by James Galvin
Clay looked down at his horse as if he’d never seen one before. “Looks like it.”
It was the summer I memorized Lyle’s huge hands gripping the oaken steering wheel of the 1930 REO flatbed. I was doing that because it was the first summer Lyle couldn’t buck bales anymore, and I knew I wouldn’t be haying many more times, not with Lyle anyway, and not on this meadow. Emphysema was chipping away at his independence.
The baler kept missing ties. It rained every afternoon. Lyle pinched a nerve in his neck from driving forward looking back, mowing, raking, baling, over and over the same ground he’d gone over and over for forty years. Ray convinced Lyle to see a chiropractor in Fort Collins. Lyle wouldn’t have gone if there hadn’t been hay to cut and he hadn’t been nearly paralyzed with pain and muscle spasms in his neck, shoulder, and arm. The problem was, the drive home following the treatments left him in worse shape than he’d started in, so he quit going.
Out of denim strips he sewed a harness that fit under his chin and behind the back of his head; it joined on the top, where he sewed a loop. He screwed an eye hook into the ceiling above his chair, and ran a nylon string from the head harness up through the eye hook, and suspended a bucket with five pounds of salt in it from the other end of the string. He sat in the chair and hung his head from the ceiling for four days until he’d fixed the pinched nerve. Just like fixing any mechanism—easier than most. Then he went back to work and finished haying.
We hayed the next year as well, me doing all the loading and stacking, Lyle still driving the tractors, but the summer before the last one was the summer I memorized his hands.
When the Van Wanings moved to Sheep Creek they were resigned to being snowed in. In 1940 everyone around here was. But down in that valley, and as far back in the timber as they settled, they were more snowed in than anyone.
From the start Lyle parked his pickup over at Pat Sudeck’s for the winter, a mile and a half away. If the road across the prairie was blown clear and the timber drifted under, Lyle could snowshoe over the hill and drive to town. That meant packing supplies on snowshoes. After ten years of it, sometimes making trips with a sledge, Lyle decided to invent a snow machine.
It was ten years before the first snowmobile appeared; it must have been one of those ideas in the air at a certain time. Lyle built his snow machine on a wooden frame, with wood skis and a wooden track with rubber cleats cut out of old tires. It was powered by a 1923 single-cylinder Deere utility motor (the same motor he used to power his cement mixer). The snow machine worked, but it was underpowered and the track kept tearing itself apart. After a certain point, snowshoeing took less time than fixing the machine, so he replaced its track with fixed runners. He left the skis in front and mounted a Chevrolet six where the Deere had been. He took a piece of quarter-sawn six-by-six from the lumber pile and disappeared into the shop to fashion an airplane propeller. For someone whose two brothers had been killed in airplanes it was a curious design choice. The fact is, though, an airpowered snow sled wouldn’t tear itelf apart.
I don’t know where he got specifications for the pitch of the prop blades, or how he made it balanced and symmetrical by hand. But a trial run in the meadow revealed an oversight: The sled wouldn’t run at less than sixty miles an hour. Lyle was a streak across the blank expanse until he could shut it off, luckily before he went through the west fence.
He hung the propeller on the shop wall and waited for the rest of the world to invent the snow machine. Not long after, they did. Harry Benson loaned Lyle a used double-track, single-ski model that wasn’t too fast, and it swam through drifts to the pickup truck for twenty-five winters.
So every winter Lyle left his truck parked at our place, out on a windthrashed knoll, staring down the barrel of every storm, snowdrifts breaking over it, the wind scooping, scalloping its shape free again.
Lyle left his truck just past where the timber ends and walked home in the fall, before the heavy snow. He walked back for it in the spring. All winter he ground over the hill, threading the winter road, in the chained-up Power Wagon, gearing down to churn like a stern-wheeler where it’s deepest. During the worst snow he snowmobiled, skimming over the wavy drifts. If the snow was too deep or rotten to snowmobile on, he didn’t go. Sometimes the prairie was snowbound as well. He didn’t go.
