by KT Sparks
Make me no grave within that quiet place
Where friends shall sadly view the …
Reverb sliced through Knibbs’s words. Test, test, no grave, ma ma ma make me, more reverb. Martin turned to the stage dwarfing the other end of the cemetery. He couldn’t make out the speaker, dressed all in black, erect among three slouching sound engineers, but Martin guessed it was Wyatt Wendt. A professional, that’s what he was. Doing his own pre-show check. Had anyone told him that “Make Me No Grave” may no longer be the best selection?
Martin tramped back around the hollow plot, avoiding bouquets of Asiatic lilies, blue delphinium, and Western sunflowers, many tied with sashes bearing Hero’s name or likeness. He headed to the parking lot and staging area for the processional. Maybe he had time to catch Julie, whom he had left with the caisson driver, a man who moonlighted as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and looked it. They were hooking Helen’s trailer to the horse-drawn hearse. If Martin could find Julie, they could just take the sleeping horse straight to Mustang Manor. Fuck the funeral. Fuck Elko and NPR and PBS and especially Lina. Because even if she hadn’t remembered about the grave on Thursday night, she must have remembered after, and yet no mention in the texts and emails she had bombarded him with since. She knew, of course she knew, and she was going to let him go through with it anyway. What was another dead Hero to her? Well, he wouldn’t. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. He wouldn’t go back to Pierre either. He would just keep heading west, hitch a ride with Lattner and Baby as far as they’d take him. Go to California. Go to Hollywood. Open a winery, learn yoga, eat sprouts. Forget cowboy poetry, forget Beaufort, forget Ginger. Reinvent the dream.
Martin caught sight of a Bobcat puttering toward a shed. He waved at the driver, diverted toward him.
“You dig that grave?” Martin yelled, gesturing widely.
The driver shut off the engine. “I dig all the graves.”
“The big one, with the ramp into it. Did you dig that one? Who told you to?” said Martin.
“Crazy people,” the man spat. “A bunch of crazy people with cameras.”
Martin continued at a fast walk to the parking lot. The red Mustang coupe was parked off to one side. Lattner stood next to it, a hand on Vess’s shoulder. Baby leaned on the driver side door, her head thrown back, a cigarette pointing toward the peaking sun.
Martin looked at his Seiko. 11:38. Kickoff was at noon. In the distance, Wyatt Wendt finished the poem.
And I shall find brave comrades on the way:
None shall be lonely in adventuring,
For each a chosen task to round the day,
New glories to amaze, new songs to sing.
Loud swells the wind along the mountain-side,
High burns the sun, unfettered swings the sea,
Clear gleam the trails whereon the vanished ride,
Life calls to life: then make no grave for me!
Martin jogged toward the caisson, passing Marilou Perkins juggling flaming batons at the front of the slowly forming processional, a program change that probably explained the grave. New glories to amaze, new songs to sing. For most of his life, until this year—in truth until the last couple of days—he had held onto to that. That promise, of cowboy poetry. And damn it, damn it. He would not let it go now.
Life calls to life. Life calls to life.
“Hang on, Helen, I’m coming,” Martin bleated.
He ratcheted up to a run. The caisson was twenty feet ahead. The Percheron stood stolid in its harness. The cart, which would normally hold a casket, was empty but for a wilting bunch of roses. Lee’s trailer was hitched behind it. Julie’s truck was gone.
Also missing, Honest Abe. Martin wheeled around the back of the trailer, assuming the driver was on the other side. He slowed only a second to check Helen, who was snug in the slings, dead asleep. Dead asleep but breathing audibly. What a shitty plan this all had been.
Martin caught sight of the driver’s stovepipe hat bobbing along a tree line on a lot across the access road from Elko’s main drag. He blessed PBS and NPR for being too cheap to provide porta potties for the performers.
He climbed up onto the bench and picked up the reins. One snap, then two. The leather thwacked on the horse’s gleaming haunches. It turned its head, blinked its cyclopean eye, and farted. Again, Martin thwacked and again the horse did not move. He felt tears well up. The Percheron shuddered from shoulder to tail, clanking its halter and rigging.
