by James Galvin
Lyle always came for the company on those Saturday nights. He’d take a little watery rum and nurse it all night while Ray put down a quart easy, pulling between songs. Lyle never sang. Sometimes he’d help Ray remember lyrics, and he tapped his foot and seemed to enjoy himself.
I saw a photograph once of Lyle sitting on the running board of an old Dodge pickup, playing a mandolin. His brother, Henry, was standing over him listening, his foot propped on the running board, too, and his hat brim pulled down low over his eyes. I asked Lyle if he played the mandolin, and he said he did but not in public. It was hard for me to imagine anyone with hands the size of Lyle’s playing the mandolin, his fingers too massive to press a single pair of strings, and he allowed as how that had been a problem. But he could pick out tunes.
That night Ginny, Lainie, Bill, Jack, Shirley, and Dave were there, too, whooping it up. Lyle, always the first to go home to bed, decided to have another rum instead.
Ray said, “Are you sure you can handle two drinks, Lyle?”
And Lyle said menacingly, “Strike up a tune, minstrel.”
We sang a few more songs. We were waiting to see what would happen. For a long time nothing did. We played “It’s Only a Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and “Has Anybody Seen My Gal.” I don’t say it had anything to do with the particular song, but when we started in on “Rufus Blossom,” who “had a head like a big sledge hammer / mouth like a terrible scar / but no one could touch him in Alabama / when he played on his old guitar…” Lyle came out of his seat as if he’d been catapulted. He said, “That sure puts rabbits in your feet, don’t it?” and he took my sister by the hand and they clogged around the room a couple of times together. When the song was over she gave him a big hug and he sat down in his chair with an expression like he’d been shot between the eyes.
We just went along into something slower so we could keep an eye on Lyle. We knew as it happened we were witnessing an event we’d be talking about for the rest of our lives. Lyle had astonished himself more than anyone. He was looking straight ahead, not tapping his foot or anything. Then he reached under his chair and put his hat on real square and tight, stood up, strode to the door, turned toward my father and touched his brim and was gone. I guess he figured that was one thing in life he’d got done and didn’t have to mess with again.
The next day he blamed me for getting him drunk. He said he’d lain in bed all night unable to sleep, his heart was pounding so loud.
Lyle wakes at two in the morning, not sure whether to blame his shortness of breath or the usual fidgets he gets in the middle of the night. He fits the oxygen mask over his face and lies back down and just breathes a little, then takes it off. It’s the last tank, and as deep as the snow is now, and as young as April is, he may not get to town for a month or more. Maybe Bert will bring up a tank on the snowmobile when he comes, if the snow isn’t too soft and he doesn’t have to come on skis.
Lyle knows this feeling well enough not to fight it. He gets out of bed, holding his hernia in with one finger. He opens the draft on the stove a finger’s width. He sits down in the easy chair and turns on the radio. He listens to what’s coming in, the all-night truckers’ station, as he rolls a cigarette. It’s a station out of Oklahoma City that lists the road conditions across the nation. By determining what the interstates are like in California, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah, Lyle can get a better idea of what he’s in for than he gets from the local weather predictions. Maybe if the roads are dry between here and the Sierras, and if it’s not too cold on the northern border he can get some sleep.
No such luck. It’s raining like hell from San Francisco to Point Arena. The sunshine that will be here tomorrow, courtesy of high pressure over the desert, will be overwhelmed by a severe winter storm the next day.
Paul Harvey says the National Weather Service, with all their satellites, balloons, computers, and color-coded maps, has a 60 percent accuracy rate. Sixty percent. That’s 10 percent better than flipping a coin. November of 1974 they predicted light snow flurries and we got thirty-one inches in one night. I’ve heard them say sunshine when it was raining on the radio station.
Lyle doesn’t like to say what he thinks will happen, but if you can get it out of him, he won’t be wrong.
Once we were down haying, and over a break for a cigarette Lyle noted the stringy clouds that were making regular streaks in the upper atmosphere. He said, “Must be a hurricane shaping up in the Gulf.” There was a hurricane brewing, but I never heard about it on the radio until about three days after Lyle had predicted it from observing the skies over Wyoming.
