I Dreamt I Was in Heaven_The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang by Leonce Gaiter

Author:Leonce Gaiter [Gaiter, Leonce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Legba Books
Published: 2011-07-07T07:00:00+00:00

5

Rufus’ old house surprised him as he approached it. It looked smaller than he remembered. He would have sworn the wood had been less weathered, its dimensions more imposing. The big shade tree looked bare of leaves despite high summer and the chickens pecking the ground less plump and more desperate for what morsels the earth offered up. His father pulled the horse to a stop and his mother filled the open doorway. She waved courteously at him and he waved back. There was no smile on her face. Rufus realized that he wasn’t wearing one either. Looking at her, this did not feel like a homecoming. It felt like goodbye.

He jumped from the wagon and walked toward the dour woman. He walked as if he would go right through her. If he could, he would have—to feel every inch and muscle of her, to know her finally. She put her arms around him and held him tight. Her fist pounded hard on his back as she held him. Then, having mastered whatever that fist smashed down, she let him go.

“Them boys were here,” she said. “They’s gonna meet you in Okmulgee.” She started back into the house, but turned again. “They was wearin’ guns,” she added.

Rufus’ father led the horse and carriage toward the barn. Rufus watched him go, and surveyed the house, the fields, and the distant trees. He made a picture of it to hold onto as if it were a special place he had run across and wouldn’t see again. He felt lonely because he knew he didn’t belong here anymore, and had no other home. It was hard to imagine his parents without him. He couldn’t see their lives continue—their sun and moon continue to rise—without him as their fulcrum. What would they do with their days? Without him, they might be mere shadows. Neither seemed whole, not like Cherokee Bill or Henry Starr who grabbed what they wanted and captured the world’s imagination doing it. They were all about possibility. His mother and father, on the other hand, took nothing, and had nothing—except him. And now he would leave them and they would continue, less substantial, ineffectually scratching and clawing at the earth like the scrawny chickens pecking at the place. He went into the house and put a few things into an old saddlebag. He took a final look at his father’s heirlooms of loss hanging on the wall. He wondered if he belonged up there with the piece of bagpipe; or maybe his parents did—heirlooms. Maybe, he thought, his father had been mourning himself all this time. His mother passed through on her way to the stove. She paused to note the saddlebag on the floor but did not glance at her son as she continued on her way. This was her goodbye.

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