Fine Just the Way It Is (3 page)

Dutchy whispered as though she could hear them. “Even her stepfather. He got killed by a mountain line last year.”

And now, seventy-one years later, it hit him. Her father had been Worley, Wintka was the stepfather who had carried the mail horseback and in Snakeroot Canyon had been dragged into the rocks by a lion. The first female he had ever plowed, a coal-town slut, was sharing final days with him at the Mellowhorn Home.

“Beth,” he said to his granddaughter. “I can’t talk about nothing today. There’s some stuff come to mind just now that I got to think my way through. The new woman who come here last week. I knew her and it wasn’t under the best circumstances,” he said. That was the trouble with Wyoming; everything you ever did or said kept pace with you right to the end. The regional family again.

Mr. Mellowhorn started a series of overnight outings he dubbed “Weekend Adventures.” The first one had been to the Medicine Wheel up in the Big Horns. Mrs. Wallace Kimes had fallen and scraped her knees on the crushed stone in the parking lot. Then came the dude ranch weekend where the Mellowhorn group found itself sharing the premises with seven elk hunters from Colorado, most of them drunk and disorderly and given over to senseless laughter topping 110 decibels. Powder Face laughed senselessly with them. The third trip was more ambitious; a five-day excursion to the Grand Canyon where no one at the Mellowhorn Home had ever been. Twelve people signed up despite the hefty fee to pay for lodging and transportation.

“You only live once!” cried Powder Face.

The group included newcomer Church Bollinger and Forrie Wintka, a.k.a. Theresa Worley, a.k.a. Terry Dolan and, finally, as Terry Taylor. Forrie and Bollinger sat together in the van, had drinks together in the bar of El Tovar, ate dinner at a table for two and planned a trail-ride expedition for the next morning. But before the mule train left, Forrie asked Bollinger to take some photographs she could send to her granddaughters. She stood on the parapet with the famous view behind her. She posed with one hand holding her floppy new straw hat purchased in the hotel gift shop. She took off the hat and turned, shading her eyes with her hand, and pretended to be peering into the depths like a stage character of yore. She clowned, pretending she was unsteady and losing her balance. There was a stifled “Oh!” and she disappeared. A park ranger rushed to the parapet and saw her on the slope ten feet below, clutching at a small plant. Her hat lay to one side. Even as he climbed over the parapet and reached for her, the plant trembled and loosened. Forrie dug her fingers into the gravel as she began to slide toward the edge. The ranger thrust his foot toward her, shouting for her to grab on. But his saving kick connected with Forrie’s hand. She shot down the slope as one on a waterslide, leaving ten deep grooves to mark her trail, then, in a last desperate effort, reached for and almost seized her new straw hat.

The subdued group returned to Wyoming the next day. Again and again they told each other that she had not even cried out as she fell, something they believed denoted strong character.

Ray Forkenbrock resumed his memoir the next weekend. Berenice waited a few minutes after Beth arrived before taking up a listening post outside the room. Mr. Forkenbrock had a monotonous but loud voice, and she could hear every word.

“So, things was better for the family after he got the jobs driving machine parts around to the oil rigs,” he said. “The money was pretty good and he joined some one of them fraternal organizations, the Pathfinders. And they had a ladies’ auxiliary, which my mother got into; they called it ‘The Ladies,’ like it was a restroom or something. They both got real caught up in Pathfinders, the ceremonies, the lodge, the good deeds and oaths of allegiance to whatever.

“Mother was always baking something for them,” he said. “And there was kid stuff for us, fishing derbies and picnics and sack races. It was like Boy Scouts, or so they said. Boy Scouts with a ranch twist, because there was always some class in hackamore braiding or raising a calf. Sort of a kind of a mix of Scouts and 4-H which we did not belong to.”

Berenice found this all rather boring. When would he say something about the Bledsoes? She saw Deb Slaver at the far end of the hall coming out of Mr. Harrell’s room with a tray of bandages. Mr. Harrell had a sore on his shin that wouldn’t heal and the dressing had to be changed twice a day.

“Now don’t you pick at it, you bad boy!” yelled Deb, disappearing around the corner.

