“Perhaps it is good to be reminded of your deepest fears,” Isaac said.
Out the kitchen window, on a summer afternoon when the temperature rises above one hundred, a wind kicks up dust. A cyclone of red sand forms in the field alongside the barn. The children spot it and they give chase. I watch them run circles round the dust devil and resist running after or even calling out to them. Be careful, look where you’re stepping, watch out: Who hears such commands after a while? I wonder if I felt compelled to say such things because there was no one saying such to me when I was their age.
I had never feared much until I came to live on Isaac’s ranch. The weather could change so rapidly. Days of drought and then down from Montana would come storms so violent the house seemed in danger of washing away into one of Isaac’s draws. And of course the cold—I knew what it could do, and I knew how quickly it could do it, as even though I had survived that day, even though I had all my appendages, I could have easily died because of my sister’s irresponsibility. Then the lesser but still present threat of snakes, and of bobcats, wolves, and the occasional bear, though Isaac thought animals only dangerous when provoked. He thought the same, however, about the elements. Survival was a given if one kept their wits about them. How one keeps one’s wits in a flood or blizzard was too obvious to bear explanation.
Slowly I also came to realize that motherhood (if taken seriously) was terror-inducing. But it did not dampen my fearlessness, for I knew that I would do anything for my children, that no sacrifice was too great when it came to their safety. And though he never said it, Isaac would have died for the children. Neither of us had any inclination toward the dramatic. (Compared to Isaac, I sometimes felt histrionic.) If I expressed worry, dismay, if I chided or nagged or complained, I appeared weak—not too much to Isaac (who would not have said) but to myself. What made me so conscious of my failings? The wind did, and the taut sheet of sky. The grasslands stretched forever, in every direction, and next to such expansiveness, what weight had my feelings?
Around this time I received a telegram from my sister informing me of my father’s death. Its arrival was somewhat delayed as it had been sent to Sheridan, the last address at which my sister had known me to reside. It was fortunate for me that it was delivered when Isaac was working his cattle on the far northern border of the ranch. After I read it, I carried it around with me in the pocket of my apron for a week, until one morning when Isaac was out milking I climbed up to the attic, took off the apron, folded it, and stowed it, telegram and all, inside Mother’s old steamer trunk, which was filled with things I had no use for.
A few years after the children started school, I had made for them, by a tailor in Gillette, three sizes of sheepskin coats, corresponding to the severity of the weather. The longest was ankle length and so thick it made the children appear obese. Isaac, professed hater of sheep, suggested it. He had worn them himself, as had his brothers, though he was quick to point out that it was the outer layer, made, of course, of cowhide, that kept the wool dry and the child warm.
“So cows yet again win the day,” I said.
“Hands down.”
We were at table, finishing supper. “Who put their hands down?” asked Elena.
“Your father does not believe in sheep,” I said to both children.
“Do you not count them when you can’t sleep?” said Isaac Junior.
“He needs no help falling asleep,” I said.
Isaac seemed to get my meaning—since Elena had been born, he had been consistently tired of an evening—and he gave me his stern not-in-front-of-the-children glance. But by this point he knew me well enough to know that I would not say anything off-color around the children, and he also knew me well enough to know that still, nearly two decades into our marriage, I desired him. Our marital life would never be as exciting (and busy) as when we were first trying to have children. One day, during the first of those six years before Isaac Junior arrived, Isaac said to me, “So I have been cataloging the sorts of weather that make you loving.” (“Loving” is his word for lustful, and though it seems a tepid euphemism, it is fitting, as he really does, and has always, loved me.) “Come a squall down from Canada and you come looking for me. Thunderstorms set you off, and so does extreme heat. And snow? Don’t matter if it’s an inch or twelve. Springtime brings it out, as does the first cold spell of autumn.”
I told him if he was trying to suggest that the elements did not matter, since my level of desire remained steady whatever was going on outside the kitchen window, he was dead wrong: all those things “bring it out,” I said, careful to quote his words. There were other things as well, such as all waltzes, and the sound of the front door creaking open, and a horse’s neigh, and hot water filling a bathtub. But I did not share these things with him because I knew (though we had never discussed it) that Isaac felt the business of initiating “loving” should fall to the man.
“I never understood the practice of counting sheep to fall asleep,” he was saying to the children. “First off, they all look alike. How can you even tell them apart to count them?”
“You could try counting the same one over and over,” I said. “I believe the effect would be the same.”
“Some sheep are just big old lambs,” said Elena.
“Cows, I gather, are each distinctive?” I said.
“Each single one,” said Isaac.
“Hands down,” I said to the children with an exaggerated roll of the eyes. “And in what ways do they distinguish themselves exactly?”
“They aren’t all white, for starters.”
“I have seen a muddy sheep once,” said Isaac Junior.
“Yet if you gave him a bath he would be white again,” his father said to him. “I can tell my cows by their voices.”
“Isaac Newton Nelson!” I said. The children, so used to such an exaggerated name-calling directed at them when they told a lie or misbehaved, grew giddy and interested. They sensed that this was no longer sheep versus cows. “You can no more tell which cow is out there mooing than you can read Latin.”
