The Meadow

by James Galvin

  By now Clay’s wife, Marrianne, has arrived with their three kids, aged one, two, and three (Clay says they’ll stop having kids as soon as they find out what’s causing them), and some other neighboring ranch kids have showed up and are trying to help. Each cow is driven, prodded if necessary, down an alley toward the chute, which is opened like a loose jaw. When the cow sees daylight on the far side of the chute and tries to jump through, Roger throws the lever and catches the cow mid-air with a clang. Brad dowses them with an evil-smelling syrupy liquid, I stab each one twice when Clay gives the word, after his arm has withdrawn from the waterfall of fear-induced diarrhea, which by now covers not only his coveralls, but his pointy-toed, high-heeled galoshes as well.

  The kids are running everywhere and shouting to Shirley all their questions about cows, as she writes things down on the clipboard in her lap. Marrianne is bottle-feeding Ely, little Oscar is screaming his head off about something. The football game is blaring, the men are shouting wry jokes and football commentary back and forth, the cows and calves are raising a deafening kind of rumbly howl. Laughter occasionally lifts above the din like a blue balloon. Frank is watching from the kitchen window, dying. I wonder what he and Julie are saying.

  Lyle stood behind his mother. He was still chewing. The little boy was still clutching his flag. The man was trying to explain in elliptical but clear English that their car was mired and they needed help to pull it free. Without a word to his slackjawed mother, Lyle pushed her aside and started to walk up toward the truck, which he had already unloaded. The little family platoon followed him like goslings after the goose.

  They all rode down to the stream again, the little boy on the hard bench seat next to Lyle. Lyle could feel the boy’s skinny thigh pressed against his own as they bounced along. The father and the girl rode in back. Out of the corner of his eye Lyle could see that the blue paint was worn off the stick where the boy was made continuously to clutch in his moist little fist the symbol that was the literal and only defense his family had in this dry, limitless foreign land. I bet he goes to sleep hanging on to that, thought Lyle, as he stopped the truck behind the family’s car and let it idle.

  Lyle could see that the car’s wheels had cut deeply into the sod and that the axle was resting on the grass. Lyle knew his pickup did not have the weight and traction to pull the car out, nor would a draft horse be able to budge it, but he had to give it a try to prove it to the father.

  Just as he had foreseen, the rear wheels spun, frivolously as a fortune wheel at the county fair, and had no more effect than to slick the grass down. The car humped a mite each time Lyle pulled, but it wasn’t coming out, and the drive wheels of Lyle’s truck were beginning to cut their own slots in the sponge, so he gave it up and offered to drive the family back to town. They’d have to wait for the bog to dry.

  Lyle could imagine the effect on his mother of boarding an entire family of Japanese overnight. So without stopping at the house to explain, he drove them and all their gear into Laramie.

  It turned out they ran a small restaurant in Laramie, a place Lyle had seen and wondered about but had never been inside since he and his family did not permit themselves the luxury of eating houses. The Japanese father, who now rode in the cab with Lyle and the little boy, extended profuse invitations to Lyle all the way to town. Lyle, the man said, could eat at the restaurant free anytime he wanted for the rest of his life. So grateful was the man, he never stopped bobbing his thanks. He also explained that they, like many Japanese-Americans in Wyoming, were not sent to camps because they were citizens of a landscape in which the government could not imagine them doing any harm. The townspeople were generally tolerant of them, sympathetic, even giving them enough business to keep going. But his family was afraid all the time, the man explained, and occasionally people said cruel or threatening things to them. Lyle just kept glancing sideways at the little boy and his flag, and then back to the blood red dust of the county road. He steered the truck like a PT boat flying colors on the bow all the way across the oceanic basin into town.

  Lyle considered this memory of his a mere curiosity, an anecdote with no apparent content, an interesting occurrence. It was the kind of thing the mind returns to in its freer moments, as before sleep or at the end of life. It was, to him, a circumstance to which he had responded the way any ordinary, decent person would have responded, but it was strange, a little magical. He never did go into that restaurant to eat for free.

