Claiming Ground

by Laura Bell

  From the deck, I pick out the landmarks from south to north, where the range disappears into the northern dusk. Trapper Creek, White Creek, Shell Creek, the two forks of Horse Creek, Beaver Creek, Pete’s Hole, Five Springs. This is the bare mountain face I have stared at for most of my adult life, and naming each canyon, I know that I have walked and ridden and trailed livestock up them all, in this place I know, that is in my blood.

  Quick as that, it goes dark and the air chills. I turn on the lights, give the back rooms a good sweeping and begin to unload the pickup, starting with my sleeping bag and coffee makings for morning. Then the few treasures I carry with me in this pared-down version of my life. Amy’s clay horse sculpture from fifth-grade art class. A watercolor of desert cactus and stars from the girls’ aunt Mary. The improbable and cumbersome love seat with the big pillows from my marriage. I leave the French doors open to the evening and the girls’ arrival, though the air is cool.

  It’s after nine when I hear their car on the gravel drive and see headlights swinging through the dark. I step out on the deck to meet them with my heart in my throat, and then they’re out of the car and into the swath of light from inside. Amy is seventeen, a senior, her blonde hair long around her face and her eyes wide-open windows like her mother’s. Jenny is fourteen and gangly, in that awkward stage of braces and baggy flannel shirts, not quite grown into her beauty. Together, they’re two shades of the same color as they move through the porch light and into my arms. I’d seen them only occasionally since leaving my forest service job and moving from Greybull a year and a half before, and our phone conversations had sometimes been a game of twenty questions without many answers. While waiting for them, I had imagined hesitation and reserve, but here they are laughing, delighted, and in this moment I’m only grateful that they have welcomed back the one who left.

  “Come in, come in. Tell me everything you know.” I make us tea and pull out biscotti and good chocolate brought up from the city. The school play is Anne of Green Gables, and Amy has the part of Anne’s bosom buddy, Diana.

  “Can you come to rehearsal?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Jenny’s track meet’s on Friday.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there. Shall we do dinner here, after?”

  “Let’s make homemade pizzas again.”

  In an hour we’ve concocted a social calendar for the next weeks and planned the brunch I’d promised Amy to celebrate her high school graduation in the open, sunlit great room of the Stone School.

  The storm moved in quietly during the night and dropped a soft, soaking rain, a rarity in this high-desert country that sees mostly wind and lightning. What remains at dawn are the softly torn edges of clouds lodged along the mountain’s rock face and clinging in thin streamers to the bare landscape of the basin. The air is charred with the smell of wet sage and the neighbor’s ditch fire gone wild into the greasewood thicket. Tendrils of moisture rise up and take on the color of morning light.

  From my bed, I heard the cries of sandhill cranes coming close and loud through the east window of the second-floor loft. Peering through binoculars, I found them, a pair, under a cottonwood across the hay meadow east of the schoolhouse with the sun rising behind them and their cries becoming more agitated. As I scanned the area, my heart jumped to see a red fox sitting on his haunches just a few yards away with his nose aimed at them, his tail curled around him. The cranes were leaning toward him with their wings lifted, imposing, shifting their weight from leg to leg, and it was unclear to me who was doing the harassing. But then the cranes stepped forward with wings still raised, and the fox gave up his position, turning to sniff at the hay stubble and saunter off.

  From this alcove, I have a perfect view, so I return later in the morning to look for the cranes. What I see instead are foxes, two adults and four kits gamboling about under the cottonwood. So, this is their den, which the fox had been defending against the cranes. The sun rises higher, and the kits disappear until later in the day, but I go obsessively to the window with binoculars to watch.

  What my life is again: horses, saddles, space, massage, words that will eventually come out, light that won’t quit, birdsong in the early morning. Friends stop by with food and flowers. The girls drop by daily, coming and going from town to their father’s house. There are school plays, awards nights, dinners with a breeze sifting in through the French doors. Geese fly in strings along the creek bottom, and wild blue flax opens in fragile, cheerful waves out the back door.

