Fine Just the Way It Is (9 page)

After three weeks Mrs. Quirt was reinstated, presented with a cookbook and a request to try something new. It was a disastrous order. She lit on complex recipes for boeuf bourguignonne, parsnip gnocchi, bananas stuffed with shallots, kale meatballs with veal ice cream. When the necessary ingredients were lacking she did what she had always done on the ranch—substituted what was on hand, as bacon, jam, eggs. After a strange repast featuring canned clams, strawberry Jell-O and stale bread, many men went outside to heave it up in the sage. Not all of them came back and it was generally believed they had hiked forty miles to the hot-bed motel town.

The head office, seeing production, income and profits slump because they could not keep workers on, hired a cook who had worked for an Italian restaurant. The food improved dramatically, but there was still an exodus. The cook ordered exotic ingredients that were delivered by a huge Speedy Food truck. After the driver delivered the cases of sauce and mushrooms, he parked in the shade of the big sagebrush to eat his noontime bologna sandwich, read a chapter of
Ambush on the Pecos Trail
and take a short nap. Three drillers coming in from the day shift noticed the truck idling in the shade. They noticed it again the next morning on the way to the rig. A refrigerator truck, it was still running. A call came three days later from the company asking if their driver had been there. The news that the truck was still in the sagebrush brought state troopers. After noticing spots of blood on the seat and signs of a struggle (a dusty boot print on the inside of the windshield), they began stringing crime-scene tape around the truck and the sagebrush.

“Kellogg, get done with the tape and get out here,” called a sergeant to the laggard trooper behind the sagebrush. The thick branches and foliage hid him from view and the tape trailed limply on the ground. Kellogg did not answer. The sergeant walked around to the back of the sagebrush. There was no one there.

“Goddamn it, Kellogg, quit horsin around.” He ran to the front of the truck, bent and looked beneath it. He straightened, shaded his eyes and squinted into the shimmering heat. The other two troopers, Bridle and Gloat, stood slack-jawed near their patrol car.

“You see where Kellogg went?”

“Maybe back up to the man-camp? Make a phone call or whatever?”

But Kellogg was not at the man-camp, had not been there.

“Where the hell did he go?
Kellogg!!!
”

Again they all searched the area around the truck, working out farther into the sage, then back toward the truck again. Once more Bridle checked beneath the truck, and this time he saw something lying against the back inner tire. He pulled it out.

“Sergeant Sparkler, I found this.” He held out a tiny scrap of torn fabric that perfectly matched his own brown uniform. “I didn’t see it before because it’s the same color as the dirt.” Something brushed the back of his neck and he jumped, slapping it away.

“Damn big sagebrush,” he said, looking at it. Deep in the branches he saw a tiny gleam and the letters “OGG.”

“Jim, his nameplate’s in there!” Sparkler and Gloat came in close, peering into the shadowy interior of the gnarled sagebrush giant. Sergeant Sparkler reached for the metal name tag.

The botanist sprayed insect repellent on his ears, neck and hair. The little black mosquitoes fountained up as he walked toward the tall sagebrush in the distance. It looked as large as a tree and towered over the ocean of lesser sage. Beyond it the abandoned man-camp shimmered in the heat, its window frames warped and crooked. His heart rate increased. Years before he had scoffed at the efforts of botanical explorers searching for the tallest coast redwood, or the tallest tree in the New Guinea jungle, but at the same time he began looking at sagebrush with the idea of privately tagging the tallest. He had measured some huge specimens of basin big sagebrush near the Killpecker dunes and recorded their heights in the same kind of little black notebook used by Ernest Hemingway and Bruce Chatwin. The tallest reached seven feet six inches. The monster before him certainly beat that by at least a foot.

As he came closer he saw that the ground around it was clear of other plants. He had only a six-foot folding rule in his backpack, and as he held it up against the huge plant it extended less than half its height. He marked the six-foot level with his eye. He had to move in close to get the next measurement.

“I’m guessing thirteen feet,” he said to the folding rule, placing one hand on a muscular and strangely warm branch.

