The Meadow (4 page)

When Jack, the smallest, falls and can't get up again, the old man, App, stops making posthole tracks. Pete, the oldest, bumps blindly into his father's back, and then he, too, sits down in the snow. Ray shouts, “Jack won't get up, Dad. He says he wants to take a nap.”

The wind cheers louder.

 

 

Appleton Worster, twice a widower, stops mid-furrow in the snow. He tilts back his head as if to laugh, but he isn't laughing. His sky-blue eyes veer wildly upward in doubtful surprise and it's more of a grimace, like apostles wear in paintings of the Crucifixion.

“Dad,” Ray says, and then louder, as if App were the one threatening to fall asleep, “Dad! Come help wake up Jack. He'll get cold if he don't wake up now. He's got snow all over him and he's starting to take a nap.”

App lowers his eyes, breathes in, and spits out a stream of tobacco juice that blows back into his beard like a flyline cast into the wind. Then he circles back to where his youngest son is splayed out on his back and says, “Get up, you little harelip runt,” and lifts him up by the collar of the oversized brown wool coat that both of his brothers have worn and outgrown, lifts him up like a pup that has made a deliberate mess and is about to be heaved out the door by the scruff of his neck. App turns him around and delivers a serious kick to Jack's skinny ass and says, “Get along, dammit, or we'll none of us get home.” And he does.

Imagine again the aerial view, the four figures pulling single file through the dry, feathery, now thigh-deep snow. It has snowed three feet in sixteen hours. Now Pete goes first, making more of a slow motion wake than tracks. Ray goes second, towing his little brother by one coat sleeve, which has by now pulled down from his thin arm like the empty sleeve of an amputee and has twisted the coat around and halfway off. App brings up the rear in two senses, heaving back and giving Jack a good kick about every twenty steps or if the youngster stops and says he's sleepy, whichever comes first.

“I'm sleepy, Dad,” and he jolts forward two or three tripsteps and starts slogging again. They look like figures in a cartoon: each of the old man's kicks juices them forward a few paces and they stop again, bumping into each other, and then another kick. But it isn't a cartoon. It's real, it's true. Though it might have irony, the truth is never funny.

After another hour of crippling along just so, the blizzard's white is traded for equal depth of blackness. Night without the sky. App is no longer sure where they are, but figures they have to keep going. At a certain point you keep going to see what happens next.

Maybe, eventually, they will strike some feature of the landscape App recognizes: a rock outcrop or fenceline. But how to tell one fence from another in this night and weather? He wants to pick up the little boy in his arms, but he knows if Jack stops moving he will freeze. His mind wanders, more aimless, but not as lost as he has gotten himself and his boys.

He thinks of his own father, whom everyone, including App, agreed was a mean, useless old shit. He'd been a sea captain out of Maine and had crossed the prairie west in the early years, never again to smell salt air. He never quit talking about how hard it was to navigate that vast, featureless landscape awash in grass. He had sold his mariner's instruments never thinking how badly he would want them back in South Dakota.

They had to travel during the day to keep from wrecking wagon wheels, hitting stones and falling into washes. At night he reckoned as best he could from the wheeling stars. During the day they trailed a length of rope and watched it to keep themselves heading straight. Going forward looking back. If the rope started to snake, they'd heave to and snake it back, as if they were trying to get away from it though it was fastened to them, and they needed that rope, not tying them to anything, to find their way.

App remembers how his father always spoke of how they “landed” at Diamond Peak on the Colorado-Wyoming border, which always seemed funny to App since there'd been nothing but land for months. Hell, they'd been
at land
the way sailors are
at sea,
adrift in grass as he and his sons were adrift in a sea of black snow, only he didn't remember any of it since he'd made the crossing in his mother's arms.

“Hey,” Pete shouts from the darkness ahead, “there's a cliff up here.”

“Does it rise or fall?” App yells back.

“It goes up.”

