The Meadow (23 page)

Bert said, “I think I have an old suit I can take over there.”

“Bless you.”

 

 

The coffin looked like a birthday cake, flocked pink. We had ordered it by phone. I knew Lyle would have ordered the cheapest for himself, so I ordered the second cheapest, which turned out to be far and away the tackiest. It looked like it was designed for family pets. It was piñata-esque. I figured Lyle could only see it from the inside.

Luckily Mac McCartney had cut some pine boughs on Boulder Ridge, and we were pretty well able to hide the coffin. Everyone who'd known Lyle was there. The three half-sisters Lyle had hardly known but willed his meadow to wept.

The preacher was the nondenominational one in town, and, indeed, he is a nondenominational kind of guy, mild and grayish. He says funeral services for all the folks who die who don't belong to a particular church. Many he doesn't know personally, which was his relationship with Lyle. He basically paraphrased the obituary in reverse order, and wrenched from that text three or four occasions to turn our thoughts toward Jesus. It was thin soup. He concluded he would have liked Lyle, had he known him, because the obituary had made him sound so “interesting.”

I thought Lyle wouldn't mind that any more than the coffin. The guy was just doing his job. All who knew Lyle held their peace, their grief, their memories, their reverence.

After the service there was coffee at Bert and Joyce's house. The three half-sisters repaired to the sun porch with a realtor. We could not hear what they were saying, but we could see them through the glass, as if they were in an aquarium. There were muffled cries.

They ironed things out right then and there, while Carl talked cattle business with Clay, Jorie talked with Shirley and June, and Ruby held forth to the astonished company about how she eavesdrops on the radio-phone and the kind of dirt she hears. It's the next best thing to daytime TV, especially now that she's blind from diabetes, and the radiophone has the added attraction that she actually
knows
a lot of the people talking. Sometimes she even interrupts the conversations of strangers with what she considers to be essential pertinencies.

Vi, one of the half-sisters, approached Joyce. “Lyle must have been quite a wealthy man. We had no idea.”

“What makes you think he was wealthy?”

“Well, last night we went to the Home to view the body. I know it was supposed to be closed casket, but I'd never seen him. We were just curious as to what he looked like. Well. He must have had more money than we thought. He was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit.”

Joyce said, “You looked at the label?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

All conversations were cut off mid-sentence when Joyce raised her voice to a shrill pitch, “Bert, you son of a bitch. You buried that old man in the suit you married me in. What the hell does that mean?”

The morning of the actual interment in Fort Collins we drove to Lyle's ranch to get his hat. There were a dozen or so wild irises about to bloom in the yard. For years we had brought Lyle irises from Tie Siding because they wouldn't grow this high, not even in the meadow. Here they were, about to bloom, though I suspect they would have winterkilled if left there. We spaded up a bunch of them and put them in a cardboard box with plenty of native soil to plant on Lyle's grave.

At the cemetery my five-year-old daughter put Lyle's old felt hat on top of the coffin. Jorie said a little poem about a blacksmith laying down his hammer at last. That was it. We went home. Boulder Ridge, Lyle's meadow, Lyle gone.

 

 

Lyle told me he could hear different tones emitted by different stars on the stillest, coldest winter nights. He said he could tell which notes came from which stars. He couldn't hear them all the time, just winter nights, and then, when he was about sixty, he admitted sadly that he couldn't hear them anymore. Age, I guess. When he said he heard the stars, though, he wasn't exaggerating. In fact, he was worried I'd think he was nuts, even though he knew I had never in thirty-five years heard him say anything but the absolute truth as far as he knew it. If Lyle said he heard stars he heard stars. The only reason he mentioned it was because it was curious to him, the idea of the music of the spheres and all.

Another time, while sorting through a fruitcake tin filled with old buttons, he told me how once in winter he was walking in deep timber with his axe. He heard a wind coming up, firing the treetops. He heard it getting closer. It reached the trees directly overhead. As it rushed into them Lyle felt the wind blow through him, blowing right through him as if he wasn't there.

 

 

I'm thinking of Lyle making a pair of silver and agate earrings with no girl in mind to give them to.

 

 

The sky was not blue all summer, nor did it rain. Sunsets were bloody without clouds. Half the west was on fire and no way to stop it in the driest summer in recorded history. The timber not already ablaze was sunsoaked to the point, it seemed, of spontaneous ignition. You couldn't see the mountains for smoke. Four thousand acres of timber burned not eight miles from us, and smoke from the Yellowstone fire four hundred miles away covered our state. There was a grass fire that barely sidled by us.

At the same time the land was being brutalized by fire and drought, we saw more wildlife than ever before: bear, puma, snowy egrets.

Waiting for winter to stop the fires, we started feeling better when the meadow wore a slip of frost through the morning. There was something reassuring about the meadow under snow, but then I thought of Lyle's empty kitchen up there some midwinter night: no light, no fire, rooms colder than the outside air, cold moonlight on the cold iron of the Majesty kitchen stove—no one looking out the window at the meadow, luminous in her snowy bed, a sleeping princess who doesn't care for waking.

 

 

People who didn't know Lyle well considered him moody. Ed Wilkes wouldn't sit down when he first came in, until he'd tested Lyle's mood. If Lyle's mood was good, Ed'd sit and visit. If not, he'd just leave. No sense in getting chewed on by some pissed hermit. Those of us who'd known Lyle longer knew he didn't have moods, he had weather. Not some inner weather that could have been a mood—Lyle had
the
weather. Inside him he had going on exactly what was going on in the sky, or some combination of recent weather and what was likely to develop. Old friends were perfectly happy to sit down and get snowed on for a couple of hours over coffee, though anyone would have preferred the happy emanations of cloudless sky and sun, even if the sun was shining on a snowdrift ten feet deep.

