The Meadow (20 page)

 

In the last three years of his life, Ray began to manifest a strange relationship with snow. Sometimes in the fall or early winter, if he was on the mountain alone and Margie was in town, he'd flee to Laramie in a flat panic at the slightest suggestion of flurries. This in a man who was born on the mountain sixty-five years ago and had already seen everything this country can dish out and was well equipped to handle it: four-wheel drive with chains all around, a light two-cylinder snow cat with a cab, called a Trackster; and he always carried shovels, blankets, extra gasoline, and food. No way he could get into real trouble. Still, some nights, with light snow predicted and a few flakes in the air, I'd see Ray streaking by without so much as a wave, with a grim look on his face, headed for town.

On the other hand there were times—more than a few—when he'd get drunk as a barn swallow on old gooseberries in Laramie, and alone or with Ginny, his daughter, he'd head up here in the middle of the night in the worst whiteout you can imagine.

He'd load the Trackster, which was more than the pickup was designed to carry, and drive through the drifts like there were hellhounds after him, as if sheer momentum could get him through anything. It got him through a lot, but it also left him high-centered in the middle of some huge snowdrifts. I know because I dug him, pulled him, or dug and pulled him out of scores of such drifts in those days. If no one was around to lend a hand, Ray seemed perfectly happy to dig himself out, even if it took several hours. If he knew he couldn't dig out or the truck broke down, he'd just unload the Trackster and away he'd go, rattling over the tops of wavelike drifts, commenting on the tooth-loosening shriek of the two-cycle motor by mumbling every so often, “Well, I guess it beats walking.”

I didn't think it did beat walking, since the Trackster moved at about the same pace as walking and sounded like the inside of a beehive. You had to shout to be heard by the person sitting next to you.

Frank reported one such night: a couple of feet of snow down, blowing into deeper drifts, more predicted, and with the wind whipping it to a froth. It was February just before calving. Frank and Shirley had just turned off their light and climbed into bed for the last good sleep they expected for a while, when Ray's headlights swept across the bedroom wall. They didn't get out of bed, just lay there as the truck idled in the yard. Once they heard Ginny laugh and it sounded like she'd had more than a few. One just assumed that by that time of night Ray was loose.

Frank peeked out the window. He could see the ends of two cigarettes glowing in the cab of the pickup. Snow swirled in the headlights like white mosquitoes. When he lay back down Frank said, “Nice evening for a drive in the country.” Shirley giggled. Then the truck pulled up the hill past the house, and they went to sleep. Frank wondered how far they'd get, but he wasn't worried about them.

At midnight they woke again to a drunken whoop of laughter and, looking out the window, saw Ray pulling down the ramps to unload the Trackster. It was still coming down like hell. The thought of starting out on the seven miles to the reservoir at this hour in these conditions seemed less like drunk than crazy, but once the whine of the Trackster had faded into the blizzard, Frank just rolled over and went back to sleep. He noticed Shirley had beat him to it. His last conscious thought was, “I wonder how far they'll get this time.”

It was sometime after two when Frank heard that overgrown chainsaw pull back into the ranch yard. When the throttle cut to idle he heard more laughter. At least they were having fun.

On the open ridges that anchor Boulder Ridge to the prairie, the snowdrifts resemble each other, and in the pitch black and white of a blizzard at night, they'd driven in circles for a couple of hours before Ginny convinced Ray to give it up after he said for the tenth time, “Oh, now I know where I am.”

They came back to the ranch, loaded the Trackster, started the pickup, and backed it straight into a big irrigation ditch.

Frank kept checking out the window every so often and going back to bed. When they unloaded the Trackster again, he figured they were sure as hell stuck, the truck resting on its axles. When they started trying to pull the truck out of the ditch with the Trackster, Frank realized the moment he had dreaded had arrived.

It was three-thirty. He told Shirley to stay in bed. He pulled on his blue jeans, laced up his Sorels, put on his down coat and Scotch cap, and headed out to the barn to start the big tractor.

When Ray saw Frank he said he sure hadn't meant to get him out of bed. Frank was good-natured about it since he thought it was funnier than anything else, a funny story. With the big tractor and the nylon towrope, Frank still had to take a pretty good run at it to yank Ray's truck out of the snow-filled ditch.

