The Meadow (6 page)

He managed to keep three wheels on the trail, but the back of the wagon was cattywhampus, and one rear wheel was toothpicks and a hoop.

When the moment ebbed and the horses stilled and the situation bespoke itself in the silence that followed (even the creek's roar was a silence now), the silence issuing from the old man overwhelmed it, and the creek became a noise again, and the roaring in App's ears came out of it, and all the sounds together became the sound of his father's wrath building. App knew what was coming so he just sat there waiting, still as granite, not from fear but from a calm prescience of the inevitable. Without turning he heard the old man's breathing and the crunch of his boots punishing the gravel. He felt the back end of the wagon lift perceptibly, which was not what he was expecting, so he craned around to see the old man squatted down behind the wagon, heaving-to in a carnival-like attempt to lift the impossible back onto the road.

App stared in amazement for a full thirty seconds as his father strained under the load, which indeed he could move, but which no mortal could lift. The cords in his neck went taut, his face reddened, his eyes bulged, sweat sprang from his brow. App wondered if a man could explode himself, split his own skull open like that bear skull split by the axe. He had time to think, “I hope the old shit blows up now because when he finds out he can't lift a ton of literally dead weight, he'll still have strength to kill me with a handy boulder or wheel shard, even though it was me kept the whole works from upsetting and it wasn't me spooked the horses, which should have been oxen that stop stock-still when they spook, and now we'll have to unload the whole mess anyway—
I
will if I ain't dead by then and here he comes.”

App felt himself lifted by the shirt and trousers like a marionette, up off the seat, and then he was airborne, sailing down the talus slope toward the creek, and the old man yelling, “Damn you, anyway.”

App knew from breaking colts that the best thing to do while flying through the air is to relax, so when he crumpled among the boulders he was no more bruised than he would have been from an ordinary beating at his father's hands, and he thanked the stars for that. The toothmarks in his thigh still hurt more than the cuts and bruises, so he thought about how easy he'd got off as he set to work unloading the wagon, and his father even helped him lift with pry poles to where they could replace the wheel with a drag stick wedged like half a travois into the axle.

By the time they were loaded again it was almost dark and there was no hope of reaching town that night. Driving the horses on those rocky trails in the dark was too risky, and they felt as if they'd had enough catastrophe for one hunting trip. So instead of heading down Sand Creek for Laramie the old man had App steer around the sidehill toward Sheep Creek drainage. He knew of a low spot where they could lay over. The cold air that hung down there nights would keep the meat ten or twenty degrees colder so they might have something besides hides to sell when they finally reached Laramie.

Where they turned the hill was just below where the Wilson Ditch now lifts water out of Sand Creek and carries it around the hill into Sheep Creek and Eaton Reservoir. By the time they descended into the meadow App could feel the cold air already pooling there. He could not see that the meadow was ringed with low timbered ridges. There was no moon and it was full dark when they bottomed out. He smelled willow bushes and mint.

They dropped down into the trapped cold, and App shivered, more than from cold, but he didn't know what. They hobbled the horses near the creek. They wrapped themselves in one blanket and slept under the wagon.

 

 

Sometimes the winter sun is so hot coming through the south-facing kitchen window, Lyle has to scoot his chair over and draw the curtain. But this morning the cold air hangs still down in the meadow, and there is enough haze in the air to filter the sunlight so Lyle can lean on his elbows over a cup of steaming instant and smoke a Prince Albert and gaze out the picture window he now spends most of his life perched in like a hunched up old raven. The air, so heavy-cold and striated with strangely floating frost, is like cotton candy. Hoarfrost builds and grows on the fenceposts and pickets like tropical ferns, but white. White.

He looks out across the meadow filled with snow, across the leafless, oddly orange willow branches along the stream and on over to the wind-bared hill that heaves itself toward the evergreen ridges of the National Forest. The woodcutting trail climbs the bald hill: two parallel lines like railroad tracks, but where the hill steepens, the road curves around the worst part of the grade so that the foreshortened trail looks like a question mark hovering over the meadow.

