by James Galvin
“Ferris gives me a jaunty wave out of his window, and I’m left with the gray aftertaste of knowing that these people live less than four miles away. In fact I could see the top of their junkheap with binoculars from the ridge.
“For the grace of God and the deals I made with Him, I personally never spoke to Ferris again, though I seen him from time to time, and his wife, who continued the daily pilgrimages to whatever kind of steamy heap they lived in formerly, and they still brought the daily bargeloads up the mountain, having fixed their brutalized pickup. But instead of junk it was always livestock after I helped them out that day, until there was twenty or more horses of chaotic variety, half as many goats, innumerable chickens, ducks, geese, and even peacocks, not to mention the manifold dogs, cats, and whatever that family had living in their clothes. It wasn’t long after the arrival of these folk that Ed Wilkes was horrified to catch in a trap set for packrats in his cellar the only honest-to-God city rat that has ever been seen on Boulder Ridge.”
When they surveyed the state line between Colorado and Wyoming it didn’t come out right. Both states are almost four hundred miles square so it wasn’t much of a surprise to the surveyors when they ended up with a fifty-foot discrepancy. They never fought over it because it wasn’t an overlap—they both came up short.
According to Colorado that ribbon of land fifty feet wide and four hundred miles long was in Wyoming. According to Wyoming it was in Colorado. According to App Worster it belonged to him since nobody else wanted it. He’d lost the meadow on Sheep Creek and figured he could build a claim shack on that strip and neither state would require him to prove up, which would be helpful since he knew there was nothing under the state line but rotten granite. App guessed right. Even after the second survey, which came out right, neither state seemed willing to notice which side of the line App’s house really was on. He lived there thirty years, to the end.
When he nailed the last shingle on the roof, whose ridgepole ran east-west, he stood up there and spread his arms out wide and tilted back his head and shouted at the sky, “Mine!” and laughed and cried at the same time. Then he said out loud to himself, “Sure hope I never have to fence the bastard in.”
Both Ray and Jack were born in that claim shack. App still hoped to get the ranch back, but when his second wife died he gave it up. He gave up a lot of things then—everything but waiting. He shipped off his three sons by rail to the state of Washington to live with his dead wives’ other sister (the one of three he hadn’t married). But one year later they arrived back at the station in Laramie, each with a bulk freight tag around his neck. Three tags that read: App Worster, Laramie, Wyoming.
Many ranchers were building vast mileages of fence in those days, so there was no lack of work cutting fenceposts on Boulder Ridge. Before long App bought a flatbed to haul posts, and a car, a Model-A, to drive to town. When the ridge was too snowed in to work, he let the boys drive the car to school at Tie Siding.
The country between the claim shack and the school was open prairie. After a big storm it blew into drifts and clear spots. Neighbors gave the boys permission to take down fencewires if they had to when meandering among drifts looking for a way through.
Driving across a prairie in winter, it doesn’t matter where the road is. You keep to high ground, exposed to the wind. You puzzle your way, sometimes backtracking, sometimes digging through. You try not to think of yourself from an aerial view.
The Worster boys always had a lot of fun driving to school. The Model-A was a good car in snow, far better than its modern equivalent. Its wheels were thin enough to cut down through the snow and reach the frozen ground for traction, and it had a lot of clearance under the differential. The boys raised rooster tails wheeling among the drifts; they turned the gearbox around so that all the car could do forward was howl along at a walking pace. They drove across the prairie at twenty or thirty miles an hour in reverse.
One winter App’s leg started to swell for no reason anyone could tell until it was big around as a gatepost and just as stiff. The boys convinced a doctor to come out from town to look at the old man, since App said he was damned if he’d go crawling and complaining to some upper-level veterinarian who would just want to saw the thing off anyway, which is exactly what the doctor proposed to do. He said the leg would kill App if he didn’t let him. App told him to go to hell.
