by James Galvin
App was still turned around looking when the old man stopped in front of the team and the horses slowed, too, and stopped. They had reached the ridgetop and the old man was letting the horses blow. App could see the whole Medicine Bow Range winding around to the northeast like the tail of a lazy cat, and the Snowy Range shown above it like clouds that had turned to salt and could never move again from where they hovered above the blue ranges. Opening to the right was the Laramie Basin, vast and dusty, reddish and choked with sage, its far end undefined except for the pale blue mirage of Laramie Peak, a broken piece of sky that had fallen like a triangular shard of mirror.
Everything ahead was open—red, brown, and blue. The prairie’s mother was unresisted wind that worked all winter to keep her child’s ears and elbows clean—an amount of scrubbing no tree could survive. App twisted back around on the bench again to see the manifold green of the valley one more time. The wooly morning air was still steaming out of it in places. App thought, I want that. He said nothing but turned forward again, the vision still behind his eyes as the wagon lurched forward and he felt the sun on his shoulders again.
Once it’s all over Clay and I lead our horses through the gloaming to stable and feed them. I’ll leave my mare here and catch a ride home in the pickup. We walk up to the house for our coats as the night air starts to sink into the valleys.
I stand by the coal stove waiting while Frank and Clay speak in low tones in the next room where Frank lies on the couch breathing oxygen. They are talking about how many cows are pregnant, how many cows and calves they will ship, how many are blind in one eye or otherwise afflicted.
I’m standing there hearing their voices, but I can’t hear the words exactly. I smell the coal smell of the heater. The armchair is buried under a drift of overcoats, dusters, and slickers. The huge elk rack on the wall (I think it was Clay’s first) is massed under cowboy hats, both felt and straw, some for work, some for wearing to town, and plaid winter caps called Scotch caps of every description and hue, some of them blinding, as though somebody killed a mess of ugly couches and made hats out of them.
In the corner on the floor is a mountain of footwear, mostly Frank’s, though now he wears only those spongy moon boots. That pile of boots has been in that corner as long as I can remember: cowboy boots curled up like croissants, dry and cracked or polished for town; boots with spurs and boots without spurs; boots inside cowboy boot galoshes; booted galoshes with spurs, booted galoshes without; shoepacks for feeding in winter; work boots for summer—all in a heap about three feet deep.
I hear the drone of the cows and calves moaning for each other, and the low chiaroscuro tones of Frank and Clay talking in the next room.
Next morning Clay is cutting the herd by seven and the cattle begin to bawl. I’m working the gate on one end of the scales, and after each calf is weighed and I turn it out I yell something like “Steer X19” or “Heifer Y4,” and Clay, who is reading the scales, shouts the weights, and Shirley writes it all down, occasionally yelling, “What?” over the din. The ground is still frozen but the sun is hot.
Brad swings a portable gate behind me, this way or that, when Shirley decides which calves are keepers and which are going to be shipped.
When we are just about done I see Frank’s small, wiry frame emerge from the house and begin its inimitable, bowlegged, ducklike walk across the yard in those moon boots and an old black felt hat. Nobody ever walked like Frank that I ever saw, though I’ve seen a lot of guys walk like they are not used to being off a horse.
Frank comes up next to me. Until recently he was as curly-headed and stout as one of these grass-fat steers, but now his hair is gone from treatments—all but a few strands. What’s left has grayed. He has aged about thirty years in three months.
He lifts one of the snowmobile boots up to rest it on the bottom rail of the corral and sticks his arms out over the top rail so that it’s kind of hanging him by the armpits. His hands are clasped inside the corral and he is quiet for a long moment, looking over his herd.