  Gathering cattle one morning out of the Sulphur pasture with Stan and Mary and their crew, he sends me off with their daughter Carol to the far hinterlands after a small bunch their neighbor had spotted from the plane. Carol is tall and lanky, with short dark hair and the fair skin and freckles of her Irish ancestors. In the years that I worked for her family on the ranch, we became friends in our own right. Through this friendship and her connection with my Kentucky family, she met my brother and eventually married him. After living in Kentucky and studying there with Wendell Berry, she led my brother back west, to Cody, and my family grew in numbers around me.

  We head off at a steady trot, slowing to climb the ridges, one after another, according to the vague instructions we’d been given. Nearly an hour later we spot the little cluster of renegades, tucked along a wet seep in the bottom of a draw, and slide our horses down off the soft ridge to get behind them and worry them down the narrow trail. Each draw opens into another, and we have no choice but to follow them down from one to the next, the ridges rising above us to block our view and sense of direction until we finally spill out into a broad basin ringed by cliffs.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “Beats me.”

  “But didn’t you ride this country? Didn’t you live out here?”

  “It’s been ten years. And this just doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe we came off the allotment at that last gate.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you think we’re in the wrong place?”

  She turns in her saddle and grins. “You know what Dad says. If you’ve got cattle, you’re always in the right place.”

  We scan the horizon and spot a horse and rider atop one ridge, as though they’ve been watching for us. We take it as a sign and begin working our tired bunch in their direction.

  “That’s Dad.”

  “How on earth can you tell from here?”

  “If it were Mom, she’d be bailing off the ridge to help us, and he’s just sitting there watching. Nope, that’s Dad.”

  As we get closer, he finally guides his horse down the ridge alongside us. “You still remember all these plants?”

  “Some.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Slender wheatgrass.”

  “This?”

  “Needle and thread.” I lean over my saddle and point out bottlebrush squirreltail, Indian ricegrass, Great Basin wildrye, prince’s plume, mariposa lily, copper mallow, Indian pipe. We plod along behind the balky cattle, the sun rising higher in the sky and turning up the heat.

  “Well,” he says, “I’m glad to see you haven’t lost all your good sense down there in Utah.”

  I scan the meadow to the east for the foxes and find them at their den. The mother stands patiently while the kits suckle her, bumping into her and one another in their hunger until she races off to the south about fifty yards and flattens herself behind a tall clump of grass. Thinking she’s seen a predator and taken cover, I swing my binoculars back on the kits, but they’re bouncing through the grass like popcorn, their white-tipped tails like flags in the sage. They find their mother, and she leaps up, exploding them into the air again, and with them on her heels she chases around for the sheer fun of it. A pickup truck drives slowly down the lane behind them. The willows are thin cover, and I’m afraid for them, so exposed.

  The basement under the addition is set deep into the ground with high ceilings and unshakable wa
lls. I prepare a room for massage and place an ad in the paper and wait to see what happens, but they come. One elderly man has his wife sit with him during the session and chews snoose, keeping his spit cup within reach the whole time. A woman in her eighties with no family for thousands of miles comes weekly. A butcher tells me, “I’m tired of killing.” A schoolteacher grieves for her lost daughter. A cowboy thrown from a horse hobbles in. One night, late, the phone rings and a drunken voice asks if I work late, and there’s a chorus of laughter in the background. The phone rings and rings until I unplug it.

  Late that summer Tim is diagnosed with lymphoma. The silent, often aloof member of a family otherwise prone to speak their minds, he becomes an awkward center. When he begins chemotherapy, I offer somewhat hesitantly to give him a massage every week as a gift; such tenderness feels risky in this cowboy world of mine, and especially with Tim, as stoic as they come. But he says yes, gladly, and shows up week after week in varying stages of pain, weakness and exhaustion. Often he arrives straight off the tractor, smelling of diesel, with orange baling twine and cattle syringes spilling from his pockets. The first session is one of sympathy and sadness, and afterward he seems drugged, almost in a stupor. In the weeks that follow I focus on his energy, resting a hand on his head and the other on his sacrum, gathering up energy and willing it to move through his spine. It sounds silly, and it takes courage. I’m not sure I know what I’m doing, but it can’t hurt. He comes out lightened and refreshed.