It was the end of November. Lyle’s health had been on the skids for two years or more. He had no wind and his heart was weak. Lyle checked the Thomson’s Lumber thermometer mounted outside on the window trim: 10. It had snowed and was bound to storm again.
Two pairs of wool pants over long johns, Sorels, wool shirt, down coat, hat, gloves. He stepped out of the wood-warm mud porch and into the real air. He pulled the door to and locked it, thinking simultaneously, No one is around, and, You never know who could be creeping around.
The truck started instantly at full choke and purred at idle while Lyle rolled a smoke. The meadow looked like a white dinner plate with willows down its middle. He put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, giving it a final twist. He fished the Zippo from his shirt pocket, tilted his head to avoid its six-inch flame, and flashed the end of his cigarette.
He pulled out into the yard to chain up. He had a block of cast concrete in the back of the truck for extra traction. Going over the hill he had no problem. As he drove past the sidehill where the winter road attacks the ridge he just glared; he had fought that hill for forty winters. Every winter it rose white against him and he fought it, sidling down the sidehill into deeper drifts, digging out, grinding in again.
He parked the truck in the usual place, left the keys in the ashtray and the doors unlocked. Taking the truck over the hill marked a significant day in Lyle’s year, not fixed on the calendar, but meaning more thereby, marking the beginning of his winter exile, recalling winters past, the best and the worst. He slammed the door and started walking home.
He could feel that the temperature had plummeted in the last few minutes. As soon as he set out he knew he had overestimated his strength. By the time he reached the first cattleguard he was running on disbelief: How could a two-mile stroll become a mortal threat?
The pace he’d started with was pushing it so he dropped it a notch. No one was watching him from the trees, but if they had been they would have thought him stock-still unless they watched for a long time.
He passed the spot where Ray froze to death before he was sure he was in trouble. Winded, he gasped aloud, “Hell, I ain’t even drunk, Raymond.” His lungs were searing. He was lightheaded. He thought, I’m almost as close to home as I am to the truck now, I’d just as well try to make it. Besides, if I went back now it would have been for nothing and I’d have to try again. I want this to be the last time I ever walk this hill.
When he reached the ridge, two hours after he’d begun, he sat down on a boulder cleared by wind and sun. He was gasping like a fish. His lungs were filling with liquid. He was drowning. The rest of the way was downhill, but he had no feeling in his hands or feet. The sweet release of giving up occurred to him, how easy it would be never to rise again, to harden and become crystalline, like a made thing, to freeze in sitting position until spring when someone would come along and find him, just resting.
The cold was to his knees and elbows, rising, but he was breathing better for resting, and he rose and started walking again, shuffling stiffly, unbearably slowly, pushing as fast as he could go. By the time the yellow Windcharger came in sight he was resting half a minute after each step, the way Himalayan climbers do. He still thought he might die in the yard; he had already fallen twice. He was delirious. Then his hand was on the doorhandle. The fire was out. It took a long time to start. He ate and drank nothing. By the time the house was warm it was dark. He still half-expected, half-wished to die. He knew how badly he’d run himself down. The next day his legs swelled to twice their normal size. The pickup was over the hill.
In 1949 Lyle’s brother, Bob, had a hard time with horses. Mowing hay they spooked at a jackrabbit
and took out about a hundred feet of fence. Bob was pretty thoroughly sanded down, not hurt bad anyplace, but hurt not bad everyplace. That same fall he and Lyle were skidding out saw-logs when the horses bolted and dragged Bob by the reins on a whirlwind tour of the forest floor. He broke a rib. That’s why Lyle went to tractors, though anytime you are around turning gears and sickle bars you have to count your fingers pretty regularly. You have to Pay Attention. I don’t have enough fingers to count the fellows I know who have lost some of theirs, mostly either from farm machinery or roping. Almost anything Lyle did was hazardous, and after his brothers were gone he mostly worked alone: felling trees with chainsaws; balancing on the top log of a barn; hewing with an axe so sharp that a couple of fingers or toes wouldn’t even slow it down; or just out fencing—old wire can snap under the stretcher and come at you like a snake, or lay open the side of your face like a stiletto.
