The Meadow (14 page)

There is really only room for one person to work in here. You have to stand sideways to make it between the workbench and the anvil. The workbenches must have been level when Lyle built them, but now they slope down as if from the enormous weight of minuscule files, pliers, punches, bits, gauges, coffee cans filled with innumerable examples of innumerable categories of small parts, from ordinary nuts, bolts, and screws to lamp generators and carburetor parts for vehicles both extant and extinct.

One window lets in a stingy amount of colorless light. It hasn't been cleaned yet, in forty-five years. It looks like frosted glass with flyspecks. It's a wonder Lyle isn't blind.

He started gun-making with muzzle loaders. He went out on snowshoes in early winter and found a lodgepole pine that had been broken by snow and then had grown back so that the resulting curve was perfect for a pistol grip. He cut that and took it home and spent the next month and a half searching the forest for the Platonic match, the same kind of tree broken to twin the first. The idealization of injury. He knew the lodgepole stands where snow drifts heaviest, breaking the young trees. It looks like a grove of snakes, but he had to cruise a lot of timber to find his mirror grip.

All winter Lyle worked on the forge. He had to make a tap with guides to drill out the barrels to .50-caliber. He made two of everything: triggers, locks, hammers, sights. He roughed out each part on the anvil then filed them down, always applying dissimilar designs to identical specifications. The hammers are identical in weight and stroke, but one is shaped and engraved to resemble a striking cobra; the identical grips are diversely carved. Different parts are tempered to different hardnesses. He made the pins and fittings to remove the barrel, and all the screws. He made the damned screws. In the dim winter light he engraved and polished and blued.

He made a powder horn with brass fittings, two ramrods that fit into holes drilled in the stocks, and a bullet mold. He took the guns out in the yard and fired them enough times to satisfy himself that they were accurate and dependable. Then he carried them inside the house and stuck them in a drawer.

Next Lyle made two rifles, which was harder. He had to design and build a tool to drill a hole three feet long through the center of a steel bar. One after one the winters clicked down. He made two violins, which he called fiddles, starting the same way he did with the pistols, on snowshoes in the woods. He was looking for a straight, even-grained spruce that he could quartersaw two-inch slabs out of to make the carved tops. This time, since they were violins, he made them look the same, but on one he made the back and sides with some maple someone had given him, and the other he made from native wood. He made forms to bend the sides on, a brass thumb plane to shave the braces, and a taper pin reamer to set the tuning pegs. When they were done and tuned, he carried them inside and put them in drawers.

Summers he spent irrigating, haying, and carpentering for neighbors and working around his own place. The winters clicked down with strings of days spent working in the dingy shop, whose benches settled and wore down over forty-five years, hollows like the stone steps of old churches, from the gouges and scratches of files and backsaws, though mostly the bench surfaces were obscured under the sprawl of hand tools that he laid down and reached for without looking up.

He scoured the desert for agates and jade. He made a saw to cut slabs out of stones. He filled several boxes with the cut and polished jewelry he made. Some of the agates are like tiny landscapes with trees and a river or distant mountains under dawn. All women's jewelry—pendants, brooches, earrings—never given or worn. Put away in boxes in a drawer.

 

 

Pat Sudeck was raised in New Hampshire. He did a stint in the Navy, and when he got out it was 1923. In 1923, there was still land to be homesteaded in the Rockies. He spent one summer looking over parts of Idaho and northern Colorado. He may have chosen Colorado near the Wyoming line because of the number of clear nights we have, and on those clear nights, the number of stars you can see. I say this because Pat arrived with a telescope and several years' worth of astronomical journals.

He chose the best section available, half-timber, half-pasture, with five springs, but no bottomland. It borders the open prairie, which the maddening wind sweeps clean, so he could sometimes get to town in winter. It has a view of the Medicine Bow Range, Snowy Range, Laramie Basin, and Laramie Peak.

