NEBRASKA'S SAND HILLS: NOT AS EASY AS THEY LOOK

HISTORY:

The Nebraska sand hills have been called a lot of names in the last couple of hundred years. "A vast and worthless area," said Daniel Webster in 1850.  James MacKay wrote in 1796 that it was a "great desert of drifting sand, without trees, soil, rocks, water or animals of any kind."  Settlers who arrived there in the 1880's and 1890's called it a hellish place to try to live.  They found temperatures which went from minus 40 in the winter to plus 110 in the summer, fanned by a wind that never ends.  They found soil they dared not plow or they'd leave a wound of open sand where the coarse grass had grown which would last for the next hundred years before it would heal.  Wise men lived there carefully if they lived there at all, and they raised cattle. Because the sand hills are a desert.  They are 20,000 square miles of sand that's been drifted by the continuous wind into dunes 300 to 600 feet high and two to six miles long.  People think of the Sahara or the Arabian or Gobi deserts when they think of vast sand dune formations.  They don't imagine that the largest desert in the western hemisphere is located in the center of the North American continent, spreading over the western panhandle of its most central state.  They don't guess that this sand hills region of western Nebraska is ten times larger than the state of Delaware and three times the size of Massachusetts. Few know this area that's been alternating between desert and grassland for the past 10,000 years.  When the last glacier melted and the last giant lakes dried up from the Ice Age, vast acres of fine quartz sand were left exposed to the northwest wind.  Occasionally, grass roots fastened into the unstable soil long enough to form a cover, but then a cold and arid spell arrived and the grasses lost their hold and the wind took over again.  Second and third generations of dunes piled on top of the first big ones, making the sand hills look like waves in a choppy sea from the air.  Geologists sometimes speculate that the dunes might simply be what's left of the wave-formed bottom of a 20,000 square mile lake that dried up long ago, but generally they accept that the formations are due to the wind.  Since the time of human habitation, however, the sand hills have remained fairly still.

Paleo Indians appeared 6000 years ago and farmer Indians dwelt along the sand hill river bottoms in 900 A.D.  Large circular earth lodges were built by the coalescent traditionists between 1450 and 1750.  Father James MacKay, the first white man to explore the region, didn't arrive until 1795.  But the hills are now covered with a fine and tenacious layer of coarse, deep-rooted sand grasses, the kind which propagate by means of rhizomes or underground stems, which grow radially outward form the parent plants.  Rhizomes store huge quantities of plant food and keep the grass futures safe from wind, drought and the damage of fire by lying patiently in wait of rainwater before sending up new shoots.  Since surface temperatures can reach 140 degrees in summer, that kind of hardiness is essential.  In the treacherous soil of the sand hills, where a man's boot can sink in up to his spur, rhizomes form a fine, intermeshed net of roots just beneath the surface, and they keep a firm promise to stability as long as nobody drops a plow into their midst.  

And down below those long-lasting roots is the second hidden jewel of sand hills life: water.  Water underlies the entire region in a great basin of hard-packed sediments - up to 800 feet thick in places - known as the Ogallala formation.  Each drop of the average annual rainfall of 19.01 inches gathers in the huge underground reservoir of water and is contained forever, one hopes, in the dunes. There is virtually no surface exit except to evaporation, but underground water supplies the Loup rivers, the Niobrara and the Dismal with continuous streams.  Surveys have found a total of 1640 lakes in the low, meadow-like valleys between the dunes.  The lakes range from 10 to 2300 acres in surface size, and are from three to 15 feet deep.  Another 850 lakes are smaller than 10 acres in size.         

Contrary to Father MacKay's first impressions, those lakes support a profusion of waterfowl, everything from pelicans to Canada geese, from Mallards to the nearly-extinct sand hills crane.  It's been awhile now since Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody, Major Frank North and Captain Luther North arrived in the sand hills to establish a ranch and see what they could do about eliminating the last of the thousands of free-ranging buffalo which also used to thrive there.  Small, protected groups of buffalo have been returned to the area in state refuges along the Niobrara River, where the mule deer is also regaining a foothold.  In the early years, however, the area was a paradise for wildlife, with its seas of tall grass and its hundreds of shallow lakes.

Now it's a paradise for cattlemen, for the same reason.   Experts estimate that 700 to 800 million acre-feet of water rests beneath the sand hills, but it's a fact they mention with the greatest of caution.  Geologists and ranchers alike fear that if enough people find out about the water, someone will decide to pump it all out onto plowed up cornfields.  They remember the tragedy of the years when homesteaders tried to plow up the hills to plant crops and lived to watch it all blow away.  They fear that modern farmers with more efficiently destructive technology, bigger tractors and plows, could do a more effective job of destroying the fragile ecosystem of the sand hills.  Not only would the sand lose its net of roots but the water table would be lowered by the irrigation wells. Lakes would dry up, wells would become obsolete and ranchers would grow desperate.  Nothing angers them like a threat to what they now think of as their own native terrain.  They don't refer to it as an ecosystem and they are too conservative to join forces with environmentalists and they see nothing wrong with having forced out the original inhabitants, the Indians who hunted and traveled there with inconspicuous ease.  They simply assume ownership.   They've forgotten, perhaps, that white men came to this great American desert of grassed-over dunes only because their cattle strayed into it for winter feed, and they stayed there only because the cattle did well.  The wildest, most insular of those cowboys even grew to like it.

Even so, their numbers are dwindling.  Population in the sand hills has been decreasing since 1920 and rapidly since 1940.  Some 36,000 people inhabited the area in 1950, when the last census was taken, and experts say the number is less than that today.  The ones who stay are the most determined ones, the ones who pride themselves on surviving any hardship.  They point with satisfaction to the remark of one Grant County rancher's wife that it's "great country for cattle and men, but hell on horses and women."

