Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. Annie Proulx

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СКАЧАТЬ of the true history they all knew as he made his way through countless verses. He could sing every song—“Go Long Blue Dog,” and “When the Green Grass Comes,” “Don’t Pull off My Boots,” and “Two Quarts of Whiskey,” and at all-male roundup nights he had endless verses of “The Stinkin Cow,” “The Buckskin Shirt” and “Cousin Harry.” He courted Rose singing “never marry no good-for-nothin boy,” the boy understood to be himself, the “good-for-nothin” a disclaimer. Later, with winks and innuendo, he sang, “Little girl, for safety you better get branded …”

      Archie, advised by an ex-homesteader working for Bunk Peck, used his inheritance from Mrs. Peck to buy eighty acres of private land. It would have cost nothing if they had filed for a homestead twice that size on public land, or eight times larger on desert land, but Archie feared the government would discover he was a minor, nor did he want a five-year burden of obligatory cultivation and irrigation. Since he had never expected anything from Mrs. Peck, buying the land with the surprise legacy seemed like getting it for free. And it was immediately theirs with no strings attached. Archie, thrilled to be a landowner, told Rose he had to sing the metes and bounds. He started on the southwest corner and headed east. It was something he reckoned had to be done. Rose walked along with him at the beginning and even tried to sing with him but got out of breath from walking so fast and singing at the same time. Nor did she know the words to many of his songs. Archie kept going. It took him hours. Late in the afternoon he was on the west line, drawing near and still singing though his voice was raspy, “an we’ll go downtown, an we’ll buy some shirts …,” and slouching down the slope the last hundred feet in the evening dusk so worn of voice she could hardly hear him breathily half-chant “never had a nickel and I don’t give a shit.”

      There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude. Archie had hammered together a table with sapling legs and two benches. At the evening meal, their faces lit by the yellow shine of the coal oil lamp whose light threw wild shadows on the ceiling, their world seemed in order until moths flew at the lamp and finally thrashed themselves to sticky death on the plates.

      Rose was not pretty, but warmhearted and quick to laugh. She had grown up at the Jackrabbit stage station, the daughter of kettle-bellied Sundown Mealor, who dreamed of plunging steeds but because of his bottle habit drove a freight wagon. The station was on a north-south trail connecting hardscrabble ranches with the blowout railroad town of Rawlins after the Union Pacific line went through. Rose’s mother was grey with some wasting disease that kept her to her bed, sinking slowly out of life. She wept over Rose’s early marriage but gave her a family treasure, a large silver spoon that had come across the Atlantic.

      The stationmaster was the politically minded Robert F. Dorgan, affable and jowly, yearning to be appointed to a position of importance and seeing the station as a brief stop not only for freight wagons but for himself. His second wife, Flora, stepmother to his daughter, Queeda, went to Denver every winter with Queeda, and so they became authorities on fashion and style. They were as close as a natural mother and daughter. In Denver, Mrs. Dorgan sought out important people who could help her husband climb to success. Many political men spent the winter in Denver, and one of them, Rufus Clatter, with connections to Washington, hinted there was a chance for Dorgan to be appointed as territorial surveyor.

      “I’m sure he knows a good deal about surveying,” he said with a wink.

      “Considerable,” she said, thinking that Dorgan could find some stripling surveyor to do the work for a few dollars.

      “I’ll see what I can do,” said Clatter, pressing heavily against her thigh, but tensed to step back if she took offense. She allowed him a few seconds, smiled and turned away.

      “Should such an appointment come to pass, you will find me grateful.”

      In the spring, back at the station, where her rings and metallic dress trim cast a golden aura, she bossed the local gossip saying that Archie Laverty had ruined Rose, precipitating their youthful marriage, Rose barely fourteen, but what could you expect from a girl with a drunkard father, an uncontrolled girl who’d had the run of the station, sassing rough drivers and exchanging low repartee with bumpkin cowhands, among them Archie Laverty, a lowlife who sang vulgar songs. She whisked her hands together as though ridding them of filth.

      The other inhabitant of the station was an old bachelor—the country was rich in bachelors—Harp Daft, the telegraph key operator. His face and neck formed a visor of scars, moles, wens, boils and acne. One leg was shorter than the other and his voice twanged with catarrh. His window faced the Dorgan house, and a black circle which Rose knew to be a telescope sometimes showed in it.

      Rose both admired and despised Queeda Dorgan. She greedily took in every detail of the beautiful dresses, the fire opal brooch, satin shoes and saucy hats so exquisitely out of place at the dusty station, but she knew that Miss Dainty had to wash out her bloody menstrual rags like every woman, although she tried to hide them by hanging them on the line at night or inside pillow slips. Beneath the silk skirts she too had to put up with sopping pads torn from old sheets, the crusted edges chafing her thighs and pulling at the pubic hairs. At those times of the month the animal smell seeped through Queeda’s perfumed defenses. Rose saw Mrs. Dorgan as an iron-boned two-faced enemy, the public sweetness offset by private coarseness. She had seen the woman spit on the ground like a drover, had seen her scratch her crotch on the corner of the table when she thought no one was looking. In her belief that she was a superior creature, Mrs. Dorgan never spoke to the Mealors or to the despicable bachelor pawing his telegraph key, or, as he said, seeking out constellations.

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