Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  They talked and drank. The women were both lawyers from Kansas City who wanted to get as far away from the bustle of their careers as they could, and bought the ranch property seven years before and spent their days reveling in their privacy.

  “Now I feel bad for butting into your haven,” Lewis said.

  “I find the wonder you have in our books engaging,” Holly said. “Besides, we need some visitors from time to time.”

  They drank the second bottle and started on a third as it was getting dark. The sky took its time getting dark there.

  The women spoke of their lives in Wyoming. They had two extra generators and two meat freezers full of processed elk with select cuts wrapped in brown butcher paper, which helped them get through the bad Chinook storms. They talked of where they came from, their careers.

  “What do you do here?” Lewis asked.

  “We paint,” Katherine said.

  “What do you do when you’re not painting?”

  “Talk about painting,” Holly jumped in.

  Then Lewis began asking about the books and how they came upon the leather-bound frontier journals.

  “Nothing special, I’m afraid,” Holly said. “An estate sale in Jackson Hole. Not sure where they traveled before that. Not really sure if they’re worth more than you paid or not.”

  They kept talking and drinking wine, and it seemed his hosts were as eager for the company as he was. They asked about his bike route, the logistics, and if he’d taken other trips like this.

  He hadn’t. This was a once-in-a-lifetime trip. It seemed important to take.

  They told him of trips they’d taken. “We went this last spring to Kearny, Nebraska, to see the sand hill cranes migrate,” Holly said.

  “That is a sight,” Katherine agreed, “but it happens when the weather is awful.”

  “We drove down there and before the sun came up went to sit in a lean-to to watch them by the river,” Holly said.

  “They dance with each other,” Katherine said.

  “How so?” Lewis asked.

  “Well, it’s hard to describe,” Holly said. She pushed back her chair and started moving around in a circle, as an auger digging through the deck until she was coiled with bent knees. She sprung upward, leaped off the ground higher than he would have guessed her age would allow, her arms shot outward, fingers fanned out, knuckles taut, and for a minute she was frozen in midjump. Levitating. She landed and jumped again, as if never touching the deck. Her neck, delicate and white, elongated, and her ponytail swayed from shoulder to shoulder.

  “And they sing,” Katherine said.

  “How do they sing?”

  Holly kept jumping.

  Katherine started making birdsongs that sounded like a piercing wind pushing through a canyon.

  Even as it was happening, Lewis knew he would remember these two women dancing and doing birdcalls for the rest of his days. Watching them he felt the troll of his own loneliness that clung to his back and kept him beneath the currents of being with and loving others.

  When they said good night, Lewis walked out to the field to his tent. He leaped and spun several times, imitating Holly imitating a crane. He was happy and full of energy despite his sore legs and rear. He was happy to have found Jacque La Véredrye and what that man had laid down in those pages. He felt the flicker of youthful love of the wider world that he had burned with as a young man.

  Instead of going to sleep, he took a flashlight and wandered farther up the hill in order to get even closer to the white pulse and heartbeat of the stars as they came out. When he reached the boulders, he climbed over a few and came to the top of the rise. There he looked east and saw what looked like a string of stars resting on the ground. A runway to the past. When he focused his eyes, he realized they were a long line of lantern lights. There must have been hundreds of people walking across the nowhere landscape toward the hill he stood on. Lewis stood watching for a minute, unsure if he was drunker than he thought or if the fun-house mirror in Natrona had blurred his vision. He climbed down the rocks and ran across the field back to the deck where Katherine and Holly were holding hands and sipping wine.

  “Maybe I’m going crazy, but it looks like a thousand people are hiking up to your property over that hill.”

  “Mormons,” Holly said. “You know how I told you we moved to the middle of nowhere to get away from people, especially judgmental people? Well, we didn’t think to ask if this ranch was smack on the Mormon Trail.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. Every summer, thousands of them come marching along. That’s why we’ve got all those posted signs on our fence.”