“Open the door, Ray, and let some of that sunshine in here. I don’t know what’s wrong with this damned thing, but I know a little sunshine will cure it.” App spent all spring and summer sitting in the open doorway, chewing Day’s Work plug tobacco, which he hardly remembered to spit out, just more or less ate, and bathing his leg in sunshine until it started to shrink and he could walk. By fall he was up on the mountain again, driving the truck and saying over and over, “Let that be a lesson to you.”
August of 1955 Ray took a Saturday off and hauled the whole family up to Snowy Range for a picnic and some fishing. They went in the old log truck because there were about fifteen of them with all the kids and in-laws. App wouldn’t eat and went back to the truck and just sat in the cab. He stayed there all afternoon, until Ray got worried.
“You all right, Dad?”
“Sure, fine. The strangest thing, though…” App was staring hard into the deep, clear, glacial lake below the white stone and snow of the faces. “I felt kind of peaked so I came in here to sit awhile and I saw Marie. I saw her like I see you sitting there now. She said she had been waiting for me all this time and that everything would be all right. We just set here for the longest time holding hands and chatting about this and that and not to worry about the boys. But she was still young and her hand was so young here in my old one…”
App died in his sleep one week later and was buried on Boulder Ridge where the ground is so hard Ray and Jack and Pete had to use dynamite and drills to get the grave deep enough. They worked for two nights and days with tears streaming down their faces, staying drunk the whole time. When they were done they put App in a number two pine box and buried him. Ray took the bar and pried up a good-sized boulder nearby for a headstone. With a hammer and cold chisel Pete carved in the stone a letter A, then a P, then another P, and called it good.
When I was seven Clara died. When I was seven nothing seemed strange. When I was seven so this is how it is is what I thought about whatever happened. Clara didn’t seem “off” to me. Everyone said incomprehensible things. She was nice to us kids, took us arrowhead hunting in the picture rocks and at Bull Mountain Spring. She laughed and was a little homely.
Clara said that Indians walked placing one foot exactly in front of the other, instead of a little off to the side the way we walk. She gave us a demonstration in a pair of beaded moccasins she’d made, being careful, also, as she said, to put the toe down first instead of the heel to make less noise. She said she wanted to make less noise and also to leave more beautiful tracks in the snow. She was going to practice until she always walked that way.
She studied occult texts. She became a Rosicrucian. All winter she talked to herself and painted landscapes. Often she depicted animals—deer or elk or horses—looking up as if they’d just heard something, some danger, but hadn’t seen it yet.
She was trying to live too far away, seeing few people and rarely going to town. The wind blew the winter long. She kept painting the vistas that shut her in, surrounded her with their fatally indifferent beauty. Icy landscapes covered the walls. It was like not having walls. She practiced automatic writing every day and contacted voices. The voices started telling her to do things. Lyle came over and asked my father if he would try to talk some sense into her. “When I talk to her she’s just yonder.”
My father went and Clara was talking out of her head, like she was from someplace far away and wanted to get back. My father said they had to take her to the hospital right away. Hazel insisted that they could calm her down and keep a close eye on her and that they’d go in tomorrow—it was already late. They’d go tomorrow
.
Lyle never drives faster than a crawl. Sometimes when he drives by on his way to town you don’t hear him, the way he babies the engine. That’s why I remember how he tore up our drive later that evening, wheels throwing gravel into the air like sprays of water. His face looked drained, without surprise or any possibility of surprise. I’d never seen his face like that before. It made me cold. Lyle was standing on the porch talking into the darkness behind the screen. “You can’t do nothin’ for her now, but maybe you can do something for Mom.”
After an hour or so my father came back in Lyle’s truck with Lyle and Hazel. My sister and I had been put to bed. Lyle and Hazel sat in the living room with my mother. My father drove to Fort Collins to get the coroner. My sister and I lay on our cots listening. It was dark in our room and there was a bar of light under the door. The grown-ups’ voices sounded urgent and weary. They were talking about how Clara had seemed suddenly better, lucid again. She’d become cheerful and was singing happily to herself as she took her sketch pad and said she was going into the sun for a while. The next thing, they heard the shot.
