The Meadow

by James Galvin

  He liked Homer, Tolstoy, Dickens, stories “about people’s doin’s.” He hated Dostoyevski and Faulkner. About the former he remarked, irritated, “All them people is nuts.” About Faulkner: “If that sumbitch wants to tell me a story why don’t he start it at the beginning and tell it through to the end?” He liked James Wright: “Me and him get along.”

  One of his main interests was religion and theology, though he subscribed to no doctrine. He’d read the subject through from the fundamental to the occult. He was curious about the kinds of answers given by people who thought they had answers. He himself had none, but he always gave others the benefit of the doubt, from Jesuits to Sikhs, and he was always disappointed.

  When zealous fundamentalist missionaries of various stripes found out there was this old man way back up on Sheep Creek whose soul needed saving and who wouldn’t slam the door in their faces but would actually invite them in for coffee, there was a big run on Lyle’s soul. Ray was dead by then or they surely would have worked him over, too. The Pillar of Fire, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Nazarenes, and Mormons—all sent delegations the fifty miles up the mountain from Collins and were greeted warmly and without prejudice by the old “hermit” who lived in the emerald valley and whose eyes were the color of the farthest peaks you could see from the ridge top.

  Lyle listened with limitless patience to their Bible quotes and what they thought it all meant. Then he asked them a few lethal questions that sent them scurrying through the pages of their pamphlets hunting for the scripture that might save them. It always ended with the prophets unnerved and Lyle disappointed because he wanted answers and wasn’t getting any.

  The Watchtower started coming in the mail and the Witnesses sent him a rescue team of three pretty women; the oldest forty and the youngest fourteen. They brought him sweet rolls and they giggled a lot and they sure hoped he’d drive down country one day before it was too late and have his soul saved by Reverend So and So. When they left Lyle said, “What a waste of perfectly all right womanflesh.”

  Then the Pillar of Fire started in on him, reading their pamphlets and claiming that they had the word of God and no one else did, which pricked Lyle’s curiosity. He asked them what they thought of Mormons, and they replied, “Oh, that’s just a cult.”

  Then Lyle said, “Now wait a darn minute. You say you have the word of God from Moses, who was a Jew that went up on that mountain and brought down the Ten Commandments, right?” Nods all around.

  “Well, Joseph Smith found the golden tablets and showed them to his people the same way, and they are no more gone than Moses’ tablets, and Joseph Smith said that was the word of God, so what’s the difference? The word of God came to Mohammed and told him it was all right to prey on the caravans, which he done, so what’s the difference?”

  He asked a number of questions that were beyond their frame of reference. Finally, more as a last-ditch strategy than out of goodwill, they asked Lyle if he’d ever been baptized. Lyle said he didn’t know, which he didn’t. They started in on him to go down to Sheep Creek right now to make sure.

  Lyle said he wouldn’t go because he wasn’t convinced of anything. “And besides,” he said, “if I am already baptized I sure don’t want a dunk in that ice water for nothing.” He stubbed out his cigarette and said, “You know, that water comes right out of the bottom of the reservoir, and it’s not much warmer than the snow it’s made from.” He smiled wide, showing them the gold linings in his teeth. He said, “That water is so cold, Preachers, it’d make your old balls draw up to where you’d never find ’em again.” And he just kept smiling as they swept up their pamphlets, bobbed a hurried thanks for coffee, and fled.

  It still rankled Lyle, though, how much time he’d spent with them, and how frustrating they were to talk to, how they seemed to have no real affection for the truth. The next day he told me all about it and said, “You know, if heaven is filled with them dummies, I’d just as soon go down to hell and be with Raymond.”

  My wife showed Lyle pictures of the house where we’d lived for a while in Italy. Lyle wanted to know about the wall around the Umbrian hilltop town. Was there mortar in it originally? Jorie said she didn’t know, but she didn’t guess so. Lyle said, “That’s strange, because by the eleventh century the Roman mortaring techniques had made their way up as far north as Umbria.”

  There was no need to check on it.