Frank waited while they loaded the Trackster again and left. Then he went to bed for the hour or so before he would be getting up anyway. He lay there thinking about Ray and that crazy daughter of his plowing through the deeply rutted snow on the county road back to town, still passing a bottle. If Ray managed to keep it on the road he'd be back in Laramie by first light.

 

 

Besides the big hay barn at the end of the meadow (that used to be the meadow's waist before they built the reservoir), there was another barn in the brome patch behind the house. It was built at the same time or before the hay barn, on soft ground and without a real foundation, just rocked up at the corners and at the middle of each wall, so that it sank and the bottom logs rotted one by one until the peak of the roof was eye level. It sank about an inch a year. The earth was inhaling it.

You could scarcely store a small tractor in there, let alone hay or stock. Someday it will be a roof resting on the ground. Lyle knew there would have to be a new barn, and he kept it in the back of his mind when he did other things. When he was cutting firewood and found a straight, standing-dead building log the right size, he'd skid it home. He gathered logs ten years for that barn and never felled a living tree.

He knew it would be his last big job, so he made it monumental. The floor plan was twenty-four by forty feet; the logs were too big for a man to lift one end without block and tackle. He decided, again, against nails except for the roof. He decided to build it in winter.

I have never heard of anyone building a barn that size, alone, at that elevation, in the winter. In ambition it was like the first ascent of a great north face, though it was never reported in journals. Tourists can see the barn from the county road, but the accomplishment of its building was only known to about twenty people, fifteen of whom have died.

Before the snow flew Lyle hauled foundation stone from Bull Mountain, big square pieces weighing up to five hundred pounds. He built a boom on the REO and winched them up on the hand winch he'd made for sawlogs. He stacked and leveled them at the corners and where the logs joined at the middles of the long sides.

The previous winter he had forged two auger bits, one and a quarter inches in diameter, eighteen inches long, the kind of tool you couldn't buy anywhere. He made a special brace with an extra long sweep to turn his huge bits.

He worked in blizzards, alone, maneuvering the logs up onto the wall one end at a time, holding them temporarily with log dogs he'd also forged. With handsaw and double-bitted axe he fitted the corners, plumb and square, rolling the logs back again and again to trim a finer fit. You'd need a feeler gauge to check the tolerances. Each time he went up a log he augered clear through two logs and into the third, till the brace had buried itself. He trimmed pegs out of lodgepole sticks with the axe, and filled the walls so full of pegs it looked like a jail in some places. He went to one-inch pegs to fasten down the hand-hewn rafters.

Unless the wind was strong enough to blow him off the walls, or the logs were so iced he couldn't balance on them holding a twice-sharpened axe, he was out there. By the time the snow was gone the roof was on. All that remained was pouring the foundation.

Lyle always put the foundation in last, so the building can settle before it's tied down. If you rock the corners and start building you can use the bottom logs to hold the forms and pour the walls under them, so that the liquid cement takes the cupped shape of the logs, which have pegs sticking downward to tie them to the concrete, which makes a stronger, tighter fit than doing it “the right way.”

Lyle's cement mixer was a 1923 Deere utility motor geared into a Model-T axle that turned a fifty-five-gallon drum that had wooden fins inside it. It mixed a wheelbarrow about as often as one man working alone can hand pour that much and get back. The few days I made it over that winter, Lyle let me help on things that would have been hard to screw up. I drilled holes, and later helped shovel sand out of the creek for cement.

I watched Lyle hewing with the broadaxe, saw him cut the perfect corners with stunningly confident strokes of the double-bitted axe. I can walk into that barn today and look up into the massive vaults of rafters, cross beams, struts, and remember. I can look around and know one thing at least is for damn sure
there.

 

 

From 1948 to 1972 Bill McMurray never worked a lick over what he had to, mostly reading clocks and turning the wheels that open the gate on the reservoir and the headgates on the ditches. At first he had to snowshoe nine miles up to Deadman during heavy runoff season, but as soon as they invented the snowmobile, Bill got one, and why not. He had tried to make the snowshoe trip up there and back easier by nailing a crosspiece between two trees for a bench every quarter mile so he could sit down and rest without having to take off his pack or snowshoes. Bill must have thought there would be the same amount of snow every year; some winters the rests are under the snow, other years they're eye-level or overhead. That was Bill.

