The Meadow (12 page)

Other people stood to speak. The preacher talked about Jesus, but was honest enough to allow that, though Frank took Christ as his saviour, he was no “Religionist” and never went to church, but worked on Sundays like any other rancher any other day. He never needed any church but the one he rode over on his horse.

After the audience filed out I sat as the pallbearers loaded the flag-draped coffin into the hearse, and then the room was empty except for Frank's old saddle up on the stage, an old, burnt-up lariat coiled loosely and hung over the high, old-fashioned pommel and saddle horn. All around it were flowers.

 

 

Ray never wanted any funeral, but after they got the body back and thawed it out and zipped up his pants, Margie, his new widow, took over. She loved Ray, but she wasn't going to let an opportunity like this slip by.

First she sent word that she wanted me to come to the funeral with my guitar and play some of the old Western tunes Ray loved enough to play all night. When I tried to say I couldn't play in front of a lot of people she said it would be just family: Ginny, Lainie, Bill, Jack, and a few kids. The same people Ray and I used to play for every Saturday night at my dad's house.

It's hard to tell a grieving widow no, especially one whose hairtrigger tears soak a litany of hankies. Once she found a hummingbird dead from whacking into a window. She built a little mausoleum for it out of white quartz pebbles and pine needles. Ray kept expecting it to smell but it never did. She used to bring it out and cry and show the thing around to company. You see what I was up against.

I told Margie I'd play, but Bert had to play, too. The morning of the service I drove into town to Bert's house to put on a suit. He showed me the morning paper announcing the funeral at Striker's and inviting the whole town. Bert and I were mentioned as musicians.

I must have looked like I'd been kicked by a horse. “I thought Ray didn't want a funeral service.”

Bert said, “He didn't, but Ray's dead.”

I said, “How can Margie do this?”

Bert said, “She ain't dead.”

At the bottom of the announcement it said donations were being accepted by the widow for a headstone. I said, “What headstone?”

I called up Margie and she cried and cried and I couldn't get anywhere. She said Ray would be cremated next day and he'd wanted to be spread out on Boulder Ridge from the tree with the rock stuck through its trunk all the way up to Deadman, but she couldn't face it yet. I said, “What about this headstone?”

She said she was behind a couple of car payments, Ray's drinking cost so much at the end, and without Ray to provide anymore, and no workman's compensation, she didn't know what to do. Maybe some of those old friends whose houses Ray had stuccoed for free would repay the favor now. I hung up, and said, “What do we do now, Bert?”

Bert said, “Bite the bullet.”

So we took our guitars over to Striker's and they gave us a little room to sit in that was out of sight of all but a few people on the edge of the audience. The man in charge of the home said all we had to do was play one song while people filed in and one song while they filed out, which didn't sound too bad.

I could see Harris Ankeny in the audience. Harris plastered with Ray for twenty years. After he fell off the scaffold and wrecked his legs he worked as a janitor at the University. Harris used to come up to the ridge with Ray, especially in winter on snowmobiles, not just because he liked it, but to keep Ray from getting too drunk and getting into trouble. I know he thought if he'd been with Ray that last time it would have turned out different. Harris sat there like a stone statue in the rain.

The funeral director gave us the nod and we started to play “Red River Valley.” After we'd played it all the way through they were still filing in so we sang it. Then we played it through again but they were still filing in and we stopped. The funeral director glared urgently at us and made a motion with his hand like he was cranking the starter on an old car. We started to play another song.

We must have played ten songs, everything we could think of for a funeral. When we played “Rio Colorado,” Ray's niece, who was born with something wrong with her brain, set off keening like a wounded bobcat and couldn't stop. It was a spooky sound.

The preacher got up and said some stuff about Jesus and how Ray was in heaven and hadn't really died at all. I knew Ray thought heaven would be a step down from Boulder Ridge, and I thought about his questions for the Devil. Then it was over and everyone started out and we started pumping up songs again, some of which we hadn't played in years.

