“No. He is sixteen hands.”
“Then why call him Newt?”
“My middle name is Newton, and when I was a tyke, I was called Newt. But a grown man can’t go around being called Newt.”
“But a grown horse can?”
“People will name a horse all sorts of things not suitable for a person.”
“Yes, it’s true,” I said, thinking of The Beatitudes, and of Sandy, though I knew a man who was called Sandy in his youth.
“Is Newton a family name?”
“I am called after Isaac in the Bible, for my father was nearly sixty when I was born. Newton seemed to suit as a middle name.”
“It certainly has a familiar ring. As well as a certain gravitas.”
He made no sign that he got the reference. “I feel like you are getting way more out of me than I am out of you,” he said.
“We must save something for dinner,” I said. “I’m not terribly interesting, and if we don’t stop now, we might be sitting in silence, in the manner of couples who have been married for decades, before the soup arrives.”
“Maybe such couples know each other so well they don’t have to be remarking on the quality of the coffee just to prove to the world that they’re happy.”
This remark was both terrifying and oddly comforting to me. I decided to put it immediately out of mind, lest I get distracted by its hidden implications.
“Before I agree to dinner—”
“I thought you’d done . . . I’m sorry, I meant to say, I thought you already had agreed.”
“There’s something I would like to know first and that is, who else is in the running?”
He begged my pardon, as he was then in the habit of doing.
“How many schoolteachers have passed the preliminary interview and are now to the wine-and-dine stage?”
“I’m afraid I never touch spirits.”
“That makes two of us.”
He looked relieved. “To answer your question and to answer it honestly, there was one other who invited me home to have dinner with her family.”
“A local girl! She must know calf roping.”
“I now feel it my duty to cancel our engagement.”
“And how will you do that?” I said, not-so-secretly pleased to be knocking out the competition.
“How will I cancel? Why, I’ll tell her the truth.”
“And what is the truth?”
“That I have met you.”
“It might be best to be general.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Better to say you met ‘someone’ rather than to use my name,” I said. I had endured enough gossip back in Lone Wolf, thanks to my younger sister, and it was one of my objectives, since relocating to Wyoming, to keep from being talked about behind my back.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Lorena Stewart,” I said.
“Isaac Nelson,” he said, rising and bowing comically over the too-small desk.
“Formerly known as Newt.”
“You’ll not let me forget that.”
“I find it charming, actually, that you named your horse after your childhood self.”
“Well, he’s a lot like me when I was a boy.”
“I suppose I will soon see evidence of his boyishness, and of yours.”
“I like to hear you talk.”
“That is good to know, for I am not sure I agree with you about the contentedness of the couple sitting in silence at the dinner table.”
“I only meant people are quick to judge a book by its cover.”
“I find it hard to disagree with that, even if it is a cliché.”
“I know what a cliché is,” he said, raising his hand as if he were in class. It was a rare display of outright humor. I told him to please wait his turn and let others talk.
“I miss learning,” he said. He pointed to the pull-down map of the United States, which would never roll up fully and always exposed the Mexican border, the very region where my sister and mother, when last heard from, were living. “I like a map.”
“Most men do.” I wondered if he worked a toothpick between his teeth while studying one.
“I am not just some man.” I liked that he said this, even though I suspected, out of instinct, that his declaration was debatable.
There was a dinner, and then another a couple of weeks later. Isaac began to make the trip to Sheridan twice a month. He was good company. His table manners were passable, meaning he did not pour coffee into his saucer to drink or use a crust of bread as a knife. His enthusiasm for his work was attractive to me, having grown up with a man who did not love his work. (To love something, you need to actually do something). I did notice straightaway that topics of conversation were few and, impressive as they were, not of a bent I would call stimulating, by which I mean he was not given to talking about the following: art, culture, music, literature, what makes people behave as they do, other people (save for his ranch hands, about whom he had humorous anecdotes, mostly involving mishaps with livestock), the seriousness of other people, politics (except for those that affected his livelihood), and family (his own kin and the concept of family.) But he knew cattle and he knew horses, and I found refreshing a mind trained in the daily existence; there was such discipline in his life, such focus and expert management of time, and his skills seemed far more valuable and nobler than a reading knowledge of Latin.
Isaac had sought out an educated woman, and he had said in our first interview that he loved learning, so all the things we did not discuss seemed inevitably forthcoming. I looked upon Isaac at first as a rough gem. And, just as he said of himself, I am not one to shirk away from a challenge.
After four months he announced that the trip to and from his ranch was getting long.
“I intend to make an offer,” he said.
“You sound like you are buying a piece of land.”
“You ought to know by now I am not so good at this business of courting.”
“It would help not to refer to it as a business. But you ought to know by now that I have little to compare you to.”
I had not told him about the man who was married to my sister. It would not be until a few weeks later, when we were making our wedding arrangements and he asked who I might want to attend, that I told him the story. He listened and he nodded, as was his way. Either he sensed the subject was still tender or else he did not find it interesting. Or perhaps he formed, from the story, a negative opinion of both my sister and her husband, which his Christian charity prevented him from stating. At any rate, he made no comment, which, as was often the case with Isaac, left me feeling both comforted and slightly judged.