Most of the time he spent drinking beer in front of the TV hooked up to a twelve-volt battery. His wife was not pretty, but she was kind. Her name was Elbertine. Elbertine and everyone else cut Bill a lot of slack, even his employers who suspected they'd have a hard time finding someone else to live that far from town, even with fringe benefits like letting him run cows on the section and pocket the proceeds.

Bill didn't care much for fixing fence. Theoretically he was responsible for half his north side (our south), and half his east side (Lyle's west), and all of his fence that bordered National Forest or railroad land. Bill never worked on our side, and we stopped expecting him to. We fixed it ourselves each spring.

The half of Bill's east fence got so bad it didn't need to be fixed anymore; it needed to be rebuilt: new posts and new wire which the company would provide, but mostly it required a few postholes, which Bill was supposed to provide. Since the cows arrived in early June, and pasture rent was real money for Bill, Lyle expected him to get after it eventually—greed kept Bill from being completely lazy.

As soon as the snowdrifts released the worst parts, Lyle went to work on his fence. Before the snow was all the way gone Lyle's fencing was done and he was waiting on Bill to fix his part. Lyle talked to him about it a couple of times, “mentioned it,” more likely: the western politesse of obliqueness. He secured assurances, pats on the back, chuckles, good-neighbor smiles. The first of June came and the fence just lay there like a strafed parade.

Lyle decided to fight the unthinkable with the unthinkable. He drove to Bill and Elbertine's to speak of the fence directly, to make demands. Bill and Elbertine had gone to town.

Lyle went home and loaded the pickup with posts he'd cut and treated himself, fencing tools, and a new roll of wire. He set to work building fence, and with every post he set he got madder at Bill. He'd started at nine in the morning and was still working at seven, when Bill drove up in his company truck.

He was all duded up for town and had Elbertine and Elbertine's sister with him. He stopped right next to the posthole Lyle was digging, then calm as you please rolled down the window. He didn't even get out of his truck, just gave Lyle a big grin, easy as thought, and asked how the fence was coming. “How's the fence coming, Lyle?”

Lyle dropped the shovel into the hole and turned around. He had never uttered an emphatically negative word to anyone's face in his life. Generally, there's no style in it. Lyle lit into Bill with volume and purpose, chewed him up one side and down the other, calling him a lazy, good-for-nothing stump not worth the powder to blow it to hell sitting there in his goddamned string tie and town duds, letting another man do his work for him. It was shameful and he was a sorry excuse for a man if there ever was one. Lyle deployed words he ordinarily wouldn't have, in front of ladies.

Elbertine kept saying, “That's right. You tell him, Lyle. I tell him that all the time, but it don't do no good. Like talking to a worm.” When it looked to Bill like the storm wasn't going to let up, he just let that grin slip a notch and reached for the window crank. Bill kept smiling, rolled up the window, easy as thought, and drove away.

Lyle turned back to work in the gathering dark. He decided that building fence was bad enough; building it mad just wasn't worth it.

The next time he saw Bill it was like nothing had happened. The cows grazed peacefully, the men were friendly, and they had a new fence between them.

 

 

I never knew Howard very well, and what I knew I couldn't figure. I'll never know why Ray took him on that last trip up the mountain in a snowstorm, unless it was because Ray didn't mind the idea of being dead, he just didn't like the idea of being dead a long time before anyone found him. That was a lonesome idea. It never occurred to Ray that Howard wouldn't make it out. Howard was supposed to have gotten out with word.

To meet Howard you'd have thought him pretty normal: a short, bearded fellow, perhaps overeager to please. You had to be around him some to realize that he was without volition to the point of dementia. He did what he was told, but he never did anything else. Ray said Howard had an older brother he just about had to check with before taking a piss. That's why it got our attention when Howard married Nita, Jack's daughter, who, like Kye, Jack's son, was afflicted with a degenerative illness that made them obese, mentally defective, and eventually blind. Kye and Nita were utterly gentle. They belonged to that elite society of people who, because defective in a certain way, go through life without hurting anyone. They were enormous, blind child angels.