Land of the Braves

Land of the Braves

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 5

Tom Bass

Only a few drops of rain make the difference.

Wicked, purple desert or naive, green plain.

The buzzards hiss overhead, their bellies and heads preened with blood.

“Like the grand tour so far?” Grandpa Pleasure asks his daughter-in-law. He wheezes for a spell, tilts his head down, the brim of his hat allowing enough time for him to light a cigarette.

“Nice,” Noemi says, a platitude delivered to the old man kneeling in Fort Goshen’s parade ground. She’s distrustful of the cracked boots, rough jeans, stained shirt, bolo tie set with a piece of jade cinched around a burnt neck, a face eroded from dirt under a sweat-stained hat, smoke incessantly issuing from the blistered mouth, maybe even from his eyes. Noemi doesn’t know whether Wyatt’s father’s tough appearance is for her benefit or just his way.

The site of their outing is forlorn and rough. What’s left of Fort Goshen? Not much: officers’ quarters, barracks, general store, stables. Preserved with paint by the nation’s park service, the ruins sit at the junction of the rivers Platte and Laramie, both no more than tears due to the need to irrigate what nominally would be called desert, what the Pleasures prefer to call home.

“Old Bedlam a pub?” Noemi asks.

“Pig farm,” he quips, a sly answer about the saloon. He squints at the sky unsullied by clouds yet clogged with birds.

The land’s a carcass, except for the bands of cottonwoods and willows trailing the two rivers. An iridescent purple glass that bounces the hard light back into the indigo sky.

“Used to come by wagon. Wyatt was a boy. Once every five years, when we’d take a day off. Wonderful. He loved it. Does now too.” He nods at the son of whom he’s proud, now hardworking, unforgiving he hopes too, the only figure walking through the mirage of heat waves towards this woman who seems capable of nothing, as much as Grandpa Pleasure can tell.

Wyatt balances the load, Toby wiggling on his shoulder and an Igloo of Kool-aid sloshing in his arms. He’s fed up because in trying to allay the mutual suspicion and satisfy everyone, he’s forgot about himself.

Grandpa Pleasure exhales a fan of smoke. “Nothing quite sets the mind alight like living history. Sure you’ll agree.”

The past is right beneath the surface, singing in the dirt, ready to well up and smother the land with its sounds and aromas: the reveille of bugles, the nicker of cavalry, the clinking of spurs at muster, the canon and Gatling guns barking on their cradles, hobbled horses, water pulling in the pumps, churning milk, bakery fires, a wooden spoon stirring in a cauldron of beans. History is here, interred under his boots, a memory too real, a deceptive remainder of legend that’s integrated into his being and dreams.

She can’t see what’s living—buildings twisted by the wind and bleached black by the sun.

He smokes a drag and begins to preach in a demonstrative voice. “Them ruts north and south of the river. Eager beavers that went west. But we didn’t go no further, nope, even when they announced gold in California. Heaven was right here in Goshen and my granddaddy built himself a church.”

Noemi gulps at the dry air. What to utter in response? The land’s forbidding, unsheltered, too vast and too open, as if her home, England, had been wiped of green and people. Obscene. The wind pushes her hair across her face into her lipstick. She’s unaccustomed to elements like these, harsh and sapping, that seemed to turn her inside out. The grass covers the dunes like a big fat lie.

“That’s the prison. And beyond that, the privy.” He stubs his toe in the dirt, white and sandy. He’s on the lookout for an arrowhead or an Indian bead, something that has been missed. The trick is to alert the eyes for lines and angles, but not exclusively. He fiddles with the ring on his finger, a large piece of olivine, etched with the square and compass of his lodge. Has Wyatt captured this woman, as beguiling as she was, without explaining what she is in for? She didn’t look like any of the broken local sweethearts bred on horse sweat and wheat.

Noemi feels something warm splatter on her neck; it’s too close and out of range of her eyes. She instinctively rubs whatever it is, pulls her hand away. It’s revolting, brown and sticky. She’s afraid her voice will betray her and rise into a scream. “Have I got something on my shirt?”

“Cussed birds,” Grandpa Pleasure says, wiping the sky with his hand, not telling her what he sees, a blob of blood. “Hold on, let me get that near miss.”

She bows her head and waits for her father-in-law to finish. “Stained?” she asks.

“Nope,” he says, “Just some crud on your neck.” He uses his calico handkerchief to wipe the thing from her collar. “Ain’t a pigeon, that’s for sure,” he adds, not showing her the clotted goo regurgitated by one of the buzzards gliding overhead. “Round here, we consider it good luck,” he says with a wink in his voice, but his mind has registered something: it’s flesh and attached to it is a chunk of skin decorated with ink, a tattoo, a paw.

“Dad boring you with his tall tales?” asks Wyatt. He delivers the baby, swathed in cotton, wearing a little bonnet tied in a bow under his sturdy chin, his head staunchly upright.

“It must have been very hard for the pioneers,” she says. She’s no stranger to privation—the rations and wounded of the war. Maybe that was what has sewn them together despite the odds. Wyatt has alluded to how his old man nearly worked him to death between the crops and the sheep. Nonetheless, the Americans would have buckled if they’d suffered the same as the English.

“Lemonade?” asks Grandpa Pleasure.

“No glasses?” she wonders. “I packed some.”

“Forgot them in the truck.” Wyatt harrumphs.

“I’ll wait then,” she says. Toby gurgles pleasingly in her arms, scratches at her recalcitrant breasts. She checkes for signs of sunburn or heat stroke, but he’s healthy, just fine.

Wyatt scratches across the parade ground to the parking lot. Anything for Noemi. He dares not broach the topic. Putting up barriers. Couldn’t just get along and adapt like a girl from here. Couldn’t she see his hands are full?

Grandpa Pleasure lifts the Igloo cooler, sticks his finger on the button and the spigot opens in his mouth. “Whoa, that’s sour. Who made it?” A trickle of lemonade meanders through the stubble on his chin.

“Me,” she says, deducing the man to be uncouth, a peasant. She doesn’t credit him one whit for smarts and perseverance.

“War’s over, Noemi. Sugar our manna if you like. No need to dispute the measure—that’s why we dug that irrigation canal: to grow corn and sugar beets.”

