Deep Creek

by Pam Houston

  4 Two children do not appear on this list: Ada, who has died of congenital heart failure since Myrtle’s wedding, and James, Maude’s son, who on this date has yet to die in the snow slide that will eventually kill him. Perhaps some of the spicy and racy content of the divorce trial concerned James’s paternity. We will have to ask Old Sleuth!

  Ranch Almanac: First Warm Day

  In February, all of January’s icy blue light gives way to a softer gold. It’s been snowing for six days straight, but this morning the sun rises with something that feels like a little bit of warmth in it, and even the equines are in a good enough mood to be silly. Simon and Isaac have been playing grab-ass out in the corral all morning. Deseo is crashed out in what we call dead horse position (DHP) in the snow, soaking up the sun through his dark coat. Mr. Kitty comes up out of the basement, meows at the door and takes off on what might be his first kitty bender of the year.

  The first time he did this, many Februaries ago, I thought we’d lost him. But he showed up at the front door—not his door, which is in the mudroom, but the front door—after seven days of subzero overnights, looking half wild and pretty hungover. He walked right into the living room, as if he owned the place, which set off Fenton’s animal-out-of-place alert and put both dogs into a frenzy. They tore around the house like something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon until Mr. Kitty slipped out the kitchen door to the mudroom and into his rightful digs.

  Today is going to be one of those bluebird days Colorado is famous for, perfect for going out to the pasture and remaking the snowshoe trails. Like everything on the ranch, repetition is the key to successful trail making, and if I make them true after the first big snowstorm, it pays dividends all winter long.

  If I stand with my back against the northeasternmost corral pole and cut as perfect a diagonal as I can to the corner pole that marks the half section line where my property and the Soward Ranch meet, I give myself the best chance of retracing my steps after each subsequent snowfall. From the corner pole, I head straight across the pasture to the ridge Bob Pinckley cut some year when he thought he might be able to use the tiny creek that comes off Sheep Mountain to irrigate. His irrigation scheme failed, but the long scar of humped-up earth makes for a great snowshoe trail that runs from one extremity of my property to another. The wind blows most of the snow off that little ridge as it moves the moisture-laden front out of our area. And even when it doesn’t, the ridgeline is the easiest place in the whole pasture to find the same trail I have packed down before.

  It feels good to be out in the sunshine moving, making tracks. The dogs pay no attention to the old trail. They leap and bound and come up with muzzles full of powder, grinning wildly. I kick along for several hundred feet, waiting for my favorite winter sound of all—the muffled whummmp of snow settling under my shoes. And even though my pasture is essentially flat, the mountains rising in a horseshoe around me out beyond the edges of my property, there will always come a time when my pushing the snow down in one key spot—only the length and width of a snowshoe—launches a kind of horizontal avalanche: a giant settling of snow in ever radiating quilt squares away from me across much of my big pasture. A whummmp, followed by a longer whummmp, followed by a longer whummmp echoing out all the way to the creek bed and the tree line.

  And then the pasture goes silent again.

  Eating Phoebe

  Back in 2011, I went off to teach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a week, as I do each summer, and when I left for the Denver airport on a Saturday morning I had five sheep in my barn: Motown, Yvonne, Jordan, Phoebe and Sampson. I returned the next Sunday, the same day twelve students arrived at the ranch for a private workshop along with Greg, his first ranch visit that summer. On Monday morning, when a student named Laura asked Greg how many sheep we had, he said three.

  “No, no,” I said, “you’re forgetting the lambs, Sampson and Phoebe. There are five now.”

  “I just let them out of their pen to graze,” Greg said, “and I can tell you definitively there are three.”

  My ranchsitters that year—I’ll call them Monroe and Daphne—a young couple of Gen Y-ers who had lived at the ranch for six months, and with whom I had a hard time conversing but tried to think the best of anyway, had not mentioned two sheep were missing before they went off on a weeklong camping trip of their own.

  Back-to-the-land types from Georgia, Monroe and Daphne had built raised beds in the yard for the six-week (if you are lucky) frost-free growing season, brewed their own beer in the mudroom and filled my basement with compost worms. They also raised chicks that spring, without asking me, or telling me, in my kitchen.

