The Meadow (3 page)

The others, two of whom are not that long out of school themselves, turn back to the snow-mound and disappear inside. The sound the door makes as it shuts is like that of a heavy stone someone dropped to the ground after carrying it a long way. By now a thread of smoke rises straight as steel pipe from the dwelling into the still sky.

There are six children in the one-room school. The floor is dirt and the air smells of coal smoke. The walls are not sod like all the children's houses but made from logs hauled all the way from the foothills of the Rockies. The school perches fully above the ground. It reminds Lyle of a birdhouse. The children are obedient. The schoolmarm is kindly and crazy as the wind. The children study hard because they know it's their last chance to learn something before they become useful as labor to their families.

Lyle, though he doesn't know it yet, will be working in the fields with his brothers this summer, trying to do a man's share, because his father has already decided to leave for good as soon as the first flowers spatter the pasture.

Lyle sits alone during lunch because he is embarrassed by his sandwiches, which are made from homemade bread, the badge of poverty. The other kids have Sunbeam. School ends early on winter days so the children have time to walk or ride home before dark.

When Lyle reaches home he gives the horse some hay and grain. He rubs the horse down with straw, not because it is in a sweat (it isn't), but because he thinks the horse likes it and it's something to do instead of going inside. From the house he can hear his father screaming at his mother with the kind of lunacy that infects prairie dwellers in winter. Lyle thinks the really smart creatures know enough to sleep till spring.

So he stays out in the shed with the animals, trying to keep warm between the horse and the cow. He is not waiting to be called for supper; they won't call him. He is waiting for his teeth to chatter so hard he's afraid they'll break.

 

 

When we think of our lives as what we have done, memory becomes a museum with one long shelf on which we arrange a bric-a-brac of deeds, each to his own liking. Lyle doesn't think of his life as what he has done, or what was done to him. He has no use for blame. The day his father left for good never came to an end. His mother tried to hide her relief, which was a joy that came over her like tough spring flowers in fearless colors flushing the high plains that winter leaves so female for a while.

Between the floating blankness of winter and the monotonous, burnt-out summer tones, the quick thrill of color over the dusty flats was just how she felt that spring. And that's how fast it was gone—faster. Her husband's labor had made more difference than she ever would have admitted to him. Now they couldn't afford to stay where they were and they couldn't afford to leave. So they left. I think the reason Hazel decided to go was because she knew her two oldest sons would leave home if she didn't take them away herself. It was her attempt to keep them with her.

They moved to Boulder a hundred miles west, which was, at the time, a humble farming town slumped in a foothill valley so close to the mountains you couldn't see them from town: the first little ridge to the west blocks out the higher peaks, making proximity to the high country oddly plain and comforting.

They rented a tiny bungalow on the outskirts of town. They kept chickens, pigs, and milk cows. The two older boys hired on to road crews, did welding and auto repair in the winter, got farm work in July. They blistered their ears and noses and dizzied their brains under felt hats driving tractors or teams pulling combines and headers in circles. They spent no money except for food and cigarette makings, the occasional new hat or pair of overalls (“overhauls,” Lyle called them). Hazel wanted to send Lyle back to school in the fall. She wanted him to learn a trade, make a steady wage, which sounded good to Lyle, but it never came about.

Clara made a little money painting landscapes from photographs—people's houses or favorite mountain views—a talent she had discovered early in the grueling bleakness of prairie winters. Hazel did the housework and cooking, some tailoring and mending for families in town, and stayed up many nights ripping the seams out of her sons' bluejeans and sewing the un-worn-out backs of pants over the fronts of other pairs worn out at the knees, restitching the seams on her treadle Singer. Each pair of jeans lasted half again as long that way. Hazel also mended their torn shirts and worn-out shoes, darned socks, and pieced quilts from scraps of clothing too far gone to mend. She wasted nothing, or to be more precise, she wasted no things.