She nods obediently and studies her child. He has been impeccable on the long journey to Wyatt’s home, the emptiest, windiest, most threatening place she could ever conceive, worse than Wales. But the boy seems to relish it. He pounds the air with his fists, whoops and bucks, so excited is he by the rich smell of the prairie, the aroma of dung and weeds.

It’s a matter of faith that the Pleasure folks adore sugar and avoid alcohol. The house is full of substitutes: jars of suckers, Jolly Ranchers, liquorices, gumballs and Twizzler sticks; a pantry full of jellies and syrups; from the oven, a constant bingo of cakes and pies.

No, they didn’t drink, couldn’t, not with Grandma Pleasure’s inordinate preparations for the return of Jesus. No Adventist wants to welcome the odd dead prophet with the stink of liquor. Least of all Grandma Pleasure, who thumps on her treasured piano in their absence from the ranch on this holy Saturday, howling her hymns to the callow heavens that blizzarded trials upon them, and from which she harvests the power to carry on.

“So.” Wyatt hands Noemi a glass that he has wiped with the tail of his shirt, an opal-like button scratching at the lip.

“Splendid,” she says, dispensing a glass for everyone.

“Brought some nut bars too.” Wyatt neatly opens the packages, divvies up the soft nougat and nuts with his pocketknife, most recently used to clean his nails. He keeps quiet about that. Just like he did that morning after Grandma Pleasure had decapitated a rattler on the front porch with a pair of shovels. No need to startle Noemi, he had said, taking charge and tossing the still active body, its tail constricting up the handle to his hand, over the stone fence. He admits it’s unfair to pretend that there were no threats or mistakes—the events and creatures that could make it fatal to live on the plains.

“Gift shop—something for your folks?” Grandpa Pleasure gestures at the square, squat cabin, the stars and bars rising from its roof.

“Of course,” she says, wondering what gifts would look like here. What could one possibly want—air?

“Museum too,” amplifies Wyatt.

They move in a group. Grandpa Pleasure limps slightly and Wyatt scuffs at the ground, while Noemi picks her way gently towards the building, Toby linked to her waist.

“Hi!” blurts the park ranger inside, gawking at the visitors, just coping with nothing to do. “How you folks?”

“Good,” says Grandpa Pleasure, his eyes readjusting from the dazzle to the gloom. Greenhorn, he utters under his breath. He doesn’t like outsiders.

“Can I help you find anything in the visitor center?” The ranger’s face is swollen with glee, his hat starched around his ears. The stool creaks under his generous proportions.

Wyatt rushes towards the displays, first of which in his admiration are the racks of repeating rifles that pacified the plains; then buffalo guns, of such weight and caliber that they seemed more appropriate for mammoths; and the cold hot pistols that settled many a barroom tiff. He covets them all.

“Those poor people,” says Noemi, appreciating the war bonnet and beaded breastplate of a buckskin-clad manikin. “Where are they now?”

“Poor people?” mumbles Grandpa Pleasure, shaking his head in shame that his boy would be mixed up with a woman like this. He gains a breath, expanding like anger. “I’m not sorry, Noemi. We took their land. We killed their people. We raped their women. We gave them no choice but to die. We and all our neighbors. Indians can moan all they want about their sacred lands and insist that the whole nation is theirs. Well, it’s not. And won’t be. But if you want an answer, the Apache and Sioux are such great brothers that we put them on a res near Lander so they could fight among themselves over what’s left. English didn’t do much different with empire. And like you, we give ‘em respect. That’s all poor people get. Same as us.”

What he doesn’t furnish is what he has forgotten, actively erased in a way, the others, the Chinese, the Irish, the strange faiths of Jews and Mormons, the Blacks and Basques, who had contributed to making the prairie livable with their labor and enterprise. Yet they had gone to where it was easier to commingle, since the welcome here had been terse and disingenuous; they had been tolerated as long as supplies of laundry, sex, ammo and booze were needed.

Not giving her time to react to the ornery injustice of homesteader opinion, Wyatt interjects from his corner where he sketches a pistol inside the cover of his matchbook. “Oh, we should visit Lander, Noemi. Green and temperate, perfect really. You’d love it.”

“Got hitched up there,” says Grandpa Pleasure.

The extermination is no great secret. Anyone can see that it’s devoid, even of the settlers who had once come, then killed or chased away by the extremes, their cabins empty, except for a few families like the Pleasures too stubborn to listen to the compound threats of weather and isolation. The museum’s dioramas portraying the peaceful fort, the coexistence of white and red man, as station, trading post and guardian of the talking wires, seem duplicitous to Noemi. America just makes up its history as it goes along. It has no king or queen to stamp a regal mark on its outcome—or bestow any mercy. 

“The prairie’s a mouth. Eats waves of people right up,” Grandpa Pleasure adds to her discomfort.

“Wyatt, please take off your hat,” she says as a reaction. She expects him to be a gentleman even at home.

Grandpa Pleasure scoffs. What a diffident woman. But she’s Wyatt’s problem. He sneaks outside rather than obey the remark he figures to be aimed at him. He is of too great an age for a newlywed dispute to be cute. Plus, the buzzards have sparked his curiosity.

Toby yanks at the buckskin fringe of a manikin and Noemi, depressed by what was presented as harmony, even as a natural outcome of vanquisher and vanquished, sidles to the aisles of the gift shop. The post cards are her first choice and she has no need for guides on blacksmithing, quilting and other homespun occupations of the West.

The ranger, perceptive to the woman disabled by choice, says in a perky voice, “Ma’am, Red Wing crockery just in. Real collector’s item. Or a spinning wheel? Maybe a Jew’s harp for the little ‘un?”

“Thank you.” Her voice fills with a combination of pride and ire. “But I have to fly home.”

“Where’s that, ma’am?”

“Why England” Just saying it gave her relief, though it wasn’t strictly true.

“My forbearers are Canadays from Ireland. Live in your parts?”

Noemi appreciates that the Americans are friendly, even polite, but they’re ignorant. Didn’t they know that Ireland and England were separate countries?

“Pity.” She dislikes the Irish, even more ungrateful and insolent than the Indians for what their masters had done to save them from themselves. Oblivious, she doesn’t realize she might be insulting. Or Irish.