Just last week two kids were stringing fence on a ranch not far from here. They were working on a sidehill. They had a hundred yards or so of wire laid out on the ground, four strands. They were pulling the wire out of a spool mounted in the pickup bed. The wire lazed on the ground in loose spirals. The truck was parked, but it jumped out of gear and started rolling, gathering barbed wire into a raging snarl under the wheels and axles. Only one kid saw it. He tried to jump into the cab to step on the brakes and save the truck from augering into the ditch at the bottom of the hill. Here is what his friend saw: one pantleg got snagged by the wire before the boy could get the door open. He was running alongside and then he was pulled underneath into the gathering, snapping rage of wire. The truck raised a little puff of dirt at the bottom of the ravine. There was nothing left of that kid bigger than a finger.
Lyle learned to pay attention, to think things through and not get ahead of himself, not to lapse into inattention ever. After a while he couldn’t not pay attention, shaking a stranger’s hand, tasting Mrs. So and So’s pickles, setting fenceposts. It endowed all his actions with precision. It gave him total recall. It obliterated time.
Lyle never would have gone to the hospital if it hadn’t been for the second hernia, which he got on his last trip to town loading his oxygen tanks. He said the first one hadn’t bothered him much over the years. He sewed a denim truss, and whenever the thing popped out he just popped it back in, like when the REO popped out of second gear going downhill against the compression—just pop it back in. But this new hernia hurt and wouldn’t go back in. He pushed on it and worked it around till he passed out. Then he put Anbesol on it and pushed on it some more. It was Clay who finally convinced Lyle to go to the hospital for a “tune up.” Lyle figured then he could come home and die of what was really killing him.
“I better die soon,” he said. “If I don’t I’ll have to move away. I can’t make another winter here. I sure don’t want to move. Don’t think I could do it. All I ever wanted to be was home.”
We loaded him into the back of the station wagon. He didn’t even glance at the meadow before he got in. He lay down beside his oxygen tank, his new, ugly bride. He had some delirium. He said, picking at the air near his knee, “I’ve gotten into this habit I have to quit. I keep seeing something there and I try to grab it, but I can’t.” Then he said, “Jim, the next pickup I buy is going to be an automatic.”
He died the second night, in his sleep. A nurse said, “Who was that old man? In here two days and nights and he never asked for a thing. You could dust that call button for finger prints and he’d be innocent.”
A couple of weeks before he died Lyle made a drawing for my daughter, Emily. He’d seen a cloud over the meadow that looked like a dinosaur and drew a picture of it. Lyle called it “Cloudosaurus.”
I was having coffee with Bert and his wife, Joyce, in Laramie. The mortuary (which prefers to be called the funeral home) called: “Do you want the coffin open or closed?” Joyce turns to me with the phone in her hand. “Do we want the coffin open or closed?” I thought about it. “I don’t think Lyle would have had any particular interest in being seen dead. Closed.”
“Do you want cremation or embalming?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. I think Don Ruth is the one Lyle told all this stuff to, and he’s on a pack trip. I guess we better embalm him until we find out, then we can still cremate him if that’s what he wanted. You can’t do it the other way ’round.”
“Okay. They say he needs some clothes. You brought him in in his underwear and they can’t put him in the coffin like that.”
“Why not, if it’s closed?”
“They say it’s a law. They say he needs some clothes this afternoon.”
“That means I have to drive an hour up there, rummage around in Lyle’s closet for that 1930s suit he has. Then I have to drive it back here and then drive home. It’d be easier for me to give Lyle the clothes I’m wearing now and just drive home naked.”
Bert said, “I think I have an old suit I can take over there.”
“Bless you.”
The coffin looked like a birthday cake, flocked pink. We had ordered it by phone. I knew Lyle would have ordered the cheapest for himself, so I ordered the second cheapest, which turned out to be far and away the tackiest. It looked like it was designed for family pets. It was piñata-esque. I figured Lyle could only see it from the inside.
