American Boy - Larry Watson [78]
I never saw Louisa Lindahl again, and as far as I know, she never returned to Willow Falls. Nor did I ever enter the Dunbar house again, not even when I came back to town after completing my education. By then that old Victorian mansion had been chopped up into apartments and offices, so its rooms would have served me well for both a residence and a clinic where I could practice medicine myself. I ended up leasing a home and an office in another part of town instead, not so much because I feared ghosts, but rather because the Dunbar house was already in need of repair.
But that afternoon when I kept watch on the Dunbar home from my hillside post, I felt as if I had saved both house and family from ruin. I was seventeen years old, the only child of a single working mother. I should have known better. There are destructive forces at loose in the world, from which neither buildings nor families can be saved.
The doctor was the first Dunbar to return that afternoon. Maybe he had a patient he had to see. And maybe he wanted to be with Louisa while they had the house to themselves. Once that big black Chrysler Imperial drove up, however, I drove away.
Dr. Dunbar left Willow Falls within a year, headed, so the story went, to Iowa to participate in a program in rural medicine sponsored by the University of Iowa. He was only supposed to be gone for a couple months, but when time passed and he didn’t return, it was said that a small town in South Dakota had extended a very attractive offer, luring Dr. Dunbar to their community, where he would head up a brand-new clinic. Maybe this story was true. But when Mrs. Dunbar left Willow Falls with the children soon after, they went in the opposite direction, to Saint Paul, where her family lived. The house was soon for sale.
Maybe the good doctor and Louisa Lindahl remained in contact and reunited in that small South Dakota town. Or maybe he discovered elsewhere a woman—or women—who would do what Mrs. Dunbar wouldn’t.
I LAST SPOKE TO JOHNNY DUNBAR on that occasion when so many people exchange final words, although they seldom know or admit it at the time.
The night of our high school commencement was blustery and unseasonably cold. As we marched out of the auditorium, the wind found us even under our black gowns. A gust ripped loose a few flakes of snow, and in that instant our graduation was not the reason the date was notable. Instead, it became the day when something rarer occurred—snow in May, and in late May at that. It was the eighth consecutive month that snow fell on Willow Falls that year.
Our after-graduation party was held in an open field north of Frenchman’s Forest. We would have built a bonfire no matter what, but we wouldn’t have huddled around it for warmth the way we had to that night. And we surely would have been drinking anyway, but we might have stayed out until dawn had it not been so cold. As it was, the heart went out of our celebration early, and kids drifted off, pairing off with boyfriends or girlfriends, or heading home to warm beds.
Johnny Dunbar and I were among the last of the class of 1963 to remain by the fire, and when it was little more than embers and choking smoke, Johnny spoke the first words he had spoken to me since that night I fled from him and his father.
He was holding a bottle of beer, and he kicked something toward the fire. Then Johnny Dunbar said, “We could have been happy.”
He said this with a look so fierce that I didn’t argue with him. I didn’t remind him that it was his father, his father and Louisa Lindahl, who had upset the balance of our lives. I didn’t mention how long it had taken the bruises on my back to fade, bruises made by his boots when he ground me into the snow. And I didn’t ask him who “we” were.
ACKNOWLEGMENTS
BIG THANKS TO EVERYONE AT MILKWEED: Ben Barnhart, Jennifer Harmening, Ethan Rutherford, Kate Strickland, Patrick Thomas, Allison Wigen, and of course Emilie Buchwald, who started it all.
A special thanks to Daniel Slager, my editor, for