‘Do we, ma’am?’
He meant this literally, did she know something he didn’t? He was baffled, but Mrs Horowitz was quick to pounce.
‘Don’t get fresh now. Spencer.’
‘I wasn’t. Sorry, ma’am.’
Mrs Horowitz sighed. She was expecting a child of her own in six months’ time and was frill of warm hormonal turmoil and good intentions. Spencer was a bright, sensitive boy and she wanted to do the right thing.
She bent over and looked kindly into his face, which was pink. ‘It’s okay. Spencer, I’m not mad at you. But try and keep that vivid imagination—’ here she tapped the side of his head with her finger ‘—for when you write in class.’
Spencer sensed imminent escape. ‘I will, ma’am.’
‘Very well. Your mother would be sad if she could hear you making things up about her, and I know you don’t want that.’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Good!’ She opened the door. ‘Now go find your friends, bell in five minutes.’
He needed no second bidding, and the exchange ceased to trouble him the instant it finished. Adults inhabited a different world, they had a different way of looking at things and one made allowances for that. Since he was by no means sure for what he had been reprimanded – he spoke only good of his mother and father after all, and his version was as likely to be true as anyone else’s – he didn’t stop telling the stories. But he made sure Mrs Horowitz didn’t find out. He liked school and didn’t want to rock the boat.
Spencer’s boyhood was safe, stable and grounded. Its day-to-day texture was made up of the small details and events, the worries and understandings and standoffs which were the stuff of most childhoods and which children assume will never change.
As a boy, no matter how much Mrs Horowitz ran the end of her pencil round the stateline on the map, Spencer thought of living ‘in Wyoming’ as one might of living ‘in comfort’ or ‘in ignorance’ or more like ‘in seventh heaven’ – it was not so much a state as a state of mind. This notion was underlined by his mother’s habit of customising British folksongs to fit. One was: ‘Wyoming, Wyoming, Wyoming’s been my ru-i-in . . .’ and another, ‘Roaming in Wyoming with my lassie by my side’. No, Wyoming was a condition for which there was no cure.
Like all good things he didn’t appreciate it till he was out of it. Till then it was just home. Parted from it, his head was full of its streaming heights and spaces, his heart ached for its gigantic and uncompromising beauty which made you and your family and your little town and tiny house feel like a fly on the hide of a grizzly.
Even Moose Draw, flanked as it was by soaring peaks, was six thousand feet up. In summer let alone winter your breath smoked before dawn. And summer was short, but gorgeous, heady with scent, the thick grasses topped with a waving surf of seedheads and aromatic with sagebrush and lavender, bright with Indian paintbrush and huge flathead daisies, more wildflowers than even Caroline could identify. In spring and in summer the lower slopes were hung with trembling silver-green curtains of aspen and larch, changeable as water. In winter they gave way to the opaque stands of lodgepole, fir and pine. Everywhere huge boulders like the corners of giant skeletons burst through the ground, scabbed with lichen red, yellow and black.
Winter was bitterly hard, brutally cold, by turns dazzling with ice and opaque with driving snow, always seeming interminable. At the end of each winter everyone always said it was the longest they could remember, but only because they chose not to remember the last.
Whatever, Spencer McColl was brought up in Wyoming and it could never be got out of him.
* * * * *
As a sideline to McColl’s Mercantile Mack ran a highly informal machinery repair business. No job too big or too small. At any given time the earth lot at the side of the store would accommodate, as well as crates of goods beneath tarpaulins and on wooden pallets, and Mack’s beat-up Dodge, a collection of jobs in progress ranging from tractors to lawn mowers, and there was generally a sewing machine or some such in the kitchen as well. Mack could fix, things, and he fixed them well and cheaply, but it was best not to be in a hurry. Like the farm machines, he was strong and sound but slow-moving. It was plain that Mack was a good man in every sense, but Spencer cherished the notion of his birth father as a far more exotic bird, someone of wide horizons and boundless possibilities urgently embraced – a fantasy which Caroline’s reserve on the subject did nothing to dispel.
