by Laura Bell
Leaning toward me, he looked out the window past my face and tapped his front teeth with a black fingernail. “These are all mine,” he said, shaking his head at the cottonwoods alongside the road. “I don’t neglect what’s mine.” Across the bridge of his nose, his glasses were taped together with electrical tape, and one gold tooth shone from his mouth as he spoke.
When I helped him through the door into the sterile white dentist’s office, it felt like guiding an emissary from some exotic country, though there was no building or community—even the other nine herders, including myself, who worked for the Lewis Ranch—where he’d seem to belong.
Afterward, I asked if there were any other place in town that he might like to go, the hardware store or the mercantile, perhaps for a cold soda or an ice cream. “I just want to go home, please,” he said. Back at his wagon, I helped him down from the pickup, and with a voice tired but almost lilting to song, he thanked me for my trouble. He maneuvered his hunched body around and, rearing back, pointed a knobby finger at the snow-covered Big Horns. “God willing, I’ll see you on the big mountain,” he whispered. Then he turned, looking at the ground in front of my feet. “Be careful out there, missy. It’s no easy place.”
The figure who rests before me in the coffin is someone I barely recognize. Fred’s beard has been washed and clipped close. After years of being covered, the skin of his face is as clear and luminous as a young man’s, and without his cobbled glasses, it appears even more so. He has been dressed in a crisply starched pale-blue shirt and a three-piece suit of light wool tweed, by any standard a distinguished presence.
For forty-one summers he’d herded sheep in the Big Horns northeast of Bald Mountain, a good and careful herder who seemed content with life just as it was. He never made more than a pittance of a salary, but by dressing in rags and banking his meager checks, he left over a hundred thousand dollars for his two final wishes. His first, according to John, was to be “buried like a banker,” and his second was to leave the remainder to his brother in Casper to give to a local charity.
Around me now heads are bowed; a few hands are held. For this ragged and solitary man, a small community has gathered. I bow my head, too, and smooth the fabric of my flowered skirt against my legs, feeling the weariness of five days’ trailing and the weight of losing Fred. I study my hands, cracked and rough and sooted black in the creases even though I’d scrubbed them.
Who would gather here for me?
The priest says words above our bowed heads, but I hear only the sound of his voice, familiar in a way that makes my heart cave with loneliness. Early light will find me horseback again, picking the trail up through rocks and gullies to a mountain that has come to feel like something I know, its endless silence both a balm and a curse. Now the voice of the priest settles around me, fitting my shape. I long to lie down, a fawn in the grass, to disappear, to say no to the mountain even though I’ve made my promises. Before me candles flicker and sputter. Shards of light reflect from the coffin’s gleaming surface. Inside, the body bears the trappings of the spirit’s last wish, revealed here to this small world for a few brief hours. Others rise to leave, but I cannot. To hide the tears, I bow my head as though in prayer, and maybe that’s what this is, but regardless, the other mourners pass me by with only a touch on the shoulder, and I don’t have to explain myself. I hear the sound of shoes on carpet, the creaking of wood beneath, the rustling of fabric against fabric. I know that I have come to the end of this trail but don’t know how it is that one returns home.
ON THE DIAMOND TAIL
It was January 1990, and in the early afternoon, the thermometer registered zero and the sun sent weak fingers of light through the south-facing windows of our thin-walled house. My husband had been out behind the tack shed all morning, splitting blocks of pine that he’d hauled off the Big Horns in eight-foot lengths through the heat of Wyoming summer. It was his ritual, up the mountain in the morning to saddle a horse from the cow camp pasture, then ride his circle of cattle and shoe what horses needed to be shod that day. In the heat of the day, he’d linger above Shell Canyon and cut a pickup load of wood, then chug down the steep grades in low gear and stop at the bar for beers by midafternoon. When I got home from my forest-service job, he’d greet me at the door with a fresh cup of coffee and a cheery smile, his eyes glassy, his breath sharp with the smell of Listerine. Through the summer, the log pile grew into a wild and disorderly snake of wood dumped haphazardly from the back of his battered Chevy pickup.