She drifts to the pile of blankets stenciled Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the quilts and macramé tonged together by the local ladies.

“A quilt, Wyatt?”

“Mom’s got plenty,” he replies. 

Noemi returns to the postcards and sorts through the black and white portraits of the Indians. They would at least prove she’d been somewhere, even nowhere.

Grandpa Pleasure picks his way down the Laramie River. The water pours over the pebbles pleasingly, not very deep, a creek at this time of year. He’s near the mouth where it joins the Platte, a junction known by trapper and bandit alike as a spot to gossip or ambush. The trees toss with a gust of wind. He studies the spiral of buzzards gliding over the bank. “Bobcat’s stashed a meal?” he asks himself as he studied the site. The scavengers launch in great lofty waves, as if erupting from the ground itself.

His boots sink into a glittering sandbar and he pushes on. The willows are decorated with knots of cloth. He’s seen the same messages at Devil’s Tower, offerings for the old bear who scratched at the summit. A jay heckles from a tangle of undergrowth.

He scans the ground for clues, a vigilant habit of self-preservation as well as one of discovery, for one never knew what flash of movement would be ready to bite or strike, what stone blade or steel cartridge would indicate something else was there than mere dirt. It isn’t something learned. No, it’s an instinct and part of his spirit, what knit together his lungs and thoughts.

Four great trees are oriented like the points of the wind. The commotion has settled. From the branches, the fat bald vultures look at him greedily, warily, some dipping away, so heavy were they, the wind whistling through their black feathers, gaining the thermals. Others remain, disturbed but staunchly refusing to be intimidated by the mere presence of a living being.

He’s shocked to see a series of platforms erected in the trees, camouflaged from easy sight by the green twirls of leaves. Then more signs of something human and well planned: the sandy ground disturbed with the soft prints of moccasins, the drag lines of travois, the unshod marks of ponies, the paw prints of dogs, the remnants of fires and the short, sharp smell of excrement.

“For heaven’s sake,” he says. Is this what he always had been hunting for, an Indian grave—not some poor prehistoric skeleton wedged in a crack in an escarpment with his weapons and supplies, but a way of death resurrected just outside the gates of the fort? This isn’t a good sign, no better than the reappearance of the Ghost Dance.

Grandpa Pleasure’s ticker boils with an awful kind of excitement. He doesn’t move, doesn’t turn, doesn’t nearly breath. He’s trespassing on a sky burial, a practice that had been outlawed but here, somehow, is underway, right under the nose of the authorities. In awe about his unlikely discovery, he suddenly folds down on his legs. He sits back on his palms and counts the platforms. Eight, he guesses from the places where the trees were weeping with indelible tears of blood. An electric almost spiritual pulse rises into his body. He has to look, even if desecration.

With fear, far more than during any nervy exploration of an wind-blown cabin filled to the brim with snakes, he walks to a cottonwood. He doesn’t see an easy way but he scrabbles and wedges the his toes and calloused hands in the crenulated bark and shimmies up, wheezing and coughing from the effort to get to the first fork.

Then it’s easier.

He crawls on all fours and what he sees, the gore of a shredded, bloated man, nearly pushes him from the roost. Mesmerizing. He couldn’t conjure a more splendid sight, not even the fort’s flag flying with taunt precision over the gift shop.

The brave is laid on a bed of woven boughs. A bandana covers his forehead. Tucked in it, a brace of eagle feathers. His eyes and everything else that are soft have been picked apart, though his face is stoic and peaceful despite the damage. His dungarees and flannel shirt are in tatters. Over his chest is an elaborate breastplate of beads, bones and porcupine quills, a bibs that guards his heart. At the ankles and wrists the skin is peeling from the musculature and liquid festers around his bones. At one side is a pistol, clenched in what digits remain. On the other is a quiver of arrows and a compound bow clearly marked with a price tag from Sears. At his feet, a cluster of Tupperware containers, a meal, Grandpa Pleasure supposed. Also, a bottle of whisky, a six-pack of Coors, two boxes of bullets, a carton of Marlboros and a bundle of maize. Whoever he is, he’s ready for the afterlife, ready to hunt and dance.

He touches his own face and feels the strong aboriginal features. They weren’t so different, just dissolved by generations. If death is that tranquil, then he’s ready

He studies the other nests sketched in the trees. More dead braves. Could he swing between them? It’s too great a feat for an old man. He’s nonplussed at how egalitarian and complete he finds the scene. No sense of abhorrence or fear clutch at his heart. Of course, he’s intrigued about who else is up here. Who are these mummies? Where do they come from? Why here? His first instinct is to alert the authorities but the integrity of the sleeping brave is insurmountable. Who would believe a crazy old loon? Since when did the government care about dead Indians? Why desecrate further what he had seen? Wasn’t it better as a mystery?

But Grandpa Pleasure desperately wants a souvenir and he scoots closer to the brave’s nest. The corpse stinks no worse than a cow struck by lightening. He peeps over the rim.

One shoulder has been opened but on it remains a tattoo, a shield embraced by bears. He thanks the buzzards that they didn’t drop a finger or a tongue on Noemi. He looks again. Maybe it’s a turtle, not a bear, dancing around the shield. The ink’s blurred, damaged by the sun.

Yet he can’t hoist himself beyond his armpits, as much as he wants the breastplate; he tippy-toes and feels his feet creak but it’s no use. He isn’t having anything from this dead man on his sacred bed sheltered from everything but the elements. Then he notices the dog tags resting on the ornamentation, dull punched letters that he can’t read. Has the conflagration in Vietnam blown the warriors of the Bear clan back home? No, he can’t wiggle them off; all he gets is a sticky handful of leaves.

He’s disappointed that he can’t have a memento. He has no evidence and he isn’t sure he can keep it bolted inside. He peeps down and realizes he will need all his strength to not break his brittle body into a jigsaw.

When he jumps the last twenty feet, he lands with a young man’s dexterity and rolls forward, complete and satisfied that he is limber and has something in his life.

The buzzards return to the branches and watch him hobble away, turning from time to time, wonderment glossed across his face. They aren’t going anywhere, not with the feast, a man’s return to nature, incomplete.

Has he imagined the unimaginable, too young by an epoch or two?