  My friend Billy Embree’s family used to own the Mountain Meadow Ranch on the Laramie River. It’s just a dude ranch now, but Billy’s grandfather had homesteaded it, and when we were kids it was still in his family. The foreman was a man named Arch McLean. Arch only had a thumb and two fingers on his right hand. He made a point of shaking hands with us kids every chance he got.

  Summers we horsebacked through the big meadows and up the draws at the base of Jelm Mountain. We fished in the Laramie River; we massacred jackrabbits with our .22s. But we also liked being treated like men. We wanted to learn to be good hands.

  So when Arch went out to build fence or check the herd, we went with him. It was before they sprayed the Laramie River, and the damned mosquitos were so thick between mid-June and the first of August, it was hard to hear above their drone. If you didn’t wear a bandana over your mouth and nose you were going to breathe a lot of them. Billy and I drenched ourselves in 6-12 repellent, which seemed to have a mild deterrent effect, but Arch never used it. He said, “Billy, what would your grandfather say if he saw you smearing that sissy-ass perfume on you?”

  Arch had somehow transcended mosquitos. Out building fence one day, setting cedar posts and stretching wire, we tried to help him but had to retreat to the cab of the pickup every so often to get away from the insects that covered us with welts despite bandanas, bug dope, and denim shirts buttoned all the way up and all the way down.

  Arch kept up a steady pace without ever bothering to brush them away. He didn’t cover his nose and mouth. They never bit him, either, as far as I could tell, just landed on him. That day, working the spud bar, you couldn’t see an inch of flesh beneath his hat. His face was a mask of gray wings.

  App sits in the open doorway of the claim shack with his bum leg in the sun, slowly rubbing it up and down and thinking. It is only the first of March, but when the sun shines with no wind it is always hot. App thinks his swollen, stiffened leg is like a tree trunk that the early spring warmth will draw the sap up into.

  As he sits in the doorway hour after hour he tries to make himself remember only the good things, tries for a little warmth in his soul. He’d started out pretty strong, as strong and capable as any man. He’d had a beautiful young wife, a green mountain ranch, children, cattle, horses, hay, and he’d lost it, or most of it, just by trying to hang on. He’d married a second time, but the hard luck dogged him and the doctor bills and lean years ended up taking everything he’d dreamed and found and built, except for his three boys.

  He tries to concentrate on the early days, before the run of hard winters and disease. In those days he used to wake each morning feeling completely indestructible. The good green memories, those warm winter sunshine memories make him smile in the sunlight with his eyes closed, and he can see the moving pictures of the times they made love down by the flume he’d built to irrigate the patch of meadow on the far side of the creek. Right out in the open sunshine in the greenness of all the different kinds of grasses that still grew in that meadow. They could hold hands and run buck naked through all that green with no way in hell anyone was going to see them cutting up like damn fool kids. But it was living that far away that killed her, App thinks, that sent her farther away yet, like she is now, only reachable in memories and dreams.

  The smile has left his face and he opens his eyes and looks down at the lumber his leg has become, sticking out the front door into the barren sunshine, and he looks down at the legs of his wooden chair sunk slightly into the dirt floor of the claim shack that isn’t his, that is built on a strip of land between two borders that two states refused
to claim, and he thinks of the cold cellar dark out back, hung with jerked venison, and with a small hill of blind potatoes. He bakes six each morning in the coals of the heater and gives two to each of his boys as they leave in the Model-T for school, to warm their hands until they get there and to eat for lunch.

  Suddenly a little breeze picks up and makes App shiver, then a small cloud covers the sun and chills him through. He starts to think of the time on Sheep Creek when he told Marie to wait supper for him, when three feet of snow had fallen during the night and it was just the end of October. He still had cows up near Bull Mountain. Most of them were smart enough to come down when it snowed, but not all. He decided to ride out and bring the stragglers down.

