by Laura Bell
That Sunday, Tom, my Crystal Creek boyfriend, was visiting and calmly said, “I’m going to teach this horse a lesson.” He took my lariat, dropped the coil with the noose end to the ground and with the other end tied a no-slip bolon knot loosely around Blue’s neck, then turned to me and said, “Now stand back out of the way.” I stepped back but felt certain he was going to lose not only my horse but also my rope, so I moved forward to grab the coil for backup. In the sudden whirling and dust, next thing I knew I was on the ground behind Blue, at a high gallop, and headed for the barbed-wire highway fence with the noose of the lariat cinched tight around my upper left thigh. I had no knife to cut myself free, but with the rope so high on my leg I was able to hold my body upright and my head off the ground, at least for a while. Closing in on the barbed wire, I feared he’d jump and drag me through, but instead he veered to follow the gravelly trail alongside and across the open meadow.
I remember cars slowing down on the highway, a young boy staring through the open window with the straw of his cold drink nearly to his lips, watching, craning to see what was happening not ten yards away. I remember his face and thinking it might be the last I ever saw, and then he was gone. As we crossed the meadow, Blue tired and slowed to a hard trot, and I could hear his breath heaving with the load. I lost the strength to hold myself up and rolled over to my stomach, my mouth filling with the dirt and roil of the trail.
When I came to, there was a face asking me questions, fingers being held up in front of my eyes. Jack, the government trapper, and his wife, Mary, were stopping by the camp to visit when they’d come upon the accident. He said later that a doctor from New York, seeing it all unfold from the road, had the presence of mind to stop and climb through the fence and simply stand in the trail in front of the approaching horse. Blue wasn’t mean, just scared and glad to have a reason to stop. The doctor tied him to a fence post and cut me loose just as Jack and Mary pulled up. Learning that Jack was an EMT, he’d handed me over and left, and I never got to thank him for saving my life. He’d tied Blue up thirty yards from the edge of the timber, where surely I would’ve broken apart.
Jack drove me down to the basin’s emergency clinic, where they picked gravel out of me and gave me a healthy dose of codeine. I’d broken no bones but had raw open sores and had traumatized every muscle in my body. Tom brought me to Gretel, who put me to soaking in her bathtub and then piled blankets on me in her bed when I began shivering with shock in the August heat. The next day, when I still couldn’t move, Tom drove me back up the mountain and deposited me at my old camptender’s cabin to heal up in the cool mountain air, above the flies and mosquitoes of the basin. John, who’d helped me through many scrapes before, made up a soft bed on the living-room couch, and for a week I took codeine and slept, letting my body mend itself. Eight days later I was horseback again and back at work, with a two-inch foam pad between me and the saddle, on a tough little black Morgan named Thunder. Though my hind end healed soon enough, I was left with a dent in my left thigh and a deep and solemn respect for ropes.
Cresting the divide with the cattle, we can see the metal glint of pickups and trailers down in the bottom and riders coming up to meet us. My husband and some of the neighbors, having shuttled the rigs from Red Mountain back around the highway to the Trapper Creek Road, are riding up to help us on with the next leg of this journey.
Kelly whoops “Got ’er made now!” and tosses his rope out behind the calves, who jump down the hill with newfound energy. “Yes sirree. Forge ahead with neither fear nor judgment!”
We have the cattle headed to water, fresh help at hand and lunch waiting within sight. It’s midafternoon and the cattle are streaming toward the snowmelt waters of Trapper Creek, one major hurdle passed and another to go at day’s end when we push them up the steep pitch of Black Mountain and turn them loose to drift for the night.
I watch Joe and the girls come up the hill, edging around the cattle, and feel as though I haven’t seen them for weeks. When I got up in the middle of the night, Joe made me coffee and promised to bring the girls along once he finished shoeing horses. He’s got Jenny, four, riding on the back of his saddle with her arms locked around his waist. Her dark hair is in braids and under a ball cap, turned backward to keep it from bumping into her dad’s back. Amy, seven, is on old Bill and following close behind, her little red boots beating a rhythm to keep him from stopping. The girls spot me and start waving to catch my attention, as though I wouldn’t be already looking for them. I wave back with a foolish grin, thinking, This is my family.
