About a decade earlier I’d laid up a few days at a former sheep-ranch in the northeast corner of the state where I’d hoped to find a little isolation so I could figure out the organization of a book I wanted to write about the tallgrass prairie. On that count my progress got slowed because I met Max Dwightman (as I’ll call him). What I set before you now comes from notes I wrote after two evenings with him, the first in a parlor corner where a body could find a taste of Admiral Foghorn 1843, and the second on a long, wooden porch good for listening to coyotes and owls, with a glass of diddle at hand. The dark remoteness promoted reflection.
Because it would not have been appropriate — as you’ll see — to jot down notes and also because I was slow to realize the quozzical import in Dwightman’s words, I could only soon afterward outline memos. What I write now is my close paraphrase of his story, minus his repetitions and stumbles as he found his way along. I’m going to put some of his words inside quotation marks with the understanding I’m re-creating his voice as accurately as I’m able. I’ve changed all the surnames and avoided most place-names.
Around the ranch were a few old cabins, each with a sagging porch, sagging floor, sagging bed, sagging divan, and sagging and dusty curtains; the only thing without sag was a hard chair and, from an old hotel lobby, an ink-splotched oak escritoire once stocked with imprinted stationery, envelopes, scratchy pen, and ink pot. In all the cabins, it was the only desk. I hoped the antique drippages might encourage a few creative dribblings into my notebooks. Trying to scribble at the table, I studied its stains as if they were little Rorschachs holding clues to creative patterns; I stared out the window, read on the divan, walked into the dry hills thick with the scent of ponderosa resin warmed by the afternoon sun. In other words, I did what I could to act like a writer. When the old word magic isn’t going well, sometimes it can help just to pretend.
In the evening I’d go down to the former ranch-house for a seat in a corner, and from somewhere a Shoshone woman soon would come forth unbidden and, saying not a word, wait for my request for a Bourbon and jigger of water. I do not ever try to write alongside alcohol, but of an evening I may take a peg and let my mind graze in green pastures as if words were woollies. Sometimes a notion gets legs and stands up like a newborn lamb ready to gambol. Sometimes, but not then.
My second night there, a man came in and sat unnecessarily near. He wasn’t a handsome man, but he had stately features: with a bleached rag mop on his head, he could have stood as George Washington on the American Legion float in a Fourth of July parade. He was wearing denim pants with sharp creases, his boots were shined, his white shirt in a Western cut and perfectly pressed right down to the fraying cuffs. His thick hair was at midpoint between dark and silver. He was slender, clean-shaven, and the nails on his fingers were immaculate and trimmed short. He was — as I was to learn — nearly seventy, and he had served with the Army in Korea during the war and been wounded there. After years in the Southwest, he had recently returned to Wyoming to look for a couple of acres where he could set up a house trailer.
When his whiskey arrived, he rolled the glass to warm it, then put it down and, ignoring my fake scribbles meant to show I was occupied, spoke that dreaded sentence: “I hear you’re a book writer.” Not now, I said. It’s not going so well. “I’m writing up my life,” he said. I thought, Oh god! Please don’t ask me to read your manuscript.
He continued, “I haven’t actually put the words down on paper yet, but I’m writing it in my head. Once I figure it all out, that’s when I’ll find somebody to type it up. I mean, anybody can write a book.” (You bet — now see how anybody does getting anybody to publish it.) I nodded and, my own manuscript struggles making me churlish, ungenerously said that a manuscript was not a book. Nevertheless, he turned his chair toward me. It would take open rudeness to discourage this man.
“My dad told me on more than one occasion, I’m quoting him, ‘Your old pa wasn’t never nothing but a no-count nobody. But don’t you be one too.’ I’ve worked hard not to.”
With that, I made a real note — setting down exactly his father’s advice. Taking notes without permission can sometimes silence a talker. The further he went on, though, the more my resistance failed.