Lt. G.K. Warren, who was one of the first real explorers of the region in 1855, wrote that the "sand hills area has been covered with barren sand which, blown by the wind into high hills, renders this section not only barren, but in a measure impracticable for travel.  About the sources of the Loup Fork, many of the lakes of water we found were impregnated with salts and unfit to drink, and our sufferings in exploring them will always hold a prominent place in our memories."   Lt. Warren summed it up by saying that it was "an irreclaimable desert of two hundred to four hundred miles in width [which] separates the points capable of settlement in the east from those on the mountains in the west."  In addition, he wrote, "the scenery is exceedingly solitary, silent and desolate and depressing to one's spirits."   But the most enduring analysis has been this anonymous remark left on a sign beside an abandoned homesteader's barren field: "God placed this soil upright.  Don't turn it over."  

But the cattle which would otherwise have starved in the bad winters from lack of feed and planning on the part of the big-thinking ranchers found the sand hills a natural home, and the cowboys who rode in after them, thinking to find only bones and skulls, were astounded.  And the ranchers who moved in after them and killed out the buffalo and pushed out the Indians and the homesteaders continue to point out that cattle-raising is no easy ticket to the good life, either.  They say there's no way to modernize the way a cow has a calf, no way to make sure she'll have it only during the daylight, or when temperatures are warm enough to keep it alive, no way to guarantee that it'll come out straight, head forward instead of cross-wise or backwards or dead, no way to be sure she'll claim it, or that it won't die of scours in a late spring blizzard, and no way to know that it'll even be worth decent money at the sale barn that fall.

It's a gamble all the way.  A man can pasture his cattle all summer, make hay for them, feed it all winter, tend to them during calving, raise up a fine crop of calves for somebody's beefsteak and still go broke. Prices for meat on the hoof are about thirty years behind prices for anything a rancher has to buy.  Still, they don't quit.  They tighten up, do without, make do, get by.   They look upon their lives as not just a job but a way of life.  They are the descendants of the grim-faced cowboys who first ventured into the sand hills in a time when only the Indians could read those endless dunes and find their way back out again.  They are the inheritors of an unsavory legacy of what happened to homesteaders' fences, the fields of the first farmers, the immigrants who tried to map out and make a living on the 640-acre Kincaid homesteads allocated to the untried newcomers venturing into the sand hills.  But it never was a fair fight.

If the blizzards and droughts and sand blowing across their fields didn't drive them out, the cowboys who hated fences did.  Graveyards in that country are filled with silent and bitter testimonials to the winters of the 1880's, when whole families died of cold if they were lucky and of starvation, madness and suicide if they weren't.   The ones who survived and stayed were therefore a special, sometimes ruthless breed, and their descendants claim the honor of that ancestry with grim pride. They like driving down miles and miles of single-track, one-way trails toward a small frame house deep in amongst the hills.  They don't mind not getting visitors or seeing neighbors.  The men of those first generations were gritty and self-sufficient and the women who stayed with them, if they stayed at all, became just as silent and as fearless as the men.  And when the men died of overwork or from accidents and injuries or illnesses no doctor was near enough to treat, the women stayed on, ranching alone or with sons, lives rooted in that sand.  They do what needs to be done, the fencing, the haying, the next calving season. They've adapted, like cactus, and can't be transplanted.

Imogene's Story, As Told By the Storekeeper

Excerpt two from Common Decency, 

From the storekeeper, Donne Tucker:

    

    “Well I can tell you what I know, that she was born Mary Imogene O’Malley in the sand hills.  Her parents were Bartholomew O’Malley and Maureen O’Connell and she had a younger sister named Anna Madeline, born later, who didn’t stay around any better than their mother had.  Maureen left in 1951, again in 1955, and the last time in 1957, fed up with the dry weather and lack of money, and went back East.”

    She took that youngest one with her, at least for a while, until she ran off and ended up in foster care.  Imogene was the one who stayed.  Even after Bart drank himself to death, or maybe because he did, she was still there.  The things that had bothered her mother, the plain old house and the long road to town, that was what she liked.  For Imogene it was the horses and the cattle, and that this was her Granddad’s original homestead.  She got some of this outlook from the neighbor who helped raise her of course. Rosa Johnson was one who could fix fence, ride a horse, work in the hayfield and not miss any more than what she had, and Imogene fit right in with that.  Some said she was a throw-back, that she’d skipped a generation, and it helped that Rosa was same age as Imogene’s Granddad and he would’ve liked her just as good - would have grinned at the sight of her chasing down a half broke colt and jumping onto its back for the heck of it.  The two of them, him and that girl, they could’ve made it work, people said, but he up and died too soon.  Whereas Bart, he more or less just threw the place away.  Or tried to, or would have - like his brothers did - if his mother Mary McLeod hadn’t kept hold of that original homestead.  Bart was just no great shakes as a rancher. The war might have been what took it out of him, but others said he just never had it in him. He couldn’t ride a horse unless it was hooked to a plow, and he’d let a cow die rather than get in there and pull the calf.  People weren’t surprised that he drank.  What they were sure of is that he would have died a lot sooner if it hadn’t been for his daughter.  Imogene could drive almost as good as she could ride, and it was her even at 10 and 12 - tall enough to reach the pedals - who drove that old truck of his home every day after school with him in it, or he’d never have got there.  It was her that dragged him into the house so he didn’t freeze to death if there was snow on the ground and it was her that did whatever cooking ever got done in that kitchen. 

    Rosa, a couple of miles up the road, she sometimes helped the girl get along, but without a lot of frills.  It was well known what she thought of the O’Malleys.  That was Rosa Johnson.  She’s still one of the real characters in this country, or maybe she was what gave the country character - the kind people count on when things need to get done.  She brought pies to the bake sales and she ran the food stand at the auctions.  And St. Bonaventure’s Catholic Church at Coleman Village would have fallen down and disappeared into the dust of those miles after miles of sand dunes across McPherson County if she had ever failed to attend Sunday morning Mass.  She was the backbone of that Church like she was of her family.  Her giving up, it was just one of those things that didn’t happen - kind of like her son Mason ever joining her there.  That didn’t happen either.  They were two of a kind when it came to stubborn. Some people said that came from his granddad - old Moses being the one who came to this country for the homesteads and then stayed to take what others left behind.  But the one good thing his son Nils ever did was to get married to Rosa Coleman.  Her dad was just some old cowboy who followed a big bunch of starved out cattle into the sand hills and when the cattle got fat in the tall grass he decided to stay too.  He made good off of those cattle, no matter whose they’d been to start with, and she grew up to be like her dad, taller than most and straight-backed. But her older boys, once they got big enough to join the Army, that was the last anybody ever saw of them.  She eased up on that youngest boy, needing at least one of them to stay, and maybe - she’d tell you this herself - she gave him too much rope.  He raised good enough cattle, rode in the rodeos, raised a little hell - him big enough to get respect most anywhere - but he never did find a girl he dared to bring back home.  Not until later.  Some people wonder if that O’Malley girl was even his daughter, but you don’t dare to say that out loud.  She was back and forth to her Aunt Katie’s place over to the west of hers till Bart passed away and then here she was, back for good, no explanations.