On the birthday in question Spencer hung around the kitchen, watching his mother wash the dishes. She did this as as she did everything, with a swift precision, her pretty hands with their slightly upturned fingertips darting like a couple of birds over their task. She glanced over her shoulder, smiled, and tweaked a checked cloth off the wooden rail, tossing it gently to him so that it landed on his head.
‘There you are, birthday boy – if you like it so much you can join in.’
He pulled the cloth off his head with a sheepish grin and began drying. His mother started to sing. Not to herself but openly, in her thin, true voice that reminded him of spring water. An English song: ‘ “Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, I heard a maiden sing in the valley below . . .” ’
It was Spencer’s cue to join in, and he did so. His voice was just on the cusp, it gave a yodelling quality to his singing which would have embarrassed him in any other context, but here and now not at all. They were like a flute and a bagpipe together.
‘ “ . . . how could you use a poor maiden so?” ’
By the time they’d done two verses and choruses the washing up was finished. It was eight o’clock and the store was already open. They could hear Mack talking to a customer, and that reminded them that they too must have been heard, and they giggled together. No matter how busy the store was, every transaction was accompanied by measured conversation. In a town where a regular customer could live a hundred miles away these exchanges reaffirmed and informed, and were as much part of the currency as the cash changing hands.
Caroline dried her hands. ‘So what are you going to do today?’
‘I dunno.’ He said it not dismissively, but with a sense of many choices.
‘Fishing?’ She smiled. She and Mack had given him a new rod, a proper one.
‘I will do soon,’ he promised. He was a little nervous of the rod.
‘Don’t worry, we shan’t be offended. It’s there for you to use when you feel like it. When you’re in the mood.’
‘Thanks, Mom. It’s great.’
‘We’re glad you like it. Anyway, your time’s your own, isn’t that nice?’
It was nice, but he still didn’t rush. This was a strange time of year in Moose Draw: like his voice, betwixt and between. Oftentimes they got their worst weather now, with heavy snowfalls, and this morning though sun glinted off Phelan’s trader in the side lot there was plenty of white stuff on the shoulder of the mountains six miles away. The little streams were gurgling and swollen but shards and crusts of ice clung to the ragged banks. In the day it could be seventy degrees, but Caroline kept the range and the fires lit. She told Spencer that in England the spring was earlier, but then the winters weren’t so cold nor the summers so hot. There were even flowers that sprouted right through the snow. Sometimes Spencer thought he detected something wistful in her look or voice when she said these things, but she always concluded with: ‘But this is a great country,’ or something like it.
At a quarter after eight Caroline went through into the store to help Mack and Spencer put on his jacket and went out to the shed to fetch his bike. They’d understand about the rod – he’d go another time with Joel and the others, or Mack would take him on a Sunday – but for now he wanted to get up the canyon to his lookout place and dream a few dreams.
He set off down Main Street at a leisurely pace, savouring his freedom. Past Mad Molly’s bar with its ‘Molly welcomes hunters’ sign in the window; past the gas station with its single pump where Aubrey Rankin, the proprietor’s fathe
r, sat in the window watching out for customers; past the saddlery and farrier’s; round the corner by the doctor’s house, the drugstore and the mineral parlour, conveniently grouped together; a discreet distance to the church, whose clockwork bell chimed the half hour with a snatch of ‘Frère Jacques’ as he pedalled past.
Then he was on the open road, humming along on the new tarmacadam. He speeded up, making the most of it until the good surface ran out. On either side were a scattering of small farmhouses with their attendant clutter of sheds and traders and animals – most had a dog or two, on guard but too well trained to bark or run into the road. He passed the ‘Moose Draw, Population 623’ sign: it had a friendly moose outlined above the words, but from this direction it was just a weird wooden shape, the antlers like a big bow perched on top.