  “They’re going to Utah. Mormon pilgrims by the millions. An endless procession of them. They come bearing down on us and then loop around, because we put up such a stink, and they didn’t want to deal directly with a pair of pussy-bearing, pussy-loving lawyers.”

  “That’s the damnedest thing.”

  “You’re telling us,” Holly said.

  Lewis walked back to his tent, climbed the hill again, and looked down on the Mormon pilgrims. He lit his Zippo and let it burn in front of him. He hoped the people far below would see the flicker of light as he licked his finger and passed it through the flame, over and over, as if sending a signal. It was clear to him then that every hidden corner of the country was too complex to really understand. People shift from one place to another too fast, coming and going from everywhere. The whole country seemed to offer up people made to feel small by one thing or another. Sun. Space. Each other. Tiny Americans everywhere. Drifting and drifting.

  But God, he loved the West. The air, the land changing from stark to beautiful along every line on a map, and the endless versions of people filling their days. He loved how he could reinvent himself a little every day. He would break camp early in the morning and bike on toward Montana to make it by the date his father had given him. His father’s cabin in the mountains now felt every bit as important as the destination the pilgrims in the valley below sought. In the morning, he would get on his bike and go forth as a man who opens his heart to the world.

  14

  Terrance Thurber, 2018

  The entire visit was a reckoning Terrance had been inviting for most of his life. As the date drew closer, it felt like a lifetime of his being one sort of person, then slowly turning into another kind of person, again and again, was about to crest upon him and reveal who he really was. He had not been able to sleep well for most of the week. Helen would wake and find him either restless on the couch, at his desk writing letters to Lewis, or out on the deck, taking in the cold air and all the stars over the valley. She’d sit with him until he’d either try to go back to bed or the sun came up and he’d go out into the woods to start his day.

  “I keep thinking of my kids following me into the trees,” he said.

  “I think they’ll really like it here,” Helen said.

  “I do too.” He knocked one boot against the other to loosen dried dirt but didn’t step off the deck.

  “They will,” she said.

  Terrance and Helen picked up Jamie and Tina, and Connor and Dennis, from the airport early that morning. As soon as they came out of the security gate, he felt how years of imagining their lives had been weighing on him deep in his body. He could hardly move and felt dangerously exposed as they walked closer.

  “Welcome,” Helen called out, and held open her arms, as if to take them all in.

  Terrance cupped his hands around Jamie’s face. “There’s my girl,” he said, but his chest tightened and he fell silent.

  He turned to greet Tina and Dennis.

  “You have the same eyebrows,” Helen said as Terrance and Connor stood together after giving each other a brief handshake.

  Terrance looked at the choked expression reddening his son’s face and recognized the continuation of the softer half of his own nature. It was so obvious it made him uneasy, like he’d just felt the earth’s slow, imperceptible mo
tion.

  When they’d gathered their luggage, he drove them all back to the cabin in the van he rented for the week. Closer to his cabin they drove by a fruit stand where Buddy, a bull-chested mastiff dog, slept under the produce tables. Then they passed the Pine Bark café, which he imagined taking them to later in the week for cheeseburgers and strawberry pie.

  Now he was trying to busy himself making them lunch. Trying to do one small task at a time and let them warm up to him. To seeing him again. To how old he must seem to them. He wanted to give them space to begin to say and feel whatever they needed to. Seeing them now, he could barely contain himself from pulling them closer and hugging them all. He also imagined falling onto his knees and begging for their forgiveness.

  Helen had given them warm hugs at the airport and kept them talking, offering spaces for Terrance to jump into their conversations all morning. Helen settled them into the rooms they would stay in for the week. She placed a hand on Terrance’s arm. He was slicing a loaf of sandwich bread he’d baked outside in the stone oven.

  “You’re doing great,” she said. He stared at the cracked skin on his knuckles and his thumb that was purple from an errant hammer strike.

