The Meadow

by James Galvin

  The last time Lyle cut hay, before his health gave out, he mowed with the ’23 Farmall he bought in 1946, the one he’d used every year for forty years. He gave up haying with horses because horses that are only used one month of the year get too jittery and dangerous. The first field you cut you just have to let them mow where they want to—the swath like a child’s scribble in the field. He’d have bought a tractor sooner, but you couldn’t during the war.

  The Farmall has iron wheels and you have to hand start it choked and with the gas shut off, and then, when it catches, you run like hell back to turn on the gas before it dies. Whenever it broke Lyle fixed it—even if he had to forge a part himself, up in the shop, right in the middle of haying. After a certain point you couldn’t buy anything for it anyway. Lyle kept it greased and drove it easy and fixed it when it broke. After about 1960 nothing ever went wrong with it.

  In the early years Lyle fixed up a sweep on the front of a truck and ran the hay up with a stacker he made of lodgepole cut nearby. Then the whole family and sometimes neighbors would pitch in. Using a stationary baler, they tied the bales by hand and hauled them to the barn on the 1930 REO, which they also used to haul lumber and sand. That truck is still in the barn in perfect working order, except that you have to drive it down to the creek each day and fill the radiator with the coffee can Lyle keeps under the seat. It leaks exactly one coffee can of water a day whether you drive it or not.

  Lyle didn’t own any farm equipment newer than 1948. Along with his pickup and car it all belonged in a museum, except that Lyle was too busy using it. That old equipment stopped traffic on the county road at haying time.

  Each year for forty years Lyle got the hay into the barn before it started snowing hard, starting in the stubble of the meadow, which disappeared willingly under the first layers of crystals that fell, as if they didn’t mean anything by it.

  Oscar Marsh, on the other hand, is more of a classic kind of Wyoming rancher. Besides everything else that means, it means if it moves he shoots it. It’s like being a ten-year-old with a .22 for your whole life. Nothing changes but the bore. Oscar has a hunting-lodge-style living room with a big stone fireplace in his log house. Some of the most beautiful creatures ever to contain motion are nailed to the wall. It’s a kind of innocence, and I don’t blame Oscar because he is ninety and pretty leathery himself from all those years in the unrestrained wind.

  Once, out riding, Oscar drew a bead on an old coyote at about two hundred yards. As usual he didn’t miss. When he rode up to collect the pelt he found that the coyote only had two legs. The other two had been caught in traps at different times in a long and bitter coyote life, and the old bastard had chewed them off, one front foot above the ankle that he could still stump around on, and one hind leg chewed off (or maybe, as Oscar said, shot off) at the knee. Somehow that coyote had figured out how to make a living in his diminished condition. Both wounds were old. His coat was healthy, not starved-looking or mangy. Apparently he was perfectly happy to go on suffering if that’s what life was for, though he probably didn’t mind being shot by Oscar that much either. Oscar said if he’d known that old boy was missing two legs and still getting along, he didn’t know whether he would have shot him or not.

  Lyle was born in a house made of dirt. Kind of like a grave with a roof on it. It was dug back into a low hill with slabs of the prairie grass it was lost in piled up high enough in front to support a roof and make a couple of windows so you could look out every once in a while just to make sure there was still absolutely nothing in sight and a door you had to duck under.

  Lyle quit school after the eighth grade because his old man ran off and forgot about his three kids and their mother and the sod cabin I’m trying to remember from a photograph I once saw of it. By age fourteen Lyle was able to do a man’s work for half a man’s wages in the fields, old enough to start killing himself with cigarettes and chew and help his family keep living in the grave they called home.

  In Flagler, Colorado, you are too far east to see the mountains, and there are no trees because there is no water. In 1934 it was all dryland farming in what the first Europeans who saw it called a desert. It was the kind of place where you’d think only the poorest most desperate sonofabitch with an overactive imagination and a zealous trust in benevolent powers of a higher nature would even sit down to rest, let alone live, back then, before irrigation turned it green. You’d have to be adaptable as an Eskimo or dumb as a snake to want to call it home.