“I've been staring at that confounded meadow and those idiot hills and lodgepole stands for over forty years now. I'm about done for and I'm still not sure I've ever
seen
any of it. All I know is I'm damned tired of looking at the sonofabitch.”

He thinks about how completely the meadow changes with respective seasons, how much it can change under light and clouds between two times he raises his eyes from his book and looks over the top of his half-lens reading glasses.

 

 

When Lyle drives the Power Wagon to the top of the question mark and into the deep timber for firewood or to mow hay in the neck of the little side-draw, he can look back toward the house and outbuildings, and it always gives him a little start, as if he were looking into a mirror for the first time in a long time, like ten years, maybe. He can easily make out the old part of the house and all he himself added on. Then there's the barn he built in the winter of '74 just to more or less see if it could be done, the log garage and toolshed, chicken coop, root cellar, loading chute, corrals, garden fences, snowfences … A lot of damned fences, he thinks, like I was afraid I'd try to get away.

Hard to believe one man could get that much built from scratch in one measly lifetime. It's a lot different from what the family first found there: just that rotten barn sinking into the pasture like a ship going down, the old Worster barn at the head of the meadow, and the two-room homestead cabin with its peaked roof like a witch's hat, now just a small part of the sprawling house he lives in alone. The old log walls, weather-darkened, covered on all sides but one with additions he built on.

Interesting, he thinks. A little sad. Possibly instructive. Funny how, when they first moved up to this place, there wasn't near enough room for all of them. Now the house was huge and with just him knocking around in all those rooms. All the others dead and gone.

While Henry was off in the Army Air Corps and Bob started building corrals and snowfences around them like a great exfoliating wooden rose, Lyle, then all of eighteen, fell to building the first of many log buildings he would carpenter from nearby trees. That was when the question mark began to appear above the meadow. It was a cabin for himself and Bob to stay in, and a shop where they could have a forge, some workbenches, and eventually, some real tools. He had built that cabin from the nearest trees he could find, skidding the logs with one of the half-dead horses they had. He drilled and pegged the logs together the old way because they couldn't afford spikes; only the roof boards and shingles had nails. But he found it a good way to build. Not as fast, but pegged walls are stronger than spiked, even if you could afford the spikes and the trips to town to get them.

So he stayed with the old methods and became a master builder with logs, increasing the size of the main house to a roomy and luxurious home with native pine paneling all hand-planed and tongue-and-grooved. Lyle began to develop a philosophy of technology that had to do with using whatever method did the best job, not like the rest of the culture he lived in, using the methods that were fastest. He used machines or worked by hand depending on quality. Time never entered into it.

Lyle and Bob built a big sawmill and went into business, not just milling lumber, but building houses, barns, and sheds for neighboring ranchers.

That's when Henry went down in the Pacific, and Bob, who didn't care for building and milling, got his own airplane and started crop dusting. His plane snagged on a powerline in Texas before he'd been at it a year. Then Clara started automatic writing and pretty soon she was hearing voices. The voices told her to take Lyle's rifle and put it in her mouth.

Hazel had always had problems with her legs hurting. They swelled into tree trunks, ankles wider than thighs. At age seventy-four the prairie-toughened matriarch finally died in the hospital in Laramie. She was the first member of the family ever to enter a hospital, and she was also, save one, the last.

Now there was too much empty space inside just like there was too much empty space outside. When the emphysema started to choke him the house got to be too much for him.

He stares out the window and thinks about how he first started to park the truck next to the front door instead of up in the shed because the short walk up the hill winded him so badly; how he began keeping split wood on the mud porch instead of out in the woodshed, beyond the snowdrift the lee of the house made; how he closed the door to the bathroom and shut off the pipes lest they burst. He went back to heating water in the kettle and bathing in a washtub the old way, standing by the woodstove's warmth. Finally, he moved his bed into the living room by the furnace, effectively moving back into the part of the house that was already there in 1940, before he ever built anything.

