Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  So what did O.C. want today? To cover up embarrassment for needing help? To discourage remarks about his crazy yard?

  “We didn’t get to see the puppy,” I say. That was the part I was looking forward to. “Suppose he’s butchered it by now for knocking him down twice?”

  “Grandma used to say O.C. saved all his tenderness for his animals. She’d say, ‘If I could grow an extra set of legs we’d pret near have a perfect marriage.’” Bo’s hands rest on top of the steering wheel and he looks out over the refuge flats to the base of Miller Butte. He nods toward two small bands of elk that have come down out of the hills early.

  “‘Welfare elk,’ O.C. calls them. On the government take.” Bo shakes his head dismally. “He resents the elk getting government-paid alfalfa pellets almost as much as he does artists getting NEA grants. As you can tell, O.C. doesn’t think much of artists.”

  “But he is one.” I add, “Sort of.”

  “I wouldn’t say that to his face again, if I were you.” Bo sighs. “Shit, I guess we better go back. The bastard.”

  He asks if I mind. I say of course not, and we pull out onto the road again toward town. “NEA grants?” I ask. “How would O.C. even know about those?” Then it dawns on me. “You were awarded an NEA?” National Endowment of the Arts grants are one of the highest honors an artist can receive; I can’t believe Bo didn’t mention being awarded one till now.

  “This spring. O.C. says I could have gotten food stamps for less trouble.” Bo dips his head down and to the side, checking the other lane for traffic, except there is no other lane. His chin puckers a second, or am I imagining that?

  “Crybaby Ranch. What’s he mean? Oh,” I answer myself again. “Your retreat.”

  “Right, but Pop began calling the place that as soon as I sold off the cattle to work at my sculpture full-time.”

  Five minutes through the town square, and then we pull up to the trailer again and lug our bags of groceries to the deck. The door opens and out rushes a beautiful black-and-sandy pup, tail a blur of waving fur, front paws high prancing in place. Bo and I prop our bags on the picnic table outside the picture window and bend to pet the dog.

  “Name’s Hazer.” O.C. stays inside the screen. “Seems that’s what she’s trying to do, haze me into place, knock me down, and tie me up. All in eight seconds like I’m some rodeo steer.”

  The old coot sounds downright friendly. I’m surprised and wonder if I dare push his mood toward an apology. I expressed my feelings to him once already today; better not make things harder. Still…

  “You were rude to me.” Damn, I impress myself sometimes.

  “This old knee gives me a crossness.” O.C. steps outside and pats my shoulder. “You’re a fine little gal,” he says as if I need reassurance.

  Bo turns his mouth down and widens his eyes in mock surprise at me, letting his grandfather see his expression. He says, “Hey, Pop, you were rude to me, too.”

  “Ah, go give my pup a chase or two. That’ll show me you’re good for something.” He pats Bo on the shoulder though, then reaches for a rubber ball lodged in a corner of the windowsill and tosses it into the yard.

  Hazer dashes onto the grass, and Bo and I follow. Her hindquarters buck in enthusiasm when she brings the ball back to us.

  In less than ten minutes, Hazer has plowed into the back of my left knee just as O.C. reported she had done to him. I plummet to the ground, half my support suddenly hacked off. I’m more shocked than hurt, in fact not really hurt at all. But I limp at first until my knee and ankle muscles spring back into place.

  Once Bo sees I’m all right, he grabs Hazer and swiftly flips her to the ground on her back. Down on all fours on top of her, Bo and the puppy are nose to nose and Bo shouts into the dog’s face, “No, no. You can’t do that. No, no.”

  Hazer lies immobile; clearly she is having genetic flashbacks about an alpha-wolf experience. Then her tail, lying between Bo’s knees, begins to wag. O.C. and I break into laughter. Bo looks over his shoulder to us and we show him the lack of fright he’s inflicting on Hazer.

  “Still,” O.C. says congenially, “she’s a smart girl. She’s learned something. Come on in, you two.”

