Fine Just the Way It Is (8 page)

Archie tried to say his mother was long gone and that he needed to get to Rose down on the Little Weed, tried to say that it was sixty-odd miles from Rawlins to their cabin, but he couldn’t get out a word because of the wheezing, breath-sucking cough. Sink shook his head, got some biscuits and bacon from the cook.

Foreman Alonzo had trimmed out two long poles and laced a steer hide to them in a kind of sling arrangement. Sink wrapped the legs of a horse named Preacher in burlap to keep the crust from cutting them, lashed the travois poles to his saddle, a tricky business to get the balance right. The small ends projected beyond the horse’s ears, but the foreman said that was to accommodate wear on the drag-ends. They rolled Archie and his bedroll in a buffalo robe and Sink began to drag him to Cheyenne, a hundred miles south. With the wagon it would have been easy. Sink thought the travois was not as good a contraption as Indians claimed. The wind, which had dropped a little overnight, came up, pushing a lofty bank of cloud. After four hours they had covered nine miles. The snow began, increasing in intensity until they were traveling blind.

“Kid, I can’t see nothin,” called Sink. He stopped and dismounted, went to Archie. The earlier snow had melted as fast as it touched that red, feverish face, but gradually, just a fraction of an inch above the surface of the hot flesh, a mask of ice now formed a grey glaze. Sink thought the mask could become the true visage.

“Better hole up. There’s a line shack somewheres around here could we find it. I was there all summer couple years back. Down a little from the top of a hogback.”

The horse, Preacher, had also spent that summer at the line camp and he went straight to it now. It was on the lee side of the hogback, a little below the crest. The wind had dumped an immense amount of snow on the tiny cabin, but Sink found the door to the lean-to entryway, and that would do to shelter the horse. A shovel with a broken handle leaned against the side of the single stall. Inside the cabin there was a table and backless chair, a plank bunk about twenty inches wide. The stove was heaped with snow, and the stovepipe lay on the floor. Sink recognized the chipped enamel plate and cup on the table.

He wrestled Archie inside and got him and the buffalo robe onto the plank bunk, then put the stovepipe together and jammed it up through the roof hole. Neither inside nor in the entryway could he see any chunk wood, but he remembered where the old chip pile had been and, using the broken shovel, scraped up enough snow-welded chips to get the fire going. While the chips were steaming and sizzling in the stove, he unsaddled Preacher, removed the gunnysacks from his legs and rubbed the horse down. He checked the lean-to’s shallow loft hoping for hay, but there was nothing.

“Goddamn,” he said and tore some of the loft floorboards loose to burn in the stove. Back outside he dug through the snow with the broken shovel until he hit ground, got out his knife and sawed off the sun-cured grass until he had two or three hatfuls.

“Best I can do, Preacher,” he said, tossing it down for the horse.

It was almost warm inside the shack. From his saddlebag he took a small handful of the coffee beans he always carried. The old coffee grinder was still on the wall but a mouse had built a nest in it, and he had no way to unbolt the machine to clean it out. Unwilling to drink boiled mouse shit, he crushed the beans on the table with the flat of his knife. He looked around for the coffeepot that belonged to the cabin but did not see it. There was a five-gallon coal oil tin near the bunk. He sniffed at it, but could detect no noisome odors, packed it with snow and put it on the stove to melt. It was while he was scraping up snow outside that the edge of the coal oil can hit the coffeepot, which, for some unfathomable reason, had been tossed into the front yard. That too he packed with snow. It looked to him as though the last occupant of the shack had been someone with a grudge, showing his hatred of Karok by throwing coffeepots and burning all the wood. Maybe a Wing-Cross rider.

The coffee was hot and black but when he brought the cup to Archie the kid swallowed one mouthful, then coughed and finally puked it up. Sink drank the rest himself and ate one of the biscuits.

It was a bad night. The bunk was too narrow and the kid so hot and twitchy that Sink swooned in and out of forty-wink snaps of sleep, finally got up and slept in the chair with his head on the table. A serious blizzard and fatal cold began to slide down from the Canadian plains that night, and when it broke twelve days later the herds were decimated, cows packed ten deep against barbwire fences, pronghorn congealed into statues, trains stalled for three weeks by forty-foot drifts and two cowpunchers in a line shack frozen together in a buffalo robe.

It was May before Tom Ackler rode up from Taos where he had spent the fall and winter. Despite the beating sunshine the snow was still deep around his cabin. Patches of bare ground showed bright green with a host of thrusting thistles. He wondered if Gold Dust had made it through. He could see no cat tracks. He lit a fire using an old newspaper on the table, and just before the flame swallowed it, glimpsed a few penciled words and the signature “Arch McLaverty.”