  Still staring out the window Lyle pokes all of his hand that will fit into his shirt pocket. He fishes out the cigarette papers and Prince Albert tin he has cut the bottom off of, shortened to fit shirt pockets, and soldered the base back on. Anyone who has tried to fit a full-sized P.A. tin into his shirt pocket knows they are built the wrong size, so you can’t quite snap the pocket flap over it. Every time you stoop to pick something up the tin falls out, plopping into the spring, for instance.

  Lyle’s fingers are enormous, whether from heredity or hard work or both, I couldn’t say. His hands are like bunches of bananas. It’s quite something to watch him separate a single leaf from a book of papers, hold it between three fingers, fill and roll a smoke, and lick it shut. He hangs the cigarette from his lower lip and sweeps whatever loose flakes have leaked out the ends off the table and back into the tin. He drops the tin back into his shirt pocket and snaps the flap over it. From the other breast pocket he uses the same two-fingered technique to extract his Zippo, which produces a flame about six inches high. He flips it open and strikes the wheel with the whole palm of his hand. Though he tips his head sideways, his eyelashes are all singed off from lighting cigarettes. He needs a good-sized flame to light his smokes in the wind.

  This ritual accomplished, he turns again to stare across the meadow. He wonders where that coyote pup has got to, what he’s spending so much time doing down by the creek. Trying to ambush the mink whose tracks Lyle saw yesterday, or just wasting time sniffing around a beaver house?

  This is the second dream. I’m coming home after a long absence and for some reason I take the Cherokee Park Road up from Fort Collins. I stop off to see how Lyle is and he seems not just better, but not sick at all and about ten years younger. We sit at the kitchen table and look out over the meadow, which is just about ready for cutting, and drink coffee like we always used to. Lyle doesn’t mention any news.

  I say so long and start to drive up over the ridge for home and am horrified to discover a huge construction project under way between my place and Lyle’s. They are moving a lot of rock and gravel around, and when I ask them what they are doing they say they are building a dam, another reservoir. But they are building it in a place where there is no stream, no water at all, and they aren’t using any modern machinery. They are using horses and mules pulling wagons and slips, and there are a lot of them but they aren’t making noise and they are tearing things up something awful.

  They have also broken the cattleguard across my fence. I start screaming at them and threatening them and they seem terrified, but they don’t stop working. They apologize. They say they have orders. They keep working. They are dressed in clothes from the last century.

  Then Clay drives up in his pickup and says he doesn’t think it’s time to do anything yet, but if I need him to help me stop these men, even if it means shooting them, if they don’t just quit pretty soon, to let him know and he will help me.

  I say I don’t know about shooting them because I think they might be Amish or something, but I will if they keep building this lake between me and Lyle, and Clay says they can’t build a lake because there isn’t any water. I say if they finish the dam and there is water we will have to shoot them even if they are Amish. Clay says okay and places his hand on my forehead, which is not something he would ever do. The hand leaves a burning red mark. Then he gets in his truck and drives away. I can see my house from where I am and it looks okay.

  Those first years on Sheep Creek things were harder. Lyle had only one auger bit, and a
s for drill bits, a lot of little holes got filed into bigger holes because he lacked the proper sizes. He had one old crosscut saw, half of whose rake teeth were missing, and whose cutting teeth had been filed so often their tops were where their bottoms used to be. Lyle’s family had no running water, no electricity, and two rooms and a lean-to for the whole family. Still, their spirits were higher then, even if they were less comfortable and more afraid.

  Clara and Lyle had read all about Holland, where all their forbears were from, and they asked Hazel a lot of questions since Hazel had spent her girlhood in a town in Iowa that was almost all Dutch.

  Clara got it under her bonnet that they should have some winter fun skating on the beaver ponds the way Hollanders skated on their canals. “I wonder if a body could skate away, down the Poudre to Collins,” she said. Lyle just snorted, but when she took the money from her last summer’s painting and sent away to Monkey Ward’s for four pairs of the kind of skate you adjust and bind with leather straps to an ordinary pair of high-topped shoes, they all were excited.

