by Laura Bell
My mother has rolled stumps of unsplit pine closer to the fire for us to sit on. Settling down on his, my father leans forward to say, “We were back in Nashville last month for a lecture at the church, and everyone asked about you. They all asked.” His eyes are kind. His face breaks into a million tiny lines as he smiles, just like mine does. He laughs and says, “We couldn’t help noticing that as a minister, I’m the shepherd of my flock, and now you’re the shepherd of your own. Like father, like daughter.”
“More like the black sheep,” I say with a laugh but mean it.
I’m squirming with all the attention, foolish with my delight, and wondering just when it was that I began to take my leave. My mother once told my brother that of her five children, I was the one she could never hold, that early on I’d always break the embrace and toddle across the floor away from her. Born the fourth of five children and sandwiched between two sprawling boys, I later chose the ease of retreating over the bruises of competition, to be the silent one and learn to succeed by keeping out of the way. My leaving took me to empty back rooms with a book, to tall orchard grasses by the creek. If these places were lonesome, they were also magical and private. I learned to entertain myself for hours with fantasies in which I was the hero, the special one, the one who could ride the horse that no one else could ride. When I was older and had a horse of my own, I packed a book and a sandwich and left on free days to roam the hills just outside of town. Then after college, I found this ranch that would feed me and pay me three hundred dollars a month to ride, read and tend to the sheep.
Wyoming was my childhood’s private world blown larger than life, with a horse, two dogs, a rifle, a wilderness. For this lonesome child, it was the perfect landscape, where isolation was sharp but safe. I had discovered a place where no one expected me to do or be much of anything. My fellow coworkers were tender alcoholics, muttering derelicts, societal rejects, and I had found a certain delicious comfort in their company.
The diesel has burned off, and when the flames take hold of the wood, they put out a sharp heat that sears my knees. Black sheep. The wayward one, the odd one, the uncomfortable one. The sky drops into darkness and the world becomes small, the shape of firelight on our faces. My mother’s is wistful, expectant, my father’s, bemused and content. I lean into the fire, rocking nervously on the uneven ground. I know how to be the forgotten child but not the only child, the blessed one.
Agnus Dei. Take away what I cannot bear.
“We just like to say that we raised a free spirit,” my mother says.
Night. I lie in my sleeping bag in the old tent that smells of the ranch’s musty basement, my head protruding slightly from underneath the flaps. What I see is stars, a far-flung glittering of icy space that I search intently for what I know. Cassiopeia, the queen, sitting on her throne, and Cygnus the Swan, the Northern Cross flying above her, and the slender arm of the Little Dipper reaching out of the northern sky to fill its cup. The night is almost silent. There is a ewe bleating on the ridge and the fire crackling close by in the sheepwagon stove. I hear the muffled voices of my parents, settling into bed. Then quiet.
My hand slips beneath the band of long underwear and rests on the smooth skin of my belly. There is life there, but I can’t imagine it, only want it to be gone. In ten days’ time, after my parents have left, there will be snow on the ground and more falling from the sky, the wagon door open and the spattering snow hissing on the hot iron stove. I’ll put a few things—clean jeans, a T-shirt, my toothbrush, and a book—into a clean plastic garbage sack, fold it over, and slip it into a burlap sheep-salt bag, with a slit cut through the top to make handles.
My sheepherder neighbor, Grady, will appear on horseback to see me off. I’ll leave the sheep in his care, slip the coarsely woven sack over the saddle horn, and, with a gloved hand, wipe the snow off the seat. He’ll squeeze my hand and say, in his soft Alabama drawl, “Now don’t forget to come back,” and I’ll ride down off the backside of Burnt Mountain, into the dark timber, toward John’s cabin, a thin music sifting through the branches of evergreens. Feeling oddly content to be so bundled up and moving through the weather, I will find myself singing through the trees as well. Leaving horse and dogs at the cabin, I’ll drive four hundred miles up into Montana to see a doctor and turn around and drive back the next day, emptied. Tonight I can’t imagine how it will be, just want it all to be over.
