by Annie Proulx
The visit ended the next morning, with Vergil, before he drove away, looking straight into her eyes with sincerity and an expression that said he was a little confused and hurt about the way things had turned out (his pose of decent uprightness was a false impression for he went to prison a few years later after bilking the credulous residents of a blue-chip retirement home through his fraudulent investment company promising large returns on stocks in selected “environmentally sound corporations”), and Josephine saddled Oatmeal, a blue-marbled mare with varnish marks on her face, gaskins, stifle region and elbow, looked away from him and said, you bet, you bet. She told her parents she was going to stay on at the ranch to help Kenneth keep the stud books, and put up jam with Bette. Maybe she’d stay always, she told them, a daughterly reward for their decision to stay together after the slut’s baby died and Kenneth signed up for fidelity counseling.
(But that fall she married Matthew Handsaw, a six-foot-two rancher, another Vietnam veteran, originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, who suffered a grand mal epileptic seizure on their wedding night. She sat in a hospital waiting room reading Rabbit Is Rich, but fell asleep at page fifty-three. They became reclusive, and in a few years, when Handsaw was convinced the federal government was red-eyed out of control and a dark-skinned, bandy-legged United Nations takeover imminent, that a lack of school prayer had destroyed the American people’s moral sense, he sealed off the ranch with steel gates. Working together, they dug a series of bunkers and tunnels that grew into a ten-acre underground city with secret mole doors.)
“Bizitza hau iluna eta garratza da”
One June, on the last Saturday in the month, Fay, in knife-creased jeans, a pearl-buttoned shirt, silk neckerchief, lizardskin dress boots and a new gem belt, ground up Elk Leg Mountain in the late afternoon, the green accordion bouncing on the seat beside him, and his own concertina, cased and wrapped in a horse blanket, foursquare on the floor along with half a dozen bottles of fine Irish whiskey. He’d had the concertina a long time. The name “C. Jeffries” straggled along the wooden end. He had always thought this was the name of some waddy owner long sodded over, and he liked the instrument’s hard loud voice, the gold dolphins stamped around the frame, much worn but still leaping. He’d done his best with the old green accordion but didn’t know what to do about the stuck button and the ones that wouldn’t sound. He wasn’t handy in that finicking kind of way.
The Basques had been going all day, although the big dance platform laid out in the flowery meadow was empty, a few costumed dancers off to the side kicking their way through the incomprehensible figures of the jota, three or four musicians dressed up in smocks and berets and squashy shoes with crisscrossed lacings climbing their legs. They played old instruments, one piping on a txistu and rapping a tambouri at the same time, a stout man with a face as pocked as a waffle pumping the trikitixa, with its specially tuned reeds squeezing out “Zolloko San Martinak,” and behind a wagon, two men with sticks held upright in their hands, pummeling a resonant wooden plank with the butts of the sticks. He didn’t think the musicians were local people; maybe imported from Los Angeles.
Near the trees he saw trucks and jeeps parked randomly, people climbing in and out, a rope corral of horses. There was a delicious, smoky, greasy haze from the barbecue pits, men sat under awnings and open tents playing cards, women talked in a wash of music and nickering horses and human cries. The accumulated heat of the day loosened stiff faces, the aspens blurred in the heated air, the dust and the slanting mountain shadow.
He walked around for ten minutes, the accordion in his right hand, looking for Michel, the cousin of Javier, saw him finally half asleep, his wedge-shaped face down, sitting on an overturned box near the horses, one thigh roofed over the other, and smoking a roll-yer-own.
“Michel,” said Fay, coming up. The man looked up, got up, skinned his lips back from yellow teeth and twitched his head at Fay who followed him to a mud-crusted jeep. They set off on a steep track, the celebration falling away behind them. Michel said nothing, frowned steadily ahead, the coal of the cigarette burning near his lips. Fay lit his own cigarette, offered another to Michel who took it, stubbing the butt of the first on the dashboard. The track jerked up through lodgepole pines, descended into a saddle, climbed the flank of another slope and moved slowly toward a roadless inner range, the pitching crests and the great swell of earth and rock empty of human sign, the cries of swooping kestrels and the whistle of wind the sounds of the place. The whine of the jeep engine hit an alien subtone. The track disappeared and they were grinding over rocks, skirting boulders and scree, sagebrush and mountain mahogany scraping the sides of the jeep. Michel pointed away to the right and Fay strained his eyes, staring until he picked out the scattered boulders, which might be sheep.