Lyle flicks the ash of his cigarette into the ashtray that is a beanbag on the bottom and an ashtray on the top, a brass arch rainbowing over the top with little half-circles bent into it to hold your cigarette when you put it down. Only Lyle never puts his down.
He rolls the dial to a talk show out of Denver, where people are holding forth on the problems divorcées have getting sex, and how important getting it is to their lives. One woman offers, “If I don’t get sex at least once a week, I become violent with my children. I can’t go out to the bars as much as I should because I can’t afford a baby-sitter. Men don’t want a woman who already has a brood weighing her down. What do you think I should do?”
Lyle is afraid he won’t be able to stand the answer. He’s predicting a different kind of weather. He says, “Jesus,” and turns it off. He stubs out the last quarter of his smoke and rolls back into bed. He takes one more breath of oxygen and dozes off again till about four. He lies there doing nothing till five.
Then he gets up again and dresses in the dark and, with his workboots unlaced, shuffles into the kitchen. He sets a kerosene lamp on the counter and removes the glass chimney. He takes the lid-lifter off its nail and removes the forward lid over the firebox. He crumples a sheet of newspaper and drops it in. He throws in a handful of chips and splinters from around the chopping block, lights a match on the stove top, lights the lamp from it, then drops it onto the newspaper. Flames leap up like a faithful dog, illuminating Lyle’s weather-drawn face as he peers into the firebox. He lays on two quarter-split pieces of lodgepole and throws back the draft that detours heat over to the oven for baking. He replaces the lid. The fire revs.
He throws another stick of wood on the fire and fills the tea kettle with water stored in an insulated tank, still steaming from circulating through the firebox in a copper coil the night before.
As the stove metal ticks, heating up, the sky brightens. Lyle puts his huge hand behind the lamp chimney and blows into his palm. The light’s out. He goes to the cupboard and takes down a mixing bowl, opens the flour bin, and starts the batter for flapjacks.
It is light enough to see now, though no direct rays have struck the kitchen window by the time the pancakes are done. Lyle fries them one at a time and puts them in the warming oven. The last one he shovels out of the pan and lays on a separate dish on the shelf to cool. He stacks his own plate, pours the coffee, and sits down at the table. He looks out the south window over the white meadow.
In the last three years of his life, Ray began to manifest a strange relationship with snow. Sometimes in the fall or early winter, if he was on the mountain alone and Margie was in town, he’d flee to Laramie in a flat panic at the slightest suggestion of flurries. This in a man who was born on the mountain sixty-five years ago and had already seen everything this country can dish out and was well equipped to handle it: four-wheel drive with chains all around, a light two-cylinder snow cat with a cab, called a Trackster; and he always carried shovels, blankets, extra gasoline, and food. No way he could get into real trouble. Still, some nights, with light snow predicted and a few flakes in the air, I’d see Ray streaking by without so much as a wave, with a grim look on his face, headed for town.
On the other hand there were times—more than a few—when he’d get drunk as a barn swallow on old gooseberries in Laramie, and alone or with Ginny, his daughter, he’d hea
d up here in the middle of the night in the worst whiteout you can imagine.
He’d load the Trackster, which was more than the pickup was designed to carry, and drive through the drifts like there were hellhounds after him, as if sheer momentum could get him through anything. It got him through a lot, but it also left him high-centered in the middle of some huge snowdrifts. I know because I dug him, pulled him, or dug and pulled him out of scores of such drifts in those days. If no one was around to lend a hand, Ray seemed perfectly happy to dig himself out, even if it took several hours. If he knew he couldn’t dig out or the truck broke down, he’d just unload the Trackster and away he’d go, rattling over the tops of wavelike drifts, commenting on the tooth-loosening shriek of the two-cycle motor by mumbling every so often, “Well, I guess it beats walking.”
I didn’t think it did beat walking, since the Trackster moved at about the same pace as walking and sounded like the inside of a beehive. You had to shout to be heard by the person sitting next to you.
