by Annie Proulx
Growing up, Wyatt Match had been given every advantage. He had good horses from the time he could walk, trips abroad, hand-tooled boots. He went to an eastern prep school and then the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation he came back to Wyoming with one or two ideas about agricultural progress and tried too soon to get into the legislature when the times favored conservative, frugal ranchers as political leaders, not spendthrift rich men, a label his father’s private golf course had burned into an envious population. Over the years he had become a sharp-horned archconservative with a hard little mind like a diamond chip. After his youthful start flirting with useless ideas sown by the eastern professors, he had dedicated himself to maintaining the romantic heritage of the nineteenth-century ranch, Wyoming’s golden time. Descended from Irish stock, he had a milky skin that flamed with sunburn, and his ginger hair had turned a saintly white. His pride was a blue neon sign—MATCH RANCH—near his monstrous post-and-lintel gate large enough to be the torii of a Shinto shrine. After years of trying he had finally made it into the state legislature. Local people were used to seeing his dusty Silverado bulge out onto the road and pass them on the right, throwing up a storm of gravel.
There was a tinge of superiority in all that he said, even in meaningless comments about weather. Match seemed to indicate that blizzards, windstorms, icy roads and punishing hail were for other people; he moved in a cloud of different, special weather. In the days when he was trying to push his way into the legislature with his radical ideas, a well-respected older rancher took him aside and told him, stressing his words, that Wyoming was fine just the way it was. Gradually he learned the truth of that statement.
His political value increased after he married Debra Gale Sunchley, a fifth-generation Wyoming ranch woman, a hard worker with a built-in capacity for endurance who dressed in crease-ironed jeans, boots and an old Carhartt jacket. The first Sunchley had come to Wyoming with the 11th Ohio Volunteers to fight Indians after the Civil War. Stationed at Post Greasewood on the North Platte, he deserted, hid out with a Finn coal mining family in Carbon and eventually married one of the daughters, Johanna Haapakoski.
Debra Gale Sunchley Match was secretary-treasurer of the Cow Belles, and member of the Christian Women’s Book Circle. The Book Circle, always striving to do good and become better, favored memoirs by old cowboys and ranchers who personified grit and endurance. Debra Gale had read no more than ten books in her life but knew she had as much right as anyone to give her opinion. After Wyatt divorced her to marry Carol Shovel, whom he had met on a California golf vacation, Debra Gale and her brother Tuffy Sunchley stayed on as joint ranch managers. Match built his ex-wife her own house on the property, a simple one-story ranch with a big shed for her nine dogs. He paid her a wage. She was a good worker and he wasn’t going to let her go.
As Dakotah grew up the Lister ranch staggered along, Bonita making ends meet, worrying about money and Verl’s health. The only free time she had was kneeling at the side of the bed saying her prayers, asking for strength to go on and for her husband’s well-being.
“Don’t let yourself get old before your time,” she said impatiently to Verl who seemed to look forward to old age. It took half an hour in the morning for him to limber up his joints. It irritated her that the child, Dakotah, had little interest in riding or rodeo, resisted 4-H meetings. Bonita could always think of some task or job for the girl, whether collecting eggs, picking over beans or discovering the section of broken fence where the cows got out. Scraping the burned toast for Verl was the most hated task. Verl insisted on toast but would not part with the money for a toaster.
“My mother made good toast on the griddle. It come already buttered,” he said. Bonita often burned the toast as she tried to cook eggs and hash, forgetting the smoking bread. Dakotah rasped the charcoal into the sink with a table knife.
Once, moved by some filament of need for affection, Dakotah tried to hug Bonita, who was scrubbing potatoes in the sink. Bonita briskly shoved her away. Once in a while Dakotah wandered around the ranch on foot, usually heading for the steep pine slope with a tiny spring, the ground littered with old grey bones from a time when a mountain lion had her den beneath a fallen tree. Bonita herself never went for a walk, a wasteful dereliction of duty. She worked spring branding with the men and still managed dinner for all hands, was again on a horse at November sale time overseeing the cows prodded into cattle trucks with Swiss-cheese sides while Verl cut winter wood in the forest. Verl walked nowhere, was always in his truck when he wasn’t in the reclining chair he favored. He would come into the house and sigh.