Michel said nothing. Fay tried a bit of song, she wrang her hands and cried, but the track was too rough to sing, the words jolted out of his mouth, the tune shaken from under them. “Kind of place you want a horse, not a jeep.”
Michel nodded once, stopped. The sheep were still distant. Michel pointed straight up and to the right, his face tilted at the sky. There was a path. He avoided looking directly at Fay, settled back and closed his eyes.
“I’m waiting here,” he said. Already a small cloud of mosquitoes had formed around him.
“Not gonna be long,” said Fay, stepping into a weedy patch that gave out a scent of licorice, taking a piss before he started up. He slung the accordion over his shoulder with a rope loop and climbed, cursing and slipping in his boots. But it wasn’t far, a few hundred yards, a tight twist under a pair of boulders shaped like buttocks, and on a flange of flat-cropped meadow he saw Javier’s sheep wagon, the round top like a white can, the door open and Javier sitting on the sill cleaning his rifle. Up here the wind streamed, the grasses and purple lupine undulating, Javier’s shirt first billowing out and then plastering close to his body.
As Fay came up, Javier turned his face to the left, morose and shy from too many years alone in the mountains with the herds, his long oily nose gleaming. The dog under the wagon growled.
“Michel’s down in the jeep. Don’t you guys get along?”
“Get along good. Sometimes. He’s a-scared. He’s the reason I need that box. He left my old one on the front seat of the truck in the sun for five hours while he was gettin drunk. You should a seen it. Nothing to do but throw it out, all warped and the wax melted all over the inside. Anyway, he’s a sorehead. He’s the kind of guy thinks about how tough life is. He’s the sour type—nothing goes for him. That it?” He took the accordion, looked it over, grimacing at the painted devil and his worn flames.
“Nice place you got here. Lawn mowed pretty good. Garbage collection don’t seem so good though,” Fay said looking at the cairn of tin cans and bottles.
“Camp tender pick ’em up next time. He can drive up here, go around the back of that rock, down the east side. Michel brought you on the south.” He tossed a can of warm beer to Fay.
“You’re missing the big party, Javier. They tell me you’re the only Basque around still goes out with the sheep, everybody else hires Messicans and Peruvians. They tell me all the other sheep wagons are in museums or rich ranchers’ yards for decoration.”
“Yeah. I’m too old for it, too. Get antsy when I’m down there. Good enough for me up on the mountain, come down and get drunk with you sometimes. The old dog can’t change his tricks. Used to it. Don’t want to break no pattern. Got no ambition. Anyways, let’s look at this thing.” He kicked out his left leg as a brace, turned the green accordion in his hands. “Shit, it’s a mess.”
“I fixed the thumb strap, not much else.”
Javier looked at the big wood screw pinning down a loop of leather.
“You don’t want to go into cabinetmaking, your next career. Anyways, I can fool around with it. It’ll be all right for up here; you don’t want something good banging around the wagon. Yeah, I’m too old to be up here, but that’s why I’m up her
e. Too old to get into something else. Sheep’s all I know. I’ll go out with it. There won’t be no wool left in the world, all synthetics anyways.”
He scowled over the accordion, turning half away. He ran his finger over the scratched lacquer, cracked buttons, the metal eyes blind with rust, the ratty bellows with Fay’s duct tape over a hole, the grille gone, the finish worn away and in one end the faint letters of a French name though the wood had been sanded. He placed his stained, muscular hands in position, drew the bellows open slowly, slowly closed them. Again. He began to play, some of the notes silent or wheezing, another button sounding two notes at once. He sang in a husky mournful voice, a melody loose and wandering, sliding from note to note and slowly rising in pitch until it had left the beginning key far behind. “Ah, what a fine friend I have who brings me music, who comes up the mountain smoking his cigarette, eager to drink a Budweiser, leaving behind in the boulders a slippery fellow who owes me plenty, who is too weak to climb up to the song of this old angel—” and from below came Michel’s cry, a shrill warbling neigh that ended with a shriek too high for human ears to hear although the dog felt its pierce and yapped.
