Fine Just the Way It Is

by Annie Proulx

  Sink thought the kid had plenty of sand, and muttering that he wasn’t no wet nurse, pulled off the icy boots, unbuttoned coat and shirt, half-hauled him stumbling to his bunk and brought two hot rocks from under the stove to warm him up. John Tank, a Texas drifter, said he had an extra pair of overalls Archie could have—old and mended but still with some wear in them.

  “Hell, better’n ridin around bare-ass in January.”

  But the next morning when Archie tried to get up he was overcome by dizziness. Boiling heat surged through him, his cheeks flamed red, his hands burned with high fever and he had a dry, constant cough. His head ached, the bunkhouse slopped back and forth as if on rockers. He could not stand, and he breathed with a sound like a blacksmith’s bellows.

  Sink looked at him and thought, pneumonia. “You look pretty bad. I’ll go see what Karok says.”

  When he came back half an hour later Archie was burning.

  “Karok says to git you out a here, but the bastard won’t let me take the wagon. He says he’s got a cancer in his leg and he needs that wagon for hisself to have the doc at the fort cut it out. Lon’s fixin up a kind a travois. His ma had some Indan kin so he knows how to fix it. Sometimes he ain’t so bad. We’ll git you down to Cheyenne and you can ride the train a where your mother is, your folks, Rawlins, whatever. Karok says. And he says you are fired. I had a tell him you was married so he would let you loose. He was all set a have you die in the bunkhouse. We’ll get a doc, beat this down. It’s only pneumony. I had it twice.”

  Archie tried to say his mother was long gone and that he needed to get to Rose down on the Little Weed, tried to say that it was sixty-odd miles from Rawlins to their cabin, but he couldn’t get out a word because of the wheezing, breath-sucking cough. Sink shook his head, got some biscuits and bacon from the cook.

  Foreman Alonzo had trimmed out two long poles and laced a steer hide to them in a kind of sling arrangement. Sink wrapped the legs of a horse named Preacher in burlap to keep the crust from cutting them, lashed the travois poles to his saddle, a tricky business to get the balance right. The small ends projected beyond the horse’s ears, but the foreman said that was to accommodate wear on the drag-ends. They rolled Archie and his bedroll in a buffalo robe and Sink began to drag him to Cheyenne, a hundred miles south. With the wagon it would have been easy. Sink thought the travois was not as good a contraption as Indians claimed. The wind, which had dropped a little overnight, came up, pushing a lofty bank of cloud. After four hours they had covered nine miles. The snow began, increasing in intensity until they were traveling blind.

  “Kid, I can’t see nothin,” called Sink. He stopped and dismounted, went to Archie. The earlier snow had melted as fast as it touched that red, feverish face, but gradually, just a fraction of an inch above the surface of the hot flesh, a mask of ice now formed a grey glaze. Sink thought the mask could become the true visage.

  “Better hole up. There’s a line shack somewheres around here could we find it. I was there all summer couple years back. Down a little from the top of a hogback.”

  The horse, Preacher, had also spent that summer at the line camp and he went straight to it now. It was on the lee side of the hogback, a little below the crest. The wind had dumped an immense amount of snow on the tiny cabin, but Sink found the door to the lean-to entryway, and that would do to shelter the horse. A shovel with a broken handle leaned against the side of the single stall. Inside the cabin there was a table and backless chair, a plank bunk about twenty inches wide. The stove was heaped with snow, and the stovepipe lay on the floor. Sink recognized the chipped enamel plate and cup on the table.

  He wrestled Archie inside and got him and the buffalo robe onto the plank bunk, then put the stovepipe together and jammed it up through the roof hole. Neither inside nor in the entryway could he see any chunk wood, but he remembered where the old chip pile had been and, using the broken shovel, scraped up enough snow-welded chips to get the fire going. While the chips were steaming and sizzling in the stove, he unsaddled Preacher, removed the gunnysacks from his legs and rubbed the horse down. He checked the lean-to’s shallow loft hoping for hay, but there was nothing.

  “Goddamn,” he said and tore some of the loft floorboards loose to burn in the stove. Back outside he dug through the snow with the broken shovel until he hit ground, got out his knife and sawed off the sun-cured grass until he had two or three hatfuls.