    She had that hard straight look on her face that maybe came more from trying to get along with a hard-case half-breed hired hand that sometimes worked up there at Johnson’s.  He went by the name of Joe Ed Davis, though he had a brother by the name of Jesse Prairie, and word was he’d been a big-time hotshot money-winner in the rodeo - a bronc rider, horse trainer, all-around hand and a pretty good cowboy if you didn’t care he’d been to prison.  He was who to have around when you needed to move cattle, work calves or get a little veterinary work done. That guy could swing a rope like nobody’s business.  He could stop a bull on that big bronc horse he rode, drag it to a horse trailer and haul it back to the barn when nobody else could.  Cattle or horses, it didn’t matter, he could handle it.  A tall, scarred-up, rough-looking fellow, he was strong enough to lay down a wild stud colt with nothing more than a rope and geld the thing right out there in the pasture, if that’s what was needed.  Some of it he learned growing up on the reservation, people said, and some of it from that Oklahoma state prison, where a guy could get real good at rodeo if he wanted to. The downside was he had to visit a parole officer every now and again, so anybody with a gripe could cause him trouble. Most ranchers had nothing but good to say about the guy, as long as he knew where he belonged.  They didn’t want him around their women but the wives didn’t want him in the house for dinner anyway so he just packed his own gear and hauled his own horses and ate in his truck like that’s how he wanted it, no insult taken.  Or none you could see.  He was just here for the work, at least for the first five or six years. He’d be here in the summers and gone back to the reservation for the winters and then he’d show up the next spring with a couple trailer loads of good broke using horses. Some said it was rodeo stock his uncle bought and sold but they’d have a sale down at Willy’s corral behind the bar and the ranch work’d start up all over again. 

    Imogene would’ve been better off with a good guy like Lester Jonas, but she was probably afraid Lester couldn’t hold the line against Johnson.  Lester said Rosa Johnson would come out of the house and stand on the porch with her arms crossed whenever she caught wind of something she didn’t like, or she’d drive out onto the hayfield at supper time and Miss Imogene would ride home with her. Johnson wouldn’t have handled that near so fair on his own.  It was Johnson, after all, who brought Joe Ed Davis in, even talked Bart into boarding him at the O’Malley house for awhile.  I guess they thought it wouldn’t matter to Imogene, no more than she was home, no more than she looked at guys.

   But she was home enough. And she saw him. It’s hard to figure why she did -- he was sure no pretty boy, just kind of a tough guy with tattoos and scars, one even right across his mouth, and this home-made chopped-off black Indian hair that hung down to his collar under that bronc rider’s hat he always wore.  A guy’d swear he wasn’t anything most women would ever have wanted anything to do with.  He could of been sent back to the slammer just for asking one of them to dance if he’d gone about it like other people did.  So he acted like he didn’t care. He’d pretend to be drinkin’ along with Bart and Mason Johnson down at Willy Bell’s bar here, all the while Willy watering down his whiskey, and there’d be Johnson running his mouth that nobody could ride that old Smoke horse of his like Imogene -- her there in a corner booth doin’ her homework.  He’d say she’d about ruined that horse to the saddle with all that bareback riding she did in the night when nobody was watching, like she thought she was smart.  Like nobody could ever catch her, he’d say.  And Willie says Imogene would maybe raise her head and let her look drift across to Joe Ed without making a point of it, like maybe she was just checking the clock for when she’d get to go home.  And Joe Ed would meet her eyes with that dead-on black-eyed stare of his and Willie said you just knew they’d made a date in the dunes.  But he never let on as to what he saw.     

    Willie keeps people’s secrets.  You about have to when you run a bar with rooms upstairs. He gets the mail for the cowboys who don’t have any other real home, and he has a barn out back and some oats and hay and a little bit of pasture for their horses. And when somebody wants to come pay for a horse, he doesn’t have to try to find Joe Ed or Lester or any of the others.  He just puts it in his bank, at interest, and gives it back when they need it.  All these years and there’s never been a question.

   Plus Willie didn’t like how the big shots tried to push Joe Ed, trying to get him riled. He knew it was easy enough to do.  Joe was hotheaded and a hard drinker and way too fast to pull a knife. And Imogene had got beat up by Bart for most of her young life after her mother left, and was hounded by Mason Johnson after that, as was her Aunt Kate in her younger days.  So she was looking for a defender, a tough guy who might be on her side. She might of have still believed in love and romance and the children she got out of it -- and to whom she was a lovely and gracious mother, like Rosa -- but all we ever saw was the hard times.  And as much as Bart and Mason were around there, you’d think they might have figured out what was coming. I could see it from my store across the street. But that’s what the drink does for people - kind of dims the headlights.

    So Joe Ed got away with it.  He got to lay his claim on her where nobody knew and stand up amongst us on land of his own that was hers after Bart died, and be a rancher.  He married her and had kids with her – her one of our own -- and nobody could say a dang thing to stop it.  Because she said yes.”

This is one of several excerpts of a novel titled Common Decency, located in the sand hills of western Nebraska.

