by James Galvin
Hard to believe one man could get that much built from scratch in one measly lifetime. It’s a lot different from what the family first found there: just that rotten barn sinking into the pasture like a ship going down, the old Worster barn at the head of the meadow, and the two-room homestead cabin with its peaked roof like a witch’s hat, now just a small part of the sprawling house he lives in alone. The old log walls, weather-darkened, covered on all sides but one with additions he built on.
Interesting, he thinks. A little sad. Possibly instructive. Funny how, when they first moved up to this place, there wasn’t near enough room for all of them. Now the house was huge and with just him knocking around in all those rooms. All the others dead and gone.
While Henry was off in the Army Air Corps and Bob started building corrals and snowfences around them like a great exfoliating wooden rose, Lyle, then all of eighteen, fell to building the first of many log buildings he would carpenter from nearby trees. That was when the question mark began to appear above the meadow. It was a cabin for himself and Bob to stay in, and a shop where they could have a forge, some workbenches, and eventually, some real tools. He had built that cabin from the nearest trees he could find, skidding the logs with one of the half-dead horses they had. He drilled and pegged the logs together the old way because they couldn’t afford spikes; only the roof boards and shingles had nails. But he found it a good way to build. Not as fast, but pegged walls are stronger than spiked, even if you could afford the spikes and the trips to town to get them.
So he stayed with the old methods and became a master builder with logs, increasing the size of the main house to a roomy and luxurious home with native pine paneling all hand-planed and tongue-and-grooved. Lyle began to develop a philosophy of technology that had to do with using whatever method did the best job, not like the rest of the culture he lived in, using the methods that were fastest. He used machines or worked by hand depending on quality. Time never entered into it.
Lyle and Bob built a big sawmill and went into business, not just milling lumber, but building houses, barns, and sheds for neighboring ranchers.
That’s when Henry went down in the Pacific, and Bob, who didn’t care for building and milling, got his own airplane and started crop dusting. His plane snagged on a powerline in Texas before he’d been at it a year. Then Clara started automatic writing and pretty soon she was hearing voices. The voices told her to take Lyle’s rifle and put it in her mouth.
Hazel had always had problems with her legs hurting. They swelled into tree trunks, ankles wider than thighs. At age seventy-four the prairie-toughened matriarch finally died in the hospital in Laramie. She was the first member of the family ever to enter a hospital, and she was also, save one, the last.
Now there was too much empty space inside just like there was too much empty space outside. When the emphysema started to choke him the house got to be too much for him.
He stares out the window and thinks about how he first started to park the truck next to the front door instead of up in the shed because the short walk up the hill winded him so badly; how he began keeping split wood on the mud porch instead of out in the woodshed, beyond the snowdrift the lee of the house made; how he closed the door to the bathroom and shut off the pipes lest they burst. He went back to heating water in the kettle and bathing in a washtub the old way, standing by the woodstove’s warmth. Finally, he moved his bed into the living room by the furnace, effectively moving back into the part of the house that was already there in 1940, before he ever built anything.
All the additions and improvements he’d made were useless to him. After all that work, he ended up back in the homestead cabin, all that progress for nothing.
But with his bed by the furnace he didn’t have to wake with his own thin breath blooming above him like a sick rose. The whole process now was withdrawal, like a man freezing to death. The blood backs off from the fingers first, and the toes, and they go numb, then back from the ears and nose and face, then the legs and arms as the blood tries to get back to protect the heart, abandoning the five senses and any outward turning. Lyle turns from the window and rises to chunk another log into the fire.
“If I’da knowed I’d end up like this, alone, I’da left things the way they was. God knows this old homestead cabin was plenty good enough for me.” He sat down again at the window, placing a fresh cup of instant on the plastic-coated tablecloth that on one end had the pattern worn completely off from Lyle’s elbows and on the other, where the company sat, looked brand-new.