11:52. Lina was running toward Vess, who had returned to the Mustang and was sharing the cigarette with Baby. A woman with a handheld video camera ambled by, swooping the lens up to the sky, then back toward the processional. A balding man in Bermuda shorts and a down-filled vest barked unintelligible instructions into a bullhorn. Marilou Perkins and her soaring sticks of fire high-stepped forward a few paces.
Martin leaned over his knees, hands on his thighs, and gasped for air. The Red Lion was just a half-mile up Main Street. He could see its blinking sign from the caisson perch. If he could just get Helen back there, before the death march began.
“Move, move, please move,” he sobbed. He thrashed the reins every which way until they flew from his grip and fell onto the Percheron’s immobile ass.
Martin should have figured that, in the end, it would all come down to horses. Two live ones, as it happens, and he might be forgiven for not foreseeing that twist. But those stinking, twitching beasts. Those most idiotic of large mammals. They transform him now to the cowboy poet he was born to be. He doesn’t rescue the schoolmarm from the flaming ranch house. He doesn’t repel the ravenous coyote. Or defeat the rustlers or outrun the dust storm or count in the herd at the end of the trail. He saves a drugged kill-pen mustang from being buried alive by driving her in a Percheron-led hearse to a casino parking lot. You get what you get, a young Dottie Oliphant used to say, long before she devoted her life to getting what she did not have. You get what you go for, Julie will say later, when she tells the story at her and Lee’s wedding breakfast. You get what you need, Mick Jagger promises on classic rock stations pretty much every day of the year. And, as Martin realizes as he stares down at the unmoving back of the draft horse, sometimes you get it all at once: who you are, what you have to do, and where to go from here.
Martin sucked his lungs full of dusty air. He dragged from his hippocampus the twenty or thirty minutes of non-crisis-laced instruction he had received at Anyone Can Ride! and on the back of Zach. And, without another thought, he coiled, sprang, landed on the draft horse’s broad back, and hit the animal’s sides with a kick that, he took only a second to note, could not have been executed by a less substantial man. By a less substantial cowboy poet.
The horse, the cart, and the trailer jerked once, then rolled steadily toward the road.
12:37 p.m.
Julie dropped Martin at the front door of the convention center and waved. He watched the back of the trailer pull out of the roundabout, Helen’s heavy head visible, swaying in its straps. Julie would stay with the mare until she woke up, then turn her over to Mustang Manor.
Martin pushed through the doors, paused in front of the Elko High School bake sale table, and checked his reflection in the side of the stainless steel coffee urn. He straightened his bolo tie. There was nothing to be done about his black shirt, which had lost three buttons in the front, or his jeans, which had split along his inseam to his right knee. He entered the mostly empty hall and headed for the Cedar Room.
He brushed by the volunteer manning the door. Beaufort stood at the podium, gnarled hands grasping it at both sides. He looked up at Martin and smiled.
“Well, our first performer has made it after all. Martin Oliphant is a talented young man I had the opportunity to work with thirty years ago on the Giles family ranch in Wickenberg, Arizona. I don’t know where he’s been since, and I don’t suppose it matters all that much. We’re just happy to
have him back.”
Martin walked down the center aisle and climbed onto the stage. He stopped at the podium to hug Beaufort and help him to his seat. Then he stood dead center on the platform.
Lattner and Baby were on their feet in the back. Lattner flashed a thumbs-up and Baby waved a small Canadian flag. About halfway through the full house, J.T. McJunkin sat next Glenn Mayfield, J.T. with his arms loose at his side, Glenn clutching his fiddle, both with open faces turned to the stage. In the front row, Caitlyn perched ramrod straight next to her father. “Go, Martin,” she hooted, then clapped her tiny hand over her mouth and popped her eyes wide. On the other side of the aisle, Ginger grinned and held hands with the balding man to her right.
Martin bowed his head for a moment and said a wordless prayer. Wordless because he did not have the words for this moment. Wordless because he did not need them. He began:
Through progress of the railroads,
our occupation’s gone;
we’ll get our ideas into words,
our words into a song.
First comes the cowboy—
he’s the spirit of the West;
of all the pioneers I claim
the cowboys are the best.
We’ll miss him in the round-up,
it’s gone, his merry shout,
the cowboy has left the country,
his campfire has gone out.