The Sagebrush Kid stands out there still. There are no gas pads, no compression stations near it. No road leads to it. Birds do not sit on its branches. The man-camp, like the old stage station, has disappeared. At sunset the great sagebrush holds its arms up against the red sky. Anyone looking in the right direction can see it.

1920

T
he black secondhand Essex rattled and throbbed along the frozen dirt road. The sky drooped over the undulating prairie like unrolled bolts of dirty wool, and even inside the car they could smell the coming snow. There was no heater, and Helen, a young woman with walnut-colored hair, was wrapped from her shoulders down in an old-fashioned buffalo robe, the fur worn to the hide in places. At a small cairn of stones her husband, Hi Alcorn, turned left onto a faint track.

“Close now,” he said. “Maybe two miles.”

“If that storm don’t beat us there,” she answered in her breathy voice.

“We’re okay,” he said. “We’re A-okay. Headin for our own place. Year from now drivin up we’ll be able to see the lighted windows.”

Hi’s feet worked the pedals, and she saw that the laces of his old worn oxfords were knotted with bits of string. An impasto of yellow mud which had ossified to stucco and then rubbed back into dust on the Essex’s floorboards discolored the shoes.

“I don’t see any houses,” she said. “It’s not like what we heard from Mr. Bewley. He said it would be almost a town by now.”

“Not yet. I guess this next year we will all build. The ones of us that come late.”

There were two sides to the colony, the east side already settled, the west side, where they had bought a homestead, still unformed.

Hi coughed a little from the dust and went on. “Mr. and Mrs. Wash, like us just startin out, and two brothers, Ned and Charlie Volin. They’ll be buildin. The Washes was at the picnic.” Abruptly he jerked the wheels to the right where a wooden stake, its top painted white, leaned. Fence posts without wire lined toward the west.

“Was Mrs. Wash the one with the strawberry mark on her chin?”

“I guess that was her. I remember something was wrong about her face. Okay, this’s it. Southeast corner. We’re on our place. Recognize it?”

They had gone out in May, right after their wedding, looking at homestead sites with Mr. Antip Bewley. They bought the land and had returned in the late summer, at Mr. Bewley’s invitation, for the Great Divide picnic. By then they were living in a boardinghouse in Craig. Helen made a few dollars a week helping Mrs. Ruffs change the sheets and cook for the boarders. Mrs. Ruffs was a widow who had carried on her husband’s freighting business after he died, but found the care of six horses and their heavy harness too much for her. She sold the business, team and wagons, bought a sizable house in Craig and hung out her sign—
RUFFS BED
&
BOARD
. Helen hated the job as all the furniture and the spaces behind the wallpaper were infested with bedbugs. They had a peculiar smell, like old beef fat. Hi, of course, had been out to the property many times, measuring, deciding where the house and barn should go, marking his corners and setting fence posts. One man could set posts well enough, but it took two or three to string the wire.

She would not forget the first sight of Mr. Antip Bewley, huge, towering above Hi. His hands were the size of hay forks. His head, hair and skin the color of raw wood, was shaped as though someone had taken a rectangular chunk of twelve-by-twelve and sanded off the corners, leaving a smooth jawline without disguising the blockiness of the shape. The face was indented by two furrowed cheek dimples. But it was when Bewley smiled that the landscape lit up as though a crackle of lightning had traversed it, for his four front teeth, top and bottom, were solid gold, pure as wedding rings.

“Call me Ant,” he had said, pumping Hi’s hand, then bending over Helen’s rough farm-girl paw as though to kiss it or the air above it, in courtly but ironic mockery. They all rode in Mr. Bewley’s touring car.

Hi, who subscribed to
The Great Divide,
already knew something about Bewley. He had been reading Bewley’s stories championing homestead settlements of public land in defiance of the big cattlemen—“range hogs,” he called them. On the way out to the platted sites, the big man talked enthusiastically about converting empty rangeland to happy homesteads that would give “the little people” a chance. Helen, sitting between the two men, was conscious of the body heat each gave off. She made up her mind to sit in the back on the return.