He had grown up a hundred miles from the Wyoming ranch, attended public school nearby, and gone off for a year to a Colorado college to study physical therapy before returning home to help his family after a steer made his father a virtual invalid. Dwightman took a job in a Main Street hardware run by an elderly man (let him be Mr. Morgan) whose health was failing. Capable and honest, he soon won Morgan’s trust and earned greater responsibility as the proprietor observed Dwightman’s knack for satisfying customers, even those who came into Morgan’s Hardware and Supply with a complaint. After a year, the trade was up by several hundred dollars, although a heart condition forced the old fellow to work less, doing only what he could from home where he was not recuperating but simply declining.
Dwightman began going by the Morgan house after work to report the day’s custom and to see how he might help with whatever needed attention: hanging storm windows, taking down storm windows, trimming the hedge, the lawn, everything but Mrs. Morgan’s roses. His presence seemed to steady the couple. At both the store and in their home, he became indispensable.
One spring evening, pulling Dwightman aside, Mr. Morgan explained he wanted him to take over the business. Max said to me, “I told him I was about to get married, and even without that I didn’t have enough money to buy the store. And he told me, ‘I’m not selling Morgan’s Hardware — I’m giving it to you.’ He told me to sit down so he could explain. It would come with a proviso, and that proviso was, after he was gone I was to share half the net with Mrs. Morgan and help her in any way I could. ‘Whatever she needs,’ he said. ‘You understand? Whatever. You be her angel.’”
Dwightman took a couple of days to mull it over, to talk to his fiancée, before agreeing to accept the emporium with its proviso. Three weeks following the wedding, Mr. Morgan died. Each evening thereafter Dwightman continued to go by the house, and every two weeks he made the proper deposit to Mrs. Morgan’s bank account. She was then in her early seventies and in good health, other than failing eyes and a little lumbago that a hot bath eased, but her progressive views and sardonic humor limited friendships in a small, conservative Wyoming town. Her opinions amused Max, and his amusement amused her; it was a good relationship.
On afternoons when there was no outside task for him, she served a cup of chamomile tea which, weak though it was, he didn’t care for, but his respect for her led him to feign enjoyment. One day a few months after Mr. Morgan’s death, as Dwightman was about to leave the house, he asked his usual question, if there was anything else he could do, and she said, “Yes, Maxwell, if you will.” Surely, Mrs. Morgan. Just name it. She had slept in a position that had put a crick in her neck, and she could hardly turn her head to the left. With his training in physical therapy, maybe he could ease the stiffness. He folded a wet washcloth to make a warm compress and placed it on her neck, held it there for a few minutes, then, while she sat upright in a kitchen chair, gently kneaded her left trapezius until she could turn her head freely.
“It was tight as a guitar string,” Dwightman said to me. “From then on, sometimes she called me ‘Maxwell the Master.’”
A few months later, the local newspaper ran a piece about a big cut-rate mega-retailer beginning construction on a building a few miles away in an old pasture, and the next year the business opened. “We all saw it coming,” Dwightman said, “but we didn’t see how fast it would hit. That very first month, our trade was down, and it did nothing but go on down until we had to put our store up for sale. The price, when it finally came, it wasn’t too good because everybody had lost faith in Main Street property.” Mrs. Morgan received her half. Dwightman’s share didn’t last long, and he counted himself lucky only in that he and his wife had no children. “That was the first time I ever saw my
Korean War injury do any good for me.”
Once his money was gone, making his three years of invested work seem fruitless, he went to the megamart and came out with a job. “I was assistant to the assistant manager in the automotive and hardware section. Having to wear that blue jacket just plain shamed me. The worst was, with it on, I had to face my former customers. I’m talking about a lot of people who quit our store to save a penny on the dollar. I used to ask myself how I could feel shame in front of people who left me high and dry.”
After a year in the blue coat, he came home one night to find the kitchen table bare and his wife sitting stiffly at it. He thought someone must have died. She said — when annoyed she always called him by his surname — “Dwightman, I can’t go on like this. There’s no money, the town gives us nothing but pity, and those are the same damn people who caused you to fail. And on top of it all, I have a half man. What do you expect?”