“Anyway, Mother was probably more into it than Dad. She liked company and hadn’t had much luck with neighbors there in Coalie Town. The Ladies got up a program of history tours to various massacre sites and old logging flumes. Mother loved those trips. She had a little taste for what had happened in the long ago. She’d come home all excited and carrying a pretty rock. She had about a dozen rocks from those trips when she died,” he said.

In the hall Berenice thought of her sister toiling up rocky slopes, trying to please her rock hound husband, carrying his canvas sack of stones.

“The first hint I got that there was something peculiar in our family tree was when she come home from a visit to Farson. I do not know what they were doing there, and she said that the Farson Auxiliary had served them lunch—potato salad and hot dogs,” he said.

“One of the Farson ladies said she knew a Forkenbrock down in Dixon. She thought he had a ranch in the Snake River valley. Well, my ears perked up when I heard ‘ranch,’” he said.

“And Forkenbrock ain’t that common of a name. So I asked Mother if they were Dad’s relatives,” he said. “I would of liked it if we had ranch kin. I was already thinking about getting into cowboy ways. She said no, that Dad was an orphan, that it was just a coincidence. So she said.”

At dinner that night, once Forrie Wintka’s dramatic demise had been hashed through again, Church Bollinger began to describe his travels through the Canadian Rockies.

“What we’d do is fly, then rent a car instead of driving. Those interstates will kill you. The wife enjoyed staying at nice hotels. So we flew to San Francisco and decided to drive down the coast. We stopped in Hollywood. Figured we’d see what Hollywood was all about. They had these big concrete columns. Time came to leave, I got in and backed up and crunch, couldn’t get out. I finally got out but I had a bad scratched door on the rental car. Well, I bought some paint and I painted it and you could never tell. I drove to San Diego. Waited for a letter from the rental outfit but it never came. Another time I rented a car there was a crack in the windshield. I says, ‘Is this a safety problem?’ The guy looks at me and says ‘No.’ I drive off and it never
was
a problem. We did the same thing when we went to Europe. In Spain we went to the bullfights. We left after two. I wanted to experience that.”

“But are they wounded?” asked Powder Face.

Mr. Bollinger, thinking of rental cars, did not reply.

When Berenice told Chad Grills about old Mr. Forkenbrock who used to work for his grandparents, he was interested and said he would talk to them about it next time he went out to the ranch. He said he hoped Berenice liked ranch life because he was in line to inherit the place. He told Berenice to find out all she could about Forkenbrock’s working days. Some of those cagey old boys managed to get themselves situated to put a claim on a ranch through trumped-up charges of unpaid back wages. Whenever Beth came with her tape recorder, Berenice found something to do in the hall outside Ray Forkenbrock’s room, listening, expecting him to tell about the nice ranch he secretly owned. She didn’t know what Chad would do.

Ray said, “I think when she heard about the Dixon Forkenbrocks, Mother had a little feeling that something wasn’t right because she wrote back to the Farson lady thanking her for the nice lunch. I think she wanted to strike up a friendship so she could find out more about the Dixon people, but, far as I know, that didn’t happen. It stuck in my mind that we wasn’t the only Forkenbrock family.” Beth was glad he didn’t pause so often now that he was into the story, letting his life unreel.

“The last day of school was a trip and a big picnic. The whole outfit usually went on the picnic, since learning academies of the day was small and scattered. When I was twelve the seventh grade had only three kids—me, one of my sisters who skipped a grade and Dutchy Green. We was excited when we found out the trip was to the old Butch Cassidy outlaw cabin down near the Colorado border. Mrs. Ratus, the teacher, got the map of Wyoming hung up and showed us where it was. I seen the word ‘Dixon’ down near the bottom of the map. Dixon! That’s where the mystery Forkenbrocks lived. Dutchy was my best friend and I told him all about it and we tried to figure a way to get the bus to stop in Dixon. Maybe there’d be a sign for the Forkenbrock Ranch,” he said.

“As it turned out,” he said, “we stopped in Dixon anyways because there was something wrong with the bus.