  “My legs have been the worst,” he says. “Weak. Won’t always hold me up.”

  “Maybe you’re learning that you don’t always have to stand on your own two feet. Sometimes you can ask for help.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  I go to see Mary, who’s waiting the day out for Tim’s test results after the chemo. “I think the waiting’s the worst part of it all,” she says and pours me a cup of tea. She tells me about Carol’s trip to Rome and that she and my brother had visited the Pantheon, which Mary explains is the world’s largest unsupported dome and has a hole in the top. Her voice is quivering, and I wonder where she’s headed with this. “When it rains and there are people inside,” she says, “they close all the outside doors, and the heat from their bodies rises up through the hole and keeps out the rain.” She pauses. “I feel like if we all just hold hands around Tim, we can keep the harm away.”

  Through that summer and fall, I work on him. I work on his parents and his brother and sisters and aunts and uncles and an ever-expanding circle of friends and family to which he has become a center.

  The wind howls all through the night and brings snow in the early morning hours and then moves on. I lean out the window and listen to the stillness. The world is spare, flat, covered in hoarfrost, the mountains invisible in an icy fog. One fox circles the outer edges of the meadow, hunting, but I scan the den and ditches and silvered willows and see nothing else moving. Before the winds, there’d been shots, and through the window I’d seen a spotlight sweeping the field. I’m glad I’m not a fox today. They have no safe place.

  I coax Jenny into staying with me for a week, and she unpacks her things in neat piles in the drawers I’ve cleared for her. We share the bed upstairs as it’s the only one, watching movies and drinking hot chocolate there in the evenings, coffee in the mornings. Fresh out of the shower, her hair all slicked away from her face, her eyes deep lidded and shadowed in her olive skin, she laughs shyly, hiding her braces, but I glimpse the woman she will become. We plant a few seeds in the raised beds out back: lettuce, onions, carrots, squash. When the nights warm, friends gather on the deck, and we make homemade pizzas and snip blooms from the wildflower garden for the table.

  As a child she had always followed me around asking about the names of flowers and trees, and these seemed the easiest of lessons to impart. When my parents came out one Thanksgiving, my mother brought her a book that identified animal tracks, and we went out under a full moon and crunched through the snow down by the creek with the book and a flashlight, exploring the movements of raccoons and rabbits. In second grade she’d been designated her class’s “star of the week” and needed to answer questions about herself for a big class poster, and she worried over her answers nearly to the point of tears.

  “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I love too many things. Maybe science, I could be a scientist. But I like art and music, and I might want to be an artist. Or maybe a nurse like my mom?” She looked up at me for guidance.

  “How about putting down ‘renaissance woman’ as your answer? That means you’re broadly interested in both the arts and sciences, a woman of vast accomplishment.”

  Her face had lit up with this solution. “How do you spell that?”

  John McGough shows up one morning with the old wood-fired hot tub in the back of his pickup. “I thought you might have more use for this here,” he says, “than I would at Trapper Creek.” We lift it to the ground, then level some planks in the dirt to support it. The tub’s made of redwood slats circled by metal bands, only four and a half feet in diameter and four feet high. The tub had made the rounds of Shell during the eighties and ended up at our Beaver Creek house in the last years of our marriage. Joe had the time and patience in the winter to split the tiny pieces of wood it required and to tend the fire through the day to have it ready for evening.

  That next night, the girls arrive with their bathing suits and we climb over the edge and sink into the water, stirring the colder water up from the bottom with a tiny wooden paddle. Around us the skies are melting through shades of evening, orange to rose to purple.

  “Do you remember the Christmas trees?” I ask and hear them both groan.

  “I thought I’d die of embarrassment,” Amy says, “scavenging the alleys of Greybull for people’s trees. I hardly saw a thing. I had my head down the whole time, afraid one of my friends would see me!”

  “Yeah,” Jenny adds, “but once we got them home they were pretty cool.”