That high in the mountains a man lives less on the land than in the sky. After forty years the weather had all the bearing. It's like the drive train in a car, going through the differential and turning the wheels.

Oh, I know everyone's moods are affected by weather, but with no one around to put him in a mood, and his own actions honed down to rightness, Lyle just had straight weather inside and out.

It takes a lot of weather to make a winter bad, whereas a couple of weeks in summer, with the east wind dug in, cold vapor shifting in the meadow, the garden's fenceposts and the timbered ridges hard to make out except for dreamy glimpses, could generate as much gloom as being snowed in for a month. A week of wind could make him edgy as a civet cat. A piddle of useless thundershower on cut hay could make him almost cynical. But when the sun shone and the air was mild, a cheerfulness that had no source in his circumstance or prognosis emanated from his soul. A January thaw made him transcendently cheerful, though tobacco smoke had opened its black cloak inside him and he knew it. He could be happy snowed in and dying alone, if only the sun kept shining.

We say the meadow is in clouds when really clouds are in the meadow. We say steam rises out of the creek like it's turning its soul loose turning inside out and it is. Dew has neglected not a single leaf or blade of grass of all the millions. The fenceposts past the garden disappear again. We can't start haying till the sky returns. Lyle sits in the kitchen by the window not smoking, not reading, not drinking coffee. This morning he woke without the heart even to go out to the shop and get after some useless project, like those earrings. He is concentrating hard on just sitting, trying to shoo his mind away from the regions of memory and despair. He is waiting for the weather to change and it won't and he is waiting.

Who wouldn't want to die in good weather, instead of some mood?

 

 

Lyle's last winter was too mean to die in, though it would have been easier to die then. Five months he couldn't get to town. Bert hauled oxygen tanks by snowmobile; Ed and Toya brought groceries in the company's new Trackster. The gasoline power plant quit and Lyle didn't have the strength to snowshoe out to the Windcharger to turn it on. He went back to kerosene lights, and with the water pump out, he bathed in a washtub with water heated on the wood-stove, the old way, the way they did forty-five years ago. The shape his body was in told him something had happened in all that time.

He hung on till summer took a good hold. June sun sponged into the pale aspen leaves. He wasn't getting out of bed anymore. We only figured out later he had cut off his intake of food, liquids, and medication. Jorie was housecleaning for him—he hadn't cleaned all winter and it was depressing. As she dusted, careful to replace exactly each object, she tried to keep up a cheerful chatter of news and questions.

Lyle said, “Hand me that box”—the one she was putting back after dusting the bureau. She handed it to him. He turned it over, studying it. He handed it back. “Ain't that pretty?”

Jorie sat down in an overstuffed chair that was bathed in windowlight. She looked at the box, one Lyle had made. He had carved it from a single block of apple wood so that with the lid on all the grain lined up and made its two-partedness disappear. The sides of the box were as thin as the sides of a violin. It was finished simply, with oil. On the lid were carved three cattails among cattail leaves, all gently bending.

“Yes,” she said, “it's beautiful.”

She took off the lid. There was nothing in the box. Woodgrain. Woodsmell. She started to cry. She covered her eyes and tried to stop.

“You'd best take that if you like it,” Lyle said. He waited, hoping she would stop. He said firmly, “Jorie.” She looked at him. His eyes were looking straight out of good weather.

“What?”

“It's no big deal, you know.”

 

 

Nowadays the meadow isn't considered worth haying. Machinery is cost-prohibitive in relation to annual yield. No one will winter here anymore. We are a different breed of Westerners. Snow always looks good to skiers.

Someone from Denver bought Lyle's place for the fishing, a summer retreat. Without irrigation much of the meadow has regressed to native sidehill pasture and sage. The rest is frumpy-looking, matted under the yellow thatch of last year's uncut growth. Along the east fence, where Pat and Lyle used to bet on whether or not the snowdrift would last till the Fourth of July, short lengths of snowbroken wire sink into the earth, sink down with the roots.

Underneath its feral pelt, the meadow is still the meadow, entire, lying in wait for winter. Wildflowers still joy in its swells and hollows. And do the ruined, sage-choked irrigation ditches feel sorry for their intricately patterned uselessness?

 

 

Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out in the middle of the meadow's widest field, everything has its own green: cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage, the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around, with that boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen to the sky's blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun.

Elsewhere on the mountain, most of the green stays locked in pines, the prairie is scorched yellow. But Lyle's meadow is a hemorrhage of green, and a green clockwork of waterways and grasses, held up to the sky in its ring of ridges, held up for the sky to listen, too.

The granite boulder is only there to hold it down.

 

 

A log cabin with a ruined roof sailed into the reservoir one morning, floating right down the middle, sure as a Viking ship with sinister purpose. It stopped over the deepest water behind the dam, becalmed. We all climbed up on the dam to look at it. Ray didn't know where it had come from, what crumbling bank delivered it to the spring-swollen creek, where it could have stood that he never saw it. Lyle didn't say anything.

It was made from a few oversized logs, suggesting deep snow country, at least a couple of miles away. Maybe the cabin had worked its way down for years from a high-country perch, riding floods till it snagged on rocks, and receding waters left it aground on sunbaked stones, waiting for the next chance. Water was high that year and it finally caught the ride it was waiting for.

Now it heeled over, pointing its open doorway at the sun.

Sometimes still, sometimes gently rolling over like a sleepy whale, the cabin lived a mysterious life for a couple of weeks at the center of the reservoir. One morning Ray woke to find it sidled up to shore in a small inlet, like it had had enough. He chained and locked it to a tree so it couldn't get away.

After the water went down the cabin lay grounded on its side, its door gaping—still chained to the tree.

ALSO BY JAMES GALVIN

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