  That April, when I was teaching in California and hadn’t been home to check on things in more than a month, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and found the following status update from Monroe: I sure hope our Great Dane puppy stops shitting and peeing all over the house before half of the Southeast shows up next month to visit. I had to marvel at Monroe’s efficiency at cramming so many alarming details into a one-sentence update. I tried to imagine a more alarming post: Cooking meth again in the clawfoot tub with ingredients purchased with forged checks from owner’s bank account.

  When I called Monroe and said it would have been courteous to ask me if they could get a Great Dane puppy, or even tell me in advance that was their plan, since they had one dog already; since I bought for the ranch everything they asked me to, including an indoor compost starter kit, a thousand dollars worth of sheep fencing, a miter saw, a pillow top mattress and even, as it turned out, the chickens they didn’t tell me they were planning to raise in the kitchen. There was a pretty good chance, I insisted, if they had talked to me about the Great Dane puppy I would have said yes.

  During the entirety of our conversation, Monroe sounded like he always did, like somebody who had just come back from a seventy-two-hour rave.

  But several months had gone by and now we were all used to Sadie, the puppy, and the aroma of chicken shit no longer filled the kitchen. When we all overlapped at the ranch, Monroe and Daphne tended the sheep and the chickens and I took care of the horses and dogs. Now, somehow, we were down two sheep.

  To my surprise Monroe answered his cell phone—in this case “camping” turned out to mean they were staying a few days at the house of a friend in town so they could drink all they wanted at the bar without having to drive the twelve miles to the ranch. Monroe didn’t know what happened to the sheep, he said, but he thought he might have seen mountain lion tracks, and the coyotes had been especially loud lately, and he’d heard there’d been a bear nosing around Red Mountain Ranch—five miles up Ivy Creek—last week. When I asked why he hadn’t thought to mention the missing sheep when I got home, and why he hadn’t locked the sheep in their predator-proof pen at night as we always had, he had no answer.

  Remembering that a few weeks before Monroe had drunk an entire bottle of wine with dinner, I asked him if he was having any kind of trouble.

  No, no trouble, he said, but he was sad about the loss of the sheep. “Those sheep were my friends,” he said, but he seemed to have already forgotten which two of his friends were missing.

  So me, and Greg, and my student writers spent several hours that day combing the surrounding hills, calling for Sampson and Phoebe.

  “Something’s not right about this,” Greg said, though I was usually the conspiracy theorist in the family. “He isn’t surprised or worried enough that they’re gone.”

  On the phone Monroe had said he and Daphne would come out and help us look for Sampson and Phoebe, but two more days went by and they didn’t show.

  On the third day, my friend and farrier Dex Decker showed up to trim the horses, and when I asked him whether he thought sheep in distress would move uphill or downhill, Dex, said, “I don’t think you’re asking the right question.”

  “So what’s the right question?” I said.

  Dex thought for a minute and then said, “Well, shit, I guess it’s gonna be me who throws t
hose kids under the bus.”

  After I heard Dex’s version it was time to call Sheriff Fred Hosselkus.

  “Pam!” he said, when he picked up the phone. “I was wondering when I was going to hear from you. You missing a couple of sheep?” I said I was, and he said, “Well, you might check the freezer down at the Far Dog.”

  The sheriff’s version and Dex’s version lined up remarkably well, given the way news travels in a small town, and those versions synched up with other versions I heard over the next several days.

  It seemed Monroe and two of his friends got wasted the last night I was in Provincetown, and in the throes of what Dex called “a bad idea at the bottom of a bottle,” decided to slaughter Phoebe, the yearling lamb. They killed her in the barnyard, in front of all my other animals, including Phoebe’s mother, Jordan, the other sheep and the chickens, the horses and the donkeys, and for all I knew, the dogs and Mr. Kitty, using one of my good cooking knives.