  Sod houses, like jungle huts and igloos, are made from the very stuff the inhabitants seek protection from. It’s like fighting fire with fire, only in this case it’s fighting grass with grass.

  So you start by digging a hole, like a gopher or a prairie dog, then you cut up some of the sod you’ve disappeared into and sandbag it all around yourself as if there was a nearby river you were expecting to rise, or as if you were making a gun emplacement. You leave a couple of holes for windows and a gap for the door that will be low enough to keep you humble for the rest of your life, even if you move away.

  Sod was layered over poles for a roof. The grass on the roof had to be alive to keep the roof from leaking and falling in.

  Those burrows were warm and dark in winter, at least a refuge from the raging whiteness that was everything outside. They were like submarines till spring. In summer they were cool, black when you first came in from the bright sunshine. The only real drawbacks were roof leaks and bug-infested walls. The walls could be covered with burlap and whitewashed or plastered white, which stopped the bugs but brought the winter glare inside, a major cause of madness in pioneer women. Lyle’s mother never whitewashed their walls and left the burlap dry.

  She had three children with her in the grave her husband made for them before he left. Imagine a winter glare. The windows are blank. The house is in a white suspension.

  Hear the wind blow.

  The doors of sod houses open inward; otherwise, the inhabitants could be trapped by heavy snowfall. After a blizzard the sky is a purple bowl the sun, like an egg, rolls around in. The earth is as blind as a hard cloud. The house is just a slight swell in the snow until someone opens the door inward, and like a drunk who’s been leaning there all night, a small avalanche tumbles inside.

  From the outside the first thing you see is a broom stuck up out of the snow like a sudden flower. It pokes around, making a hole. Then shovelfuls of snow sail into the air in steady puffs.

  One floppy-hatted head pops out from the burrow and, gopherlike, looks all around. Then the whole man climbs out and begins to excavate a passage to the door. Two boys emerge, followed by a smaller boy. They wade out through deep but dry new snow, across the yard to a shedlike affair that is less buried because of the body heat and stamping about of animals.

  One boy rolls a bale of hay off the stack to knock the spindrift off it. The other places an icy bucket under the cow and begins to milk with red, swollen hands. The streams of warm milk against the pail sound like fabric ripping. The man unhooks a bridle from a nail and places the bit under his armpit to warm it. The small boy just stands there with his hands at his sides.

  When the horse is bridled the man calls to the house the name of a girl or woman, and she emerges from the snow-burrow bundled so tight she can’t bend her arms easily. She wears a big, moth-eaten sweater over her coat. She is carrying a ratty green blanket and a lunchbox.

  The little boy, who is Lyle, is hoisted onto the horse by his father and packaged in the blanket. His sister, Clara, hands him the reins and the lunchbox. Lyle begins to flail his heels against the enormous horse’s sides without result. This is a horse that wouldn’t break into a trot if you dipped his tail in coal oil and lit it. The father says, “Giddyup, Bill,” and slaps the horse’s flank hard enough to hurt his freezing hand. The horse begins to plod through the smooth, undrifted snow up an almost imperceptible rise toward the deep sky where Lyle disappears on his way to school.

  The others, two of whom are not that
long out of school themselves, turn back to the snow-mound and disappear inside. The sound the door makes as it shuts is like that of a heavy stone someone dropped to the ground after carrying it a long way. By now a thread of smoke rises straight as steel pipe from the dwelling into the still sky.

  There are six children in the one-room school. The floor is dirt and the air smells of coal smoke. The walls are not sod like all the children’s houses but made from logs hauled all the way from the foothills of the Rockies. The school perches fully above the ground. It reminds Lyle of a birdhouse. The children are obedient. The schoolmarm is kindly and crazy as the wind. The children study hard because they know it’s their last chance to learn something before they become useful as labor to their families.

  Lyle, though he doesn’t know it yet, will be working in the fields with his brothers this summer, trying to do a man’s share, because his father has already decided to leave for good as soon as the first flowers spatter the pasture.

