The Meadow

by James Galvin

  2/28 Damn tourist came up the creek and got stuck in the snow. Took him an hour of shoveling to get out. They don’t have any sense at all. Warm and windy.

  2/29 This day ain’t on my calender.

  3/1 Started sewing up a pair of P.J.’s am—sawed wood in pm. Two cars on road today—real warm, + 42, some wind.

  3/2 Spent the whole day reading, sure lazy.

  3/3 Ray, Jack, and Ki were here this morning, came back this evening, stayed till late. Nice day. Bluebirds arrived today.

  3/4 Fixed horse trophy for Frank’s mother am, looked for old pictures pm. Snow in am 1½'' —Clara’s birthday.

  * * *

  5/27 Went to the Johnson place to start building the scale house. Fairly nice day but cool.

  5/28 Stormy—East wind and light snow. Stayed home and done some cooking.

  5/29 Snowed last night. Have nearly 16" since yesterday am. Went up to check the ditch and over to see Galvins. Whiteout. Hard to see.

  5/30 Stayed home and rested and filed a saw. Took the Ski-doo to check the fence, scared some elk out of the draw. Nice day and warm.

  5/31 Worked in shop and spent some time with the water. Nice day, some fog early.

  6/1 Irrigated all morning. Went to Frank’s and mail box pm—nice day.

  6/2 Went to town.

  6/3 Worked at the Johnson on the scales.

  6/4 Worked on scales

  6/5 Worked on scales

  6/6 Worked on scales

  6/7 Worked on scales

  6/8 The next 5 days I worked on the scales.

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  6/14 Claude brought his cows up today.

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  12/6 Snowing today—worked on grindstone shaft bearings.

  12/7 Still snowing—have about 6". Jimmy Galvin and Julie came over in afternoon.

  12/8 J. Galvin Sr. came today with his woman. Forgot her name.

  12/9 Cleaned chicken house—shut off Marie’s spring—put new wire glass on south bay window—washed outside windows—charged light batteries.

  12/10 Went to town then res for supper. Nice day but cold— – 14 in morning.

  12/11 Baked bread, trimmed the geraniums, put coasters on sewing machine. Ben and Don came in morning. Ray and Margie at noon. Van Freemont and wife in afternoon. Windy day.

  12/12 Went to Galvin’s, saw five coyotes—over to Marie’s cabin to cut tree—took tractor to barn in afternoon. Windy.

  12/13 Went down to Johnson place to fix water pipes—went to town with Mrs. White—cloudy most of day—snowed some late afternoon.

  12/14 Cold and windy today—cleaned the bay window—recovered the shelves and washed the windows.

  12/15 Worked some on grindstone—walked up to feed horses—Worster tribe here in evening—cold and windy, some snow flurries.

  12/16 Washed clothes in am worked on grindstone in pm. Cold and windy.

  12/17 Got my Christmas cards ready and went to town—went to see Ray on his job, sure a mess—Nice in am, colder, stormy pm.

  12/18 Made a double throw switch for batteries. Worked on grindstone trying to get it to run true. Cold and windy.

  12/19 Put the control on the windcharger, got it going. Hooked up the new batteries. They are Western Electric—cost $25.00 each. Cold and wind.

  12/20 Worked in shop, chipping grindstone to true it up. Cold and windy—snow flurries. Hooked on new batteries today.

  12/21 Worked in shop making another switch and chipping on grindstone. Windy as hell but warmer.

  12/22 Worked in shop—went up to feed horses am—Ray and Harold were here in pm—late in day 12 Jeeps and a pickup went down. Cold and windy, + 10 high.

  12/23 Baked bread and other cooking in am. Worked in shop in pm. – 10 this noon, some light snow, east wind tonight.

  12/24 Worked in shop am. Frank and Clay were here pm. – 18 this morning. Windy afternoon. At 8:30 pm, 0 degrees, strong wind.

  12/25 Christmas! ha! Not a soul did I see this day.