  One of Monroe’s friends held Phoebe up off her front feet and Monroe leaned in to slit her throat. Phoebe struggled hard, causing Monroe to cut not only her throat but also his friend’s brachial artery. But the friend was too shitfaced to know he had a severed artery, so the drinking party loaded Phoebe’s body into the truck and went into town, to a restaurant called the Far Dog, where the other friend worked as a prep cook, and therefore had a key.

  In their enthusiasm for whatever Bacchanalian ritual they were enacting, they forgot to lock the other sheep away, and so little Sampson—only a month old—must have been dragged away in the night by coyotes.

  One can only imagine the 3:00 a.m. scene at the restaurant. The part-time chef butchering Phoebe, wrapping her in white paper and putting her in the freezer, Monroe chugging a beer, sautéing a little garlic for the tenderloin steaks, the third guy slumped at a four top in the corner, quietly bleeding out. Across the street a well-meaning insomniac notices a light on in the Far Dog, calls the sheriff’s office, and suddenly Fred Hosselkus’s pager goes off.

  If Fred had not shown up at the restaurant when he did, I heard from Deputy Billy Fairchild, the bleeder probably wouldn’t have made it. As it was, he was taken all the way to the Front Range by ambulance—five hours over passes—and even then doctors weren’t sure they’d be able to save his life. Meanwhile, one imagines, Monroe and the prep cook sat around in the Far Dog, toasting the manly life, eating Phoebe.

  I had gotten those sheep in the first place because the county tax laws had changed so pleasure horses no longer counted as livestock when determining agricultural status. In Colorado land status designations, there is no category between agricultural property and vacant land, no “gentleman farm” category for people like me who love to be surrounded by animals, but who don’t make the largest part of their living from them. The taxation difference between agricultural property and vacant land is not two or three times, but twenty. If I lost the ranch’s agricultural status—which it has had since homesteading days—not only would I have to move because of the tax burden, I would be doing a disservice to the land itself, and to anyone who owned it after me. Eventually it would fall into the hands of a developer who’d likely pay the taxes for one year, and then subdivide it into one- to five-acre ranchettes.

  Early that spring, Monroe and Daphne and I had talked at length about what kind of livestock I should purchase. We had decided on sheep because chickens only counted if you had them in the hundreds, and I’d heard too many stories of goats eating sideview mirrors off cars. We could’ve raised a calf or a pig every summer, but that would mean sending it to slaughter at the end of the season. We agreed none of us wanted to get attached to an animal with a death date stamped on its ear. With sheep, we reasoned, we could shear them and sell the wool, and sell a yearling ram or ewe now and then to another Icelandic breeder.

  “I understand those sheep were named,” Sheriff Fred Hosselkus said, over the phone, and I confirmed that in fact they were. “Shame,” he said, but I wasn’t sure if he meant the naming, or the killing.

  “What do I do now?” I asked, sincerely.

  “Why don’t Billy and I go talk to Monroe,” Fred said. “We’ll tell him if he and Daphne get all their stuff off your property by five tonight with an officer standing by in the driveway to make sure they don’t give you any trouble, you’ll think twice before pressing criminal mischief charges.”

  I had not yet thought of pressing criminal mischief charges. But our sheriff is a good man, compassionate and moral, and in a very small town where neighbors have to depend on one another through the long and frigid winter, he likes it when conflicts get resolved along the path of least resistance.

  “I’ll send Billy out there right now to take some pictures,” he said. “We want to keep all our ducks in a row.”

  Once I knew the story, it was easy to find the slaughter site. My Wüsthof cleaver over here, an empty bottle of Black Velvet over there, a bloodstained golf shirt, a Texas Rangers ball cap, an unopened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon caked in mud, an unspooled roll of toilet paper and several small pools of dark congealed blood. There were also a great many chicken feathers—apparently the ritual had involved killing one of those too.

  Billy asked if he could take the hat and shirt back to town with him, but not before he regaled my private students—most of them sophisticated ladies from urban centers—with tales of cabin fever, unrequited passions, restraining order violations and dramatic winter rescues full of severed limbs and body parts frozen to large pieces of metal. Before he left he took me aside and said, “We can all be thankful that kid didn’t bleed out behind your barn, Pam, or you might be in for a whole mess of trouble you don’t want.”