And this is Imogene’s mother, Maureen O’Malley:

    “Well, Rosa hated me from the beginning, and that’s all there was to that.  All the time acting like she was just helping out, just being a good neighbor, well what she really wanted was my kids, at least that oldest one anyway.  And don’t think I didn’t know why, I just didn’t know what to do about it, and after a while I didn’t care.  That country takes it out of you, takes the caring right out of you.  It got so I used to think about the war as a happy time and peace as a misery, that’s how bad it was.  I used to hope they’d activate the armed forces again just so’s Bart ‘n me’d have to go back to Connecticut and I’d have to go back to singing in that little club where I met him.  People used to say I sounded like Judy Garland, but I didn’t, it was just something nice of them to say.  I didn’t look anything like her, and sure, I got to drinking a little out there in that empty country, but Bart was worse’n me, a lot worse’n me.  My mother said he was no good, but all I saw at the time was that uniform and that cute way he grinned.  I didn’t see the bottle, didn’t see it all the way out on the train to Omaha.”

    “I just thought it was clever of him to make a party out of that whole long trip.  But then on the bus north to the sand hills, it was like the hangover set in.  I’d never been west before that.  I never knew there was country where it never rained, never grew anything but sand grass, just baked and blew like that.  No towns to speak of except little one-horse burgs a hundred miles apart where the bus stopped -- maybe one bar on the street, and me and Bart just staring out the windows.  Then the bus finally came to the dinkiest town of them all and Bart said this is where we get off. I couldn’t believe it.  Maybe six houses and a building that was a grocery store and a house all in one and across the street a bar and a hotel up above, if you could call that place a hotel, and Bart says this is where we get off?   This is home, he said.  Ma lives over there.  And he started walking on ahead of me in that wind, the wind blowing like a hurricane, dust and sand up in my face, tearing off my hat and my feather boa first thing. He just goes on ahead to the middle one of those six houses, which I saw was a school house from the bell on top, and he walks on in like he owns the place and there is his Ma. Doesn’t even get up to greet him, or me.  Just sits there with this sour look on her face and says so, you’re back. 

    “And that was it.  No coffee, no tea, no come on in and sit down and let me get to know you.  Acted like she never even saw me.  Room full of kids so I guess school was more important.  Bart, he just turns around and walks out. And so did I.”

    “And so there we stand in the middle of that dirt street with our suitcases and him drunk, which I can see why by now.  He goes straight into the bar and calls up what he says is an old friend of his from before, a man by the name of Mason Johnson, and says he’d come to get us.  I am amazed there is even a telephone at that point.  I didn’t know then who this Mason Johnson would turn out to be. I was just glad there was somebody, glad to at least be back in a bar with a bathroom.          

    “And finally this big guy comes in, tall and great-looking, could of played football maybe back a few years, has this grin on his face and this cowboy hat, and you just know he belongs in that country.  Not us, just him. I’m already wanting to jump up into his arms, but can’t do more than shake his hand and try not to cy.  He gets us into his pick-up truck, me in the middle of course, to take us out to that awful place where we were going to have to live and I try to keep my dress which was already ruined from all that dust from getting worse ruined by the gearshift in that truck. They weren’t saying much that I had to hear so I kept looking out at all those dunes with grass on ‘em and thinking it was the moon we were on, that people couldn’t live in a place like this with no trees, no houses, just that raw-looking grass everywhere.  It was just miles and miles of fences and this long trail road we were on.  I remember thinking it wasn’t real, that I was going to go crazy if it took an hour just to get to the house, and then the house itself – well it was full of mouse manure and leftover grain from them using it for storage, and dust was all over.”

    “I just saw this blue water lake out in the pasture and I headed straight for that at a dead run, clothes and all, and dived in.  Maybe I thought I was going to drown myself, I don’t know.  But you should of heard Mason Johnson laugh.  Bart stayed on the porch like he could care less but that big guy followed me out there and stood like a man should stand and grinned at me swimming around in circles in the water. Then he waded in and hauled me out like I was so much kindling wood.  It didn’t matter who was married to who or if it was the wrong thing to do, it was just that he was the only thing in that whole empty country that made any kind of sense to me. 

    “I’m sorry if this sounds bad.  I’m sorry I basically abandoned my oldest daughter out there and let his mother Rosa Johnson raise her, but that’s what they acted like they wanted.  I’m sorry if I let Bart O’Malley ruin my life.  But that’s what I did.  I used to think where I’d have been otherwise, singing on some stage in New York, probably married to a musician, which is what I should’ve done.  But there I was out in those dunes, burning to a crisp, making moral mistakes left and right and generally going crazy.  And all Bart could think of to do was beat me for it, like it was my fault he brought me to that place, like it was my fault he didn’t know what to do with it or how to fix fence or raise cattle, like it was my fault all he could do was rent out his land to Mason Johnson all those years and then spend every dime of what he got paid for it down at Willy Bell’s Bar.  Like that was my fault.”

FICTION, AS IT HELPS TO SAVE YOU

     It helps that God’s gift to me is the joyful work of writing. I am in fact instructed by the Church to write the story of how a journalist moves from that most secular of all possible professions into a life of prayer as a third order Carmelite nun. And so here I am, by way of voice type dictation, working on the reformatted autobiography, inserting new memories of the old days that have been called to the surface by this attention, fitting in old poetry and fiction to augment the explanations of how and why things went as they did -- not necessarily in that order.

   It’s good to be making use of what I’ve written in such a practical fashion toward the good and wholesome purpose of telling the story of my vocation, without blame. In fact, Books Without Blame is the working title of the five and possibly six volume set, the first of which is subtitled Just Words On A Page (in deference to my late husband’s assessment of my chosen lifework). The next five include, in addition to short stories, excerpts of the journalism I wrote for 35 years and the fiction, plus a volume of photographs produced at stops along the way. It begins to seem not only possible, but essential, at least to me.

   And so, here are the first in the fictional series, a geographically correct short story, Paulo, with another such, titled Josiah. 

The Story of Paulo

Where I came from was country like desert, dunes grassed over since the Pleistocene Epoque, where people who knew each other traveled in caravans, two or three cars at a time. That was how I met Paulo. He was someone invited along by someone I knew one summer in a pilgrimage across the plains toward the dot on the map which was my hometown.

He was good-looking, idle and apparently directionless in that first glance, with no reason for being there. I was going home for reasons of family necessity but he had no stated purpose for such a rigorous trip to a place most anyone else would have thought of as nowhere. He might even have said nowhere had seemed like a good idea at the time.