I've been to visit Margie since and she never changes. She watches “soapies” and fills up the doublewide with crocheted knickknacks, whatnots, and bric-a-brac. For instance, she made a little sombrero and a serape for her bottle of Tabasco sauce. I ask her when she wants to go up on the ridge to scatter Ray's ashes. She still isn't ready; they're under her bed. She got about $300 toward the headstone, though, so she still has something to drive. God bless her.

 

L
YLE
, 1981

“The first time I come face to face with Ferris was on a Sunday afternoon and I was taking a snooze after dinner. I woke with a start, though I didn't hear anything, and there he was peering through the screen door at me where I was lying on the couch. He'd come up on the house afoot and was just standing at the open door looking at me through the screen, which is one thing, I guess, in town, but out here it's very damned strange. It gave me the willies and I jumped up off the couch and said, ‘What do you want? Jesus Christ.'

“‘Howdy, good neighbor,' says the voice behind the screen. ‘Sorry to be botherin' you, but my truck quit me back down the road a piece and I was wonderin' if you had some jumper cables you could borrow me a minute to get her goin' again.'

“‘Sure,' I say, because around here you just don't leave people stranded. I still didn't like being sneaked up on, though, and I still couldn't make out the stranger's face through the dark screen backlit by a bright afternoon sun. Then I started to wake up a bit and I asked, ‘You mean it was running and it quit?' He nodded. ‘Then a jump start won't help you. Cables are for starting cars that won't start, not for starting cars that won't run. If it quit you something else is wrong. Where is it?' He said about halfway between here and Ray's. The way he used Ray's first name surprised me. It was like he'd known him for years.

“‘If I can just get it up over the hill I know I can get it home. I own some land up here, you know,' he said importantly.

“By then I'm awake enough for it to hit me who I'm talking to and I say, ‘Well, if you think it will do you any good I can loan you some cables. But what are you going to jump it off of?'

“Then, unbelievably, deadpan, he says, ‘Can I borrow that 'ere truck?' He jerks his chin in the direction of my Studebaker. My heart slid down to about knee high as I thought of the nearest phone seven miles away, the nearest wrecker thirty-five miles away, and how once I got involved with this outfit, I'd be responsible for their well-being. I couldn't refuse them. You just don't do that. I also wasn't about to loan this stranger my truck and have him hitch it up for the locomotive to his junk train.

“So I put on my hat and stepped out into the yard and was immediately startled by the presence of another man, a younger man, standing about fifteen feet off to the side, out of sight near the window.

“Once outside I could see the face of the man I'd been talking to and I didn't like what I saw. He was gray-haired and handsome-ish, tall, with squinty blue eyes—like he was staring into a bright light all the time. There was something else about him, too, that kind of chilled me, a slackness in desperation, like a deer whose throat you are about to cut. His skin was the color of brick cement, heavy on the lime. He was unshaved, but not bearded. He looked like he hadn't bathed for a year or more and there were clots of black greasy muck in his ears tufted with hair. His clothes were so filthy with grease and dust, their original colors were hard to make out. It was like someone had dipped him in used crankcase oil and rolled him in the dust like a chicken-fried steak.

“The younger man, clearly his son, was pretty clean by comparison, black-haired, but with the same squinty blue eyes like I was shining a spotlight at him or caught him in the headlights as he was doing something illegal. I decided not to think about it.

“The three of us climb into the cab of my truck and head up the road. When his truck come into sight I despaired another notch. It had quit on a steep incline, right in the middle of the road. Hooked up behind it was the usual massive load, but instead of junk metal it was livestock. There was three horses in the trailer, two goats in the cart behind it, and crates of chickens in the bed of the pickup. Now I was really in over my head in terms of responsibility.

“What if the truck wouldn't start, as I suspicioned it wouldn't? What was I going to do with these people, and worse, what was I going to do with the animals? Where was this greasemonkey going to overhaul his truck? If he had no booster cables, did he have any tools at all? Money for parts?

“Then I caught sight of the most chilling vision of all. Sitting stock-still in the backseat was the hulking form of an enormous woman, possibly the ugliest woman I ever seen in my life. She had a pronounced moustache and her eyebrows were a straight thick line like a piece of greasy rope stuck to her forehead. Her hair was curly black and all sprangled out, and she had on this tiny straw cowboy hat that looked like she must have screwed it on. The look in her eyes said, ‘If you address one word to me I'll tear your head off and suck out your guts.'

