by Annie Proulx
A parade of saddle bums drifted through the Peck bunkhouse and from an early age Archie listened to the songs they sang. He was a quick study for a tune, had a memory for rhymes, verses and intonations. When Mrs. Peck went to the land of no breakfast forever, caught in a grass conflagration she started while singeing slaughtered chickens, Archie was fourteen and Bunk in his early twenties. Without Mrs. Peck as buffer, the relationship became one of hired hand and boss. There had never been any sense of kinship, fictive or otherwise, between them. Especially did Bunk Peck burn over the hundred dollars his mother left Archie in her will.
Everyone in the sparsely settled country was noted for some salty dog quirk or talent. Chay Sump had a way with the Utes, and it was to him people went when they needed fine tanned hides. Lightning Willy, after incessant practice, shot both pistol and carbine accurately from the waist, seemingly without aiming. Bible Bob possessed a nose for gold on the strength of his discovery of promising color high on the slope of Singlebit Peak. And Archie McLaverty had a singing voice that once heard was never forgotten. It was a straight, hard voice, the words falling out halfway between a shout and a song. Sad and flat and without ornamentation, it expressed things felt but unsayable. He sang plain and square-cut, “Brandy’s brandy, any way you mix it, a Texian’s a Texian any way you fix it,” and the listeners laughed at the droll way he rolled out “fix it,” the words surely meaning castration. And when he moved into “The Old North Trail,” laconic and a little hoarse, people got set for half an hour of the true history they all knew as he made his way through countless verses. He could sing every song—“Go Long Blue Dog,” and “When the Green Grass Comes,” “Don’t Pull off My Boots,” and “Two Quarts of Whiskey,” and at all-male roundup nights he had endless verses of “The Stinkin Cow,” “The Buckskin Shirt” and “Cousin Harry.” He courted Rose singing “never marry no good-for-nothin boy,” the boy understood to be himself, the “good-for-nothin” a disclaimer. Later, with winks and innuendo, he sang, “Little girl, for safety you better get branded…”
Archie, advised by an ex-homesteader working for Bunk Peck, used his inheritance from Mrs. Peck to buy eighty acres of private land. It would have cost nothing if they had filed for a homestead twice that size on public land, or eight times larger on desert land, but Archie feared the government would discover he was a minor, nor did he want a five-year burden of obligatory cultivation and irrigation. Since he had never expected anything from Mrs. Peck, buying the land with the surprise legacy seemed like getting it for free. And it was immediately theirs with no strings attached. Archie, thrilled to be a landowner, told Rose he had to sing the metes and bounds. He started on the southwest corner and headed east. It was something he reckoned had to be done. Rose walked along with him at the beginning and even tried to sing with him but got out of breath from walking so fast and singing at the same time. Nor did she know the words to many of his songs. Archie kept going. It took him hours. Late in the afternoon he was on the west line, drawing near and still singing though his voice was raspy, “an we’ll go downtown, an we’ll buy some shirts…,” and slouching down the slope the last hundred feet in the evening dusk so worn of voice she could hardly hear him breathily half-chant “never had a nickel and I don’t give a shit.”
There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude. Archie had hammered together a table with sapling legs and two benches. At the evening meal, their faces lit by the yellow shine of the coal oil lamp whose light threw wild shadows on the ceiling, their world seemed in order until moths flew at the lamp and finally thrashed themselves to sticky death on the plates.
Rose was not pretty, but warmhearted and quick to laugh. She had grown up at the Jackrabbit stage station, the daughter of kettle-bellied Sundown Mealor, who dreamed of plunging steeds but because of his bottle habit drove a freight wagon. The station was on a north-south trail connecting hardscrabble ranches with the blowout railroad town of Rawlins after the Union Pacific line went through. Rose’s mother was grey with some wasting disease that kept her to her bed, sinking slowly out of life. She wept over Rose’s early marriage but gave her a family treasure, a large silver spoon that had come across the Atlantic.
