by Jon Billman
One evening a group of church elders paid a visit to Joe—vigilantes in slacks. Beth shooed the kids outside and served the men lime Kool-Aid and brownies while I lay on my down sleeping bag in his trailer and read sporting magazines. In nervous mixed metaphors and confusing analogies, Joe told the deacons that he was making progress with me, that it’s tough to teach a wayward sheep new tricks, that a slick-brand cow can’t be registered overnight.
“Your effort with Mr. Beers is very noble,” said a gaunt man in a bolo tie and a golf shirt, “but perhaps there are times when one simply can’t make chicken salad from chicken droppings.”
“Look,” Joe said, “every time I drive down to the Ben Franklin for a quart of oil, I miss seeing that elk. But the beauty about this land is that you aren’t prosecuted until proven guilty.” He was almost pleading.
“Who shall be prosecuted in the court of the Lord?” said the bishop.
“He’s right,” Beth said in a guttural voice when the mob left. “What are you trying to do, get us excommunicated?”
I traded like Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Jeremiah Johnson. I swapped skis for meat. I swapped skis for fruits and vegetables. I swapped bronze park art for chain saws and skis. I swapped skis for mountain bikes and a kayak. I swapped a canoe for fishing rods and rifles. I swapped rifles for televisions. I swapped an old pedal sewing machine for an antique button accordion I couldn’t play very well. It had been about three years since I’d moved to Hams Fork. Business was good. I swapped televisions, rifles, and skis for cash at one of the few pawnshops in Salt Lake City I could trust.
Joe often gets laid off from his pipe-fitting job for weeks at a time. He fishes. He skis. He hunts. He creates sculptures in the stout log workshop he built from old telephone poles. Joe winces a little whenever I call his creations art.
I tell Joe the two of us are the last of the frontiersmen. “We’re tougher than two-dollar steaks,” I say. Joe makes his own snow-shoes. I was convinced if I didn’t give him new skis every year, Joe would whittle them himself out of a green ash log. He is that much the craftsman.
It’s tradition. On the eve of the first of November of every fall, Joe invites me over for birthday cake. “I’m putting on my winter fat,” he says, something wild in his cheek. “Like an old bear.”
“I’m getting a little thick under the chin myself,” I reply. “But I sure as hell could use a slice of birthday cake.”
“Well, it won’t be from scratch. It’s a mix from a friggin’ box.”
Joe sings old songs with titles like “Joe’s Got a Head Like a Ping-Pong Ball.” He will not eat pork and certain seafood because it says not to in the Old Testament. He won’t eat bear because a bear without its hide looks human, the way the muscles and fat are stretched and layered. Just about everything else, Joe eats.
After chocolate cake, I excuse myself and go out to the trailer for Joe’s birthday present. Back inside the house I hand the gift to my friend. Tears well up behind Joe’s eyes and he says, “Aw, fetch, new skis.” A year ago, as well as skis, I had given Joe a pair of hand-tooled cognac calfskin Paul Bond cowboy boots with cricket-killer toes and a Rocky Mountain elk stitched into the stovepipe shaft. Not once has Joe ever asked me where I got anything.
To Beth, I give expensive appliances she would not otherwise have—a commercial mixer, a nearly new microwave. In the spirit of the season, it is not her place to ask if the gifts were stolen. She has to accept them, which she does. To the kids I give shiny newish pocketknives, compasses, many watches.
The kids clear the table of paper birthday plates and someone pops in an eight-track tape of Freddy Fender or Roger Miller or Abba, and the entire family and myself hop and flail our arms about until after midnight in the little living room that smells like deerhide, used socks, rough-cut pine, and old maps. It is Hams Forks only celebration of winter, only snow dance.
Joe is six three, over two twenty, and quite a little more in the wintertime. I am shorter, and thick like a fighter. I’m not as graceful on skis, but I ski hard and fast.
Working all night most nights, I sleep until midafternoon. I wake, fix coffee, and make the blue trout tattoo on my bicep jump and dance for the smaller kids, who circle me. In the evenings after work, Joe, myself, and the kids ski Sarpy Ridge and Green Hill, above the Hams Fork valley. They like to climb to the top, take a quick look at the town between their skis, and try to glide their way down, slaloming between the sagebrush, crashing often in the rocks. They hit patches of granite and gravel. “I hit a big flootin’ rock and took a chunk out of my bottoms!” Joe yells to the wind. “Get out the p-tex candle.”
