So Brave, Young, and Handsome Read Online Free PDF Page B

her,” said Glendon, abashed. “A sailboat’s a terrible advantage—everyone knows that, I guess.”

9
    At last I commenced to cheat. I slashed my goal to 500 words a day, then 300. Some days I didn’t reach even that; when the sun was high I would stack my pages in a drawer and head downriver. Like a boy I began to hang around Glendon’s barn, sometimes trimming or steaming planks but more often sweeping up or just watching. Mainly he built two designs: an elfin peapod and the longer vessel he called the Dobie Swift. They were only rowboats, it is true, yet Glendon was a master: He never worked from a drawing but eyeballed lines and measured with a waxed thread.
    “You should ask more money for these boats,” I told him. He had confided to me his price for the Swift now under construction. He was building it for a dairy farmer whose world, I suppose, wanted a little splendor.
    “Why is that?”
    “You must be barely meeting expenses.”
    “Look at this copper, ain’t it glad?” He held up a bright sheet. It pleased Glendon to make shiny inlaid sections in the small foredeck of his Dobie Swifts. He generally shaped copper or bronze to the profile of a bird in flight—aglow with polish, they were pretty and simple as sonnets.
    “You might be able to produce more boats,” I remarked, “if you cared to take on some help.” I said this cautiously—it won’t surprise you I had begun to imagine myself in such a role. Not that I was any sort of hand with the work as yet, but it’s true the contours of Glendon’s rowboats had begun to settle and sing in my mind. I pictured sheerlines and tumblehome, rocker and lift; I woke from dreams where my handsshaped gunwales instead of sentences. Who doesn’t long for the door in the air?
    I said, again, “Did you ever think of that, Glendon? Did you ever think you might want an associate?”
    “A partner? I don’t know, Becket.” He ran the back of his hand over the hardwood keel of the upturned Swift. “Boats are a solitary enterprise, generally. They don’t care to be hurried.”

10
    “What do you think of visions, Becket?” Glendon inquired one night. He’d come to dinner preoccupied, agreed to a few hands of whist at which Redstart was almost unbearably competitive, and stayed later than usual—Susannah had left the porch and gone off to bed, freeing Glendon, I saw now, to lower his voice and ask his unsettling question.
    “Visions,” I said, my heart sinking.
    “Dreams, apparitions. Do you reckon them credible?”
    I did not tell him no. I did not say to him, Visions are a writer’s stock-in-trade but that cupboard is bare for me.
    “I keep picturing my girl Blue, on a horse, on the other side of the river.” He brightened. “Maybe it’s just my grubby conscience.”
    “What’s she doing on the horse?”
    “Trotting to and fro. I seen her several times now. She’s got a muslin dress on and my black coat over it. Horse is a little Tobiano.”
    “That’s precise, for a dream.”
    “Seems like she’s looking for a place to ford. The horse won’t cross over. She rides knee-deep into the river and looks across at the barn.” He reached in his pocket for cigarette makings and rolled one on his knee, watching me wonder what to say next. Gently he said, “You think I am simple, Becket? Think I’ve got one wheel in the sand?” He scratched a light for his cigarette—his eyes were firefly green and nearly merry.
    “You might,” I replied.
    He laughed softly. “She’s still pretty. Got a rifle in a scabbard. I ain’t sure whether she’s come to forgive me or shoot me.”
    “What do you mean to do, Glendon?”
    He shrugged. “I’m nervous she’ll get that mare to swim across, next time. Blue always knew how to talk to a horse.”
    We sat quiet while he smoked the tobacco down and stubbed it out on his boot heel. He said, “Monte, I didn’t ever ask her forgiveness. I was a stupid youngster, you understand. My reasons for leaving