The whole family worked with a ferocity and inventiveness that could only have been provided by an intelligent woman who had spent her life till now stranded halfway, who'd had enough of living in a house made of dirt, surrounded by measureless prairies of dirt, pulling food from the dirt to feed to her sons who were covered with the same dirt they all worked, ate, and slept in. She started hoarding a portion of the money they got, saving fiercely, wasting nothing, buying nothing new and nothing at all they could make themselves or do without, pretending to nothing.

Her children got nothing for themselves, any more than she did. They lived for a better future she would reveal to them. They were humble and hardworking as the earth itself, the dry earth of the prairie.

During the Depression most families were slipping, losing land and possessions. Hazel was holding ground, even gaining a little. She was already an expert at the kind of poverty the rest of the country was just beginning to learn and would never master.

Lyle was fourteen and old enough to think that a man had a right to one thing, at least, in life, one simple pleasure, which was to stop killing himself every so often for long enough to sprinkle a few golden flakes of crimp-cut tobacco into a delicate boat of paper, held just so between thumb, index, and middle finger, to roll it and lick it and strike a wooden kitchen match to light it and go back to work with the cigarette stuck to his lower lip.

And sometimes, at noon or sundown, the ritual included the possibility of sitting down long enough to smoke it, too. Life had three parts: working from first light to last, sleeping too tired to dream, so deep he was pretty sure he knew what death was like, and smoking cigarettes.

Eating didn't count because the food was so plain it was part of work, like pouring gasoline in a tractor. Lyle never took pleasure in eating, any more than a coyote would.

 

 

In the Depression a lot of people lost their lives, if your life is what you do. People who had never missed a mortgage payment, had worked hard, not for money but for a way of life, lost their land when its value dropped below the amount they owed. Old story.

The illusion of land ownership creates a cheap workforce in the fields: people who often pay more than they are paid to work, as we say, like slaves. But, oh, they are rich in illusions of independence, and they are also very proud, which is not an illusion.

In 1938 Hazel Van Waning was not in a position to feel sorry for anyone. She assumed the loan, $2,000 remaining—a song, Lyle called it—on a small mountain farm: 320 acres of hay meadow in a valley surrounded by so much green it was hard to imagine winter ever being there, though it was precisely winter at that elevation (8,500 ft.) and that far from town that made it so no one in his right mind would actually try to
live
there. A few families who were not in their right minds had tried and failed to keep a grip on it, one of them App Worster's.

Hazel didn't feel sorry for him, either. In fact, feeling sorry, that questionable human capacity, for herself or anyone else, was something she would never regain, not even in relative comfort, not in this life.

She didn't believe in borrowing so she bought the deed outright, in cash, from a banker who was amazed to have unloaded a backwoods property he thought he was stuck with. The bank clerks made jokes about the woman who had given all her savings to acquire a piece of land not only unprofitable but untenable, and her without a husband to work the land for her. They were laughing about it when word came down that the bank was folding and all the laughing employees were no longer employed.

Hazel signed the deed in '38, but she kept her family in Boulder, all of them working at something. They were poorer that year than they ever had been. Lyle hired on to the road crew where his brother, Bob, was already working. They were mostly over near South Park, building fence along the new highway. They were supposed to drive steel posts a uniform depth along the new road so that the white painted tops came out looking even. Some of the posts wouldn't go that deep into the rocky ground, so it fell to Lyle, the newest and youngest member of the crew, to cut off the tops of the high posts with a hacksaw and repaint them when the foreman wasn't looking.

All the wages the boys brought in went to fixing up the dilapidated log cabin and caved-in sheds that were evidence of grim failures on the farm they'd bought. Slowly the place became livable. They soon bought a team to hay the meadow and fixed the barbed wire fence around its perimeter, cutting their own posts and piecing together short lengths of wire they scavenged where snowdrifts and elk snapped the fence each winter.

The house itself was well made, if neglected. A log house lasts forever in this climate as long as it has a good roof over it and a foundation under it. In 1940, Hazel moved her family up to Sheep Creek for good. The cabin had three rooms: two bedrooms and an everything-else room with a wood cookstove and a wood heater.