Since their mother’s death, they’ve been living most of the year with her family in Minnesota, spending summers and Christmas here with Joe and me. This will change before long, and instead they’ll spend their vacations back with their grandparents and aunts.
There will be times when I worry about the change, about them leaving the solid and predictable comfort of their grandparents’ home for what can seem a disorderly life that changes with the seasons. I’ll worry over my inadequacies and those of their dad. But this is the scene I come back to when I need to be reminded of what is meant to be.
Getting the cattle up Black Mountain will be the last challenge of the day. They’re tired, and so are horses and hands. The trail’s straight-up steep and west-facing, catching the full brunt of the afternoon sun, and there’s more ground than should be covered in one day. But there’s no place we can leave the cattle until we get them up and through the Black Mountain gate, where a fence will hold them. No matter how you cut it, it’s just one of those days that starts in the dark and ends at dusk. For now, until it cools, we simply have to hold them in a bunch around the water and let them rest.
In the red-dirt flats, we trade off holding herd while the cows and calves mother up and settle. There aren’t many places for them to go, hemmed in by the steep mountain face on one side and nearly circled by hayfield fences. On either side of the creek crossing, the banks are thick with willow and narrowleafed cottonwood, and spreading out from them is a tangle of chokecherry, buffaloberry, snowberry and skunkbush. We prepare to hunker down in the shade with time to linger over lunch and stories until the day’s heat softens enough to cut pairs and head up the mountain.
Horses get watered in the creek and tied along the fence, dozing with heads hanging and cinches loose under their bellies. We splash cool water on our faces and hands and pull coolers from the pickups to the cottonwood shade by the stream. It’s three o’clock and we’re famished, but inside the coolers is every imaginable delight: tubs of fat roast beef sandwiches piled with lettuce, green pepper and red onion; Fritos, Cheetos, pretzels and salty potato chips; a gallon ice-cream bucket full of chilled and juicy cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon; bags of Mary’s homemade oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies; half-frozen jugs of iced tea and water. We fill our paper plates and pockets and find a spot of grass to spread out among friends and family, sure in the feeling that all of this—the food, rest and friendship—has been earned.
When we’ve eaten and drunk all that we’ve dreamed of through the long hot morning, I unzip my chaps and wad them for a pillow next to my husband and girls. Closing my eyes for a while, I listen to the cattle bawling out on the flats and the creek gurgling by my head and someone getting teased about a girlfriend or horse that outdid him or some other funny thing that might’ve happened ten years ago. After drifting off for maybe only a minute or two, I raise up and see that most everyone else is sprawled out, too, that I’m not the only one. And then, maybe about to doze off again, I hear that cow coming back toward the creek-crossing bawling for the calf she must think is back at Red Gulch. I hear Stan say to Mary, “I don’t think I saw her calf all mornin’, but her bag’s not tight.” And then Mary says, “He’s here, that little baldy calf with the kink tail that lost his tag.” Stan’s spurs jangle as he stands up and throws a rock to turn the cow back. “Go on. You best go take another look; try a little harder.” Then I hear those spurs jangling along the creek and
kicking at a rock, making noise just to make noise, and I know that this time of resting is about over.
SHELL CREEK
Crossing the empty highway below Granite Pass, I imagine myself stepping out into these currents of mountain air moving through hot, bright sun, the cattle bawling, my husband-to-be horseback on the slopes above us. It’s late July, just days before the wedding, and my family’s two vans have just rounded the long, slow curve out of the timber and pulled, one behind the other, into the turnout by the Antelope Butte ski area. The doors slide open, and crumpled, familiar bodies appear stretching and waving, the grandkids stumbling out around them and cameras already pointed at the riders on the slope above us. There are fourteen of them in all, come eighteen hundred miles for the wedding, camping cross-country with tents and coolers and sleeping bags.
“This crew’s a wedding waiting to happen,” my mother exclaims, embracing me.
My father follows with a hug and laugh. “Yes, all we need is one good shower and we’re ready for anything!”
