Parts of him scattered about and other parts just a puzzle. Maybe everyone was like this? Elise certainly was a puzzle. Often she said things that more than puzzled Gus.
Just before Leslie left home to work on the 360 ranch down near Marathon, as a kind of going-away party, they’d loaded up the wagon with picnic baskets and blankets and traveled over Wild Rose Pass to the San Solomon Springs.
Spread out on the banks on a couple of old Kiowa blankets they’d brought from Lone Wolf, eating pecan pie for dessert, Elise, clutching the edge of the blanket, said to the children, “Your father was my schoolteacher. He rescued me from the elements. It was his little brother, whispering in his ear over the coyote wind, who told him where to find us.”
“Us,” said Lorena. “You mean you and your sister?”
“Me and Sandy.”
“Where was your sister?” said Lorena.
“She was with your father.”
“And Daddy’s brother was there also?” asked Leslie.
“In spirit,” said Elise.
“This is when you got frostbite?” said Leslie.
“Why was Aunt Lorena with daddy?” Lorena said.
Henry said, “Who is Aunt Lorena?”
Mattie, who was only three, said, “What does frost bite?”
“Your father was engaged to my sister before he was engaged to me,” said Elise.
Gus said his wife’s name. He looked into the faces of his children, which were worried with questions, none of which they knew how to ask. Or maybe they knew how to ask them but did not know whether they ought to. Gus knew the only way out of this was to start talking so that Elise would not. He could tell the truth. But what was the truth? Ought he to tell his children how he had fooled himself into thinking he loved one sister only to ditch her and marry another? He did not want them to know they could fool themselves into doing such drastic things, although he knew he could not prevent them from finding out on their own.
“I was not engaged to her, not officially. I had the ring in my pocket. I had traveled by train to Stillwater with the idea of proposing.”
“Stillwater,” said Leslie, who liked the names of places, and of things.
“And why didn’t you?” said Lorena.
Gus was not raised to have conversations of this sort, and especially not with his children. The closest he had ever come to a personal conversation with his father was when his father had asked him, in front of that bony woman his father had married, in front of Aunt Mattie, if there was a girl in the picture. The most intimate conversation he’d ever had with a member of his family (pre-Elise) was with Aunt Mattie, during the last hour he spent with her.
“Your mother put a spell on me,” said Gus. “She is a sorceress.”
The younger boys looked at their mother with the appropriate mix of fear and awe. Lorena looked disappointed, as if she were being patronized. Only Leslie, in the spirit of his namesake, who Gus remembered being able to always and easily move to laughter, smiled.
But Gus was not smiling when he called Elise a sorceress, and he did not smile the rest of the way home or when they went to bed that night. Elise was distant, he supposed because of Leslie’s leaving, as he felt sure it had not occurred to her that telling the children about his involvement with their aunt might be something about which he would want to be consulted.
They did not speak of it until the next morning, after they saw Leslie off and the children were gone to school.
Gus said, “You know what, Elise?”
“No, what?”
“Sometimes I envy you.”
“Why?
“Because you know exactly what you’ve lost.”
Elise said, “Are you referring to my severed digits and compromised nose?”
“Yes.”
“You envy me these?”
“For knowing the parts of you that are lost,” he repeated.
“You think because I walk funny and wear my wedding ring on the wrong finger that I am lucky?”
“I don’t believe in luck.”
“Enviable? Is that the word? You think that I am enviable?”
Words, their meanings, were so often where their arguments led. The actions got lost in the words they chose to defend, explain, or apologize. It wore Gus down. He wanted it to be over. So the children knew about Lorena. Chances seemed high that none of them would ever lay eyes on her, so what difference did it make. He thought to say, Let’s just forget it, but Elise was not one to abandon a good skirmish.
“It’s not the worst thing anyone ever said to me,” she said, in a way that suggested it was in the running.
Gus wanted to ask about the competition but knew it would be unseemly. He knew, many years ago, Elise had received a letter from Lorena. He imagined Lorena’s letter was not kind. Perhaps it contained the worst thing anyone had ever said to Elise?
When he told Elise that he envied her, he’d been thinking, mostly, of himself, of the things that were missing, the scattered parts of him. He’d aimed low. He knew that the parts of him scattered about or altogether absent were not comparable to the toes a doctor had sawed off in the Hobart Hospital. Elise’s accident, her losses, just made her more desirable to him, he realized some years after he married her, when she was showing her lone left toe to two-year-old Leslie and teaching him to say Wee, wee, wee, all the way home.
But an hour after this fight, one of their worst, they were down by the creek. Vultures circled high in the cloudless blue sky. Shaded by the only cover for miles, a thicket of cottonwood hugging the creek, their clothes came off an item at a time and were tossed between rocks, upon branches. One of Gus’s boots landed in a puddle. Elise leaned back against a live oak. The rhythm of their friction echoed off the cliffs above the creek. It made them laugh, the echo.