  The horse’s belly dragged in the snow, but it was a light, dry powder. The horse was strong and plowed through the drifts with his head down like a doubtless pilgrim. App’s boots were making their own runnels alongside the horse’s big furrow. The weather seemed like it would hold clear and cold, and he didn’t notice that his feet were frozen by the time he made it up to the big meadow on Sand Creek where he expected to find his strays. They were nowhere to be seen so he pushed on when he should have turned home. His legs were numb all the way to his knees before he realized they were cold. So intent had he been, scanning the hypnotic white ridges and draws for his stock, that it was near dark before he knew that he’d gone too far, that he was in trouble.

  His horse was still strong, but they were too far from any timber to build a fire, the snow was deep, and he could not feel anything from the waist down.

  He rode into an arroyo and up the other side. He saw a young antelope, not yet a yearling, separated from the herd somehow, standing above him on a high spot of ground. She was unable to go anywhere, unable to reach the grass beneath the snow anymore, so played out and exposed that she just stood there shivering like a wet dog on the back porch, looking right at App, too tuckered out to run or show any fear.

  App rode slowly up to the antelope child. Since he could not dismount any more than the antelope could run, he dropped the loop of his lariat over the antelope’s neck and hoisted her up onto the saddle and laid her across his legs like a lamb. Then he turned his horse for home. His legs thawed out some because of the critter on his saddle, and the antelope decided she liked it better where she was now than where she was before. She never struggled when App carried her into the house after midnight and laid her in his wife’s lap.

  The antelope that App figured had saved his life got named Misty. She hardly went out of the cabin that winter, but lapped up pans of sugared milk and ate hay from Marie’s hand. Misty slept on a blanket next to the stove. By spring she was going outside to graze on the new shoots of grass making their way up through the sagebrush, and she knew to come when called by name.

  That summer they left her outside nights. She’d bed down and disappear in the sage until Marie said her name. Then she’d spring up, long-legged and skittish, and bounce up to lick the salt from Marie’s palm.

  When the antelope herded up that fall, App wondered what Misty would do. She went with them. One morning the following summer, though, Marie said an antelope ewe with twins at her side came strangely near the cabin, sniffed, and kind of perked up when Marie called “Misty” and held out her hand. Then she bolted and ran with the two miniatures of herself zigzagging and playing tag like two kites she was trying to get to fly.

  The Overland Stage ran up from Fort Collins, through Virginia Dale, to Tie Siding, where it veered west to the Wooden Shoe and on up north for the Pass.

  Jack Slade kept the roadhouse at Virginia Dale. As stationmaster he always knew when there was money on board and, of course, when the stage was due to arrive. He’d saddle a new fast horse, of which he kept several, supplied by an outfit on Sheep Creek that wasn’t exactly buying them first. He’d trot down to Owl Canyon, where the stage had to snake through a narrow sandstone canyon on a steep upgrade. With a bandana covering his face dime-novel-style, Slade would leap aboard the passing coach from the overhanging rocks. He would come up on the drivers from behind, armed, tell them to whoa and not turn around. He would relieve the coach of its hazard of cash and jump down to disappear into the rocks. He then retrieved his mount and rode hell for leather back to Virginia Dale on a side trail he’d worked out. By the time the stage pulled into the station, shouting the news, Slade had his feet propped up on the porch rail and would take it all in with feigned astonishment. His horse was cooling down in the barn. Slade pulled that trick regularly over a number of years, letting most of the cash get through for appearance’s sake and not wanting to overgraze his pasture. He finally retired out of boredom.

  Not that Jack Slade was funny. After he left here he went to Julesburg where he tied a man to a corral fence and shot him in the groin and both knees and left him. No one knows why.

  The old town of Tie Siding was right on the Union Pacific track, seventeen miles southeast of Laramie, seven miles north of the Colorado line. The Boulder Ridge Road runs southwest from Tie Siding about twenty miles up into Colorado. It was a major logging road that the UP’s oxen and tie wagons made when the tracks first came through. They cut the ties up here to put on flatcars at Tie Siding, using the track they’d already built to supply construction into the tieless prairie northward and westward. The railroad kind of built itself like that, sending roadroots into the timber, budding railroad flowers like Tie Siding, sending out new branches, drawing nourishment along its length. Ties from Boulder Ridge and rails from Pennsylvania, our timber sent up to bed new track as far as Rock Springs.

