Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. Annie Proulx
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small and scattered. When I was twelve the seventh grade had only three kids—me, one of my sisters who skipped a grade and Dutchy Green. We was excited when we found out the trip was to the old Butch Cassidy outlaw cabin down near the Colorado border. Mrs. Ratus, the teacher, got the map of Wyoming hung up and showed us where it was. I seen the word ‘Dixon’ down near the bottom of the map. Dixon! That’s where the mystery Forkenbrocks lived. Dutchy was my best friend and I told him all about it and we tried to figure a way to get the bus to stop in Dixon. Maybe there’d be a sign for the Forkenbrock Ranch,” he said.
“As it turned out,” he said, “we stopped in Dixon anyways because there was something wrong with the bus.
“There was a pretty good service station in Dixon that had been an old blacksmith shop. The forge was still there and the big bellows, which us boys took turns working, pretending we had a horse in the stall. I asked the mechanic who was fixing the bus if he knew of any Forkenbrocks in town and he said he heard of them but didn’t know them. He said he had just moved down from Essex. Dutchy and me played blacksmith some more but we never got to Butch Cassidy’s cabin because they couldn’t fix the bus and another one had to come take us back. We ate the picnic on the bus on the way home. After that I kind of forgot about the Dixon Forkenbrocks,” he said. He was beginning to slow down again.
“I didn’t think about it until Dad died in an automobile accident on old route 30,” he said.
“He was taking a shortcut, driving on the railroad ties, and a train come along,” he said.
He said, “I’d been working for the Bledsoes for a year and hadn’t been home.”
At the mention of the Bledsoes, Berenice, out in the hallway, snapped her head up.
“Mr. Bledsoe drove me back so I could attend the funeral. They had it in Rawlins and the Pathfinders had took care of everything,” he said.
Beth looked puzzled. “Pathfinders?”
“That organization they belonged to. Pathfinders. All we had to do with it was show up. Which we done. Preacher, casket, flowers, Pathfinder flags and mottoes, grave plot, headstone—all fixed up by the Pathfinders.” He coughed and took a sip of whiskey, thinking of cemetery weeds and beyond the headstones the yellow wild pastures.
Berenice couldn’t listen anymore because the chime for Cook’s Treats rang. It was part of her job to bring the sweets to the residents, the high point in their day trumped only by the alcoholic Social Hour. Cook was sliding triangles of hot apple pie onto plates.
“You hear about Deb’s husband? Had a heart attack while he was hitching the tow bar to some tourist. He’s in the hospital. It’s pretty serious, touch and go. So we won’t be seeing Deb for a little while. Maybe ever. I bet she’s got a million insurance on him. If he dies and Deb gets a pile a money, I’m going to take out a policy on my old man.”
When Berenice carried out the tray of pie, Mr. Forkenbrock’s door stood open and Beth was gone.
Sundays Berenice and Chad Grills drove out on the back roads in Chad’s almost-new truck. Going for a ride was their kind of date. The dust was bad, churned up by the fast-moving energy company trucks. Chad got lost because of all the new, unmarked roads the companies had put in. Time after time they turned onto a good road only to end up at a dead-end compression station or well pad. Getting lost where you had been born, brought up and never left was embarrassing, and Chad cursed the gas outfits. Finally he took a sight line on Doty Peak and steered toward it, picking the bad roads as the true way. Always his mind seized on a mountain. In a flinty section they had a flat tire. They came out at last near the ghost town of Dad. Chad said it hadn’t been a good ride and she had to agree, though it hadn’t been the worst.
Deb Slaver did not come in all the next week, and the extra work fell on Berenice. She hated changing Mr. Harrell’s bandage and skipped the chore several times. She was glad when on Wednesday, Doc Nelson’s visit day, he said Mr. Harrell had to go into the hospital. On Saturday, Beth’s day to visit Mr. Forkenbrock, Berenice got through her chores in a hurry so she could lean on a dust mop outside the door and listen. Impossible to know what he’d say next with all the side stories about his mother’s garden, long-ago horses, old friends. He hardly ever mentioned the Bledsoes who had been so good to him.
“Grandpa,” said Beth. “You look tired. Not sleeping enough? What time do you go to bed?” She handed him the printout of his discourse.
“My age you don’t need sleep so much as a rest. Permanent rest. I feel fine,” he said. “This looks pretty good—reads easy as a book.” He was pleased. “Where did we leave off,” he said, turning the pages.
“Your dad’s funeral,” said Beth.
“Oh boy,” he said. “That was the day I think Mother begin to put two and two together. I sort of got it, at least I got it that something ugly had happened, but I didn’t really understand until years later. I loved my dad so I didn’t want to understand. I still got a little Buck knife he give me and I wouldn’t part with it for anything in this world,” he said.
There was a pause while he got up to look for the knife, found it, showed it to Beth and carefully put it away in his top drawer.
“So there we all were, filing out of the church on our way to the cars that take us to the graveyard, me holding Mother’s arm, when some lady calls out, “Mrs. Forkenbrock! Oh, Mrs. Forkenbrock!” Mother turns around and we see this big fat lady in black with a wilted lilac pinned on her coat heading for us,” he said.
“But she sails right past, goes over to a thin, homely woman with a boy around my age and offers her condolences. And then she says, looking at the kid, ‘Oh, Ray, you’ll have to be the man of the house now and help your mother every way you can,’” he said. He paused to pour into the whiskey glass.
“I want you to think about that, Beth,” he said. “You are so strong on family ties. I want you to imagine that you are at your father’s funeral with your mother and sisters and somebody calls your mother, then walks right over to another person. And that other person has a kid with her and that kid has your name. I was—all I could think was that they had to be the Dixon Forkenbrocks and that they was related to us after all. Mother didn’t say a word, but I could feel her arm jerk,” he said. He illustrated this by jerking his own elbow.
“At the cemetery I went over to the kid with my name and asked him if they lived in Dixon and if they had a ranch and was they related to my father who we was burying. He gives me a look and says they don’t have a ranch, they don’t live in Dixon but in LaBarge, and that it is his father we are burying. I was so mixed up at this point that I just said ‘You’re crazy!’ and went back to Mother’s side. She never mentioned the incident and finally we went home and got along like usual although with damn little money. Mother got work cooking at the Sump ranch. It was only when she died in 1975 that I put the pieces together,” he said. “All the pieces.”
On Sunday Berenice and Chad went for their weekly ride. Berenice brought her new digital camera. For some reason Chad insisted on going back to the tangle of energy roads, and it was almost the same as before—a spiderweb of wrong-turn gravel roads without signs. Far ahead of them they could see trucks at the side of the road. There was a deep ditch with black pipe in it big enough for a dog to stroll through. They came around a corner and men were feeding a section of pipe into a massive machine that welded the sections together. Berenice thought the machine was interesting and put her camera up. Behind the machine a truck idled, a grubby kid in dark glasses behind the wheel. Thirty feet away another man was filling in the ditch with a backhoe. Chad put his window down, grinned and, in an easy voice, asked the kid how the machine worked.
The kid looked at Berenice’s camera. “What the fuck do you care?” he said. “What are you doin out here anyway?”
“County road,” said Chad, flaring up, “and I live in this county. I was born here. I got more rights to be on this road than you do.”
The kid gave a nasty laugh. “Hey, I don’t care if you was born on top of a flagpole,