The stationmaster was the politically minded Robert F. Dorgan, affable and jowly, yearning to be appointed to a position of importance and seeing the station as a brief stop not only for freight wagons but for himself. His second wife, Flora, stepmother to his daughter, Queeda, went to Denver every winter with Queeda, and so they became authorities on fashion and style. They were as close as a natural mother and daughter. In Denver, Mrs. Dorgan sought out important people who could help her husband climb to success. Many political men spent the winter in Denver, and one of them, Rufus Clatter, with connections to Washington, hinted there was a chance for Dorgan to be appointed as territorial surveyor.
“I’m sure he knows a good deal about surveying,” he said with a wink.
“Considerable,” she said, thinking that Dorgan could find some stripling surveyor to do the work for a few dollars.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Clatter, pressing heavily against her thigh, but tensed to step back if she took offense. She allowed him a few seconds, smiled and turned away.
“Should such an appointment come to pass, you will find me grateful.”
In the spring, back at the station, where her rings and metallic dress trim cast a golden aura, she bossed the local gossip saying that Archie Laverty had ruined Rose, precipitating their youthful marriage, Rose barely fourteen, but what could you expect from a girl with a drunkard father, an uncontrolled girl who’d had the run of the station, sassing rough drivers and exchanging low repartee with bumpkin cowhands, among them Archie Laverty, a lowlife who sang vulgar songs. She whisked her hands together as though ridding them of filth.
The other inhabitant of the station was an old bachelor—the country was rich in bachelors—Harp Daft, the telegraph key operator. His face and neck formed a visor of scars, moles, wens, boils and acne. One leg was shorter than the other and his voice twanged with catarrh. His window faced the Dorgan house, and a black circle which Rose knew to be a telescope sometimes showed in it.
Rose both admired and despised Queeda Dorgan. She greedily took in every detail of the beautiful dresses, the fire opal brooch, satin shoes and saucy hats so exquisitely out of place at the dusty station, but she knew that Miss Dainty had to wash out her bloody menstrual rags like every woman, although she tried to hide them by hanging them on the line at night or inside pillow slips. Beneath the silk skirts she too had to put up with sopping pads torn from old sheets, the crusted edges chafing her thighs and pulling at the pubic hairs. At those times of the month the animal smell seeped through Queeda’s perfumed defenses. Rose saw Mrs. Dorgan as an iron-boned two-faced enemy, the public sweetness offset by private coarseness. She had seen the woman spit on the ground like a drover, had seen her scratch her crotch on the corner of the table when she thought no one was looking. In her belief that she was a superior creature, Mrs. Dorgan never spoke to the Mealors or to the despicable bachelor pawing his telegraph key, or, as he said, seeking out constellations.
Every morning in the little cabin Rose braided her straight brown hair, dabbed it with drops of lilac water from the blue bottle Archie had presented her on the day of their wedding and wound it around her head in a coronet, the way Queeda Dorgan bound up her hair. At night she let it fall loose, releasing the fragrance. She did not want to become like a homestead woman, skunky armpits and greasy hair yanked into a bun. Archie had crimpy auburn locks, and she hoped that their children would get those waves and his red-cheeked handsome face. She trimmed his hair with a pair of embroidery scissors dropped in the dust by some stagecoach lady passenger at the station years before, the silver handles in the shape of bent-necked cranes. But it was hard, keeping clean. Queeda Dorgan, for example, had little to do at the station but primp and wash and flounc
e, but Rose, in her cabin, lifted heavy kettles, split kindling, baked bread, scrubbed pots and hacked the stone-filled ground for a garden, hauled water when Archie was not there. They were lucky their first winter that the river did not freeze. Her personal wash and the dishes and floor took four daily buckets of water lugged up from the Little Weed, each trip disturbing the ducks who favored the nearby setback for their business meetings. She tried to keep Archie clean as well. He rode in from days of chasing Peck’s cows or running wild horses on the desert, stubbled face, mosquito-bitten neck and grimed hands, cut, cracked nails and stinking feet. She pulled off his boots and washed his feet in the enamel dishpan, patting them dry with a clean feed sack towel.
“If you had stockins, it wouldn’t be so bad,” she said. “If I could get me some knittin needles and yarn I could make stockins.”