Frank reported one such night: a couple of feet of snow down, blowing into deeper drifts, more predicted, and with the wind whipping it to a froth. It was February just before calving. Frank and Shirley had just turned off their light and climbed into bed for the last good sleep they expected for a while, when Ray’s headlights swept across the bedroom wall. They didn’t get out of bed, just lay there as the truck idled in the yard. Once they heard Ginny laugh and it sounded like she’d had more than a few. One just assumed that by that time of night Ray was loose.
Frank peeked out the window. He could see the ends of two cigarettes glowing in the cab of the pickup. Snow swirled in the headlights like white mosquitoes. When he lay back down Frank said, “Nice evening for a drive in the country.” Shirley giggled. Then the truck pulled up the hill past the house, and they went to sleep. Frank wondered how far they’d get, but he wasn’t worried about them.
At midnight they woke again to a drunken whoop of laughter and, looking out the window, saw Ray pulling down the ramps to unload the Trackster. It was still coming down like hell. The thought of starting out on the seven miles to the reservoir at this hour in these conditions seemed less like drunk than crazy, but once the whine of the Trackster had faded into the blizzard, Frank just rolled over and went back to sleep. He noticed Shirley had beat him to it. His last conscious thought was, “I wonder how far they’ll get this time.”
It was sometime after two when Frank heard that overgrown chainsaw pull back into the ranch yard. When the throttle cut to idle he heard more laughter. At least they were having fun.
On the open ridges that anchor Boulder Ridge to the prairie, the snowdrifts resemble each other, and in the pitch black and white of a blizzard at night, they’d driven in circles for a couple of hours before Ginny convinced Ray to give it up after he said for the tenth time, “Oh, now I know where I am.”
They came back to the ranch, loaded the Trackster, started the pickup, and backed it straight into a big irrigation ditch.
Frank kept checking out the window every so often and going back to bed. When they unloaded the Trackster again, he figured they were sure as hell stuck, the truck resting on its axles. When they started trying to pull the truck out of the ditch with the Trackster, Frank realized the moment he had dreaded had arrived.
It was three-thirty. He told Shirley to stay in bed. He pulled on his blue jeans, laced up his Sorels, put on his down coat and Scotch cap, and headed out to the barn to start the big tractor.
When Ray saw Frank he said he sure hadn’t meant to get him out of bed. Frank was good-natured about it since he thought it was funnier than anything else, a funny story. With the big tractor and the nylon towrope, Frank still had to take a pretty good run at it to yank Ray’s truck out of the snow-filled ditch.
Frank waited while they loaded the Trackster again and left. Then he went to bed for the hour or so before he would be getting up anyway. He lay there thinking about Ray and that crazy daughter of his plowing through the deeply rutted snow on the county road back to town, still passing a bottle. If Ray managed to keep it on the road he’d be back in Laramie by first light.
Besides the big hay barn at the end of the meadow (that used to be the meadow’s waist before they built the reservoir), there was another barn in the brome patch behind the house. It was built at the same time or before the hay barn, on soft ground and without a real foundation, just rocked up at the corners and at the middle of each wall, so that it sank and the bottom logs rotted one by one until the peak of the roof was eye level. It sank about an inch a year. The earth was inhaling it.
You could scarcely store a small tractor in there, let alone hay or stock. Someday it will be a roof resting on the ground. Lyle knew there would have to be a new barn, and he kept it in the back of his mind when he did other things. When he was cutting firewood and found a straight, standing-dead building log the right size, he’d skid it home. He gathered logs ten years for that barn and never felled a living tree.
He knew it would be his last big job, so he made it monumental. The floor plan was twenty-four by forty feet; the logs were too big for a man to lift one end without block and tackle. He decided, again, against nails except for the roof. He decided to build it in winter.
I have never heard of anyone building a barn that size, alone, at that elevation, in the winter. In ambition it was like the first ascent of a great north face, though it was never reported in journals. Tourists can see the barn from the county road, but the accomplishment of its building was only known to about twenty people, fifteen of whom have died.
