Authors: Annie Proulx
Postcards (39 page)
‘I didn’t make anything on that sale. Fact, we took something of a loss. Then Bob Emswiller asked if he could lease part of the ranch for sheep range. Summer range. Promised he’d watch they didn’t graze it down too heavy. That’s his fence.’
‘Didn’t see any sheep.’
‘Yeah.’ Her neck was red, maybe the heat of the oven. The oven was set high, a smell of scorching came from it. ‘He didn’t pay what
he said he would so I told him to take his sheep and skedaddle. No sheep this year. He said he wouldn’t pay, either, that the fence was enough, I ought to be glad of it. After I told him no more sheep, there was a few shots Bred at the house one night. Broke the spare-room window. A woman wants to learn what kind of neighbors she’s got, let her husband die. They always thought I was an outsider here.’
‘So you took a loss on the cattle, got skunked on your range lease.’
‘That’s only the beginning. I got to sell the ranch. I know Jack loved this place, and I did, too, but I don’t any more. They’ve done that to me.’ She gestured with her chin, her old woman’s chin, downy and soft with fat. ‘I want to do something with the rest of my life. If I sell the ranch I can get away from here.’ She poured the egg onto the cheese and bacon in the dish, slid it into the oven. She turned to him. God knows what she saw. She was playing in her own movie.
‘How’d you like to hear me sing, Loyal?’ The voice suddenly bright and silly.
She put a record on the turntable. The record player was still on the sideboard where it had been for years. Loyal studied the album cover; five men in musician’s chairs, a swirl of yellow color coming from their hands to the top of the cover and red letters bursting,
‘MUSIC TO SING ALONG WITH
• Volume 7 • Country Ballads.’
The record rotated, double-stop fiddle harmonies of a sentimental country song filled the room. Starr stood in front of the oven, feet side by side, hands folded in a knot of fingers, held in front of her crotch. Middle-aged, in wrinkled whipcords and a sweatshirt, but something of the old vulnerable beauty persisting. Perhaps she knew it.
She counted silently, then sang ‘He was just passing through, I was all alone and blue.’ The words forced themselves up into her nose, she reached for the cheap sadness. Loyal couldn’t help it, felt the barroom tears jerking out of his eyes. That song always got to him, but here he had to sit in a damn kitchen chair, couldn’t even hunch over a beer. So he closed his eyes and wished Jack had lived.
The quiche was good, and they ate all of it. It was easier now, no talking, the food on the plates, the forks spearing and lifting. She put
a paper napkin near his hand. Jack’s chair was empty. Pickles. The coffee perked. How many times had he sat here?
‘So, what do you think of my singing. Loyal?’
This was the kind of question he couldn’t answer.
‘It’s fine. I like it fine.’
Sour face. She poured coffee while his fingers pinched up crumbs in the quiche dish. All of Jack’s things were scattered around as if he’d just stepped out. Well, that’s what he’d done, just stepped out. The rope he knotted while they watched television on a peg by the door, a pair of boots, stiff now from disuse. Bills still on the Victorian spindle. The gray rancher’s hat, the band stained with Jack’s sweat, on top of the sideboard where he always slung it when he came in for dinner.
‘Think you might go back to Wisconsin, see your kids? Must be all growed up now.’
‘Them ties was cut too long ago. With blunt scissors.’ She said the milk was on the turn. He smelled it and said he’d take his coffee without.
‘I know I’m not going to sing at any rodeo, Loyal. My voice is weak, I’m too old. Old ladies don’t sing at rodeos. But you know, I don’t feel old. I feel like I’ve got the liveliest part of my life still ahead. I could stay on the ranch, Loyal, but not alone. A man is needed.’ She couldn’t say it much clearer.
The coffee. Its blackness in the familiar blue cups. He stirred in sugar. Her spoon clinked.
Then all at once the awkwardness was gone. Stories of things he had seen began to pour out, the words firing from between his loosened and gapped teeth. He told her about Cucumber drowning in a mine, midnight driving with Bullet over dangerous passes when the headlights failed, the mountain lion. He, who had talked little, talked much, swelled to a glowing huckster selling stories of his life. At two in the morning, Starr nodding off, wanting nothing but sleep and silence, he stopped. They were tired of each other, each longed for the relief of solitude. He said he would sleep on the daybed beside the stove. The kitchen sunk of cigarettes.
In the morning she gave him Jack’s pearl gray cowboy hat.
A booth in Dot’s Place. The plastic owl’s head on the wall glows. He’s reading the local paper, arms folded on the plywood table. There is the smell of grease dissolver. Dot squats and wipes at the encrusted stove. The coffee is the color of river bottom dirt. Elk, big horns, whitetail, moose heads on the walls, coated with grease from Dot’s cooking. French fries. Eggs over easy. Dot’s old man, Harry S. Furman, shot them. In the right light anybody can see the dull crust of grease on the glass eyes.
He turns the pages of the paper, glances at a photograph of a Basque family posing with relatives from South America. Some of the men squat in the front row, their knees straining their polyester trousers, their sports coats hunched. There is the grand matriarch of the group, Celestina Falxa, from the House of Little Children, Tripinonia, unsmiling, stout and bowlegged, the little eyes staring straight into the camera. She wears a rayon dress printed in squares, grips a handbag. Eighty-four and flies a single-engine plane over the flaring distances says the caption. Never learned to drive.