Wyatt and Noemi are drinking lemonade on the porch of the gift shop, happily chanting in their secret language of love, Toby restless on their laps, inserting a toy gun into his mouth, a strange violent shape that he’s too young and feeble to understand.

“Where you been, Pa?” asks Wyatt with boyish enthusiasm. He sees the scratches and the dust smeared over his dad’s jeans and knew he’s been out prospecting.

“Found this,” he says. “Over there.” Grandpa Pleasure opens his palm and inside is the chipped form of an arrowhead, a strange opulent black.

“Goes to show,” says Wyatt, “Never discount where you’ll find an arrowhead.”

Noemi is bewitched by the elegant point. “ Magic,” she says. Never had anything materialized from the ground during her clumsy wanderings along Offa’s Dyke at home, certainly nothing that hadn’t been edible like a bramble or a mushroom. But Noemi doesn’t look, doesn’t know, doesn’t want. She’s interested in paths, sidewalks, the asphalt that lead to civilization, clearly marked with signage and hoardings. Then it crystallizes: if only the whole world could be made of asphalt, just a few cracks for the decoration of grass and trees, how divine.

“Shall we go?” suggests Wyatt. “Guess Mom burnt the roast by now.”

“Oh, it’s dead,” replies his father. “She don’t like to think anything’s ever been alive.”

Wyatt notices the febrile light in his father’s eyes, but he puts it down to the walk, wherever he’d been. Yes, Wyatt’s right: Grandpa Pleasure emanates a haunted fire from his very fabric, his core glowing like a piece of radioactive ore, as if he’s burning inside out, burning so fast and hot that he would either extinguish or explode.

They join the truck in the Fort Goshen parking lot, drop the windows to let in the air and dust. Noemi hugs her envelope of postcards and harnesses Toby in her lap. Wyatt drives, briefly stopping at the nearby at Sinclair for a top up: gas, coffee, nutbars.

They coast over the gravel road to the Pleasure place. Wyatt points out the landmarks in a muted voice, pulling over on the shoulder sometimes—Muskrat Canyon, Hell Gap, Wildcat Canyon, Government Farm—the places that give the landscape with meaning, and he wishes for Noemi too. They are two sides to the horizon they travel towards as the land streams across their eyes. What Wyatt regards as opportunity, joy, wonder, and boundlessness, the epitome of freedom, as big and ineffable as a home run. What Noemi thinks of as no less than unbridled fear.

Wyatt and Noemi don’t manage to eat much of the salty canned green beans and charred hunk of beef served on the yellow picnic table under the arbor, but Grandma Pleasure’s homemade bread drenched in margarine is a heavenly moment in an otherwise penitentiary Sunday lunch.

Rather than relax after, Wyatt says, “Let me show you a secret spot,” and urges Noemi into the truck.

“Awful.” Noemi could retch from the recurring thought of what she has suffered in her mouth. She’s afraid his secret spot had something to do with oil.

“I know,” he says, firing up a cigarette. “Good thing you can cook.”

“Nan taught me. She was a lovely cook.”

“Nice lady?”

“My mum really. But next time, you cook the steaks. She’s not going to ruin them.”

He’s afraid she’ll spill the beans into his lap right then, but she successfully keeps her tormented past bottled up, preserved neatly in a syrup of bile and regret as they bounce down the dirt track, riding between the ruts, keeping the truck out of trouble, the grass tickling the underbelly. It’s a relief.

“Got a little burned this morning, huh?”

“Did I?”

“Sun’s a mile closer than elsewhere. That’s all it takes.”

Noemi smiles wryly. She’s English, unaware of the power of the sun, but not so unaware that she hasn’t noticed the dramatic change in Wyatt: how much more hokey and homespun he’s become upon his return to Goshen. He’s stepped from one shoe to another as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. No longer a man with a fancy education in the sciences, but a farm boy, his voice, gestures and volume drowning in a treacle of slow thinking and even slower acts, his sentences without subjects or verbs, depending, the colloquial replacing the well-formed speech she admires.

Wyatt glances back at the house that squatted among the trees, a white turtle of peeled white siding, its beak and eyes of fragile white glass. The hills are gathered behind it, about to fold over, rose and lilac in the afternoon light. The turtle burrows in the prairie, hunkers in the dust freed by the drought, strips of gray wheat in the distance.

Two scaly humans sit on the porch and watch the truck recede down the track towards the gravel road. A basket rests on the steps, Toby snoring securely in the papoose of reeds and swaddled in calico. It’s been a quick adjustment for Grandpa Pleasure: babies again.

Wyatt jigs open the barbed wire gate with his shoulders, leaps back in, grinning, turns to his wife. “He’ll be fine with the old folks,” he says. “Plus, I made some grape Tang. He’ll love that.”

Grandpa Pleasure lights a cigarette as the truck exhales a plume of dust. Wyatt’s gift from Malta, a treat from the best duty-free shop outside the Middle East. They taste a lot better than lunch.

The old man picks up his flute. He only unpacks it for special occasions or visitors, and dabs out a few tunes, out of breath between coda and decoda, struggling with the phrases that he once had used to serenade his flock. But he’s moved on from the immiseration of a shepherd; he’s a rock hound, and for that he’s somewhat respected, unlike the dismal unpracticed tune that he sourly spit into the flute. He abruptly stops. The reminder sounds dreadful and the trees are distracting him.

What he regards as no more than a welcome source of shade and wood reaches far over the picket fence, the pouch of an oriole nest suspended from a bough blowing in the breeze. He’s intrigued by the idea of trees as a cemetery. What a superior way to go, recycled by the birds, who might as well be sardines circulating over the ocean of grass.

He rounds the house to his workshop, a separate building, unconcerned about Toby blissfully asleep on the porch. This is their sanctuary, tended by his hand, erected with his sweat, permeated with his being, and nurtured by one sole helper, the reason for his choosing this spot: the sweet water simply bubbles to the surface from a soft sandy pit, the house its shrine. The legs of his jeans rustle together. Inside, it’s littered with slices of geodes, jades and agates. But the cores of petrified wood are foremost in his estimate, from the time of Pangea when the continents had been one. A rock saw in one corner. A series of grinders in another. He grabs a bucket of siftings, topped with a package containing forceps, cotton wool and little acrylic specimen boxes, and then apprehends the microscope so he can study the fossil seeds. Laden, Grandpa Pleasure returns to the porch to categorize the gravel. He snickers a beat remembering an article about his amateur paleobotany in Life. If he could identify and taxonomize the shapes of prehistoric seeds, so could anyone.