Mr. Bewley talked about growing up in Oklahoma, about his career as a prizefighter, as a lawyer, as a prospector in Alaska and how he had returned to Oklahoma out of love for his wife, and he said this with the same courtly irony as when he had bent over Helen’s hand, nudging her with his thigh as though in complicity. She shifted slightly toward Hi.

He told them how he had come to Denver to write for
The Great Divide.
He knew and admired Mr. Bonfils, one of the owners of
The Denver Post,
a powerful friend of “the little people.” Helen wished he would not refer to the little people so often. She felt it diminished them, for she and Hi were undoubtedly classed among the lowly peasants. It also seemed unfair to Helen that ordinary men—Hi, for example—had great trouble finding an occupation, while Mr. Antip Bewley had enjoyed so many and cast them all to one side.

They spent the day driving from one homestead site to another, horned larks running before them on the roads, flying up only at the last moment. They walked over acres of level ground that seemed much the same to Helen. Around three o’clock they stopped and rested in the shade of the car. Bewley took a dripping basket from the back. Inside were three apples, chunks of melting ice, six bottles of beer and two of sarsaparilla. Bewley and Hi each drank two beers. Helen walked to a draw out of sight of the car to relieve herself, and as she started back she saw the two men were doing the same, standing side by side, separated by a polite distance of eight or ten feet.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Antip Bewley, speaking to Hi in a confidential tone as though beer and urination had moved them to another level of intimacy, “there’s a kind a special site I been saving for some special people, and I think you are the ones. It’s got a real valuable feature. Wait’ll you see it.”

Helen thought the site looked very much the same as the others and stayed in the car, but Bewley led Hi to a small draw where the vegetation appeared different. Birds flew up as they approached it, and the hoofprints of wild horses showed on the damp soil.

“There,” said Bewley. “What do you think of
that
?”

That
was a wet seep at the head of the little draw, hardly more than a slanting crease in the otherwise level ground. “Nice little spring. Never goes dry. Dig it out, put in a springhouse and you’re set for life.”

Right then, Helen, watching from the car, saw that Hi decided this was their place. He tossed his head a little as he always did when he had made up his mind about something.

“Didn’t you say we was going to have trees?” Her voice was so light she seemed to have inhaled a ribbon of cloud and to float out her words on its gauzy remnants. But her face was pinched and yellow and she kept her hands under the buffalo robe. He thought she had taken on a Chinese look.

“You saw the place last spring. Did you think trees was goin a grow up by now? We got to plant them. I’ll plant them. By the gods, first thing I do soon as the ground thaws, I’ll get out here with a load of lumber and some trees and rosebushes. That suit you?” There was in his voice some asperity, as though she had asked for a cobblestone drive and a perpetual fountain.

She nodded, wanting to preserve the peace of the day.

His voice mellowed. “All right, then. Come on, get out and I’ll show you the best part.”

Slowly, for her joints were half-frozen, Helen got out of the car, slapping dust from her sleeves, and walked into the sharp air. She was very cold and she wished she had worn her brown merino wool skirt. She followed Hi’s striding legs, both of them hurrying now because the first few flakes of snow were gliding down. Last spring the land had been rich green starred with wildflowers, for Antip Bewley had shrewdly showed them around when the season was most promising. When, in late summer, they came for the picnic, they had stayed on the east side. The landscape there was sere, the grass a dry brown color like a coffee stain, and she was glad they were to live on the flowery west side. Now it resembled a wasteland.

“Cold!” she gasped, fumbling with the neck button of her light jacket and wishing she had brought a woolen scarf, wishing she had a heavy duster or an overcoat.

“Take a look at this,” Hi cried in a joyful voice, spreading his arms wide to encompass the two acres he had plowed and disked with the hired help of a Craig farmer. “Just a second disking in the spring and we’ll plant. And how about this?” He pointed to the springhouse he had built a few weeks before. He had cleared out the muddy spring, surrounded it with a cedar box, covered the bottom with clean river gravel and water-smoothed stones, then built a small structure to protect it from range horses, livestock and silt-laden wind. He opened the small door and she could see the black water reflect the square of light that had fallen on it.