“I’ve never seen any Latin nor heard it spoke,” said Isaac, “so it remains to be seen whether or not I can read it.”
“I’ve a volume of Virgil on the shelf. Would you like me to bring it to you?”
Isaac leaned forward suddenly. “E pluribus unum!” he shouted, then sat back in his chair as if he’d won a debate.
Aside from church and the ranch hands, we saw very few people. Only when I took the children to town were Isaac and I apart for more than a workday. He did not like to spend more than a night away from his cows. I knew that he considered educationally vital only what his parents had exposed him to, which was not much more than visits to other ranches and church suppers. He thought—and often said—that before he shipped off to Europe, he’d hardly left the ranch, and he’d turned out all right. I told him I suspected it was his time in Europe that led him to want to marry a schoolteacher, but he insisted he had always liked schoolteachers and I remembered the rumor of his crush on the Irish teacher of his youth.
Still, you never know what aspects of your youth will change you. I have often thought of the many men who have passed through here, working for a while on the ranch, who are in hard flight from what they left behind. They never speak of where they came from or whom they left behind, but there is a brittleness to the one, which I’ve decided is the result of a shedding. You’d think crawling out of one skin and leaving it to wither would make you vulnerable and tender, but in the case of these drifters—and in my own case—the opposite was true. It toughened us. In no other way was I like these men, many of whom were drunkards and otherwise unsavory, but in this way I was their sister.
In the spring of Isaac Junior’s tenth year and Elena’s seventh, I took them to stay with Mrs. O’Connelly in Sheridan. We were gone an entire week. Isaac had stopped accompanying us unless he had cattle to sell or supplies to fetch. Too much work to be done around here, he said, no matter wha
t season it was.
We spent most of the first day in the library. It was new but well equipped for a town considered by many to be an outpost. I assigned the children subjects to look up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the famous (or so the librarian said) eleventh edition, donated by a Mr. Kendrick, a cattleman who had built a thirteen-thousand-square-foot mansion in town after (according to the librarian) making his fortune by marrying his boss’s daughter. The librarian, who was uncharacteristically chatty for her profession, also told me that the entire third floor of the mansion was taken up by a grand ballroom, and she had been there for a dance and had her picture taken there, though she confessed she did not have the picture on her person. Mr. Kendrick had also installed a central vacuum system in his mansion, though when I pressed her, she was not sure what duty such a system performed.
I enjoyed chatting with the librarian, starved as I was for the sort of idle gossip that I had once shared with other women, so much that I neglected to check on the children for nearly a half hour. Isaac Junior was to look up Tasmania; Elena May, the history of the hot-air balloon. They were to take notes and make a presentation to me, Mrs. Connelly, and one of her boarders, an elderly man who smiled through his whiskers and stomped his cane on the floor in lieu of applause, after which we had peach ice cream.
I took them downtown to the Golden Rule department store. We bought their father a pair of socks so that the children might see the clerk place the money in a pneumatic tube, which shot up to the green-visored cashier on the mezzanine. We visited the local museum, saw a herd of bison a local eccentric kept in his backyard, and had a ham sandwich at a lunch counter, a luxury I myself did not experience until college. The final night, we attended the circus, to whose appearance in town we had timed our visit. It seemed the entire city turned out to watch the circus train roll up the tracks, the giraffes’ bobbing heads visible in the middle distance despite the cloud of coal smoke that hung always over that town.
The next day we returned to the ranch. It might have been easier on all of us if the children had been dejected, as their father might then be able to use their low spirits to argue against future trips. But they were ecstatic, still charged by all they had witnessed. They wanted to tell Isaac everything, but their testimonials lasted only until Isaac Junior announced that he no longer wanted to be a cowboy but had his eye on trolley operator when he grew up.
“I would like to be a waitress at the lunch counter,” said Elena May.
I looked at my husband, who said nothing. He did not have to. The matter of their future was decided before we had been blessed with children. Isaac Junior was to take over the ranch. Elena would marry a rancher, if we were lucky to find one with a neighboring spread, so that the holdings might one day be consolidated.
But Isaac’s attachment to his ranch was impressive to me, given my father’s tendency to move hundreds of miles because of something he read in the paper or overheard in the barbershop. Isaac never raised a hand to either child, though as they grew older, he often accused me of pampering them. Once Isaac Junior turned twelve, Isaac insisted he could drive his sister to school on the sleigh, no matter how cold it was. I had been in the habit of accompanying them, and taking Jed along in particularly bad weather, dropping them off and picking them up. The thing I feared most in life was not having my feet covered in the skin of a rattlesnake, but my children getting lost in a blizzard. Isaac, having grown up in this place, having lived here all his life, paid no attention to weather, and only once, when it was forty-five below, did he agree to keep the children home for the day.
“We’ll wait until it warms up to forty,” he said at the breakfast table.
“Hardly likely until spring.”
“I mean below.”
“What is the difference between forty and forty-five below zero?”