“Lost whatever it was. I’ll go down tomorrow and see how they are doin.” And he unpacked his saddlebags, wrestled his blankets out of the sack hanging from a rafter where they were safe from mice.

In the morning Gold Dust pranced out of the trees, her coat thick. Tom let her in, threw her a choice piece of bacon.

“Look like you kept pretty good,” he said. But the cat sniffed at the bacon, went to the door and, when he opened it, returned to the woods. “Probly shacked up with a bobcat,” he said, “got the taste for wild meat.” Around noon he saddled the horse and headed for the McLaverty cabin.

No smoke rose from the chimney. A slope of snow lay against the woodpile. He noticed that very little wood had been burned. The weasel’s tracks were everywhere, and right up into the eaves. Clear enough the weasel had gotten inside. “Damn sight more comfortable than a woodpile.” As he squinted at the tracks the weasel suddenly squirted out of a hole in the eaves and looked at him. It was whiter than the rotting snow, and its black-tipped tail twitched. It was the largest, handsomest weasel he had ever seen, shining eyes and a lustrous coat. He thought of his cat and it came to him that wild creatures managed well through the winter. He wondered if Gold Dust could breed with a bobcat and recalled then that Rose had been expecting. “Must be they went to the station.” But he opened the door and looked inside, calling “Rose? Archie?” What he found sent him galloping for the stage station.

At the station everything was in an uproar, all of them standing in the dusty road in front of the Dorgans’ house, Mrs. Dorgan crying, Queeda with her mouth agape and Robert F. Dorgan shouting at his wife, accusing her of betraying him with a human wreck. They paid little attention to Tom Ackler when he slid in on his lathered horse calling that Rose McLaverty was raped and murdered and mutilated by Utes, sometime in the winter, god knew when. Only Mrs. Buck Roy, the new freighter’s wife, who was terrified of Indians, gave him much attention. The Dorgans continued to scream at each other. The more urgent event to them was the suicide that morning of the old bachelor telegraph operator who had swallowed lye after weeks of scribbling a four-hundred-page letter addressed to Robert Dorgan and outlining his hopeless adoration of Mrs. Dorgan, the wadded pages fulsomely riddled with references to “ivory thighs,” “the Adam and Eve dance,” “her secret slit” and the like. What Tom Ackler had thought was an old saddle and a pile of grain sacks on the porch was the corpse.

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire!” bellowed Robert F. Dorgan. “I took you out a that Omaha cathouse and made you a decent woman, give you everthing and here’s how you reward me, you drippin bitch! How many times you snuck over there? How many times you took his warty old cock?”

“I never! I didn’t! That filthy old brute,” sobbed Mrs. Dorgan, suffused with rage that the vile man had fastened his attentions on her, had dared to write down his lascivious thoughts as real events, putting in the details of her pink-threaded camisole, the red mole on her left buttock, and, finally, vomiting black blood all over the telegraph shack and the front porch of the Dorgans’ house where he had dragged himself to die, the four-hundred-page bundle of lies stuffed in his shirt. For years she had struggled to make herself into a genteel specimen of womanhood, grateful that Robert F. Dorgan had saved her from economic sexuality and determined to erase that past. Now, if Dorgan forced her away, she would have to go back on the game, for she could think of no other way to make a living. And maybe Queeda, too, whom she’d brought up as a lady! Her sense of personal worth faltered, then flared up as if doused with kerosene.

“Why you dirty old rum-neck,” she said in a hoarse voice, “what gives you the idea that you got a right to a beautiful wife and daughter? What gives you the idea we would stay with you? Look at you—you want a be the territory surveyor, but without me and Queeda to talk up the important political men you couldn’t catch a cold.”

Dorgan knew it was true and gnawed at his untrimmed mustache. He turned and melodramatically strode into his house, slamming the door so hard the report killed mice. Mrs. Dorgan had won and she followed him in for a reconciliation.

Tom Ackler looked at Queeda who was tracing an arc in the dirt with the toe of her kid-leather boot. They heard the rattle of a stove lid inside the house—Mrs. Dorgan making up a fire to warm the parlor and bedroom.

“Rose McLaverty—” he said, but Queeda shrugged. A tongue of wind lapped the dust, creating a miniature whirl as perfect in shape as any tornado snaking down from black clouds that caught up straws, horsehairs, minute mica fragments and a feather. The dust devil collapsed and died. Queeda turned away, walked around the shaded back of the Dorgan house. Tom Ackler stood holding the reins, then remounted and started back, the horse moving in a kind of equine stroll.