The road began gradually to climb – gently at first but enough to make Spencer find another rhythm – and as it did so the character of the land on either side rose with it. You couldn’t see any of the really big properties – the Firth place, or the Buttroses’, or Kenwright the Coal King’s palace with its fancy tower – they were still miles away, and protected from public view by majestic drives as long as highways, and processions of great gates. Spencer only knew they were there because Mack had pointed them out to him when they were driving down the mountain road, each one like a private kingdom. But here and there you could make out a flash of smart white fencing in the distance that marked the perimeter of some fancy spread or other.
And it was where the horses began. Spencer himself had never been on a horse, but this was horse country and they were as much a part of the landscape as the longhorn cows, the cottonwoods and the prairie dogs. And these were some horses – pampered beauties, bred to make money and for the kind of riding that the residents of Moose Draw never saw, and could scarcely imagine: polo, racing, drag hunting. Caroline had told Spencer that many of these horses were thoroughbreds from England or Ireland, or their descendants, and changed hands for more money than the Mercantile made in a year. Spencer slowed down slightly to admire a bunch that were close enough to see. They treated his interest with the disdain it deserved – only one looked up, briefly, and then continued with its unhurried grazing, a process by which they idled across their thousands of acres of lush grass like expensive yachts on the open sea.
Another mile and he turned off down the dirt road for Bucks Creek Canyon. He was sweating but this was the good part now, a bone-shaking couple of miles through ruts and potholes and across two shallow streams to reach his objective.
By comparison with the great clefts and gulleys that thrust fingers of darkness into the base of the Gannon mountain range, Bucks Creek was a tame, baby canyon hardly worthy of the name, but it was a natural playground for the kids of the area and the mouth of the canyon was the site of a dude ranch, the eponymous Buck’s, of unparalleled size and splendour. Spencer had been there with Mack to make deliveries, and considered that everything about it – the gate, the sign, the fencing, the thirty cabins ‘with every modern convenience’, the outbuildings converted into rooms for dining and dancing and the large white two-storey house from which Buck Jameson ran the operation – was the height of glamour. Caroline had pointed out with a hint of coolness that he must remember that Buck’s was a sort of toy ranch, a pretend place for rich people to come and play at being cowboys, and that therefore it wasn’t to be taken too seriously – though of course McColl’s Mercantile was glad to have the business. Business notwithstanding, Mack was even less approving, hinting darkly at play which extended beyond what was decent and respectable. Spencer sensed another adult undertow which he couldn’t begin to understand.
The bridlepath to the canyon had a right of way across the corner of Buck’s land in back of the cabins. There wasn’t much to see at this time of the year, the season hadn’t started properly and there were no guests except presumably for the famous but hard-drinking writer who overwintered here every year: Spencer had never seen this mysterious figure, and there was no sign of him now, but a couple of hired hands were fixing guttering and they gave Spencer a nod as he bumped past.
On the far side of Buck’s ground he got off his bike, pushed through the small gate at the side of the five-bar and propped the bike on the fence. As soon as he began to walk he heard a solitary deep ‘woof’ of greeting and waited for Tallulah to catch up to him.
‘Hi, Lula, good girl, come on then!’
Their mutual greeting was ecstatic. Tallulah was a black labrador who lived up at the house and although Spencer knew she was free with her favours and welcomed every hiker with the same exuberance it was still good to receive this warm, buffeting, slobbering embrace and to see her running ahead, tail waving, his dog for the next few hours. Mack had a collie called Kite, a wall-eyed one-man bitch who guarded the side lot and rode around in the back of the Dodge, but she wasn’t what you’d call fun. Tallulah was the indulged pet not just of the Jameson house but of the ranch guests and all the hikers who came this way. Tallulah’s role in life was to enjoy herself and (though she didn’t know it) to help other people do the same. From her slippery black nose to the tip of her springy tail she was a canine good-time girl.
She trotted along some fifteen yards ahead of Spencer, turning now and then to check on his progress. At this point the track was still broad, and the river burbling alongside at a steady pace, but after a while the path began to climb and the river gulch to narrow and deepen, squeezing the water between its walls. Its fluctuating rushing sound was what Spencer liked, it cut him off from everything else, he became a silent boy with a silent dog, in a separate world.
