Close Range
His failure as a stockman was recognized, yet he was tolerated and even liked for his kindly manner and skill playing the banjo and the fiddle, though most regarded him with contemptuous pity for his loose control of home affairs and his coddling of a crazy wife after her impetuous crime.
Mrs. Tinsley, intensely modest, sensitive and abhorring marital nakedness, suffered from nerves; she was distracted and fretted by shrill sounds as the screech of a chair leg scraping the floor or the pulling of a nail. As a girl in Missouri she had written a poem that began with the line “Our life is a beautiful Fairy Land.” Now she was mother to three. When the youngest girl, Mabel, was a few months old they made a journey into Laramie, the infant howling intolerably, the wagon bungling along, stones sliding beneath the wheels. As they crossed the Little Laramie Mrs. Tinsley stood up and hurled the crying infant into the water. The child’s white dress filled with air and it floated a few yards in the swift current, then disappeared beneath a bower of willows at the bend. The woman shrieked and made to leap after the child but Horm Tinsley held her back. They galloped across the bridge and to the river’s edge below the bend. Gone and gone.
As if to make up for her fit of destruction Mrs. Tinsley developed an intense anxiety for the safety of the surviving children, tying them to chairs in the kitchen lest they wander outside and come to harm, sending them to bed while the sun was still high for twilight was a dangerous time, warning them away from haystacks threaded with vipers, from trampling horses and biting dogs, the yellow Wyandottes who pecked, from the sound of thunder and the sight of lightning. In the night she came to their beds many times to learn if they had smothered.
By the time he was twelve the boy, Rasmussen, potato-nosed, with coarse brown hair and yellow eyes, displayed a kind of awkward zaniness. He was smart with numbers, read books. He asked complicated questions no one could answer—the distance to the sun, why did not humans have snouts, could a traveler reach China by setting out in any direction and holding steady to it? Trains were his particular interest and he knew about rail connections from study of the timetables, pestered travelers at the station to hear something of distant cities. He was indifferent to stock except for his flea-bitten grey, Bucky and he threw the weight of his mind in random directions as if the practical problems of life were not to be resolved but teased as a kitten is by a broom straw.
When he was fifteen his interest turned to the distant sea and he yearned for books about ships, books with pictures, and there were none. On paper he invented boats like inverted roofs, imagined the ocean a constant smooth and glassy medium until Mrs. Hepple of Laramie spoke at an evening about her trip abroad, describing the voyage as a purgatory of monstrous waves and terrible winds. Another time a man worked for them five or six months. He had been in San Francisco and told about lively streets, Chinese tong wars, sailors and woodsmen blowing their wages in a single puking night. He described Chicago, a smoking mass shrugging out of the plains, fouling the air a hundred miles east. He said Lake Superior licked the wild shore of Canada.
There was no holding Ras. At sixteen this rank gangler left home, headed for San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Boston, Cincinnati. What his expectations and experiences were no one knew. He neither returned nor wrote.
The daughter, neglected as daughters are, married a cowboy with bad habits and moved with him to Baggs. Horm Tinsley gave up on sheep and started a truck garden and honey operation, specializing in canning tomatoes, in Moon and Stars watermelons. After a year or so he sold Ras’s horse to the Klickas on the neighboring ranch.
In 1933 the son had been gone more than five years and not a word.
The mother begged of the curtains, “Why don’t he write?” and saw again the infant in the water, silent, the swollen dress buoying it around the dark bend. Who would write to such a mother?—and she was up in the night and to the kitchen to scrub the ceiling, the table legs, the soles of her husband’s boots, rubbing the old meat grinder with a banana skin to bring up the silvery bloom. A murderer she might be but no one could say her house wasn’t clean.
Jaxon Dunmire was ready to get back on the road with his Morning Glory pitch and bluster. They’d finished building a new round corral, branding was over, what there was to brand, forget haying—in the scorched fields the hay hadn’t made. What in another place might have been a froth of white flowers here was alkali dust blooming in the wind, and a dark horizon not rain but another choking storm of dust or rising cloud of grasshoppers. Ice said he could feel there was worse to come. To save the ranchers the government was buying up cattle for nickels and dimes.
Jaxon lounged against a stall watching shaggy-headed Bliss who bent over a brood mare’s hoof, examining a sand crack.
“Last year down by Lingle I seen Mormon crickets eat a live prairie dog,” Jaxon said. “In about ten minutes.”
“God,” said Bliss, who had not tasted candy until he was fourteen and then spat it out, saying, too much taste. He enjoyed Jaxon’s stories, thought he might like to be a windmill man himself sometime, or at least travel around a few weeks with Jaxon.
“Got a little crack startin here.”
“Catch it now, save the horse. We still got half a jar a that hoof dressin. Yeah, see and hear a lot a strange things. Clayt Blay told me that around twenty years ago he run into these two fellers in Laramie. They told him they found a diamond mine up in the Sierra Madres, and then, says Clayt, both a them come down with the whoopin pox and died. Found their bodies in the fall, rotted into the cabin floor. But acourse they’d told Clayt where their dig was before they croaked.”