A coyote yips. I lift an ear from the rustling of the bag to listen. From the ridge where the sheep are bedded, there comes an answer, one howl, then a chorus rising up. My rifle’s in the sheepwagon, but I don’t want to disturb my parents. I’ve never tried to shoot a coyote anyway, wouldn’t want to even if my aim were true enough. If I were in bed tonight with the Winchester hanging below the bookcase, I’d fire a shot or two through the open door, straight up into the stars. I might yell something, just to hear my voice. Eat mice, you lazy bums! Other nights when maybe the day has been too quiet, I might clear my throat and let loose a high-pitched keen, part howl, part prayer, wavering up into the sky. Lady and Louise would be at my feet, heads cocked and eyes dark with indignation at my behavior; then they’d take quick, furtive glances out into the black night. Silence. Maybe a sheep bleating far off or the crickets’ soft drone. If I’m lucky, they will answer. One yip, maybe from a young one who doesn’t know, then perhaps the whole bunch will join in for the sheer joy of it.
Either way, it’s just our nightly conversation.
Around the lip of the pond and sprawling down into the swale below the wagon, the sheep lay panting, knit together by the heat of the midday sun. Along the edges, some ewes have already heaved up onto their feet and begun feeding, heads down and tearing at the flowers in tiny jerking motions. “Hey girls, hey girls,” I call Lady and Louise up from beneath the wagon and send them on to the sheep. “Push ’em up!” All at once, a thousand mouths open into a frantic, bug-eyed bleating for mother or lamb, a roar of longing. The dogs swing back and forth behind the sheep, sneaking in to nip a heel when the coast is clear and holding their ground when a mother turns to stamp her foot and glare. The ewes squat spraddle-legged and pee before moving out, the smell sharp and sour in the heat.
“This is the easiest sheepherding allotment on the mountain,” I tell my father, who’s mounted on the buckskin gelding John had brought me as an extra horse. Wearing a ball cap low over his eyes, he kicks the horse into a walk with the heels of his hiking boots. He’s never ridden horses much but sits his saddle easily. I point to the rocky ridge behind us where my mother is bent over the fractured pieces of shale looking for fossils in what once was the ocean floor. “That’s the highest point on my range,” I nearly shout over the din of the sheep. “And sheep always go up. If I turn them loose from any place on this allotment, they’ll end up there by dark.”
The sheep are moving now, like some great ship getting under sail, and we follow along behind letting the dogs do most of the work. We’re headed off the top, pushing the sheep down over the edge toward the thin timber that rises up out of the Little Big Horn meadows. My father, reins in one hand and cap in the other, is swinging and slapping his thighs, calling out to the sheep with abandon.
“Hey, hey, hoooh!” His face is browned and relaxed. His boots beat a soft rhythm on the buckskin’s flanks, but the old horse pays no attention, moving always at the pace he chooses. Watching my father, I begin to understand what I couldn’t have imagined—that he’s having fun in this end-of-the-earth place I’ve claimed as my home.
I’d seen it in my mother the day before when she and I rode down off the top to go fishing with Grady. Dad had gotten a ride with Jack, the government trapper, to buy a fishing license at Bear Lodge. But Grady had promised to take the two of us fishing the “sheepherder way,” which, being illegal, required no license. He led us to a tiny snowmelt stream that fed into the Little Big Horn, one that we could straddle, a foot on either bank, in most places. He untied a small hand net from his saddle and, whispering in
his Alabama drawl, showed us how to hold it underwater with one hand and spook the fish into it with the other, then handed the net to my mother. After many, many tries, barefoot with her father’s bib overalls rolled up to her knees, she scooped the net into the air with a wild shriek of excitement to find that she’d caught a tiny brook trout. Her face was that of a child, open wide in wonder at the surprise of the rosy fish flipping in her hand and the cold water streaming over her bare feet.
We had eaten trout for dinner, three brookies scooped up with the net and another that Dad caught in the late afternoon with his fishing rod before hiking back to camp from the river bottom. We sprinkled them with pepper and salt and cornmeal and fried them up in bacon fat in the iron skillet.
Now I watch Dad work the far edges of the sheep, tucking in the stragglers with a veteran’s proficiency. Whooping and hollering, arms flapping and body swinging in loose-jointed motion, he has disappeared into a world of his own, as though the roar of a thousand sheep has rendered him invisible. Now I understand that he, too, longs to break the rules, to be the child who explodes in joy.