Luckily Mac McCartney had cut some pine boughs on Boulder Ridge, and we were pretty well able to hide the coffin. Everyone who’d known Lyle was there. The three half-sisters Lyle had hardly known but willed his meadow to wept.
The preacher was the nondenominational one in town, and, indeed, he is a nondenominational kind of guy, mild and grayish. He says funeral services for all the folks who die who don’t belong to a particular church. Many he doesn’t know personally, which was his relationship with Lyle. He basically paraphrased the obituary in reverse order, and wrenched from that text three or four occasions to turn our thoughts toward Jesus. It was thin soup. He concluded he would have liked Lyle, had he known him, because the obituary had made him sound so “interesting.”
I thought Lyle wouldn’t mind that any more than the coffin. The guy was just doing his job. All who knew Lyle held their peace, their grief, their memories, their reverence.
After the service there was coffee at Bert and Joyce’s house. The three half-sisters repaired to the sun porch with a realtor. We could not hear what they were saying, but we could see them through the glass, as if they were in an aquarium. There were muffled cries.
They ironed things out right then and there, while Carl talked cattle business with Clay, Jorie talked with Shirley and June, and Ruby held forth to the astonished company about how she eavesdrops on the radio-phone and the kind of dirt she hears. It’s the next best thing to daytime TV, especially now that she’s blind from diabetes, and the radiophone has the added attraction that she actually knows a lot of the people talking. Sometimes she even interrupts the conversations of strangers with what she considers to be essential pertinencies.
Vi, one of the half-sisters, approached Joyce. “Lyle must have been quite a wealthy man. We had no idea.”
“What makes you think he was wealthy?”
“Well, last night we went to the Home to view the body. I know it was supposed to be closed casket, but I’d never seen him. We were just curious as to what he looked like. Well. He must have had more money than we thought. He was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit.”
Joyce said, “You looked at the label?”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
All conversations were cut off mid-sentence when Joyce raised her voice to a shrill pitch, “Bert, you son of a bitch. You buried that old man in the suit you married me in. What the hell does that mean?”
The morning of the actual interment in Fort Collins we drove to Lyle’s ranch to get his hat. There were a dozen or so wild irises about to bloom in the yard. For years we had brought Lyle irises from Tie Siding because they wouldn’t grow this high, not even in the meadow. Here they were, about to bloom, though I s
uspect they would have winterkilled if left there. We spaded up a bunch of them and put them in a cardboard box with plenty of native soil to plant on Lyle’s grave.
At the cemetery my five-year-old daughter put Lyle’s old felt hat on top of the coffin. Jorie said a little poem about a blacksmith laying down his hammer at last. That was it. We went home. Boulder Ridge, Lyle’s meadow, Lyle gone.
Lyle told me he could hear different tones emitted by different stars on the stillest, coldest winter nights. He said he could tell which notes came from which stars. He couldn’t hear them all the time, just winter nights, and then, when he was about sixty, he admitted sadly that he couldn’t hear them anymore. Age, I guess. When he said he heard the stars, though, he wasn’t exaggerating. In fact, he was worried I’d think he was nuts, even though he knew I had never in thirty-five years heard him say anything but the absolute truth as far as he knew it. If Lyle said he heard stars he heard stars. The only reason he mentioned it was because it was curious to him, the idea of the music of the spheres and all.
Another time, while sorting through a fruitcake tin filled with old buttons, he told me how once in winter he was walking in deep timber with his axe. He heard a wind coming up, firing the treetops. He heard it getting closer. It reached the trees directly overhead. As it rushed into them Lyle felt the wind blow through him, blowing right through him as if he wasn’t there.
I’m thinking of Lyle making a pair of silver and agate earrings with no girl in mind to give them to.
The sky was not blue all summer, nor did it rain. Sunsets were bloody without clouds. Half the west was on fire and no way to stop it in the driest summer in recorded history. The timber not already ablaze was sunsoaked to the point, it seemed, of spontaneous ignition. You couldn’t see the mountains for smoke. Four thousand acres of timber burned not eight miles from us, and smoke from the Yellowstone fire four hundred miles away covered our state. There was a grass fire that barely sidled by us.
