The Meadow

by James Galvin

  Lyle decided to fight the unthinkable with the unthinkable. He drove to Bill and Elbertine’s to speak of the fence directly, to make demands. Bill and Elbertine had gone to town.

  Lyle went home and loaded the pickup with posts he’d cut and treated himself, fencing tools, and a new roll of wire. He set to work building fence, and with every post he set he got madder at Bill. He’d started at nine in the morning and was still working at seven, when Bill drove up in his company truck.

  He was all duded up for town and had Elbertine and Elbertine’s sister with him. He stopped right next to the posthole Lyle was digging, then calm as you please rolled down the window. He didn’t even get out of his truck, just gave Lyle a big grin, easy as thought, and asked how the fence was coming. “How’s the fence coming, Lyle?”

  Lyle dropped the shovel into the hole and turned around. He had never uttered an emphatically negative word to anyone’s face in his life. Generally, there’s no style in it. Lyle lit into Bill with volume and purpose, chewed him up one side and down the other, calling him a lazy, good-for-nothing stump not worth the powder to blow it to hell sitting there in his goddamned string tie and town duds, letting another man do his work for him. It was shameful and he was a sorry excuse for a man if there ever was one. Lyle deployed words he ordinarily wouldn’t have, in front of ladies.

  Elbertine kept saying, “That’s right. You tell him, Lyle. I tell him that all the time, but it don’t do no good. Like talking to a worm.” When it looked to Bill like the storm wasn’t going to let up, he just let that grin slip a notch and reached for the window crank. Bill kept smiling, rolled up the window, easy as thought, and drove away.

  Lyle turned back to work in the gathering dark. He decided that building fence was bad enough; building it mad just wasn’t worth it.

  The next time he saw Bill it was like nothing had happened. The cows grazed peacefully, the men were friendly, and they had a new fence between them.

  I never knew Howard very well, and what I knew I couldn’t figure. I’ll never know why Ray took him on that last trip up the mountain in a snowstorm, unless it was because Ray didn’t mind the idea of being dead, he just didn’t like the idea of being dead a long time before anyone found him. That was a lonesome idea. It never occurred to Ray that Howard wouldn’t make it out. Howard was supposed to have gotten out with word.

  To meet Howard you’d have thought him pretty normal: a short, bearded fellow, perhaps overeager to please. You had to be around him some to realize that he was without volition to the point of dementia. He did what he was told, but he never did anything else. Ray said Howard had an older brother he just about had to check with before taking a piss. That’s why it got our attention when Howard married Nita, Jack’s daughter, who, like Kye, Jack’s son, was afflicted with a degenerative illness that made them obese, mentally defective, and eventually blind. Kye and Nita were utterly gentle. They belonged to that elite society of people who, because defective in a certain way, go through life without hurting anyone. They were enormous, blind child angels.

  Howard worshiped “Uncle Ray,” and mimicked his boozing and whatever words and gestures he could affect. He was tickled to death when Ray asked him to go up the mountain.

  They loaded the Trackster and headed for the reservoir in a March snowstorm. At least it was daylight. They drove as far as the abandoned Running Water buildings, where, Frank later said, it looked like they’d gotten stuck, dug out, and decided to go by Trackster from there. It was probably dark by the time they reached my house. No one was home but Ray had a key. I know they stopped in because I found one of Ray’s Parliaments with the filter bitten the way Ray did. It was in the ashtray, just the one, meaning they didn’t stay long. They headed up toward the ridge to follow it to the reservoir, probably very drunk by then.

  It wasn’t unusual in those days for Ray to lose the road and head off in some screwy direction. His tracks were sometimes laughably astray. He headed off the road where it climbs straight up the side of the ridge and ended up in the trees, in the deep spring powder. The Trackster foundered, and when Ray revved it up it just dug a hole for itself.