Pat arrived with a horse and wagon. In the wagon were a woodstove, an army tent, a crosscut saw, a double-bitted axe, a hammer, a plane, a shovel, the telescope and journals, some food and cooking utensils, and his clothes. He built a pole floor for his tent, set up the stove, dug out the spring, and started hand-sawing a winter's supply of wood and felling the building logs he needed. That first winter he spent burning wood in the tent, sawing more wood, and reading astronomy journals by the fire. Not only did he train his telescope on stars, he turned it on the county road by the mailboxes seven miles away, to see if anyone had been out through the snow from town.

He mail-ordered a Belsaw log carriage and a thirty-six-inch circular ripping blade. He spent the spring putting together his sawmill and ripping the planks for his floor and roof. Pat bought the motor from an old Packard and used it to power the sawmill. He used his horse to skid logs out of the woods. By fall his one-room log cabin was done and he went back to bucking up winter fuel.

The second summer he built four miles of perimeter fence so he could rent the pasture for grazing beef. He couldn't go into the cattle business himself without more land and a hay crop, so he devised other strategies instead.

The third summer he dug a root cellar in the sidehill by the spring. Like App Worster and his boys during the same years, Pat had a small vegetable garden, he canned and pickled, and he lived mostly on venison. To get cash for staples and supplies he hired out as a carpenter on ranches that were too far from town to get a union man. He raised goats and mink, especially mink. He bought old horses at the sale barn (live horses are easier to move than dead ones) and slaughtered them to feed his mink. He never quite prospered but he made it to comfortable.

 

 

You can tell a lot about someone by how they make things, but you can't tell everything by it. I did some growing up in the house Pat made, and out in the toolshed. I walked past his sawmill every day. I considered his dugout cellars, his springhouse whose water is cold and clear enough to break your teeth, the small alps of whiskey bottles over the back fence.

On the sawmill a system of cables and levers and a horseshoe is bolted to the end of a long rocker arm so that it flops over and cuts the throttle on the Packard. At the other end of the rocker arm a bearing operates centrifugally on the driveshaft as a governor. Pat could operate the motor from the same position he needed to be in to run the logs through the saw and notch them over on the carriage for each board. All the lumber he used he milled on his Packard-powered Belsaw, even shingles.

Pat lived where I live now. He made this house. He preferred the company of stars. I try to imagine his solitude. I try to imagine his loneliness, his endurance. I finger the leather binding on an old pair of snowshoes.

Pat was a good carpenter, but he wasn't much on foundations. He wanted to get to the wood-butchering part so he'd rock up the bottom logs on the corners without masonry, and away he'd go, raising walls and roof, windows, doors, ceiling, floors. He was wild for fancy trim. In his third and last house on this place he made a curved kitchen counter, boards mitered on edge then hand-planed to round, a curved header in the kitchen door, and one bedroom all paneled in aspen. But he never did go back and finish the foundation.

He made beautiful chairs and tables and beds and dressers and mirrors. He chose to spend his one life apart, isolated, self-sufficient. Thirty winters alone; thirty years in the stars.

Pat was a little over five feet tall. He slouched. His face was scrunched up in a clownlike grimace, happy and sad at the same time. Pat drank pure water, wore baggy clothes, and became Lyle's neighbor. He was forgetful. I've found trees half-sawn through standing in the forest, sawlogs cut to length forgotten on the forest floor. Once I found a singletree leaning against a big ponderosa, as if Pat would surely come back for it that afternoon.

When Pat was sixty his doctor told him he had to move to a lower elevation for his health. Pat could see the end of fighting winters alone anyway, so he sold the place to my father for $12,000 and started a cabinet shop in Longmont, a quiet farming town south of Fort Collins. He lived there fifteen years. At age seventy-six, he married for the first time, a woman who owned a motel in Arizona. He spent his last years with his bride, doing handywork around the motel. I remember when news filtered up to Laramie that he'd died.

I only met Pat once. I must have been twelve the one time he came back, before he went to Arizona. He didn't fit the hermit image. He was neither reticent nor gruff. He wore khaki pants and a khaki workshirt. He wore a gray felt hat with a narrow brim. He was soft-spoken and painstakingly polite.