A few days later I was back in town from my ancestral countryside and I saw Paulo walking hand-in-hand down the street with a woman I had known since high school, a shopkeeper now.  I could see she had decided to give him everything she had in this life. I asked if he knew what he was doing, in a town as small as this one, but he simply shrugged, there in his pale blue suit, his blonde hair perfectly combed, and said he didn’t mind.

Whatever happened, he was amenable. Any invitation was acceptable. If she wished to marry him he could go along with that. He had no other plans. I saw that a person as beautiful as Paulo was had become accustomed to trust in the benefits of happenstance.

When I saw them again at the wedding, she was radiant and adoring; he was adored. She had made all the arrangements; he had accepted them -- the white suit, the ring, the ceremony, the feast, the house, the honeymoon, the love and pride she felt in him. All of this was evident though none of it appeared to have changed him nor made him a visibly deeper or more thoughtful man. None of it seemed to have aroused in him the need for something more, different or of his own definition.

Perhaps he’d had no needs that had ever gone unfulfilled, and so no knowledge of the necessity of design. He simply stood and was beautiful, tall and handsome with sociable grace, or sat and was beautiful, with his air of careless freedom. He made conversation with those who approached him, simple chat about the weather or the prices, the kind to put others at ease, or he stood attentively beside the shopkeeper and helped to cut the cake. He was precisely where she wished him to be, his obedience effortless. He felt no cause to look around and study faces or situations, no reason to assay prospects or dangers, no benefit in strategy, no need to think of the future nor to remember the past.

How many others had there been, I wondered, like this eager happy woman? How long would it be until he heard some new invitation and wandered off at that suggestion just as easily? How long before the shopkeeper tired of the constant need of supervision and stepped aside from him a little, wishing once more for the answering friction of a blessed reciprocity?

But Paulo was glorious as he stood there that day in the summer sunshine, his hair gleaming gold in his white suit beside her. He had no curiosity about her nor the people of that town, or at least none that I could see; he was simply there in our tiny enclave of residence surrounded by its vast pastureland because he happened not to be someplace else. On the one hand he was detached from materialism or considerations of provision for the physical; on the other he was offering little beyond his simple form of service. Paulo did not look or see beyond himself.

I was fascinated. I was, or thought I was, the opposite, purposeful at identifying and satisfying my needs. I’d had no time to simply coast, no opportunity to let others lead the way and remembered no instance in my known human existence when anything was that effortless. But now I wondered, what might have happened if I’d eased back a little on that racing throttle and waited, if I’d taken more time and proceeded as Paulo did, with no sense of living at stake? What would have happened if I had proceeded with no grand plan, accepting and following; would I break apart, would I have disintegrated as I so feared or found myself trapped, stranded or in trouble? I imagined, even if I could not imagine it, that Paulo had never been so afraid, nor even mildly inconvenienced.

I finally asked him: Paulo, how do you do it? I watched him smile and glance around at the racks of fine clothes in his wife’s shop and when he shrugged and looked at me with those clear blue eyes I saw that he knew precisely what I meant.

I suppose I’ve had good teachers he said smoothly, turning to his wife at the register, who heard him and smiled back with deep appreciation. She went on taking money from her customer and then looked at me and winked.

I mean about pressure, I persisted, including her in the question; how do you never seem to feel any pressure? He laughed and it was an easy, genteel laugh, full of merriment and good manners, and his wife studied him, as attracted as she had been the first day she had seen him.

You can’t be like him, she said to me; he’s one-of-a-kind, a finished soul, you might say.

The next time I saw him, a few months later, he went to stand at the window of the store, hands in his pockets. It was a slow day for business and his wife had gone to the bank. He was wearing a powder blue cardigan over his shirt in that cool, air-conditioned place. I had seen golf clubs behind the counter. He had a natural gift for the sport, she had told me; he had a natural gift for all sports.

He was Paulo.

You have to not care, he said quietly to me; you have to simply accept.

But Paulo, I said; what if it’s not what you want?

It always is, he said, turning to look at me with those quiet blue eyes.

And I said oh sure, for you it is.

For you too, he answered.

He seemed so quiet that day, so like a spirit that I could not continue my questions and left to contemplate what he had said. I heard from others around town that his wife had been pregnant, but had miscarried. Paulo had gone with her to a grief group, but no one had seen him grieve. I went back then and took him a gift, nothing grand, just a small crucifix. I put it into his hand one afternoon as his wife sat nearby sewing up a hem for a customer. She was bent over her work, though she had given me a quick smile of welcome. Paulo studied the cross for some minutes, turning it over, warming it with his heartbeat, making me wish I could have given him more for that simple thank you.

If I had asked him to come with me, to visit the grave of my husband, he would have done so. He would have let me tell him about the love and the loss and the heartache; he would have listened, would have heard and would have waited. But I didn’t say the words, so he didn’t make the gesture, and the next time I was home, again for the holidays, he was gone.

His wife just shrugged and gave me a sad smile. She said it was probably for the best. He was probably bored with her anyway and with the forsaken nature of our largely abandoned little town. She said he was too handsome for her anyway, and what could she do to entertain a man like him after the new had worn off?

I wanted to wail at her, to shout how wrong she was to have so misjudged Paulo, to have ever let him go, but I said nothing, having been as willing as she was to be so pessimistic. I knew that her words had been my words when I had first seen him. I had assumed he would leave at the first invitation just as he had come, and so had she, and so he had.

If she had assumed he would stay, he’d have done that too.

If I’d said how I wanted him to be there for me as my friend, my brother and my teacher about life, he’d have smiled and said all right. And he’d have done that. But we assumed we meant nothing and because of that we meant nothing. Because we let him go, Paulo left.

I had learned, though it was the hard way, and too late, that we might well have asked for a great deal more. We had let go an Angel.

A Short Story

Josiah  And The Relocation

    The relocation program was what had brought her out there, her and that other woman that had got a job in town.  Josiah saw her at the table at that place where he worked and knew she was different than the women he'd known in his life so far.   He looked at her sitting there stiff in her dress that came from charity and bet this one wouldn't need her face marked up to learn his ways.  She didn't even look around the table at all the men in the hay crew that had come in for dinner that hot day to look at her and that other one. 

