by Laura Bell
Sonia’s note said that our friend Gretel would be giving a reading at the community college in Powell and that we were invited to have dinner beforehand with her, the dean, some professors, and the poet who was reading with her that night. If I gave John the okay, she’d pick me up at the highway and bring me back home afterward. Please, please, she’d added at the end.
“I told her it’s a lucky thing, you bein’ so close to the highway here. Otherways, once you got back in the Peaks, she’d never be able to find you in that little car.” John’s voice is soft, his actions meticulous. Having unloaded the oats and water and groceries, he’s now sweeping bits of debris from the bed of his truck with a whisk broom.
“Tell her I’ll be there. What time?”
“Five thirty, she says, at the highway turnoff. Now do you have anything to wear that don’t smell like sheep shit?”
I spot her miles away. Hers is the only car on the road, and when she pulls into the gravel turnout, I’m standing there.
She honks the horn and, jumping out the door, gives me a hug. “I’m here to swoop you off to civilization—electric lights and flush toilets! A real kidnapping.” Sonia’s dressed in a bright full skirt, a linen jacket and a pale silk scarf wound around her neck. She’s Danish, and her dark wispy hair is full of curls. She opens her arms to the hills and spins around. “What an address you have!”
She is the Big Horn County librarian and has, in the three years that I’ve been herding sheep, brought me the gift of books, many of them and wide ranging in topic. The library itself is in the town of Basin, but she makes monthly rounds to all the outpost branches in the county, some no more than a few square feet in a post office or community hall. She added me to her list early on, boxing up thirty and forty-pound collections of literature, biography, and a wild assortment of whatever intrigued her. I imagined her moving among the shelves like a sorceress adding treasures to a boiling pot—Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat, Cather’s Song of the Lark, Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a book on color and design, paintings of the French impressionists, edible plants of the Rockies, a brief history of China. “These are for your sheepwagon library. You can keep them as long as you want—no late fees.” On occasion she’d add her own exotic surprise, whether a head of elephant garlic brought back from Laramie, a pair of lacy pink panties, a bar of chocolate, or a swath of fabric for a tablecloth or curtains. Always there would be a note, either a card or just a brief scribble on library stationery.
Her responsibilities took her the breadth of a county that was a hundred miles across with only one stop light anywhere. That was in Greybull, whose Main Street banners proclaimed it the HUB OF THE BIG HORN BASIN. With her car full of books, she’d crisscross the county to the libraries in Tensleep, Hyattville, Manderson, Greybull, Shell, Emblem, Otto, Lovell, Frannie, Deaver, Byron, and Cowley, infusing their collections with new titles and recycling old ones into fresh homes. In Cowley she would deposit my box of books at the Waterhole Bar, across the street from John’s trailer, for him to pick up and haul out to camp.
Inside the car I suddenly feel shy and foolish, blushing under my sunburn and feeling a tomboy in her company. I hold my hands to my nose and smell the Jergens lotion I’d worked into my skin, but still there’s woodsmoke and kerosene rising up out of my pores and out of my clothes. As she pulls the VW out onto the highway, I search the hillside for my dogs and feel I’ve left half of me behind.
“So, happy birthday. Forty, right?” My lips are chapped and the words come out squeaking.
“Lord, yes, can you believe it? And”—she pauses—“I have a story. I’ve been seeing someone recently, a man who has a place south of Shell on Trapper Creek. Such an interesting man, works for the railroad, a naturalist, and has a beautiful log cabin along the creek.”
She goes on to tell me he’d invited her for a birthday dinner at his home over the weekend. She’d offered to bring something, a salad or bottle of wine, but he’d said no; just come. So she drove the eleven miles to Greybull and the twenty to Shell and turned north on Trapper Creek Road. She wondered what he might cook but didn’t know him well enough yet to know. Still a bachelor—maybe steak on the grill or a jar of Ragú heated and poured over spaghetti. Any of it sounded like an adventure, and she was glad to have someone to celebrate with.
When she turned onto the gravel drive that wound down toward the cabin, she saw him sitting on the wide steps of the front porch, plucking a pheasant he said he’d just run over with his truck driving home.