Even in the brittle cold, the freshly split pine gave off the summer smell of pitch and forest duff as Joe stacked armload after armload in neat ricks on the east end of the front sunporch. Wood stacked three-deep and head-high made the world seem right with order and the promise of warmth no matter how far the temperature dropped. A couple weeks before, on New Year’s Day, we’d sat on the couch with the fire crackling in the stove and agreed to have a child together. “If you’ll just have it, I’ll take care of it,” he assured me when I wondered out loud how I could afford not to work. It was unnamable to me what was missing from our lives, but the promise of a baby sparked the emptiness. I imagined a baby to be the flesh that was missing from the bones of our marriage.
I fixed myself a cup of tea and went out onto the porch to breathe in the bright fragrance of split wood. I stood in the doorway and noticed the light slanting through the windows and how it left thick bars of gold across the river rocks of the hearth. We’d gathered the rocks by hand from the gravel banks of Shell Creek, turning each one over in the water to reveal its color, and now I could see veins of green and pink and glittering mica shooting through round granites, smooth as eggs.
This house was for each of us our first home. It had begun with a photograph on the front page of the Greybull paper, a photograph of a late-twenties bungalow with overhanging eaves and a sunporch with banks of latticed windows. The caption had read, “House without a Home,” and I couldn’t take my eyes away from it. The house had sat on Main Street in town and had been auctioned off for $180 when the high school enlarged its campus. A mover had been hired to haul it to Tensleep, but this was foiled by something—a bridge, maybe, or a change of heart—so for six months the house was parked by the railroad tracks, beached on top of beams and wheels. I made daily visits, climbing up into it to peel back carpets and imagine bare oak floors. Finding evidence of hobos sheltering there, I began worrying about fires with the propriety of ownership. I called the house mover and within days had written him a check for three thousand dollars, which covered the cost of the house and of moving it. Within weeks, my husband had negotiated a barstool deal on six acres of land along Beaver Creek at the foot of the Big Horns, and we had the pieces of our first home.
I sipped my tea and thought about what I’d wear to the party that night, the new dress ordered from J. Crew catalog for Christmas, thin black fabric with small red and green flowers, close fitting and elegant. It made me feel like someone else, pretty, like I might have stepped from the pages of a different world. I imagined this slim black dress over a belly with new life, maybe even then, and thought that lives are like stories and that this one might add up, might mean something after all. I pulled out the iron and ironing board and waited for the steam to rise up, hissing, while I traced the tiny flowers with my fingers. In the kitchen I heard the refrigerator door open, close, and another can of beer being cracked open. I remember thinking it was all beginning too soon, the drinking, and that by the time we left, for a fiftieth-birthday party at the Diamond Tail Ranch, he’d already be gone, three sheets to the wind. I knew the signs and had been charting my daily course by them for seven years.
He whistled through the living room with a beer in hand and another two pocketed in his vest, going out to split more wood. He grinned at me, his smile already an electric buzz across his face. “You can never have too much wood in this country!” He leaned over at the door to pull on heavy felt-pack boots and put on a wool scotch cap. He was cheerful. Sn
orting with delight. Beaming.
The ranch house is a gracious old log home, sprawling and generous, set in the bare-branched cottonwoods of Shell Creek. In the deep winter dusk, the windows shimmer in clusters of light. Against them, the snow-covered fields and the sky are dimmed into one immense thing, muted grays losing light and color, the sky not yet gone to stars. Inside, coats are already piled in the guest bedroom by the back door, and boots and overshoes have been deposited in pairs across the mudroom floor. I climb the stairs behind my husband and feel at once the heat of the party, the elbow-to-elbow energy of people sprung out of a winter jail of heavy coats and bitter cold.
“Hey, you bounder!” Joe enters the logjam of people in the kitchen and leans into each conversation with his big grin and a slap on the back. “Goddamn it, Marvin!” His eyes are loose and unfocused. “Jesus Christ!” He disappears into the crowd in the front of the house, toward the makeshift bar set up in the music room. I find a corner of bench at the crowded kitchen table and sit, a spectator to conversations.
