by James Galvin
On his final approach he was wobbly. I could see his jaw muscles bunching, and his knuckles were white as sugar cubes when he clattered past me at eye level. He hit the road surprisingly smoothly, taxied up to the top of the rise, spun her around, and shut the motor down. The age of flight arrived on Boulder Ridge in the summer of 1981.
It ended that same summer when Bert came down a little harder than he meant to and the landing gear collapsed. Lyle came over and figured out a way to brace things up again with some light chain and a come-along. Bert didn’t like the looks of it so we all set to work unbolting the wings. Lyle was horrified to find each wing secured by only two bolts. “Two bolts? Two bolts, Bert?” The plane went out on the back of Lyle’s 1930 REO.
For a while Bert was landing and taking off on that road as if it was routine. One Saturday Bert offered rides to everyone, so they could see the country from above. Everyone came but Lyle. We took turns going up in the two-seater. We saw what loggers had done to Deadman. We saw the sand rocks like a batch of meringues. We saw our own houses.
Ray had been hanging back. “Oh, no, you go ahead. I ain’t in no hurry.” I wondered if he was afraid to go up, but when I thought about it, thought about Ray, I knew that wasn’t it.
Bert said, “Ray, you’re last. Now or never.”
Ray got ready to speak by covering his mouth with his hand. He pretended he was feeling his beard, but really he was hiding his bad teeth. He said, “Bert, I’ve spent my whole life on this mountain, and I just don’t think I can stand to see it look small.”
One of the things modern medicine has managed to do besides turning hospitals into churches and doctors into priests, is to infect the culture with the foreknowledge of distantly imminent death, something human beings don’t really have it in them to cope with. What I mean is, we are supposed to live knowing we are going to die; we are not supposed to live knowing when.
The modern victim of Intensive Care often goes from someone who knows he is going to die, at some unpredictable time, to someone who is in danger of imminent death, to someone who doesn’t have a chance and knows it. I’m not talking about the time it takes for your life to flash before you. The body ticks on horribly, without hope. And everybody has to know about it, too, especially relatives who are forced to talk more about miracles than is dignified.
Bert Honea told me that when he was a resident in an inner city hospital he had to learn, for the most part, to divide the patient’s complaints by ten to get an accurate sense of the degree of pain and the seriousness of the condition. When he moved to Laramie and set up his practice, he learned that with ranchers you have to take the complaint and multiply by ten to know where you are.
Example: A guy about ten miles west of here, cutting poles in the National Forest, broke some part of the drive train on his truck once it was loaded. He jacked it up and went to try to fix it. It fell off the blocks and crushed his legs.
Luckily there was a CB radio in the cab that he could reach and he raised a neighbor lady, and what he said was, “Hello, Ruby? How ya doin’? Say, is Don busy?” By the time they found him he had passed out, but they managed to save his legs.
Another example: A young woman whose husband had died, but who stayed on at the ranch alone was robbed one night by two strangers. They shot her twice in the face and threw her body in the root cellar. Two days later she crawled out and drove herself to town.
In old age the same woman, still living on the ranch alone, got a call from friends in town who couldn’t get out of their driveway because of a heavy snowfall. Louise drove her Jeep twenty miles at night through the blizzard, pulled them out of the driveway, turned around and went home. She got stuck herself about a mile from her house. While digging herself out, the Jeep, which she’d forgotten to leave in gear, rolled over her leg and broke it. She crawled home and went to bed. When her leg still hurt in the morning she called the doctor.
Anyone who knew him would have thought Frank Lilley was far more likely to get blasted out of the saddle on his hundredth birthday by a bolt of lightning than to go down the way he did.
So when Frank came into the clinic to see Bert, the very fact was worrisome to say the least. For about four months Frank had had a pain when he breathed or lifted his arm. He said, “It doesn’t really hurt or nothin’, Bert, it’s just that something’s not quite right in there.”