“Happy birthday, and welcome to Trapper Creek,” he said. “Dinner will be just a bit.”
“Roadkill for your fortieth. Could be quite a year ahead.”
“But the wine was fabulous,” she tells me, smiling.
Sonia holds herself carefully, nearly Victorian in bearing, but has a wide open, racy streak that in those early years surprised me. The divorced mother of two daughters, she’d moved them here from Kentucky and taken this job, arriving a year ahead of me. We discovered soon after meeting that our paths had already crossed. She had taught school in the Nashville grade school I’d attended, then had gotten her master’s in Lexington about the time I would’ve been there on summer breaks from college. Miles, the paleontologist from Little Mountain, had introduced us in the summer of 1976, knowing that we shared a connection of place, but what he couldn’t have known then was that these were just two of a generous handful of seeds that would germinate and start up the trellis, sending out runners and binding us together. We don’t know this yet, but in the years to come, we will marry, divorce, trail cattle, throw baby showers, celebrate birthdays, build campfires, mourn losses, and weep together. We will follow each other, without question, through all of the changes that life brings.
When we arrive at the Lamplighter Inn, Gretel and the poet haven’t yet arrived. But there are ice cubes in the water glasses and hot water in the bathroom sink and—yes!—toilets that flush. Sonia musters up diversionary small talk while wine is poured and I sit wondering about my dogs and horse, picketed at camp, and watch the doorway for our friend.
I’d met Gretel a couple of years earlier in the Lovell lambing sheds when I’d driven in from Whistle Creek for supplies. She’d come to Wyoming to make a film about sheepherders and stayed on. We’d become friends because we both loved dogs and horses and because women were scarce at sheep camp. My first summer herding on the forest permit, she’d spent much of it living out of the headquarters cabin with John. She’d brought a big editing machine and was finishing up her film, tending camps with John and helping when she could, and I’d see her once every few weeks. Or John would bring messages: “Grets is comin’ your way tomorrow. Says she’ll ride over, so leave about eight if you want to meet her halfway.” From my high camp on Burnt Mountain, the trip was only about three miles down the backside of the mountain, around Rooster Hill, and across the big flat meadows along the Sheep Mountain Road. She would arrive bearing gifts in her saddlebags, a bottle of wine or maybe T-bones plundered from the ranch freezer, local gossip and stories from the part of her life I didn’t know—New York, California, some ranch in New Mexico, someone’s play being produced in London.
Sometimes she disappeared back into her other world, and John would show up at my camp with a report: “I don’t know where the hell she’s gone this time. She put on her fancy pants and packed up half her shit, but she left the goddamn movie machine in the spare room, so I know she’ll be back.” And he would smile, his auburn freckled face crinkling into tiny lines, and laugh softly, hardly more than a sigh. No one I’ve ever known could cuss like him and make it sound so much like tenderness.
Salads come and then prime rib, rare, but still no Gretel, no poet. The dean disappears to make phone calls; watches are discreetly checked. “Well,” he said, “there must have been some mistake, though I’m sure we’ll meet them over at the hall.”
When they come tumbling into the lecture hall, we discover that we’d been sitting in different parts of the
same restaurant, the two of them in the café with the cheap menu and the rest of us in the formal dining room with amber shaded lights and crushed velvet drapes.
“We thought we’d been fired,” Gretel roared hilariously. “We had to buy our own goddamn dinner!” And then, to me, “Does John know you’re playing hooky?”
A crowd has gathered, and it’s time to begin, so Sonia and I take our seats.
When Gretel reads, she becomes someone I’d never seen before. I knew that she’d danced and was making documentaries, but had no idea she’d written poems. She gathers herself up with a dancer’s grace and speaks with sureness and care.
Probably she is a river where
seasonal mixtures run
rich: watercress, hot springs, ice floes stacked
in clerical collars on robes of
dark water folding and
unfolding around her.