He watched a young coyote descend from the heavy cover of timber and diagonal down the open hillside above the creek and disappear into the willows. “Better keep a move on today, Bud,” he muttered, and turned his attention to the book that lay open before him: Blacksmithing through the Ages. But instead of reading he lifted his gaze again to find out what that punk coyote was up to. He could see nothing but the snow-stilled meadow with the coyote’s tracks slicing down and across the hill.
His eyes stayed on those tracks, but somehow his mind lifted off and floated back to a certain spring four years after the family first wintered on Sheep Creek. Back then all they had was one Model-A pickup and the horses.
He was fording the creek down on the railroad section to go up into the timber for a load of posts when he saw them. It was a family of Japanese, fishing and having a picnic. They had a Dodge car that looked like it had fallen off a cliff. He remembered there were five of them. The teenage girl was the one he saw first, half reclining on the curved fender of the car. She was reading a pamphlet of some sort. As he drove down into the creekbed she didn’t even look up, whether from concentration or fear he couldn’t be sure. Then he saw an incredibly tiny and ancient-looking woman, he supposed the grandmother, who sat inside the car. She stared at him openly as he passed. She looked so frail and light-boned he thought a good wind could have drawn her out the window and up into the sky like a kite that’s broken its tether.
The mother was down on her knees on the bank, blowing on a greenwood fire that was going to smoke the trout they presumed to catch. That’s when the irony of it became more immediate in Lyle’s mind than the images before his eyes.
Here were these people whose country had started a war against our country. Lyle’s brother, Henry, was flying airplanes over families just like this one, bombing the hell out of them and whatever kind of tropical wickiups and paper houses those people lived in, and here was this family right up here on Sheep Creek, in the heart of the American wilderness, having an afternoon picnic.
“It’s Henry as should be fishing and picnicking on our stream.” Then he noticed the father, just upstream with a green willow pole, a can of worms, and a piece of kite string with a cork for a bobber, showing a small boy how to flip the worm into a deep pool and wait, keeping his eye on the cork. The man was gesticulating vigorously, pointing at the cork, and then throwing his arms skyward as if in surrender, imitating the setting of the hook, once the theoretical trout took the bait.
Even over the creek noise and the noise of the truck as it ground down against the gears and the compression of the motor into the gravel ford, Lyle could hear the man speaking in a singsong gibberish, high-pitched and rapid, that reminded him of a dry gate-hinge, or maybe a Western meadowlark, but off-key and arrhythmic.
When the man took notice of Lyle’s truck, his face, at first awash in the happiness of a man who is proud of his young son and enjoying the role of father and teacher, turned like sudden weather, or more exactly, slid, like all the plaster sliding off a stucco wall in rain, into an expression of absolute terror. Lyle thought of crowds of faces just like that when they saw Henry’s bomber, saw the American pilots coming in the sky, and they wanted to get out of the way but instead stood rooted, too terrified to move, with the fear that looks more like calm than calm does.
When the man recovered his wits he began poking the boy in the ribs and squealing a piercing, almost female-sounding command at him. Lyle tried not
to stare but watched them politely out of the corner of his eye, the way a coyote would, and tried to watch where he was going, the rounded creek stones tending the skinny tires sideways as he entered the current.
After three or four pokes and attendant screeches the kid roused from his own paralysis, got the idea, and held up a tiny American flag he’d had all along, though lowered so that Lyle never saw it until it was held up for him to see. After another moment’s hesitation the boy began to wave the flag in nervous and vigorous greeting. The father recovered a terrified grin and began bowing from the waist like a pump handle.
Utterly astonished, but impassive, Lyle slowly raised his big gloved hand from the oaken steering wheel and waved once, in the country manner. He watched relief flood the man’s face like clear water turned into a muddy irrigation ditch. Then, in the mirror, he saw that the mother had turned to watch, but the girl and the grandmother had not moved. The little boy still waved the flag as the truck whined up the far bank and Lyle whispered, “I’ll be.”