“I bet you have another birthday coming up,” I tell him. Between the two of us, we own a virtual quiver of skis.
Joe and I and the kids will sometimes hike all day, to the tops of the small mountains north of town, and ski the best snow, the powder between the thick groves of pine trees. We wear wool army pants and baggy sweaters, wool Andean mountain caps, and clouded green glacier glasses. We crash through branches and the sound is like bull elk charging through the timber.
We sometimes ski by moonlight the twenty cross-country miles to Cokeville on nights so clear and cold that water bottles freeze solid and it is too painful to stop long enough to eat the peanut-butter-and-serviceberry-jelly sandwiches or the hunk of venison salami we carry on our backs.
But Sunday is His day, Gods day. The family goes to service in the morning, visiting members of the congregation in the afternoon, and are back in evening service before sundown. Joe cannot ski on Sundays. I try to tempt him, but Beth only glares at us both like heaven will thaw before her husband plays on the Sabbath.
On Sunday nights, after the churchgoers begin bedding down, I often stop by to tell him how things were. “The powder was a foot deep if it was an inch,” I tell my friend. Each Sunday it gets better and better.
Joe looks at the ceiling, then down at his new Paul Bond boots. “Aw, fetch!”
Some Sunday nights I bring Joe a newer thermos or a shiny pair of poles without bends and scratches in them.
Beth began ordering subscriptions to the Hams Fork Gazette and the Diamondville Camera. The Casper Star-Tribune and the Logan Herald Journal. She clipped stories about the regular statue heists and photos of vacant concrete pedestals; where bronze beasts and heroes used to stand, there were only sheared bolts and cables. Police sketches of a suspect that looked not unlike me. She kept the clippings tucked inside the Hams Fork phone book, and whenever Joe went to make a call, stories floated to the floor like December aspen leaves. When I came in to borrow the phone, I made sure I put Beth’s clipped articles back between the pages.
We hunt the old way. In the dark of early morning we load the dogs and family into whichever of the three old Scouts is running and drive as far north as Sawmill Road is plowed. Everyone straps on cross-country skis and we ski for half a day into the deepest country. We talk and laugh and sing hymns and folk songs. Beth hands out jerky, bushel-bargain oranges, and off-brand candy bars. Joe’s big baritone leads the singing:
Oh, we’ll shoot the Buffalo,
Yes, we’ll shoot the Buffalo,
And we’ll rally round the cane-brake
And shoot the Buffalo.
The day we shot the big cow was a fine one, bright and sharply cold due to the high-pressure system that splits the clouds here most winter days, leaving us in a barrel of fresh sunshine. We tow pulks made of bright plastic children’s sleds with thermoses of hot chocolate and army-surplus wool blankets—the smallest kids wrapped in them—and meat saws and licorice and egg-salad sandwiches on week-old bread. The older kids pull their own sleds. Everyone sings.
Oh, the hawky shot the buzzard.
And the buzzard shot the crow,
And we’ll rally round the cane-brake
And shoot the Buffalo.
The dogs howl from joy and the cool air fills with dogs and laughter. We ski hard, fueled by the fat our bodies have stored for winter. The mor
ning is distinct, definite, like the day’s first cup of coffee or that very first sip of cold beer in the evening after a long day of thrashing around in the Wyoming outback.
Last fall had been wet and warm and the grasses still poked well above the snow and the big elk were slow to come down into the lower mid-range country. We planned to meet the elk halfway, near Electric Peak. That country was difficult to get to in the wintertime, even with a snow machine, due to a tricky system of stream crossings and closed Forest Service roads.
The kids sang softly as they gathered sticks for a noontime fire.
Oh, the Buffalo will die,
For we shot him in the eye,
And we’ll rally round the cane-brake
And shoot the Buffalo.
“Dad, what’s a cane-brake?”
“The reeds around a stock pond, son.” Joe unsheathed the black powder rifle I’d given him two Christmases ago. It’s an in-line .54-caliber Buckhunter with a cutaway bridge, black fiberglass stock, and an eight-power scope. From three hundred yards it could put a hole in an elephant big enough to throw a cat through.
I shoot an old Sharps .50-caliber buffalo gun I’d swapped for a pair of skis. The gun isn’t worth eight eggs for accuracy. But the shoulder kick and the smell of the barrel bluing and the walnut stock and the hot brass shells take me back to the plainsman I was in a former life and I am happy for the sport it puts into the hunt.
