by Annie Proulx
Helen leaned into the passenger window, her arms on the hot metal, the breeze that moved always around the cottonwood fluttering the hem of her print dress.
“Where did you get the nice car?” she said. The car gave off a variety of ticks and pings as it cooled. The girls came up, Mina folding her arms across her flat chest, Riffie swinging on the door handle, and listened to the women talk. They too wore cotton print dresses but with puff sleeves and Riffie with a small lace-edged collar that Helen had tatted. Their pale legs were like peeled willow sticks.
“Fenk’s makin good money catchin horses,” said Verla. “That’s how come us to visit.” She looked, not at her sister, but at Fenk, waiting for him to nod his head.
Hi appeared from behind the house where he had been grubbing up sagebrush. Helen wanted a kitchen garden and getting the soil in shape was work. He stood near Fenk’s window.
Verla said, speaking for Fenk, “Fenk wants Hi to throw in with him. The horses bring five or eight dollars and he has been getting good bunches.”
Hi shook his head. His work-enlarged hands, crusted with soil, hung by his sides. “Never done it,” he said.
Fenk had to speak. He whispered, “It’s good work. Some, like them Tolberts, runs them, some drives them into a box canyon, but we been makin night traps around water holes. That way you don’t lose so many tryin to get out. You follow me? The money is good. I been workin with Wacky Lipe.”
“Wacky Lipe! Hell, he’s got a wood leg.”
Verla spoke up. “Yes, and it come off the other night. All the horses run out of the trap and now they’re wise to it.”
Fenk added, pitching his voice down to alto, “He hopped around pretty good, but wasn’t no use. Wacky is all try and no luck.” He looked at Hi.
But Hi only said he’d think it over. Henry and Buster came in sight, lagging around the edge of the drought-burned wheat field. When they recognized the passengers in the car they began to run, hoping the male cousins had come. They were disappointed and showed it by punching their sisters and running.
“You boys better stop it,” said Helen.
Ten days later the old black Essex quit for good. Hi had made a hundred repairs over the years, had repaired the repairs, but now the entire engine had seized and he knew the thing wasn’t worth fixing. There was no money for it anyway, and so he had hoofed it to Fenk and Verla’s and told Fenk he was in.
“I knew you’d come in,” murmured Fenk. “Well, we’re layin out a new trap tomorrow. We don’t run horses—takes a lot of time and you need a bunch a riders. I’ll leave that to the Tolberts. Old Jim there and his seven boys don’t even need to talk they know each other’s minds so good. Me and Wacky favor a water trap, you follow? Last month we found a spring the hell off in rough country, horse trails comin in from every direction. Hitched the wagon to the new car and hauled out the posts and cable last week and now we got a build the corral and the wings. Hard drivin out there. I about wrecked that car and Verla’s pretty mad. There’s deep washes and the stones are hell on the tires. I been thinkin about getting a set a them solid tires like the JO runs on their truck. I been thinkin about saw off the ass end and put a bed on her, follow me? I don’t suppose you got a ridin horse these days?”
Hi shook his head. “Just Old Bonnet. The kids ride him mostly. He’s about a hunderd years old.”
“You can use Big Nose and Crabby.”
Hi nodded.
It was a rare day, windless, cool and clear. Fenk and Wacky had set up camp about three miles from the spring where they planned to build the water trap. They came to the camp in late afternoon, Fenk’s sedan hauling the horse trailer, wallowing across the flats and washes. The country was rough, full of cliffs and arroyos, and Hi liked being out in it. The canvas tent at the foot of a sandstone bluff was stained red with desert dust and crowded inside with bedrolls, a stove, a crooked table and boxes of food. The stove was throwing off waves of heat. Hi threw his gear against the back wall. Fenk was unloading Big Nose and Crabby, putting them in the corral with the others. Wacky, who had stayed at the camp all week, had fresh coffee perking, antelope steaks frying and a pot of boiled potatoes. They ate outside where Fenk built a campfire and hit the hay before it was full dark.
