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, used to say.
He had followed Dale through the empty house, upstairs and down, into the basement, dutifully admiring the new furnace and water heater Gilbertson had installed the year before his father’s death, the quality of the repairs he had made since then, the shining grain of the wooden floors, the thickness of the insulation in the attic, the solidity of the windows, the many craftsmanlike touches that met his eye.
“Yeah, I did a lot of work on the place,” Dale told him. “It was pretty shipshape to begin with, but I like working with my hands. After a while it turned into sort of a hobby. Whenever I had a couple of hours free, weekends and such, I got in the habit of driving over here and puttering around. I don’t know, maybe it helped me feel like I was staying in touch with my dad. He was a really good guy, my dad. He wanted me to be a farmer, but when I said I was thinking of getting into law enforcement, he supported me straight down the line. Know what he said? ‘Go into farming halfhearted, it’ll kick you in the tail sunrise to sundown. You’d wind up feeling no better than a mule. Your mom and I didn’t bring you into this world to turn you into a mule.’ ”
“What did she think?” Jack had asked.
“My mom came from a long line of farmers,” Dale had said. “She thought I might find out that being a mule wasn’t so bad after all. By the time she passed away, which was four years before my dad, she’d gotten used to my being a cop. Let’s go out the kitchen door and take a gander at the meadow, okay?”
While they were standing outside and taking their gander, Jack had asked Dale how much he wanted for the house. Dale, who had been waiting for this question, had knocked five thousand off the most he and Sarah had ever thought he could get. Who was he kidding? Dale had wanted Jack Sawyer to buy the house where he had grown up—he’d wanted Jack to live near him for at least a couple of weeks during the year. And if Jack did not buy the place, no one else would.
“Are you serious?” Jack had asked.
More dismayed than he wished to admit, Dale had said, “Sounds like a fair deal to me.”
“It isn’t fair to you,” Jack had said. “I’m not going to let you give this place away just because you like me. Raise the asking price, or I walk.”
“You big-city hotshots sure know how to negotiate. All right, make it three thousand more.”
“Five,” Jack said. “Or I’m outta here.”
“Done. But you’re breaking my heart.”
“I hope this is the last time I buy property off one of you low-down Norwegians,” Jack said.
He had purchased the house long-distance, sending a down payment from L.A., exchanging signatures by fax, no mortgage, cash up front. Whatever Jack Sawyer’s background might have been, Dale had thought, it was a lot wealthier than the usual police officer’s. Some weeks later, Jack had reappeared at the center of a self-created tornado, arranging for the telephone to be connected and the electricity billed in his name, scooping up what looked like half the contents of Roy’s Store, zipping off to Arden and La Riviere to buy a new bed, linens, tableware, cast-iron pots and pans and a set of French knives, a compact microwave and a giant television, and a stack of sound equipment so sleek, black, and resplendent that Dale, who had been invited over for a companionable drink, figured it must have cost more than his own annual salary. Much else, besides, had Jack reeled in, some of the much else consisting of items Dale had been surprised to learn could be obtained in French County, Wisconsin. Why would anyone need a sixty-five-dollar corkscrew called a WineMaster? Who was this guy, what kind of family had produced him?
He’d noticed a bag bearing an unfamiliar logo filled with compact discs—at fifteen, sixteen dollars a pop, he was looking at a couple hundred dollars’ worth of CDs. Whatever else might have been true of Jack Sawyer, he was into music in a big way. Curious, Dale bent down, pulled out a handful of jewel boxes, and regarded images of people, generally black, generally with instruments pressed to or in their mouths. Clifford Brown, Lester Young, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Desmond. “I never heard of these guys,” he said. “What is this, jazz, I guess?”
“You guess right,” Jack said. “Could I ask you to help me move furniture around and hang pictures, stuff like that, in a month or two? I’m going to have a lot of stuff shipped here.”
“Anytime.” A splendid idea bloomed in Dale’s mind. “Hey, you have to meet my uncle Henry! He’s even a neighbor of yours, lives about a quarter mile down the road. He was married to my aunt Rhoda, my father’s sister, who died three years ago. Henry’s like an encyclopedia of weird music.”