On the way he thought of the whiskey in his cupboard, then of Rose and decided he would get drunk that night and bury her the next day. It was the best he could do for her. He thought too that perhaps it hadn’t been Utes who killed her but her young husband, berserk and raving, and now fled to distant ports. He remembered the burned newspaper with Archie’s message consumed before it could be read and thought it unlikely if Archie had killed his young wife in a frenzy, that he would stop by a neighbor’s place and leave a signed note. Unless maybe it was a confession. There was no way to know what had happened. The more he thought about Archie the more he remembered the clear, hard voice and the singing. He thought about Gold Dust’s rampant vigor and rich fur, about the sleek weasel at the McLaverty cabin. Some lived and some died, and that’s how it was.

He buried Rose in front of the cabin and for a tombstone wrestled the big sandstone rock Archie had hauled in for a doorstep upright. He wanted to chisel her name but put it off until the snows started. It was too late then, time for him to head for Taos.

The following spring as he rode past their cabin he saw that frost heaves had tipped the stone over and that the ridgepole of the roof had broken under a heavy weight of snow. He rode on, singing “when the green grass comes, and the wild rose blooms,” one of Archie’s songs, wondering if Gold Dust had made it through again.

For George Jones

T
hose who think the Bermuda Triangle disappearances of planes, boats, long-distance swimmers and floating beach balls a unique phenomenon do not know of the inexplicable vanishings along the Red Desert section of Ben Holladay’s stagecoach route in the days when Wyoming was a territory.

Historians have it that just after the Civil War Holladay petitioned the U.S. Postal Service, major source of the stage line’s income, to let him shift the route fifty miles south to the Overland Trail. He claimed that the northern California–Oregon-Mormon Trail had recently come to feature ferocious and unstoppable Indian attacks that endangered the lives of drivers, passengers, telegraph operators at the stage stops, smiths, hostlers and cooks at the swing stations, even the horses and the expensive red and black Concord coaches (though most of them were actually Red Rupert mud wagons). Along with smoking letters outlining murderous Indian attacks he sent Washington detailed lists of goods and equipment damaged or lost—a Sharp’s rifle, flour, horses, harness, doors, fifteen tons of hay, oxen, mules, bulls, grain burned, corn stolen, furniture abused, the station itself along with barn, sheds, telegraph office burned, crockery smashed, windows ditto. No matter that the rifle had been left propped against a privy, had been knocked to the ground by the wind and buried in sand before the owner exited the structure, or that the dishes had disintegrated in a whoop-up shooting contest, or that the stagecoach damage resulted from shivering passengers building a fire inside the stage with the bundles of government documents the coach carried. He knew his bureaucracy. The Washington post office officials, alarmed at the bloodcurdling news, agreed to the route change, saving the Stagecoach King a great deal of money, important at that time while he, privy to insider information, laid his plans to sell the stage line the moment the Union Pacific gathered enough shovels and Irishmen to start construction on the transcontinental railroad.

Yet the Indian attack Holladay so gruesomely described was nothing more than a failed Sioux war party, the battle ruined when only one side turned up. The annoyed Indians, to reap something from the trip, gathered up a coil of copper wire lying on the ground under a telegraph pole where it had been left by a wire stringer eager to get to the saloon. They carted it back to camp, fashioned it into bracelets and necklaces. After a few days of wearing the bijoux, most of the war party broke out in severe rashes, an affliction that persisted until a medicine man, R. Singh, whose presence among the Sioux cannot be detailed here, divined the evil nature of the talking wire and caused the remainder of the coil and all the bracelets and earbobs to be buried. Shortly thereafter, but in no apparent way connected to the route change or the copper wire incident, travelers began to disappear in the vicinity of the Sandy Skull station.

The stationmaster at Sandy Skull was Bill Fur, assisted by his wife, Mizpah. In a shack to one side a telegraph operator banged his message key. The Furs had been married seven years but had no children, a situation in those fecund days that caused them both grief. Mizpah was a little cracked on the subject and traded one of Bill’s good shirts to a passing emigrant wagon for a baby pig, which she dressed in swaddling clothes and fed from a nipple-fitted bottle that had once contained Wilfee’s Equine Liniment & Spanish Pain Destroyer but now held milk from the Furs’ unhappy cow—an object of attention from range bulls, rustlers and roundup cowboys, who spent much of her time hiding in a nearby cave. The piglet one day tripped over the hem of the swaddling dress and was carried off by a golden eagle. Mrs. Fur, bereft, traded another of her husband’s shirts to a passing emigrant wagon for a chicken. She did not make the swaddling gown mistake twice, but fitted the chicken with a light leather jerkin and a tiny bonnet. The bonnet acted as blinders and the unfortunate poult never saw the coyote that seized her within the hour.

