The Meadow (7 page)

When the man recovered his wits he began poking the boy in the ribs and squealing a piercing, almost female-sounding command at him. Lyle tried not to stare but watched them politely out of the corner of his eye, the way a coyote would, and tried to watch where he was going, the rounded creek stones tending the skinny tires sideways as he entered the current.

After three or four pokes and attendant screeches the kid roused from his own paralysis, got the idea, and held up a tiny American flag he'd had all along, though lowered so that Lyle never saw it until it was held up for him to see. After another moment's hesitation the boy began to wave the flag in nervous and vigorous greeting. The father recovered a terrified grin and began bowing from the waist like a pump handle.

Utterly astonished, but impassive, Lyle slowly raised his big gloved hand from the oaken steering wheel and waved once, in the country manner. He watched relief flood the man's face like clear water turned into a muddy irrigation ditch. Then, in the mirror, he saw that the mother had turned to watch, but the girl and the grandmother had not moved. The little boy still waved the flag as the truck whined up the far bank and Lyle whispered, “I'll be.”

He brought his load of posts back over the bridge two miles downstream to avoid the risk of getting stuck in the ford because of the extra weight.

Back at the house, Bob had not returned from the Wooden Shoe, where he had gone to trade eggs for milk. Lyle, his sister, and his mother were at the dinner table when the Japanese appeared again, this time lined up in a little platoon, single file, with the little boy holding the flag leading them through the yard gate. The boy was followed by his father. The ancient grandmother, who was about the same size as the boy, brought up the rear. Lyle saw them through the window, but he stayed where he was.

When Hazel heard the rap on the door she waddled over and opened it. Lyle, typically, had said nothing about seeing them before, and he watched as his mother stared, uncomprehending, from their faces down to the flag and back to their faces and down to the tightly clutched flag again. Lyle pushed back his chair and stood. Hazel was just plain stunned and wasn't hearing what the man said. She just kept looking from the man's face—his moving mouth, really—and down to the boy's flag as if they all were ghosts.

 

 

It was light but no sun yet. App lay under the wagon alone, staring at the undercarriage, the knotholes in the boards like eyes that looked back, the bolts, springs, brackets. He didn't know that some blood had dripped on his face as he slept. He saw some dried flecks on his right hand and thought nothing of it. He was cold and damp under the blanket, and dampness was something he had rarely experienced in these arid mountains. Oh, he had felt wet before, and cold, but he didn't know the mist that hangs in valley bottoms, the air like wet felt over the wet grass of the meadow. He could see his breath escaping like puffs of smoke from a train as it pulled out of the Union Pacific station in Laramie. He reached out his hand to the thick grass outside the relatively dry square: a rainshadow the wagon cast on the ground. App felt the heaviness of the wet grass and he liked it. On the Laramie side of the ridge it was like a desert compared to this. The icy Divide lay west; to the east over a series of ridges lay the high plains of Colorado that stretched in App's mind beyond thinking.

He rolled out from under the wagon and looked around, shivering. He could see individual droplets of water, lighter than the cold air, swirling in the first light that struck. The old man was nowhere to be seen. App looked down the valley over the cloud bank that lapped against the ridges and made them look like islands. He thought it looked like you could step off the ridges and onto the clouds and walk away into the sky.

 

 

When Frank got sick, I was just one of many who were grateful to help out. All the Lilley kids, all grown now, gathered around, of course, and Shirley, Frank's wife, started gathering her strength as if it were a crop of hay she needed to see her through a winter that was going to last the rest of her life.

Frank had a kind of cancer that no one gets over, which seemed to some of us altogether too meaningful about the world, since Frank was the healthiest, clean-livingest, most optimistic family man around. He didn't smoke or drink. He quit dipping snuff ten years ago. He'd spent his life on horseback, breathing in the Wyoming sky. But he'd been in the Navy during WW II, refitting ships, and asbestos finally caught up with him forty years later.

I wanted to help, even though I knew that so many others felt the same way I wouldn't have been missed. I asked Clay, Frank's son my age, to let me know what I could do. It was mid-October and Clay said I'd just as well help with gathering, vaccinating, and pregnancy testing.