  “Thanks, love.”

  Helen made tea and they all sat around the dining room talking, but their voices stilled as he came back in. He placed the bread next to a plate of meats, cheeses, spreads, and a large salad he’d made that morning. Terrance sensed he had interrupted Jamie and Connor’s catching up.

  Tina lifted and dipped the string of her teabag. Jamie cupped the steaming mug in her palms and blew on it. He was eager to take them outside and show them his narrow valley, the eddies in the river with the most beautiful speckled trout, and the unhindered view from high up the mountainside.

  “Eat. Please. Eat,” he said.

  Tina and Dennis started making themselves sandwiches. Fresh-picked mountain flowers arranged in jelly jars lined the window behind them.

  “You know, I’d be tempted to lose a testicle if it meant I got to retire and live in this place,” Dennis teased.

  Connor took a jab at his son’s shoulder but was grinning, clearly sharing the same sense of humor as his son.

  “I didn’t lose it,” Terrance said. “Can you imagine what I could have gotten if I had though? We could have done this little family reunion on a giant yacht. Hired your Uncle Lewis to captain it for us.”

  “Do you know that it was because of Mom that Lewis went into the navy?” Jamie jumped in. Her face reddened immediately, embarrassed to have brought up their mother so soon.

  “How so?” Terrance asked.

  “Remember when Lewis took that bus trip out here and ended up staying at that girls’ camp? He had the paperwork for all four branches of the military in his bag. Mom dug around for them and took them out in the bus station when he went to the bathroom. She thought she grabbed them all but guess which one she missed.”

  “Come on,” Connor said.

  “True story.”

  “I was in the room with him when he packed his bag,” Connor said. “He put that navy application in with his college folders. I think he meant to toss the whole thing in the trash and pick from the others. I thought for sure he’d pick the marines.”

  “Do you even remember Mom?” Jamie blurted out, then looked down into her lap. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Terrance stayed silent then. Waiting. He wanted this from her, from all of them.

  “So, what is going on with Mom?” Connor asked.

  Terrance could sense that old nervousness in Connor, the family peacemaker, always racing ahead to where he sensed trouble, trying to distract everyone from a collision.

  Jamie looked over at Tina. Smiled at her, as if smoothing over the feeling that made her take a shot at her father. “Did you know she’s in South Carolina now? Tina and I went down there a few times to visit.”

  “Yeah,” Connor said.

  “She’s doing well too. She keeps busy. Paints the dunes and waves and sells her stuff to tourist shops.” She laughed a bit and looked at Terrance. “You guys could have started a business like that together.”

  “Bones and Beaches,” Terrance said.

  “Yeah,” Jamie gave a tense laugh. “You two would have made a killing.” She dabbed at the corner of her eye before she went on. “The first time we went to visit, Tina was only ten. Do you remember that trip?”

  “Of course. The turtles,” Tina said.

  “Turtles?” Connor asked.

  “Mom volunteers for this group. What’s it called, Tina?”

  “NEST. Network for Endangered Sea Turtles. They monitor the nests.”

  “Good memory. Yeah, so we’re down there, and she comes into our room in the middle of the night. Whispers to us and asks, ‘Do you want to be the moon?’”

  “Oh boy,” Connor said.

  “No. Not like that. She’s not like that anymore. She’d gotten a call from this NEST group. They have these loggerhead sea turtles down there that leave their eggs buried in the sand. On nights when the eggs hatch and there’s no moon out, the baby sea turtles go toward the nearby streetlights and never find the ocean.”

  “It was so cool,” Tina jumped in. “There were almost a dozen nests with little turtles digging their way out of the sand. We were given flashlights and told to stand in the surf in front of our assigned turtle nests with the lights over our heads.”

  “Tina had to pin herself against me to stay sturdy against the surf. I was so afraid she’d get pulled out.”

  “No. You were afraid of sharks,” Tina said. “But I loved it.”