Before the snow flew Lyle hauled foundation stone from Bull Mountain, big square pieces weighing up to five hundred pounds. He built a boom on the REO and winched them up on the hand winch he’d made for sawlogs. He stacked and leveled them at the corners and where the logs joined at the middles of the long sides.
The previous winter he had forged two auger bits, one and a quarter inches in diameter, eighteen inches long, the kind of tool you couldn’t buy anywhere. He made a special brace with an extra long sweep to turn his huge bits.
He worked in blizzards, alone, maneuvering the logs up onto the wall one end at a time, holding them temporarily with log dogs he’d also forged. With handsaw and double-bitted axe he fitted the corners, plumb and square, rolling the logs back again and again to trim a finer fit. You’d need a feeler gauge to check the tolerances. Each time he went up a log he augered clear through two logs and into the third, till the brace had buried itself. He trimmed pegs out of lodgepole sticks with the axe, and filled the walls so full of pegs it looked like a jail in some places. He went to one-inch pegs to fasten down the hand-hewn rafters.
Unless the wind was strong enough to blow him off the walls, or the logs were so iced he couldn’t balance on them holding a twice-sharpened axe, he was out there. By the time the snow was gone the roof was on. All that remained was pouring the foundation.
Lyle always put the foundation in last, so the building can settle before it’s tied down. If you rock the corners and start building you can use the bottom logs to hold the forms and pour the walls under them, so that the liquid cement takes the cupped shape of the logs, which have pegs sticking downward to tie them to the concrete, which makes a stronger, tighter fit than doing it “the right way.”
Lyle’s cement mixer was a 1923 Deere utility motor geared into a Model-T axle that turned a fifty-five-gallon drum that had wooden fins inside it. It mixed a wheelbarrow about as often as one man working alone can hand pour that much and get back. The few days I made it over that winter, Lyle let me help on things that would have been hard to screw up. I drilled holes, and later helped shovel sand out of the creek for cement.
I watched Lyle hewing with the broadaxe, saw him cut the perfect corners with stunningly confident strokes of the double-bitted axe. I can walk into that barn today and look up into the massive vaults of rafters, cross beams, struts, and remember. I can look around and know one thing at least is for dam
n sure there.
From 1948 to 1972 Bill McMurray never worked a lick over what he had to, mostly reading clocks and turning the wheels that open the gate on the reservoir and the headgates on the ditches. At first he had to snowshoe nine miles up to Deadman during heavy runoff season, but as soon as they invented the snowmobile, Bill got one, and why not. He had tried to make the snowshoe trip up there and back easier by nailing a crosspiece between two trees for a bench every quarter mile so he could sit down and rest without having to take off his pack or snowshoes. Bill must have thought there would be the same amount of snow every year; some winters the rests are under the snow, other years they’re eye-level or overhead. That was Bill.
Most of the time he spent drinking beer in front of the TV hooked up to a twelve-volt battery. His wife was not pretty, but she was kind. Her name was Elbertine. Elbertine and everyone else cut Bill a lot of slack, even his employers who suspected they’d have a hard time finding someone else to live that far from town, even with fringe benefits like letting him run cows on the section and pocket the proceeds.
Bill didn’t care much for fixing fence. Theoretically he was responsible for half his north side (our south), and half his east side (Lyle’s west), and all of his fence that bordered National Forest or railroad land. Bill never worked on our side, and we stopped expecting him to. We fixed it ourselves each spring.
The half of Bill’s east fence got so bad it didn’t need to be fixed anymore; it needed to be rebuilt: new posts and new wire which the company would provide, but mostly it required a few postholes, which Bill was supposed to provide. Since the cows arrived in early June, and pasture rent was real money for Bill, Lyle expected him to get after it eventually—greed kept Bill from being completely lazy.
As soon as the snowdrifts released the worst parts, Lyle went to work on his fence. Before the snow was all the way gone Lyle’s fencing was done and he was waiting on Bill to fix his part. Lyle talked to him about it a couple of times, “mentioned it,” more likely: the western politesse of obliqueness. He secured assurances, pats on the back, chuckles, good-neighbor smiles. The first of June came and the fence just lay there like a strafed parade.