He didn't stay long, a couple of hours. He refused to come inside the house. He talked to my father in the yard. Before he left he took me down to the spring and cut a green willow fork and trimmed it with his pocket knife. We took it up on the mesa and he showed me how to witch water. We walked in circles, me following, through the dry sagebrush. Pat held the live and eager wand. He said, “Nothin' mystical about it. It's just like drivin' a car.”

 

 

In defense of whatever happens next, the navy of flat-bottomed popcorn clouds steams over like they are floating down a river we're under. To the west, red cliffs, more pasture, the blue Medicine Bow with stretch-marked snow-fields, quartzite faces like sunny bone. I'm worried about Lyle getting back from town with his oxygen, but then through binoculars I see him turn the Studebaker, antlike, off the county road and up the four-mile grade, so small down there that I want to imagine his hands on the wheel, still strong, his creased blue jeans and high-top shoes I know he wears to town. He turns off the road on a small knoll about halfway up and stops the truck, facing the mountains. He still looks small against so much space, but I can see his left arm and shoulder and the brim of his hat lowered as he lights a smoke and looks off toward the west, and small countries of light and dark rush across the prairie toward him and over him.

 

L
YLE
, 1981

“Ferris became the most popular topic of conversation around coffee tables in ranch kitchens throughout southern Albany County. It wasn't just the aggressively sorry poverty he lived in—a dilapidated mobile home cobbled onto a scrapwood shack with a neoprene roof nailed down with sawmill slabs, leaving the black edges flapping like trapped crows even before the real winds came over the Divide. The real topic of speculation was where did he get all them horses and how did he expect to keep them on forty acres of ridgetop with no water?

“If he spent all day hauling water from the nearest creek he had a right to [Sand Creek was about two miles away], he could keep them and maybe even the goats from dying of thirst, but by early fall he was still hauling in animals and he hadn't begun to bring in any feed. By the end, as I say, he had about twenty of these motley horses, including two stud horses, besides the goats and chickens and dogs and cats and peacocks.

“Forty acres of that kind of high plains pasture could conceivably support two animals if you gave them hay during the winter. Twenty horses would last about two weeks before they'd graze it down to dirt so that it would take twenty years to recover, since we get about fourteen inches of precipitation a year, which is exactly what happened. In two weeks Ferris had himself forty acres of dirt, a personal dust bowl which begun to blow away until he had forty acres of gravel. So you can see why people was wondering what he might have in mind.

“It wasn't long before they found out. What he had in mind was opening the gate. He turned the whole herd out across the Wyoming line, into the old Chimney Rock Ranch. The first I heard about it was when his studs got into Frank's bunch and cut the hell out of two or three mares, and probably knocked them up with God knows what kind of rough approximation of horseflesh, which Frank didn't much care for, since he is at least as concerned about the looks of his herd as anybody else around here is. You don't want a bunch of blooded quarter horse cow ponies to have some weed of a goosenecked, no-tail, wall-eyed, rhinoceros-looking thing right out in the middle of it. So Clay come out and sewed up the mares where they were cut on the withers, and Frank rode horseback up to have a word with Ferris where he lived on his dazzling junkheap with his hard-looking woman. Frank told me about it later over coffee.

“As Frank's good buckskin gelding carefully picked his way among the refrigerators and shower stalls and even some television sets, the first thing he notices is the smell of goats that even the wind up there couldn't scrub out of the air. The next thing he notices is all the goat sheds Ferris had built, an impressive amount of work even though it was slapdash, like the addition on the trailer where Ferris lived himself, but without the neoprene roofing. It really was a lot of labor, especially when you consider all the junk hauling, poaching, and timber thieving Ferris done on the side. Frank got down, though the goatsmell was fit to suffocate him.

“He knocks on the trailer and Ferris comes out and closes the door behind him, but not before Frank can see that there is an awful lot of stuff—clothes, pots and pans, tools, and cardboard boxes of groceries on the floor, and no furniture. Frank forces himself to shake hands and introduce himself. Then he tells Ferris to round up his horses and keep them fenced and get some hay up there to feed them.