When I get ready to fire the Sharps, Joe does his best to count and account for all his kids and his wife and dogs, rounding them up and behind me and my frontier cannon. When we’re looking to fill the freezer, we stick with the fiberglass Buckhunter and the eight-power scope.
We saw jackrabbits. We saw many hawks. Sparrows. A bull moose (neither of us had drawn moose tags that year). Coyote tracks. Fox tracks. But not elk. We tracked around the Electric Peak country, up Turkey Creek and Prospect Canyon. We’d leaned against our ski poles and were chewing and spitting little pieces of licorice in the snow when one of the towheads said, “Look! Up on that knob.”
We glanced up. Joe said, “Well, Holy Abel.” Two hundred yards in front of the hunting party was God’s symbol of plenty: a milky-white shorthorn beef heifer that weighed no less than twelve hundred pounds.
Joe glassed the bovine through his binoculars. “She’s a ways from home,” he said. “She’s wearin’ the Broken Antler brand. The Broken Antler. That up around LaBarge?”
“I do believe,” I said. It was getting on toward late afternoon and still no elk. “You in the mood for beef?”
Beth called out, “Joseph Levi Jackman!” It was all she said, eyes wide as Susan B. Anthony dollars.
“It’s good meat,” Joe reasoned, not looking at his wife. He chewed at his lip and thought. The pipe fitter’s shaggy mustache was iced with respiration. Hot breath blew from his nostrils like cigarette smoke. He looked at me. I reached out and Joe unslung the Buckmaster and gave it to me. “You gonna shoot that white elk?” whispered one of the smaller kids.
“This is a McDonald’s elk,” I said, greasing a patch, tucking it under the lead ball and ramming it home. I pulled the bolt and thumbed a percussion cap into the breech, then, still mounted on my skis, sighted for the beef heart.
Bloooom! The recoil slid me back a few inches, but the heifer just stood there, still chewing her cud.
I must have missed, I reasoned. I stood staring, not blinking, and the afternoon sunshine on the animal made it appear warm, golden. “Joe Jackman, my friend,” I said, “I just ask that you don’t tell anyone I missed a standing cow.”
I started reloading. Beth glared, re-sized-up the net worth of the man she had married and the outlaw he had befriended.
“Wait,” said Joe. He squinted his eyes and his temples wrinkled and twitched as he birthed thoughts that seemed to come as hard and complex as gasoline wrung from coal. For a moment, as we all watched our father, husband, and friend, the wind quit blowing, the birds quit singing, and no jet planes passed overhead. “He maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat.”
Then, “Get the saws, kids! No sense in wasting a dead cow.” The heifer’s legs buckled and the meat of her dropped to the snow.
The moon was high overhead and the night cold had landed hard under Electric Peak by the time we got the game skinned and butchered and the cuts papered and packed accordingly in everyone’s sleds. Joe took Beth aside and whispered to her until her face slackened. Holding Beth’s hand, Joe led a prayer, thanking the Lord for the day’s quarry, the fatted cow, and the opportunity to be where we were.
The moonlight was enough that we did not need headlamps. We sang the way home, the way we did after every successful hunt:
Oh, the Buffalo is dead,
For we shot him in the head,
And well rally round the cane-brake
And shoot the Buffalo.
At the Jackman house the sleepy kids worked from rote to put their equipment away and store the packaged kill in the old International Harvester freezers. We heard Beth say “Oh oh” and Joe walked to the pantry; stepped inside, and let fly with a “Fuck!” that echoed off the trailer walls like the report of a Sharps in a box canyon.
Eyes stayed wide as his wife hollered his full Christian name for the second time in twenty-four hours, and for a moment you could hear the collective quiet of the whole Wyoming early morning. “Forgive me,” he said. “Fetch! They ate my boots!”
Joe posted an offspring with an air rifle at the pantry door, ready to fire upon the little outlaws who ate the Paul Bond elk-embroidered boots. “I’ll get em, Dad.”
The night herders traded two-hour shifts until time for church, which I promised to attend in order to give thanks for the prosperous hunt. I was out of my trailer in time for breakfast—pancakes and eggs. Beth was silent. A Jackman held out two field mice the size of balloon animals by their tails, BB-shot through the hearts.
