Fine Just the Way It Is (10 page)

She had met Hi, then only a few months home from the Great War, at the funeral of her older brother, Ned. It was a sultry day, unrelieved by breeze or cloud cover. The mourners cooled themselves with little round fans bearing the name of the undertaker, Farrow’s Funerals. Hi’s brother Sen had been a friend of Ned’s and with him on the ill-fated egg-collecting trip. Ned had climbed a hollow tree stub in a black-water swamp to get the egg of a great blue heron while Sen waited in the boat below, and as Ned came even with the nest, the violent bird, defending her egg, had pierced his eye and brain with her beak.

The first thing Hi said to Helen as they walked away from the fresh grave in the sweating company of the mourners was “If they piled up all the birds’ eggs in the world in front a me I would turn the other way.” That put it flat. Her mother overheard the remark and took it as oblique blame for their son’s death. From that moment she disliked Hi.

Hi was nine years older than Helen. In the war he had suffered a whiff of gas and a wound in his right thigh. He came home with a limp, brusquely unwilling to farm with his father and brothers. The family did not know what to make of him, and his father sang in a sarcastic voice the new song that every farmer knew—“How you gonna keep em down on the farm, after they seen Paree?”

But of course he had not gone to Paris.

“I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” he said, as though his refusal to visit the City of Light somehow punished the French, whom he called “the Froggies,” in a jocular, insulting tone. Hi’s life now seemed to him a valuable gift that must not be wasted when so many had died in French mud for reasons he still did not understand. He knew he had to get away from his family, from Tabletop with its relentless corn and quivering horizon. He wanted a frontier, though it seemed to him that the frontiers had all disappeared in his grandfather’s time. He was, without knowing it, searching for a purpose that his spared body might carry out. Helen, nineteen years old and with long wood-brown hair, came into view as an island to the shipwrecked. They would make their own frontier.

Hi was counting on the corn and wheat prices staying up, and when corn dropped to forty-two cents and wheat plunged from three dollars fifty to a dollar, he was stunned.

“I don’t understand how it could slide like that,” he said, for he had been too busy for many months to read
The Great Divide
. Now Helen pointed out an article warning that wartime demand had ended and that too many farmers, counting on continuing high prices, had overplanted.

“That don’t make sense,” he said. “There’s still the same bunch a people in the world. They got to eat.”

Even if the prices had remained steady, they had to face the fact that neither the wheat nor corn had done well. Only the potatoes had thrived, but potatoes were a cheap crop; anyone could grow them. In November of 1921, Hi went back to Iowa to see his father, not out of family sentiment, but to learn how to make potato whiskey.

They had, of course, to visit her family when they were in Iowa. They spent a bare half hour in the dismal house, then fled.

“See you are in the family way again,” her mother said coldly, went silent.

“How can they live that way,” mourned Helen on the way home. William had taken up egg collecting once more, not to align in rows in cabinets and on tabletops, but to sell to city collectors who did not have the time or location for egg forays. Soon he was making more money than any dairy farmer, such was the longing of fanciers in New York City and Philadelphia for the eggs of bald eagles, meadowlarks and trumpeter swans. His mother had made him move everything associated with eggs out to the old henhouse, now empty, as she would have nothing in the place that brought back memories of poor Ned. Rather than put up with his mother’s icy hatred of what he was doing, William began to live in the henhouse himself, ripping the nest boxes off their support planks and throwing down his dirty blankets. Soon he smelled like a chicken, and looked like one, his clothes festooned with stray feathers.

“My poor brother,” Helen said and sighed.

“Huh,” said Hi. “He’s gone simple. Just a dirty gristle-heel chicken lover.”

The potato whiskey didn’t work out. Hi was the kind of man who couldn’t keep something quiet and within six months the revenuers were onto him. He had picked one of the old Indian caves under the ledges as his place of manufacture, throwing out the Indian corpse wrapped in deerskin and beads. He was cooking mash on a day of clouds smeared by thumbs of wind when the sheriff came in. The judge made him an example—six months in jail and a two-hundred-dollar fine. Helen had to borrow from William to pay the fine. She lied to Hi and told him she had raised the money selling the tractor. She had sold the tractor, but got only fifty dollars for it.