“Well, I had me some luck today,” he would say in his plaintive voice.
She waited. This might be one of his slow unwinding stories that went nowhere, wasted her time.
“Filled up the gas can, got up there in the woods and damned if the can hadn’t tipped over and spilled out all the gas.”
Yes, it was. He was speaking in his portentous, I’ve-got-grave-news voice. She nodded, scraped carrots, making the orange fiber fly. She was still in her red pajama bottoms, had pushed the heifers out of the east pasture, mended a broken section of fence, got the mail, fed the bum lambs and was now cooking dinner. There had been no time to pull on a pair of jeans. She wasn’t going to town anyway.
“And then I got to workin awhile and the chain broke.”
“Well, you surely had problems.” Once, oppressed by Verl’s self-pitying complaints, she had considered poisoning him. But they carried no insurance and how she could manage alone she didn’t know and gave up the idea. Then, too, she never forgot the joyous winter when they were courting, the long freezing drive in from the ranch in a truck with a broken heater to meet him at the Double Arrow Café. Her teeth chattering, she would walk from the snowy street into the wonderfully hot and noisy bar, Russ Eftink punching G5 again and again to make “Blue Bayou” play continuously, and Verl, the tough handsome cowboy, slouching across the room toward her and pulling her into the music. Into the pot went the carrots and she started on potatoes with an ancient peeler that had been in the kitchen since Verl’s great-grandmother’s day. The wood handle had broken away decades earlier. Most of her kitchen tools were old or broken—an eggbeater with a loose handle bolt that fell into the mixture, a chipped and rusted enamel colander, warped frying pans and spoons worn to the quick.
His voice lifted. “And my chest didn’t hurt today the way it done yesterday.”
“Uh-huh.” She rinsed the potatoes and cubed them so they would cook faster.
“I supposed to go see her, that doctor, tomorrow mornin at ten minutes before eight. I don’t know if I should now. Seein it didn’t hurt today.”
“Well, Verl, it might a been a matter a luck, don’t you think? That it didn’t hurt and you workin so hard.”
He squinted at her, trying to tell if she was being sarcastic. “It’s just I don’t want a leave you all alone, and me dead of a heart attack,” he said sanctimoniously.
She said nothing.
“So I guess I better go.” It was what he’d intended to do from the beginning.
Wyatt Match thought Verl Lister’s dilapidated place gave Wyoming ranchers a slob name. He personally thanked heaven that Lister was not on the main road. He often quoted Robert Frost’s line “good fences make good neighbors” without understanding the poem or the differences of intent between those who made fences of stone and those who used barbed wire. He had picked the Listers to criticize, and whether it was Verl’s work habits or the way he never looked straight at anyone except in the left eye, or Bonita’s aqua rayon pantsuit, Wyatt Match made them out to be the county fools. In truth, Verl Lister’s cows were wild and rough because they were rarely worked; they suffered parasites, hoof rot, milk fever, prolapses and hernias; they were shot by rifle and bow and arrow, they fell on tee-posts, ate wire, coughed and snuffled, fell into streams and drowned. Verl referred to Match as “him and his click. Them bastards pretty much run things the way they want.” Y
et if he met Match at a cattle sale or the feed store, he would smile and greet him cordially. And Match, in his turn, would say, “How’r you, Verl?” But if they crossed on the back roads in their trucks, Verl lifted three fingers in salute while Match, face bright with sun color, stared straight ahead. Pete Azkua, the grandson of a Basque sheep rancher, put it simply: “Nahi bezala haundiak ahal bezala ttipiak,” which he said meant the big boys do what they want, the small fry do what they can, which accounted for certain sour faces around town.