  We carry in our bags, and while we unpack groceries, O.C., now as gracious as a society hostess, opens three of the beers we brought him. Pretty soon, Violet and Maizie stop by to deliver their father’s laundry. The aunts end up staying for dinner with us. Afterward, we get out a deck of cards and play hearts. We have such a good time slapping down cards, jocularly insulting one another’s decisions, that Bo and I don’t start home till nearly midnight.

  “Families,” Bo says on the drive home. “It’s the contradictions that keep them together, not prayer, as the old saying goes.”

  He’s right. My dad scrawls my name on a sign for Mom, but refuses to believe her memory is impaired. My mom can’t remember my name, but never forgets how to trick me into answering the phone for her. And O.C. pretends to hate artists while filling his yard with stone totems and his porch with carved whirligigs.

  I want to know why Bo would even think of telling O.C. about his artists’ retreat before he absolutely had to, knowing what he does about his grandfather’s prejudice. After a few miles pass, I ask.

  Bo tells me, “A while back, Dickie wanted to buy Crossing Elk Ranch. Pop doesn’t give a damn what I do with his share of the land, neither do the aunts, but I felt I had to let them know about Dickie’s offer and why I turned it down.”

  “I didn’t know Dickie was interested in your land. Why didn’t he buy my cabin when you put it on the market?”

  “I waited until he left town and put that low price on it so the job would be done by the time he came back.”

  Bo says Dickie Donnell wanted to financially back the artists’ retreat. “I think he wanted a legal hold on the land I refused to sell him. I figure Dickie believed the enterprise would get into financial trouble eventually, or Dickie himself would guide it there. Then he’d bail me out of debt by taking some of my land. He likes the piece where I plan to build the cabins—the twenty-acre saddle where the aspens grow.”

  “Smack in the center of your ranch.”

  “Right. I don’t trust Dickie. I don’t want to be in business with him. Besides, Crybaby—I mean the artists’ retreat—isn’t meant to be a business, just good use of the land. A way for me to move away from ranching without moving away from the ranch.” Bo says the word business with a kind of sneer in his voice, much the same way O.C. says artiste.

  “But why did you sell my cabin? With the NEA grant and the sale of your cattle, you must be earning enough for groceries.”

  “Your cabin is buying the materials for the five other cabins. I’m doing the labor myself.”

  We both fall silent. The night sky is dappled with clouds, like giant soap bubbles clumped here and there in a black tub. The moon is two days past full, and it begins to rise from behind a tree-covered mountain. Every bough of every tree is outlined. Trees hang off this chipped golden ornament, instead of the other way around. The moon clears the peak and heads into the sudsy clouds. I roll down my window and inhale the clean night air.

  “I don’t know,” Bo says. “Maybe Crybaby Ranch won’t work, but when you turned out to be a jewelry maker, I figured it was a good sign.”

  fourteen

  Bo says November is the perfect month to leave the valley. He’d trade a few weeks in Florida for this month’s miserable weather any day. He’s driving me to the airport; the Tetons fill my side window.

  “You’re not missing a thing, Zann, except gray skies, wind, and snow.”

  “I hate missing that.”

  The accumulation of the winter snowpack begins. I think of the drama of blizzards and power outages. I tattoo the image of the Tetons onto my inner eye for reference for the next three weeks. An irrational fear that I’ll get stuck in Florida and won’t ever again see these granite peaks makes me whiny. “There aren’t any rocks in Florida,” I compla
in. “Not many sticks either. Just shells and palm fronds.”

  “Poor baby.”

  He’s as bad as the women at the bookstore who’ve called me lucky all week because I’m going where it’s warm and sandy. But Bo should know better; I’ve told him what faces me there: caring for my mother alone while my dad takes a break. Maybe Bo needs a stronger picture about what I’m headed for.

  “My mother eats with her fingers now.” She needs help in the bathroom, too, but I’ll spare him that fact. “She’s hiding money, and last week she mistook her diamond earring for a piece of candy. Dad got the earring out of her mouth in time, but can’t find the money. What he’s really worried about is that maybe he’s getting forgetful, too, and just misplaces his bank draws.”

  “What are you really worried about?” Bo asks.