  The skates appeared in the big mailbox that everyone shared for packages which stood beside the row of ordinary boxes down at the Wooden Shoe Ranch. Lyle brought them home one day coming back from town.

  The next morning was sunny, and they all snowshoed across the meadow, skates slung by the straps over their shoulders, to the biggest beaver pond on the creek. It wasn’t exactly like the pictures in Clara’s books about Holland, what with the beaver house out in the middle of the pond, but the ice was thick and the wind had scoured most of the snow from its surface. Lyle brought a broom to tidy up their little rink.

  The ice was rough and Lyle remembered how they laughed that day, each of them trying to stand and go a bit, and the bubbly laughter that ensued each time their legs flew out and they landed with a crack on the unforgiving ice, skated feet stuck straight up in the air. Their bottoms were mighty sore after that first day, but not as sore as their stomach muscles from laughing so much. That was the last of the skating for everyone except Clara and Lyle, who took to practicing every day for a while, until they could loop gracefully around the pond together, holding hands and swinging themselves around each other, skating in tandem, arm in arm.

  Lyle flicks the long ash from his cigarette. He watches from the kitchen window as his dead sister and his younger self glide elegantly and happily around their own private skating rink in that meadow tucked back in the mountains, where no one else could ever know or see, with all the happiness they ever held inside themselves at one time, when the family was far too poor to be fooling around with exotic sports. But Lyle was twenty and Clara was alive, and poverty seemed the least of burdens a man could hold in his heart.

  Now Lyle catches sight of the young coyote angling back up the bare hill toward the edge of the evergreens where the ridge begins. The coyote is drenched and his usually apparent bushiness has collapsed around the reality of his impossibly skinny frame. He is carrying something in his mouth, even more drenched and limp-looking than he is, something that he carefully drops in the snow long enough to look back over his shoulder at the house, where smoke rises from the chimney into the sky without a twist or curl, so straight it looks solid.

  He licks his left forepaw, probably cut on the ice. Lyle wonders if the coyote can actually see him, the only other animal around, where he sits in the kitchen window. Lyle often wonders how well different animals hear or see or smell, and what, for instance, it would be like to see what the red tail sees, to be behind his eyes, or to smell mice under the snow asleep, the way coyotes do. To see with your sense of smell would be to see things narratively, to know not only where things are but where they have been, and how long they have been gone, as if everything seen had a gently diminishing streak behind it like a comet, showing where it came from and how fast it had traveled. To hear what an owl hears, a mouse rustling dry leaves a hundred feet down in the timber, in a tangle of roots and undergrowth.

  Lyle knows that coyote isn’t much concerned about being followed or hunted, since he’s passed by here so often before. Lyle thinks it’s more a matter of showing off, showing Lyle, who had doubted the wisdom of hunting the creek bottom on a day as cold as today, that it had indeed paid off, and that he didn’t mind being soaked to the skin in ten below. So he turns and fixes his gaze on the kitchen window in a superior kind of way, then picks up the brown lump that is now rolled in snow like a drumstick in flour, and haughtily trots toward the cover of the timber.

  Lyle stubs his smoke and says, “Better keep movin’, you little bastard. It’s cold and your ass is soaked. You fell through the ice and got drenched just to catch some goddamn disgusting muskrat that you are going to eat raw while you shiver yourself dry, and you think that’s something to be proud of. Well here’s to you, you puffed up little bastard. You can have it. You’re a fool to survive if that’s all your life is for. But I’ll say one thing for you. You’re tougher than a pine knot, by God. There’s no denying you are one tough little hombre.”

  As soon as the sun found the valley, it warmed and the mist rose straight up. By the time the old man returned with an armload of wood to boil his coffee on the sun felt hot. App thought the meadow was like a nest, ringed by ridges and sentinel pines. Sheep Creek lazed in its deep willow cover. App figured it would be an easy matter to catch a nice brook trout for breakfast if the old man would give him time. Warming himself in high-altitude sun he studied the anomalous lushness around him. Just beyond the ridge lay the dry, rocky slopes he was used to, the sagey emptiness of home.