  “Best I can do, Preacher,” he said, tossing it down for the horse.

  It was almost warm inside the shack. From his saddlebag he took a small handful of the coffee beans he always carried. The old coffee grinder was still on the wall but a mouse had built a nest in it, and he had no way to unbolt the machine to clean it out. Unwilling to drink boiled mouse shit, he crushed the beans on the table with the flat of his knife. He looked around for the coffeepot that belonged to the cabin but did not see it. There was a five-gallon coal oil tin near the bunk. He sniffed at it, but could detect no noisome odors, packed it with snow and put it on the stove to melt. It was while he was scraping up snow outside that the edge of the coal oil can hit the coffeepot, which, for some unfathomable reason, had been tossed into the front yard. That too he packed with snow. It looked to him as though the last occupant of the shack had been someone with a grudge, showing his hatred of Karok by throwing coffeepots and burning all the wood. Maybe a Wing-Cross rider.

  The coffee was hot and black but when he brought the cup to Archie the kid swallowed one mouthful, then coughed and finally puked it up. Sink drank the rest himself and ate one of the biscuits.

  It was a bad night. The bunk was too narrow and the kid so hot and twitchy that Sink swooned in and out of forty-wink snaps of sleep, finally got up and slept in the chair with his head on the table. A serious blizzard and fatal cold began to slide down from the Canadian plains that night, and when it broke twelve days later the herds were decimated, cows packed ten deep against barbwire fences, pronghorn congealed into statues, trains stalled for three weeks by forty-foot drifts and two cowpunchers in a line shack frozen together in a buffalo robe.

  It was May before Tom Ackler rode up from Taos where he had spent the fall and winter. Despite the beating sunshine the snow was still deep around his cabin. Patches of bare ground showed bright green with a host of thrusting thistles. He wondered if Gold Dust had made it through. He could see no cat tracks. He lit a fire using an old newspaper on the table, and just before the flame swallowed it, glimpsed a few penciled words and the signature “Arch McLaverty.”

  “Lost whatever it was. I’ll go down tomorrow and see how they are doin.” And he unpacked his saddlebags, wrestled his blankets out of the sack hanging from a rafter where they were safe from mice.

  In the morning Gold Dust pranced out of the trees, her coat thick. Tom let her in, threw her a choice piece of bacon.

  “Look like you kept pretty good,” he said. But the cat sniffed at the bacon, went to the door and, when he opened it, returned to the woods. “Probly shacked up with a bobcat,” he said, “got the taste for wild meat.” Around noon he saddled the horse and headed for the McLaverty cabin.

  No smoke rose from the chimney. A slope of snow lay against the woodpile. He noticed that very little wood had been burned. The weasel’s tracks were everywhere, and right up into the eaves. Clear enough the weasel had gotten inside. “Damn sight more comfortable than a woodpile.” As he squinted at the tracks the weasel suddenly squirted out of a hole in the eaves and looked at him. It was whiter than the rotting snow, and its black-tipped tail twitched. It was the largest, handsomest weasel he had ever seen, shining eyes and a lustrous coat. He thought of his cat and it came to him that wild creatures managed well through the winter. He wondered if Gold Dust could breed with a bobcat and recalled then that Rose had been expecting. “Must be they went to the station.” But he opened the door and looked inside, calling “Rose? Archie?” What he found sent him galloping for the stage station.

  At the station everything was in
an uproar, all of them standing in the dusty road in front of the Dorgans’ house, Mrs. Dorgan crying, Queeda with her mouth agape and Robert F. Dorgan shouting at his wife, accusing her of betraying him with a human wreck. They paid little attention to Tom Ackler when he slid in on his lathered horse calling that Rose McLaverty was raped and murdered and mutilated by Utes, sometime in the winter, god knew when. Only Mrs. Buck Roy, the new freighter’s wife, who was terrified of Indians, gave him much attention. The Dorgans continued to scream at each other. The more urgent event to them was the suicide that morning of the old bachelor telegraph operator who had swallowed lye after weeks of scribbling a four-hundred-page letter addressed to Robert Dorgan and outlining his hopeless adoration of Mrs. Dorgan, the wadded pages fulsomely riddled with references to “ivory thighs,” “the Adam and Eve dance,” “her secret slit” and the like. What Tom Ackler had thought was an old saddle and a pile of grain sacks on the porch was the corpse.

