The Meadow (19 page)

 

 

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 held 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.

Lyle always came for the company on those Saturday nights. He'd take a little watery rum and nurse it all night while Ray put down a quart easy, pulling between songs. Lyle never sang. Sometimes he'd help Ray remember lyrics, and he tapped his foot and seemed to enjoy himself.

I saw a photograph once of Lyle sitting on the running board of an old Dodge pickup, playing a mandolin. His brother, Henry, was standing over him listening, his foot propped on the running board, too, and his hat brim pulled down low over his eyes. I asked Lyle if he played the mandolin, and he said he did but not in public. It was hard for me to imagine anyone with hands the size of Lyle's playing the mandolin, his fingers too massive to press a single pair of strings, and he allowed as how that had been a problem. But he could pick out tunes.

That night Ginny, Lainie, Bill, Jack, Shirley, and Dave were there, too, whooping it up. Lyle, always the first to go home to bed, decided to have another rum instead.

Ray said, “Are you sure you can handle
two
drinks, Lyle?”

And Lyle said menacingly, “Strike up a tune, minstrel.”

We sang a few more songs. We were waiting to see what would happen. For a long time nothing did. We played “It's Only a Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” “Hey, Good Lookin',” and “Has Anybody Seen My Gal.” I don't say it had anything to do with the particular song, but when we started in on “Rufus Blossom,” who “had a head like a big sledge hammer / mouth like a terrible scar / but no one could touch him in Alabama / when he played on his old guitar…” Lyle came out of his seat as if he'd been catapulted. He said, “That sure puts rabbits in your feet, don't it?” and he took my sister by the hand and they clogged around the room a couple of times together. When the song was over she gave him a big hug and he sat down in his chair with an expression like he'd been shot between the eyes.

We just went along into something slower so we could keep an eye on Lyle. We knew as it happened we were witnessing an event we'd be talking about for the rest of our lives. Lyle had astonished himself more than anyone. He was looking straight ahead, not tapping his foot or anything. Then he reached under his chair and put his hat on real square and tight, stood up, strode to the door, turned toward my father and touched his brim and was gone. I guess he figured that was one thing in life he'd got done and didn't have to mess with again.

The next day he blamed me for getting him drunk. He said he'd lain in bed all night unable to sleep, his heart was pounding so loud.

 

 

Lyle wakes at two in the morning, not sure whether to blame his shortness of breath or the usual fidgets he gets in the middle of the night. He fits the oxygen mask over his face and lies back down and just breathes a little, then takes it off. It's the last tank, and as deep as the snow is now, and as young as April is, he may not get to town for a month or more. Maybe Bert will bring up a tank on the snowmobile when he comes, if the snow isn't too soft and he doesn't have to come on skis.

Lyle knows this feeling well enough not to fight it. He gets out of bed, holding his hernia in with one finger. He opens the draft on the stove a finger's width. He sits down in the easy chair and turns on the radio. He listens to what's coming in, the all-night truckers' station, as he rolls a cigarette. It's a station out of Oklahoma City that lists the road conditions across the nation. By determining what the interstates are like in California, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah, Lyle can get a better idea of what he's in for than he gets from the local weather predictions. Maybe if the roads are dry between here and the Sierras, and if it's not too cold on the northern border he can get some sleep.

No such luck. It's raining like hell from San Francisco to Point Arena. The sunshine that will be here tomorrow, courtesy of high pressure over the desert, will be overwhelmed by a severe winter storm the next day.

Paul Harvey says the National Weather Service, with all their satellites, balloons, computers, and color-coded maps, has a 60 percent accuracy rate. Sixty percent. That's 10 percent better than flipping a coin. November of 1974 they predicted light snow flurries and we got thirty-one inches in one night. I've heard them say sunshine when it was raining on the radio station.

Lyle doesn't like to say what he thinks will happen, but if you can get it out of him, he won't be wrong.

Once we were down haying, and over a break for a cigarette Lyle noted the stringy clouds that were making regular streaks in the upper atmosphere. He said, “Must be a hurricane shaping up in the Gulf.” There was a hurricane brewing, but I never heard about it on the radio until about three days after Lyle had predicted it from observing the skies over Wyoming.

Lyle flicks the ash of his cigarette into the ashtray that is a beanbag on the bottom and an ashtray on the top, a brass arch rainbowing over the top with little half-circles bent into it to hold your cigarette when you put it down. Only Lyle never puts his down.

He rolls the dial to a talk show out of Denver, where people are holding forth on the problems divorcées have getting sex, and how important getting it is to their lives. One woman offers, “If I don't get sex at least once a week, I become violent with my children. I can't go out to the bars as much as I should because I can't afford a baby-sitter. Men don't want a woman who already has a brood weighing her down. What do you think I should do?”

Lyle is afraid he won't be able to stand the answer. He's predicting a different kind of weather. He says, “Jesus,” and turns it off. He stubs out the last quarter of his smoke and rolls back into bed. He takes one more breath of oxygen and dozes off again till about four. He lies there doing nothing till five.

Then he gets up again and dresses in the dark and, with his workboots unlaced, shuffles into the kitchen. He sets a kerosene lamp on the counter and removes the glass chimney. He takes the lid-lifter off its nail and removes the forward lid over the firebox. He crumples a sheet of newspaper and drops it in. He throws in a handful of chips and splinters from around the chopping block, lights a match on the stove top, lights the lamp from it, then drops it onto the newspaper. Flames leap up like a faithful dog, illuminating Lyle's weather-drawn face as he peers into the firebox. He lays on two quarter-split pieces of lodgepole and throws back the draft that detours heat over to the oven for baking. He replaces the lid. The fire revs.

He throws another stick of wood on the fire and fills the tea kettle with water stored in an insulated tank, still steaming from circulating through the firebox in a copper coil the night before.

As the stove metal ticks, heating up, the sky brightens. Lyle puts his huge hand behind the lamp chimney and blows into his palm. The light's out. He goes to the cupboard and takes down a mixing bowl, opens the flour bin, and starts the batter for flapjacks.

It is light enough to see now, though no direct rays have struck the kitchen window by the time the pancakes are done. Lyle fries them one at a time and puts them in the warming oven. The last one he shovels out of the pan and lays on a separate dish on the shelf to cool. He stacks his own plate, pours the coffee, and sits down at the table. He looks out the south window over the white meadow.