He feels a tad greedy and smokes another cigarette. His heart purrs from the spike. He can see his wife making a batch of lemonade and cookies inside. Their life is quaint and self-sufficient.

When he returns, the little package gurgles. Toby’s curled up in the basket usually reserved for Grandma Pleasure’s flower arrangements.

“Cute little devil, ain’t ya?”

He has trouble hearing himself today, wondered if he says anything at all. He’s deaf to everyone else anyway, out of stubbornness and pride to a degree, but this is sudden: he’s acutely unable to hear himself. 

Grandpa Pleasure, uninspired now that he had brought the microscope, stretches for the basket. “What you say, Tobias, take a stroll down to pond?”

He’s a master of doing nothing in his way.

The young spruces are staked down and wrapped with chicken wire to dissuade the deer and porcupines. A peacock bawls somewhere in the cottonwoods, melancholy echoing over the grounds.

The decorative birds are his wife’s idea.

A comet tail of dust rises on the horizon, running across his eye like a sore. Wyatt at the wheel of his own truck, that galls him, along with marrying a gal who knows nothing about the country.

They must be going to the beaver dam, he concludes. Nice spot. Like a lot of good chinks in the hills, secluded, a detail that only a local fellow would know.

Wyatt cracks the gate, drives forward, parks again, then battens the wires back together. They sail into the pasture, guarded by a single white bull bellowing from a pile of white rocks. A lake is somewhere beyond the remains of a homestead and a corral, two separate piles of gray wood.

“Is that a tomb?” she asks, pointing out the shape jutting out the prairie like a giant apple as they snake around the abandoned house, the truck bucking wildly over the uneven ground. Wyatt nods. There isn’t always time to worry about where the dead go when the living have surviving to do.

Playing the tour guide, he says, “Beavers blocked the creek.”

“Brook,” she calls it, much to his annoyance.

“Those two old trees are Adam and Eve, as old as time,” he says, deflecting his ambiguous thoughts about the war of the sexes. “Buffalo hair and bullets in ‘em.”

Wyatt cuts the engine, the silence immediately choking her, and they wade into the chartreuse waist-high grass around the tranquil lake. Red- and yellow-winged blackbirds chat in the cattails that slap at one another. The place is quite an achievement, a series of elegant pools, held by an ongoing sequence of haphazard dams build by the beavers. They walk out a way on one of the barriers, jump between the logs and stare at the plum-colored water.

“Any trout in the lake, Wyatt?”

“Carp,” he says, “Crawdads – you know, langoustines.”

They continue, their bellies tickled by the heads of grass, burrs grasping for their clothes, the occasional soggy footstep and pull of mud. A frog surfaces for a bug. The place is tucked away from the wind and it has a harmony all its own.

“This’s my secret spot,” he says, inserting a sweet green blade of grass between his teeth. “When we were kids, we’d skinny-dip and slide down that bluff opposite into the water all day like otters, sometimes hiding underwater and breathing through reeds. Best thing in the world. Until the leaches got ya.”

Now she grasps the intent, why he wants to rush away from the house so badly. Actually she wouldn’t mind. She couldn’t be intimate at the ranch, not yet, not with his snoopy mother sneaking around a house that isn’t hers and seems to have no doors. But here it’s, well, out of sight. She did feel the right mixture of bodily confidence and attention. Noemi crawls over. Wyatt’s on his back, chewing on the grass. Noemi tugs it out of his mouth and kisses him. Then quite quickly and unexpectedly, Noemi lifts herself onto him and they melt into one another, despite the clothes, two stars blending into one another, limb to limb, both admiring the sky relaxed with promise, striated now with a few wisps of clouds. Their hands interlock and they stretch out their legs, arms and spines, the magnetic current of the earth rising into them, two copper plates full of charge, pinned to the earth like two moths. Ecstatic at the sound of his heart and lungs beating through her own, she approaches for another kiss.

“Hang on,” he says, slipping away, leaping up and dashing into the reeds. A line of bubbles run from the near bank into the pond.

Wyatt surges after something, the water above his waist.

A muddy, farting log?

He dips over the water, his shirt just skimming, and yanks. A great sucking sound follows and Wyatt pulls out a turtle unlike any turtle Noemi has ever seen. It’s a castle, all ramparts and watchtowers, keeps and defenses. It’s hissing and barking and showing its pink white mouth, beating at the air with its muddy, claws. Wyatt holds the beast by its tail, bucking like a bull, older than an oak.

“Poisonous?” she asks. She’s frustrated with the juvenile interruption, just when she’d felt she was getting somewhere with him. But that’s so typical of Wyatt. He doesn’t just avoid conflict, he avoids anything sincere, too.

“Nope, but bite your pecker right off. Or your arm.”

She shakes her head. His language. He was never this crass in Libya.

“Cajuns eat em, I hear, but we never tried,” he says, grinning again, sure his trick would impress his wife.

She’s startled by the whole performance. What had been tender, quiet, almost English, with the willows curtseying over one part of the pond, and the dragonflies zithering through the air, the ducks circulating in one of the pools, was now an adventure in newer and greater dangers of tragicomedy, Wyatt her Virgil, she his Dante in a hell of barbed wire, cattle and crops, the demons on tractors, the sinners the size of bugs, the devil the amorphous shape of the wind. Now that she’s obliged to enjoy herself for his benefit, she doesn’t feel anything at all.

He provokes the beast enough to make it bite down on a stick. He ponders shooting it for fun, but he suspects, rightly, that she’d be appalled. The sight of a gun is enough to make her as frigid as brass.

Wyatt turns the turtle on its back and it gasps angrily. His hands stink of mud and turtle fury. No way is she going to allow him to touch her with those mitts.

She confidently fetches the picnic from the truck, not far off, and returns with the sandwiches, Food Club chips and a jar of pickles arranged in a basket lined with calico. Noemi sets out the napkins, knives and forks. It’s very homey but without walls. Grandma Pleasure can at least make decent sandwiches and doesn’t want her boy going hungry.