That was the second stage. After that you reached a kind of natural platform overlooking the creek, the precipitous forested slope on the far side, and the no less steep but more welcoming prospect further up where the path parted company with the creek to cut across a broad meadow scattered with smooth, bedded-down boulders.
Tallulah waited on the outlook, standing with her forepaws on the rocky outcrop like a heroic dog in a movie. She didn’t fool Spencer. The minute he caught up and sat down by her she stopped being heroic and began nudging and jostling – this was where hikers stopped for a bite. All Spencer had in his coat pocket was the remains of a packet of hard gums, but he shared them with the dog, who swallowed them whole.
Five minutes later he got up and trudged on. You sometimes came across other kids up here, and ranch guests and hunters in their due season, but he was glad it was deserted today. He began to sing, somewhat disjointedly because of his heavy breathing, another of his mother’s English songs: ‘ “The water is wide, I cannot get o’er. And neither have I wings to fly . . .” ’ The song made him think of a vast expanse like the Mississippi, which he’d learned about, or the Atlantic Ocean, but Caroline had said it was about a regular English river, scarcely more than a stream or a little lake, and that it was really more about the difficulties of loving someone you couldn’t reach. He believed her, though he didn’t quite get it.
Up on the meadow he continued to climb towards his special place, saving it up, not looking back till he got there, while Tallulah described a series of elliptical circles across the path in front of him.
He stopped when he reached the stone beneath the lone pine. He’d first come across it one hot afternoon when he’d flopped down in the shade of the only tree on this high meadow. Otherwise he might always have missed it, for it wasn’t conspicuous, just a slab of rock, twelve inches high, smooth on either side, its top edge left rough and unworked, bedded in the ground. But the writing on it was engraved clear and true, the work of a craftsman: ‘To Lottie, 1900–1921, who loved this place best’. He’d sprung up in alarm, spooked at the idea he’d been lying on a grave. But when he’d mentioned it to his parents Caroline told him that it was only a memorial, a stone to remember someone by, and that there were lots of them around Buck’s because of all those rich people who came to escape from the city.
‘So they didn’t die there?�
�� he asked.
Mack shook his head. ‘No, but they sure would have liked to have done.’
Spencer couldn’t imagine liking to die anywhere, let alone at the age of twenty-one, but it was a relief to know that Lottie’s bones weren’t lying beneath the turf on the high meadow. Since then he’d formed a kind of friendship with the stone, and made a point of going to look at it when he passed. After all, if Lottie wanted to be remembered it was right that somebody should.
It was while he was standing by the stone, reflecting on Lottie and chewing a hard gum, that Tallulah’s ears went up and she stood very still, indicating that they weren’t alone.
‘What’s up, girl?’
It was a riderless chestnut horse, standing about twenty yards to his left, clearly as surprised as they were, and in the same attitude as Tallulah – motionless but alert, ready for flight. Spencer could feel the thread of nervous tension between the two animals. The horse snorted and Tallulah sat, with a small whine, shifting her front feet.
‘Hey . . .’ Spencer turned slowly. ‘Where did you come from?’
The horse nodded its head, kind of mock fierce, and its fancy bit rattled. The rein was slewed way over its neck, threatening to catch its leg if it moved suddenly. Also, there was the question of the rider. Spencer’s free morning was suddenly clouded by a whole pile of scary decisions.
The first thing would seem to be to catch the horse. Though Spencer had no direct experience with horses he was used to seeing them around, and the way other people handled them. This wasn’t a big horse like the thoroughbreds he saw from the road, but it was pretty, with a long pointy mane like a shawl, and a tail that almost brushed the ground.
He took a single careful step and it was like trying to catch a grasshopper – the horse shied as if stung, Tallulah jumped up and barked, the horse skittered a few yards further away and stood with its back to them, blowing nervously.
The Grass Memorial Page 7