After he got out they moved over the state line to Wyoming in a region of steep pointed hills separated by deep gorges. The desert wilderness lay to the west; to the east the Sierra Madre rose like a great black wave. Helen’s curly-headed sister Verla and her husband, Fenk Fipps, lived on one of the highest farms. Antip Bewley had showed and sold them the place.

“That man again,” said Helen. It seemed to her that Mr. Bewley had manipulated many lives; no doubt he thought of them as the little people and himself as the puppeteer. All the settlers, dreaming the war prices would come again, grew wheat on the tops of the hills. The local ranchers were against them and there were rumors that two families had been burned out while they were up in Rawlins buying supplies. Helen thought it was a hard country with hard people and longed for their old place west of Great Divide although she had been glad to leave it.

1932

The children were making a tremendous racket, jumping on the beds it sounded like, and after a particularly violent crash a dead silence fell, followed by whispering. Helen went to the door and looked in. One of the beds had collapsed at one end and now resembled a cow getting up.

“For pity’s sake,” she said. “Your father will be here any time and what do you do? Smash up the furniture.” She looked wildly around as though for the stick with which she beat them.

“Listen! That’s him!” said Mina, eleven years old and big in the same way Hi was big. The twins, Henry and Buster, were nine, slender and on the short side. Hi often teased them about their heights, urging them to eat plenty and put some meat on their bones. Little Riffie was the spoiled baby, the favorite.

They could all hear the chugging of the car engine as it drew near the porch, and then Hi’s feet on the steps, the door opening.

The boys raced for him, Henry already asking if he had brought them anything.

“Alls I could get was a roll a Life Savers. You got to share.” He held it out on his palm. Buster grabbed it and ran outside, the others snatching at his shirt.

Helen looked at him. He shook his head. “I go in to Sharps, see, and say I heard he wanted a man. He didn’t say a word, just pointed to where that big half-wit Church Davis was throwin bags a grain onto a wagon. His way of saying he already hired Church. Makes you blue to know a half-wit gets a job over you.”

Helen’s stomach ached. What could they do? She didn’t understand why the Depression was harming men who wanted to work. There had to be a way to get money.

From the front window Mina could see a throbbing plume of dust laboring up the hill through the heat. She knew it was going to turn in by the way it slowed.

“Ma! There’s a car coming.”

Helen wiped her hands on her apron, slipped it off and went to the porch door. A heavy sedan crept up the drive. It was so dusty she could not see the color. Kind of maroon, she thought. The vehicle parked under the cottonwood tree in the only piece of shade. The passenger window rolled down and a face appeared.

“Verla!” she cried and rushed down the steps. To the girls she called “It’s your aunt Verla!” The girls advanced, mincing across the gravel on bare feet. A half-grown puppy followed, biting at dress hems. Henry and Buster were a mile distant shooting prairie dogs with slingshots. Verla and Fenk stayed in their seats but rolled the windows down. Fenk’s tight-jawed face displayed blackheads mixed with stubble. He had a low smile and dark, staring eyes like those of a marionette. Helen knew he beat his children with a strap and that he had slapped Verla around a few times. She shuddered to think of those wooden eyes painted with malice fastening on her sister.

“Out this way and thought we’d see if you was home,” whispered Fenk who had something wrong with his voice that threw it in a high womanish register. Whispering suited him better. Fenk generally let Verla do most of the talking. The story was that he had tried to hang himself as a boy and damaged his voice box. “They get awful moody at a certain age,” his mother had offered as explanation, but his old father knew it was probably something else on the other edge of the great divide that separated men’s and women’s knowledge of sexual matters. He had caught the tail of some sniggered comment about coming or maybe going when he went into the metalwork shop, the informal meeting place for local farmers. Ray Gapes, who owned the smithy, had a large coffeepot and some stage of inky java was always on tap for anyone who could drink it.