’You didn’t fall for it.” Bliss began to cut a pattern into the hoof above the crack to contain it.
“Naw, not likely anything Clayt Blay says would cause me to fire up.” He rolled a cigarette but did not light it.
Bliss shot a glance into the yard. “What the hell is that stuff on your skunk wagon?”
“Aw, somebody’s threwn flour or plaster on it in Rock Springs. Bastards. Ever time I go into Rock Springs they do me some mess. People’s in a bad mood—and nobody got money for a goddamn windmill. You ought a see the homemade rigs they’re bangin together. This one guy builds somethin from part of a old pump, balin wire, a corn sheller and some tie-rods. Cost him two dollars. And the son of a bitch worked great. How can I make it against that?”
“Oh lord,” said Bliss, finishing with the mare. “I’m done here I’ll warsh that stuff off a your rig.”
As he straightened up Jaxon tossed him the sack of tobacco. “There you go, brother boy. And I find the good shears I’ll cut your lousy hair. Then I got a go.”
A letter came to the Tinsleys from Schenectady, New York. The man who wrote it, a Methodist minister, said that a young man severely injured a year earlier in an auto wreck, mute and damaged since that time, had somewhat regained the power of communication and identified himself as their son, Rasmussen Tinsley.
No one expected him to live, wrote the minister, and it is a testament to God’s goodness that he has survived. I am assured that the conductor will help him make the train change in Chicago. His fare has been paid by a church collection. He will arrive in Laramie on the afternoon train March 17.
The afternoon light was the sour color of lemon juice. Mrs. Tinsley, her head a wonderful frozen confection of curls, stood on the platform watching the passengers get down. The father wore a clean, starched shirt. Their son emerged, leaning on a cane. The conductor handed down a valise. They knew it was Ras but how could they know him? He was a monster. The left side of his face and head had been damaged and torn, had healed in a mass of crimson scars. There was a whistling hole in his throat and a scarred left eye socket. His jaw was deformed. Multiple breaks of one leg had healed badly and he lurched and dragged. Both hands seemed maimed, frozen joints and lopped fingers. He could not speak beyond a raw choke only the devil could understand.
Mrs. Tinsley looked away. Her fault through the osmosis of guilt.
The father step
ped forward tentatively. The injured man lowered his head. Mrs. Tinsley was already climbing back into the Ford. She opened and closed the door twice, catching sudden sunlight. Half a mile away on a stony slope small rain had fallen and the wet boulders glinted like tin pie pans.
“Ras.” The father put out his hand and touched the thin arm of his son. Ras pulled back.
“Come on, Ras. We’ll take you home and build you up. Mother’s made fried chicken,” but looked at the warped mouth, sunken from lost teeth, and wondered if Ras could chew anything.
He could. He ate constantly, the teeth on the good side of his mouth gnashing through meats and relishes and cakes. In cooking, Mrs. Tinsley found some relief. Ras no longer tried to say anything after the failure at the train station but sometimes wrote a badly spelled note and handed it to his father.
I NED GIT OTE A WILE
And Horm would take him for a short ride in the truck. The tires weren’t good. He never went far. Horm talked steadily during the drives, grasshoppers glancing off the windshield. Ras was silent. There was no way to tell how much he understood. There had been damage, that was clear enough. But when the father signaled for the turn that would take them back home Ras pulled at his sleeve, made a guttural negative. He was getting his strength back. His shoulders were heavier. And he could lift with the crooked arms. But what did he think now of distant cities and ships at sea, he bound to the kitchen and the porch?
He couldn’t keep dropping everything to take Ras for a ride. Every day now the boy was writing the same message:I NED GIT OTE A WILE . It was spring, hot, tangled with bobolink and meadowlark song. Ras was not yet twenty-five.
“Well, son, I need a get some work done today. I got plants a set out. Weedin. Can’t go truckin around.” He wondered if Ras was strong enough to ride. He thought of old Bucky fourteen years old now but still in good shape. He had seen him in Klicka’s pasture the month gone. He thought the boy could ride. It would do him good to ride the plain. It would do them all good.
Late in the morning he stopped at Klicka’s place.
’You know Ras come back in pretty bad shape in March. He’s gainin but he needs to get out some and I can’t be takin him twice a day. Wonder if you’d give some thought to selling old Bucky back to me again. At least the boy could get out on his own. It’s a horse I’d trust him with.”
He tied the horse to the bumper and led it home. Ras was on the porch bench drinking cloudy water. He stood up when he saw the horse.
“Ucka,” he said forcefully.
“That’s right. It’s Bucky. Good old Bucky.” He talked to Ras as though he was a young child. Who could tell how much he understood? When he sat silent and unmoving was he thinking of the dark breath under the trees or the car bucking off the road, metal screaming and the world tipped over? Or was there only a grainy field of dim images? “Think you can ride him?”
