“I don’t do no ranchin. Pretty well out a the sheep business, never did run cattle much. I just do some truck gardenin, bees. Plan a get a pair a blue foxes next year, raise them, maybe. We got the well. We got the crick close. So I guess I don’t need a windmill.”
“Cricks and wells been known a run dry. This damn everlastin drought it’s a sure thing. More uses to a mill than waterin stock. Run you some electricity. Put in a resevoy tank. That’s awful nice to have, fire protection, fish a little. You and the missis take a swim. But fire protection’s the main thing. You can’t tell when your house is goin a catch fire. Why I seen it so dry the wind rubbin the grass blades together can start a prairie fire.”
“I don’t know. I doubt I could stand the expense. Windmills are awful expensive for somebody in my position. Hell, I can’t even afford new tires. And those I need. Expensive.”
“Well, sure enough, that’s true. Some things are real expensive. Agree with you on that. But the Mornin Glory ain’t.” Jaxon Dunmire rolled a cigarette, offered it to Horm.
“I never did smoke them coffin nails.” There was a ball of dust at the turnoff a quarter mile away. Windmills, hell, thought Horm. He must have passed the boy on the road.
Dunmire smoked, looked over the yard, nodding his head.
’Yes, a little resevoy would set good here.”
Old Bucky rounded the corner, pounded in, lathered and tired and on him Ras, abareback, distorted face and glaring eye, past the windmill truck close enough for dirt to spatter the side.
“Well, what in the world was that,” said Jaxon Dunmire, dropping the wet-ended butt in the dust and working the toe of his boot over it.
“That is Ras, that is my son.”
“Packin the mail. Thought it might be that crazy half-wit got the women all terrorized wavin his deedle-dee at them. You hear about that? Who knows when he’s goin a get a little girl down and do her harm? There’s some around who’d as soon cut him and make sure he don’t breed no more half-wits, calm him down some.”
“That’s your goddamn windmill, ain’t it? It’s Ras. Tell you, he was in a bad car wreck. There’s no harm in him but he was real bad hurt.”
“Well, I understand that. Sorry about it. But it seems like there’s a part a him that ain’t hurt, don’t it, he’s so eager a show it off.”
“Why don’t you get your goddamn windmill out a my yard?” said Horm Tinsley. “He was hurt but he’s a man like anybody else.” Now they had this son of a bitch and his seven brothers on their backs.
’Yeah, I’ll get goin. You heard about all I got say. You just remember, I sell windmills but I ain’t full a what makes em go.”
Out in the corral Ras was swiping at old Bucky with a brush, the horse sucking up water. A firm man would have taken the horse from him. But Horm Tinsley hesitated. The only pleasure the boy had in life was riding out. He would talk to him in a day or so, make him understand. A quick hailstorm damaged some young melons and he was busy culling them for a few days, then the parched tomatoes took everything he had hauling water from the creek, down to a trickle. The well was almost out. The first melons were ready to slip the vine when the coyotes came after the fruit and he had to sleep in the patch. At last the melons—bitter and small—were picked, the tomatoes began to ripen and the need for water slacked. It was late summer, sere, sun-scalded yellow.
Ras sat hunched over in the rocking chair on the porch. For once he was home. The boy looked wretched, hair matted, hands and arms dirty.
“Ras, I need a talk to you. Now you pay attention. You can’t go doin like you been doin. You can’t show yourself to the girls. I know, Ras, you’re a young man and the juice is in you, but you can’t do like you been doin. Now don’t you give up hope, we might find a girl’d marry you if we was to look. I don’t know, we ain’t looked. But what you’re up to, you’re scarin them. And them cowboys, them Dunmires’ll hurt you. They got the word out they’ll cut you if you don’t quit pesterin the girls. You understand what I mean? You understand what I’m sayin to you when I say cut?”
It was disconcerting. Ras shot him a sly look with his good eye and began to laugh, a ghastly croaking Horm had not heard before. He thought it was a laugh but did not catch the cause of it.
He spoke straight to his wife in the dark that night, not sparing her feminine sensibilities.
“I don’t know if he got a thing I said. I don’t think he did. He laughed his head off. Christ, I wish there was some way a tell what goes on in his mind. Could a been a bug walkin on my shirt got him goin. Poor boy, he’s got the masculine urges and can’t do nothin about it.”
There was a silence and she whispered, barely audible, “You could take him down a Laramie. At night. Them houses.” In the dark her face blazed.
“Why, no,” he said, shocked. “I couldn’t do no such thing.”
The following day it seemed to him Ras might have understood some of it for he did not go out but sat in the kitchen with a plate of bread and jam before him, barely moving. Mrs. Tinsley put her hand gingerly to the hot forehead.
“You’ve taken a fever,” she said, and pointed him up to his bed. He stumbled on the stairs, coughing.
“He’s got that summer cold you had,” she said to Horm. “I suppose I’ll be down with it next.”