  Once the railroad finished growing itself, Tie Siding started to die. When Ray started school, the school was the only building not boarded up. The town had once sported three saloons and two whorehouses. When Ray was in second grade they built a new Tie Siding about a mile away, on the old stage trail, which had become U.S. Highway 287, connecting Laramie and Fort Collins, and they moved the school, too.

  Miss Gunnerson became Tie Siding’s schoolmistress around 1927 when the town was still by the tracks. Pat Sudeck was homesteading on top of the ridge, and Lyle Van Waning was a five-year-old playing in the dirt on the floor of a sod house. Miss Gunnerson was the only teacher Ray ever had.

  She also ran the post office and pumped gas. Until she left, sometime in the sixties, she was Tie Siding, living there alone in that cluster of small white buildings, like woodchips washed up from a lake of sagebrush, ringed all around by distant mountains. Ray said she was always too nice to punish anyone. She got the rowdy ranch kids to behave by shaming them into it. I never asked what became of Miss Gunnerson. I just wonder what it must have been like for her to leave after forty years of giving children their lessons in the wind.

  One year the Worster boys never went to school because the ridge stayed open all winter. Ordinarily, though, there was plenty of foul weather to go to school in. It was just that they didn’t start till December and would be back on the mountain swinging their axes by April. App would put them back to work whenever there was a spell of fine weather. Ray quit the eighth grade when he got too big for the desks.

  In October of 1958 Ray donated a new coat of stucco to the schoolhouse. The men who volunteered to help from the nearby ranches were mostly Ray’s old schoolmates, now wind-parched cowboys in their thirties. Waiting for a load of sand they stood around smoking and chewing and drinking coffee out of thermos lids. They were joking and arguing about who used to whip whose ass when they were boys in school. Ray allowed as how none of them would tease Jack about being harelipped now. Indeed, Jack had grown bigger and stronger than any of them, but it wasn’t that alone that put respect in their voices when they talked about him. They were grown men now. Their lives were not easy. Now they shared something more than the world’s largest supply of sagebrush and wind.

  Ray said, “I bet Jack could lift a thousand pounds.”

  The joking turned serious and bets were made. The next thing Jack was picking up sacks of cement. He hel
d two sacks pinched between his legs. They started handing him more and loading him down, two sacks under each arm. Then he bent over so they could stack cement sacks on his back. They put four sacks on his back. That was it. He held it, a thousand pounds.

  Jack let the sacks fall to the ground, then he straightened, smiling, and said, “How was that, Raymond?”

  Ray dragged his sleeve across his eyes.

  Till the day he died Ray never missed an opportunity to sing for an audience, never mind being blind drunk and unable to make it all the way through any given song without forgetting the words. He had a clear, strong voice, a good range. Ray always sang from the heart, no artifice. Pete fiddled, Jack harmonized. I believe the only reason they never went professional was because no one outside Laramie in the late thirties and early forties had heard of them, and they’d never heard of themselves either. It never occurred to them that they might make the big time with the backward kind of cowboy swing they played, so they played saloons and barn dances on weekends.

  For ten years it was a party every Saturday at my father’s house, Pat’s third cabin, starting when the Worsters moved in over at the reservoir, which was the summer Hazel died.

  Two or three months after his mother died, and he’d got his grieving somewhat done (he was exactly fifty then), Lyle went through a period of jubilant freedom most people get done with before they are twenty. But Lyle never had the chance before, so he quietly went happy-haywire for about three years.

  The first thing Lyle did after he buried his mother was buy a motorcycle from a kid in town. It was during the fuel shortage, and Lyle said he’d save money by running his fences and ditches and visiting neighbors on the Suzuki 150 instead of always taking the truck, which was true enough, but it never fooled anybody.