Martin took a breath, unzipped his fly, dropped his jeans, and moved on to the second stanza.
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks go out to the following people and institutions:
Regal House Publishing, editor-in-chief Jaynie Royal, and managing editor Pam Van Dyk, who took a chance on a weird story then worked tirelessly to get it to readers in its best form.
Kathy Daneman, a master publicist, who has tackled this project with heart, drive, and so many brilliant ideas.
The Western Folk Life Center, who labor so diligently to preserve and promote the work of the real cowboy poets and put on the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering each January in Elko, Nevada.
The Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry, whose site, cowboypoetry.com, makes public an encyclopedic record of cowboy poetry and poets, both classic and modern.
Fred Veil, executive director of the Sharlot Hall Historical Society, who figured out how to get me permission to use a stanza of Hall’s poem “Beyond the Range,” and cowboy poet Shadd Piehl, who let me open the novel with my favorite cowboy poem, his “Sweetheart of the Rodeo.”
Rainbow Trout Ranch, a dude ranch as magical as Jimmy Sneedle’s is cynical, and especially c0-owner (along with the rest of the Van Berkum family) Jane Van Berkum, whose spirit, love of horses, and endless enthusiasm were the inspiration for Ginger’s appealing personality. My family has vacationed at RTR for twenty years, and without exception, we are all in love with Jane.
The James River Writers, and especially Katharine Herndon and Phillip Hilliker, who awarded Four Dead Horses first prize in its Best Unpublished Novel Contest, which led to an excerpt published in the Richmond Times, a generous sponsor of the contest and Virginia arts in general, and an introduction to contest judge and master thriller author Brad Parks, an early and consistent supporter of the book.
The magazines and journals that accepted my short work and gave me hope and the motivation to keep writing something longer—in particular WhiskeyPaper and its editor, the effervescent author Leesa Cross-Smith, who published the first thing I ever had published; Jersey Devil Press, which ran the short story that introduced the character of Martin; and Jellyfish Review, Pank, and the Kenyon Review, whose editors I hope realize how much their kind and generous attention meant to a novice writer like me.
The Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop and legendary author Pinckney Benedict, who convinced me both that Martin was a character worthy of a novel and that I needed to go to the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University in Charlotte to learn how to write it.
The Queens MFA program instructors who read chapters, sections, and entireties of early drafts, constantly pushing me to make them better: Pinckney Benedict (again), David Payne, Dana Spiotta, Myla Goldberg, and Fred Leebron. Myla, my thesis advisor, in particular provided characteristically honest, detailed, and insightful direction.
My workshop mates Shawn Miklaucic, Walker Smart, and Milo Silver along with workshop leader Fred Leebron, who helped me start the novel.
Fellow Queenies Hannah Cohen, Robert McCready, Pam Van Dyk, Alan Bell, Jay Hefron, and Eddie Ackerman, who were always there with advice and encouragement.
Author and teacher BK Loren, who led the Taos Writers’ Conference seminar that workshopped the first draft of the novel. BK led me through a complete and vital restructuring of the book then and has remained since then a steadfast supporter, vigilant editor, and dear friend. I will always be in awe of her immense talent and her fierce advocacy for (and insistence on) the well-written word.
Author and professor CJ Hauser, who has been with me and Martin, cheering and collaborating, from the first word of the first story, through every draft, and on into the launch. CJ believed in this book long before I did, and without her energy, friendship, and advice, it would not have happened. Not to mention, she gave the book its title.
My beloved family, who have offered unflagging support and reassurance, no matter what they thought (and kindly kept to themselves) about my career-shift from paid work to novelist: Jeff Telgarsky, Jack and Ann Sparks, Brenton Auclair, Austin and Liz Auclair, Vanessa and Max Grenader, Fredda Sparks, Will Root and Vivian Telgarsky, and Nick Auclair. Jeff, Jack (who is not Frank), Max, Fredda (aka Mom), Viv, and Nick all read and commented on drafts. Viv and Will designed and maintain my website, which, as a result, is much more stylish than I. Mom brought her clear editor’s eye to several versions of the book, as she has for most of my writing for most of my life.
And in the end, Viv and Nick, I am forever grateful to and for the both of you. You are my home and heart, and all of it, always, is for you.