  “I don’t know. I’m not looking forward to going home, but I miss my mother and I want my father to have a rest.” Our plan is to change the guard slowly, a week caring for my mother together. Then Dad leaves for a week, and then another week before I leave. The transition is more for my father than my mother; he has a hard time giving over her care. “It’s been two months since I’ve seen her; I don’t know if I can deal with these changes.”

  I begin to argue with myself out loud. “I should be able to deal with them. My father does and he’s sixty-nine.”

  “You’ll know what to do,” Bo says.

  Easy for him to say. I watch a coyote cruising the sagebrush a few hundred yards off the road.

  “There’s just no break. Every minute she’s asking, ‘Where’s Addie?’ In August, when my dad left on a fishing trip, she wouldn’t stay in bed unless I lay in the dark with her and she goes to bed at seven thirty.” I don’t even go into the times she wanders about the house after I’ve fallen asleep. Once, I found her in the guest room and she asked me where that other person was. Scared me to death. I thought she’d heard a prowler. Turned out she was remembering me from when I’d slept in there before my father left.

  “It’ll be damn hard, Zann.”

  This trip, a friend at the library is letting me check out half a dozen books on tape for an extra two weeks so I can lie beside my mother in the other twin bed with the lights out and pretend to sleep, while listening to novels on my Walkman. Tessa’s idea, and just knowing I can rely on this plan is saving my sanity.

  Once Bo helps me carry my suitcases to the check-in counter, I tell him he should head home. It’s beginning to snow, just lightly right now, but the radio warned us all day yesterday to expect a major storm today. Luckily, I’m scheduled on the first plane out of Jackson Hole this morning, because the way it looks, visibility will be zero once that deep mauve-colored front scoots clear of the Snake River Range south of us. The rest of the flights could be canceled.

  Ahead of me in line is a woman with five large pieces of expensive luggage. She looks fussy. I figure she’ll probably hold things up. Bo wraps his arms around me and holds me tight.

  “I’ll miss you, Zann,” he says softly into my hair.

  I love the good feel of him surrounding me. I want to say I’ll miss him, too, but I know once I step into my parents’ house the fullness of the misery there will absorb all my emotions and even my memory of the other parts of my life. Already, I feel myself detaching from Bo and the things I care about here. Bo accepts my silence and kisses my cheek before leaving.

  The line moves up a notch and the Delta clerk requests the fussy lady’s ticket. “Atlanta?” he asks when he opens her travel folder.

  “Yes,” she says, “but I’d like this suitcase to go to Chicago.” She loads the largest wardrobe onto the scale beside the counter. “This one I want to go to Seattle.” She slides number two onto the scale, and I know it’s no coffee for me before my plane leaves. I turn sideways and see Bo’s Suburban begin to pull away from behind a Snow King Resort van unloading Delta pilots and attendants. Bo waves in my direction just in case I’m watching, and I wave back, though I know he can’t see me.

  “The third bag,” the woman continues, “I’d like sent to Washington, D.C. And these other two”—she points to the small bags at my feet—“I’d like sent to San Diego.”

  “Lady…” the clerk begins, exasperation pulling sideways at the muscles of his face. His eyes skim the row of clerks next to him to see if any of his fellow workers can share in his misery. “Lady,” he says again, “we can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” she asks. “That’s what happened to my luggage on my trip here.”

  She doesn’t look the type for bold humor. The clerk and I look at each other and then at her. It takes us a couple seconds before we break into appreciative howls of surprise and pleasure.

  The clerk glances at her ticket. “Mrs. Forrest,” he says, “gee, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh,” she says, grinning, “that’s okay. You made a good straight man.”

  I sip a mocha latte and watch luggage being loaded into the waiting plane, parked right outside the windows. Through the lightly blowing snow, the Tetons rise abruptly from the landing strip beyond, the peaks still pink from the dawn light, the snowfields looking both forbidding and beckoning at once. To keep myself from imagining the plane crumpled up like a wad of used tin foil on Skillet Glacier, I time Bo’s drive into town. About now he’s stacking storm supplies into a grocery cart at Fred’s Market. I mentally urge him to hurry. Once out of the store, he’ll still have a forty-minute drive home, chased by high winds and a thickening snowfall.

