Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. Annie Proulx
the cabin with heavy yellow clay. One day Archie dragged a huge flat stone to the house for their doorstep. It was pleasant to sit in the cool of the evening with their feet on the great stone and watch the deer come down to drink and, just before darkness, to see the herons flying upstream, their color matching the sky so closely they might have been eyes of wind. Archie dug into the side of the hill and built a stout meat house, sawed wood while Rose split kindling until they had four cords stacked high against the cabin, almost to the eaves, the pile immediately tenanted by a weasel.
“He’ll keep the mice down,” said Rose.
“Yeah, if the bastard don’t bite somebody,” said Archie, flexing his right forefinger. “And you’ll wear them windows out, warshin em so much,” but he liked the way the south glass caught Barrel Mountain in its frame. A faint brogue flavored his sentences, for he had been conceived in Ireland, born in 1868 in Dakota Territory of parents arrived from Bantry Bay, his father to spike ties for the Union Pacific Railroad. His mother’s death from cholera when he was seven was followed a few weeks later by that of his father, who had whole-hog guzzled an entire bottle of strychnine-laced patent medicine guaranteed to ward off cholera and measles if taken in teaspoon quantities. Before his mother died she had taught him dozens of old songs and the rudiments of music structure by painting a plank with black and white piano keys, sitting him before it and encouraging him to touch the keys with the correct fingers. She sang the single notes he touched in her tone-pure voice. The family wipeout removed the Irish influence. Mrs. Sarah Peck, a warmhearted Missouri Methodist widow, raised the young orphan to the great resentment of her son, Bunk.
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A parade of saddle bums drifted through the Peck bunkhouse and from an early age Archie listened to the songs they sang. He was a quick study for a tune, had a memory for rhymes, verses and intonations. When Mrs. Peck went to the land of no breakfast forever, caught in a grass conflagration she started while singeing slaughtered chickens, Archie was fourteen and Bunk in his early twenties. Without Mrs. Peck as buffer, the relationship became one of hired hand and boss. There had never been any sense of kinship, fictive or otherwise, between them. Especially did Bunk Peck burn over the hundred dollars his mother left Archie in her will.
Everyone in the sparsely settled country was noted for some salty dog quirk or talent. Chay Sump had a way with the Utes, and it was to him people went when they needed fine tanned hides. Lightning Willy, after incessant practice, shot both pistol and carbine accurately from the waist, seemingly without aiming. Bible Bob possessed a nose for gold on the strength of his discovery of promising color high on the slope of Singlebit Peak. And Archie McLaverty had a singing voice that once heard was never forgotten. It was a straight, hard voice, the words falling out halfway between a shout and a song. Sad and flat and without ornamentation, it expressed things felt but unsayable. He sang plain and square-cut, “Brandy’s brandy, any way you mix it, a Texian’s a Texian any way you fix it,” and the listeners laughed at the droll way he rolled out “fix it,” the words surely meaning castration. And when he moved into “The Old North Trail,” laconic and a little hoarse, people got set for half an hour of the true history they all knew as he made his way through countless verses. He could sing every song—“Go Long Blue Dog,” and “When the Green Grass Comes,” “Don’t Pull off My Boots,” and “Two Quarts of Whiskey,” and at all-male roundup nights he had endless verses of “The Stinkin Cow,” “The Buckskin Shirt” and “Cousin Harry.” He courted Rose singing “never marry no good-for-nothin boy,” the boy understood to be himself, the “good-for-nothin” a disclaimer. Later, with winks and innuendo, he sang, “Little girl, for safety you better get branded …”
Archie, advised by an ex-homesteader working for Bunk Peck, used his inheritance from Mrs. Peck to buy eighty acres of private land. It would have cost nothing if they had filed for a homestead twice that size on public land, or eight times larger on desert land, but Archie feared the government would discover he was a minor, nor did he want a five-year burden of obligatory cultivation and irrigation. Since he had never expected anything from Mrs. Peck, buying the land with the surprise legacy seemed like getting it for free. And it was immediately theirs with no strings attached. Archie, thrilled to be a landowner, told Rose he had to sing the metes and bounds. He started on the southwest corner and headed east. It was something he reckoned had to be done. Rose walked along with him at the beginning and even tried to sing with him but got out of breath from walking so fast and singing at the same time. Nor did she know the words to many of his songs. Archie kept going. It took him hours. Late in the afternoon he was on the west line, drawing near and still singing though his voice was raspy, “an we’ll go downtown, an we’ll buy some shirts …,” and slouching down the slope the last hundred feet in the evening dusk so worn of voice she could hardly hear him breathily half-chant “never had a nickel and I don’t give a shit.”
There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude. Archie had hammered together a table with sapling legs and two benches. At the evening meal, their faces lit by the yellow shine of the coal oil lamp whose light threw wild shadows on the ceiling, their world seemed in order until moths flew at the lamp and finally thrashed themselves to sticky death on the plates.
Rose was not pretty, but warmhearted and quick to laugh. She had grown up at the Jackrabbit stage station, the daughter of kettle-bellied Sundown Mealor, who dreamed of plunging steeds but because of his bottle habit drove a freight wagon. The station was on a north-south trail connecting hardscrabble ranches with the blowout railroad town of Rawlins after the Union Pacific line went through. Rose’s mother was grey with some wasting disease that kept her to her bed, sinking slowly out of life. She wept over Rose’s early marriage but gave her a family treasure, a large silver spoon that had come across the Atlantic.
The stationmaster was the politically minded Robert F. Dorgan, affable and jowly, yearning to be appointed to a position of importance and seeing the station as a brief stop not only for freight wagons but for himself. His second wife, Flora, stepmother to his daughter, Queeda, went to Denver every winter with Queeda, and so they became authorities on fashion and style. They were as close as a natural mother and daughter. In Denver, Mrs. Dorgan sought out important people who could help her husband climb to success. Many political men spent the winter in Denver, and one of them, Rufus Clatter, with connections to Washington, hinted there was a chance for Dorgan to be appointed as territorial surveyor.
“I’m sure he knows a good deal about surveying,” he said with a wink.
“Considerable,” she said, thinking that Dorgan could find some stripling surveyor to do the work for a few dollars.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Clatter, pressing heavily against her thigh, but tensed to step back if she took offense. She allowed him a few seconds, smiled and turned away.
“Should such an appointment come to pass, you will find me grateful.”
In the spring, back at the station, where her rings and metallic dress trim cast a golden aura, she bossed the local gossip saying that Archie Laverty had ruined Rose, precipitating their youthful marriage, Rose barely fourteen, but what could you expect from a girl with a drunkard father, an uncontrolled girl who’d had the run of the station, sassing rough drivers and exchanging low repartee with bumpkin cowhands, among them Archie Laverty, a lowlife who sang vulgar songs. She whisked her hands together as though ridding them of filth.
The other inhabitant of the station was an old bachelor—the country was rich in bachelors—Harp Daft, the telegraph key operator. His face and neck formed a visor of scars, moles, wens, boils and acne. One leg was shorter than the other and his voice twanged with catarrh. His window faced the Dorgan house, and a black circle which Rose knew to be a telescope sometimes showed in it.
Rose both admired and despised Queeda Dorgan. She greedily took in every detail of the beautiful dresses, the fire opal brooch, satin shoes and saucy hats so exquisitely out of place at the dusty station, but she knew that Miss Dainty had to wash out her bloody menstrual rags like every woman, although she tried to hide them by hanging them on the line at night or inside pillow slips. Beneath the silk skirts she too had to put up with sopping pads torn from old sheets, the crusted