Both my sisters are here, one of my brothers, and three of the in-laws. I reach down to hug my nieces, all five of them, and my nephew, gathered around me rumpled and warm, showing me the rocks and feathers and treasures they’ve collected en route. I find myself entering a circle from which I’ve so long held myself apart. My family around me, come from so far and at such cost, I’m simply amazed and grateful. But then, this is what my family does. This is what my family can do.
On the slopes above us, Stan and Mary and Joe are pushing the cattle into new pasture and settling them onto the high benches of fresh grass above Granite Creek. Joe, his dark cowboy hat pulled low and silk scarf around his neck, sits his fine-boned liver chestnut, Poco. He turns and raises a hand in our direction.
“Is that the lucky guy?” my brother-in-law asks.
“Yep, that’s the one. He promised me I could have as many horses as I wanted, so I said yes. Seems as good a reason as any, don’t you think?” I point up the hill to where my sheepwagon’s leveled in a clump of aspens. “We’ve got lunch up at the wagon, champagne in the spring, and coffee on the stove. Those guys’ll be done soon.”
From one of the vans, my father pulls out a cooler, and over his shoulder I can see my parents’ silver service wrapped up in plastic and his black clerical robes and stole hanging from a hook. The whole back of the van’s piled high with wedding presents, all wrapped in fancy pastels with white ribbons and cards tucked underneath.
“Dad, who on earth are all these from?”
“You’ll see when we get them unloaded. They’ve been coming out of the woodwork the last few weeks, dropping these off. They’d all have come along if they could’ve.”
I know where they’ve come from, of course; in my mind’s eye I can see the gracious homes with perfect lawns and heirloom clocks ticking and chiming the hour inside, with season tickets to the symphony, church bulletins, leather-bound books, and generations of tradition. These are people who love my parents and so, without question, love me as well.
We walk back up the hill to my camp through a profusion of sticky purple geranium, bistort and forget-me-nots, hands full of children and cameras, Louise following on our heels. When Joe rides up to join us, he tips his hat and swings down off his horse in his spurs and batwing chaps with brass Texas stars down the sides, and I couldn’t be more proud. He holds his reins in one hand and leans into hugs from everyone. With a smile spread across his face, he says, “Welcome to Wyoming,” and holds me in his arms and kisses my hair as if he’d discovered gold.
Stan and Mary host a dinner that evening at their ranch house, with green chili enchiladas and salads, the good china brought out from the cupboards and our glasses clinking in toasts. With the families combined, we overflow the dining table and scatter through the living room with plates on our laps.
I watch Joe across the table talking with my family, the smooth skin of his face nut-brown against his crisp white shirt, his back held straight and tall. Mostly quiet, he listens to their stories and nods, then cleans his wire-rimmed glasses on a napkin and takes a pull on a long-necked beer.
But in the course of the meal, his graciousness begins to unravel into stories I’ve heard countless times before, though my family hasn’t, and I think that maybe he’s still okay. I eye him nervously as his voice grows louder and louder.
After finishing dinner, we’ve gathered in the living room to open presents when the doorbell rings. It’s my old boyfriend from Crystal Creek, stopping by to pick up fencing supplies he’d ordered from Stan and unaware of the occasion. He’s greeted awkwardly at first but then, in the generous spirit of the evening, is invited in and given a plate and a beer. He finds an empty place on the rug next to Joe and flashes a grin around the room at us and the adventure he just stepped into. I watch closely as these unlikely friends sit and visit while the gifts are brought in and stacked around me. Though I try to catch Joe’s eye, to call him to my side, he shies from the spotlight and sticks with Tom in the far corner, drinking in earnest now. My eyes scan the rambling log rooms to see if anyone has noticed, but if so they pretend they haven’t. Come kiss my hair. Come say you love me, that I’m your gold. I open the presents one by one from family and friends, professors at the seminary in Lexington, members of the church in Nashville. My sisters are at my side jotting down notes and folding wrapping paper, and the pretty cards are passed around, and everyone’s smiling so big. If only it were just the two of us, it would be all right. I’d make it all right. But he’s too far across the room for me to bring him back. I pretend this is all somehow gallant, that it’s how we do things out here, but when I look up again, they’ve tilted their heads together and are laughing at some little joke. And the next time I risk a glance, Joe has laid a big pink bow on top of his head and his eyes are drooping into a doze.