  “Where there’s smoke there’s fire!” bellowed Robert F. Dorgan. “I took you out a that Omaha cathouse and made you a decent woman, give you everthing and here’s how you reward me, you drippin bitch! How many times you snuck over there? How many times you took his warty old cock?”

  “I never! I didn’t! That filthy old brute,” sobbed Mrs. Dorgan, suffused with rage that the vile man had fastened his attentions on her, had dared to write down his lascivious thoughts as real events, putting in the details of her pink-threaded camisole, the red mole on her left buttock, and, finally, vomiting black blood all over the telegraph shack and the front porch of the Dorgans’ house where he had dragged himself to die, the four-hundred-page bundle of lies stuffed in his shirt. For years she had struggled to make herself into a genteel specimen of womanhood, grateful that Robert F. Dorgan had saved her from economic sexuality and determined to erase that past. Now, if Dorgan forced her away, she would have to go back on the game, for she could think of no other way to make a living. And maybe Queeda, too, whom she’d brought up as a lady! Her sense of personal worth faltered, then flared up as if doused with kerosene.

  “Why you dirty old rum-neck,” she said in a hoarse voice, “what gives you the idea that you got a right to a beautiful wife and daughter? What gives you the idea we would stay with you? Look at you—you want a be the territory surveyor, but without me and Queeda to talk up the important political men you couldn’t catch a cold.”

  Dorgan knew it was true and gnawed at his untrimmed mustache. He turned and melodramatically strode into his house, slamming the door so hard the report killed mice. Mrs. Dorgan had won and she followed him in for a reconciliation.

  Tom Ackler looked at Queeda who was tracing an arc in the dirt with the toe of her kid-leather boot. They heard the rattle of a stove lid inside the house—Mrs. Dorgan making up a fire to warm the parlor and bedroom.

  “Rose McLaverty—” he said, but Queeda shrugged. A tongue of wind lapped the dust, creating a miniature whirl as perfect in shape as any tornado snaking down from black clouds that caught up straws, horsehairs, minute mica fragments and a feather. The dust devil collapsed and died. Queeda turned away, walked around the shaded back of the Dorgan house. Tom Ackler stood holding the reins, then remounted and started back, the horse moving in a kind of equine stroll.

  On the way he thought of the whiskey in his cupboard, then of Rose and decided he would get drunk that night and bury her the next day. It was the best he could do for her. He thought too that perhaps it hadn’t been Utes who killed her but her young husband, berserk and raving, and now fled to distant ports. He remembered the burned newspaper with Archie’s message consumed before it could be read and thought it unlikely if Archie had killed his young wife in a frenzy, that he would stop by a neighbor’s place and leave a signed note. Unless maybe it was a confession. There was no way to know what had happened. The more he thought about Archie the more he remembered the clear, hard voice and the singing. He thought about Gold Dust’s rampant vigor and rich fur, about the sleek weasel at the McLaverty cabin. Some lived and some died, and that’s how it was.

  He buried Rose in front of the cabin and for a tombstone wrestled the big sandstone rock Archie had hauled in for a doorstep upright. He wanted to chisel her name but put it off until the snows started. It was too late then, time for him to head for Taos.

  The following spring as he rode past their cabin he saw that frost heaves had tipped the stone over and that the ridgepole of the roof had broken under a heavy weight of snow. He rode on, singing “when the green grass comes, and the wild rose blooms,” one of Archie’s songs, wondering if Gold Dust had made it through again.

  The Sagebrush Kid

  For George Jones

  Those who think the Bermuda Triangle disappearances of planes, boats, long-distance swimmers and floating beach balls a unique phenomenon do not know of the inexplicable vanishings along the Red Desert section of Ben Holladay’s stagecoach route in the days when Wyoming was a territory.