He said he’d been looking into a job at an airplane plant down in Kansas, and she said, “Like hell I’m moving to Kansas.” Then what if — “It’s no use,” she said. “I want out.” The next morning she was gone, and his letters suggesting this or that to her she ignored, and at last he realized the main thing she wanted away from was Max Dwightman.
Over the succeeding three months, his distracted performance almost caused him to lose his job, and he probably would have had not Mrs. Morgan steadied him as he’d earlier steadied her. She told him several times, “Maxwell, keep the hinges oiled, and the door one day will swing open.” She continued to pour him chamomile tea, and he even began to enjoy it, or maybe it was just the conversation along with it, conversations unlike any he’d ever had with his wife. “Mrs. Morgan came to know me well,” he said. “Even about my war disability. And when I’d mention my dad saying he wasn’t never nothing but a no-count nobody, she’d tell me, ‘Don’t you believe it about yourself, Maxwell. Honesty and faithfulness have never been not nothing.’”
It took him almost two hours to relate those events, even though I had the feeling it was only half the story. Then, without warning he drained his second glass and said, “I’m getting stiff in the knees. Time to get up,” and he did. He looked at me, his first close look. “You’re a polite listener,” he said, and left.
The next morning when I went out for a walk, I noticed by the door a rock holding down a slip of paper, and on it was “I’ll be on the porch tonight. If you want, I’ll tell you how the hinges got oiled. Your glass is on me.”
3
How Max Oiled the Hinges
MAX DWIGHTMAN WAS A STORYTELLER lacking vivid turns of phrase and humorous twists (other than a few inadvertent double entendres), having only a gift of methodical clarity, yet in his words and even more in his face were hints of something beyond a tale of divorce and job loss. Having come to believe perhaps I should listen to his tale rather than study ink splotches on a desk, that evening I went to find him on the porch. The Indian woman appeared — again unbidden — and stood in her usual wordless wait until Dwightman asked her to bring us two whiskeys, but he said nothing more until she returned and he thanked her in Shoshone, yet still she did not speak. Then to me he said, “Her name means ‘Talk-Talk Girl.’ And her nickname means ‘Little Magpie.’ But what I call her means ‘Pretty Night-Woman.’”
He lifted his glass. I mentioned I’d seen a couple of pronghorn that morning, and he answered, “There are more now than when I was a boy. I love antelope. In Wyoming, wildlife is called game — you know, Game and Fish Department. I could shoot you before I could take one of them. They have the most beautiful dark eyes — those long lashes. A lonely sheepherder could fall in love with one. And I’ll tell you this — take a look at that backside. Sweetest rump in the West. There’s a tale for your next book.”
I said I had the feeling last night he had a story that went beyond afternoons with Mrs. Morgan. “She was a fine woman,” he said. “If she’d been younger —” He stopped, lifted his whiskey, and took his time before saying brokenly, “When I was in Korea — that injury — it was a groin injury. I didn’t lose any body parts, but I lost some function in some parts.”
Again he stopped. I think he was deciding how — or even whether — to go on. Then he continued, uncertainly and at times fumblingly. “Mrs. Morgan was thirty years older than me, but I think I might not be around today if I didn’t ever get to know her. I don’t mean her financial help so much, because it was more than that. She was a pretty woman, the kind that a few age lines in a face seem to improve. Whenever I said hello or good-bye, I gave her a heartfelt hug, and sometimes I wanted to hold her longer. And I think now she wouldn’t have said no. But to risk disrespect or scare her — that, I couldn’t do.
“She knew my history, all about my crappy marriage and the way the Korean War messed it up. And I’ve got to tell you this — I told her my injury made me a master in other ways. I mean, I did have training in physical therapy. But that didn’t matter to my wife.”
He called out something in Shoshone, and the woman appeared, and he raised his empty glass. He sat quietly until he had a new whiskey, then he spoke again in Shoshone to the woman, words that pleased her. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I need some courage to talk about some of this stuff.