“Mrs. Peck made some. Once. Took about a hour before they was holed. No point to it and they clamber around in your boots. Hell with stockins.”
Supper was venison hash or a platter of fried sage hen she had shot, rose-hip jelly and fresh bread, but not beans, which Archie said had been and still were the main provender at Peck’s. Occasionally neighbor Tom Ackler rode down for supper, sometimes with his yellow cat, Gold Dust, riding behind him on the saddle. While Tom talked, Gold Dust set to work to claw the weasel out of the woodpile. Rose liked the black-eyed, balding prospector and asked him about the gold earring in his left ear.
“Used a sail the world, girlie. That’s my port ear and that ring tells them as knows that I been east round Cape Horn. And if you been east, you been west, first. Been all over the world.” He had a rich collection of stories of storms, violent williwaws and southerly busters, of waterspouts and whales leaping like trout, icebergs and doldrums and enmeshing seaweed, of wild times in distant ports.
“How come you to leave the sailor-boy life?” asked Rose.
“No way to get rich, girlie. And this fella wanted a snug harbor after the pitchin deck.”
Archie asked about maritime songs, and the next visit Tom Ackler brought his concertina with him and for hours sea chanteys and sailors’ verses filled the cabin, Archie asking for a repeat of some and often chiming in after a single hearing.
They say old man your horse will die.
And they say so, and they hope so.
O poor old man your horse will die.
O poor old man.
Rose was an eager lover when Archie called “put your ass up like a whippoorwill,” and an expert at shifting his occasional glum moods into pleased laughter. She seemed unaware that she lived in a time when love killed women. One summer evening, their bed spread on the floor among the chips and splinters in the half-finished cabin, they fell to kissing. Rose, in some kind of transport began to bite her kisses, lickings and sharp nips along his neck, his shoulder, in the musky crevice between his arm and torso, his nipples until she felt him shaking and looked up to see his eyes closed, tears in his lashes, face contorted in a grimace.
“Oh Archie, I didn’t mean to hurt, Archie—”
“You did not,” he groaned. “It’s. I ain’t never been. Loved. I just can’t hardly stand it—” and he began to blubber “feel like I been shot,” pulling her into his arms, rolling half over so that the salty tears and his saliva wet her embroidered waist shirt, calling her his little birdeen, and at that moment she would have walked into a furnace for him.
On the days he was away she would hack at the garden or take his old needle gun and hunt sage grouse. She shot a hawk that was after her three laying hens, plucked and cleaned it and threw it in the soup pot with a handful of wild onions and some pepper. Another day she had gathered two quarts of wild strawberries, her fingers stained deep red that would not wash away.
“Look like you killed and skinned a griz bear by hand,” he said. “It could be a bear might come down for his berries, so don’t you go pickin no more.”
The second winter came on and Bunk Peck laid off all the men, including Archie. Cowhands rode the circuit, moving from ranch to ranch, doing odd jobs in return for a place in the bunkhouse and three squares. Down on the Little Weed, Archie and Rose were ready for the cold. He had waited for good tracking snow and shot two elk and two deer in November when the weather chilled, swapping a share of the meat to Tom Ackler for his help, for it could take a lone man several days to pack a big elk out, with bears, lions and wolves, coyotes, ravens and eagles gorging as much of the unattended carcass as they could. One rough acre was cleared where Archie planned to sow Turkey Red wheat. The meat house was full. They had a barrel of flour and enough baking powder and sugar for the city of Chicago. Some mornings the wind stirred the snow into a scrim that bleached the mountains and made opaline dawn skies. Once the sun below the horizon threw savage red onto the bottom of the cloud that hung over Barrel Mountain and Archie glanced up, saw Rose in the doorway burning an unearthly color in the lurid glow.
By spring both of them were tired of elk and venison, tired of bumping into each other in the little cabin. Rose was pregnant. Her vitality seemed to have ebbed away, her good humor with it. Archie carried her water buckets from the river and swore he would dig a well the coming summer. It was hot in the cabin, the April sun like a furnace door ajar.