  12/26 Calm and sunny. Worked in shop making a stone-facing hammer to smooth up the grindstone. Ray and Marge were here for supper. Marge gave me a willow cup for Christmas.

  12/27 Worked in shop am. Went to reservoir for dinner. Nice in am, cloudy in pm.

  12/28 Went to town—stopped to visit with Don Collins on the way home—Don is 74 years old and looks good. Nice day but cool.

  12/29 Baked bread—worked some in shop and rested. Nice day—cold in am, – 8.

  12/30 Worked in shop on a pair of spurs for Don Ruth. Sure a SOB to make. Some wind but nice, up to 20.

  12/31 Worked in shop am—went for a walk pm. Some light snow am, sunny pm. A lonesome time of year.

  Since the first time App went to sleep, in that strangely cold, green place with his old man, on the Sheep Creek side of Boulder Ridge, he had a desire to go back there and build a ranch on that spot. It was a feeling like he belonged there, that the events of his life would inevitably lead him back, and he would be happy. It was as though he had a tuning fork vibrating in his chest when he thought about it.

  It didn’t, therefore, worry him much when someone else laid claim to 360 acres of the meadow, including some side-hill pasture and a good bit of the bordering timber.

  That was 1895. In 1895, App knew, there were many places that, from a practical point of view, would have made better homesteads than that one, places down out of the heavy snow country and a lot closer to town. App liked that Sheep Creek meadow from an impractical point of view. It was like a separate country. It was a place where he could disappear into the mountains, into a life that was no one else’s, where he didn’t need anyone to get by. Furthermore, App didn’t consider thirty miles from town any more than far enough from town. When he was twenty he rode the fifty miles from Laramie to Virginia Dale and back on a horse named Spook in less than six hours on a bet.

  When he heard that some stranger had filed on the piece of ground his heart was set on, that almost imaginary thatch of peat bog surrounded by low hills and tall stands of lodge-pole pine, with its own ocean of sage-gray prairie lapping at its shores and the whole Medicine Bow Range to drink in every day, he just started to figure how he could get it back.

  Except in the rare instance of an App Worster, who preferred the absence of people to the people themselves, whenever you see someone living that far from human society, human scrutiny, chances are they are not so much hiding as hiding out. Chances are they are temporary. The best thing for App to do was to save his money, since he’d have to buy the place now, if not from the homesteaders then from the bank. That was number one. Number two was to find a wife, since a man who likes solitude doesn’t necessarily like loneliness, and the help would be a plus.

  There was a girl in Laramie who gave App that same tuning fork feeling in his chest whenever he saw her, which was usually when he went into the eating house across from the Union Pacific station, where she worked. Saving for a ranch was antithetical to the indulgence of store-bought dinners, but it was the only way he could talk to her and get that hum inside his chest. Besides, App was a man of unusual intelligence and energy, and could make pretty good money bringing deer and elk meat to the town, trapping some, and occasionally hiring on to break colts on ranches.

  When the news came out that whoever was living up there on Sheep Creek was wanted in Oklahoma for robbery, and had been supplying Jack Slade with different horses to ride so that he would be harder to recognize when he knocked over a small town bank, App wasn’t surprised. It seemed like destiny. He had to ride to Fort Collins to sign for the deed. He bought the place outright. The price was four hundred dollars. Then he walked into the lunchroom and asked Marie to marry him.

  Her eyes were dark green. She was shy an
d rarely spoke. Her waist was so thin App could encircle it with his hands, so that his thumbs and middle fingers touched.

  Though their acquaintance was slight by modern standards—mostly abashed, brief pleasantries—a girl stranded in a frontier town had limited time and opportunity. So when App asked her, and told her about the ranch, she and her mother agreed they should marry.

  Nevertheless it was with more fear than excitement constricting her breath and making her heart flutter that she climbed onto the wagon seat next to App after their ten minutes in front of the Justice of the Peace. They creaked and rattled out of town onto the thirty miles of barely visible track and then no track at all across the prairie toward the green hills to start a life together.