“Where was I?” Therapy, I said. “Therapy, yes. One evening after I rehung her screen door and oiled the hinges, she said, ‘See what I mean about doors?’ I don’t know if it made much sense then, but I agreed. And she called me in to tea, and we sat down, and she said, ‘Try to follow me here, Maxwell. Mister Morgan’ — she always referred to him as Mister Morgan around me — ‘his health emasculated him in his last years. He was never difficult as he declined, but he just wasn’t really here. Now, not every woman needs a man — especially in her later years — but more of us do than young people realize. It’s sort of a national secret.’ And she stopped there to give me time to catch on.
“Then she told me how her bridge ladies — they were all widows — how they talked during the game about their health and how a couple of them mentioned looking forward to their annual women’s exams. You know, for women’s health. There was a doctor over in Sheridan that seemed to understand all that, and he always some way added a few extra movements with his hands and sort of stretched out the exam without ever really crossing the line. She said he was good but had retired.”
At that point, Dwightman took a swallow and commented how it was a warm night for the season. Then he said, “I should have told you before — my neck massages had more or less progressed to back and chest massaging, even though she was always seated in a kitchen chair and was clothed. She was always fresh out of a hot bath to loosen her joints. You know, to relax her muscles. She smelled of lavender soap. Her housedress was always fresh too.
“On one afternoon as I was working on her shoulders, she said, ‘Maxwell, stop for a moment. I want to talk about something.’ So I did. She got up and went to the sofa and sort of reclined out like a lady of leisure. She said, ‘Let me tell you more about us old gals. You listen up now. You men die on us, and before a lot of you die, you’re already dead from the navel down. Where does that leave us?’”
Dwightman began struggling to express to me all that Mrs. Morgan had said, but what it came down to was this: After a woman loses her husband, she may find herself living somewhere between loneliness and relief at his passing. She can miss his contributions and at the same time be happy to be shut of his male stuff — obtuseness, poor listening, self-gratifying sexual demands or sexual incapacities attendant with age and disease. Some of those widows, once free, did not want a second or third marriage to someone else who would only end up dying on them. Between the burden of a man and a no-man’s-land, there should be another choice. I don’t think Dwightman was punning when he said, “Mrs. Morgan made it clear there was a gap to fill.”
To a coyote howl, he called a Shoshone word into the darkness, and there followed a silence, then a yipping of several voices, and he smiled. “
They speak Shoshone. Around here anyway.”
He returned to his story. “When Mrs. Morgan finished what she wanted to tell me, she asked, ‘Do you know what I’m saying?’ I was afraid to answer. She said, ‘Speak up, Maxwell,’ and I said I didn’t know, and she reprimanded me. ‘Sure you do. You’ve told me many times you’d do whatever you could to help out in this house, and now I want to call in that pledge.’
“I was scared all to hell. She said, ‘It’s all right,’ and she sort of motioned me toward the sofa. ‘Come over here to the couch and put your hand under my shift and continue your very effective therapy.’
“I just stood there. She said real sweet, ‘Come along now. You’re a professional, and you have a patient.’ She was as cool as could be, but I was shaking so much I thought I might have to leave, but I made it over to her. She pointed to a jar of unguent and closed her eyes, and I — you know — I reached up under her housedress, and I closed my eyes too, and I did as she asked.”
Here Dwightman again fell silent, and I dared not speak until the silence became uncomfortable. I said so softly I’m not sure he heard me, And? “Oh,” he said, “the therapy was successful, and it continued more or less weekly for the next couple of years, even after her eyesight was almost gone. At a completion, I’d pull an afghan over her to leave her to a comfortable nap. I did everything I could to make it professional.
“Then she began to fail. It happened so fast there wasn’t even time for a nursing home. When they put her in the ambulance, the last thing she said to me was ‘Maxwell, you’re the best of men.’ She didn’t make it through to morning.”
He cleared his throat and said he’d like another whiskey, but he’d better not, because there was more to tell and he didn’t want to muddle it. I hadn’t touched mine. The sky in that remote piece of Wyoming was a carbon black letting even the most feeble starlight shine through from far corners of the galaxy.