It started snowing the night before the roundup. The horses in the corral were nervous because of the change in weather and being caught up well before daylight. I was on my way before first light, heading for the school section on my black mare.

It was cold. After I crossed the Sand Creek bridge the snow started going sideways and I had to get down and walk awhile to get the blood back into my feet. Clay had said to rendezvous around eight, which meant they'd probably have the herd gathered and headed home by then. Clay is always early the way other people are always late.

Sure enough, by the time I arrived at about seven I could see the trailers already there and hear the whoops and whistles of the riders kicking the summerfat cows and calves out of the willows where they were lying-in because of the cold.

Every cowboy develops a whistle or a hoot or a click you can tell him by, a sound he thinks moves cows better than others. It's like a signature. I could hear Roger up in the corner, Clay down by the gate, and Shirley and Julie coming up the creekbed. By the time the cows were moving, like cold motor oil, all in the same direction, by the time they were through the gate and counted, the snow had stopped, the wind had died, the sun was getting hot. We drove them down the county road where it threads the picture rocks, those sandstone sculptures that were once an ocean floor, where we used to hunt arrowheads and occasionally lose ourselves when we were kids. Everyone was taking off coats and rolling up dusters to let in the warm sun.

We had a couple of pair missing so Clay and I broke off up a side-draw to look for them. I like to ride with Clay because he always rides a mount you don't have to wait for, and he doesn't like to wait for anyone else either. He doesn't mind riding in mutual silence, and he doesn't mind talking, as long as he doesn't have to crane his neck around to do it, and as long as it's “nothing too philosophical.”

 

 

Dinner today is simple and mountainous: beefburgers, potato salad, and string beans on paper plates, beer and pop. Not a meal to linger over since there's a lot that has to get done before dark. We can hear the low moan of cows and calves finding each other in the corral. They are mothering up.

The first thing we do after dinner is separate the cows and calves, banishing the calves to the weaning corral. A couple of riders on stellar horses cut out the calves, and a couple of people stationed at gates open and close them when the time comes. The gates are like tongues catching flies, swallowing the calves into the weaning pen, clanging shut behind them. I like to work one of the gates so I can watch Clay and Roger work their horses, cutting with calm but quick predictive moves, their footwork like a boxer's.

Clay now works as a veterinarian out of Laramie, though he was raised right here on the Chimney Rock, and went to the one-room school at the Wooden Shoe (the other two pupils were his sisters). He backs the Bronco up to the branding chute and turns on the football game full blast, Wyoming vs. Wisconsin, loud enough to hear over the bereaved bawling of cows and calves, and begins to arrange syringes and bottles and needles on the tailgate.

Julie, Clay's younger sister, stays in the house with Frank, who shouldn't be left alone anymore. I can see Frank's face in the window. He is watching a ritual that, from the back of a horse, he has presided over every year for forty years.

Earlier, at dinner, when asked about some detail or other, Frank had said, “I can't worry about it anymore. It's up to you young fellas now,” which made the young fellas, all in their thirties, ranch-hardened and some wearing the silver buckles they'd won at rodeos, feel like kids lost in a forest, the weight of their ignorance easily equal to the weight of Frank's wisdom, especially concerning a particular collection of sandstone, pasture, livestock, and weather known as the Chimney Rock Ranch.

Frank watches from the window all afternoon, with the game on inside the house. Once he walks feebly out to the corrals in the snowmobile boots he always wears now, even if it's warm and the ground is bare, because they are comfortable, and there are very few parts of his body left that are comfortable.

Shirley has to be outside with the pregnancy testing because she knows the calving history of all the cows better than anyone, and she has all the birth records and weights to decide which animals to keep and which to sell.

The hands had named one cow Shirley because she was born one February night of ten below when Shirley was out at the ranch alone during calving. There were complications and the mother died, but the calf was saved and grafted on to another cow. Shirley (the cow) went on to produce twelve fat calves for the herd in as many years. This year, though, she didn't take, was not vaccinated, and was sent through the gate that meant good-bye, despite everything. You don't get by being soft in this business. Shirley, the woman, just shook her head and penned an X next to the number corresponding to the cow's ear tag.