They lay sunning their winter-whitened flesh in a patch of sand on the creek bank. In the canyon, quiet save the steady swish of creek, Gus felt a little melancholy. The near-intolerable pressure of his passion was gone and what followed was not catharsis but a mildly anxious lassitude, until Elise, ever intuitive, having forgotten the horrible thing he said to her an hour earlier, said, “Afterward?”
“As in right now?”
“I never feel either completed or depleted. There is always some part of us lost, Gus McQueen. There is always more to lose.”
12
LORENA NELSON
Recluse, Wyoming, 1938
Many years ago now, I received in the mail a series of letters addressed to a horse. The writer was obviously of infirm mind, as—aside from the fact that they were addressed to a horse—the letters were hardly coherent. Included were intimate details of the writer’s domestic life as well as disjointed ruminations on past events. As to style, I would describe these letters as chaotic. The aftereffects of reading these letters were what I assume a hangover to be like. (I am not and have never been a drinker). I felt dyspeptic and confused.
Then I met the man I would marry. I put the letters away, and they went away.
Isaac had come to town to sell cattle. He owned a ranch a good distance east of Sheridan. In those days he came to Sheridan four times a year: once to sell his cattle, once for supplies, once to see the Christmas lights, and always on the Fourth of July. Isaac was a fan of parades. He was not a fan of fireworks, having served in the trenches during the Great War. “No veteran who did not sit behind a desk stateside could find such commotion entertaining,” he told me. He had seen the Fourth of July fireworks once after his return from Europe and could not sleep for a week afterward. This is one of the few times he has admitted to having been emotionally riled by anything. He is much stirred by certain hymns, and he can be effusive about pie, particularly rhubarb, but otherwise his emotional range is as unchanging as the ranch land that has been in his family for three generations.
Isaac is straightforward. He is steadfast and loyal. He uses words as he does dollars, which is to say carefully and without waste. Deliberate is a word I would u
se to describe his character. He is a man of lists and goals. Since returning home from the army, he had had in it his mind to marry a schoolteacher. He himself is not given to reading much past the newspaper, the Bible, and the dime westerns he buys in bulk during his quarter-annual shopping trips to town, but he appreciates education and wanted his children to be raised by a woman of some cultural refinement. Many years into our marriage I was told by one of his cousins that Isaac had a crush on his schoolteacher, an Irish woman who had survived the potato famine and loved the poetry of Robert Burns. This is not the sort of thing I would have ever gotten out of Isaac himself, which suited me fine, as I grew up with a father who felt the need to give voice to everything he had experienced in life, not to mention every idea that came half-formed into his head. There is a lot to be said for the unsaid, especially where men are concerned. It did not bother me to learn, so many years into my marriage, that Isaac’s stated reasons for wanting to marry me were not comprehensive. In fact, I suspected such already, for I had often heard him reciting Robert Burns to his collie dog, and when I asked him how he came to be a fan of a poet known for his bawdy verse (for my Isaac is a devout Christian), he told me of this Missus McConigley and I saw something not in his eyes but in the way he averted them.
One afternoon, a couple of years after I arrived in Wyoming, I was sitting at my desk in my classroom after school, working on my lesson plan, when someone knocked on the door. It was open. Isaac was standing in the doorway, dressed in his Sunday best. He held his hat in his hand and he had obviously come straight from the barbershop, for I could see the white skin on his neck and about his ears that his hair had hidden from the sun, exposed now by the barber’s blade.
“May I help you?”
He asked if he might borrow a moment of my time. He said he was interviewing schoolteachers.
“Are you a journalist?”
“No ma’am. Why would I be?”
“Journalists conduct interviews.”
He nodded, as if this were news to him.
“The only other reason to conduct an interview is if you have a job to offer. Are you a prospective employer?”
“Oh no,” he said. “I’d never dare pay for it.”
“Pay for what?”
“Why, a wife.”
“Well, that bodes well for you. Any man who purchases a wife, or attempts to, should be horsewhipped.”
At this time in my life my tongue was sharp. I had been described as insouciant. I had even been accused of being a suffragette. In fact, I had high standards and firm morals, which men of weak intellect often confuse with a militant streak in a woman.
“I agree with you,” he said. “No woman should sell herself.”
“No man ought to offer to pay.”
“Is it not the same thing?”
“Not at all.”
He looked confused and intrigued at once.
“Might I take a seat?”
I looked him over. From a distance he appeared to be clean, and he was mannerly enough. He was tall, lean, springy on his feet, blue-eyed. There were signs in the wrinkles about his eyes of a life spent in the elements.
I motioned for him to sit. Of course the seat was too small for him. He could not fit his knees beneath the desk. He spent some time arranging his legs in the aisle. His boots were worn but well polished. His hands were large and rough, but his nails were trimmed.
“So you are interviewing for a wife?”
“Yes.”
“And are you going door to door?”
“Oh no,” he said. “I am only interviewing schoolteachers.”
“A narrow field, especially in Wyoming. Might I ask why you’ve chosen such limitations?”
