by Finley J. MacDonald
This piece was originally published in issue six of Embodied Effigies https://effigiesmag.com/archives/issue-six/
Crook County’s a chest of gray light and cowpokes and roustabouts and busted, gnarled fence posts casting long shadows, an achromatic steppe upon which my mother, a mountain girl, gradually suffocates. One January morning, she will bundle my brother and me in army blankets, and our homestead will slip away in the Power Wagon’s side window. Today, she is arranging bum-lamb bottles in a canister of water on the stove. Her hair’s the color of penny, and the sleeves of her jacket are taped. On the wall beside the stove roosts the black, thirties-style phone box. She zeroes in on my shoes.
“Take those off. Where were you?”
I have been in the barn. Spilling rolled grain from a Dixie cup to grunting, gobbling snouts. Feeding the pigs is forbidden. I deflect.
“Saw some antelope.”
“Antelope? Are you telling a story? Where?”
In the next room, the rattling of the coal-burning stove ceases.
“What’s that?”
“Antelope, he says.”
We live on antelope. For more than a year, the landlord has failed to pay my father for looking after the cattle. Just tell him directly, tell him to pay you, says my mother. Lately, we have gotten by on jackrabbit. Evenings, I get to sit beside Oshoto, our heeler, while the GMC pokes along and the oval of light glides over brush and barbed wire. When they are shot, the rabbits do summersaults and flounder or their white legs stretch and tremble. Some carry tularemia, and my father feeds those to Oshoto.
My father strides past the kitchen entryway, pulling on his Mackinaw. He stomps across the kitchen floor in his socks and leans the rifle. It is from the Spanish American war, a bolt-action 30-40 Krag. He stands on one foot, jerking a boot.
“They still there?”
“Yeah, Dad”
He lays in cartridges and snaps the magazine. The bolt clacks like it means business.
“Can you point them out?”
“You going to shoot them?”
“You bet I am.”
There’s an image of my father crabscooting from Ford on blocks to line of heaving cottonwoods. For a very long time, he kneels behind a tree. I creep up. Keep down, he whispers. The breeze blows his hair and hisses in dry thistles. On the hilltop, the windmill is groaning homage to the gaunt and gray Wyoming spring. I tremble. I’d like to see the antelope. Horns of jacks. Jennies snatching buffalo grass.
“They still there?”
“Hush.”
The Krag cracks and echoes.
In a river valley nearer mountains, I chop mortar with a sawed-off hoe, and my father, whose legs have failed, scoots on his rump, fitting river-smooth stones into the wall of a deep flower bed to wrap around our double-wide trailer and additions he has constructed with studs at random intervals. He fashions knives with resin-sticky handles, artless gifts contradicting a saga of loss and broken faith: futile—and inessential. We, these watercourses which for a season make their way to the broad rivers cannot be convicted by arroyos we carve—those stories that carry us—and so we wind in due time as blessing.
My father, having laid out a dialectic of life and death by his own hand and Jesus on the plywood wall with his heart on fire, slumps in his wheel chair, hanging onto the barrel of the Remington. I had been called as a witness to night rides and jackrabbits and brook trout and yarns about “Big Ponkey”, the slow, colossal, bandoliered cowpoke who, one blistering day, drank the Powder River dry. Averse to pleading that it all meant something, I elect to stand aside, to leave the matter between my father and Jesus, insensible of the breathless consequence if my father were to murder himself with the 30 Remington I gave him Christmas morning.
Thank you for leaving that as a passing temptation.
Years later, his second daughter, who suffered his disesteem, lay beside him on his deathbed and wrapped her arms around his thin body and told him that he was a good father and that she loved him.
My father works the bolt and fires again.
“You missed,” I say. “Didn’t you, Dad?”
My father plants the iron-plated butt among thistles.
“Seems so.”
But that day, he did not miss. With a cottonwood gnarl as a stand, on a windy, Wyoming morning, he shot two antelope at a glorious distance—so far away he never saw them drop in sagebrush.