  So far, though, nothing was unusual. Why they didn’t walk back the half-mile of packed track to my house, where they knew there was wood and food for exactly such an occasion, I’ll never know. Nor will I know why Ray, who kept blankets, food, and two five-gallon cans of extra gasoline in the Trackster for exactly such an occasion, had apparently forgotten all these things.

  So they sat there, keeping the Trackster running for its heater till it ran out of gas. They passed the bottle and smoked cigarettes. They had left the shovels locked in the cab of the pickup, four miles back.

  When spring came I found a few charred pine twigs with which Howard must have tried to start a fire. They had no snowshoes; they couldn’t gather dry wood.

  Frank said Howard must have gone back to the pickup for the shovels, but when he got there, he didn’t have the keys. He started back to Ray for the keys, but drunk, out of shape, and underdressed, he didn’t make it. Frank found Howard’s body about a quarter-mile from the Trackster, face down in the snow.

  Since it wasn’t unusual for Ray to get snowed in for a week, and since there was no telephone, Margie never worried until the following Sunday, when the weather was clear and the boys didn’t come down.

  No one knew whether Ray should be looked for in Albany County, Wyoming, or Larimer County, Colorado. Both counties refused to send rescue parties until they knew for sure where Ray was lost.

  Frank went up on his snowmobile and found them, in Colorado. Then the sheriff’s rescue team came with snow machines, helicopters, and walkie-talkies.

  Freezing to death is supposed to be relatively painless, especially if you’re drunk. Frank said Ray was frozen solid. He must have gotten out to take a piss and tipped over backward, since his pants were unzipped and he was out. The posse had to be careful not to break it off. Ray must have liked the tickle of snowflakes on his face because Frank said he was smiling.

  Drunk, lying on his back in the deep, soft snow, looking up into the gently falling sky, smiling. For ten days the storm buried him and uncovered him and buried him and uncovered him like it was looking at something.

  Between the dead gray tree standing in the forest and the tree of smoke that resurrects itself from the chimney, each piece of wood is handled six times: hauled out of the timber in logs, unloaded, cut to length on a tractor-powered buzz saw, stacked, put in the woodbox, put in the stove; seven times if you have to split it. Lyle had a woodpile the size of a schoolhouse, enough fuel for two or more years. If he got hurt and couldn’t cut wood some year, he wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else, and he still wouldn’t freeze.

  Lyle added to the woodpile every year. It got so old and big the bottom pieces began to rot and the wooden mountain began leaning and had to be propped. Lyle kept adding to it each year, a little more than he burned in a year, and the woodpile loomed.

  Ray questioned the practicality of cutting new wood every year when perfectly good fuel was rotting in the pile. Lyle said, “I ain’t about to restack it, and besides, if I build it up it works like a snowfence, keeps snow off the house.”

  Emphysema began to erode Lyle’s health. Digging out the woodpile was no longer a welcome bit of exercise in a snowbound winter; it was a potentially fatal necessity. Loading and hauling furnace wood to the house on a sledge was bad enough—shoveling out the woodpile was likely to kill him. He needed a woodshed.

  Lyle figured he could still get in a year’s supply of wood if he took all summer doing it. When I offered to put up his wood for him he said, “Goddammit, there’s just a few things I can still do for myself around this place, and I don’t want you taking them.” The real problem was shoveling snow.

  Lyle had never built a woodshed because it was too easy, beneath his interest as a craftsman. Now he needed to build one to stay alive. By then Lyle couldn’t drive a nail without resting before it was a
ll the way in. I helped him as much as he would let me. He appreciated the help, but he resented it, too. Once or twice he was pretty short with me, and I already felt as if everything I did, every lick, was substandard compared to how Lyle would have done it.

  He cut and dragged in all the poles he needed. I dug the holes and set the treated uprights. Together we lifted and fit the cross beams, drilled and bolted them. When it came to covering the walls, Lyle wanted to cut and nail all the boards himself. He had some one-by-twelves he’d milled about thirty years ago. He’d saw halfway through a plank then sit down on the sawhorse and suck air for five minutes. He took all day to nail on a dozen boards.