Ras lay in the bed, Mrs. Tinsley sponging his scarred and awful face, his hands and arms. At the end of two days the fever had not broken. He no longer coughed but groaned.
“If only he could get some relief,” said Mrs. Tinsley. “I keep thinkin it might help the fever break if he was to have a sponge bath, then wipe him over with alcohol. Cool him off. This heat, all twisted in them sheets. I just hate a summer cold. I think it would make him feel better. Them dirty clothes he’s still got on. He’s full a the smell of sickness and he was dirty a start with when he come down with it. He’s just burnin up. Won’t you get his clothes off and give the boy a sponge bath?” she said with delicacy. “It’s best a man does that.”
Horm Tinsley nodded. He knew Ras was sick but he did not think a sponge bath was going to make any difference. He understood his wife was saying the boy stank so badly she could no longer bear to come near him. She poured warm water in a basin, gave him the snowy washcloth, the scented soap and the new towel, never used.
He was in the sickroom a long time. When he came out he pitched the basin and the stained towel into the sink, sat at the table, put his head down and began to weep,hu hu hu .
“What is it,” she said. “He’s worse, that’s it. What is it?”
“My god, no wonder he laughed in my face. They already done it. They done it to him and used a dirty knife. He’s black with the gangrene. It’s all down his groin, his leg’s swole to the foot—” He leaned forward, his face inches from hers, glared into her eyes. “You! Why didn’t you look him over when you put him to that bed?”
The morning light flooded the rim of the world, poured through the window glass, colored the wall and floor, laid its yellow blanket on the reeking bed, the kitchen table and the cups of cold coffee. There was no cloud in the sky. Grasshoppers hit against the east wall in their black and yellow thousands.
That was all sixty years ago and more. Those hard days are finished. The Dunmires are gone from the country, their big ranch broken in those dry years. The Tinsleys are buried somewhere or other, and cattle range now where the Moon and Stars grew. We are in a new millennium and such desperate things no longer happen.
If you believe that you’ll believe anything.
The Bunchgrass Edge of the World
THE COUNTRY APPEARED AS EMPTY GROUND, BIG SAGEBRUSH, rabbitbrush, intricate sky, flocks of small birds like packs of cards thrown up in the air, and a faint track drifting toward the red-walled horizon. Graves were unmarked, fallen house timbers and corrals burned up in old campfires. Nothing much but weather and distance, the distance punctuated once in a while by ranch gates, and to the north the endless murmur and sun-flash of semis rolling along the interst
ate.
In this vague region the Touheys ranched—old Red, ninety-six years young, his son Aladdin, Aladdin’s wife, Wauneta, their boy, Tyler, object of Aladdin’s hopes, the daughters, Shan and (the family embarrassment) Ottaline.
Old Red, born in Lusk in 1902, grew up in an orphan home, a cross-grained boy—wrists knobby and prominent, red hair parted in the middle—and walked off when he was fourteen to work in a tie-hack camp. The year the First World War ended he was in Medicine Bow timber. He quit, headed away from the drought burning the west, drilled wells, prodded cattle in railroad stockyards, pasted up handbills, cobbled a life as though hammering two-bys. In 1930 he was in New York, shoveling the Waldorf-Astoria off the side of a barge into the Atlantic Ocean.
One salty morning, homesick for hard, dry landscape, he turned west again. He found a wife along the way and soon enough had a few dirty kids to feed. In Depression Oklahoma he bombed roosting crows and sold them to restaurants. When crows went scarce, they moved to Wyoming, settled a hundred or two miles from where he’d started.
They leased a ranch in the Red Wall country—log house, straggle of corrals that from a distance resembled dropped sticks. The wind isolated them from the world. To step into that reeling torrent of air was to be forced back. The ranch was adrift on the high plain.
There was the idea of running a few sheep, his wife’s idea. In five years they built the sheep up into a prime band. The Second World War held wool prices steady. They bought the ranch for back taxes.
In August of 1946 a green-shaded lamp from Sears Roebuck arrived the same day the wife bore their last child. She named the kid Aladdin.
Peace and thermoplastic resin yarns ruined the sheep market and they went to cattle. The wife, as though disgusted with this bovine veer, complained of nausea as they unloaded the first shipment of scrubby calves. She stayed sick three or four years, finally quit. Red was a hard driver and of the six children only Aladdin remained on the dusty ranch, the giant of the litter, stubborn and abusive, bound to have everything on the platter whether bare bones or beefsteak.
Aladdin came back from Vietnam, where he flew C-123 Bs, spraying defoliants. Now he showed a hard disposition, a taste for pressing on to the point of exhaustion, then going dreamy and stuporous for days. He married Wauneta Hipsag on a scorching May morning in Colorado, the bride’s home state. A tornado funnel hung from a green cloud miles away. Wauneta’s abundant hair was rolled in an old-fashioned French knot. The wedding guests were her parents and eleven brothers, who threw handfuls of wheat, no rice available. During the ceremony, Wauneta’s father smoked cigarette after cigarette. That evening at the Touhey ranch a few kernels of wheat shot from Aladdin’s pants cuffs when he somersaulted off the porch, exuberant and playful before his new wife. The grains fell to the ground and in the course of time sprouted, grew, headed out and reseeded. The wheat seized more ground each year until it covered a quarter-acre, the waving grain ardently protected by Wauneta. She said it was her wedding wheat and if ever cut the world would end.