  What I didn’t tell Bo is that dealing with my father produces more tension than dealing with my mother. Last night when I phoned to confirm my arrival time and my father confessed Mom wasn’t using her silverware all the time, he’d said, “She tried to eat spaghetti at Marco Polo’s Pasta House with her hands.”

  I said, “You ordered spaghetti for her?” He’s been cutting her meat for months, so I couldn’t understand why he was making life harder for himself. Instead of offering the sympathy he needed, I tried to convince him to simplify his life.

  “I could simplify her into a nursing home. Don’t come down here bringing a bunch of bad news with you.”

  Nearly every night Dad dresses Mom in panty hose and bra, wrestles her into dresses and heels, teases her hair and smudges her cheeks with blusher, then sets her on the toilet lid in the bathroom while he showers himself. Last visit, I heard him talking a mile a minute from the shower stall to keep her from wandering away.

  “Stay on your throne, Queen Elizabeth. You hear me out there? We’re going to your favorite restaurant. Out on a date. Me and Queen Elizabeth smooching in a booth. Lizzie? Are you still there? Lizzie? Hell.”

  Dad says now he needs to lock the bathroom door to keep her with him, but he can’t get accustomed to using the toilet with an audience.

  When I’m in charge, I dress my mother in cool cottons, loose and comfy, no hose, no bra, no makeup. “She can’t go to Conchy Joe’s looking like that. You want to embarrass her?” Dad accuses. He says she looks like a toddler. When he leaves town, we drop the fancy restaurants and get carryout instead.

  But I understand my father’s thinking. Every step backward is a permanent loss. Once he cut her meat for her, she lost the ability to do it herself forever.

  Kettie Jefferson, once-a-week housekeeper for my parents, sits with Mom until Dad and I arrive home from the airport. It’s late but Dad insists Mom needs to have a treat, so we all take Kettie home, then go to the Blue Moon Diner for a snack. They serve Coke in the old bottles and Mom used to like those. Dad thinks she still does and ignores my concern about caffeine this late in the evening. The two of them sit across from me and Dad takes Mom’s hand.

  He says, “Elizabeth Ann and the Raggedy Man. That’s us.”

  Mom says, “Who’s that?”

  “The Raggedy Man? You used to read that poem to our little girl here.”

  “No,” she says and points to her reflection in the black plate-glass window next to our booth. “What’s that woman
want?”

  “Lizzie…you haven’t talked to Suzannah here. After we’ve been waiting all this time for her. Lizzie, turn around now.”

  “She keeps looking at me. What?” my mother asks her own image rather sharply. She frowns with impatience. “I don’t know what you want.”

  My father tries to lure my mother’s attention with her Coke. He’s tipping back her head and holding the bottle to her lips. I feel antsy watching this, as if he is about to politely drown her.

  “It’s all right, Dad. Let her go.” Over his shoulder I spot the waitress and announce she’s loaded down with a full tray and heading our way.

  “Lizzie, here comes your food. Look here.”

  My mother again murmurs to herself, face up close to the window. She has not sustained so animated a conversation in months. This could be my privacy in the bathroom. Introduce her to herself in the mirror and quickly use the toilet. While the waitress sets out our plates, I take the opportunity to fill in Dad on family news.

  “Beckett is doing well in school these days. He’s thinking about transferring to the University of Wyoming for prelaw.”

  “Where is he going now?”

  My father has never been much of a grandparent to Beckett. Didn’t believe it was his role to be, since he wasn’t related by blood to Erik’s son.

  “You know, Laramie County Community College. L Triple C? Or, as Beck calls it, Last Chance Cowboy College.” Maybe Dad will chuckle. I’m always trying to make Beck seem appealing to my father. I want him to accept, if not approve, of the child I have loved and raised since he was an infant. Dad is engrossed with trying to get a French fry between Mom’s lips and doesn’t respond to me.

  “Nice and salty, Lizzie, just the way you like.”

  My father doesn’t allow me to help feed my mother. He can’t admit the trouble he’s going through. He can let me witness it in person though, and in a few days, when he leaves for the respite I’m here to offer him, he can let me experience it myself. Only recently have I moved past a strong sense of guilt over talking about my mother’s illness to anyone. I think my father still feels this way.