Curtis pulls his lemon yellow Cadillac convertible up to the back door of the Shell Community Hall and begins to unload coolers and boxes. Tall, thin and freckly with pale skin and coppery hair and glasses, he works for the Wyoming Highway Department but caters on the side and has agreed to do the food for our wedding. The day of the ceremony, he’s ferrying everything from Basin, where he lives, the twenty-three miles to Shell. He’s already made two trips and thought that would be that but then wanders over to the church, where Gretel is decorating, and decides his big red potted geraniums from home would look great on the bare white steps. So he races back to Basin, loads them up, and is driving ninety when the county deputy sheriff pulls him over. “He asked me if somebody was dyin’, and I said, ‘No, but Joe and Laura are about to get married and they need these geraniums.’ And he said, ‘Oh, well then. Slow it down. See you tonight!’” This, after all, is a man who’d bring us cold sodas on a cattle drive in his patrol car and flash his lights when we had to trail the cattle across the highway.
We marry early that evening in the Shell Community Church, a small white clapboard structure a block off the main street, next to the fire station and the log community hall. The date is July 27, 1983, a Wednesday evening, because it’s the only day all my family can be with us before driving back across the country to their lives and jobs. “Give us the traditional,” I’d said to my father, “the whole ball of wax.” And when the vows are made and the kiss given, the tiny church comes to its feet in ovation, and hand in hand we nearly dance down the aisle and past the red potted geraniums to greet our friends outside under the leafy cottonwoods.
Coming out of the church into the bright sun, I kiss my new husband again and feel the smooth of his cheek against mine. He’s wearing a linen suit and a pale-blue Western shirt and the silver squash-blossom belt buckle I’d given him as a wedding present. Behind us the celebrants empty onto the steps, spilling down through the bright geraniums and under the cottonwoods for shade, and for the first time I get to see who all has shown up from across the country and deep in my past.
John Hopkin has driven down from Montana with his partner, Charlie, a
nd they’re some of the first out the door. When the decision had been made to sell most of the sheep off the Lewis Ranch, John moved up to Billings to do maintenance work at the college and pursue a more liberal social life with the man who’d been an occasional visitor to his mountain cabin. “The work’s a hell of a lot easier than sheep,” he’d said with a laugh. “And sheepherders!” He’s already smoking a cigarette, just steps away from the church, lifting his head and blowing smoke above the crowd as he leans to give me a hug. “Good thing you got outta the business. There ain’t sheep one left on the outfit now.” His gold ring flashes in the sun as he taps his ashes.
“I couldn’t have done this without you, John.”
“Hell, you know I never woulda missed it. And worth the trip just to see you all cleaned up.”
Here are Butch and Charlene, a Nebraska couple who’d come with their horses to the northern Big Horns every fall just to hear the elk bugle, sharing meals, rides and stories with me and Grady and John. Dot and Mac from the church in Nashville, with whom my family had spent our first night when we arrived in 1960 to begin our life there; Dot has a small white rose with baby’s breath pinned to her dress, part of the wedding party as she’s volunteered to cut and serve the cake. My college friend, Gini, who’d flown in from Alaska with her father in his twin-engine plane, landing at the strip in Greybull, where I’d left a pickup for them to use. Jim and Beth in from Wisconsin with their week-old daughter, Moira. Jimmi and Burton, ranchers from the Sheridan side who I’d met while building fence along the elk refuge behind their place.
Gretel comes through the line with Press, who’d known Joe before his first marriage, back when he was cowboying for the Snake River Ranch and riding bulls at the county fair. They’d sung together in the bars around Jackson and on the Wind River Reservation, Press playing guitar and Joe singing in his clear, strong tenor with his head tipped back like a coyote, joyful, yodeling. Press had been his best man and known Amy as a baby. In my mind, I see the photograph of her mother, Linda, standing by a split-rail fence at the ranch they lived on in Morton, Wyoming, early in their marriage. She’s holding Amy, only days old and bundled in a white blanket, with her eyes squinting into the sun and her hair pulled from her face in pigtails. There are freckles across her nose, and her mouth is turned into a shy smile, a tentative happiness. The photo has been trimmed with scissors to the size of Joe’s wallet.