  I hewed the rafters, which irked Lyle—by then he was taking it like medicine. We set them and trimmed them together. He had salvaged some Strongbarn roofing and insisted on nailing it up himself. Again I was sent away. When I came back the next week the roof was done. He’d put a skylight in. He was busy hanging doors.

  He built the woodshed over as much of the woodpile as would fit in it, so he didn’t have to move it. He never cut firewood again. He started burning that rotten wood he’d cut as much as forty years ago, when he still had a family to keep warm. One day he paused over the cookstove with the lid-lifter in his hand and said, “You know, there’s more heat in that old rotten wood than you’d think.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “A saw.”

  “What kind of saw?”

  “For cutting out a wooden wheel. It cuts a perfect circle.”

  “What do you want to make a wooden wheel for?”

  “A wheelbarrow.”

  I knew better than to ask why Lyle didn’t just slide down to the True Value and get himself one with a nice rubber wheel.

  The saw was like a big hardwood picture frame, only the sides were all turned out fancy on the lathe, and there was a piece of bandsaw blade stretched across its middle. It was just like Lyle to spend a week or more building a tool he would only use once.

  I wondered how you get the spokes all in between the hub and rim. Lyle showed me a piece of fir he’d found that had just the right curve for a handle. He only had one, though, so it was like the pistol grips all over again: He had to scour the timber for the piece that matched it.

  After dinner we went for a walk in the woods. Lyle studied each tree we passed, searching for the handle’s mate. I was supposedly helping, but I wouldn’t have opened my mouth had I seen a piece that looked close. I knew Lyle wasn’t missing anything. I pretended to be looking, to know what I was looking for, but really I was just trailing along like a pup.

  We didn’t find the right piece that day, but Lyle found it later and shaved them down to match with a draw-knife. Each handle was also half the frame the box was mounted on, so they were long, about six feet, straight where they made the frame, then sweeping up and back to become the grips.

  He cut out, mounted, and trued the wheel, and forged a steel rim. He got bearings from the junkheap and balanced the box just right. He knew his strength was going, and he thought a big wheelbarrow might make things easier around the place. It might help him stay there longer.

  A fellow brought Lyle a ruined treadle grindstone rotted off its frame. Building a new frame for that grindstone and trueing it up was the other project Lyle had going that summer. Lyle didn’t need a grindstone; he had three or four. The project was to keep a beautiful stone from becoming a lawn decoration, or worse.

  He hunted up a couple of bearings, and just to make sure no one would ever have to do that job again, he welded a steel frame for it, and mounted an old tractor seat to it for extra comfort while pumping the treadle that turned the wheel. With good bearings and a true stone (the heavier the better), with the right leverage on the armature, it takes about as much effort to turn a grindstone with footpower as it does to scratch your ear.

  Lyle had to build a tripod to lift the stone onto its frame. Once mounted he turned it slowly, and with a small cold chisel he pocked the stone to balance it. Then he turned the wheel fast and trued it with a high-carbon tool bit. It took two weeks of turning to make the wheel true.

  It was clear that Lyle wasn’t going far from his house anymore, unless it was to town, so as soon as the snow melted I went over on horseback to fix his fence. Pasturing cows was the only income Lyle had left. He qualified for social security but wouldn’t take it because he had never paid into it. He never made enough money to file taxes either.

  I pieced together the short lengths of wire that lay on the ground.

  Scraps of cloth, tongues of worn-out work boots, bits of wire, buttons, bent nails, recipes, magazine articles, gunnysacks—Lyle never threw out anything that might someday have a use. He didn’t have it in him. It was partly the result of being raised in poverty (“You never outgrow the way you grew up,” he said), but I know Lyle thought of his own being the same way (like one of those boot tongues or scraps of wire). He thought, someday, probably after he died, his own purpose might finally be revealed to him.

  I know because he told me.