“Remember, Dad,” said a daughter, “that time a mouse chewed his way through the plastic lid on your can of peanuts and he ate so much he was too fat to fit back out the hole, and when you went to open the can he was still sitting in there eating peanuts like tomorrow wouldn’t come?”
Beth cooked the beef for dinner, pushing it around in the cast-iron skillets and smelling it, curiously. At the dinner table, Joe blessed the meal. “Heavenly father, for it says in Joel that ye shall eat plenty and be satisfied, and praise you, the Lord our God, who hath dealt wondrously with us: His people shall never be ashamed. Amen.” The steak was tender and the tame taste of beef was such a delicacy to everyone that they ate everything, gristle and all, even Beth, who studied each piece before she put a bite in her mouth. I told a story about the worst steak I had ever eaten—a desert steer out of Vernal, Utah—and the cut was tough as the sole of an old ski boot.
Beth grew more talkative with each mouthful. We laughed about the time I had brought over a basket of Maine lobsters Id done some swapping for in Rock Springs. Joe had leaned against me and whispered, “What’s it say in Lamentations about eating these buggers?” I shook my head and told him I didn’t know. The passel of kids stood gawking at the lobsters as they screamed and knocked against the sides of the big stockpot of boiling salt water.
“This beef beats everything,” Joe said. “I’ve never felt so satisfied.”
When every cooked scrap of beef was gone and the children lay sprawled out on the floor, bellies full, eyes drooping, we talked about Frederic Remington’s fine bronze Coming Through the Rye. Joe pulled a book from the shelf with a picture of the bronze and Beth watched us lean our heads over the picture to study it. “They aren’t young,” I said. “The riders are gristly and rough, but not young, getting older, putting on just a hint more fat each season. But alive as all hell.” I leaned back in my chair so I could look at Joe as we talked. I liked to watch him process what I said. It was almost as if I could see the mechanics of his brain working in his eyes.
“What’s apparent in the wild
glints in their sculpted eyes is that it isn’t over. It’s a race for discovery. They’re riding out of their present, pistols blaring, and toward something as wild and new and beautiful as their past.”
“You wouldn’t steal that museum statue now, would ya?” Joe joked. Beth cleared her throat from behind a pile of dishes at the kitchen sink.
I told Joe Jackman he should branch out, expand his work. “Think about what you could do with wax and molds.” There was a rare moment of complete silence. “I’m fixin’ for high ridin’. I’m off to see the elephant.”
“The what? Where’s that?”
“Black Hills. I hear that Costner fella has an artistic herd of American bison up there at his new casino, and I’d like to have me a look at them. I’m feeling the need to do some traveling.”
“Back soon?”
“Not before things cool down again. Summer I expect. And if the Apocalypse comes, and the skies fill with smoke and the horizon glows with fire, just think of all the beer we can brew with that cache of wheat. I’ll send you a postcard.” Beth winced just a little as she sat back at the table with us, but her face smoothed and her frown was replaced with a slight smile. Me, working a piece of gristle in my cheek, I winked and said I knew where Joe could come by a river of bronze.
“Joe …” Beth started, but Joe wasn’t listening to her. His face beamed and he slapped me on the back. Beth stood to put the children to bed.
The warm Chinook winds come out of the southwest to the mountains above Hams Fork. Snowmelt causes the Hams Fork River to run high and fast, carrying with it flotsam—beaver dams, pine trees, fence posts—through town, over the Jackmans’ vegetable garden, and nearly to their front door. The kids run trotlines from their bedroom windows and catch fish between pages of homework.
The river pushes to the porch of the old Southern Hotel. Three sheriff’s Blazers are parked in the mud surrounding the historic brothel. Radios squawk and bootsteps rap up and down the rotting wooden porch. The half-inch plywood has been pried off the front doorframe. Inside, the deputies are dusting for fingerprints, but the fingerprints they find on the twenty or so statues are of the hundreds of small children who’d worn bronze elbows and noses to a shine in city parks throughout the West. The deputies walk through the hotel slowly, pointing and taking pictures, as if touring a museum. From a dank corner of what had been the parlor, arms crossed and jaw set, like a statue, Beth studies the diorama. Joe is at work making art with steel pipe, oblivious to the accusations flying out of his wife’s mouth. He is making a crude buffalo sculpture as a Christmas present for his friend. A surprise.