“And all this time I thought I had married an educated woman.”
“I’m serious, Isaac. What difference does five degrees make?”
“In these parts, the difference between school and no school.”
“Jed will take them and I will go along.”
“Jed’s got to help me shoe a horse, and you have your own work to do.”
“Have you looked outside?” I said. Isaac was slowly drinking his coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar. I pulled back the curtain to expose a view of nothing. Snow so thick you could see only thick snow.
Isaac did not bother to look up from his coffee. “The horse knows the way,” he said.
“What did you say?” I asked him, not because I wanted to hear it again, but because I wanted to make sure I heard it right the first time.
He said it again.
I put down the dish I’d been washing and climbed the stairs to the attic. In a trunk I found the letters addressed to a horse. They were bound by twine. I untied them and pulled out one and opened and read it. “You and I know that words are wind,” the writer wrote to her dead horse. I sat down on another trunk and I kept reading. “Wind can maim . . . Can words?”
I read another. The letter writer had bundled up her baby and pinned the two of them (badly) beneath a blanket so that they might venture out into the snow. But the horse could not find its way out of the stall. The horse did not know the way, but Elise was not interested in actually going anywhere. She never has been, really. She was trying to find me. Or, more accurately, she was trying to find us as we were before Gus McQueen got off the train in Lone Wolf.
I had closed the door to the attic. I could hear Isaac calling to me from two floors below. In the trunk, in the pocket of an apron I’d been wearing when it was delivered, I found the telegram I had hidden from him: Father killed in a mining accident . . .
The attic door opened. Isaac called up to me. His words climbed the stairs slowly.
“Lorena, are you up there?”
“I’m coming,” I said.
But he must have heard it in my voice. I did not come, but he did. I heard his boots on the creaking stairs.
The afternoon Mr. McQueen—who I then called Gus—threw me over for Elise, we were walking across the campus. He did something peculiar. He stopped and fixed his eyes on something, and he appeared frozen in place. He was not looking at anything in particular, it seemed—he was looking at everything but without moving his head. I knew he had a ring—I could see the box in his pants pocket—and I thought, what an oddly unromantic way to propose. I asked him what he was looking at (as if it mattered) and he told me he had lied to me and I made him say it, even though I had known all along. But I would have gone to my grave rather than admit it to either of them. Why? Well, I’m certainly not the first person on earth to choose love over family. Everyone does, unless they marry their cousin. And yet I knew they were better suited. But I thought, at the moment, that the only reason she got to have him was because she had gone and lost her toes. She had maimed herself while researching her play. That made her “pure.” In that moment, and for many years, I hated her.
“What in the world, Lorena?” said Isaac. He was at the top of the stairs and he was looking at me like I must have looked at Mr. McQueen when he stopped in the middle of campus and stared at nothing on that day so long ago.
Why was I so far from civilization? She was always the tomboy. She lived on the back of that horse. She would have slept in the hayloft had Mother let her. She played in the fields with the Bulgarians and came back so dusty we had to dip her in the stock tank. That ring that bulged in the box in his pocket she likely wears on a string around her neck. I bet she lost it years ago.
And it had been years. So many years had passed.
What did she look like now? Were there runnels in her brow from the brutal heat of that desert she favored? Did she still call herself a cripple and pretend she was joking?
I would not know until I watched her walk down the sidewalk. I wouldn’t know anything sitting up in that freezing attic, reading old letters. I would not know until I searched for the string around her neck that held
his mother’s diamond ring whether or not I could stomach it.
I would not even know what it was I could or could not stomach.
There was Mother to think about. So I thought about Mother.
“I am taking the children to see their grandmother,” I told Isaac.
“Now?”
“As soon as it warms up to forty.”
He stared at me as if I were speaking Latin.
“Below,” I said, to clarify.
“What has gotten into you?”
“You’re the one who suggested it.”
“That was years ago.”
Everything was years ago.
“What is that in your hand?” he asked.
“This?” I said, holding up the telegram. I folded it and the letter. I put them both in the pocket of my apron, remembering when Gus McQueen did the same thing, hiding from my eyes a letter sent to him by my sister.
Life presents many situations in which you might manipulate the emotions you feel about your own behavior in order to admonish others.
“Where are the children?” I said, shocked by the harshness in my voice. “Who is looking after them? Why are you up here?”
Isaac looked stunned. It was so cold in the attic. I was wearing my housedress and an apron, and I was freezing. I had not been so cold since the day we found Elise in the snow. The attic had no insulation. I was exposed to the elements. Through the boards I saw white sky. Isaac said something, but I only saw his breath. His words were puffs of wind.
13
ELISE MCQUEEN
Fort Davis, Texas, 1940
“I wonder whatever happened to Damyan,” Elise said to Gus. It was early afternoon, a weekday in February, warm out and sunny. They were sitting on the front porch after a sprawling and rapturous hour of stolen midday lovemaking. They’d been at the newspaper office when Elise had told Gus she needed his help at home.
“He was rather bright, I always thought,” said Gus.
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