  After he died the auctioneers went through everything. The contents of his house that were considered valueless were emptied into eighty-five black plastic bags that lined the walk, like a bile the house spewed out.

  They were loaded into Eddie’s horse trailer and hauled away to the dump.

  LYLE, 1980

  “Did you know that the first line in Hamlet is the same, outside of not being in Spanish, as Billy the Kid’s last words? Well, it is.”

  I have some snapshots of Lyle sitting at his kitchen table. He was baking bread that day, using his mother’s recipe. The prints are glossy, high contrast. Lyle looks like a Vermeer under many coats of varnish. His face is long, lantern-jawed. He has a thin nose and a wide mouth. He looks aristocratic. The lines grooved into his face are angular, especially around his eyes and the folds of skin hooding his eyes, as if from a lifetime of squinting into snowglare. His eyes are pale blue and so piercing, that even from a photo he seems to be looking around inside you. He’s balding. He’s smiling. Everything he’s ever done, or seen, or felt, or thought is brought to bear on his expression. He’s sort of smiling.

  Clara’s diary contains an entry concerning a moonshine cabin they went looking for above Sheep Creek by Slickrock. Bill had run into an old-timer in town, a fellow with a long white beard who seemed to know the country, who claimed there was a moonshine cabin tucked into a ravine near Slickrock. Bill didn’t want to climb up any gullies or draws or sidehills, so Clara, Lyle, and Elbertine went looking for it while Bill fished in Sheep Creek.

  The diary entry doesn’t mention anything about finding the moonshine cabin. They didn’t. It aggravated Lyle that there was a whole house up there that he, who could find geodes and crystals, agates and arrowheads, and game in lean years, couldn’t find.

  So he went back in winter on snowshoes, searched all the same ravines and springs, went halfway to Deadman, looking. Nothing.

  Coming down it began to blizzard. It was a crazy swirl that would hide your fingers from you and then lift so you could go a bit, and then it would come down again. Once the snow lifted just in time for Lyle to see that he was walking off a cliff. It was sixty feet straight down into a side drainage just above Sheep Creek. Lyle followed the edge downstream. The snow blew in, then lifted, blew in and lifted. Something caught his eye, some manmade form on the far side of the canyon, a square shape and an oblong one. It was the door and window of a cabin, built halfway up the far escarpment, under an overhang. Then the blizzard closed down for good and Lyle considered himself lucky to find home.

  Lyle went back the next summer, thinking to enter that cabin and see what was there. He found what he was certain was the right drainage; he found what he was certain was the overhang the cabin was built under. There was no cabin there. Lyle muttered, “It mighta been here but it’s gone now.”

  My dad was headed downcountry Christmas Eve, riding the front of a storm. All the children were grown and g
one, and he was spending Christmas with a friend in Denver. There were a couple of feet of powder down, and more in the air and more on the way, but with four-wheel drive and chains on all fours he was making it out all right.

  When he reached the abandoned Running Water Ranch he thought he was hallucinating. Riding up through the ghostly, winterbound cabins and barns was a figure in the swirling snow. When he saw my father the rider turned his mount and headed over. Dad said later it was like a Frederic Remington painting come to life. The horse was big and had a thick sorrel coat. The rider was wearing shoepacks with spurs, sheepskin chaps, a Scotch cap with a scarf tied around it. He was wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket. The stock of a Model ’94 Winchester protruded from a saddle scabbard.

  When the rider stopped my father was struck by the youthful, clean-shaven face. It was Clay.

  “Are you lost?”

  “Probably.”

  “What brings you out on this fine day?”

  “Thought I’d ride over and invite Lyle to Christmas dinner with us. Didn’t think the snowmobile would make it through the drifts between your place and his. Nothing stops this nag.”

  “Do you think Lyle will come down for dinner?”

  “Oh, I know for a fact he won’t, but we ask him every year, just so he knows he can if he wants.”

  “And you’re riding fifteen miles through deep snow in a blizzard to invite Lyle to a dinner you are sure he won’t attend?”