At midnight, I wait in the passenger seat of the brown Toyota, my knees pressed together in the cold and the remains of a broccoli casserole held in a covered dish in my lap. From the dark carport, I can see people inside laughing, telling stories still. Some are reaching their arms into coats and saying their good-byes.
A man staggers out to my car, opens the driver’s door, and lands hard in the seat. “Goddamn, my hat! Where’s my goddamn hat?” Looking toward the house, not at me, he lurches back inside and through the door, his figure passing out of sight, and the whole dark world is silent again, every single living thing hunkered down in the cold. I think of the birds that sleep with their heads tucked under their wings and imagine being asleep in my bed under soft down. I hunker down, too, pulling the collar of my jacket up around my neck and pressing it to my ears and wait until my husband returns, his hat pulled down close over his eyes.
The driveway is nearly a mile long, with a sharp elbow where it corners a fenced field. Tonight the snow’s packed and glazed into ice by the warmth of tires spinning across it. The barbed wire lining the lane glitters, hard frosted, in our headlights. As we turn from the house out into the lane, the car spins slightly by the gateposts, and I want to say that we’re going too fast, but nothing comes out. I notice the grip of his hands on the wheel and the set of his jaw as we pick up speed. I open my mouth again and say words that come out a whisper, a whine, and they hang frozen in the air. His face turns on me in a hard glare, his eyes bulging, and he jams his foot down on the gas. We careen down the icy chute, the CorningWare lid rattling in my lap, the sound of tires on frozen ground like a ship tearing through ice.
At the turn, the car spins through the snow and into the air, almost silent as we leave the ground, but then out of jaws unhinged to the sky comes a siren of a wail. The Toyota slams into the far side of the irrigation ditch, and then it’s silent again except for a wide-open voice yelling seven years of hard-jawed silence, maybe thirty-five years of silence, out into a night sky crackling with cold and vast enough to hold it.
Finally there is only the sound of warm metal ticking itself back into the cold. I wipe broccoli and cheese from my lap and climb out of the car and up from the ditch on shaky legs onto the graveled lane, where cows stand staring, curious, their whiskers frozen into white halos around their mouths. A half mile away, I can see the lights of the ranch. To the east, above the Big Horns, a lantern of winter moon has risen, and I strike out toward it, my feet rising lightly.
In this community of neighbors, there is little to hide and no one who doesn’t understand a wife walking the road home in the night, so when a car stops, I get in and let them take me home. Upstairs, I find the girls asleep. Jenny, eight, her dark braids wild across her pillow as though stopped in motion, a somersault in her dreams. I pull the comforter up to her neck and brush her bangs from her eyes. I cross the room, picking up a half-eaten bowl of popcorn from the couch where they’d been watching movies. I turn off the lamp and let my eyes adjust to the moonlight flooding in through the east window onto Amy’s bed. She’s eleven, her hair golden, as her dad’s was as a boy. I wonder that she can sleep so deeply in light so bright it nearly calls her name through the glass, through the splintered crystals of ice that frame it. I sink to a corner of her bed and lay a hand on her legs. They have been aching lately, growing pains. I straighten her covers and listen to her breathing and think that it sounds like the ocean giving itself up to the shore and taking itself away. Here … away. Here … away. I smooth the covers over her legs and understand that I’ve been wrong about many things.
How can I be enough for these precious girls, their mother long in her grave and their father drunk in a ditch on a winter’s night? Who would be the flame for them if tonight I just kept walking? Where would I find forgiveness if I left?
I’d come to the Diamond Tail Ranch by chance in the winter of 1980, a single woman looking to rent the small cinder-block house by the cattail marsh. Stan said he could probably use me the six weeks during calving if I wanted to work nights checking the first-calf heifers. I said okay and stayed on for six years.