“First light,” said Fenk softly, shaking him. Wacky was already at the stove cooking bacon and stirring the sourdough batter. They drank the coffeepot dry, saddled up and rode out. The hundred-mile sight line eased Hi’s mind away from money worries.
The sun was up by the time they got to the spring. There were plenty of fresh horse tracks and piles of dung.
“They come for water after dark,” said Fenk in his woman’s voice, “with their tongues hanging out for a drink. You follow me? They don’t never come in the daylight.”
It took the three of them all day to dig four-foot holes and set the posts—old sawed-off telephone poles—and string the cable and wire. Wacky and Fenk built the wings while Hi hauled juniper and sagebrush to disguise them.
It was late afternoon, about three hours before dark, the sky filling with braided clouds evasive in direction, when they finished. They went back to camp to pack up. Fenk whispered they would go home because it was going to rain and he didn’t want to get the car stuck, let the horses have a week or two to get used to the change in the landscape, then they would come out, take their places before dusk and wait until night fell and the horses came to drink, then jump up and close the trap. They’d leave the horses there to fill up on water. They would be easier to handle the next morning that way when they’d be roping and hobbling them and driving them to the rail yard at Wamsutter, thirty miles distant.
“Then where do they go?” asked Hi. He guessed they would be rodeo stock.
Fenk sniggered. “Mink farms. California pet food factories. Chicken feed. Follow me?”
Ten days later they caught seventeen horses. Fenk said it was a good trap, no telling how long they could use it; months, maybe. The hardest work was getting them to the railroad and into the hot, airless car. Those cars smelled like death, and Hi felt his stomach roil. Horses kept coming to the trap and in between days they searched for additional springs and flowing wells.
Fenk had a dozen tricks to slow chicken horses down on the drive to the railroad. He would catch a horse, make a slit in a nostril, run a length of rawhide through and tie it closed, reducing the animal’s oxygen intake. Or he would tie two horses together, or tie one to a broke saddle horse. A few got a big metal nut tied into their forelocks, the constant hit of the sharp-corner nut causing enough pain to slow them down. The ones who moved too quickly with front hobbles got side hobbles. And obstreperous horses that continued to fight to get free despite everything he gutshot.
“What the hell, Fenk!” cried Hi the first time his brother-in-law put up his rifle and shot a breakaway stallion. For two days the animal listlessly plodded after the other horses. It was still standing when they reached the tracks.
“They stay alive long enough,” murmured Fenk matter-of-factly. “Hey, they’re headed for chicken feed anyway, you follow me? What difference does it make? Still worth five or six bucks.”
But Hi thought it was an ugly business and when the day came that Fenk told him to shoot two of the fighters he quit. He said it as it came to him, without reflection.
“Well, you’ll walk then. Go ahead. I’m not fixin to throw a fit over you.” Fenk’s eyebrows pulled together in a black, hairy stripe. His whispering voice rasped like a file. “You wasn’t with us from the git-go, am I right? You’re so lily-livered you can have a good long hike to think it over.”
“I thought it over.” Hi walked three miles to the tent camp, got his bedroll and necessaries and hiked through the night to the old stage road where, in early morning light, he caught a ride with Isidore the Jew peddler, riding in the back of his wagon and watching a handful of magpies chop the air into black and white flashes.
Helen put Mercurochrome on his blisters and bandaged his raw feet.
“Get out a this hellhole. Far as Fenk’s concerned I’m sagebrushed for good. Wasn’t makin enough to do much for the bank anyways. You might as well know they are takin the place. Move up to Rock Springs or Superior. We’ll rent. I’ll get a job in the coal mines. That’s steady money and I won’t have to shoot anybody in the guts.” He told her about Fenk’s ways with wild horses.
“The poor things,” she said, for Helen had a tender heart. “I guess Fenk has got a mean streak.”
“It’s the money, I suppose. He’s one will do anything to get it. You ought to see how he’s wrecked the new car. Figures he can get another one easy.”
“Maybe he can,” said Helen. Fenk seemed to her now a cruel monster. She vowed never to speak to him again.