Her voice is cadenced, heavy. Snowdrift, comet tail, wounded deer, the words that come out of her are surprises. Gone is the toe scuffing and the flippant cowboy humor, the scattered profanity that I’d come to accept in her. That was all wind in the trees and trash blowing around, and what we glimpse this night is the wind itself, powerful and clear. Sonia’s knee nudges mine, and we look wide-eyed at each other in surprise.
What had seemed obvious in the light of day is less so in the narrow beam of headlights, but there it finally is, the red bandanna tied to the wire of the highway fence where my dirt road splintered off from the highway.
“Will you be able to see? Can you find your way back?” Sonia worries as we slow down and stop.
“Of course. It’s not far.” I dig into jacket pockets for my gloves and feel my alarm clock, bulky and out of place. The sun of the afternoon, the anticipation and the waiting all seem a world away. I’m sleepy, dead tired, and ready to be back in my bed, to bring my camp back to life. To make my world whole again, all that I need.
“I could drive you up the road.”
“No, it’s far too rough. I’m fine, really.”
She keeps the headlights on the gate as I crawl through the wires, and then I wave good-bye into the glare and watch the headlights retreat and swing away from me, illuminating a wide swath of sage and fence, then blacktop. I zip my jacket tight and see the lights creep up the rise of highway, the VW’s engine sounding like a sewing machine stitching the night air together.
It’s black dark, with only a slip of new moon in the sky. I swing a leg out in front of me like a blind man’s cane to feel for the road, no more than a tentative path through the sage, and stumble along the ruts until the sage closes in around me. I pivot in a circle, straining to see some outline of camp against the horizon. There’s only the sound of my feet shuffling dirt and, when I stop, the sound of a sheep bleating in the distance.
Fixing myself on that, I open my mouth and call out, “Lady, Lady, Laadeee!” into the night and then, louder, “Louise, Loueeeese! Hey girls, hey girls! Come on, come on, come ooon!” my voice warming and nearly singing into the black night. I stop and listen. A coyote yips in reply, and I hear an uneasy stir of bleating, then more silence.
I call out again, this time feeling the lonesome rising up through my body and echoing in the night, and I cry out harder to lose it, to make myself heard. “Pretty, pretty, giiirls, come ooon!” I think what it must feel like to stand in an opera house and sing the passion up into the farthest seats and warm the blood of an entire audience. How it must turn a person inside out to be able to do this.
A minute goes by, two.
And then here they are, out of the dark and suddenly upon me, in my face with their rough tongues and panting breaths, squeaking with delight at our reunion. From my pockets, I pull out the wax-paper wrapping of meat scraps and bread soaked in drippings and divide the treasure into their mouths. I hold them close against me and think I could almost lay myself down and sleep in the sage, I’m so tired. I whisper into their necks, “I’m so sorry, girls, for what I’m about to do.”
And then I rise up to my feet and yell down at them, “Go home! Go home! Bad dogs!” as if they’re in big trouble, and stumbling blindly through the sage, let the dim shapes of their bodies lead me back to camp.
MURDI
It’s late June 1979. The chapel of the Lovell funeral home is small, dark paneled, and dimly lit, set neatly with rows of metal folding chairs, only a few of which are occupied. I’ve chosen a seat at the rear and sit down to collect my thoughts, to let my eyes adjust from the early evening light of high summer. A few faces turn to me, and I see a scattering of ranch hands and their wives, the winter sheepmen turned summer farmers and irrigators with neatly pressed shirts and pale scalps, their hats now in their laps. Lila sits near the front of the room with her two boys, cowlicked and freckled, sunburned with summer. Several rows behind are John’s aunt and uncle, well-dressed in dark suit and silk, who have managed the Lewis Ranch since the passing of Claude. In the front of the room, raised on a small platform and flanked by pillared candles and vases of white daisies, sits the coffin of the herder Fred Murdi, smoky bronze, gleaming with polish and substance. Beneath its open lid, Fred’s body lies on tufted ivory silk, only his profile visible to me, but clearly and curiously transformed from the man I’ve known.