    Josiah knew the other one, with her red hair and bold eyes, was trouble, but this one at the table, this one who held herself so still and quiet while the boss man's wife let out their story in her foghorn voice, this one had a dignity about her, a dignity that was not sundered by all the trouble that had led her to this place.  He could see she was older than the redhead, and was maybe someone's widow, with nothing left to lose.  She made his heart go still and quiet to match her, and she made him want to give her shelter. 

    "These here two's been sent down to us by the relocation," the boss's wife was saying, importantly, to the boss.  "I told 'em what you said, as we got no more use for a couple o' worthless women than any more dang dry cows, but that lady says we's signed up for free help and free help's what we got, so."

     The boss grunted his recognition of this fact, and Josiah saw how his face reddened with a deeper heat than what the sun had given off when he looked at the redhead's bold eyes.  His wife saw it, too.

    "This one's got the town job," she said, her chin jutted out at the redhead.  "She's gonna work in the healin' arts, with the doctor."

    Several of the men in the crew grinned at one another, betting they'd find some ailment or other to take them into town.  Josiah kept his eyes on the quiet one, wondering if they would assign her to his crew in the hayfield, wondering if it was possible that she would be made to drive a tractor in that heat and dust of the prairie hayland. 

    "What about this other 'n?" asked the boss.

    His wife gave a derisive snort.

    "Told her what we needed was help in the hayfield," she said, grinning around at the men at her table, playing to all their worst impulses.  "Told her she had t'drive the rakes."

    The old man studied his wife for a long moment, unsure whether to laugh or get angry at the idea of a woman in his hayfield, but then he seemed to recall that she  herself, his own wife, had once driven the rakes back when he hadn't had any other help, and she'd done okay.  Josiah could read the old man's mind remembering they'd all heard his wife brag about it and now the old fellow turned toward Josiah, his foreman and ramrod for all these years that the old man was too old to keep up, and it was clear, he was turning it over to Josiah.  Josiah met his look and nodded.

    "Says she's drove a tractor before," said the old man's wife in the same derisive tone, not believing it.  "Ask her yourself."

    And then, like a miracle made for himself alone, the quiet woman from some other land raised her eyes to Josiah’s as if she knew that he was the one with the power in that room, and she'd been waiting to sense it and to know who she would answer to.  She had deep blue eyes, almost navy blue, as she looked straight into him, and she didn't smile, or shift in her chair.

   "I was raised on a farm," she said, her accented voice quiet and clear. 

    Josiah saw the depth of the grief in her, the measure of her loss, and knew that she didn't care what she did now, at this stage of her life, in this extremity.  All she was doing was just getting through her days. Josiah had known times like that himself. If they wanted her to rake hay, she would rake hay, and she would start with them at sun-up and work with them until sun-down, and she would never even see the other men around her, except as workers. 

    "I told 'em I'd be glad to work in your hayfield, but my skin burns so bad," said the redhead, back by the stove, and the food. 

    She was smiling at the men who were watching her and wishing it was her who had been sent to their fields instead of this silent, steady woman who looked only at Josiah. 

    "I told 'em Maria's skin don't burn,” she said.

    And then she laughed, as if she'd told a joke on all of womankind in general, on all of the skin that women had that burned from the kind of use men could put it to, and the boss's wife chuckled with her, and all of the men around that table suddenly recognized what kind of a woman the redhead was. 

    The only one whose face did not change expression was the quiet woman, whose name was now known as Maria, who remained fixed in her focus on Josiah as the man she would work for.  Maria already knew what the redhead was, and she was watching to see, with a tired look of pessimism, what Josiah would make of it and if he would expect the same thing of her.  But Josiah was not surprised, and he shook his head slightly, not smiling, as he returned Maria's look. 

    "You ever drove a John Deere?" he asked her, quietly. 

    "Yes," she said. "But mostly International Harvester."

    The other men in the hay crew grinned and chuckled among themselves at the idea of a woman who knew the brand names of tractors, and the boss's wife and the redhead began setting the food on the table as if the main part of the show was about to being, and the men began hungrily to eat. 

    Josiah ate too, watching her watch his clean manners.

    "You ever mowed?" he asked then, still in his quiet way, the way he had with the horses he broke and trained. 

    "That was my main job," she answered.

    "Probably broke a lot o' Pittman's an' sickles, I bet, huh," said the old man, eating, trying to inject some joviality into the atmosphere. 

    But the woman just shifted her steady gaze to him briefly, and then back to Josiah.

    "No sir, I did not," she said. 

    "Well hell, we do," said one of the men, laughing roughly. 

    Josiah silenced him with a glance.

    "Watch your language," he said in his way that meant what he said. 

    There was a general silence then, as everyone in the room, the women at the stove and the old man and the five other crew members at the table, and Maria, recognized in Josiah's words and tone that an old banked fire was burning hot inside him, and had led him to take a position none other would soon dare to challenge, lest it bring out the knife in his boot.  Only the old man, who paid Josiah's wages, could be the first to speak in that dead space behind his words.

    "Well now, seems like you think we got ourselves a lady, ain't that right, son," he said around his food.  He had winked up at his wife and at the redhead. 

    Josiah looked across at the woman, whose name was Maria, and said nothing, because he didn't have to. It was clear in his black eyes, and in his tanned face, lined by the years of work and weather and hard times, that he did indeed believe she was a lady, and that he intended for her to be treated so.  He saw that Maria saw what he believed, and that she could guess about the knife in his boot. There was a quiet wisdom in those navy blue eyes that he was pleased to see.

    "Well," said the boss's wife, clearing her throat in an unnecessary way.  "She may be a lady to you, Josiah, but as we got nothin' out here for the hired help to sleep in but the bunkhouse, maybe you wanta take her into that trailer house with you, huh."

    She laughed a nasty laugh, and the redhead chimed in, commenting that she guessed if she'd known the deal came with a man included, she might of jumped at driving those rakes instead of the doctor.  The men at the table, all except for the boss, kept their attention on their plates lest their hot-headed crew chief, who was known to flare into open warfare, have a reason to notice them.  Josiah kept his own attention at the center of the table, and on himself, and then looked into Maria's eyes.

    "She can stay with me," he said, daring anyone to laugh.