“They’re sandwiches,” he says, pointing at the cutlery.

“Yes, but look at your hands.”

They’re embedded with a mess of slime and weeds and it doesn’t want to come off, even as he squats next to the water and vigorously washes. His jeans reek of swamp, too. What a mistake to grab the turtle from the lake. At the expense of a poor joke, he has ruined the mood.

“That’s what attracted me to you,” he says when he’s done. He pours coffee from the flask.

“What for?” She was astonished.

“I’ve this thing for secretaries and girls next door.” He winks, draws her closer with his forearms to give her a smelly hug.

“I know you love me, but don’t antagonize me for your own sake.” Yes, she had been a secretary when they met; thankfully, not his secretary.

The turtle struggles to right itself, its white fibrous belly cooking in the sun, its beak snapping uselessly at the air. For all its symbolic power, the turtle’s vulnerable, useless, paddling at the air, crying like a child, trying to get a purchase.

“Wyatt, it’s coughing,” she observes, raising an eyebrow.

“Huh?” he says, absorbed in his mystery meat sandwich smothered with mustard.

“Wyatt, don’t be so cruel. Put him out his misery. I can’t eat.”

She’s frank in a way that he knows he must obey, something he sometimes has a hard time doing.

He pushes off from his elbow, rolls and kicks the beast over. He’s a good acrobat. The thing snaps and gapes with a smelly exhalation and then waddles away, indignant. Wyatt remembers how he ruthlessly shot them, the old wise men of the creek, nothing but targets in his juvenile mind. He doesn’t think she’ll be too impressed so he won’t explain about his many insults to nature in the name of exploration and growing up, nature being the playground that it is.

He wonders if after lunch whether she would the day conducive to expressing their love once more? So far the forecast looks poor, but he’s the one who has interrupted any intimacy for a prank. Could she relax? Would he relent? Like they did in the desert. Maybe it’s a matter of comfort, the grass coarse and thick under them, pronged with thistles in places. Nature has a way of biting back.

Grandpa Pleasure reaches for the basket. His watch slips down his wrist as he pulls the twisted cane handle, heavy in his weirdly numb arm. Toby’s a very heavy baby, as heavy as petrified wood. Then he gasps, stands sharply, folds over, pushing himself up, sits, his chest in agony, imploding. Then he grabs at the air and topples again.

All sound is sucked from a discombobulating, disembodied world, suddenly deafeningly silent and without wind. Conscious, he hyperventilates and slips down the wall of red rock he has stacked around the house’s foundation. His hat tips off when his head strikes the ground.

Toby and his basket clatter over, too. Toby blinks. He’s topsy-turvy and upside down. His baby face rests on an attractive flagstone of Wolfenite hauled out of the hills with a chain and tractor by the man prone on the flagstones and grass.

Grandpa Pleasure hears the old spirit in his cries, like ages, as if the rocks he loves are speaking to him, summoning him. He slides over the abyss, blinking at the uncanny baby, remembers how Tobias Pleasure eats everything in sight, a black hole of appetite, even eating him, his grandfather. No one can remember a six-month-old that eats T-bone steaks.

“So long, my boy,” he croaks, not falling but rising on a pillow of air.

The house looks welcoming; it always does when the wind and weather work to send a man indoors. Anything can happen here: the hay bailer, the stubborn fence stretcher, a misfiring gun, or nearly wild steers skittish about being roped and gelded. But no courage or luck can save him from the accumulative effect of the deadly white sticks he has smoked all his life despite the efforts of the prairie gusts to extinguish his habit. No one stretches from the sky to right the old man. Nor can the peacocks and rabbits resuscitate him even as they cluster around their benefactor. The house leans, creaks, bends, flattens, but it has no legs, no arms, is just a wooden box, not a nurse. He’s survived everything, the blizzards, the droughts, but for this, his dirty habit. Grandpa Pleasure bows together and expires, suddenly like a withered bean.

He paws at the air, the seizure almost over as he gasps and his heart busts to tiny bits. He curses this body that has let him down, this body that hauled dinosaur bones out of the bedrock, this body that dug nearly fatal wells from the sand, stretched tricky fences where there had been none, shoed horses and oxen, cauterized and sewed amputations of hand and foot, fought prairie fires with just plain old dirt, cut up sod for an estimate of a house when the other was lifted away by storms, this body that ploughed frozen fields, that cut millenia-old cedars from the hills, that climbed the highest point in Goshen, that tracked bears and cougars for their pelts, that muled supplies across the deadly flats, that diverted blizzards from the door, that buried and birthed with equal measure, this body that in its last moments, somehow, preternaturally, raises its right hand, the nails smoldering from the hot cigarette that has ignited his spidery fingertips, in a stupendous movement of divine will and earthly muscle, that loosens his grip and pulls apart his hand and points a lance-like finger at the heavens and locks into place—accusatory and gargantuan in its verdict, sending the Pleasures after him and warning them to watch out from above as well as below.

Toby, cogent, registers the trouble. A great hunger wells inside: for chilis and dirt and milk. He feels the wind tugging his mouth apart, opening its vastness, coaxing. He’s all tongue, stomach, sheer cavity. He has replaced Noemi’s breast with anything else that’s pink and pointed but still he’s empty. The old man twitches on the lawn, peace’s hardness and war’s humor peeling away, Toby grabbing it all. Toby Pleasure swallows the great smoky spirits that emerge from their faltering metabolic host and fastens them to those spirits who line his body already, sleeping, gaining, congealing, growing within him, a stop for more souls as Grandpa Pleasure’s pulse slows its movement and then ceases.

The hunger diminishes in the stomach that is Toby Pleasure, digesting, disposing and deposing as his grandfather retreats into the after-being. The titanic struggle of godly good and ungodly evil resumes in his belly. Whatever he has eaten, it’s made him very full. He’s bloated, puffy.

The screen door sizzles behind her, clamping shut. Grandma Pleasure is a little tender on her feet, with a pitcher of lemonade balanced on the tin tray that she places on the old stove on the porch piled up with Lego-like lengths of rock. The pitcher settles and tinkles with ice. Then she discovers the supine body—the one arm like a spar—and the askew basket, both as if ravaged by an intruder.

She rushes to Grandpa and rights Toby with her free, knotted hand.