“I am a cattle rancher, ma’am. I work hard and my spread is a good ways from any town. Forty miles, in fact. I have given much thought to the type of woman I would like to marry and I have decided that an educated woman best suits my needs.”
“Are cattle ranchers better suited to educated women all around?” I asked, though the question that came to mind was, Are educated women suited to cattle ranchers, especially ones that live forty miles from a town? I had explored the country outside of Sheridan and knew that in Wyoming the word town often meant a crossroads store, a school, and a church.
“Well, I enjoy learning. I am not a man who knows everything.”
“Then you are the exception. I suppose you are educated yourself?”
“I attended school until I was needed on the ranch.”
“At what grade did your schooling end?”
“I had six grades behind me when I left. I should add that had it been up to me, I would have continued. But a boy must listen to his father. I have never been accused of shirking.”
Six grades was several more than the average in this part of Wyoming. The man was a veritable scholar.
“Of course, when I was seventeen I went into the service.”
“You are a veteran.”
“Yes.”
“You must have seen a lot. Were you wounded?”
“I was fortunate. The good Lord watched over me closely and kept me out of harm’s way.”
Oh dear. I was not raised in the church, and at that point my life had not been graced by the presence of any power higher than my own desire to overcome early hardship and some emotional suffering.
“You are not a believer,” he said.
I was not one to advertise my lack of faith, so I lied and said I was certainly a believer, which was only a lie in the context of his question, for there were many things I believed in strongly.
“That’s good. I would have had to take my leave if you weren’t.”
“What other qualifications aside from schoolteacher and believer are you searching for in your wife?”
He appeared stymied. He crossed and uncrossed his long legs. His lap was hard up against the desktop.
“What about you,” he said, rather cannily, I thought. “What do you require of a husband?”
“I don’t recall saying I am in search of a husband.”
“Are you not, then?”
In fact, I had been engaged once. Well, not officially—I had been serious with a man, a schoolteacher, in fact, who had, on the heels of proposing—the boxed ring visible in his pocket—changed his mind. He is, as far as I know, married still to my younger sister.
“I would never marry another schoolteacher.”
“I would never marry another rancher.”
“There are female ranchers?”
“Sheep,” he said with obvious derision.
“What is wrong with sheep?”
He seemed shocked by the question. It was the first I would learn of the acrimony between sheep and cattle ranchers.
“They are unintelligent.”
“Their wool is indispensable.”
“You can get far more out of a cow than you can a sheep.”
I went quickly from wondering why I was discussing the relative differences between sheep and cattle with this handsome but pious rancher to realizing I was enjoying it. The conversation itself was moving quickly and I did not want it to.
“Do you realize that your method of finding a suitable wife might put off many a good prospect?”
“No doubt it has already,” he said. “But they won’t the right fit.”
“Weren’t,” I said. “Not won’t.”
He beamed, as if he had been waiting years to have his grammar corrected and found it almost intolerably amorous.
“Begging your pardon. They weren’t the right fit.”
“I should beg your pardon for correcting you,” I said. “It’s only that much of what I do in this room all day is broker agreements between subjects and verbs.”
“And here I come adding to your workload. Desecrating the place at that,” he added, staring up at the rafters. “Like cursing in the Lord’s house.”
“Well, it’s not really of that order,” I said, and for the first time I smiled.
/> “I would like children,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I don’t care much for sweet potatoes or turnips.”
“Then you should not plant, buy, or cook them.”
He laughed. “You’ve got some spark in you.”
“I’ve no idea what is meant by that.”
“I would like permission to ask you to dinner.”
“Where did you have in mind to dine?”
“The Sheridan Inn.”
“I am not a fan of ‘Buffalo’ Cody and his western equivalent of a minstrel show,” I said.
“I agree that he is a dissolute opportunist, but Cody has not managed the place in over a decade.”
“His presence lingers. I’m afraid if that is all you can offer, permission is denied.”
“I was thinking it was your father I’d ask.”
“You will have to travel to the part of Texas that is mostly Mexico.”
I noticed a shift in his appraising eye.
“Ah,” he said, “a Texan!”
“Good gracious, no. I was born in Kansas and raised in Oklahoma.”
“There’s some decent calf ropers out of Oklahoma here lately.”
“Decent sorts can be found there.”
“You are making fun of me now,” he said, banging his body against the desk.
“Actually, I am, in a roundabout way, admitting my ignorance of rodeo.”
“I can take it or leave it myself,” he said earnestly.
“What else can you leave?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Never mind. What can you not leave?”
“My ranch. The church. My horse.”
A man who does not love his horse is suspect to me, though I took note that family did not appear in his list. However, I did not judge him for it, as the word means nothing, or rather it is a word that evokes sentiment only in those who have never felt born into the wrong clan. I thought the rancher and I might be, in this way, kindred spirits. Perhaps he too was the only normal product of his bloodline.
“What is your horse called?”
“Newt,” he said, staring at the desk like one of my third graders.
“Is he wee in stature?”
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