The Meadow

 

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C
ONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Acknowledgments

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

I.

II.

Also by James Galvin

Copyright

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote this book for Emily.

Thanks to Allan Gurganus, William Kittredge, Richard Kenney, Jorie Graham, William Strachan, Abigail Thomas, and Beverly Pepper for their help and encouragement. Special thanks to Curtis Bill Pepper for talking it out of me to begin with.

Thanks also to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a grant which helped enormously in the writing of this book.

The text on page 131 first appeared in the
Coe Review
under the title, “Small Countries.”

O
FTEN
I A
M
P
ERMITTED TO
R
ETURN TO A
M
EADOW

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am

I say are likenesses of the First Beloved

whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill

whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words

that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing

east against the source of the sun

in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game

of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a given property of the mind

that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,

everlasting omen of what is.

—Robert Duncan

I.

 

 

The real world goes like this: The Neversummer Mountains like a jumble of broken glass. Snowfields weep slowly down. Chambers Lake, ringed by trees, gratefully catches the drip in its tin cup, and gives the mountains their own reflection in return. This is the real world, indifferent, unburdened.

Two rivers flow from opposite ends of Chambers Lake, like two ends of yarn being pulled off a spool at the same time. The Laramie River flows through its own valley, through its own town, then into the North Platte. From the opposing end of the lake the Cache la Poudre gouges into a steep canyon down to the South Platte River. At North Platte, Nebraska, the two forks of the Platte conjoin and the separate, long-traveled waters of Chambers Lake remarry.

The real world goes like this: Coming down from the high lake, timbered ridges in slow green waves suddenly stop and bunch up like patiently disappointed refugees, waiting for permission to start walking out across the open prairie toward Nebraska, where the waters come together and form an enormous inland island, large parts of three large states surrounded by water. The island never heard of states; the real world is the island.

There is an island on the island which is a meadow, offered up among the ridges, wearing a necklace of waterways, concentrically nested inside the darker green of pines, and then the gray-green of sage and the yellow-green of prairie grass.

The story of the meadow is a litany of loosely patterned weather, a chronicle of circular succession. Indians hunted here in summer, but they never wintered here, as far as we can tell, not on purpose. It's the highest cultivated ground in this spur of the Medicine Bow, no other level terrain in sight. There have been four names on the deed to it, starting just a hundred years back.

The history of the meadow goes like this: No one owns it, no one ever will. The people, all ghosts now, were ghosts even then; they drifted through, drifted away, thinking they were not moving. They learned the recitations of seasons and the repetitive work that seasons require.

Only one of them succeeded in making a life here, for almost fifty years. He weathered. Before a backdrop of natural beauty, he lived a life from which everything was taken but a place. He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in.

By the end he had nothing, as if loss were a fire in which he was purified again and again, until he wasn't a ghost anymore.

 

 

The way people watch television while they eat—looking up to the TV and down to take a bite and back up—that's how Lyle watches the meadow out the south window while he eats his breakfast. He's hooked on the plot, doesn't want to miss anything. He looks out over the rim of his cup as he sips.

The meadow is under two feet of snow, which looks gray but not dirty in this light. Leafless willow branches make an orange streak down the middle. Each year the snow tries to memorize, blindly, the landscape, as if it were the landscape that was going to melt in spring.

The wind has cleared a couple of the knobs above the meadow, and the silver-gray sage throbs out. Above that stands the front line of timber, where the trees begin, or end, depending, still dead black though the sky has brightened behind it, a willing blue. Nothing is moving across the meadow this morning.

Yesterday sixteen elk streaked across the hillside above the meadow. Lyle could easily imagine what they had done to the fence where it runs under deep drifts on the east side. They walked through it, not even feeling the barbs through their winter coats. They dragged broken wire through the woods, strewing it like tinsel. He'd find the pieces in the spring like tendrils of steel briar growing along the ground. It doesn't make him angry anymore, as it did in the early years. He figures the elk have been crossing that section of timber to forage on the north side of Bull Mountain for a lot longer than there has been anyone here to build fence and get pissed off every time the elk tear it up. Now he splices the fence with baling wire, which is lighter, so it will break easier and always in the same place and not get dragged so much or pull out posts.

The first light hits the meadow and the kitchen window, and it's like Christmas lights going on. The trees go from black to loden green. The snow turns a mild electric blue and sparks.

A white crown sparrow lights on a small juniper branch that bends down and springs back up. Lyle says, “What kept you?” The sparrow hops onto the windowsill as a chickadee lights and begins bouncing up and down on the juniper branch just left by the other. “And you, you cheerful little sonofabitch, you don't waste no time either, do you?”