App spits, relieved they aren't rimrocked. Better not to be on something you could fall off. He leaves Ray holding Jack by the sleeve and wades up to where Pete waits. App stops and sniffs like a grizzly bear, and a smell he hates gives him the first good feeling he's had all day. Even in this cold and wind he can smell it: the pungent, resinous, musty stink of a packrat's nest.

“Now we'll be fine, boys.”

Ray puts in hopefully, “Now do you know where we are?”

“Yep. Right here.”

App scrambles up onto a snow-covered ledge and pulls the boys up after him, one by one by their collars, now like a mother lynx moving her kits. Here at least they are out of the wind. App crawls back along the ledge, following the smell that would have tightened his throat if it weren't so cold, back into a crevice where the packrats have built and abandoned a nest of finger-width sticks covered with their own varnishlike piss.

“Nobody home. Get that cracker-assed kid up here,” App says, fishing a match from his coat pocket and lighting it with the thumbnail of the same hand that holds the match—the same one-handed flourish he uses to light the kerosene lamps at home. The boys watch as fire springs from their father's hand. As the sticks catch they begin to feel the heat on their windburned faces.

 

 

“Did I ever tell you the story…” App begins, and as he does his mind feels to him like a packrat balanced on a stringer in the barn, sluggishly feinting back and forth, firmly in the sights of some ranch kid's .22. Two bad choices: stay huddled here in the rocks and rest—he knows how long that nest will burn, not very; or strike out again when the fire wanes, into the storm that seems bound to lose them. He thinks the boys will be more frightened if they stay.

The idea of their being scared, of their knowing how bad things really are, depresses the old man and shames him. His depression and shame scare the hell out of him. He knows that under circumstances in which well-being is not a possibility, the illusion of well-being is a matter of life and death. And what if he gets them all confounded, leads them away from the safety of home? When he thinks of the cabin, probably colder inside than out by now, with its stove stone-cold, dirt floor, and no mother to hustle them in and warm them with soup and coffee, he thinks, why fight it. Then he kicks himself mentally the way he's been kicking Jack all afternoon to keep him from freezing … no, to keep him alive even though he was freezing. He sees Ray's eyes drooping.

“… of the time your old granddad and me was up on Deadman Mountain hunting deer and elk meat for the town of Laramie?” He knows they've heard it to death so he doesn't wait for an answer. Just as well kill them with boredom as let them freeze, he thinks, but they wouldn't answer anyway because it was their favorite story and they didn't want to lie.

“I'd loaned my rifle, the old .44-.40 to a sheepherder who'd had coyote trouble, but now I'd got it back, so that when I woke up that morning and looked across the clearing where we'd camped and saw that curious old grizzly sniffing us out, standing up on his hind legs with his nose up in the air and his front paws hanging limp so that he looked just like a overgrowed gopher, I thought I'd just as well shoot him since he'd volunteered. I mean he was just about
begging
me to shoot him, standing up like that with those little gopher paws.

“So I reached back and grabbed my rifle and said, ‘Wake up, Dad,' just before I squeezed the shot off so's I wouldn't scare the old sonofabitch to death without waking him up first.

“The first shot wasn't bad, but it was a lung shot and that bear changed from a giant gopher into a full-fledged, madder-than-hell grizzly and came after me across that clearing with blood more or less pouring out of his mouth.

“But I wasn't worried, boys, hell no. I figured I was the one with the rifle. I took careful aim for a head shot and just as he jumped on me I fired. Only I didn't fire. I just kind of clicked. The rifle had jammed on me. That bear had just enough strength left to clamp on to my thigh and hang on to see which one of us died first and which one second. By now I was starting to worry. I couldn't move. I had this not-completely-dead grizzly bear hanging off my leg. I thought I was pretty young and tough, like you boys are, but I was afraid that bear would find the strength to finish biting off my leg before he died.

“Well, by then my old man was getting pretty well waked up and was coming around the tent with the double-bitted axe in his hands. ‘Roll over, App, so's I can get him a decent lick,' he said about as calm as high noon in July.