She grimaced, and he caught the expression.

“What’s the matter with it,” he said.

“Nothing! It’s swell! It’s just that the baby kicked,” and she put her hand on her belly as actresses did when they wanted to indicate that they were pregnant.

“Well,” he said. “That’s fine. Isn’t it? Isn’t it, honey?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fine, new land, new springhouse, new big house coming, one baby coming. And we’ll name him Joe. Joe is a good name for a boy.”

“Yes. Or Jim or Frank.” This was old ground. She knew his horror of burdensome names, for the three Alcorn brothers, Hiawatha, Hamilcar and Seneca, had suffered, and their names had been abbreviated to Hi, Ham and Sen by the end of each boy’s respective first day in school. Helen teased him sometimes, chanting in a low voice such as she thought an Indian reciter would use

“That’s not how it goes,” he said in a tight voice, for he did not stand teasing, and he took up a tin cup fastened to the cedar spring casing by a strip of rawhide, dipped it full, handed it, dripping, to her.

“You did a lot of work,” she said to mollify him.

“You tell em, kid.”

She drank the ice-cold water, pure and sweet and with the faintest taste of cedar, and thought, This is our water,
my
water, for her father had given them one hundred dollars toward the place. The war years had been good for farmers. Corn had gone to two dollars a bushel and it seemed wheat prices would keep rising. The money had helped, for every homestead family, Mr. Bewley said, should have two thousand dollars, six cows, three horses. Hi explained to her on the way to the picnic when the established settlers showed off their squash and corn, that the Great Divide Colony was not a setup for people who were flat busted. It was more for people who had a little something and wanted to get back to the land.

Later, in the pushing crowd, he said “all these people”—waving in the direction of the crowd watching the bathing beauty contest—“have some money, so the colony is a surefire success.” Helen and Hi had only six hundred dollars and one cow, but Hi was confident they’d make up for it within five years. He had managed to buy three horses, all of them cheap and half-wild as they were fresh off the Red Desert to the northwest.

“I’ll have them gentled down pretty quick,” he said. But he was not good with horses and after a few months he sold them, using the money for a down payment on a tractor. He was going to plant corn and wheat.

“Pay the tractor off with what we make on the crops,” he’d said.

Now, standing shirtsleeved in the freezing autumn wind he remarked, “Quite a few houses already over on the east side. If it wasn’t set for snow we could run over there. You could see.” He looked at the churning clouds and the sparse flakes whirling down. She shuddered, said nothing.

“Better idea, hustle back to Craig and get warm. We’ll hop right in the bed and get warm.” He rapidly raised and lowered his eyebrows communicating a coarse intention. This eyebrow wriggling was something she thought nastily comic.

Both of them came from Tabletop, Iowa. Hi’s father was a strong-minded farmer, and her own parents, Rolfe and Netitia Short, owned a small dairy farm. She was the middle child of nine. Her brothers were dairy farmers as well, and Helen, who had developed a dislike of milk cows and their endless care, had married, in part, to escape cows. She had married, too, to escape the household’s obsession with bird eggs. Every surface of the house bore blown bird eggs which Rolfe Short and his sons collected. They often took long trips to distant places to gather more eggs. Her father’s climbing paraphernalia hung from hooks in the milk room, and even there, among the dust and hen feathers, wild bird eggs rolled in small arcs whenever the door opened. Three of her brothers collected eggs as well, and at the dinner table there was no end to the talk of tree-climbing adventures and perilous forays onto cliffs to seize coveted clutches.

The trip back to Craig was terrifying, the storm suddenly upon them, Hi cursing as he wrestled the car along the slippery ruts, losing the track in the flying snow. It took them five hours to cover twenty-two miles and Helen thought it a miracle they had survived. Hi was white and exhausted but he said the Essex was a peach of a car.