Mizpah Fur, heartbroken and suffering from loneliness, next fixed her attention on an inanimate clump of sagebrush that at twilight took on the appearance of a child reaching upward as if piteously begging to be lifted from the ground. This sagebrush became the lonely woman’s passion. It seemed to her to have an enchanting fragrance reminiscent of pine forests and lemon zest. She surreptitiously brought it a daily dipper of water (mixed with milk) and took pleasure in its growth response, ignoring the fine cactus needles that pierced her worn moccasins with every trip to the beloved
Atriplex
. At first her husband watched from afar, muttering sarcastically, then himself succumbed to the illusion, pulling up all grass and encroaching plants that might steal sustenance from the favored herb. Mizpah tied a red sash around the sagebrush’s middle. It seemed more than ever a child stretching its arms up, even when the sun leached the wind-fringed sash to pink and then dirty white.

Time passed, and the sagebrush, nurtured and cosseted as neither piglet nor chicken nor few human infants had ever been—for Mizpah had taken to mixing gravy and meat juice with its water—grew tremendously. At twilight it now looked like a big man hoisting his hands into the air at the command to stick em up. It sparkled festively in winter snow. Travelers noted it as the biggest sagebrush in the lonely stretch of desert between Medicine Bow and Sandy Skull station. It became a landmark for deserting soldiers. Bill Fur, clutching the handle of a potato hoe, hit on the right name when he announced that he guessed he would go out and clear cactus away from the vicinity of their Sagebrush Kid.

About the time that Bill Fur planed a smooth path to and around the Sagebrush Kid, range horses became scarce in the vicinity of the station. The Furs and local ranchers had always been able to gather wild mustangs, and through a few sessions with steel bolts tied to their forelocks, well-planned beatings with a two-by-four and merciless first rides by some youthful buster whose spine hadn’t yet been compressed into a solid rod, the horses were deemed ready-broke to haul stagecoaches or carry riders. Now the mustangs seemed to have moved to some other range. Bill Fur blamed it on the drought which had been bad.

“Found a water hole somewheres else,” he said.

A party of emigrants camped overnight near the station, and at dawn the captain pounded on the Furs’ door demanding to know where their oxen were.

“Want a git started,” he said, a man almost invisible under a flop-rimmed hat, cracked spectacles, full beard and a mustache the size of a dead squirrel. His hand was deep in his coat pocket, a bad sign, thought Bill Fur who had seen a few coat-pocket corpses.

“I ain’t seen your oxes,” he said. “This here’s a horse-change station,” and he pointed to the corral where two dozen broomtails stood soaking up the early sun. “We don’t have no truck with oxes.”

“Them was fine spotted oxen, all six matched,” said the captain in a dangerous, low voice.

Bill Fur, curious now, walked with the bearded man to the place the oxen had been turned out the night before. Hoofprints showed where the animals had ranged around eating the sparse bunchgrass. They cast wide and far but could not pick up the oxen trail as the powdery dust changed to bare rock that took no tracks. Later that week the disgruntled emigrant party was forced to buy a mixed lot of oxen from the sutler at Fort Halleck, a businessman who made a practice of buying up worn-out stock for a song, nursing them back to health and then selling them for an opera to those in need.

“Indans probly got your beasts,” said the sutler. “They’ll bresh out the tracks with a sage branch so’s you’d never know but that they growed wings and flapped south.”

The telegraph operator at the station made a point of keeping the Sabbath. After his dinner of sage grouse with rose-haw jelly, he strolled out for an afternoon constitutional and never returned to his key. This was serious, and by Wednesday Bill Fur had had to ride into Rawlins and ask for a replacement for “the bible-thumpin, damn old goggle-eyed snappin turtle who run off.” The replacement, plucked from a Front Street saloon, was a tough drunk who lit his morning fires with pages from the former operator’s bible and ate one pronghorn a week, scorching the meat in a never-washed skillet.

“Leave me have them bones,” said Mizpah, who had taken to burying meat scraps and gnawed ribs in the soil near the Sagebrush Kid.

“Help yourself,” he said, scraping gristle and hocks onto the newspaper that served as his tablecloth and rolling it up. “Goin a make soup stock, eh?”

Two soldiers from Fort Halleck dined with the Furs and at nightfall slept out in the sagebrush. In the morning their empty bedrolls, partly drifted with fine sand, lay flat, the men’s saddles at the heads for pillows, their horse tack looped on the sage. The soldiers themselves were gone, apparently deserters who had taken leave bareback. The wind had erased all signs of their passage. Mizpah Fur made use of the bedrolls, converting them into stylish quilts by appliquéing a pleasing pattern of black stripes and yellow circles onto the coarse fabric.