He could manage. It was a godsend. Horm had to saddle the horse for him, but Ras was up and out after breakfast, rode for hours. They could see him on the prairie against the sharp green, a distant sullen cloud dispensing lean bolts. But dread swelled in Mrs. Tinsley, the fear that she must now see a riderless horse, saddled, reins slack.
The second week after the horse’s return Ras was out the entire day, came in dirty and exhausted.
“Where did you go, son?” asked Horm, but Ras gobbled potato and shot sly glances at them from the good eye.
So Horm knew he had been up to something.
Within a month Ras was out all day and all night, then away for two or three days, god knows where, elusive, slipping behind rocks, galloping long miles on the dry, dusty grass, sleeping in willows and nests of weeds, a half-wild man with no talk and who knew what thoughts.
The Tinsleys began to hear a few things. Ras had appeared on the Hanson place. Hanson’s girls were out hanging clothes and suddenly Ras was there on the grey horse, his hat pulled low, saying garbled things, and then as quickly gone.
The party line rang four short times, their ring, and when Mrs. Tinsley answered a man’s voice said, keep that goddamn idiot to home. But Ras was gone six days and before he returned the sheriff came by in a new black Chevrolet with a star painted white on the side and said Ras had showed himself to a rancher’s wife way the hell down in Tie Siding, forty miles away.
“He didn’t have nothin she hadn’t see before, but she didn’t preciate the show and neither did her old man. Unless you want your boy locked up or hurt you better get him hobbled. He’s got a awful face on him, ain’t it?”
When Ras came home the next noon, gaunt and starving, Horm took the saddle and put it up in the parents’ bedroom.
“I’m sorry, Ras, but you can’t go around like you’re doin. No more.”
The next morning the horse was gone and so was Ras.
“He’s rid him bareback.” There was no keeping him at home. His circle was smaller but he was on the rove again.
In the Dunmires’ noon kitchen a greasy leather sofa, worn as an old saddle, stood against the wall and on it lay Ice Dunmire, white hair ruffed, his mouth open in sleep. The plank table, twelve feet long and flanked by pants-polished benches, held a dough tray filled with forks and spoons. The iron sink tilted, a mildew smell rose from the wooden counter. The dish cup-board stood with the doors off, shelves stacked with heavy rim-nicked plates. The beehive radio on a wall shelf was never silent, bulging with static and wailing voices. A crank telephone hung beside the door. In a sideboard stood a forest of private bottles marked with initials and names.
Varn was at the oven bending for biscuits, dark and bandy-legged, Marion scraping milk gravy around and around the pan and jabbing a boil of halved potatoes. The coffeepot chucked its brown fountain into the glass dome of the lid.
“Dinner!” Varn shouted, dumping the biscuits into a bowl and taking a quick swallow from his little whiskey glass. “Dinner! Dinner! Dinner! Eat it or go hungry.”
Ice stretched and got up, went to the door, coughed and spat.
They ate without talk, champing meat. There were no salads or vegetables beyond potatoes or sometimes cabbage.
Ice drank his coffee from the saucer as he always had. “Hear there was some excitement down Tie Sidin.”
“Didn’t take you long to hear it. Goddamn Tinsley kid that come back rode into Shawver’s yard and jacked off in front a the girl. Matter a time until he discovers it’s more fun a put it up the old snatch.”
“Do somethin about that. Give me the relish,” said Jaxon. “Sounds like nutty Mrs. T. drownded the wrong kid.” He swirled a piece of meat in the relish. “Goddamn, Varn, I am sure goin a miss this relish out on the road.”
“Nothin a do with me. Buy yourself a jar—Billy Gill’s Piccalilli. Get it at the store.”
Around noon one day in the wide, burnt summer that stank of grasshoppers, Mrs. Tinsley heard the measured beating of a truck motor in the yard. She looked out. A roadster with a miniature windmill mounted in the trailer behind it stood outside, the exhaust from the tailpipe raising a little dust. There was a mash of hoppers in the tire treads, scores more in various stages of existence clogging the radiator grille.
“The windmill man is out there,” she said. Horm turned around slowly. He was just getting over a cold and had a headache from the dust.
Outside Jaxon Dunmire in his brown plaid suit came at him with a smile. His dust still floated over the road. A grasshopper leaped from his leg.
“Mr. Tinsley? Howdy. Jax Dunmire. Meaning a come out here for two years and persuade you about the Mornin Glory windmill. Probably the best equipment on the market and the mill that’s saving the rancher’s bacon these damn dustbowl days. Yeah, I been meanin a get out here, but I been so damn busy at the ranch and then runnin up and down the state summers sellin these good mills I don’t get around the home territory much.” The smile lay over his face as if it had been screwed on. “My dad and my brothers and me, we got five a these Mornin Glories on the Rockin Box. Water the stock all over, they d
on’t lose weight walkin for a drink.”