When my father got there she was still breathing, but not for long. When he arrived in Fort Collins the coroner asked him why he hadn’t brought the body with him. He (the coroner) wasn’t going all the way up there at this time of night. So my father headed home to get an old rug my grandmother had braided, then over to Van Waning’s, where he wrapped the body in the rug, then back to Collins.
We were all having breakfast and no one was talking. My father drove up and came in and got some buckets and rags and a mop and went out again. As he left, he hung my grandmother’s rug, which now had a dark stain like rust on it, over the back fence next to the forge.
October 1963, Thursday. No one around for miles. Lyle is building a new room on the homesteader’s cabin we live in. He’s been hard at it since eight this morning and now it’s past six. He didn’t go home at noon today. He wanted to finish the rafters so he just brought a sandwich and a thermos of coffee.
Hazel’s bread rose so aggressively the slices looked like cross-sections of a huge mushroom. The same damned slices that had embarrassed him at school. Good, though. The sandwich was elk meat that Bill McMurray had shot two falls ago and Hazel had canned. By noon the coffee in the steel thermos was just warm.
Lyle had spent the day cutting out and laying up rafters, first figuring the angles for the pattern so the rafters fit flush against the ridgepole and the notches in the rafters fit the plate on top of the wall, which in this case was the top log itself, hewn flat on the outside and with notches chiseled in the top to make right angles. The rafters themselves were roughsawn two-by-sixes that Lyle had milled on his sawmill.
You have to keep your tools sharp. You have to be willing to spend half an hour every so often to sharpen your saw, your chisel, your axe. If you keep your tools sharp and aren’t afraid to move your arms, power tools are unnecessary. If you keep your tools sharp it isn’t that much slower to do it by hand, and the results are better.
Lyle lifts another rafter onto the sawhorses, lays the pattern on it, and marks it out. First he crosscuts, then he rips. The ripsaw sails through the wood. His arm strokes steadily till each outcut drops.
Electricity, he thinks, is overrated. Hazel, and Clara before she died, had urged him to put in a power plant for lights and a water pump so they could hook up the water jacket on the cookstove and run water through the firebox and back to an insulated tank and have hot water from the faucet, like people do in town. Lyle went along because he wanted electricity in his shop. He’d had some ideas for power tools he wanted to build, starting with a metal lathe.
He got a junked Windcharger from the Diamondtail Ranch and rebuilt it. He traded for a bank of thirty-two-volt deep-cycle batteries. He’d set up the house for lights and it had been nothing but headaches ever since. The batteries eventually wore down and had to be replaced. Light-bulbs blew and were increasingly hard to find in thirty-two volts. The wind was often still or raging like a banshee. He couldn’t leave the charger on if he was away from home.
Having electricity started giving the women ideas: an indoor bathroom, a phonograph, and then it just snowballed.
He liked having the power tools he’d designed himself and made from scraps—two lathes, three drill presses, a table saw, joiner, planer, lapidary saw, grinder—but unless you were setting up for a really big job, most things were just as easy to do by hand, if you knew what you were doing and kept the tools sharp.
Lyle hoists the rafter to his shoulder and climbs the ladder with it and sets it in place, driving in one tenpenny nail to hold it. He climbs back down and sits on a sawhorse. He fishes out his tobacco. As he lights up, the sun is setting, turning the sky as many pastels as you see on the side of a rainbow trout. The reddest clouds are the fish cut open. Aspen trees are peaking with yellow. A wind comes up the draw, announced in advance by clapping aspen leaves, and then he can hear it take the pines around the house and he feels it on his cheek and it makes the end of his cigarette glow brighter. He takes a deep drag and looks down past the springhouse nested in orange willow branches. Up over the opposing hill he sees the snow on mountains west of Laramie. Another breath of wind comes up and starts the aspens chattering like nervous girls, and they catch the last low-angling rays of sun and flare. The dark tops of evergreens are red, almost bloody, and for a good thirty seconds he knows that the world is something altogether other than what it appears to be.