    There was a short pause, as Maria nodded and gave him the barest hint of a very tired smile.  She’d had worse offers and far worse company.

    "Thank-you," she said, in her quiet way.

    "Oh you can't stay with him -- !" said the boss's wife, registering sudden, belated alarm.  "I only meant it as a joke, for heaven's sake.  Why he's -- !"

    She didn't say Josiah was an Indian by his mother's side, a white man only by what little was known of his father.  She left the accusation hanging in the air, making a wordless round-eyed plea toward her husband, aghast as she was, all of a sudden, at the prospect of such a scandal on her own ranch, the product of her own simple doing gone wrong.

    "Delbert, do something -!" she said to her elderly husband, who was smiling at her in his grizzled, bemused fashion.  Clearly, he enjoyed these jams she got herself into.  He shrugged, wiping up the gravy on his plate with a thick hunk of bread.

    "Seems t'me you done all the doing there might o' been done by it already, woman," he said. 

    "Well, for heaven's sake, I didn't mean -- !" said the wife.

    She was looking in horrified despair at Josiah and at Maria and thinking ahead to her church group and her club meetings and what all the women would say who were already a fairly clear cut above her in class and culture and breeding and background. She settled her blind rat's stare on Maria at last, as if it were all her fault now, all this embarrassment.

    "Well, I never meant you had to go sleep with that half-breed," she said, huffy and spiteful.  "Just because you come in here half-black yourself thinkin' we owe you somethin' due to some kind o’ fake ref-u-gee status, eatin' our food, you just see if you get away with this, you miserable beggar -- !"

    Maria had stood up during this tirade, and had taken up her flimsy raincoat, which was her only other possession besides the cotton housedress she had on and gestured toward the still-empty plate at the table where she'd sat.

     "I never ate your food, Mrs. Hutchins," she said.  "And I never will."

    Josiah, who had finished his own meal and had stood up with her, moved to precede her to the door, and to hold it open.  He was a tall man, lean and hard from his years of work, and it gave him pleasure to place his battered cowboy hat over his gleaming black hair and lean down now, to open the door for her.  He was glad for his long bow legs and his strong brown arms and hands and the way he could stride beside her to his old pick-up truck with his saddle in the back, and open that door for her too. He would open every door that they came to, all the rest of her life, if she would allow him to. And when she turned to face him before she stepped inside, her jaw still clenched from what had happened at the house, he felt the charge of her intensity. She lay her hand over where his heart might be inside his shirt, and he placed his own hand over hers, feeling the quick warmth of her contact out there in that sunshine.

    "I'll be no trouble," she said softly. 

    And Josiah knew that he had known from the very beginning, from when he had first seen her, that this was the truth upon which all her other truth rested.  She would be no trouble. Causing trouble meant worse trouble even than this. He had made a few of those same choices himself.

    He drove his truck with her in it far down into the hills, mile after mile, to the small silver trailer house underneath the stand of cottonwood trees where he lived alone, with half a dozen horses in a corral with a windmill. He never thought to be ashamed of his circumstances and she rode alongside him all that long way without talk, only turning now and then to smile her quiet smile at him as she noticed some especially beautiful setting of a lake or a stand of planted trees or the windswept grass rolling like waves in a sea as it drifted over the dunes.  Josiah felt that he had been riding like that with her for the best part of his life already and that she already shared with him everything he loved about that country and most of what his ancestors had known about its harvests from her own land.  And when he parked his truck underneath his trees and came around to open her door he saw how she was looking at the horses, and saw with what a deep divine hunger she was taking them in -- those great shining graceful and powerhouse creatures standing by his water tank in the sun -- and he led her over to the corral fence to have a closer look.  She reached through the planks to rest her hand -- and Josiah saw what a strong hand it was -- on the nearest warm sorrel flank, and he observed how the horse leaned into her touch and how the others shifted toward her, unafraid on instinct, eager to be handled.

    "Only two of 'em's mine," he said.  "The others I train for people."

    She smiled her direct, restrained smile, and he saw how the lines deepened around the corners of her mouth and knew how a husband must have loved her for that woman's look of pleasure and acknowledgement.  The wind drifted through the trees across them as they stood looking at one another, and her hair, which was tied up in a gray-blond braid like a crown around her head, shone softly in the hot summer sun.  Josiah believed he loved her then as much as it was possible to love a woman.

    "I'll need to borrow some work clothes," she said quietly, with both dignity and apology, reminding him of the work she was expected to perform in the hayfield.

    He nodded and was then able by that good excuse to escort her inside his trailer house. He was glad that he was clean, that his dishes were done, that his bed was made. He saw how she touched the dark polished wood of his counter-top and how she took in the compact tidiness of the place.  She met his eyes, everything about her aware, as he knew she would be, of the bed.  And Josiah, who had been aware of little else, could not help but stand closer, could not but touch her bare arm in that blue flowered house dress, that hand-me-down garment besides which she so clearly had little else. 

    "If you would do me the honor," he said, his hands on her shoulders, holding her like some precious jewel between his hands; "I will not hurt you." 

    She nodded slowly, her deep gaze studying him and measuring him, but as with so much else, having no choice. He had no way of knowing what was the memory in her mind or how much pain he might cause to her forcibly relocated heart; he just knew that he could have it no other way than this way, laying his claim.  Still, she wept, and by that he knew that her grief was not so well buried that it did not return in terrible heaving cries as from an animal caught and dying, from having been reminded in his arms of better times and younger days. He held her, watching her worn face, combing out her thick hair from its gray braid with his fingers, until she finally slept. 

    It was early the next day before they got back out to the hayfield -- her in an old pair of his jeans, rolled up at the ankle, with a clean work shirt and a spare straw hat.  Josiah put her up on his own mowing outfit with the double cutting bars and a harness on the front for scaring small animals away from the blades. He took the second mowing tractor for himself, following and watching and mowing inside her lines, directing the others to the rakes, sweeps and stackers, and they worked in tandem all that day and for the rest of the summer, to harvest Mr. Hutchins' hay. 