  All Marie could think about as they rolled across the Laramie Basin and then began to climb toward Boulder Ridge were stories she knew to be true about girls coming all the way from the East or Europe, where they’d had decent, respectable lives, coming west on the promises of men who claimed to be rich landholders, gentlemen with mansions and vast herds of cattle or sheep. Men who met these girls at the station in St. Louis or Denver, married them on the spot, and then, swigging whiskey and spitting nonstop, drove them into the desert and whoaed up in front of some board shack or hole in the ground with a roof, like where a badger might live, with floors and walls of dirt, and without a tree or even a hill in any direction. They’d had to winter in such burrows, wide awake in the shrill whiteness of the outer world where they would die in a matter of hours if they tried to escape and be torn apart by wolves. Many women lost their minds in such circumstances, or took their own lives.

  When App pulled up short at the top of the ridge, just as the sun was setting over the deep green meadow with the creek running through it and wildflowers smattering the sidehills and a decent log house with a bay window facing south, her fears melted into most delightful, from App’s point of view, manifestations.

  It was a good house, well made of logs, with a steeply pitched roof to shrug off heavy snows, three rooms, and a strangely fancified bay window that made the living room almost too hot in the winter sun, even when the outside temperature was well below zero. “Some of them thieves was pretty handy with the axe,” App remarked. “I guess nobody’s all bad.”

  The sun shines an average of 340 days a year on Boulder Ridge. That’s why it has that dried-up and about-to-blow-away look and all the white light, and why Marie was so taken with the lush green of the Sheep Creek meadow. There are bigger meadows down on the Laramie River, but they’re surrounded by empty sage flats. They don’t have that protected feeling.

  Marie liked the house and the first winter wasn’t bad. They were able to visit her mother three times between November and May, when the wind carved a passage through the drifts. But App didn’t care for the location of the house or its size—or so he said. What he meant was he hadn’t built it himself.

  The former owners had begun a big log barn at the upper end of the meadow, but they’d quit before they got the top logs and the roof on. App decided to finish the barn and build a house next to it, and put the sheds and corrals he’d need to raise cattle up there, too, so that everything would be together and handy for winter feeding. He spent his next year getting that done (and planting a family) but the barn is all that’s left of what App built at the upper end of the meadow.

  The barn is something of a puzzlement. Clearly it was not begun by the same hand that built the house below. Whoever started the barn didn’t have a very good idea of how it’s supposed to be done. The corners are saddle-notched, but all the cups are turned up instead of over, so they catch the rain water and tend to rot out. Those logs can roll in their cups and the barn spits them out with the passage of time. Well, most of the log buildings in America were first tries, but I’ve always wondered what happened to the fellow who built that house. He wasn’t around when they started the barn; he wouldn’t have allowed such methods.

  It’s easy to see where App’s work begins on the barn: The vastly oversized top logs are hewn flat on the outside with a broadaxe so expertly it looks like they were milled, planed, and sanded. The rafters are hewn square and notched snugly into the top logs and pegged down to keep the roof from lifting like an enormous wing into the wind (though once when Lyle owned it the wind got so fierce it did lift the roof and three top logs and set it over a foot or so).

  App finished the barn, which is thirty-by-sixty-feet, in the second summer. He filled it with stalls, and the loft with hay, and brought up a starter herd of old-fashioned long-horned cows and calves. App’s stock spread up Sheep Creek to Bull Mountain and down Sand Creek to Chimney Rock. It was easier to keep an eye on them from a horse than to build enough fence to keep them home.

  Ray had an enormous old photograph, maybe twelve-by-twenty-four inches, of the new house App finished in time for his first child to be born. Marie is standing in the doorway with the infant in her arms. The hay barn still looks about the same as it does in the picture, but today there’s no trace of the house or any of the sheds or corrals. The house and the rest of it burned down one year after it was finished. A chimney fire set the shake roof ablaze while App was cutting hay among the willows with a scythe, cleaning up the tight spots where he couldn’t mow with the team.