It may have been a trick of the light or the poor quality window glass, as wavery and distorting as tears, but Mizpah, sloshing her dishrag over the plates and gazing out, thought she saw the sagebrush’s arms not raised up but akimbo, as though holding a water divining rod. Worried that some rambunctious buck trying his antlers had broken the branches, she stepped to the door to get a clear look. The arms were upright again and tossing in the wind.

Dr. Frill of Rawlins, on a solitary hunting trip, paused long enough to share a glass of bourbon and the latest town news with Mr. Fur. A week later a group of the doctor’s scowling friends rode out inquiring of the medico’s whereabouts. Word was getting around that the Sandy Skull station was not the best place to spend the night, and suspicion was gathering around Bill and Mizpah Fur. It would not be the first time a stationmaster had taken advantage of a remote posting. The Furs were watched for signs of opulence. Nothing of Dr. Frill was ever found, although a hat, stuck in the mud of a playa three miles east, might have been his.

A small group of Sioux, including R. Singh, on their way to the Fort Halleck sutler’s store to swap hides for tobacco, hung around for an hour one late afternoon asking for coffee and bread which Mizpah supplied. In the early evening as the dusk thickened they resumed their journey. Only Singh made it to the fort, but the shaken Calcutta native could summon neither Sioux nor American nor his native tongue to his lips. He bought two twists of tobacco and through the fluid expression of sign language tagged a spot with a Mormon freight group headed for Salt Lake City.

A dozen outlaws rode past Sandy Skull station on their way to Powder Springs for a big gang hooraw to feature a turkey pull, fried turkey and pies of various flavors as well as the usual floozy contingent and uncountable bottles of Young Possum and other liquids pleasing to men who rode hard and fast on dusty trails. They amused themselves with target practice on the big sagebrush, trying to shoot off its waving arms. Five of them never got past Sandy Skull station. When the Furs, who had been away for the day visiting the Clug ranch, came home they saw the Sagebrush Kid maimed, only one arm, but that still bravely raised as though hailing them. The telegraph operator came out of his shack and said that the outlaws had done the deed and that he had chosen not to confront them, but to bide his time and get revenge later, for he too had developed a proprietorial interest in the Sagebrush Kid. Around that time he put in a request for a transfer to Denver or San Francisco.

Everything changed when the Union Pacific Railroad pushed through, killing off the stagecoach business. Most of the stage station structures disappeared, carted away bodily by ranchers needing outbuildings. Bill and Mizpah Fur were forced to abandon the Sandy Skull station. After tearful farewells to the Sagebrush Kid they moved to Montana, adopted orphan cowboys and ran a boardinghouse.

The decades passed and the Sagebrush Kid continued to grow, though slowly. The old stage road filled in with drift sand and greasewood. A generation later a section of the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway rolled past. An occasional motorist, mistaking the Sagebrush Kid for a distant shade tree, sometimes approached, swinging a picnic basket. Eventually an interstate highway swallowed the old road and truckers used the towering Sagebrush Kid in the distance as a marker to tell them they were halfway across the state. Although its foliage remained luxuriant and its size enormous, the Kid seemed to stop growing during the interstate era.

Mineral booms and busts surged through Wyoming without affecting the extraordinary shrub in its remote location of difficult access until BelAmerCan Energy, a multinational methane extraction company, found promising indications of gas in the area, applied for and got permits and began drilling. The promise was realized. They were above a vast deposit of coal gas. Workers from out of state rushed to the bonanza. A pipeline had to go in and more workers came. The housing shortage forced men to sleep four to a bed in shifts at the dingy motels forty miles north.

To ease the housing difficulties, the company built a man-camp out in the sagebrush. The entrance road ran close to the Sagebrush Kid. Despite the Kid’s size, because it was just a sagebrush, it went unnoticed. There were millions of sagebrush plants—some large, some small. Beside it was a convenient pullout. The man-camp was a large gaunt building that seemed to erupt from the sand. The cubicles and communal shower rooms, stairs, the beds, the few doors were metal. A spartan kitchen staffed by Mrs. Quirt, the elderly wife of a retired rancher, specialized in bacon, fried eggs, boiled potatoes, store-bought bread and jam and occasionally a stewed chicken. The boss believed the dreary sagebrush steppe and the monotonous diet were responsible for wholesale worker desertion. The head office let him hire a new cook, an ex-driller with a meth habit whose cuisine revolved around canned beans and pickles.