He brought his load of posts back over the bridge two miles downstream to avoid the risk of getting stuck in the ford because of the extra weight.
Back at the house, Bob had not returned from the Wooden Shoe, where he had gone to trade eggs for milk. Lyle, his sister, and his mother were at the dinner table when the Japanese appeared again, this time lined up in a little platoon, single file, with the little boy holding the flag leading them through the yard gate. The boy was followed by his father. The ancient grandmother, who was about the same size as the boy, brought up the rear. Lyle saw them through the window, but he stayed where he was.
When Hazel heard the rap on the door she waddled over and opened it. Lyle, typically, had said nothing about seeing them before, and he watched as his mother stared, uncomprehending, from their faces down to the flag and back to their faces and down to the tightly clutched flag again. Lyle pushed back his chair and stood. Hazel was just plain stunned and wasn’t hearing what the man said. She just kept looking from the man’s face—his moving mouth, really—and down to the boy’s flag as if they all were ghosts.
It was light but no sun yet. App lay under the wagon alone, staring at the undercarriage, the knotholes in the boards like eyes that looked back, the bolts, springs, brackets. He didn’t know that some blood had dripped on his face as he slept. He saw some dried flecks on his right hand and thought nothing of it. He was cold and damp under the blanket, and dampness was something he had rarely experienced in these arid mountains. Oh, he had felt wet before, and cold, but he didn’t know the mist that hangs in valley bottoms, the air like wet felt over the wet grass of the meadow. He could see his breath escaping like puffs of smoke from a train as it pulled out of the Union Pacific station in Laramie. He reached out his hand to the thick grass outside the relatively dry square: a rainshadow the wagon cast on the ground. App felt the heaviness of the wet grass and he liked it. On the Laramie side of the ridge it was like a desert compared to this. The icy Divide lay west; to the east over a series of ridges lay the high plains of Colorado that stretched in App’s mind beyond thinking.
He rolled out from under the wagon and looked around, shivering. He could see individual droplets of water, lighter than the cold air, swirling in the first light that struck. The old man was nowhere to be seen. App looked down the valley over the cloud bank that lapped against the ridges and made them look like islands. He thought it looked like you could step off the ridges and onto the clouds and walk away into the sky.
When Frank got sick, I was just one of many who were grateful to help out. All the Lilley kids, all grown now, gathered around, of course, and Shirley, Frank’s wife, started gathering her strength as if it were a crop of hay she needed to see her through a winter that was going to last the rest of her life.
Frank had a kind of cancer that no one gets over, which seemed to some of us altogether too meaningful about the world, since Frank was the healthiest, clean-livingest, most optimistic family man around. He didn’t smoke or drink. He quit dipping snuff ten years ago. He’d spent his life on horseback, breathing in the Wyoming sky. But he’d been in the Navy during WW II, refitting ships, and asbestos finally caught up with him forty years later.
I wanted to help, even though I knew that so many others felt the same way I wouldn’t have been missed. I asked Clay, Frank’s son my age, to let me know what I could do. It was mid-October and Clay said I’d just as well help with gathering, vaccinating, and pregnancy testing.
It started snowing the night before the roundup. The horses in the corral were nervous because of the change in weather and being caught up well before daylight. I was on my way before first light, heading for the school section on my black mare.
It was cold. After I crossed the Sand Creek bridge the snow started going sideways and I had to get down and walk awhile to get the blood back into my feet. Clay had said to rendezvous around eight, which meant they’d probably have the herd gathered and headed home by then. Clay is always early the way other people are always late.
Sure enough, by the time I arrived at about seven I could see the trailers already there and hear the whoops and whistles of the riders kicking the summerfat cows and calves out of the willows where they were lying-in because of the cold.