“You better get somebody knows about well diggin,” she said sourly, slapping the bowls on the table for the everlasting elk stew, nothing more than meat, water and salt simmered to chewability, then reheated for days. “Remember how Mr. Town got killed when his well caved in and him in it?”
“A well can damn cave in and I won’t be in it,” he said. “I got in mind not diggin a deep killin well, but clearin out that little seep east a the meat house. Could make a good spring and I’d build a springhouse, put some shelves, and maybe git a cow. Butter and cream cow. Hell, I’m goin a dig out that spring today.” He was short but muscular, and his shoulders had broadened, his chest filled out with the work. He started to sing “got to bring along my shovel if I got a dig a spring,” ending with one of Tom’s yo-heave-hos, but his jokey song did not soothe her irritation. An older woman would have seen that although they were little more than children, they were shifting out of days of clutching love and into the long haul of married life.
“Cows cost money, specially butter and cream cows. We ain’t got enough for a butter dish even. And I’d need a churn. Long as we are dreamin, might as well dream a pig, too, give the skim and have the pork in the fall. Sick a deer meat. It’s too bad you spent all your money on this land. Should a saved some out.”
“Still think it was the right way to do, but we sure need some chink. I’m ridin to talk with Bunk in a few days, see can I get hired on again.” He pulled on his dirty digging pants still spattered with mud from the three-day job of the privy pit. “Don’t git me no dinner. I’ll dig until noon and come in for coffee. We got coffee yet?”
Bunk Peck took pleasure in saying there was no job for him. Nor was there anything at the other ranches. Eight or ten Texas cowhands left over from last fall’s Montana drive had stayed in the country and taken all the work.
He tried to make a joke out of it for Rose, but the way he breathed through his teeth showed it wasn’t funny. After a few minutes she said in a low voice, “At the station they used a say they pay a hunderd a month up in Butte.”
“Missus McLaverty, I wouldn’t work in no mine. You married you a cowboy.” And he sang “I’m just a lonesome cowboy who loves a gal named Rose, I don’t care if my hat gets wet or if I freeze my toes, but I won’t work no copper mine, so put that up your nose.” He picked a piece of turnip from the frying pan on the stove and ate it. “I’ll ride over Cheyenne way an see what I can find. There’s some big ranches over there and they probly need hands. Stop by Tom’s place on my way and ask him to look in on you.”
The next day he went on the drift. We need the chink, she thought, don’t we?
Despite the strong April sun there was still deep snow under the lodgepoles and in north hollows around T
om Ackler’s cabin; the place had a deserted feeling to it, something more than if Tom had gone off for the day. His cat, Gold Dust, came purring up onto the steps but when Archie tried to pet her, tore his hand and with flattened ears raced into the pines. Inside the cabin he found the stub of a pencil and wrote a note on the edge of an old newspaper, left it on the table.
Tom I looking for werk arond Shyanne.
Check on Rose now & than, ok?
Arch McLaverty
In a saloon on a Cheyenne street packed with whiskey mills and gambling snaps he heard that a rancher up on Rawhide Creek was looking for spring roundup hands. The whiskey bottles glittered as the swinging doors let in planks of light—Kellogg’s Old Bourbon, Squirrel, McBryan’s, G. G. Booz, Day Dream and a few sharp-cornered gin bottles. He bought the man a drink. The thing was, said his informant, a big-mustached smiler showing rotten nutcrackers, putting on the sideboards by wrapping his thumb and forefinger around the shot glass to gain another inch of fullness, that although Karok paid well and he didn’t hardly lay off men in the fall, he would not hire a married man, claiming they had the bad habit of running off home to see wife and kiddies while Karok’s cows fell in mud holes, were victimized by mountain lions and rustlers, drifted down the draw and suffered the hundred other ills that could befall untended cattle. The bartender, half-listening, sucked a draught of Wheatley’s Spanish Pain Destroyer from a small bottle near the cash register.
“Stomach,” he said to no one, belching.
Big Mustache knocked back his brimming shot of Squirrel and went on. “He’s a foreigner from back east, and the only thing counts to him is cows. He learned that fast when he come here back in the early days, cows is the only thing. Grub’s pretty poor, too. There ain’t no chicken in the chicken soup.”