Verl resented Match, but it was Match’s second wife, Carol Shovel, whom he truly detested. She was a California woman with red eyebrows and foxy hair, clothed in revealing dresses and garnished with clanking bracelets. She considered herself an authority on everything. She was a smart-mouth. No one knew why she had married Match. Of course, they said, he did have money, not from ranching, but through the Cowboy Slim Program, his father’s patented weight-loss mail-order plan. Carol Match had endless recipes for Wyoming’s betterment: bring back the train or start up a bus line for public transportation; invite black people and Asians to move in and improve ethnic diversity; shift the capital to Cody; make the state attractive to moviemakers and computer commuters. It got around that she had said Wyoming people were lazy. Lazy! Verl was outraged. Although he himself avoided as much work as he could, it was because he was half-crippled and work was bad for his heart. The whole world, except this California bitch, knew that there were no more frugal, thrifty, tough and hardworking people on the face of the earth than those in Wyoming. Work was almost holy, good physical labor done cheerfully and for its own sake, the center of each day, the node of Wyoming life. That and toughing it out when adversity struck, accepting that it was not necessary to wear a seat belt because when it was time for you to go, you went. Not being constrained by a seat belt was the pioneer spirit of freedom.
“I’d sure tell her where to set her empties, but you can’t tell nobody like that nothin,” he said to Bonita. “She is too ignorant. It would just be water off a duck’s ass.”
One day in the auto parts store, where Carol Match was checking to see if their order for a side window sunscreen for the restored 1948 Chevy half-ton had come in, he listened to her talk to Chet Bree behind the counter. She was wearing a tiny blue skirt with a hem just below her fatty buttocks and a silky top that showed off her robust tanned breasts.
“They have got to put a traffic light at that intersection. Somebody is going to get killed one day.” Her bracelets rattled.
“Always been okay the way it is. Just got to be a little bit careful. People here never had no trouble with it.” Bree looked at her chest for a few seconds, then looked away, then again let his gaze slide down into the cleft. Verl almost had the view of her bum.
“The place needs some new people,” she said.
Verl understood that she didn’t just mean importing strangers. She meant an exchange. For every ignorant California fool she brought in, a Wyoming-born native would be…removed. He was sure she had a list and that he was on it. Bree said nothing, and that, thought Verl, had probably got him on the list.
“Wyomin is fine just the way it is,” said Verl to Bonita. “They come in here and…”
For Dakotah, kindergarten was packed with revelations. On the first day the teacher, a fat woman with a pink, hairy sweater, asked each child for a birthday date.
“We’ll have a party each time it is somebody’s birthday,” she said with false excitement. One by one the children named dates, but Dakotah, who had never had or heard of a birthday party, was confused. The boy next to her said, “December nine.”
The teacher looked expectantly at Dakotah.
“December nine,” she whispered.
“Oh, class! Did you hear that? Dakotah has the same birthday as Billy! That’s so wonderful! We’ll have a double birthday party! Two children have the same birthday! We’ll have two cakes!”
Riding home in the truck with Bonita, Dakotah asked if she had a birthday and if it was December nine.
“Well of course. Everbody has a birthday! Yours is April first, April Fools’ Day. That’s when you play mean tricks on somebody. Like the April Fool trick your mother pulled on us. Why do you want to know?”
Dakotah explained that the teacher wanted to make many parties at school for birthdays with cakes and games. And she didn’t know her birthday. And there was a song.
“Well, we never went in for that birthday stuff. We don’t do such foolishness. No wonder the school is always runnin out a money if they spend it on cakes.”
She knew she could not tell the teacher her birthday was an April Fool.
In school she learned again what she already knew; that she was different from others, unworthy of friends.
The Listers did their duty, raising Dakotah, Bonita making peanut butter sandwiches for her school lunch while listening to Morning Glory, the pre-sunrise program of advertisements, a little news of the sensational kind, prayer and weather reports. The radio voices roared in the bathroom where Verl crouched on the toilet with chronic constipation. His chest pain, which often migrated to some remote interior organ where it pulsed and gnawed, had long baffled the young woman doctor from India who tried to fit into the rural life by uncomprehendingly attending the local amusements of fishing derbies, calcuttas, poker runs and darts tournaments.