  “It rains a light rain here when it isn’t raining anywhere else around, then the sun shines. Rain at night, sun by day. It should do that everywhere. Why it doesn’t, I guess I’ll have to ask the Devil,” he said to himself.

  He spread the damp blanket to dry on the gray dome of a boulder that stuck up out of the meadow like a bullet. Steam rose from the blanket and it reminded him of winter, standing next to the woodstove, soaked through, steam from his shoulders wreathing his ears.

  As the old man got the fire lit App limped through the tall grass. It soaked his ripped trousers from the knees down, wet as if he’d waded the creek. He thought if the old man was paying attention he’d think App was just going to take a piss or get a drink from the creek. As long as he didn’t ask, App might get a little fishing in before the water boiled.

  When he reached the bank he squatted down in the tall brome and almost disappeared. He studied the water. The quicksilver glimpses and their shadows flashed in and out of the shadow of a rock in the middle of the current. He stood quickly and leapt out on the flat surface of the boulder and flattened himself, belly down on it. His sudden shadow over the water had dispersed the trout like grass blades thrown into a gale. He waited happily as the sun warmed him and he rolled up one sleeve. Soon the trout began to trail back, lazily toying with the currents the way hawks and ravens play with updrafts and breezes. He began, almost imperceptibly, to lower his forearm into the water. He watched his arm as he reached, making sure its descent was slow enough to be taken for stillness, like the hour hand on the old man’s pocket watch that App liked to stare at, trying to decide if he could see it move or not. Of course he couldn’t move his own arm that slowly, but that’s what he was trying for.

  When his arm was fully extended he moved his hand underneath the rock, still slow in the current, until he touched a fin slowly wavering like a gently fanning angel’s wing. In his mind he could see the beautifully speckled body as he moved his hand forward to the slick cold under the gills. He began to wave his hand gently from the wrist like a willow branch trailing the current. He stroked back along the sleek form toward the vent to see how big a fish he was rocking to sleep. It was fourteen inches or so, big for a native brookie, enough for a good breakfast.

  He massaged softly, working his hand forward, and when his hand was behind the gills again he knew the fish was dead asleep. In one swift motion he grasped it and lifted it out of the water in a showe
r of gemlike drops that fell back into the creek, which was itself as full of light as it was of water. With a deft motion of his left hand he shoved the head up and back until he heard a definitive snap. He leapt back to the bank, his hand already reaching into his pocket for his clasp knife.

  One cut, slick as a zipper, from vent to gills, revealed the inner mysteries. The second cut popped out a flap under the chin. He inserted his thumb and pulled, removing the lower fins, gills, and viscera. He threw them all in one piece back into the stream. It made a gulping sound where it went under. He slid his thumbnail down the bloodline in the spine, dunked the fish, closed his knife one-handed against his hip, and emerged from the willows, breakfast in hand.

  The trout had gone from living to cleaned in thirty seconds. One minute later it was turning on a willow spit, and the coffee water was beginning to boil. App looked into his father’s face that stared greedily at the fish and decided to feel happy anyway.

  As the horses leaned into their harnesses and the wagon scraped and groaned toward the top of the ridge north of the valley, App could see how the valley pinched off to almost nothing between rock outcrops and then opened out again just upstream. He could feel the air getting warmer by increments as they climbed out of the valley. It struck him as decidedly female. It was too high for cottonwoods, but there were willows and aspens, and the hayfields fanned out on either side of the narrow granite waist. The valley made an eight. The hills all around were covered with dark green lodgepole stands; the aspens were splashes of lighter green among the pines and in tributary draws. App was trying to count how many different greens there were dancing in the early light down in that hidden valley. It reminded him of a walled garden, like he’d heard of in foreign cities, though it was surely as untrammeled as any piece of ground in the inhabited world. He was happy just to have seen it and spent one night down in its cool lushness.