They were not hiring at Superior but he found work at the Union Pacific mines in Rock Springs. Even though the company house was more of a shack Helen liked the conveniences of town—electricity, running water. The kids could walk to school. There were plenty of people around, gossip and talk, a social life, handy food supplies. That pleasure sagged when little Riffie got sick with polio and had to be put in an iron lung. The doctor told Helen that it was living in town and going to school with other children that had caused it, that polio was contagious, and that in their old homestead out on the edge of the desert the child would likely have remained free of the affliction. Helen hated the doctor, not the town.
1940
The coal mines were hard for a man who’d once owned his place and worked all his life outdoors. Hi was surprised to find he missed horse catching with Fenk, riding through the chill high desert, the grey-green sage and greasewood, the salt sage sheltering sage hens, pronghorn, occasional elk, riding up on ridges and mesas to spy out bands of wild horses, plodding through the sand dunes, seeing burrowing owls in a prairie dog town, wheeling ferruginous hawks and eagles, a solitary magpie flying across the quilted sky like a driven needle, the occasional rattlesnake ribboning away. Seeking the elusive water flows and seeps had given him a private, solitary pleasure that he could not share with anyone. Not even Helen could understand the pull of the wild desert. And as much as he despised Fenk’s ways, the man loved the wild country and it was a bond. Now, to go down in a metal cage with men in stinking garments unchanged for weeks or months, to work bent over in a cramped space in dim light was misery. He dragged home late, black with coal dust. Helen had a tub of hot water ready for him at night, a very great luxury. Because of the new war in Europe—they were calling it World War Two, demoting the Great War to World War One—the work held steady, he spoke less, went daily to the job as an automaton. Two years cranked by.
Helen mourned the separation from her sister but could not stomach the thought of Fenk. The children whined and bellyached to see their cousins again. Verla wrote to her pleading, explaining and describing a Fenk Helen did not know, a sensitive “deep” Fenk. It took time, but at last Verla wore Helen down and Helen gave in, persuaded Hi they had to make amends for the sake of the children and Verla. Thanksgiving was named as the day for reconciliation and rejoicing.
Verla and Fenk and their four children drove into town Thanksgiving morning in their 1939 Crosley, even Fenk, who was rough but bragged that he did not hold a grudge, keyed up. Verla balanced a packed basket on her knees and the girls clutched boxes of cake and jams. Immediately the country and town cousins ran down to the railroad tracks to throw stones at the bums in the hobo jungle and at the great huffing engines. The shining steel rails, surely the most polished objects on earth, awed the Fipps cousins.
“You got a penny?” asked Buster. The cousins shook their backcountry heads.
“Too bad. You put a penny on the rail, see, and the train comes and mashes it flat and big and skinny.”
“Yeah,” said Henry. “And that ain’t all. This kid in our school, Warren McGee, got his legs cut off. He was runnin on the ties and the train was comin and his sister yelled at him to get off but he tripped and the train got him.”
“Did he die?”
“Naw. He goes to school at home. The teacher comes to his house. He’s got this wheelchair and his sister pushes him around.”
“Did he say it hurt?”
“What a you think? Course it hurt.”
The house was redolent of pies and simmering giblet gravy. Helen had raised two turkeys in the minuscule backyard, had slaughtered and plucked them two days earlier. She put them in the oven at seven, aiming at midafternoon. Verla brought side dishes and relishes—pickled black walnuts, red pepper relish, vinegar pie and a dish of Hattie Bailey, which she and Helen remembered from Thanksgiving at their paternal grandmother’s house.
“Where did you get okra!” marveled Helen. Verla smirked and finally admitted a distant cousin had sent it in the mail and the pods had arrived in usable condition. The girls and women worked in the kitchen, punching down the dough for the rolls, grating carrots and cabbage for slaw, making celery curls and radish roses, arranging olives on a saucer with their red eyes glaring outward, all talking a mile a minute to catch up. Hi and Fenk talked politics at first, both hating FDR who had dragged them into this Hitler war. Fenk bragged about his Crosley which he claimed got better than fifty miles to the gallon. Hi said the coal mining business was changing.