Bert started out hoping for curables, but Frank went from being someone who is going to die someday to being someone who is as good as dead, and everybody including him had to know about it and go on living with that knowledge for months.
The day I saw Roger come out with his horse trailer to move the herd from the Sand Creek pasture was the day I knew Frank was done for. I don’t know how I knew, exactly; I just watched that plume of dust burning down the county road like a fuse and I knew.
The Civic Auditorium was the biggest room they could find for the service. They say it’s a terrible thing to see a grown man cry, but when you see a whole roomful of tough-as-jerky, dried-up old cowpokes who never talk except to say hello, good-bye, and excuse me, all broken down with weeping it’s kind of a relief. That day in the auditorium there were a lot of very tough people, men and women, choked up.
Arlo Hewlett, the county extension agent, had to stop in the middle of his eulogy, which was mostly a story about how the county commissioners (of whom Frank was one) took Frank to a seafood restaurant and tried to get him to order fish. Frank said, “Boys, to me, seafood is a cow standing in the stock pond.” Arlo had to stop in the middle and say, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got a kind of a catch in my throat.” He stepped back from the microphone and stood stone-still for about two full minutes before he went on with another funny story.
Other people stood to speak. The preacher talked about Jesus, but was honest enough to allow that, though Frank took Christ as his saviour, he was no “Religionist” and never went to church, but worked on Sundays like any other rancher any other day. He never needed any church but the one he rode over on his horse.
After the audience filed out I sat as the pallbearers loaded the flag-draped coffin into the hearse, and then the room was empty except for Frank’s old saddle up on the stage, an old, burnt-up lariat coiled loosely and hung over the high, old-fashioned pommel and saddle horn. All around it were flowers.
Ray never wanted any funeral, but after they got the body back and thawed it out and zipped up his pants, Margie, his new widow, took over. She loved Ray, but she wasn’t going to let an opportunity like this slip by.
First she sent word that she wanted me to come to the funeral with my guitar and play some of the old Western tunes Ray loved enough to play all night. When I tried to say I couldn’t play in front of a lot of people she said it would be just family: Ginny, Lainie, Bill, Jack, and a few kids. The same people Ray and I used to play for every Saturday night at my dad’s house.
It’s hard to tell a grieving widow no, especially one whose hairtrigger tears soak a litany of hankies. Once she found a hummingbird dead from whacking into a window. She built a little mausoleum for it out of white quartz pebbles and pine needles. Ray kept expecting it to smell but it never did. She used to bring it out and cry and show the thing around to company. You see what I was up against.
I told Margie I’d play, but Bert had to play, too. The morning of the service I drove into town to Bert’s house to put on a suit. He showed me the morning paper announcing the funeral at Striker’s and inviting the whole town. Bert and I were mentioned as musicians.
I must have looked like I’d been kicked by a horse. “I thought Ray didn’t want a funeral service.”
Bert said, “He didn’t, but Ray’s dead.”
I said, “How can Margie do this?”
Bert said, “She ain’t dead.”
At the bottom of the announcement it said donations were being accepted by the widow for a headstone. I said, “What headstone?”
I called up Margie and she cried and cried an
d I couldn’t get anywhere. She said Ray would be cremated next day and he’d wanted to be spread out on Boulder Ridge from the tree with the rock stuck through its trunk all the way up to Deadman, but she couldn’t face it yet. I said, “What about this headstone?”
She said she was behind a couple of car payments, Ray’s drinking cost so much at the end, and without Ray to provide anymore, and no workman’s compensation, she didn’t know what to do. Maybe some of those old friends whose houses Ray had stuccoed for free would repay the favor now. I hung up, and said, “What do we do now, Bert?”
Bert said, “Bite the bullet.”
So we took our guitars over to Striker’s and they gave us a little room to sit in that was out of sight of all but a few people on the edge of the audience. The man in charge of the home said all we had to do was play one song while people filed in and one song while they filed out, which didn’t sound too bad.