By the time he puts his tools away and starts the Studebaker down the drive it is full dark. He can see the light brown gravel of the road where it contrasts the gray-green sage and blond grass and he drives home without turning the headlights on.
By welding a Model-T axle and a bar of tool steel to either end of an arm’s length of pipe, Pat Sudeck made a bar for chipping out postholes in rock, the kind of bar Lyle calls an idiot stick. It’s heavy enough for its own weight to do some of the work, and the pick and blade are so hard you have to draw them out on the forge to sharpen them. After it’s heated and hammered out it is crucial to temper it right or it will either crumple (too soft) or break (too hard) when it strikes a piece of granite.
Tempering different grades of steel is a subtle art that can’t be explained in any book. People see colors differently, so that the relationships of colors as they shade down a metal rainbow from red to purple to tan, can only be hinted at. It takes years and failures to learn. So I take Pat’s bar over to Lyle’s forge to draw it out, where his master’s eye can guide me.
It goes all right at first, then Lyle gets disgusted with my timid hammering. I hold the bar for him and turn it on the anvil as he instructs, and he finishes drawing it out and gives it shape, though he can barely breathe. Then he takes it outside and rubs the hot steel in the dirt, scraping off the scales of carbon to see the colors better as the steel cools. He waits for the right purple-to-tan display and thrusts it into a bucket of crankcase oil.
Lyle’s shop is half of his first log building, a dimly lit square with a dirt floor. The other half is the room where Clara shot herself. Lyle thought so little of his first attempt at saddle notches he never bothered to trim the log ends off. In the middle of the floor are the forge and wood heater, whose chimney pipes join, and the anvil. Considerable bench space is taken by homemade machines. One wall is all batteries and two pair of ice skates hanging from the ceiling joist. One wall is a window and a double door. All the projects that failed hang from the remaining two walls, along with some snowshoes and some tools that were made for some job now finished. There is an airplane propeller and a loom. He keeps his failures out where anyone can see them and keeps his successes in drawers. The failures could come in handy someday for parts.
There is really only room for one person to work in here. You have to stand sideways to make it between the workbench and the anvil. The workbenches must have been level when Lyle built them, but now they slope down as if from the enormous weight of minuscule files,
pliers, punches, bits, gauges, coffee cans filled with innumerable examples of innumerable categories of small parts, from ordinary nuts, bolts, and screws to lamp generators and carburetor parts for vehicles both extant and extinct.
One window lets in a stingy amount of colorless light. It hasn’t been cleaned yet, in forty-five years. It looks like frosted glass with flyspecks. It’s a wonder Lyle isn’t blind.
He started gun-making with muzzle loaders. He went out on snowshoes in early winter and found a lodgepole pine that had been broken by snow and then had grown back so that the resulting curve was perfect for a pistol grip. He cut that and took it home and spent the next month and a half searching the forest for the Platonic match, the same kind of tree broken to twin the first. The idealization of injury. He knew the lodgepole stands where snow drifts heaviest, breaking the young trees. It looks like a grove of snakes, but he had to cruise a lot of timber to find his mirror grip.
All winter Lyle worked on the forge. He had to make a tap with guides to drill out the barrels to .50-caliber. He made two of everything: triggers, locks, hammers, sights. He roughed out each part on the anvil then filed them down, always applying dissimilar designs to identical specifications. The hammers are identical in weight and stroke, but one is shaped and engraved to resemble a striking cobra; the identical grips are diversely carved. Different parts are tempered to different hardnesses. He made the pins and fittings to remove the barrel, and all the screws. He made the damned screws. In the dim winter light he engraved and polished and blued.
He made a powder horn with brass fittings, two ramrods that fit into holes drilled in the stocks, and a bullet mold. He took the guns out in the yard and fired them enough times to satisfy himself that they were accurate and dependable. Then he carried them inside the house and stuck them in a drawer.