  Lyle sits alone during lunch because he is embarrassed by his sandwiches, which are made from homemade bread, the badge of poverty. The other kids have Sunbeam. School ends early on winter days so the children have time to walk or ride home before dark.

  When Lyle reaches home he gives the horse some hay and grain. He rubs the horse down with straw, not because it is in a sweat (it isn’t), but because he thinks the horse likes it and it’s something to do instead of going inside. From the house he can hear his father screaming at his mother with the kind of lunacy that infects prairie dwellers in winter. Lyle thinks the really smart creatures know enough to sleep till spring.

  So he stays out in the shed with the animals, trying to keep warm between the horse and the cow. He is not waiting to be called for supper; they won’t call him. He is waiting for his teeth to chatter so hard he’s afraid they’ll break.

  When we think of our lives as what we have done, memory becomes a museum with one long shelf on which we arrange a bric-a-brac of deeds, each to his own liking. Lyle doesn’t think of his life as what he has done, or what was done to him. He has no use for blame. The day his father left for good never came to an end. His mother tried to hide her relief, which was a joy that came over her like tough spring flowers in fearless colors flushing the high plains that winter leaves so female for a while.

  Between the floating blankness of winter and the monotonous, burnt-out summer tones, the quick thrill of color over the dusty flats was just how she felt that spring. And that’s how fast it was gone—faster. Her husband’s labor had made more difference than she ever would have admitted to him. Now they couldn’t afford to stay where they were and they couldn’t afford to leave. So they left. I think the reason Hazel decided to go was because she knew her two oldest sons would leave home if she didn’t take them away herself. It was her attempt to keep them with her.

  They moved to Boulder a hundred miles west, which was, at the time, a humble farming town slumped in a foothill valley so close to the mountains you couldn’t see them from town: the first little ridge to the west blocks out the higher peaks, making proximity to the high country oddly plain and comforting.

  They rented a tiny bungalow on the outskirts of town. They kept chickens, pigs, and milk cows. The two older boys hired on to road crews, did welding and auto repair in the winter, got farm work in July. They blistered their ears and noses and dizzied their brains under felt hats driving tractors or teams pulling combines and headers in circles. They spent no money except for food and cigarette makings, the occasional new hat or pair of overalls (“overhauls,” Lyle called them). Hazel wanted to send Lyle back to school in the fall. She wanted him to learn a trade, make a steady wage, which sounded good to Lyle, but it never came about.

  Clara made a little money painting landscapes from photographs—people’s houses or favorite mountain views—a talent she had discovered early in the grueling bleakness of prairie winters. Hazel did the housework and cooking, some tailoring and mending for families in town, and stayed up many nights ripping the seams out of her sons’ bluejeans and sewing the un-worn-out backs of pants over the fronts of other pairs worn out at the knees, restitching the seams on her treadle Singer. Each pair of jeans lasted half again as long that way. Hazel also mended their torn shirts and worn-out shoes, darned socks, and pieced quilts from scraps of clothing too far gone to mend. She wasted nothing, or to be more precise, she wasted no things.

  The whole family worked with a ferocity and inventiveness that could only have been provided by an intelligent woman who had spent her life till now stranded halfway, who’d had enough of living in a house made of dirt, surrounded by measureless prairies of dirt, pulling food from the dirt to feed to her sons who were covered with the same dirt they all worked, ate, and slept in. She started hoarding a portion of the money they got, saving fiercely, wasting nothing, buying nothing new and nothing at all they could make themselves or do without, pretending to nothing.

  Her children got nothing for themselves, any more than she did. They lived for a better future she would reveal to them. They were humble and hardworking as the earth itself, the dry earth of the prairie.

  During the Depression most families were slipping, losing land and possessions. Hazel was holding ground, even gaining a little. She was already an expert at the kind of poverty the rest of the country was just beginning to learn and would never master.

  Lyle was fourteen and old enough to think that a man had a right to one thing, at least, in life, one simple pleasure, which was to stop killing himself every so often for long enough to sprinkle a few golden flakes of crimp-cut tobacco into a delicate boat of paper, held just so between thumb, index, and middle finger, to roll it and lick it and strike a wooden kitchen match to light it and go back to work with the cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

  And sometimes, at noon or sundown, the ritual included the possibility of sitting down long enough to smoke it, too. Life had three parts: working from first light to last, sleeping too tired to dream, so deep he was pretty sure he knew what death was like, and smoking cigarettes.