“You see Jimmy Mint catch that three-hundred-dollar fish?” she asked to put him at ease. He preferred to describe his torments in exquisite detail, drawing the devious path of a pain with his finger, tracking across his chest, down to his groin, around to the side and back again, rising to the throat.
At last the doctor sent Verl to Salt Lake City for advanced tests. Bonita went with him after arranging for Dakotah to stay with Pastor Alf Crashbee and his wife, Marva.
Dakotah, then seven years old, stood shyly in the hallway while Bonita and Marva Crashbee talked. Mrs. Crashbee spoke in emphatic phrases to set up her salient points. She puffed her cheeks and her nostrils flared. As Dakotah waited to be told where to go and what to do, she fell in love with a candy dish. The single piece of furniture in the hallway was a long, narrow table. On its gleaming surface rested Mrs. Crashbee’s car keys. On the farthest end was a small blue plate, close to a saucer in size, and shaped like a fish. On it were seven or eight watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher candies. It was the amusing shape and color of the dish that entranced, variegated blues ranging from cobalt to flushes of teal. Mrs. Crashbee noticed her gaping and told her to help herself to Jolly Ranchers, thinking that the poor thing probably never had much candy. After Bonita left she said it again in a spasm of urging.
“Go ahead! Help yourself.”
Dakotah took one and unwrapped it, not sure where to put the wrapper. The pastor’s wife led the way into the kitchen and pointed at a chrome can. When Dakotah tried to lift the lid, the pastor’s wife motioned her away, trod on a foot pedal, and the lid flew open. This, too, was novel. She blushed with shame because she had not known about the foot pedal. At her grandparents’ house, trash went into a paper grocery bag sitting on a newspaper, and when it was full, the sides grease-stained, the bottom often weakened by wet coffee grounds, it was her job to carry the bag out to the burn barrel. This was the only time she was allowed to light matches, which she did with the gravity of one lighting a vestal hearth, then ran from the stinking smoke.
Bonita came alone to pick her up. She told Mrs. Crashbee that Verl’s tests showed serious arthritis in his joints and lumps of bone where old breaks had healed badly, but that not much could be done. He needed a whole new skeleton and his heart was weak. A bull had stepped on his chest when he was twenty and bruised his heart. They told him to take it easy.
“He’s at home resting this very minute,” said Bonita.
In some way Dakotah’s coat sleeve brushed the blue dish off the hall table. Jolly Ranchers skittered along the floor like pale red nuts.
“For pity’s sake,” said Bonita, bending down to pick up the p
ieces, “clumsy as a calf.” Mrs. Crashbee, shaking her head and thrusting out her chin, said, “It is nothing, just an old cheap dish,” but her tone implied it had been part of a set of Royal Worcester. Bonita gave Dakotah a good leg whipping when they got home.
Mrs. Crashbee had a microwave oven that had magically heated the soup for lunch. When Dakotah described this marvel to Bonita a few days later, Verl, who was listening from his chair in the living room, snorted and shouted that he guessed he would stick with the good old kitchen stove. It was a way of saying there would be no microwave oven for Bonita, who had shown some interest in Dakotah’s description.
Thin and with colorless brown-grey hair and greyish eyes, yet with a boy-size nose and chin, no trace of her mother’s vivid beauty, in school Dakotah hunched over and kept to herself, considered somewhat stupid by her teachers.
In the fourth grade Sherri Match brought four kittens to school.
“They’re for free,” she said. “You can choose.”
Dakotah instantly wanted the tiny black one with white paws and a diminutive tail that stood straight up. She smoothed him and he purred.
“You can have him,” said Sherri grandly, the dispenser of munificence.
Dakotah brought the kitten home under her sweater, where he scratched and wriggled, terribly strong for such a small creature. In Bonita’s kitchen she gave him a doll’s saucer of milk. He sneezed, then drank greedily. Bonita said nothing, but her expression was chill.
“Where’d that cat come from?” demanded Verl at supper.
“Sherri Match was givin kitties away.”
“I bet she was,” said Verl grimly. “Well it can’t stay here. Cats give me asthma. I’ll take it back to them goddamn Matches,” and he picked up the kitten and strode out to the truck.