Church of the Graveyard Saints. C. Joseph Greaves
in the righteousness of his task.
Expected to last but six weeks, the journey from Fortymile Gulch to Montezuma Creek took over six months instead. Building roadway as it went, the Hole-in-the-Rock Expedition, as it came to be known, chopped and scraped and blasted its way to the west rim of the Colorado only to be confronted with a sheer drop of some two-thousand vertical feet to the muddy waters below.
By then, of course, there was no turning back. And so, in what counts as perhaps the single greatest feat in the history of a nation born of such superhuman efforts, the Hole-in-the-Rock pioneers set about carving a makeshift passage that none but the maddest among them would ever have dared to envision.
They began at a cleft in the rim rock where forty roped men with picks and crowbars chipped and hacked and spalled a slanting trough through an opening they’d blown with dynamite. The job once begun had lasted for fifty days and when it was finished the men had hewn on hands and knees through solid rock and bitter cold a chute through which they hoped their wagon wheels might find purchase against the fatal pull of gravity. Where they could not carve—where the rock bowed or fell away—men were lowered in wooden barrels to chisel holes into which pegs could be set and driftwood laid in cantilever.
The work at last completed, all that remained was to test it. First they sent their livestock down and were pleased when only nine horses plunged to their deaths on the jagged scree below. Next they fitted the first of their wagons into the rut they’d made, its axles roped and its wheels chained, and with teams of twenty men straining at the lines lowered it to safety. In this fashion each of the expedition’s eighty-eight wagons made its way to the narrow mud beach, there to be rafted across the river.
Not a single pioneer was lost. Two, in fact, were born in that cold desert waste under the diamond banner of heaven. And after their struggles on its western rim, the east side of the Colorado seemed as nothing by comparison, taking the expedition only two backbreaking weeks to reach the top.
What lay beyond the river was a kind of fever dream—a dizzying maze of red-rock cliffs and gorges, buttes and mesas slick with snow and studded with twisted cedars. There the expedition traveled another hundred zigzag miles to cover ground a hawk might glide in a leisurely hour. But cover it they did, and in the spring of 1880 arrived at a broad floodplain of the San Juan River warmed by the morning sun and cooled by the evening shadow of a high sandstone mesa. It was there they built their fort, and their homes of log and mud, and christened their little settlement Bluff City.
Reaching their destination was one thing; taming it proved another matter entirely. Ute, Paiute, and Navajo people—some of whom had never laid eyes on a white man—greeted the 225 exhausted newcomers with attitudes ranging from indifference to curiosity to outright hostility. Misunderstandings festered into disputes, and disputes into gunfights. Then the river rose with the summer monsoons, wiping out months of trenching and plowing. Then winter returned with a frigid vengeance.
From those hardscrabble origins the Olsen family began its slow migration eastward to Colorado’s remote and scenic McElmo Canyon where the Red Rocks Ranch, Addie’s point of entry into her family saga, lay nestled in a broad side-canyon of slickrock and sage. It was on the Triple-R that Addie had pedaled her first tricycle, and raced her first pony, and branded her first calf. It was where Jess Olsen, her octogenarian grandfather, still lived in the creek-side cabin his own grandfather had built from hand-hewn logs in the summer of 1921.
Logan Decker, Addie’s father, had never managed to convince her Grandpa Jess or Grandma Vivian to move into the ranch’s main house, two stories of timber and stone that had been their gift to Addie’s mother—Carole’s dowry, in effect—upon her marriage to Logan in 1993. Even after Carole’s death in ’98—before Addie had acquired the language of memory—Grandma Vivian had insisted Logan would need both space and privacy for the new wife that would surely come along to help him raise her only granddaughter.
Except Logan never did remarry, and now Grandma Vivian was dead. Which is how Addie Decker found herself speeding through Mexican Hat as nighttime fell, bound not just for her grandmother’s funeral but also for a reunion with a family whose indomitable will to settle the land around her was matched only by Addie’s iron determination to escape it altogether.
“Besides,” Bradley said, nudging her from her reverie, “it’ll probably be fun. See some old friends. Visit your old haunts.”
“Yup.”
“You’re making much ado about nothing,” he said, reaching for her hand, finding it. Giving it a squeeze. “I mean, what’s the worst that could possibly happen?”
2
The drive from the front gate to the main house measured half a mile, and in the sweep of the Prius’s headlights Bradley could make out a hay barn, and a riding arena, and a sleepy cluster of farm equipment. The house itself, when they’d rounded the final curve, stood backlit by a faint incandescence that seemed to emanate from atop the towering mesa behind it.
It was after midnight, and all was eerily quiet.
“Maybe we caught a break.” Addie leaned into the windshield. “Maybe we can sneak upstairs without waking him.”
“Maybe we should get a hotel room.”
“We will, don’t worry. After the funeral. Just remember, whatever you do don’t mention the Warriors. Daddy thinks climate change involves moving his cows to a higher pasture.”
Light from the porch, yellow and sudden, set a dog to barking.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “There goes the element of surprise.”
Bradley studied the house as he unlatched his seatbelt. It appeared more Evergreen Lodge than Bates Motel, and its canine guardian proved a blocky shape awkwardly navigating the four wooden steps from its front porch down to its long flagstone walkway.
“Is it true what they say? That they can actually smell fear?”
“He growls, but he doesn’t bite.”
“I wasn’t talking about the dog.”
“Neither was I.”
No sooner had they stepped from the car than Addie was set upon by the dog—a gray-muzzled Labrador that whimpered as it circled, its licorice tail lashing her shins.
“Waylon,” she cooed, bending and offering her face. “Oh, Waylon. Did you miss me?”
Bradley examined the midnight sky, vast and clear and gaudy with stars. He lifted their bags from the hatchback. Reddish dust, finer than flour, had coated the back of his car. At the house, another figure appeared in silhouette, this one nearly as tall and lean as the porch posts that flanked it.
A shrill whistle. The dog wheeled and galloped toward the sound. Addie and Bradley followed, their footsteps crunching the driveway gravel.
“Hello, Daddy. I hope we didn’t wake you. This is Bradley Sommers. You can thank him for delivering me safe and sound.”
“I was expecting you hours ago.” Logan Decker held his watch to the porch light, ignoring Bradley’s hand. “Must’ve dozed off on the couch. Come in, come in. Are you hungry? We got more food than the Safeway store.”
They settled in the great room where sprays and bouquets, incongruously festive, seemed to fill every nook and corner. Where the fire Logan had kindled sent shadows to dancing on the high raftered ceiling. Where the piñon smoke and the cloying fragrance of lily and rose blossom grappled with the yellow odor of cigarettes. The room’s décor suggested some nightmare amalgam of Ralph Lauren and Charles Addams—all Indian blankets and riveted leather and, above the stone fireplace, an elk’s head whose glass-marble eyes seemed to flutter in the firelight.
Addie sipped her tea. Logan Decker smoked and slouched with his stocking feet outstretched toward the fire. Tired but wary, self-conscious of his interloper status, Bradley watched them both from the far end of the sofa where, the pleasantries exhausted, father and daughter seemed to have reached