Helen leaned into the passenger window, her arms on the hot metal, the breeze that moved always around the cottonwood fluttering the hem of her print dress.

“Where did you get the nice car?” she said. The car gave off a variety of ticks and pings as it cooled. The girls came up, Mina folding her arms across her flat chest, Riffie swinging on the door handle, and listened to the women talk. They too wore cotton print dresses but with puff sleeves and Riffie with a small lace-edged collar that Helen had tatted. Their pale legs were like peeled willow sticks.

“Fenk’s makin good money catchin horses,” said Verla. “That’s how come us to visit.” She looked, not at her sister, but at Fenk, waiting for him to nod his head.

Hi appeared from behind the house where he had been grubbing up sagebrush. Helen wanted a kitchen garden and getting the soil in shape was work. He stood near Fenk’s window.

Verla said, speaking for Fenk, “Fenk wants Hi to throw in with him. The horses bring five or eight dollars and he has been getting good bunches.”

Hi shook his head. His work-enlarged hands, crusted with soil, hung by his sides. “Never done it,” he said.

Fenk had to speak. He whispered, “It’s good work. Some, like them Tolberts, runs them, some drives them into a box canyon, but we been makin night traps around water holes. That way you don’t lose so many tryin to get out. You follow me? The money is good. I been workin with Wacky Lipe.”

“Wacky Lipe! Hell, he’s got a wood leg.”

Verla spoke up. “Yes, and it come off the other night. All the horses run out of the trap and now they’re wise to it.”

Fenk added, pitching his voice down to alto, “He hopped around pretty good, but wasn’t no use. Wacky is all try and no luck.” He looked at Hi.

But Hi only said he’d think it over. Henry and Buster came in sight, lagging around the edge of the drought-burned wheat field. When they recognized the passengers in the car they began to run, hoping the male cousins had come. They were disappointed and showed it by punching their sisters and running.

“You boys better stop it,” said Helen.

Ten days later the old black Essex quit for good. Hi had made a hundred repairs over the years, had repaired the repairs, but now the entire engine had seized and he knew the thing wasn’t worth fixing. There was no money for it anyway, and so he had hoofed it to Fenk and Verla’s and told Fenk he was in.

“I knew you’d come in,” murmured Fenk. “Well, we’re layin out a new trap tomorrow. We don’t run horses—takes a lot of time and you need a bunch a riders. I’ll leave that to the Tolberts. Old Jim there and his seven boys don’t even need to talk they know each other’s minds so good. Me and Wacky favor a water trap, you follow? Last month we found a spring the hell off in rough country, horse trails comin in from every direction. Hitched the wagon to the new car and hauled out the posts and cable last week and now we got a build the corral and the wings. Hard drivin out there. I about wrecked that car and Verla’s pretty mad. There’s deep washes and the stones are hell on the tires. I been thinkin about getting a set a them solid tires like the JO runs on their truck. I been thinkin about saw off the ass end and put a bed on her, follow me? I don’t suppose you got a ridin horse these days?”

Hi shook his head. “Just Old Bonnet. The kids ride him mostly. He’s about a hunderd years old.”

“You can use Big Nose and Crabby.”

Hi nodded.

It was a rare day, windless, cool and clear. Fenk and Wacky had set up camp about three miles from the spring where they planned to build the water trap. They came to the camp in late afternoon, Fenk’s sedan hauling the horse trailer, wallowing across the flats and washes. The country was rough, full of cliffs and arroyos, and Hi liked being out in it. The canvas tent at the foot of a sandstone bluff was stained red with desert dust and crowded inside with bedrolls, a stove, a crooked table and boxes of food. The stove was throwing off waves of heat. Hi threw his gear against the back wall. Fenk was unloading Big Nose and Crabby, putting them in the corral with the others. Wacky, who had stayed at the camp all week, had fresh coffee perking, antelope steaks frying and a pot of boiled potatoes. They ate outside where Fenk built a campfire and hit the hay before it was full dark.