  One afternoon after Christmas we’d been in town with the girls in the pickup when Joe saw a discarded tree out by a Dumpster. “You know, that tree’s still green and there’s no tinsel. It’d look great out by the hot tub.” He pulled the pickup alongside and tossed it in the back, and we began a concerted scavenge for all we could find. When I came home from work the next afternoon, the trees had been wired to the fence, the deck, and each other. Joe had strung white lights around them all to create a tiny, sparkly forest around the hot tub, with steam rising up out of it and a fire crackling in its stove.

  In the early light I go to the window and look across the hayfields for the foxes, but there’s no movement in the space below the cottonwood or along the ditches in the tall grass where they hunt mice. Through the morning I come back to the window again and again, looking, but the landscape’s empty, quiet, and too still without them. I’ve heard no shots, and traps wouldn’t get them all at once. Poison seems more likely.

  In the late afternoon I’m sweeping the gallery and pass by the big west window on the opposite side of the schoolhouse when something catches my eye. Foxes! All six of them out in the tall weeds at the edge of the bluff, not fifty yards away. I give a whoop and run upstairs for the binoculars. The two adults sit on their haunches by a mound, and the young ones romp through the crackling weeds washed clean by last night’s rain. They’ve moved to safety behind my skirts, and I am embarrassed by my joy.

  That night I leave a little something on the deck, a heel of French bread, and in the morning it’s gone. The next night I put out some cornbread and by morning it, too, is gone. This goes against everything I know, but I can’t help wanting their company. I go to town and buy a small bag of expensive lamb and rice dog food and put a little out each night in a cast-iron skillet, half a cup, not enough to make them dependent. Just a taste, and every morning it’s gone.

  One evening I’m sitting at my desk with the French doors wide open talking to my mother on the phone as the evening dusk descends
and a fox comes to the edge of the deck, watching me. Talking softly, I describe this to my mother. The fox steps up onto the deck and, still watching me, starts eating the dog food. And while I keep talking, my voice low and constant, the fox finishes and steps carefully to the corner and, her back turned, looks out over the creek bottom as the light fades.

  In the fall, when Tim’s cutting competitions are over for the season, he lets me work his prize-winning Doc O Dynamite cutting mare on a calf in the arena. I’ve seen him work her plenty of times, riding “turnback” for him as he practiced. He would walk his mare slowly into the bunch of calves at one end of the arena and quietly nudge one out. With his mare positioned squarely before the calf, he’d drop the reins to her neck and let her work to keep it from rejoining the others. As the turnback rider, I’d position myself behind the calf, at a distance, to provide tension and intensity to the workout, to keep the calf from simply drifting back to the other end of the arena.

  I step up into the saddle, wanting to stay out of her way, not wanting to be clumsy. Tim talks me through cutting out the calf, moving slowly and quietly with one hand on the saddle horn and the other holding the reins loosely. When Dynamite’s facing the calf squarely, her head dropped to his nose level, I drop my rein hand to her neck. He steps to the right, and she smoothly feints left to meet him. Wild eyed, the calf bolts left, and all hell breaks loose underneath me as Dynamite pivots and whirls to stay in front of him, her neck snaked low and ears laid flat to her neck. The saddle falls out from under me as she dives right, then left, and somehow I’m still in the middle, hovering half an inch in the air above her center. The thrill of it has me grinning like a damned fool. When we come to a stop, I howl with delight and plant a kiss on her lathered neck, wishing I could ride life’s turns as easily.

  For five years my life is divided between two states, with every trip between Utah and Wyoming a paring down of accumulations, books and clothes and furniture and sometimes even friends. Each spring, when the snows are melting in the Wasatch and Salt Lake’s in high bloom with flowering crab apples, tulips and daffodils, I pack up and head east and then north toward Kemmerer, where I begin to see bands of sheep scattered across the spare ranges and hear the meadowlarks again. By the time I reach the Big Horn Basin, the calendar has been turned back a month, the buds tightfisted and flurries of snow mixing with sun. Every trip is a shedding, a centering, a test to see how little I can get by with no matter how great the need.