The ground drops off sharply below us into fingers of lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce that reach up along the sides of Burnt Mountain. We give the sheep one last push down into the thin stringer meadows; then I wave my arms to Dad to just let them go. We turn our backs on the whole mess of lost ewes and lambs, bleating like stocktraders on Wall Street, and head back up the hill. “They’ll sort themselves out,” I say to his questioning look. “When the feed’s good and there aren’t any other sheep around to mix with, the best thing to do is just trail them down to fresh feed and leave them alone instead of fooling with them.”
Dad nods his head in understanding or maybe just to the beat of his gelding’s newfound exuberance as we head back toward camp and the possibility of oats. We have plans, later, to ride over to the snowbank on the north side of Rooster Hill and bring back salt sacks full of snow to make ice cream with the grouse whortleberries we’ve picked. Our plans for the afternoon are comfortable ones.
I remember everything about their coming and nothing about their leaving. In my memory, they simply disappeared. John must have come and picked them up. There must’ve been hugs, good-byes, promises to gather as always for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I don’t remember. What I suspect is that I was the one who disappeared first.
If my parents had been able to ask why this remote mountaintop seemed a safe haven, I couldn’t have answered with any other story than that of the heroine, the adventurer, the brave one. We didn’t have the language of failure to describe the dark howl that simmered below the surface; our only words were those of success. What do you love? What have you lost? If I could have asked both these questions of my mother or father, what would I have been able to hear? We did what we could. We spoke the words that we knew. I gave the names of the rough beauty in which I hid.
My father had brought my mother eighteen hundred miles to see me. As a young woman, I struggled to be enough for them, to pass muster in what I thought was an inspection. But he brought her to me in her grieving, and many years later, I am profoundly touched by the simple faith of his gesture. He brought the woman he loved across the whole country. Yes, to fresh air and open space, but also to me—for solace.
That we loved each other is clear. That we fumbled in that love is painful. What we had, in our shared blood, was the grace to lay ourselves out under a vast and forgiving sky and let its steady winds blow over us.
HIDDEN
Outside, bears roam the dark and lodgepole pines give in the wind, their tall, thin spikes waving against the stars. Elk appear, ghostlike, their noses testing the night air for scent, and silently fill the open meadows to graze. Two horses stand side by side, and three dogs watch the night for what we cannot hear. Below us all, the Little Big Horn River falls into the canyon and runs to Montana, leaving behind only the sound of itself rising back up the valley.
In a battered aluminum kettle on the stove, he heats water, lots of it, and closes the wagon door and window tight against the chill night air. The space inside becomes thick with heat and moisture and pitch pine snapping and popping and water rumbling toward a boil, water dripping down the bulging sides of the pot to explode and hiss on the cast-iron stove. From the cupboard under the bed, he pulls frayed towels and washcloths and puts them into the kettle, still folded, poking them under the water with a big wooden spoon. On top of the covers he arranges a rough canvas, folding it to half so that it neatly covers the bed. On top of this he lays a clean dry towel and then another, overlapping, together as long as a person’s body. “Now it’s time,” he says to me. I heel my boots off, set them upright in the corner and tuck my socks inside, then skin my jeans to the floor and underwear, too, and fold them in a pile on the bench along with my shirt.
Bowing under the roof’s curve, I crawl on the bed and roll carefully onto my back, straightening the towels beneath me as I watch him at the stove, maneuvering hot towels out of the pot with fencing pliers and a wooden spoon. He’s short, compact, and wiry, his legs bowed slightly with the years and his silvered hair bright against skin that’s nut-brown and weathered. He’s still wearing jeans and cowboy boots but is down to a T-shirt in the heat of the fire. He holds each towel high, letting the water stream back into the pot—busy, preoccupied with the order of his project, like a mother fussing over a meal.
He’d been raised in Alabama and still had the deep, slow drawl of the south after all his years in the west. He’d ridden the rails after the war, hoboing, picking up jobs catch as catch can. When John had hired him onto the Lewis Ranch, he discovered that Grady had a knack with dogs, that under his care they learned to work precisely and eagerly and with great heart. He’d discovered, too, that Grady offered the same to him, away from the barstool and the booze, out in the hills where his soul was aired out and quiet.