“There was a pretty good service station in Dixon that had been an old blacksmith shop. The forge was still there and the big bellows, which us boys took turns working, pretending we had a horse in the stall. I asked the mechanic who was fixing the bus if he knew of any Forkenbrocks in town and he said he heard of them but didn’t know them. He said he had just moved down from Essex. Dutchy and me played blacksmith some more but we never got to Butch Cassidy’s cabin because they couldn’t fix the bus and another one had to come take us back. We ate the picnic on the bus on the way home. After that I kind of forgot about the Dixon Forkenbrocks,” he said. He was beginning to slow down again.

“I didn’t think about it until Dad died in an automobile accident on old route 30,” he said.

“He was taking a shortcut, driving on the railroad ties, and a train come along,” he said.

He said, “I’d been working for the Bledsoes for a year and hadn’t been home.”

At the mention of the Bledsoes, Berenice, out in the hallway, snapped her head up.

“Mr. Bledsoe drove me back so I could attend the funeral. They had it in Rawlins and the Pathfinders had took care of everything,” he said.

Beth looked puzzled. “Pathfinders?”

“That organization they belonged to. Pathfinders. All we had to do with it was show up. Which we done. Preacher, casket, flowers, Pathfinder flags and mottoes, grave plot, headstone—all fixed up by the Pathfinders.” He coughed and took a sip of whiskey, thinking of cemetery weeds and beyond the headstones the yellow wild pastures.

Berenice couldn’t listen anymore because the chime for Cook’s Treats rang. It was part of her job to bring the sweets to the residents, the high point in their day trumped only by the alcoholic Social Hour. Cook was sliding triangles of hot apple pie onto plates.

“You hear about Deb’s husband? Had a heart attack while he was hitching the tow bar to some tourist. He’s in the hospital. It’s pretty serious, touch and go. So we won’t be seeing Deb for a little while. Maybe ever. I bet she’s got a million insurance on him. If he dies and Deb gets a pile a money, I’m going to take out a policy on my old man.”

When Berenice carried out the tray of pie, Mr. Forkenbrock’s door stood open and Beth was gone.

Sundays Berenice and Chad Grills drove out on the back roads in Chad’s almost-new truck. Going for a ride was their kind of date. The dust was bad, churned up by the fast-moving energy company trucks. Chad got lost because of all the new, unmarked roads the companies had put in. Time after time they turned onto a good road only to end up at a dead-end compression station or well pad. Getting lost where you had been born, brought up and never left was embarrassing, and Chad cursed the gas outfits. Finally he took a sight line on Doty Peak and steered toward it, picking the bad roads as the true way. Always his mind seized on a mountain. In a flinty section they had a flat tire. They came out at last near the ghost town of Dad. Chad said it hadn’t been a good ride and she had to agree, though it hadn’t been the worst.

Deb Slaver did not come in all the next week, and the extra work fell on Berenice. She hated changing Mr. Harrell’s bandage and skipped the chore several times. She was glad when on Wednesday, Doc Nelson’s visit day, he said Mr. Harrell had to go into the hospital. On Saturday, Beth’s day to visit Mr. Forkenbrock, Berenice got through her chores in a hurry so she could lean on a dust mop outside the door and listen. Impossible to know what he’d say next with all the side stories about his mother’s garden, long-ago horses, old friends. He hardly ever mentioned the Bledsoes who had been so good to him.

“Grandpa,” said Beth. “You look tired. Not sleeping enough? What time do you go to bed?” She handed him the printout of his discourse.

“My age you don’t need sleep so much as a rest. Permanent rest. I feel fine,” he said. “This looks pretty good—reads easy as a book.” He was pleased. “Where did we leave off,” he said, turning the pages.

“Your dad’s funeral,” said Beth.

“Oh boy,” he said. “That was the day I think Mother begin to put two and two together. I sort of got it, at least I got it that something ugly had happened, but I didn’t really understand until years later. I loved my dad so I didn’t want to understand. I still got a little Buck knife he give me and I wouldn’t part with it for anything in this world,” he said.

There was a pause while he got up to look for the knife, found it, showed it to Beth and carefully put it away in his top drawer.

“So there we all were, filing out of the church on our way to the cars that take us to the graveyard, me holding Mother’s arm, when some lady calls out, “Mrs. Forkenbrock! Oh, Mrs. Forkenbrock!” Mother turns around and we see this big fat lady in black with a wilted lilac pinned on her coat heading for us,” he said.