Every cowboy develops a whistle or a hoot or a click you can tell him by, a sound he thinks moves cows better than others. It’s like a signature. I could hear Roger up in the corner, Clay down by the gate, and Shirley and Julie coming up the creekbed. By the time the cows were moving, like cold motor oil, all in the same direction, by the time they were through the gate and counted, the snow had stopped, the wind had died, the sun was getting hot. We drove them down the county road where it threads the picture rocks, those sandstone sculptures that were once an ocean floor, where we used to hunt arrowheads and occasionally lose ourselves when we were kids. Everyone was taking off coats and rolling up dusters to let in the warm sun.
We had a couple of pair missing so Clay and I broke off up a side-draw to look for them. I like to ride with Clay because he always rides a mount you don’t have to wait for, and he doesn’t like to wait for anyone else either. He doesn’t mind riding in mutual silence, and he doesn’t mind talking, as long as he doesn’t have to crane his neck around to do it, and as long as it’s “nothing too philosophical.”
Dinner today is simple and mountainous: beefburgers, potato salad, and string beans on paper plates, beer and pop. Not a meal to linger over since there’s a lot that has to get done before dark. We can hear the low moan of cows and calves finding each other in the corral. They are mothering up.
The first thing we do after dinner is separate the cows and calves, banishing the calves to the weaning corral. A couple of riders on stellar horses cut out the calves, and a couple of people stationed at gates open and close them when the time comes. The gates are like tongues catching flies, swallowing the calves into the weaning pen, clanging shut behind them. I like to work one of the gates so I can watch Clay and Roger work their horses, cutting with calm but quick predictive moves, their footwork like a boxer’s.
Clay now works as a veterinarian out of Laramie, though he was raised right here on the Chimney Rock, and went to the one-room school at the Wooden Shoe (the other two pupils were his sisters). He backs the Bronco up to the branding chute and turns on the football game full blast, Wyoming vs. Wisconsin, loud enough to hear over the bereaved bawling of cows and calves, and begins to arrange syringes and bottles and needles on the tailgate.
Julie, Clay’s younger sister, stays in the house with Frank, who shouldn’t be left alone anymore. I can see Frank’s face in the window. He is watching a ritual that, from the back of a horse, he has presided over every year for forty years.
Earlier, at dinner, when asked about some detail or other, Frank had said, “I can’t worry about it anymore. It’s up to you young fellas now,” which made the young fellas, all in their thirties, ranch-hardened and some wearing the silver buckles they’
d won at rodeos, feel like kids lost in a forest, the weight of their ignorance easily equal to the weight of Frank’s wisdom, especially concerning a particular collection of sandstone, pasture, livestock, and weather known as the Chimney Rock Ranch.
Frank watches from the window all afternoon, with the game on inside the house. Once he walks feebly out to the corrals in the snowmobile boots he always wears now, even if it’s warm and the ground is bare, because they are comfortable, and there are very few parts of his body left that are comfortable.
Shirley has to be outside with the pregnancy testing because she knows the calving history of all the cows better than anyone, and she has all the birth records and weights to decide which animals to keep and which to sell.
The hands had named one cow Shirley because she was born one February night of ten below when Shirley was out at the ranch alone during calving. There were complications and the mother died, but the calf was saved and grafted on to another cow. Shirley (the cow) went on to produce twelve fat calves for the herd in as many years. This year, though, she didn’t take, was not vaccinated, and was sent through the gate that meant good-bye, despite everything. You don’t get by being soft in this business. Shirley, the woman, just shook her head and penned an X next to the number corresponding to the cow’s ear tag.
Roger and Brad are positioned on the corral side of the chute to dip the cows for parasites, trim the hair back from the ear tags, and check the eyes. I have a syringe in each hand, while Clay, who has donned coveralls and a shoulder-length latex glove, sticks his whole arm up the ass of each cow, feels around a couple of seconds and then screams over the screams of the herd and the football game either she’s good or she isn’t, and Shirley marks it down, and the hands at the gates know which gate to open when she comes out of the chute.