Roger and Brad are positioned on the corral side of the chute to dip the cows for parasites, trim the hair back from the ear tags, and check the eyes. I have a syringe in each hand, while Clay, who has donned coveralls and a shoulder-length latex glove, sticks his whole arm up the ass of each cow, feels around a couple of seconds and then screams over the screams of the herd and the football game either she's good or she isn't, and Shirley marks it down, and the hands at the gates know which gate to open when she comes out of the chute.

By now Clay's wife, Marrianne, has arrived with their three kids, aged one, two, and three (Clay says they'll stop having kids as soon as they find out what's causing them), and some other neighboring ranch kids have showed up and are trying to help. Each cow is driven, prodded if necessary, down an alley toward the chute, which is opened like a loose jaw. When the cow sees daylight on the far side of the chute and tries to jump through, Roger throws the lever and catches the cow mid-air with a clang. Brad dowses them with an evil-smelling syrupy liquid, I stab each one twice when Clay gives the word, after his arm has withdrawn from the waterfall of fear-induced diarrhea, which by now covers not only his coveralls, but his pointy-toed, high-heeled galoshes as well.

The kids are running everywhere and shouting to Shirley all their questions about cows, as she writes things down on the clipboard in her lap. Marrianne is bottle-feeding Ely, little Oscar is screaming his head off about something. The football game is blaring, the men are shouting wry jokes and football commentary back and forth, the cows and calves are raising a deafening kind of rumbly howl. Laughter occasionally lifts above the din like a blue balloon. Frank is watching from the kitchen window, dying. I wonder what he and Julie are saying.

 

 

Lyle stood behind his mother. He was still chewing. The little boy was still clutching his flag. The man was trying to explain in elliptical but clear English that their car was mired and they needed help to pull it free. Without a word to his slackjawed mother, Lyle pushed her aside and started to walk up toward the truck, which he had already unloaded. The little family platoon followed him like goslings after the goose.

They all rode down to the stream again, the little boy on the hard bench seat next to Lyle. Lyle could feel the boy's skinny thigh pressed against his own as they bounced along. The father and the girl rode in back. Out of the corner of his eye Lyle could see that the blue paint was worn off the stick where the boy was made continuously to clutch in his moist little fist the symbol that was the literal and only defense his family had in this dry, limitless foreign land. I bet he goes to sleep hanging on to that, thought Lyle, as he stopped the truck behind the family's car and let it idle.

Lyle could see that the car's wheels had cut deeply into the sod and that the axle was resting on the grass. Lyle knew his pickup did not have the weight and traction to pull the car out, nor would a draft horse be able to budge it, but he had to give it a try to prove it to the father.

Just as he had foreseen, the rear wheels spun, frivolously as a fortune wheel at the county fair, and had no more effect than to slick the grass down. The car humped a mite each time Lyle pulled, but it wasn't coming out, and the drive wheels of Lyle's truck were beginning to cut their own slots in the sponge, so he gave it up and offered to drive the family back to town. They'd have to wait for the bog to dry.

Lyle could imagine the effect on his mother of boarding an entire family of Japanese overnight. So without stopping at the house to explain, he drove them and all their gear into Laramie.

It turned out they ran a small restaurant in Laramie, a place Lyle had seen and wondered about but had never been inside since he and his family did not permit themselves the luxury of eating houses. The Japanese father, who now rode in the cab with Lyle and the little boy, extended profuse invitations to Lyle all the way to town. Lyle, the man said, could eat at the restaurant free anytime he wanted for the rest of his life. So grateful was the man, he never stopped bobbing his thanks. He also explained that they, like many Japanese-Americans in Wyoming, were not sent to camps because they were citizens of a landscape in which the government could not imagine them doing any harm. The townspeople were generally tolerant of them, sympathetic, even giving them enough business to keep going. But his family was afraid all the time, the man explained, and occasionally people said cruel or threatening things to them. Lyle just kept glancing sideways at the little boy and his flag, and then back to the blood red dust of the county road. He steered the truck like a PT boat flying colors on the bow all the way across the oceanic basin into town.