We were married on May 11, 1920, at the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Sheridan. Isaac had wanted to have the ceremony at his “home” church, ten miles from his ranch, since I had no affiliation. But that would have required Mrs. O’Connelly and my two favorites of her sons, Sean and Patrick, and their wives, Molly and Kathleen, who would serve as my attendants, to travel a good distance, and of course there were no accommodations in the area. Isaac said there were dozens of ranchers who would be happy to put up the wedding party and all guests, but when quizzed, he admitted that these ranchers were spread out over a fifty-mile area.
It made more sense to be married in Sheridan. Isaac went along with it because I reminded him it was tradition to marry in the bride’s hometown, and he had respect for tradition. Sheridan was—oddly enough—the closest I had to a home. I knew no one in Lone Wolf, and I no longer had family to speak of.
There was the question of who ought to give me away. Mrs. O’Connelly suggested Mr. Richard, he of the hacking cough and the basement room. I was not at first taken with the idea, since I had laid eyes on him fewer than a dozen times in my life and suspected him a man of questionable habits, but the notion of a complete stranger standing in for the complete stranger who would have stood in for me had I invited my parents appealed to me. Isaac was perplexed but di
d not question me about it. Mrs. O’Connelly saw to it that Mr. Richard was presentably attired; his wool suit smelled, curiously, of pavement after a hard summer rain, and his boots were not evenly polished, but the look on his face was so amicable that I wondered if Mrs. O’Connelly had not remunerated him in some way I did not care to further consider. Midway through our vows he erupted into a fit of coughing best described as hacking, but it came just when I was repeating the preacher’s words to Isaac as instructed. Love was clear, but honor and obey were drowned out by Mr. Richard’s wet cough. He would die not long after of consumption. I will always remember him, just as I will never forget the words his fit rendered inaudible.
Isaac’s brother was his best man, and his two cousins served as groomsmen. They arrived an hour before the wedding and did not stay for the reception. I found this peculiar until Isaac explained that they were tending to his ranch in his absence and could not be away any longer. I knew better than to push, given the situation with Mr. Richard, which I could tell embarrassed Isaac, who was left to explain to his family who this man was to me, as I merely smiled at the question and pretended that their words had been drowned out by the most hacking of coughs.
Thank goodness for the Irish Catholic tendency toward procreation, for the church was packed with Mrs. O’Connelly’s sons, their wives, their grandchildren, and I believe perhaps their in-laws. Isaac was paying for it and had slaughtered a pig and several chickens for the feast as the head count grew, but I think it appealed to his vanity to have such a well-attended wedding, and Mrs. O’Connelly won him over with her rhubarb pies, which were served in place of cake, at Isaac’s request.
That night we took rooms in the Sheridan Inn, previous odious proprietor notwithstanding. Before he came to bed, Isaac spent such a long time on his knees, praying for God to make our union long and happy, that I fell asleep. Isaac did not think it polite to wake me. To his mind, there would be plenty of time to consummate our union once we arrived at his ranch.
We were over three hours getting there. The wagon was loaded with all I owned, which fit into two trunks and several boxes containing hats I would rarely need. It felt liberating traveling so lightly to a new life. I felt myself capable of anything, really, adaptable and dependable and several other things that ended in -able. But midway through the journey, I understood why Isaac had been ready to make his “offer.” It was rough going through broken hilly country just east of town before the hills fall away and the plains stretch to the Dakotas and beyond. The road was deeply rutted when it was not washed out completely by snowmelt. There was much mud, and where there is mud, I discovered, there are generally swarms of flies. Isaac paid no attention to them—he seemed as immune to them as the horses—but I spent much of the journey waving a church fan in front of my face, not that I was overheated, just that I did not care for flies.
The house was a quarter mile off the road but visible from much farther, as there were no trees. Why not plant trees? Other settlers had chosen naturally wooded plots or else planted shade trees they kept alive with well water. Not Isaac’s family. The house was two-storied, whitewashed, and without the slightest adornment. Mrs. O’Connelly’s house in town, with its scrollwork about the porch and the triangular lattice lacing its gables, was like a castle compared. Isaac’s farmhouse appeared wind-blasted. It looked, from the driveway, cold in winter and hot in summer. A box in a vast field, surrounded by a barn, a silo, a pen for horses, a chute for branding cattle, a stock tank, a windmill, and several leaning sheds.
Isaac took me inside and led me on a tour. I took in the furniture, functional and unattractive. There was plenty to be done to keep up the house, which had long gone without a thorough cleaning. But the most pressing need was for curtains. I cannot live without curtains and see no reason to. Men apparently do not care who is looking into the windows at night, nor do they have the sense to block the heat of the day with heavy drapes.