“Wait,” said Javier, disappearing into his wagon. He came out wearing a long strange necklace of small bones that hung almost to his knees.
“What is it, Ind’an?” said Fay.
“Nah, Basque, old-style Basque. I made it. My grandfather had one, but I’ll tell you the bastard ain’t satisfactory.” He hooked the forefinger of his left hand in the end of the necklace and pulled it taut in front of him. In his right hand he held a polished stick. He began to strike the small bones with the stick and a brittle, chill music, rapid and fragile, fell into the clear air. He sang softly, a plaintive tune in his tobacco-hoarsened voice: “Ah, bizitza hau iluna eta garratza da, this life is sad and bitter…”
“What is it made out of, bones?”
“Eagle. Meadowlark. Goose. Hawk. Sage grouse. Bird bones. Ten feet away you can’t even hear it.”
“You better keep it hid under your bunk. They’ll put you away for ten years for that eagle bone music.”
But Javier was looking at the tongue of cloud moving in from the west, curved veils of rain and hail falling on some distant place, sick of company and longing to be alone in the pearl hour of twilight, the time between dogs and wolves.
Fay shrugged and started down the track. He had a five-hour drive ahead of him before he got to Padraic’s place, old Padraic, who was all his family now. The Bascos weren’t the only ones who could have a party.
In the army
On a night of full moon in January 1863, sixteen-year-old Riley McGettigan, tightly made, with doll’s feet, had left the family croft, teeming with his half-wild sibs, and made his way to Galway where, in five nights, he was able to rob enough drunks to buy steerage passage to New York. The last sight for his sore, peat-smoked eyes was of a penitent leaning on a short stick and inching along the cobbled shore on bloody knees.
In the fabled city, penniless and famished, he tried the same robber’s work with some success for a month or two, then was caught and beaten but, through his captor’s gin-soaked inattention, escaped back into the streets where he joined in with a gang calling themselves Lads of Ireland, playing hot and heavy in the draft riots, joyously beating any blacks they caught, busy at three hangings and in the mob that set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. In late summer he accepted a sum of money to serve in the army in place of a Yankee hardware merchant’s son (how the Americans loved the cannon-fodder Irish during that war) and found himself with three dozen other paddies in Sherman’s army slogging through the south, a few of the half million who had come to get rich, not to die, and who ended their lives marching behind a drummer whose sticks might have been thighbones, following a banner that should have showed a death’s-head.
He marched from the defeat at Kennesaw Mountain down Georgia to the sea, singing a catchy rebel song, “The Rock Island Line,” and laughing at Sherman’s witty dispatch to President Lincoln, “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah,” learned to play a pennywhistle and liked the rough life well enough to reenlist after the war to fight Indians.
He married Mary Blunky, a poverty-hardened girl with red ears, drifting along in the wake of the Union Army, dreaming of husband and home, no matter how lousy. The husband she got, but, pregnant and terrified of Red Indians, she stayed east of the Missouri when Riley marched to Fort Phil Kearny on the Bozeman Trail in the autumn of 1866.
In December he was in the column that rode out under the bragging command of Captain Willy Fetterman to protect a wagon train of lumber coming from the pine groves eight miles away. Fetterman, steeped in the myth of white invincibility, rode willfully into a trap. A thin Indian boy fled just ahead of them, seemed scared to death, dodging and evading, but never opening the gap. This clumsy youth, this easy kill, led the galloping column off the trail and onto a ridge where the grass and boulders and gullies and brush suddenly vomited arrows, and a horde of ululating warriors, the decoy Crazy Horse now with them, dashed chopping forward with razory axes and hardwood cudgels, loosing hissing swarms of darts, and annihilated the column in twenty minutes. Riley McGettigan, nineteen, wondering at the brevity of life, swooned with an arrow in his neck.