Lyle slowly straightens his stiff joints as he gets out of the chair and shuffles (his shoes are still untied) over to the wood stove. He picks up the plate with the extra pancake, carries it back to the table, and sits down. He cranks the window open about an inch—not enough for the birds to come in and kill themselves trying to get out—pinches off some warm pancake and crumbles it onto the outside sill. “Little beggars.”

When the day's first visitors have finished their crumbs and flown, Lyle picks up a two-month-old newspaper Ed Wilkes brought and begins to read, but he is soon interrupted by a tiny beak tapping on the glass. This one is a junco, and then the chickadee is back, bouncing from branch to branch chirping. Lyle gives them some crumbs. Addressing the chickadee, “I don't know what you're so goddamn happy about all the time.”

There's a racket of chirps and squawks by the front door. Lyle unbends out of the chair again, takes another pinch of flapjack to the door, and steps outside on the stoop. The screeching squawk is a Stellar's jay, who flees the wire he's perched on as soon as the door opens. He's had enough stones and snowballs pitched at him to know. To the little row of sparrows that has returned to the perch Lyle says, “That hatchet-head won't bother you now.” All at once they fly down and light on his uplifted palm. They peck off pieces of cake and flee back to the wire like greedy children waiting another turn. When the pancake is gone Lyle goes back inside to wash the dishes.

Once, coming back from town, I saw Lyle's truck parked at the Wooden Shoe. I stopped to say hello. Lyle was building a new garden fence, and as I approached, he held up his hand, a signal not to come closer. Then he leaned his shovel against the post he was setting and walked slowly across the garden to where a barn swallow was perched on a rail. Lyle took off his glove, and with the back of his huge index finger, touched the swallow gently under its throat, then ran his finger down once, gently, over its breast. Then he put his glove back on and walked away, and the bird took to the air again.

Lyle said, “Up close them swallows are the funniest damned looking things you ever saw. They fly like angels and then up close they look like little clowns. The damndest thing.”

 

 

Lyle's thinning hair is the color of last year's grass next spring, fresh from under the long snow. He cuts it himself, so it's always nebulous on top and hacked away in patches above the back of his neck, which is red with chain link creases.

He would be almost homely if he didn't look so bright: long in the chin and nose, wide of mouth, eyes such a cutting pale blue that when he looks at you, he makes you think of whatever it is you are ashamed of. It's like he can smell your soul's feet.

I've never seen a stranger meet him who could return his stare. Not that he's trying something. He's just looking at you. I've known Lyle since I was two years old. There's nothing he doesn't know about me. That's the only reason I can look him in the eye.

Lyle is sixty-three. When he sits in a straight-backed chair he kind of folds himself down, like a folded union suit—the terrible posture of someone who is usually exhausted before they allow themselves to sit—legs crossed, hands in lap, almost liquid shoulders.

When he smiles at a joke you can see a lot of gold behind his teeth. And his eyes flare in their far blue.

 

 

Here's the first dream: Lyle is still Lyle, still driving the '59 Studebaker that sounds more like it runs on an electric motor than a gasoline one it's tuned so fine, but you can tell it's a dream when he drives it into Denver: the kind of detail that lets the dreamer know he's dreaming even as he dreams.

The dreamer, outside this dream, has only seen Lyle ruffled once. That was the time his sister, Clara, put his rifle in her mouth and painted the roughsawn boards in his room with her brains. Generally, he's unflappable: The time his baler caught fire he didn't seem in much of a hurry to put it out.

In this dream he's scared to tears just from being in Denver. He arrives at this house my family lived in for a while. The pickup is loaded down with tape measures of many sizes, all sprung out of their cases. Some are as big as rolls of steel, the way they come from the mill. We start unloading them, but we can't because we are cutting our hands to shreds and we haven't got any gloves. Lyle's eyes are like blue lasers. His tears shine like some light leaking out. Then we are both crying because we can't get the tapes out and Lyle doesn't understand the directions for getting out of the city. I offer to go with him but he refuses, saying things just have too much direction and you can't find your way back to anywhere, and besides, someone has to stay here with the tapes, which have somehow unloaded themselves while we were talking and weeping.

So we shake bloody, shredded hands, both weeping inconsolably because we know that Lyle will never find his way out of the city and back to Sheep Creek, but he is leaving anyway, and I am left standing there with all these tape measures on the lawn of a house where I don't live anymore.