  He looked up once and everything was tranquil, smoke from the cookstove lazing into the sky. The next time he looked up the roof was engulfed in flames and Marie was running in her long dress across the yard with Goldie in her arms, the child’s swaddling trailing smoke.

  They moved back down to the house with the bay window, but a series of hard winters kicked something out of Marie’s spirit and she became consumptive. The winter Goldie was three and Marie was pregnant with Pete, they weren’t able to get to town for five months. Game was scarce and they survived mostly on venison jerky. Marie just wasn’t built for winters like that, so far away, nor summers stacking hay, canning, sewing, gardening, and cooking. After Pete was born she never got out of bed again.

  App sold off stock to pay for doctors’ calls and medicine. The medicine was mostly laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol that was easily available, but whose beneficial effects were questionable. The last summer she was alive, App spent most of his time digging a thousand feet of ditch, six feet deep, from the spring down to the house. He swung the pickaxe and shoveled fourteen hours a day. It kept his mind off what was happening. When the ditch was finished he made a thousand feet of wooden pipe out of lodgepole rails drilled in the middle and threaded on the ends. He wanted it so that if Marie ever recovered she would never have to haul water in a bucket again.

  To this day no one has been able to figure how App drilled out those poles into sections of pipe ten and twelve feet long without coming out the sides, but he did it. Lyle found many of those pieces still in place when he dug up the line fifty years later and put down PVC. No one knows why they never rotted either, since they were buried and untreated.

  Marie’s health slipped steadily, and it depressed App so much that, after the water line was in, he more or less gave up tending to things. Marie’s sister came to the ranch to take care of her, and after Marie died and App lost the ranch, App married the sister. She bore two children in the claim shack, and then she died, too, and that was the end of App’s dream.

  Ray and Jack were born in that claim shack at the base of Boulder Ridge, near Tie Siding. When their mother died App sent all four children to the third and last sister, who lived in eastern Washington. The boys eventually came back, but Goldie never did. For the rest of his life App had to picture Marie carrying her from the burning house with her blankets still smoldering.

  Ray said his father never got over losing Marie, the girl whose waist was so slender he could encircle it with his hands, like the low hills of timber surrounding the meadow. Ray said App never stopped thinking about Marie his whole life, never stopped missing her. The day she died App climbed up on a haystack in the middle of the meadow and lay there on his back f
or three days and nights, facing the sky. Ray said he lay on that haystack and cried.

  As far as I know Ray never did anything worse than drink too much, smoke, and curse, and occasionally take an elk out of season—except for once. It was at a dance at Woods Landing where the Worster boys were providing the music (Pete on fiddle, Ray and Jack on guitars and singing—this would have been 1960). There was a bully in there—a usual sort of smalltime bar brawler who started fights in saloons the way other people go bowling on Saturday nights—insulting people and generally trying to get something started. People were only afraid of him because of the pure joy he seemed to derive from beating someone up, always someone smaller or drunker than he was.

  That night he made the mistake of picking a fight with Ray, who was both smaller and drunker, and who ordinarily walked away from invitations like that, but the guy insulted Margie instead of Ray, and she was sitting right there and heard it. Not that she gave a damn, but Ray did, and the two men agreed to go outside in the snow. As they reached the door the guy said, “Ray?” and when Ray turned around the guy let him have it, and as soon as Ray had picked himself up off the floor, he did it again. “Ray?” Bang.

  Once they got outside in the snow Ray not only slapped tar out of that bully, but once he was ready to give up, begging for mercy, Ray put a hammer lock on his head with one arm and went to work on the guy’s face with the other. When I say work I mean a long and steady kind of work like a hammer breaking rock, steady, methodical blows as if Ray actually expected the man’s head eventually to crack in two. When Ray let him drop there was not much recognizable about his face.

  That was the only time Ray actually hurt anybody, but Ray had a feeling they were saving a place for him in hell, and he made his list of questions for the Devil.

  By 1975 Lyle had finished reading much of the Laramie library and was having the Denver library sent up a dozen books at a time. He was not limited by subject matter or genre; he had total recall.