  Later that afternoon, while I taught my class in the living room, Monroe and Daphne moved their things out of the bedroom, with Fred and Billy in the county’s GMC in my driveway, standing by.

  The day after Monroe and Daphne moved out, a friend of theirs with a Georgia area code called the house phone. “Monroe doesn’t live here anymore,” I said, in the most neutral voice I could muster.

  The young man barked out a laugh like a dog. “Did he leave on good terms?” he said. “Or did he crash and burn like he always does?”

  “You’ll have to take that up with him,” I said, and hung up.

  What had Monroe done, I wondered, in front of or to this young man, to make him willing to say such a thing to a total stranger? And how had he hypnotized Daphne? Sweet, southern, docile, acquiescent Daphne. What was she doing with herself when the men started sharpening the knives? Did she try to talk Monroe out of killing Phoebe? Did she hide in the house with the stereo loud so she wouldn’t have to hear her bleating? Did she, or anyone else in the drinking party, think for a minute, I wonder what Pam will have to say about all this when she gets home—not next week or next month or next summer, but tomorrow? I knew I was still asking the wrong questions. But I wasn’t yet sure what the right ones were.

  What came next was a crash course in sheep and chicken tending, which I failed, rather spectacularly, two days after Monroe and Daphne left. I still don’t know how the chickens got out of the chicken run at the exact moment one of my students opened the kitchen door, but the dogs raced out of the house like competing contestants on a game show, and faster than you can say “Drop that chicken!” I had two mortally wounded birds, one in each set of handsome wolfhound mouths—Fenton, still fit and fast in 2011, breaking his bird’s neck instantly, efficiently, but William, still a puppy, managing to spill the guts of the second bird without actually breaking her neck. After wrangling her out of William’s mouth and getting the dogs locked back in the house, it was left to me to cut off the chicken’s head.

  “You can do this, Pam,” my student Laura said, impressively composed, as I raised the axe and the chicken blinked at me sweetly. “But you have to do it now because she’s suffering.”

  “What if I don’t get it right on the first try?” I said. It was dawning on me that this would be the very first time
in fifty years I personally killed a living thing other than bugs, and even spiders I usually took outside.

  “Then you will hit her again and again until she dies,” Laura said, calm as the surface of a pond in summer, and it took three tries to be sure but then she was absolutely dead. Laura and I carried the bodies a mile into the forest and left them for the coyotes.

  I hated killing that chicken. I hated that it was my lack of vigilance that put the dogs and the chickens in the yard at the same time. I wasn’t even done hating Monroe for getting drunk and slaughtering Phoebe and letting little Sampson wander off to get torn limb from limb by coyotes, and now I had to take a break from hating Monroe so I could hate myself. You didn’t have to get raging drunk, apparently, to screw up colossally in the animal husbandry department. I was two sheep and three chickens down in a week, and at the end of the day I had no one to blame but myself.

  Meanwhile, at the Tommyknocker Tavern in town, Monroe was telling everyone he couldn’t understand what I’d gotten so upset about, because I had told him when we got the sheep he could do anything he wanted with them. The only thing I’d ever said to Monroe that could possibly fall into that category was that he and Daphne could keep the money from the wool sales, since they were the ones doing the sheep care and feeding. If Monroe had ever actually believed it would have been fine with me for him and his buddies to get drunk and start killing ranch animals, he’d have had no need to invent the mountain lion tracks, nor the especially loud coyotes, nor the bear last seen at Red Mountain Ranch.

  I’d lived in Creede for nearly twenty years by then. I was well versed in small towns and the way people talk in them. I’d had eyebrows raised at me for being on Oprah, been laughed at when a friend from CBS Sunday Morning had lobsters FedExed in for my birthday and received hate mail for an article I wrote for Santa Fean magazine that I thought was a veritable love letter to Creede, but to which some people in town took exception. But I also knew this: Monroe and Daphne would be gone, as most tourists are, before the snow fell. A few years would go by and no one would remember even their (actual) names.