Now he’s dropping the towels into an empty pan at the side of the stove. With heavy leather gloves, he wrings the water from them and stacks the twisted lumps in a dishpan. “Okay,” he says, and turns to me with a steaming towel. He loosens the twist and tests the heat with his cheek, then gently lays it over me from my neck down across my lower belly. The heat makes me cry out softly and then go quiet, stunned. He smooths the towel over me and presses his palms against the hollows and mounds of my body where hands fit easily. I close my eyes and feel the heat driven through me, almost more than I can bear but not. Another steaming towel, laid lengthwise and covering my legs, and I feel my body disappear completely under its weight. He brings a washcloth to my face and presses it across my eyes with both hands, and when I feel my face soften, he begins to wash it. Under the blanket of heat, I am still, and only my face tilts toward the touch. He moves across my forehead, wetting the hair away from my face, and cautiously into the corners of my eyes. His hands tremble slightly as he works and his head, too, side to side, palsied, a dry drunk. On his fingers I smell tobacco and garlic and kerosene as he wipes at the creases along my nose, my chapped lips, and the corners of my mouth. His hands cover my face, and my mind drifts, imagining the leaves of aspens shimmering, tender to the wind, against my skin. I hear his voice ask softly, and with some amusement, “Does this suit you, ma’am?” as though I’m some lady in a spa, and I open my eyes and smile a little in answer. He’s smiling a little, too, and his gray eyes are clear, the skin around them creased and weathered. I cannot find in this face the man I’ve seen on the streets of Lovell and will again come fall, barking and staggering, with a husky whiskey laugh, a face bloated like a pumpkin, and his false teeth lost somewhere along the trail from bar to bar.
He turns to the stove and retrieves another towel, loosens the twist and layers it on top of those already draped across my body. He smooths the corners and goes to my feet with a fresh hot cloth and spreads my toes and begins to work between them and down along the soles of my feet as if this is all he was ever meant to do in the world.
In the yellow, uneven light
flickering from the kerosene lamp, I can see the steam beaded on his forehead and smooth upper lip. I see his lips moving and know that he’s whispering to himself, to me, as he works, but lost in the heat and the roar of fire, I cannot hear him.
There is only the sound of fire crackling and water boiling, and beneath the heavy towels, my shoulders have softened in the comfort of this odd tenderness. I feel alone but protected, a thought that lets me breathe deeply. The winds gust against the wagon and my eyes close to the heat, the care and the belief that in this dark place I am hidden, if precariously, from the world.
I see her walking the dirt road up Burnt Mountain even before the dogs, sprawled in the dirt asleep, thinking their work done for a time. From where the road comes out of the timber into the open grass, it’s maybe a mile to my camp. From her husband’s camp on the lower reaches of the mountain, at least another half.
Lila’s alone, and with binoculars, I watch her walk slowly, her gaze to the ground, aimless in her route as though she’s not intending to come here to this place but might only happen upon it. She stops from time to time to pick up some small object and turn it over in her hands. Rock chips, arrowheads, fossils, maybe flower blossoms. She’s put in her time at sheep camp and knows how to make something out of nothing, to make empty time a full day. As she comes closer, I see that her pants are a pale color and cropped short, that she has on thin tennis shoes and a plaid sleeveless blouse in the heat. Closer still, her head lifts to study the wagon as she picks up her pace. I set the binoculars down, though I know she can’t yet see me back in the shadows.
She’d come west from Massachusetts as a young woman to teach high school English in one of the small communities of the basin. One summer day she drove her visiting grandfather up into the Big Horns to see the high mountain country, and they came across a man by the side of the road with a horse, a dog, and a band of sheep. I can imagine their enchantment, the car slowing, the window rolling down to the fresh mountain air, the sound of sheep bleating and stock-bells tinkling. At some moment in the exchange of pleasantries and the request to take a photo she would have realized that she was in the presence of a man who could match her wit. She must’ve also imagined him matching her adventuresome spirit, and there would have been some invitation to follow up with another visit, perhaps a picnic. I can’t know what followed, but I can picture the courtship, the family wedding back east and the bright adventure of heading out into the Wyoming hills as newlyweds with high hopes and their band of sheep.