My shift would run from midnight until noon the next day, checking the heifers through the night, doing the morning chores around the corrals and helping to feed hay to the cattle. “Come on over to the corrals about seven tomorrow morning,” Stan had said, “and we’ll show you the lay of the land in the daylight.” When I arrived, he was adjusting the heavy oiled harnesses on a pair of blond Belgian draft horses, Pet and Maude, as they ate their morning oats at the hitching rack of a low-slung log barn with horse corrals off to the left. On the right, a heavy timbered loading chute was wedged between the barn and a working alley with tall swinging gates that could be adjusted to cut cattle or horses into any number of corrals and pens. Stan introduced me to Chon Gonzales, his hired man, who’d just come up from spreading flakes of hay into the feed-bunks of the corral below the barn. “These horses, they like to run,” he said for my benefit, but looked to Stan, teasing, instead. He wore brown insulated coveralls and had hair that curled black and glossy. Stan grinned and said, “Oh, I bet they’ve got over it by now.” Pet and Maude had been out to pasture ever since the spring before, when their job of hauling hay to the winter cattle was done. A buyer was coming to look at them in a couple days, he said, and he wanted to get the kinks worked out of them. He slipped the snaffle bridles over their huge heads, snapped them into the yoke, and led them back to where the hay wagon sat backed into an open shed, already loaded with a few bales and a pile of feed cubes, or “cake,” as he called it.
Stan backed the team up to the flatbed wagon with a high slatted front, slipped the wagon tongue into the yoke, and asked me to hold the horses while he snapped their harnesses into the traces. I stood before them, one hand raised up to each snaffle bit, as he gathered the longline reins into his hand and said, “Now, you just hold ’em while I step on the wagon; then we’ll be in business.” He sounded like he was swallowing a grin. Pet and Maude shifted their weight from side to side and grabbed nervously at the metal in their mouths. As he reached for the wagon stay to pull himself up, I wondered briefly if, in fact, I was supposed to be able to hold them. With the first creak of Stan’s weight on the wagon, the horses lifted their front ends from the ground in unison, as though preparing for takeoff. I was lifted with them and in an instant eyed the alternatives—an old pickup with rounded fenders on one side and a hay rake bristling with spiky teeth on the other. As they lunged into the traces, they flung me off in front of the pickup and bolted with Stan, Chon, and the wagon in tow. Sprawled in the dirt, I watched them take the first corner by the horse corral, hay bales and cake bouncing off the bed like popcorn.
At midnight, the corrals were close with the heavy breathing of heifers bearing a great pregnant weight. After a week of working nights, they’d grown used to me. I could walk through them, weaving a path around their beached bodies, and they wouldn’t move. I practi
ced walking quietly, making no fuss, though I carried a flashlight and completed a survey of their rear ends as I made the rounds. I looked for signs of labor, for the tail held high and kinked off to the side or maybe already the tips of hooves showing out from between the loose folds of vagina. When the calf was backward, the hooves appeared oddly, tips pointed down and the flat surface of hoof facing up. It was my job to walk the laboring heifer through the corrals—outsmarting her will to dive back into the darkest corner—and into the alley, where I’d close a gate behind her and steer her more quietly into the confines of the calving shed.
These nights were silent spaces, buckets dipped into a dark well and brought up one by one into wakefulness. Stan had pulled a sheepwagon down by the corrals so there was a place to build a fire and close off the cold, but usually the door stood wide open to the sounds of the night. I spent the winter nights zipped up in insulated coveralls and pack boots, protected from the raw cold of the corrals and, in the warmth of the sheepwagon, swaddled enough to fall into immediate sleep between rounds.
Sleep became the comma between things, thinly separating dreams from reality. I emerged from twenty-minute naps and carried my dreams out to find the world a changed place—a heifer showing two feet, an owl hooting from the cottonwoods on the lower side of the bull pen, northern lights spread shimmering across the sky in heartbeats of light, a wide swath of prayer rising up.
Every season was different, every year the same. I loved the order, the ritual, the immediacy of what needed to be done. I felt useful and in place. Winter mornings, I flaked hay into the corrals at dawn and heaved the harnesses onto the mules, Merle and Pearl, or the new draft horses, Bud and Barney. I saddled a colt for my own morning rounds of cattle in the field and later joined Stan and Mary on the far feedgrounds to flake off the hay and load the next day’s bales onto the wagon. There was always a thermos of coffee covered in fine alfalfa leaves and sometimes a morning brownie. There was winter sun or blowing snow. There were jokes, sometimes poetry and philosophy, and there were always the geese coming back to the stubble fields in the late winter.