There were other challenges. Isaac had been honest from the beginning about how isolated the place was. Having grown up in Lone Wolf, I was not intimidated. We’d not grown up in Lone Wolf proper (as if “proper” in Lone Wolf meant much) but four miles out in the country. Our nearest neighbors, a mile away across the prairie, were a family of Bulgarians. I had only my sister to play with, and she either wanted to play with the Bulgarians or in our barn, which was stifling in summer and freezing in winter and smelled, year-round, of barn.
Play suggests the deep differences between our sensibilities. My sister liked to indulge herself in elaborate games and in made-up scenarios constructed from the articles we read in the local paper. Many involved our horse, which was just a horse, who was given talking parts and, more often than not, special powers. Years later, when I began to attend church with Isaac, I would first hear the following lines from 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.” You could say I grew up earlier than most, and you can say, fairly, that last I heard from her, there was evidence that my sister clung still to childish ways. Especially did she speak, think, and reason like a child.
I preferred to spend my time indoors, helping my mother—who had her own struggles with behaving as a responsible adult—or studying. But my sister was always after me to participate in one of her elaborate scenarios and more often than not, I indulged her, as it was easiest in the end.
Lone Wolf had not actually been all that isolated—the town itself had a half-dozen stores, a train station (the famed Rock Island Line passed through there), two churches, and a couple of saloons. But, having had to give up childish things at an early age, I felt an isolation that transcended geography.
And then I came to Isaac’s ranch. When he told me that the nearest town was forty miles away, I expected a town the size of Lone Wolf. The aptly named Recluse, Wyoming, consisted of a general store selling mostly farm implements, a church, a schoolhouse, and several abandoned houses. Isaac’s quarterly trip to Sheridan for supplies involved much calculation and planning, for it wasn’t as if, should we run out of sugar, we could easily borrow some from a neighbor. The nearest ranch was seven miles away.
When I first arrived at the ranch, I was much taken by its starkness. Mountains are visible on the horizon, but often they are indistinguishable from banks of clouds. The land is flat and the sky wide. The vista is such that a cow grazing several hundred feet away can seem, at first glance, a hillock. There are several ponds on the property and a spring creek fed by snowmelt runs near the house, but it does not produce enough water for trees.
It is a dry country. I was there for several weeks before Isaac admitted that, on a good year, it took twenty acres of land to feed a single cow.
“How many cows do you have?”
“It depends,” he said.
“On average.”
“Two hundred and eighty-seven.” That was a precise number and I admire precision.
“And how many acres?”
“Six thousand five hundred and thirty-one.”
“That strikes me as a lot of land.”
“Maybe back east,” he said. “Out here, not especially sizable.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“See what?”
“I would like to explore your ranch.”
“Nothing much to explore. What you see out the kitchen window’s about what you’re going to see if you ride for an hour.”
The response was typical of Isaac, who was often puzzled by my curiosity. I had married a cattle rancher who owned what he referred to as “a decent spread.” I wanted to see the land, and to know it. To Isaac’s mind, there was nothing to know. Nevertheless I persisted until one Sunday after church he agreed to take me on a tour.
When I met him in the barn, he had tacked only Newt, though there were three other horses, idle in their stalls.
“I’d prefer my own mount.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “You ride wit
h me and Newt today and after the spring auction I will buy you a gelding.”
“I can buy my own horse. It may be a filly or it may be a mare. Perhaps it will be a stallion. I highly doubt it will be a gelding. It will not be bought without my consent, as it must pass my requirements, which for horses are more elaborate than people.”
“Horses are necessary and I will mourn Newt when he passes, but they are not on the same order as people.”
“Are we not all God’s creatures?” I said.
“People are given the ability to reason for a purpose,” said Isaac.
“I have known reasonable horses and deeply unreasonable people, and as for the purpose behind the giving, I would like for you to tell me, as we explore your six thousand five hundred and thirty-one acres, what that is. I fear it might take you that long.”
“I still like to hear you talk.”
“I hope it is still true after we finish our exploration.”
“I will love you when we are the old couple we spoke about in our first meeting, sitting in silence at supper.”
“My silent supper will be my last supper.”
The tour was tersely narrated. We rode through grass that swished against my dress, keeping the Bighorns behind us, for over an hour. In time, the land broke and rolled with low hills, blond with sun-bleached sagebrush and cheatgrass. These were the only plants I recognized. When we came upon a bluish grass, I asked after its name and was told it was called bluestem. I pointed to another plant, tall and spiky, and Isaac said it was a weed.
“Mullein. Good for nothing. Indians smoked it. Said it cured a cough. I believe it might have been the cause of one.”
We rode for a half hour in silence, there being no new vegetation to query him about. We came over a hill at the bottom of which cattle stood in the shallow of a pond.
“This is a delightful valley,” I said.
“This a draw, not a valley.”
“Back east it would be called a valley,” I said, though aside from a couple of spots in the Wichita range, we had no valleys in the prairie.
“We have our own terms for things,” Isaac said.
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