  “I know. You kept yelling, ‘Grandma, Grandma, I can feel them brushing up against my legs.’”

  It was the first time Terrance had heard one of his grandkids refer to anyone as their grandparent. Helen reached under the table and held his hand. Tina excused herself and went to the back of the cabin. She was already a grown woman. A childhood behind her already. He kept quiet. He waited to hear what other stories they might want to tell him about the scattered factions of his old life.

  Though he already knew all about the South Carolina condo. He’d paid for that with the first batch of his injury money.

  What Jamie and Connor didn’t know was that Catrin had gotten into a minor car wreck after the kids were grown and out of the house. She put the car in a ditch and dislocated her left hip. She had a short stay in the hospital, which kept her from having to stay a few days in jail. There was to be a court date for a DWI. A mess of money needed. She called Terrance for the first time in years. She wanted to know what to do, not wanting to burden the kids.

  “I can’t do this,” Catrin said. “The kids are all gone. I have nothing here.”

  It was then they talked for the first time in years. He listened to her spill a decade of worry and pain. When he hung up he told Helen everything he was feeling. How hearing Catrin had brought up the memories of his greatest sins, which were still living, pulsing entities that shadowed him. He imagined his old house and all those painful memories. But then there was the memory of himself as a younger man too. As a new dad. The pace of life was staggering. He remembered holding all the babies in this house. Each as infants crying all night like machines. Toothaches, diapers, and wet beds. It felt like years without sleeping and stress becoming a solid sludge between him and Catrin. He saw how strained and human they had been and felt the ache of it.

  It was Helen’s suggestion that they help her. Helen believed that helping Catrin would relieve some of the guilt he felt for leaving Catrin and the kids those many, many years ago.

  Terrance called Catrin back the next morning and agreed to help her sell the house and move away, a break as far and drastic as the one he had made.

  “So what sort of itinerary do you have lined up for us?” Jamie asked, breaking him from his reverie.

  “Two fifteen: chop wood. Two thirty: hunt bear,” Connor teased.

  Terrance laughed at the joke, but he had b
een dreaming of this day for years. He desperately wanted to show them the breath of his valley. The fog in the morning. The stars a blur of milk-colored light at night. He wanted them to come to know him through all manner of his current home in hopes they’d sense how deeply he wanted to know them.

  Terrance looked at his two grown children and asked himself, Who were they, those beautiful children who used to look up to me? Did they see how much I loved them? Did that break through to them despite me going away? Looking back, there is Connor walking around with a finger dipped in red paint, waggling it in front of him after he saw E.T. There is thin-armed Lewis in the backyard whipping a length of rope at empty cans he hung from the trees like Indiana Jones. There is Jamie flinging herself around the living room pretending to be Mary Lou Retton or sprinting around the house like Flo-Jo.

  Terrance could still hear their young voices. They all came running into the house after school, talking over one another, their need and desire to share themselves a flash flood pushing off the daytime silence. One day they came home in shock after their whole school watched the launch of the Challenger—the hope and awe of learning about teachers going up into space before the fiery, confusing end. There was Jamie, who horrified Terrance by walking into the house singing “Like a Virgin,” before he’d ever heard of Madonna. There was teeth-chattering Jamie standing over the heating vent to get warm, the hem of her sweater held out to catch the air. And here is Jamie now. This grown woman and mother and beneath all that years of unasked and unanswered questions. Terrance was ready and waiting to receive them now.

  When they finished eating, Helen kissed Terrance on the top of the head. “I’ll clean up. Why don’t you go show everyone the woods.”

  “Great idea,” Jamie said. “Some fresh air would be nice.”

  “I’d love that,” Terrance said. He got up and went to the bathroom before they left. When he opened the door he saw his reflection in the opened medicine cabinet mirror, and heard the rattle of Tina shoving a pill bottle back inside.

  “Sorry. Sorry. Not used to company I guess,” Terrance said, shutting the door.