“Ok, turtle?” she asks. He’s breathing bluely, alarmed but otherwise fine.

She bends to kiss the stubble of her husband’s face, strokes his shock of white hair and sunburned dome. She calls on Jesus to bring back Grandpa but he doesn’t return, no matter her plain, mordant pleas.

The grackles and orioles clatter in the trees, perpetual war in the canopy as vast as the lawn.

For what it’s worth, old widow Pleasure keens like a squaw, sings part of a hymn until she can’t manage any more feelings. She wrings the tears from her kerchief. She blames the stubborn lemons for keeping her from him, and the piano practice, too.

But very soon she’s forthright and composed and deals with the emergency. She draws strength from the thought of her reliquary, the crucifix, and knows all too well the harsh justice of the prairie when it comes to life and death. She studies it and feels his soul passing through its center, the very center of the crossroads, the prairie, the universe, the mouth of Pleasure.

She doesn’t wait long. Grandma Pleasure alerts Genie, a neighbor, half-breed and fellow Adventist, on the crackling telephone. She’s very practical, very precise and very tidy. She returns Grandpa’s microscope and rocks to the workshop.

A trail of white dusty vapor approaches, homing in like a missile.

Soon Genie hobbles from his warped Jeep that has absorbed the charges of one too many bulls. Bitten by a rattlesnake years ago, one of his legs has dried up, atrophied like a piece of jerky. He limps up the steps to the lawn and greets her.

“Howdy,” he says, his voice a queer falsetto. “The Good Lord has taken Brother Pleasure?”

She nods.

Genie and Grandma stagger with the corpse into the bedroom, maneuvering made all that more difficult by the odd, pitched arm. Grandpa Pleasure doesn’t complain about the indignity, his arm rigid and blaming, sending them away, marking the deeds to be done.

She puts Toby aside, first on the porch, then in the house on the large blacksmith bellows converted into a coffee table. She doesn’t want the vultures molesting him. She knows what they do to lambs. They’d harass a body before it even dropped.

Flies buzz menacingly against the windows. She deliberates if he could be fine. He doesn’t look worried or traumatized, just curious. His skin’s glossy and eyes shine like kohl. But she considers adjusting the story a hair or two. She doesn’t want to alarm Noemi unnecessarily, sensitive soul that she is; Wyatt, she can deal with. She agrees: she was watching Toby while she made lemonade and Grandpa Pleasure just keeled over on the porch.

This isn’t her first time doctoring a dead man. She sponges her husband’s hairy body with a wet rag, wipes him clean with as much tenderness as she can summon, then dresses him in his cowboy finery, struggling with the arm, and then drapes him in a white sheet. She powders his red face at the conclusion of their last bath together. But she can’t push down the arm—still pointing, as condemning as ever, and she considers limbering it up with an ax to make it obey.

Noemi and Wyatt are flushed with excitement about a bald eagle coasting in the sky. It bombs the prairie as they idle along and then settles on a fence post with a serpent lashing in its talons. Nature could be glorious and remarkable.

The sun glints sharply off the Quonset hut at the Pleasure ranch. Wyatt notes they have a visitor. Maybe that would mean pie?

But no.

Genie sits morosely on the edge of the porch. Grandma Pleasure rushes out to the truck.

 “Grandpa’s dead,” she says without ado. “Had a heart attack.”

Wyatt lights a cigarette in response. “Show pa to me,” he says, “I want to see pa.”

He’s alone in the bedroom with the body on the brass bed. His father’s right arm is like a tepee pole and he doesn’t know how to interpret it. First, he tucks a pack of Camels in his father’s shirt pocket, fastened the single rhinestone button. They were allies. He feels culpable. He’s been out to have sex and would have succeeded, if not for the snapper. He wants to blame Noemi, then his mother, for the journey to familiar spot, a wild, romantic nest for getting laid.

Crude but true.

He smiles out of the corner of his mouth. It’s unintentional. Wyatt feels no better seeing his old man dead, now that he has received this double christening of adulthood, the birth of his first child, the death of his father, the broad-nosed, thick-browed, red-skinned old man living in Tobias. What more is there for him? His own demise? He shudders and turns from the desiccated lizard. Even dead, he knows his father’s expectations: to return and take up the mantle of the ranch, even if he had claimed it wasn’t so, even if he was closer to the rocks than he ever was to the sheep, much less the Pleasure family. No one had thought the shepherd boy would end in Libya, a star petroleum geologist for the world’s largest company, Poseidon Oil and Gas. That had not been the script of the Pleasure plan, conjoining with just anybody to ensure the Pleasure legacy would spread west. Grandpa Pleasure had wanted everyone to think that once upon a time they had been the stewards of all the land in Kingdom Come. But they had stopped here, where the sweet water apparently flowed eternally from the artesian well, where the hills provided a wigwam from the high drifting bands of wind, sand and snow, opaque, brown and white. They obviously had coupled along the way, until they were subdued like horses; with grazing and water, the Pleasure clan had seen no need to go on.

The arm points, menacing, withered yet tough, an invitation and an accusation. Whatever has killed him, it has left a haunting mark. As he leaves the room, Wyatt thinks about chopping it down to size.

The routine of feeding Toby Pleasure cannot be avoided. He licks his lips and bawls in spurts. His appetite demands that he be fed despite the crisis. He feels the shadow move in him, recently added and hungry for Noemi’s breast.

Wyatt needs something to do, so he builds a fire and grills a round of bacon burgers. He would gladly sink into a cup of whisky but there’s none. The smoke’s pungent and bitter, then sweet when the meat goes on. What the hell is he going to do with it, all the land? And the harness of his new family? He hasn’t counted on that. But he’s disingenuous enough to accept it, this copy of his parents’ bodies and the extra that is Wyatt.

“Help me write the obituary, son,” says Grandma Pleasure that night, calling from the room of the wake. The trees whisper with wind and an owl calls through the darkness illuminated with the pinheads of stars, unpolluted by anything as manmade as light.

He doesn’t know quite where to start as the grief begins to spiral in his mind, and it’s his mother who fashions together the few sentences for the Goshen Gazette that are to be the summary of Grandpa Pleasure’s life. It comes out so smooth it’s like she already had written it, which sends a quiver down her spine, to think she might have willed him dead and did not wean Karl from his bad habits.