     The men in the hay crew would have bothered her had the two of them not been so clearly a pair, and Mrs. Hutchins would have made meals unbearable had they not packed their own food and water to the fields each day, taking their dinners in his truck.  As it was, old Mr. Hutchins watched her from the stacker and took note of the clean way she mowed, as good as any man could do, he said to the others, and when the time came to write out the paychecks, he wrote out two for Josiah, doubling his pay for having made a home for this silent woman stranger that his wife had so misjudged, and Josiah saw that Maria nodded. 

    He had bought her a ring on the day when they first went to town for boots in her size, and they were married with her in a nicer dress from the thrift shop and him in his town jeans and shirt.  The Priest pronounced those holy words of matrimony upon them in an empty chapel one evening with no one present but the parish housekeeper and when they came out of the Church hand-in-hand, shy in the early twilight of late autumn, they could feel the old Priest's smile on their backs on their way out of town.  They were not young anymore, Josiah and Maria, and this wedding was their only protection against the crew and the town and women like Mrs. Hutchins who would find a way to burn them out when the work was done, if they had that excuse. Though they seldom spoke of their past associations, only sometimes about childhood or work they had done or other places they had been, both bore the look of refugees who had been burned out before. Josiah was an Apache Indian, which gave him lifetimes of age behind his eyes, and Maria had lived through a war her grandfathers and fathers had fought, and lost, which gave her age beyond bearing. Both knew what they had found by God’s mercy and gift, a partnership formed in an instant of instinct, and that it would keep them alive if they were careful, and perhaps even give them reason for living.

    And so, when the work was done for the summer and the hay was moved up next to the Hutchins' main place where they could feed his cattle in the winter, and before it was time to sort off the several thousand head of calves he would sell in the fall, Mr. Hutchins invited all his hands for a special Sunday supper, as was his custom each year.  He could say good-bye to the hay crew for another year, and he would re-establish his primary dependence on Josiah and the one other man he kept on for the work of the winter with the cattle and the fencing, and it was a good time for looking back over the year and ahead to the next.

    But still Maria sat stiffly at their outdoor picnic table with Josiah, saying nothing and not eating, and the other men's wives eyed her uneasily, as they did Josiah, and tried to break the ice by remarking upon the nice rings he had placed upon her hands.  Mrs. Hutchins tried not to be astounded that there had been a wedding about which she'd been entirely uninformed and she started a dozen or more sentences which she could not finish, for fear of what she might say.  And after the meal they were separated -- the men going out to the corral to see a new horse Mr. Hutchins had bought and the women coming in the house to do the dishes -- but it wasn't long before Josiah, who had been keeping an eye on the door of the house, saw that Maria had left that other company and was striding out toward where he had saddled Mr. Hutchins' new horse to buck him out, as was his job.  She came inside the corral and Josiah waited, his face shaded from the sun by his hat, leaning back against the wooden planks with the snubbed-up and heaving horse, watching her.  He could see that she was as angry as the last time they had been in that house and he grieved at his inability to spare her, for all that he had tried to give her the right armor, what the women of that life could still do to her.  He knew too that the men on the fence were waiting with grinning faces to see how their hard-minded foreman, a man who had marked up women's faces in the past, would handle what was coming now from his half-white wife.

    "Somethin' happen in there?"

    She nodded, her stare hard. 

    "She tried to make me clean her bathrooms," she said in a way the others could hear. 

    Josiah shifted his posture and whistled softly. He looked at the house in a way that spoke of fire one of these fine nights, if it wasn’t for the old man, and then reached to take her hand, which clenched around his.

    "I told her it was my Sabbath day, and I did no work, especially not her dirty work, to keep my Sabbath holy," she said. 

    Josiah stared into her eyes, oblivious of the men on the fence and also very much aware of them, very aware of the dirty work they were having him do -- had always had him do -- on his Sabbath day.  He saw the set jaw of his fine wife, Maria, and how her pride was settling like a mantle down around him, too, and how maybe they could both afford to have a little self-respect now, the two of them together. They were God's people, honoring the Sabbath. 

    "Sounds like a real good philosophy," he said. 

    He saw how she understood him, and how she glanced at the visibly unbroken horse snubbed up tight to the fence just waiting to try to buck him off, and how she also saw the row of men waiting to watch it happen, men who hated him for his blood and for his skill and for the knife in his boot and for all the times he had beaten them and their kind until they spoke to him now with respect, and how they were just hoping against hope that maybe this time, finally, Josiah would be the one to get hurt. So maybe he didn't need to do their dirty work anymore either. He saw that wisdom coming into her mind as it came into his. He nodded, looking around at the faces, at the men who hated him but had to work with him, at old Mr. Hutchins who used him to run his big place, to remind himself of what he could remember of his own better hell-raising days, and paid him well for it, and he nodded again. 

    He gave Maria the second she needed to climb up out of the way, and then turned and unhitched the horse, stepping back as it reared over backward. He opened the gate as it scrambled up and slammed its back feet into the lower planks below the gallery of the suddenly scrambling watchers. It was a completely wild horse, its eyes rolling and insane, caught and cornered and murderously well defended, now that it was loose, and then it was out the gate, free of them, bucking and crow-hopping and bawling out across the prairie.  How he had ever caught it in the first place or would ride it was just who he was, but was also their wager that some day he couldn’t. Josiah looked up at Mr. Hutchins then, at where he sat grinning on the top plank of his corral, chewing on a toothpick, admiring his foreman and his horse and his entire outfit. 

    "Might come back in a day or two, get that horse into the trailer," said Josiah. 

    Mr. Hutchins nodded, re-adjusting his hat.

    "Sure thing, son," he said.  "Whatever you think's right."

    The other men, though clearly disappointed that they were to be cheated of their show, said nothing, and Mr. Hutchins followed Josiah and Maria out to their pick-up truck, talking all the way about the great plans he had for the place next spring, the good new bulls he would buy, the better blooded horses, the fine new equipment. 

    "Far's that goes, maybe even pull in a little bigger trailer house for you 'n the lady," he was saying at Josiah's window, eyeing him and Maria.  "No reason you folks can't have what you need."

    Josiah stared out ahead and then turned to the old man.

    "We got what we need, sir," he said quietly.  "But thanks anyway."

    And then they drove away.