Henry joined the Army that year and learned to fly: Hazel's nightmare. He figured she had Lyle and Bob to work for her and Clara to chew on all day, and it seemed like now or never, so off he went in his green uniform, and none of them ever saw him again.

In February of 1941 the snow rose past the windowsills. The family tried to make the best of what looked like the cold tunnel of the rest of their lives. Bob promised to build snowfences the next summer so they wouldn't be buried alive like that again. He and Lyle spent the winter nights shivering in the unheated lean-to they'd built on the back of the house. Clara took a snapshot with the family's Brownie of the snowdrift in front of the house. She perched her own wool hat on top of it and placed sticks with her mittens on them so it looked like someone buried in the snow and reaching for air. With a pen she drew an arrow on the print pointing to the hat and wrote,
ME,
and sent it to a friend in Boulder. Hazel showed them how, as a girl in Iowa, when hoarfrost grew thick as ferns on the windows, she'd heat a thimble on the stove and use it to melt a peephole in the frost, to spy on the still, white world outside.

 

 

The problem is there is no one to blame for this. It's just so much snow you can't see. It's just a blizzard like white ants moving in mild waves and stopping, covering, moving on, covering everything, moving on, uncovering and covering everything again, getting deeper, the wind ordering and disordering and ordering them to advance, stop, advance, wait; or like an invasion of angels. Advance, stop, advance, wait, so that they all move forward like a wave, but they are never all moving together like a wave, claiming, reaching, deepening, and you can't see. If you could rise above and look down on this blindness you might see that the whole storm is a kind of silence.

From up there you could see a Model-A car that has lost its top, as if it were decked out for a sunny Sunday drive, and the leather seats look as if they are covered with white mold, and then they fill, and there is a delicate mantle of snow, like an eyebrow, on top of the steering wheel, in the lee of the windshield, and at first you can see the last of the deep ruts the narrow tires cut in the snow before the snow got higher than the axles and the wheels just spun in place. The ruts are filling fast. They resemble unsure lines drawn by a hand that lifted off the page while drawing, gesturing disappearance, and in the time it took to say that they have disappeared.

The point of view can't rise high enough to find the edge of the storm. The car fills and is lost to the principle of whiteness, blankness, stupidity and, without the car, the point of view is also lost, without external reference or direction. It could be spinning. You wouldn't know.

It's only logical to think there must be people somewhere near, a way to explain, someone to blame for the abandonment of the car. There must always be an explanation for abandonment, a destination maybe. The point of view wants someone to blame for this, somewhere to pin the cause and effect. It needs reasons. It wants to give these people, whose car has foundered, a home to try to get to, even in this storm. Because you have to make assumptions. Because you have to assume they do not want to die, or they do not want to want to, or some of them are helping others in not wanting.

Down there: a footprint like a posthole in the snow. The footprint is filling up, full, gone, but there is another one not yet quite full, which provides a sense of direction. Back off. A bit left. There they are.

There are four people. One slogs ahead through knee-deep drifts, leaning into them like a horse leaning into the harness. The others follow carefully, saving their strength by placing their feet in the foot holes of the first. They look like majorettes in slow motion, prancing, but not a joyful kind of prancing and not a proud kind. No one is having fun. A little closer.

The old man whose full white beard is filled with spindrift breaks trail. The three that follow are his sons. He blames himself for everything, even though it is just October. He has icicles of tobacco juice dangling like a nasty chandelier from the whiskers under his lower lip. With every steam engine puff of breath he breathes a curse against himself in rhythm with each slogging step.

He does not curse the freak fall storm any more than he would curse an invasion of angels. In counterpoint to his own poisonous huffing, he hears the breathing of his eldest son, then the lighter breaths of Ray, the middle one, and a little farther behind again, the toneless grace notes of the youngest, who stumbles often and they have to stop and wait for him. It's taking longer for him to get up each time. How the old man hears these small sounds above or below the screech of wind cannot be explained. He just hears them, and his hearing ties them together in the whiteout like a thick rope between prisoners of war or kindergarten children on a busy street.