  Historians have it that just after the Civil War Holladay petitioned the U.S. Postal Service, major source of the stage line’s income, to let him shift the route fifty miles south to the Overland Trail. He claimed that the northern California–Oregon-Mormon Trail had recently come to feature ferocious and unstoppable Indian attacks that endangered the lives of drivers, passengers, telegraph operators at the stage stops, smiths, hostlers and cooks at the swing stations, even the horses and the expensive red and black Concord coaches (though most of them were actually Red Rupert mud wagons). Along with smoking letters outlining murderous Indian attacks he sent Washington detailed lists of goods and equipment damaged or lost—a Sharp’s rifle, flour, horses, harness, doors, fifteen tons of hay, oxen, mules, bulls, grain burned, corn stolen, furniture abused, the station itself along with barn, sheds, telegraph office burned, crockery smashed, windows ditto. No matter that the rifle had been left propped against a privy, had been knocked to the ground by the wind and buried in sand before the owner exited the structure, or that the dishes had disintegrated in a whoop-up shooting contest, or that the stagecoach damage resulted from shivering passengers building a fire inside the stage with the bundles of government documents the coach carried. He knew his bureaucracy. The Washington post office officials, alarmed at the bloodcurdling news, agreed to the route change, saving the Stagecoach King a great deal of money, important at that time while he, privy to insider information, laid his plans to sell the stage line the moment the Union Pacific gathered enough shovels and Irishmen to start construction on the transcontinental railroad.

  Yet the Indian attack Holladay so gruesomely described was nothing more than a failed Sioux war party, the battle ruined when only one side turned up. The annoyed Indians, to reap something from the trip, gathered up a coil of copper wire lying on the ground under a telegraph pole where it had been left by a wire stringer eager to get to the saloon. They carted it back to camp, fashioned it into bracelets and necklaces. After a few days of wearing the bijoux, most of the war party broke out in severe rashes, an affliction that persisted until a medicine man, R. Singh, whose presence among the Sioux cannot be detailed here, divined the evil nature of the talking wire and caused the remainder of the coil and all the bracelets and earbobs to be buried. Shortly thereafter, but in no apparent way connected to the route change or the copper wire incident, travelers began to disappear in the vicinity of the Sandy Skull station.

  The stationmaster at Sandy Skull was Bill Fur, assisted by his wife, Mizpah. In a shack to one side a telegraph operator banged his message key. The Furs had been married seven years but had no children, a situation in those fecund days that caused them both grief. Mizpah was a little cracked on the subject and traded one of Bill’s good shirts to a passing emigrant wagon for a baby pig, which she dressed in swaddling clothes and fed from a nipple-fitted bottle that had once contained Wilfee’s Equine Liniment & Spanish Pain Destroyer but now held milk from the Furs’ unhappy cow—an object of attention from range bulls, rustlers and roundup cowboys
, who spent much of her time hiding in a nearby cave. The piglet one day tripped over the hem of the swaddling dress and was carried off by a golden eagle. Mrs. Fur, bereft, traded another of her husband’s shirts to a passing emigrant wagon for a chicken. She did not make the swaddling gown mistake twice, but fitted the chicken with a light leather jerkin and a tiny bonnet. The bonnet acted as blinders and the unfortunate poult never saw the coyote that seized her within the hour.

  Mizpah Fur, heartbroken and suffering from loneliness, next fixed her attention on an inanimate clump of sagebrush that at twilight took on the appearance of a child reaching upward as if piteously begging to be lifted from the ground. This sagebrush became the lonely woman’s passion. It seemed to her to have an enchanting fragrance reminiscent of pine forests and lemon zest. She surreptitiously brought it a daily dipper of water (mixed with milk) and took pleasure in its growth response, ignoring the fine cactus needles that pierced her worn moccasins with every trip to the beloved Atriplex. At first her husband watched from afar, muttering sarcastically, then himself succumbed to the illusion, pulling up all grass and encroaching plants that might steal sustenance from the favored herb. Mizpah tied a red sash around the sagebrush’s middle. It seemed more than ever a child stretching its arms up, even when the sun leached the wind-fringed sash to pink and then dirty white.