He studies the picture, the direction of their eyes. No one else looks into the camera. An elderly woman with harlequin glasses smiles tentatively and looks at Celestina. The three South American cousins have matching hair and delicate smiles. They, too, gaze at Celestina. The men in the back row stand on chairs. Their foreheads gleam white, their faces are sunblackened. Three of the men are missing front teeth. To the side stands a woman in a plaid pantsuit. The pants stand away from her legs like culvert tubes, the vest has been cut and sewn in a way that makes the plaid stagger. In the background is a television set near the ceiling, the
plastic walls of the Holiday Inn, a chrome chair, a soiled nylon carpet.
‘What the hell you got there, Mr. Blood, clue to the secret of the ages?’ Dot titters. She grips a tub of frozen meat patties. ‘You scrutinizing it so hard I thought you found your long-lost brother.’
This is what it comes down to, the study of photographs of strangers.
HE DIDN’T THINK there would be anything under the rabbitbrush. But as he came in to pull the trap and stake he saw her, a late-season coyote with a strong red color, stronger on her face, chest and haunches. The hot spring sun reflecting off the late snow had frizzled and burned her pelt like a cheap permanent. She pulled back from him with a gape that showed her teeth, she cringed and twisted in submissive posture, the yellow eyes fixed his. She looked at him. The crimped red hair, the extraordinary expression on the animal’s face, in her body language, mingling appeasement, fear, anger, threat, resignation, pain, horror, and more, the terrible and thrilling sense of her life’s imminent end.
Billy.
The fur was no good. Red, yes, but singed and rubbed. The foot didn’t look too bad. She hadn’t been chewing on it anyway. Quickly he threw the kneeling tarp over her head, twisted it tight so she couldn’t lunge at him, and pried the trap open. The foot was swollen, but still warm, there was still circulation. He got up and pulled the tarp away in almost one motion. She was gone.
IN THE GARDEN Kosti and Paula threw sheets over the tomato plants to protect them from the night frost, old sheets Paula’s mother had given her years ago, and patched in all the hues of white, marble, ivory, milk-silver, snow, chalk, pearl, birchbark, ghost, moonflower, cloud, ash, quartz. The teeth of autumn gnawed at the light. They trampled back and forth over the silvered clods, working together, the only ones left on the mountain farm now. Leopard Lady, Inks, the three sisters with the trunk of antique dresses, the Grass Man and his hundreds of friends, all pulled out and gone. Some of their funky rags still in the empty rooms, posters of Bob Dylan gone magenta, stacks of paperback books, Brautigan, Hoffman, Kesey, Wolfe, Fariña,
McLuhan, the covers curled by summer heat, the sentiments outmoded, the ideas betrayed.
The tomato plants reared in creamy columns against the black trees beyond the clearing. Their numb hands seized new sheets, snapped them open. They could feel the soil stiffening with cold. The smell of burning grass replaced the summer scent of wet grass. The air seemed banded as sharply as jasper with cold.
‘Gonna be hard frost tonight. These old tomatoes ain’t never gonna make it any farther than they already are with nights like this,’ said Kosti. ‘Do better to pick them green and put them in the woodshed.’
‘If it looks like frost again tomorrow we’ll pick them. I’ll make four hundred quarts of piccalilli. What the hell, I don’t care. I’ll fry green tomatoes until spring. “Johnson boys ate green tomatoes, they have eat them all their life,”’ she sang. There were streaks of gray hair at her temples. Kosti swatted her across the rump with a dried flower stalk from the rhubarb. As they went into the warm kitchen they heard the barred owl throw her voice, fixing hunched crows to their branches with a glue of fear.
‘After supper want to go down and see the old Hat Man? We could bring him down some green tomatoes.’
‘Bring him down some of the gingersnaps. Last time he was around he ate damn near the whole jar full.’ They called him the Hat Man, old Mr. Blood, because he always wore a hat, sometimes a cowboy hat, usually a farm cap, his white hair sticking out the arched hole at the back.
He had come in his rust-scabbed truck the spring before with an ancient dog who let no one near him without showing her teeth. He made a deal to rent a couple of acres of a fallow potato field and backed his humpbacked wagon onto the level ground.
One day there was nothing there but weeds and scrub brush, and a week later the Hat Man was anchored down, surrounded by a chicken wire fence strung on flimsy posts, meant, perhaps, to give a boundary to his life or keep the dog in. He turned over a garden with a rented tiller and as soon as the seeds were in he got some kind of a job at the sawmill. Something an old guy could do, tallying, maybe. Maybe Bricker had took pity on him, said Kosti.
In a month it looked like he had been there forever. He bought
or found an old Dodge truck for parts and stowed it in the weeds, picking away at it to keep the truck he drove running.
From the first week Kosti got the habit of stopping by at the end of the day, leaning on the truck’s fender and drinking beer in the long summer light while the Hat Man worked on his greasy internal mechanics and talked and talked around his persistent cough. It was like punctuation, a few words, a couple of coughs, a sentence or two, more coughing. Or they sat on the wagon steps in a human pyramid, like they were waiting for a bad game to begin. But they were only enjoying the evening. Listening. Nobody could get a word past the Hat Man. He had the talking cornered, sitting on the highest step coughing and spitting into the darkness in the pauses of his wandering talk. He was a rank old man, grease and dirt and dog, hard face under the scarred forehead, hat brim tipped over the eyes. You could see he’d been good-looking though, said Paula. One of the tough old ones, said Kosti, never mind how he looked. He wished he could wander around the country like the old Hat Man.
He kept peculiar time. Sometimes weeded his potatoes at ten o’clock at night, the trouble light he used to illumine the oily guts of the engine hanging on a post in the garden, casting enormous shadows of potato leaves on the bleached sod and throwing down the shapes of gargoyles from his hunched shoulders and cowboy hat. While he worked the dog watched him like a new apprentice, snapping moths out of the air with a wet chop.