When he was twenty-six Aladdin wrenched the say of how things should go from old Red. Aladdin had been in the mud since blue morning digging out a spring. The old man rode up on his one-eyed mare. The son slung a shovelful of wet dirt.
’You ain’t got it dug out yet?” the old man asked. “Not too swift, are you? Not too smart. Shovel ain’t even sharp, I bet. How you got a woman a marry you I don’t know. You must a got a shotgun on her. Must a hypatized her. Not that she’s much, but probably beats doin it with livestock, that right?” The mud-daubed son climbed out of the hole, picked up clods, pelted his father until he galloped off, pursued him to the house and continued the attack with stones and sticks of firewood snatched up from the woodpile, hurled the side-cutters he always carried in a back pocket, the pencil behind his ear, the round can filled not with tobacco but with the dark green of homegrown.
Red, knot-headed and bleeding, raised one arm in surrender, backed onto the porch. He was seventy-one then and called out his age as a defense. “I made this ranch and I made you.” His spotted hand went to his crotch. Aladdin gathered can, pencil and side cutters, and put the old man’s horse away. He went back to the spring, head down, picked up the shovel and dug until his hands went nerveless.
Wauneta moved old Red’s belongings out of the big upstairs bedroom and into a ground-floor room off the kitchen, once a pantry and still smelling of raisins and stale flour. A strip of adhesive tape held the cracked window glass together.
“You’ll be closer to the bathroom,” she said in a voice as smooth as gas through a funnel.
Wauneta taught her two girls to carry pie on a white plate to their grandfather, kiss him goodnight, while Tyler played with plastic cows and stayed up late. One forenoon she came in from hanging clothes and found four-year-old Ottaline gripped astraddle over old Red’s lap and squirming to get down. She ripped the child from him, said, “You keep your dirty old prong away from my girls or I’ll pour boilin water on it.”
“What? I wasn’t—” he said. “Not—never did—”
“I know old men,” she said.
“Potty!” screamed Ottaline, too late.
Now she warned the daughters from him, spoke of him in a dark tone, fine with her to let him sit alone in the straight-backed chair, let him limp unaided from porch to kitchen to fusty room. The sooner he knocked on the pearly gates the better she told Aladdin, who groaned and rolled to his side, fretted by the darkness that kept him from work, a quick-sleeping man who would be up at three, filling the kettle, opening the red cofee can, impatient to start.
“Wauneta, what a you want me a do about it?” he said. “Drown him in the stock tank? He will kick off one a these days.”
“You been sayin that for five years. He is takin the scenic route.”
Time counted out in calving; first grass; branding; rainfall; clouds; roundup; the visit from Amendinger the cattle buyer; shipping; early snow; late blizzard. The children grew up. Aladdin got an old Piper Cub, swapping for it two bulls, a set of truck tires, a saddle, the rusted frame and cylinder of an 1860 Colt .44 he’d found at the root of a cedar. Wauneta’s sandy hair greyed and every few months she went into the bathroom and gave it a maroon color treatment. Only old Red watched the progression of dates on his little feed-store calendar. He was older than kerosene now and strong to make his century.
Shan, the younger daughter, graduated from high school, moved to Las Vegas. She took a job in the package-design department of a manufacturer of religious CDs, quickly grasped the subtleties of images: breaking waves, shafts of sunlight denoted godly favor, while dark clouds with iridescent edges, babies smiling through tears represented troubles that would soon pass with the help of prayer. Nothing was hopeless and the money came in on wheels.
Ottaline was the oldest, distinguished by a physique approaching the size of a hundred-gallon propane tank. She finished school a year behind her younger sister, stayed home. She plaited her reddish-pink hair in two braids as thick as whip handles. In conversation a listener would look back and forth between the pillowy, dimpled mouth and crystal-crack blue eyes and think it a pity she was so big. The first year at home she wore gaily colored XXL skirts and helped out around the house. But her legs were always cold and she suffered from what Wauneta called “minstrel problems,” a sudden flow that sent her running for the bathroom, leaving a trail of dark, round blood spots behind her varying in size from a dime to a half-dollar. After bare-legged wades through snow, after scaly chilblain, she gave up drafty skirts and housework, changed to ranch chores with Aladdin. Now she wore manure-caked roper boots, big jeans and T-shirts that hung to her thighs.
“Yes, keep her out a the house,” said Wauneta. “What she don’t break she loses and what she don’t lose she breaks. Her cookin would kill a pig.”