(He was not dead. Hauled back to the fort by the nervous collectors of bodies, he was sent down the line to recover but, satiated with the Indian experience, escaped from the field hospital one moony night and made his way to Texas where he scrounged a poor living stealing cattle and in 1870 was caught red-handed by a rancher with a sense of humor. The rancher’s hands killed and skinned the cow, shot out Riley’s elbows and knees and sewed him up inside the animal’s skin, his head and feet protruding from each end of the stitchery, and left the arrangement in the sun, promising to come back in a month and buy him a drink. The hide shrank and dried in the heat of the day, tighter and tighter, while the nearby deliquescing carcass stank and attracted coyotes, their slavering and gnawing his night music, while in the beating day buzzards peppered the sky.)
Mary McGettigan did not marry again for four years though she bore three sons with the handy surname McGettigan in the period—Riley junior, then one who in the toddling age fell against the hot stove and died of the burns, and the youngest, who succumbed to cholera. Finally she moved to Dynamite, Montana, where she married Francis Dermot, a railway laborer who broke her heart singing “Beautiful Dreamer” in his delirious Irish tenor. On her in the next decades he begot four more sons and three daughters, all of whom survived and scattered across the continent, becoming wives and mothers, an assayer, a cardsharp who expired in a punitive barbwire corset, a muleteer, a railway laborer who wrote exquisite poetry on Sundays.
Fay’s old man
Riley junior, Fay McGettigan’s old man, was a hard-luck feller, the natural luck of a McGettigan, he said. He worked as a ranch hand and stayed single until he was forty when he had saved up enough to buy a dry, scabby ranch and lure a mail-order bride to him from Ireland, the seventeen-year-old orphan Margie, silent, hardworking, quick-tempered and a singer, especially of “The Snowy-Breasted Pearl,” accompanying herself on a tiny fingering diatonic she called a come-to-me-go-from-me. The gift she gave to her children was a taste for song, the human voice pitched against waving grass, four walls, a sky lowering on invisible chains. Whatever befell her or them the woman had a song coiled in her lung for it, knew hundreds of verses and hundreds of tunes, remembered every sung fragment she ever had heard, and had a quick knack for imitating birdcall. She could tell the name of an unseen horse by nicker, whinny or neigh, heard a windstorm approaching the day before it struck, harbored true pitch somewhere inside her like a lodestone, and wept in the street the first time she heard a phonograph, in 1921, playing a recording of tenor Tom Burke’s “If You’ll Remember Me.”
Her husband, Riley junior, was hard-willed, sought relief in drink, burned impatient with men, women, children and animals
; barely literate, he got seven children on Margie and one day in 1919 walked out of the house, mounted his good horse and rode into the sunset, leaving her with the foreclosure, a sucking baby, and a hundred twelve gaunt mortgaged cattle.
(He got as far as San Francisco where he was struck down by a touring Cadillac with an electric self-starter.)
Fay was eleven when the old man pulled out; the next child down the ladder was ten-year-old Padraic—the desperate boy, their mother called him. (He got the name when he was five years old and they took him to town for the first time. He was with his mother in the general store, he goggling at the objects hanging, standing, leaning, shelved, at the glassed myriad candies, when someone opened the door a little and a dog entered. Margie was examining a paper of needles, looking for one large-eyed enough to carry wool yarn, and a few feet away Padraic studied the candy jars in agonies of choice, a nickel heavy in his hand. The dog, unnoticed at first, staggered down the brown aisle, rolling its dry hard eyes, an edging of foam on its black lip. It slammed into a display, jostling oil-lamp chimneys, and at the glassy rattle the clerk looked up. “Oh godamighty, mad dog,” he cried and climbed onto the counter, his shoes slipping on some piled-up paper fans, hauling up the lady customer at hand. Padraic saw the dog as it marched past him but his mother did not turn until the dog, growling, seized her skirt in its champing jaws. She shrieked and stretched her hands to Padraic to lift him to safety. He thought she cried for his help and there was nothing for it, he wrestled the heavy octagonal jar of cinnamon red hots into his arms, came forward and crashed the candy jar onto the mad dog’s head. The dog fell to its side, dazed, its legs scrabbling until the clerk leaped down and bludgeoned it dead with a cane. The desperate boy was celebrated the length of the street and puked sugar all the way home, a pair of bloody dog’s ears in his pocket.)