Karl Pleasure b. 1902 in Holt, Nebraska, d. 1971 in Goshen, Wyoming.

Karl Pleasure tragically passed away on the afternoon of September 20. Son of an original homesteader family, one of twelve siblings, Karl Pleasure attended Holt High School and graduated in 1920. He moved to Wyoming thereafter and bought his own ranch in Goshen under the Homestead Act. Karl won the Goshen County Fair four years in a row with his entries in the sheep category. He married Pearl Pleasure nee Divan in Thermopolis in 1930. Karl farmed and ranched for over thirty years and was known as a good neighbor and vital member of the Goshen Masonic Lodge. An avid collector of Indian artifacts, he began a second career as an amateur geologist at this time and is credited with several important fossil discoveries in the Black Hills. He and his wife were noted also for their contribution to paleobotany and corresponded with many fellow amateurs in this regard. He lobbied for the archaeological expedition of Harvard University at Hell Gap that resulted in the area’s continued interest to archaeologists as a site of prehistoric activity. He is survived by his wife, Pearl; son, Wyatt; daughter Whitney; and grandson Tobias. RIP.

Grandma Pleasure calls in the obituary to the local paper before bed and it’s her croaky voice greeting the coroner in the morning, who arrives to disperse the death certificate and who wakes Noemi and Toby, both tuckered out from the trauma of the previous day. Even this early before the heat sets in, the house is redolent of death, but the dough and batter of pastries and cakes, the wonderful chemistry of sugar, does much to combat the reminder.

She’s groggy and can’t find Wyatt at first. Maybe he’s gone to town. But from the sound of the hammering and sawing in the shop, she eventually locates her husband. Wyatt’s struggling in the workshop to make a coffin of warm-scented fir. He’s covered in splinters and sawdust and he looks annoyed to see her.

“You didn’t tell me you have a sister,” she says.

“Whitney?”

“Is that her name?”

“She’s a hippie,” he says.

“A what?”

“Hippie. You know, long hair, funny name like Flower or Rainbow or something. Smokes pot. Likes Hendrix. Child out of wedlock, I guess.”

“You don’t talk?”

“Lost track. We couldn’t keep up.”

“Is she coming?”

“From Kabul?”

“Well, I don’t know. You’re the family with the appetite for adventure.”

“Listen, Noemi, please, today’s a mess. I have to finish this coffin, put up the marquee, make things ready. Lots of people will come.”

“From where?”

“More people around than you think. Now, if you’ll—”

“Bugger off?”

“Yes. But help, mom, okay?”

“Okay,” she says. She can’t be the center of attention, not today.

Before she leaves, Wyatt explains that he can neatly accommodate for the morbid arm, like a spoke or barb, with a special annex that rises like a chimney from the top. The coffin deliberately resembles an arrowhead. None of them want to mutilate the old man.

Later, with the baking nearly complete after Noemi’s welcome cooperation decorating cakes and shaping cookies that are inevitably small and English in their design, the refrigerator tanked up with lemonade and ice tea, she evacuates to a patch of shade on the lawn, Toby on a quilt, playing and pretending nothing is abnormal as the telephone continually trills to exclamations to the Lord, traitor that he is, ruining their holiday.

Visitors ply the track between the road and the house by the afternoon and Noemi revises what she thinks of Grandpa Pleasure as the condolences stream forth. She meets prospectors and bone hunters, Masons and Shriners, shepherds and cattlemen, Adventists and Mormons, bountymen, archaeologists, cowgirls, rock hounds, trappers, national guardsmen, officials of the game and fish department, crop duster pilots, mechanics, just about the whole county and even beyond. Everyone’s exceedingly nice, complimentary about her child, hyper and stuffed with sweets, but she regrets that death seems such a good excuse out here for a meeting of a rural community spread over hundreds of miles.

At long last that afternoon, the vehicles join in a queue, once Grandpa Pleasure’s body’s loaded into the back of the truck. The Pleasure family gets in front and the cars file behind. Wyatt turns on the radio and Hank is spilling his guts. He leaves the dirge on low and stares grimly out the window. They drive over the rolling dirt road at a somber speed and then pull into the settlement of Rawhide half an hour later, the trail of fine dust settling over everyone. Overhead the thunderclouds have rapidly bloomed and the trees shiver in anticipation of rain. Just along the creek is a cemetery with a handful of graves. The procession marches with a slow gait, stepping on ants, twigs, beetles and leaves, following the pall bearers, improvised at the last moment from among Grandpa Pleasure’s neighbors.

The grave’s waiting, anus and mouth, ready to eat with a hunger that would return Grandpa Pleasure to an astringent womb of oily dirt. Of course, this isn’t quite how he might have imagined his burial after his incredible discovery of the sky burial, but he has no time left to communicate any special request. Nonetheless, he’s rejoining the food chain, an alluring digestive treat for the critter-filled ground.

The Adventist pastor begins evangelizing and Wyatt pays no attention to the words. They mean nothing to him. He believes in nothing, worships nothing, just accepts religion as a salve to smooth over human relations, and it holds no substance for him. Anyway, oil’s his creed. He’d just as rather honor Allah, Buddha or Satan, so long as he has permission to drill. That’s what the syncretic resource empire was all about.

Noemi stands sternly at his side and his mother looks on with her watery eyes. The congregation murmurs and bobs and a woodpecker hammers in the distance. The town of Rawhide, all twelve souls, has also come and they stand respectively at a distance, honored just to be present at the funeral of so imminent a man as Karl Pleasure, lowered into the ground like a favorite loaf of beef.

His hair swirls in the wind, lifts above his head as if its own cataclysm, revealing the thinning patch for what it is, a disguise. It begins raining, hard, sparse, nearly crystalline, and everyone else hovers under trees, but not Wyatt, alone, sad and remorseful.

Then it stops.

The abrupt, bruised mixture of clover, alfalfa and sage render the air something magic, something poetic and otherworldly beyond the tragedy of Grandpa Pleasure’s demise, that stubborn arm accommodated with his special annex to his coffin, the olivine ring etched with square and compass removed and tucked under his tongue.

“Like Peter,” Wyatt says, “Cannot a fisherman learn to tend sheep?”

Up next: Naphthalene