“Ferris was looking at me with those eyes, squinting, disaster-accepting, a depending-on-the-kindness-of-strangers denial of responsibility for whatever happened next.

“I pull my truck up bumper to bumper with his and we raise the hoods and connect the cables. I jump into my truck with unreasonable hope and fire it up. I gun the motor and shout for Ferris to give it a try. Ferris says nothing. Ferris does nothing. Ferris squints at me. Finally he looks up at me and says, ‘It's not ready yet.'

“He sat inert in the driver's seat of his vehicle, and he wouldn't turn it over. I yelled for him to start it, but he just smiled and said it wasn't ready, at which point I understood that his battery was indeed dead, his generator shot, that he knew it perfectly well, and that he intended not to jump start his truck, but to charge his battery off of mine at the risk of melting not only the cables, but the wiring in both vehicles.

“‘Start it!' I said, and when he still wouldn't I jumped out of my truck and headed for his to do it myself, mad enough to forget about the enormous, evil-looking wife in the backseat. Ferris waited until I was reaching for his door before he pretended to turn the ignition and quickly turned it off again for a few more amps.

“I stood in front of his open truck door. ‘Why don't you let
me
try it?'

“He says, ‘Okay, okay, okay, here we go now,' and then he waited a few more seconds. He turned the key and it started.

“Without the generator working and with so little charge in the battery, which was running the truck by itself—which Ferris knew when he left Fort Collins—I knew I wasn't necessarily out of the woods yet, though luckily nothing in the electrical system of my truck had been damaged. If they made it over the top of the ridge, it was downhill all the way to the junkheap, which was apparently now going to be a barnyard menagerie as well.

“I said, ‘Get the hell out of here while you've still got some battery.' He nodded pleasantly and squinted at me. Even the ugly woman gives me a tiny squeak of a smile. She had been sitting there, still as a sphinx, stalled out in the backseat for a couple of hours at least, with the goats and horses and chickens in crates threatening to expire from heat stroke.

“Ferris put it in gear and began to grind his fantastic contraption up the grade toward the ridgetop. I made several deals with God before he made it. I had fallen in behind as the caboose of the unlikely train pulled by the little engine that I hoped to Christ could, and when we topped the ridge and the Ferris train begun to pick up speed on the downward grade I was sure relieved.

“Ferris gives me a jaunty wave out of his window, and I'm left with the gray aftertaste of knowing that these people live less than four miles away. In fact I could
see
the top of their junkheap with binoculars from the ridge.

“For the grace of God and the deals I made with Him, I personally never spoke to Ferris again, though I seen him from time to time, and his wife, who continued the daily pilgrimages to whatever kind of steamy heap they lived in formerly, and they still brought the daily bargeloads up the mountain, having fixed their brutalized pickup. But instead of junk it was always livestock after I helped them out that day, until there was twenty or more horses of chaotic variety, half as many goats, innumerable chickens, ducks, geese, and even peacocks, not to mention the manifold dogs, cats, and whatever that family had living in their clothes. It wasn't long after the arrival of these folk that Ed Wilkes was horrified to catch in a trap set for packrats in his cellar the only honest-to-God city rat that has ever been seen on Boulder Ridge.”

 

 

When they surveyed the state line between Colorado and Wyoming it didn't come out right. Both states are almost four hundred miles square so it wasn't much of a surprise to the surveyors when they ended up with a fifty-foot discrepancy. They never fought over it because it wasn't an overlap—they both came up short.

According to Colorado that ribbon of land fifty feet wide and four hundred miles long was in Wyoming. According to Wyoming it was in Colorado. According to App Worster it belonged to him since nobody else wanted it. He'd lost the meadow on Sheep Creek and figured he could build a claim shack on that strip and neither state would require him to prove up, which would be helpful since he knew there was nothing under the state line but rotten granite. App guessed right. Even after the second survey, which came out right, neither state seemed willing to notice which side of the line App's house really was on. He lived there thirty years, to the end.