I first met Fred in the spring of 1977 outside the Lovell lambing sheds, his bent figure leaning over water troughs with a hose while ewes lipped at the fresh water. His wiry arms and legs were covered in plastic bags and flannel that he’d secured with bits of twine and duct tape. Over this tattered arrangement he wore a large black oilfield rain jacket, spider-webbed in gray duct tape, with a hood from which he peered. He turned to me with a raised hand and a crinkled, gold-edged grin, his face smeared with a quarter inch of opaque goo later identified as Bag Balm, a medicated salve meant for chaffed cow and sheep udders. His lips were plastered with what I would discover were the membranes peeled from hard-boiled eggs, to protect his lips from the sun and weather.
“Ah, missy!” His voice a hoarse whisper. “You must be the lady!”
Fred’s spring range in the northern hills near the Montana border was far from mine in the McCullough Peaks, but in the next two summers we shared boundaries both on the ranch’s private lands on Little Mountain and on the federal grazing permits in the Big Horn National Forest. In the close quarters of our lush Little Mountain ranges, we visited as we kept watch between our two bands. He’d bring me his old copies of U.S. News & World Report, which he proudly read from cover to cover and generally saved in bundles under his bed. And after we trailed up to the big mountain, I might glimpse his silhouette on the far horizon of Rooster Hill. Born in the Basque country that runs along the common mountainous borders of France and Spain, he’d herded sheep all his life and had come to America with his brother and, in 1938, had hired on with the Lewis Ranch, where he’s been ever since.
Fred died at his sheep camp from a leg wound he’d poulticed with fresh sheep manure and hidden from John when he came to tend his camp. “When he went to see the dentist, he got so excited you’d a thought he was goin’ to see the queen of England,” John said. “But the poor bugger wouldn’t set foot near a hospital. He thought that’s where you went to die.”
This evening, with my sheep safely trailed to Roundup Springs on the flanks of Little Mountain and ready to hit the slide-rock trail at dawn, John had stayed at my camp and let me bring his pickup in to town for my “woman things” and to attend Fred’s rosary service the evening before his funeral. “Just get the hell back here by dark with that pickup,” he’d said as I drove away, “’cause I got to carry his coffin tomorrow and get him buried.”
It had been April, back at the Lovell lambing sheds, when I’d last seen Fred. John was about to haul Fred’s camp out next day to his spring range on the Montana border and asked me to drive him into town to see the dentist. Fred had emerged from the dark jumble of his sheepwagon shading his eyes, dressed carefully for his trip to town in a brand-new pair of pinstri
ped overalls, a nearly crisp Pendleton wool shirt, and an unblemished pair of five-buckle overshoes. His “dentist outfit,” according to John, and what he wore for his twice-yearly trips to Dr. Welch come rain, snow or summer’s heat.
“You’re looking mighty handsome today, Fred,” I offered with more than a little astonishment.
“Oooh!” he nearly crowed in his Basque accent, “Every time I look in the mirror I look more old and more crumbly. But thank you.” Fred was soft-spoken. His hands rose up in vivid exclamation as he told a story, but his words were never really more than a loud whisper.
On that day, his wagon was one of seven backed up and set against a woven wire fence facing the cottonwood river bottom east of the lambing sheds. “Wagon City” to the herders, this was their home during the late-winter months when the ewes were brought in to lamb, and I saw that he’d begun to pack for the upcoming trip to his spring range near the Montana border. For Fred, that meant corralling into gunnysacks the piles of string, cans, and rags that he’d collected over the winter and stored beneath the wagon. Even in normal times, his bed in the back was piled so high with boxes that he slept sitting on a five-gallon bucket by the woodstove, his body leaned back against the cupboards. That next morning, when John hooked the wagon to his pickup for the trip to the hills, it would be stuffed to the ceiling with Fred’s treasures.
At his wagon door, Fred had turned, clumsy in his overshoes, to sort out the odd bits of orange baling twine beneath his feet. “Oh, give it up,” he crooned to the strands that wouldn’t let go of his buckles. His fingers were gnarled and slow, but I waited until he nodded that he was ready.
Perched on the seat of the ranch pickup with his hands in his lap, he seemed out of place but happy. He wasn’t a drinking man, like many of the other herders who frequented the bars, so those trips to the dentist were the social highlights of his year.