All the additions and improvements he'd made were useless to him. After all that work, he ended up back in the homestead cabin, all that progress for nothing.

But with his bed by the furnace he didn't have to wake with his own thin breath blooming above him like a sick rose. The whole process now was withdrawal, like a man freezing to death. The blood backs off from the fingers first, and the toes, and they go numb, then back from the ears and nose and face, then the legs and arms as the blood tries to get back to protect the heart, abandoning the five senses and any outward turning. Lyle turns from the window and rises to chunk another log into the fire.

 

 

“If I'da knowed I'd end up like this, alone, I'da left things the way they was. God knows this old homestead cabin was plenty good enough for me.” He sat down again at the window, placing a fresh cup of instant on the plastic-coated tablecloth that on one end had the pattern worn completely off from Lyle's elbows and on the other, where the company sat, looked brand-new.

He watched a young coyote descend from the heavy cover of timber and diagonal down the open hillside above the creek and disappear into the willows. “Better keep a move on today, Bud,” he muttered, and turned his attention to the book that lay open before him:
Blacksmithing through the Ages.
But instead of reading he lifted his gaze again to find out what that punk coyote was up to. He could see nothing but the snow-stilled meadow with the coyote's tracks slicing down and across the hill.

His eyes stayed on those tracks, but somehow his mind lifted off and floated back to a certain spring four years after the family first wintered on Sheep Creek. Back then all they had was one Model-A pickup and the horses.

He was fording the creek down on the railroad section to go up into the timber for a load of posts when he saw them. It was a family of Japanese, fishing and having a picnic. They had a Dodge car that looked like it had fallen off a cliff. He remembered there were five of them. The teenage girl was the one he saw first, half reclining on the curved fender of the car. She was reading a pamphlet of some sort. As he drove down into the creekbed she didn't even look up, whether from concentration or fear he couldn't be sure. Then he saw an incredibly tiny and ancient-looking woman, he supposed the grandmother, who sat inside the car. She stared at him openly as he passed. She looked so frail and light-boned he thought a good wind could have drawn her out the window and up into the sky like a kite that's broken its tether.

The mother was down on her knees on the bank, blowing on a greenwood fire that was going to smoke the trout they presumed to catch. That's when the irony of it became more immediate in Lyle's mind than the images before his eyes.

Here were these people whose country had started a war against our country. Lyle's brother, Henry, was flying airplanes over families just like this one, bombing the hell out of them and whatever kind of tropical wickiups and paper houses those people lived in, and here was this family right up here on Sheep Creek, in the heart of the American wilderness, having an afternoon picnic.

“It's Henry as should be fishing and picnicking on our stream.” Then he noticed the father, just upstream with a green willow pole, a can of worms, and a piece of kite string with a cork for a bobber, showing a small boy how to flip the worm into a deep pool and wait, keeping his eye on the cork. The man was gesticulating vigorously, pointing at the cork, and then throwing his arms skyward as if in surrender, imitating the setting of the hook, once the theoretical trout took the bait.

Even over the creek noise and the noise of the truck as it ground down against the gears and the compression of the motor into the gravel ford, Lyle could hear the man speaking in a singsong gibberish, high-pitched and rapid, that reminded him of a dry gate-hinge, or maybe a Western meadowlark, but off-key and arrhythmic.

When the man took notice of Lyle's truck, his face, at first awash in the happiness of a man who is proud of his young son and enjoying the role of father and teacher, turned like sudden weather, or more exactly, slid, like all the plaster sliding off a stucco wall in rain, into an expression of absolute terror. Lyle thought of crowds of faces just like that when they saw Henry's bomber, saw the American pilots coming in the sky, and they wanted to get out of the way but instead stood rooted, too terrified to move, with the fear that looks more like calm than calm does.