I could see Harris Ankeny in the audience. Harris plastered with Ray for twenty years. After he fell off the scaffold and wrecked his legs he worked as a janitor at the University. Harris used to come up to the ridge with Ray, especially in winter on snowmobiles, not just because he liked it, but to keep Ray from getting too drunk and getting into trouble. I know he thought if he’d been with Ray that last time it would have turned out different. Harris sat there like a stone statue in the rain.
The funeral director gave us the nod and we started to play “Red River Valley.” After we’d played it all the way through they were still filing in so we sang it. Then we played it through again but they were still filing in and we stopped. The funeral director glared urgently at us and made a motion with his hand like he was cranking the starter on an old car. We started to play another song.
We must have played ten songs, everything we could think of for a funeral. When we played “Rio Colorado,” Ray’s niece, who was born with something wrong with her brain, set off keening like a wounded bobcat and couldn’t stop. It was a spooky sound.
The preacher got up and said some stuff about Jesus and how Ray was in heaven and hadn’t really died at all. I knew Ray thought heaven would be a step down from Boulder Ridge, and I thought about his questions for the Devil. Then it was over and everyone started out and we started pumping up songs again, some of which we hadn’t played in years.
I’ve been to visit Margie since and she never changes. She watches “soapies” and fills up the doublewide with crocheted knickknacks, whatnots, and bric-a-brac. For instance, she made a little sombrero and a serape for her bottle of Tabasco sauce. I ask her when she wants to go up on the ridge to scatter Ray’s ashes. She still isn’t ready; they’re under her bed. She got about $300 toward the headstone, though, so she still has something to drive. God bless her.
LYLE, 1981
“The first time I come face to face with Ferris was on a Sunday afternoon and I was taking a snooze after dinner. I woke with a start, though I didn’t hear anything, and there he was peering through the screen door at me where I was lying on the couch. He’d come up on the house afoot and was just standing at the open door looking at me through the screen, which is one thing, I guess, in town, but out here it’s very damned strange. It gave me the willies and I jumped up off the couch and said, ‘What do you want? Jesus Christ.’
“‘Howdy, good neighbor,’ says the voice behind the screen. ‘Sorry to be botherin’ you, but my truck quit me back down the road a piece and I was wonderin’ if you had some jumper cables you could borrow me a minute to get her goin’ again.’
“‘Sure,’ I say, because around here you just don’t leave people stranded. I still didn’t like being sneaked up on, though, and I still couldn’t make out the stranger’s face through the dark screen backlit by a bright afternoon sun. Then I started to wake up a bit and I asked, ‘You mean it was running and it quit?’ He nodded. ‘Then a jump start won’t help you. Cables are for starting cars that won’t start, not for starting cars that won’t run. If it quit you something else is wrong. Where is it?’ He said about halfway between here and Ray’s. The way he used Ray’s first name surprised me. It was like he’d known him for years.
“‘If I can just get it up over the hill I know I can get it home. I own some land up here, you know,’ he said importantly.
“By then I’m awake enough for it to hit me who I’m talking to and I say, ‘Well, if you think it will do you any good I can loan you some cables. But what are you going to jump it off of?’
“Then, unbelievably, deadpan, he says, ‘Can I borrow that ’ere truck?’ He jerks his chin in the direction of my Studebaker. My heart slid down to about knee high as I thought of the nearest phone seven miles away, the nearest wrecker thirty-five miles away, and how once I got involved with this outfit, I’d be responsible for their well-being. I couldn’t refuse them. You just don’t do that. I also wasn’t about to loan this stranger my truck and have him hitch it up for the locomotive to his junk train.
“So I put on my hat and stepped out into the yard and was immediately startled by the presence of another man, a younger man, standing about fifteen feet off to the side, out of sight near the window.