Then he says, “You know, that horse of yours wouldn’t be worth a damn to anyone else.” A long pause while he lets that sink in. “But you’ve got a lot of patience.” Pause. “You’re bringing her along pretty nice. Stay with her and someday she might even be useful. I was watching you from the house.” Another long pause. He jabs toward the mountains with his chin. “You know, there wasn’t enough snow up there last winter to melt down for a cup of coffee. I thought surely the pasture would burn up by the end of June. But I’ll be damned if it didn’t rain just about every so often, like this was some kind of sensible country to live in. The grass this summer was the greenest I’ve ever seen all my life up here. And you look at those calves now. Fattest we’ve ever raised. And the percent of cows that took is higher, too. Now what do you make of that?” He turns to look at me for the next long pause, but he doesn’t really expect me to answer. He knows I’m just listening.
“Here I am pussyfootin’ around with all my hair falling out and the country looks like damned Ireland or something.” Pause. “If it don’t beat all. ’Course I don’t blame anyone. The Navy didn’t know about asbestos in 1946. I’m glad that the one who got sick was me. I’m just glad it wasn’t Shirley or one of the kids. I couldn’ta stood that.” Long pause.
“Asbestos is just one of the things we come up with to make this a better world, and ever so often one of those things goes haywire and some poor sucker like me pays the price. But I sure don’t blame anyone. You can’t blame the whole damn Navy. Or civilization. The world is better now than it was when I was your age, and me and Shirley started out at the Running Water, cooking on the woodstove and trying to nail down the livestock so it wouldn’t blow away. My Lord, it’s windy up there. Things are a lot better now, though I know you and Clay don’t think so. You weren’t there, now, were you?” He turns to look at me again, expecting no answer.
“You know, that Clay—him and Brad and them put up hay faster this year than I’ve ever seen anybody put up hay. Like the Devil was after ’em. And for once I didn’t have to worry about a thing, not broken balers or thunderstorms or any of it. I just sat back and watched it get done. Best year of my life.
“So green.
“Not to mention all my kids havin’ kids faster’n I can count. Greenest year I’ve known, bar none. Now I’m goin’ down the road before you all bring the herd. I’ll be ahead of you guys and have the gate open when you get there.
“And don’t forget to take a load of hay home with you for your horses. This hay we put up this year is almost as good as what Lyle used to make.”
Frank turns and duck-walks over to the Bronco. The rest of us saddle up and take the herd that’s staying on for winter. We have a little trouble at first when we turn them out of the corral and they want to go every direction, but we sprint our nags and whoop till they start down the road, bawling all the way like they’re sad the summer is over.
Frank stops the Bronco on the hill until he sees we have them moving, then he eases down the road. We chouse them the two miles down to Oscar’s meadow (the Wooden Shoe), where Frank is waiting by the open gate. We count them through and Roger has to rope one calf and yank him into Brad’s trailer. Somehow that calf wasn’t supposed to be here.
Frank closes the gate behind us, and we slowly start back up the road for home. It is just getting dark. I twist around in the saddle and watch Frank watching us ride away. He takes off the black felt Stetson and, holding the brim curled, lifts it once into the air.
School had started, but not for the Worster boys. It had been a summery October and the first snow had fainted away so fast it was like the perfume of a passing girl. It occurred to Raymond that the episodes of his life all faded that fast. There were parts of his life so ephemeral that they didn’t even qualify as stories, more like dreams already woken from. Like his father’s first wife, who was beautiful, they said, but weaker than the year’s first snow, who died before she ever got a chance to be
Ray’s mother. And the ranch, too, the ranch on Sheep Creek that App mortgaged to pay the doctors and lost. And Ray’s own mother, App’s first wife’s sister, who died bringing Jack into the world. Now he was wondering if anything at all lasted, anything you could grab on to before it slipped past, beyond blame, beyond meaning.
Ray had missed so much school already it would have been better, from his point of view, to go ahead and miss the rest of it. It had become humiliating. He was almost too big to fit into the desks. He liked the teacher, Miss Gunner-son, though, and the schoolhouse at Tie Siding was warm and had pine floors, not dirt like home.