“Well, boys, have you ever tried to roll over with a grizzly bear clamped to your leg? Steel jaws anchored to about eight hundred pounds of meat—now that's what I call a bear trap. Well, I tried it and I can tell you it hurt some, but I rolled over just enough and Dad raised that axe over his head and split that bear skull off my thigh just like he was splitting wood for the kitchen stove.”

As App spins out the familiar tale, his mind still clambers back and forth over what is best to do. He watches his sons' faces, red and chapped from windburn and riveted in the fireglow as if they were sitting around a campfire on a summer fishing trip. At least he'd get their minds off where they are, which is mostly what stories are good for anyway.

“I still carry the scars to this day,” he says, and they know it's true, since they've seen those scars, like raindrops in dust, a thousand times, more times than they've heard the story.

“From that day I resolved never to loan a firearm to anyone, lessen it was a matter of life and death, number one, and number two, to learn to handle the double-bitted axe as good as my sourpussed old man, which I done.”

When the story ends they all hear the wind again. Their grim present starts pushing back in, taking back what's left of the fire, and the little space the story made. Fear invades the children's faces like cloud shadows rising on the side of a cliff. Then Ray says, “Do you know where we are?” and App's mind begins again that rodentlike back and forth between the truth his sons expect of him, and the lie that might give them enough hope to save them. The packrat nest is down to coals and ash. It is getting time to decide a few things.

“I guess this is no place for kids,” App says, and then he thinks no place ever is. “Come on, we're almost home,” he says, and then he thinks,
either way.
He says, “We don't want to be late.”

 

 

Ray listened to the story of his father and his father's father and the bear. He heard it as if it were traveling a long distance to reach him, from beyond his father's voice, as if the story had existed before his father and his father's father had been born. It was like a Bible story he'd heard from Miss Gunnerson at school, one of those where fathers and sons somehow love each other through veils of rage and God's mean tricks. That could never happen to Ray. God seemed to more or less leave them alone, compared to doings in the Bible, and Ray loved his father with a distillate of admiration and trust so pure it would shrivel the Devil if you sprinkled it on him. The awful-smelling twigs of the burning nest flamed down, glowed, and changed to ash that briefly held the selfsame form before snowing down in a heap.

He studied the faces of his brothers and father that were like the faces of a tiny, motherless tribe of terrified savages. All their wet wool clothes were steaming as if their souls were already rising, before they even died. The heat felt good, but it was fast going. Ray looked down at his own felt-lined denim coat that was sending up a junglelike mist wreathing about his head. His wool cap was also steaming; the cuffs of his trousers were frozen solid as sections of stovepipe. He looked up and saw his father's face, framed by the flowing beard, white, but tobacco-stained so that it was like granite streaked with lichen.

App, in fact, had so much beard that mostly what one noticed was the blueness of his eyes, which Ray had been told more than once were exactly like his own, though he had only seen himself in a mirror maybe a dozen times in his life. Right now he couldn't remember what he looked like. He tried, but he couldn't picture himself. He just hoped he still had his father's eyes, that distant color, like a mountain so far off at first you think it's just sky.

Pete had his mother's eyes, but Ray knew that only from what his father said. Ray never knew Pete's mother, and the few photographs they had of her showed her far away, for instance in the doorway of the cabin App built that burned down, on the ranch he used to have that was a green meadow surrounded by timbered hills. App lost the ranch when she was sick for so long and needed so many doctors and she died anyway.

She was standing in that doorway holding Pete's older sister, who also died. When he looked into Pete's eyes he thought there was something dead about them, too, because they were his mother's, and they were a vegetal green, almost brown. Other than that Ray thought Pete looked aristocratic, like a president or something, with a strong chin and straight nose, a face you'd see on money or stamps, a Roman emperor or somebody rich.

Ray looked at Jack, who was shivering quietly. Jack had been born with a cleft palate and harelip, which his long pointy nose drooped over. No one but Ray could understand him when he spoke, and there was no doubt about it, he looked like hell. Ray got into fistfights almost daily at school, when they got to school, because other boys made fun of Jack, who was too puny to defend himself and cried easily.