  Eating didn’t count because the food was so plain it was part of work, like pouring gasoline in a tractor. Lyle never took pleasure in eating, any more than a coyote would.

  In the Depression a lot of people lost their lives, if your life is what you do. People who had never missed a mortgage payment, had worked hard, not for money but for a way of life, lost their land when its value dropped below the amount they owed. Old story.

  The illusion of land ownership creates a cheap workforce in the fields: people who often pay more than they are paid to work, as we say, like slaves. But, oh, they are rich in illusions of independence, and they are also very proud, which is not an illusion.

  In 1938 Hazel Van Waning was not in a position to feel sorry for anyone. She assumed the loan, $2,000 remaining—a song, Lyle called it—on a small mountain farm: 320 acres of hay meadow in a valley surrounded by so much green it was hard to imagine winter ever being there, though it was precisely winter at that elevation (8,500 ft.) and that far from town that made it so no one in his right mind would actually try to live there. A few families who were not in their right minds had tried and failed to keep a grip on it, one of them App Worster’s.

  Hazel didn’t feel sorry for him, either. In fact, feeling sorry, that questionable human capacity, for herself or anyone else, was something she would never regain, not even in relative comfort, not in this life.

  She didn’t believe in borrowing so she bought the deed outright, in cash, from a banker who was amazed to have unloaded a backwoods property he thought he was stuck with. The bank clerks made jokes about the woman who had given all her savings to acquire a piece of land not only unprofitable but untenable, and her without a husband to work the land for her. They were laughing about it when word came down that the bank was folding and all the laughing employees were no longer employed.

  Hazel signed the deed in ’38, but she kept her family in Boulder, all of them work
ing at something. They were poorer that year than they ever had been. Lyle hired on to the road crew where his brother, Bob, was already working. They were mostly over near South Park, building fence along the new highway. They were supposed to drive steel posts a uniform depth along the new road so that the white painted tops came out looking even. Some of the posts wouldn’t go that deep into the rocky ground, so it fell to Lyle, the newest and youngest member of the crew, to cut off the tops of the high posts with a hacksaw and repaint them when the foreman wasn’t looking.

  All the wages the boys brought in went to fixing up the dilapidated log cabin and caved-in sheds that were evidence of grim failures on the farm they’d bought. Slowly the place became livable. They soon bought a team to hay the meadow and fixed the barbed wire fence around its perimeter, cutting their own posts and piecing together short lengths of wire they scavenged where snowdrifts and elk snapped the fence each winter.

  The house itself was well made, if neglected. A log house lasts forever in this climate as long as it has a good roof over it and a foundation under it. In 1940, Hazel moved her family up to Sheep Creek for good. The cabin had three rooms: two bedrooms and an everything-else room with a wood cookstove and a wood heater.

  Henry joined the Army that year and learned to fly: Hazel’s nightmare. He figured she had Lyle and Bob to work for her and Clara to chew on all day, and it seemed like now or never, so off he went in his green uniform, and none of them ever saw him again.

  In February of 1941 the snow rose past the windowsills. The family tried to make the best of what looked like the cold tunnel of the rest of their lives. Bob promised to build snowfences the next summer so they wouldn’t be buried alive like that again. He and Lyle spent the winter nights shivering in the unheated lean-to they’d built on the back of the house. Clara took a snapshot with the family’s Brownie of the snowdrift in front of the house. She perched her own wool hat on top of it and placed sticks with her mittens on them so it looked like someone buried in the snow and reaching for air. With a pen she drew an arrow on the print pointing to the hat and wrote, ME, and sent it to a friend in Boulder. Hazel showed them how, as a girl in Iowa, when hoarfrost grew thick as ferns on the windows, she’d heat a thimble on the stove and use it to melt a peephole in the frost, to spy on the still, white world outside.