App always pulled the boys out of school when it was fine enough to work. Here it was October and they hadn’t even been yet. Ray was beginning to think of himself as a stupid person who would make his way in life by the sweat of his brow and the strength of his back, which at twelve was already considerable.
Ray watched App tuck his flowing white beard inside his shirt so it wouldn’t get caught in the grindstone. App pumped the treadle and let the wheel throw drops of water in the shape of a galaxy as it spun. He sharpened the eight blades of four axes for the morning’s work.
When App told the boys stories of his early life, they seemed like just that: stories. It seemed to Ray as though none of it had really happened, though he knew all of it was true: how green the meadow was, how much hay it made some years, how much stock his father had to feed in winter. How the cabin had floors, like the schoolhouse, and no one had to fetch water because the water flowed from a spring above the house, through wooden pipes that App had drilled out of lodgepoles, right up to a tank by the front door. It didn’t freeze in winter either because the pipe was buried deep and the water was always running so no one had to melt chipped ice or snow to drink. How there was a woman in that house who was their mother. How App had lost it all.
Ray wondered where things like that went when they were gone, and, even that young, he longed to go there.
Ray looked around at the claim shack they lived in. Hell, they didn’t even own the dirt floor under it, let alone the walls and roof. They weren’t trying to prove up any claim—App knew the ground was worthless. They all knew it was a matter of time until they lost the shack, too.
Every morning App sharpened the axes and they drove the flatbed up along Boulder Ridge, sometimes all the way into Colorado, almost as far as that meadow that was supposed to have been their home, their own land to work and build on.
Things seemed to have a way of going haywire, as if there were some other kind of gravity in the world that pulled things in the wrong direction: Someone else got the homeplace and they lost two mothers.
Every day Ray and his brothers scoured the forest for cured pitch pine. They cut and split the logs they found into fenceposts; they shouldered the posts out to the road and loaded them on the old Chev. App hauled them to town where a supply store paid him fifty cents apiece for posts that, once set in the ground, would not rot in a man’s lifetime.
But the good cured pitch was getting harder and harder to find, and Ray noticed he was spending more time wandering through the woods looking. He didn’t like looking. It was just more time to think about how he’d already lost everything before he ever got a grip on any of it. He didn’t like the direction things kept pulling in and he didn’t like thinking about it. Swinging his axe, working up a sweat was about the only time he gave those thoughts a break, outside of sleeping.
App handed the razor-edged axes to the boys and they rode the back of the truck up the sharp spine of Boulder Ridge on the road that had been made by the railroad tie hacks when they put the Union Pacific through. You can still find the worn-out ox shoes they tossed by the side of the road.
The boys were silent before the day’s labor. They would stop for half an hour at lunchtime (which they called dinner, though it wasn’t even much of a snack), and then go back to work until it was too dark to see. Maybe one of the boys would see a bear, or pick up an arrowhead, or lay his boot open with his axe without scratching his foot, something to mark the day somehow, to set it apart so that memory could find it, but usually the days were the same. Anonymous. By the time they got home, had eaten their supper and turned in (“Time to scratch the feathers and purr,” App always said), there wasn’t much dark left before it started all over again.
It was four-thirty. Ray had just carried three posts out of the timber to a side trail and was walking back to Nigger Bob Creek. He still had a good hour of work to do before App called them in. He was scanning the forest floor for pitch logs when he saw something that was, to him, more rare and strange than any ox shoe or Indian knife, something so foreign to his twelve-year-old mind that he did not know what to do.
He saw a human being. A man. A man fishing. The man had a peg leg and was wearing a buffalo coat, but neither the leg nor the coat made as much of an impression on Ray as the simple fact of a human in a place where Ray had never seen anyone who was not his father or his brothers. It was the first time Ray had ever seen anyone he didn’t know.