“Once outside I could see the face of the man I’d been talking to and I didn’t like what I saw. He was gray-haired and handsome-ish, tall, with squinty blue eyes—like he was staring into a bright light all the time. There was something else about him, too, that kind of chilled me, a slackness in desperation, like a deer whose throat you are about to cut. His skin was the color of brick cement, heavy on the lime. He was unshaved, but not bearded. He looked like he hadn’t bathed for a year or more and there were clots of black greasy muck in his ears tufted with hair. His clothes were so filthy with grease and dust, their original colors were hard to make out. It was like someone had dipped him in used crankcase oil and rolled him in the dust like a chicken-fried steak.
“The younger man, clearly his son, was pretty clean by comparison, black-haired, but with the same squinty blue eyes like I was shining a spotlight at him or caught him in the headlights as he was doing something illegal. I decided not to think about it.
“The three of us climb into the cab of my truck and head up the road. When his truck come into sight I despaired another notch. It had quit on a steep incline, right in the middle of the road. Hooked up behind it was the usual massive load, but instead of junk metal it was livestock. There was three horses in the trailer, two goats in the cart behind it, and crates of chickens in the bed of the pickup. Now I was really in over my head in terms of responsibility.
“What if the truck wouldn’t start, as I suspicioned it wouldn’t? What was I going to do with these people, and worse, what was I going to do with the animals? Where was this greasemonkey going to overhaul his truck? If he had no booster cables, did he have any tools at all? Money for parts?
“Then I caught sight of the most chilling vision of all. Sitting stock-still in the backseat was the hulking form of an enormous woman, possibly the ugliest woman I ever seen in my life. She had a pronounced moustache and her eyebrows were a straight thick line like a piece of greasy rope stuck to her forehead. Her hair was curly black and all sprangled out, and she had on this tiny straw cowboy hat that looked like she must have screwed it on. The look in her eyes said, ‘If you address one word to me I’ll tear your head off and suck out your guts.’
“Ferris was looking at me with those eyes, squinting, disaster-accepting, a depending-on-the-kindness-of-strangers denial of responsibility for whatever happened next.
“I pull my truck up bumper to bumper with his and we raise the hoods and connect the cables. I jump into my truck with unreasonable hope and fire it up. I gun the motor and shout for Ferris to give it a try. Ferris says nothing. Ferris does nothing. Ferris squints at me. Finally he looks up at me and says, ‘It’s not ready yet.’
“He sat inert in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, and he wouldn’t turn it over. I yelled for him to start it, but he just smiled and said it wasn’t ready, at which poin
t I understood that his battery was indeed dead, his generator shot, that he knew it perfectly well, and that he intended not to jump start his truck, but to charge his battery off of mine at the risk of melting not only the cables, but the wiring in both vehicles.
“‘Start it!’ I said, and when he still wouldn’t I jumped out of my truck and headed for his to do it myself, mad enough to forget about the enormous, evil-looking wife in the backseat. Ferris waited until I was reaching for his door before he pretended to turn the ignition and quickly turned it off again for a few more amps.
“I stood in front of his open truck door. ‘Why don’t you let me try it?’
“He says, ‘Okay, okay, okay, here we go now,’ and then he waited a few more seconds. He turned the key and it started.
“Without the generator working and with so little charge in the battery, which was running the truck by itself—which Ferris knew when he left Fort Collins—I knew I wasn’t necessarily out of the woods yet, though luckily nothing in the electrical system of my truck had been damaged. If they made it over the top of the ridge, it was downhill all the way to the junkheap, which was apparently now going to be a barnyard menagerie as well.
“I said, ‘Get the hell out of here while you’ve still got some battery.’ He nodded pleasantly and squinted at me. Even the ugly woman gives me a tiny squeak of a smile. She had been sitting there, still as a sphinx, stalled out in the backseat for a couple of hours at least, with the goats and horses and chickens in crates threatening to expire from heat stroke.
“Ferris put it in gear and began to grind his fantastic contraption up the grade toward the ridgetop. I made several deals with God before he made it. I had fallen in behind as the caboose of the unlikely train pulled by the little engine that I hoped to Christ could, and when we topped the ridge and the Ferris train begun to pick up speed on the downward grade I was sure relieved.