“They’re puttin in these machines for what they call ‘strip mining,’ put us old boys out a business.”
“Well,” said Fenk, “oil is the direction to look, I think. Fella I know got in it two years ago and today he is sittin pretty.”
“You still catchin horses?” asked Hi.
“Yeah. Well, not so much like we used to. I throwed in with Tolbert for a while after Wacky went up to Montana. So now I pretty much run em. Lot a fun, don’t hurt them none. You got a dodge the oil geologists. Desert is crawlin with those bastards. You ought a come out with us, get out a that hole in the ground for a while. You used a be able to throw a loop. Do you good.”
Hi said it would sure enough do him good. He hated the underground. He said he would, and before the women called dinner he had agreed to ride out the next weekend with Fenk.
“If it ain’t snowin a blizzard. Could start any day now.”
“We had that little swipe in September.”
“I got a real good horse you can ride. Little buckskin, come out a the Chain Lakes two years ago. Throws his head up real snooty like, so we call him ‘Senator Warren.’”
Hi laughed.
The chase was exhilarating. He had missed the keen wind, the badlands and outlaw cliffs, the smell of horses, the distant pronghorn sentry alert and wound up, the whinnying dust cloud. Fenk flung his arm out. They went after the band, cutting northeast at a sharp angle to head them off, but keeping two miles behind the rises to avoid showing themselves. They rode with Tolbert’s two oldest boys, Hi on Senator Warren, his old rope coiled and ready. Fenk had built a trap in the heart of the badlands of casually interwoven sage and rabbitbrush to guide a herd into a box canyon with steep-sloped stone walls. But even as Hi rejoiced in the broken country, he could see changes had come in the two years he’d been digging coal. There were fences where no fences had ever been, and the old White Moon trail had become a county road, complete with culverts and ditches. There were wisps of wool in the sage and greasewood so he supposed the sheepmen had been using the desert for wintering their woolies.
Once inside the trap Fenk and the Tolberts leaped from their mounts and ran to close the opening with three heavy cables. They could hear the horses at the end of the trap coming up point-blank against the stone walls. The old stallion was screaming with rage, and even from the mouth of the trap they could see the powdery dust cloud that rose from frantic horses trying to scale unscalable walls. And yet somehow, almost beyond belief, one horse clawed its way up and began to run west.
Hi, outside the gate, was the only one mounted. Automatically he took up the chase, Senator War
ren understanding the game well. The escaped horse, a young bay, was hurt and exhausted. Climbing that thirty-foot almost sheer wall had taken a lot of the starch out of him. Hi built a loop and within a mile of the trap roped the escaped prisoner. But the terrified and furious horse drew on inner reserves of strength and fairly dragged Senator Warren with him. One of the new fence corners loomed. The wild horse dodged around it sharply. The sudden swerve broke the old rope. The bay staggered a step or two, then ran. Hi’s end of the rope leaped back and wrapped around Senator Warren’s ankles. The Senator began to buck, the rope tangling and twisting. Hi saw the fence coming closer and rather than get piled into it, he bailed out of the saddle, hit the ground and rolled. As he rolled one of Senator Warren’s lashing hind feet clipped him on the thigh.
In a minute one of the Tolbert boys was there, catching up the Senator’s reins. Fenk and the other Tolbert boy galloped up.
“Hell, I’m all right,” said Hi. “Everthing’s fine. Just my leg’s a little bit busted. I guess I can get some time off from work now.” He laughed, and Fenk laughed with him, relieved that he wasn’t bad hurt. The Tolbert boys sat dazed, dusty and wordless.
“Okay, just lay there,” said Fenk. “I’m goin a get the Crosley and we’ll get you into town, get that leg set.”
“Not much I can do except lay here,” said Hi. “I promise I won’t run off.”
Fenk went to get his automobile, and the Tolbert boys got down and squatted near Hi. They smoked cigarettes, lighting one for Hi. The oldest boy pulled out a half-empty pint of whiskey and offered it; Hi took a good slug.