The stranger was standing on a beaver dam with his back turned. Ray let his axe drop and tiptoed up behind a big balsam fir to watch. He was mesmerized. He watched the man from behind the tree until it was so dark he was afraid of not being able to find his way back to the road. He was afraid his father and brothers would go home without him. He turned and fled, quietly as he could, forgetting the axe where he’d dropped it, for which App gave him the thrashing of his life that night.
They found the axe the next day. Fifty years later, Ray said, “You think you’ve had to adjust. I was twelve years old before I ever saw a stranger.”
With half a bottle of rum in his hand, Ray made a lateral sweeping gesture, like he was using the jug to brush a fly off the table, only there wasn’t any table. “They ought to e-rase the human race and put something good on here. When I get down to hell I’ve got a few questions for that Devil, real sticklers, like how come they let people into this world when it would have been perfect without them. I mean if you imagine the natural world without the human race, you are thinking of something perfect, perfectly balanced, that just keeps going. Only thing as messes it up is the people. Especially when they try to manage things. The more of ’em there are the worster it gets. Now how come they done that? That’s going to be the first question. After that there’s the long list and the short list, depending on if he’s got time, which I imagine he’s got aplenty of, but you never know if he takes questions or not.”
Ray took a healthy pull and wiped his mouth on his sleeve and passed the half-gallon of booze. Some fisherman had given it to him as a bribe to fish in the reservoir where the company didn’t allow it. The news that the Chimney Rock Ranch had sold its Colorado holdings had reached us, which was why we were parked by the side of the road up to Deadman, blind drunk, taking turns weeping from rage and grief.
Not that it was anything new for the big ranch that, along with the National Forest, surrounded all of us to be selling land. Frank Lilley had been foreman down there for thirty-five years, but the multimillion-dollar spread kept changing owners, usually among Eastern wheeler-dealers looking for places to hide their money, or big corporations like Western Union—six times that I could remember. Frank had always stayed on, though he had no assurance of keeping his job from year to year. The ranch stayed a cattle operation; it just shrank from 90,000 to 72,000 acres and increased in value from one to six million dollars. We were crying because this time they had sold six sections in Colorado to Colorado land developers, which meant the summer cabin, hunting, fishing, and recreational vehicle set was moving in. The land we’d roamed free all our lives was about to be sawed up and nailed down into forty acre “parcels” all the way to Wyoming, the whole foreground of our view. About a hundred low-budget refugees in Winnebagos and fly-away shacks were massing for the invasion since the land was being pedaled at bargain basement prices. Most of the plots had no trees or water. People would be told it was a good invest
ment as well as a recreational paradise. Only those of minimal intelligence and maximal faith in realtors’ lies would fall for it. Many of them would throw away their life savings.
Ray said, “Jim, I never saw a stranger till I was twelve years old, but I’ve seen a passel of ’em since. You got to realize it’s going to go that way. You got to cry a little more and take it. There’s no way in hell to stop it. Oh, you might put a crimp in their get-along, but you can’t stop ’em. And it ain’t nobody’s fault, neither.”
Ray put the truck in gear and drove a hundred yards down the road, not bothering to shift into third. He pulled over again, cut the motor, and took another pull from the jug. “Yessirree Bob, Jim. You’ve got to realize. And so do I. You own a whole section, and these people that are fixing to ruin this country just want their own personal little piece of heaven. We gotta move over and let ’em in. You’ve got your section. You’ve got your memories of the used-to-be same as I do, and they can’t squat on that.”
“Ray, there are so many of them they’ll make a trailer court out of the wilderness they are after. It’ll be a country club for white trash. They’re going to eat it up before they ever have it, and we won’t have it anymore either. Those jackasses actually believe it when the realtors tell them they’ll be able to get in here all winter and the creeks run high all summer and that the price of land will rise forever. They are going to build ugly things down there where we’ve been looking at nothing so long we’re addicted to it. We won’t be able to see the mountains for the junk they are going to strew down there.”
