THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021 53
C
ary was out of likely places to
cross. The five-strand ranch fence
was on the county line, ran south,
and would guide him to the canyon and
the wild grasslands beyond. He could go
all the way to Coal Mine Rim and a view
dropping into the Boulder Valley. Due
south he could see the national forest,
the bare stones and burned tree stubs
from the last big forest fire. After the fire,
a priest who loved to hike had found
nineteenth-century wolf traps chained to
trees. The flames and smoke had towered
forty thousand feet into the air, a firestorm
containing its own weather, lightning
aloft, smoke that could be seen on sat-
ellite in Wisconsin. The foreground was
grassland but it had been heavily grazed.
In the middle of this expanse, a stock-
ade, where sheep were gathered at night
to protect them from bears and coyotes,
had collapsed. The homestead where
Cary’s dad had grown up and where Cary
himself had spent his earliest years was
in a narrow canyon perpendicular to the
prevailing winds, barely far enough below
the snow line to be habitable. Around
his waist, in a hastily purchased Walmart
fanny pack, he carried his father’s ashes
in the plastic urn issued by the funeral
home, along with the cremation certifi-
cate that the airline required.
Once, these prairies had been full of
life and hope. The signs were everywhere:
abandoned homes, disused windmills,
straggling remnants of apple orchards,
the dry ditches of hand-dug irrigation
projects, a cracked school bell, the piston
from an old sheep-shearing engine. Where
had everyone gone? It was a melancholy
picture, but maybe it shouldn’t have been.
Perhaps everyone had gone on to better
things. Cary knew enough of the local
families to know that things weren’t so
bad; some had got decidedly more com-
fortable, while claiming glory from the
struggles of their forebears. Where the first
foothills broke toward the Yellowstone, a
big new house had gone up. It had the
quality of being in motion, as though it
were headed somewhere. It had displaced a
hired man’s shack, a windmill, a cattle scale,
and had substituted hydrangeas and lawn.
A
fter his father died, Cary had flown
to Tampa and then driven north to
the retirement community where his dad
had ended his days in a condominium
that had grown lonely in his widowhood.
Cary sped through the Bible Belt, where
“we the people” were urged to impeach
Barack Obama. The billboards along this
troubling highway offered a peculiar array
of enticements: needlepoint prayers, alli-
gator skulls, gravity deer feeders, pecan
rolls, toffee. “All-nude bar with showers.”
“Vasectomy reversal.” “Sinkhole remedi-
ation.” “Laser Lipo: Say goodbye to muf-
fin tops and love handles!” “It’s a Small
World. I know. I made it.—The Lord.”
A car displayed a sign that said “I work
to cruise” and a cartoon ocean liner run-
ning the full length of the rear window,
with an out-of-scale sea captain waving
from its bridge.
We the people.
Cary thought that his old man had
had a pretty great American life. He’d
lived on the homestead through grade
school, attended a small Lutheran col-
lege in the Dakotas, flown a Douglas A-4
Skyhawk named Tumblin’ Dice in Viet-
nam, worked as an oil geologist all over
the world, outlived his wife and their
mostly happy marriage by less than a year,
spent only ten days in hospice care, watch-
ing his songbird feeders and reading the
Wall Street Journal while metastatic pros-
tate cancer destroyed his bones. “Can’t
rip and run like I used to,” he’d warned
Cary on the phone. He’d died with his
old cat, Faith, in his lap. He’d once said
to Cary, “In real psychological terms, your
life is half over at ten.” For him, ten had
meant those homestead years, wolf traps
in the barn, his dog, Chink, a .22 rifle,
bum lambs to nurture, his uneducated
parents, who spoke to him in a rural En-
glish he remembered with wry wonder:
as an adult, he’d still sometimes referred
to business disputes as “defugalties” or
spoken of people being “in Dutch.” The
old pilot had observed himself in his hos-
pice bed, chuckled, and said, “First a
rooster, then a feather duster.” His doc-
tor had given him a self-administered
morphine pump and shown him how to
use it sparingly or on another setting: “If
you put it there, you’ll go to sleep and
you won’t wake up.” His warrior buddies
at the retirement community had held a
small service, with tequila shots and music
on a homemade CD that finished with
a loop of “The Letter,” which played until
a carrier mechanic who’d serviced Tum-
blin’ Dice replaced it with “Taps.”
Cary didn’t spend long at the condo—
long enough to meet the Realtor, long
enough to pick up a few things, includ-
ing photographs of himself up to sixteen.
What an unattractive child I was, he
thought. The rest were shots of aircraft,
pilots, crews, flight decks. Judging by the
framed pictures, his mother was forever
twenty-two. He took his father’s Air
Medal, which was missing the ribbon
but had fascinated him as a child, with
its angry eagle clasping lightning bolts.
“That bird,” he’d called it. He put it in
his pocket and patted the pocket. He
took the black-and-white photograph of
his great-grandfather’s corral, with the
loading chute and the calf shed, and
the distant log house. “We lived in the
corral,” his father had joked. He’d told
Cary plainly that he had grown up poor.
He remembered his grandfather, who’d
started the ranch, prying the dimes off
his spurs to buy tobacco, sticking cotton
in the screens to keep the flies out. The
old fellow had spanked him only once,
and it was for deliberately running over
a chicken with a wheelbarrow. Cary’s
great-grandfather was a cowboy, who
moved through cattle like smoke, who
could sew up a prolapsed cow in the dark
with shoelaces and hog rings. His only
child, Cary’s grandfather, had detested
the place, had done almost no work, and
had lost everything but the homestead
to an insurance company. A tinkerer and
a handyman, a tiny man with a red nose
in a tilted ball cap, he ran the projector
at the movie theatre in town. When
Cary’s father was home from the war, he
took him to see his grandfather up in the
booth; Cary remembered the old man
pulling the carbon rods out of the pro-
jector to light his cigarettes. An unpleas-
ant geezer, he’d peered at Cary as though
he couldn’t quite put his finger on the
connection between them, and said, “Well,
well, well.” Years later, his father said, as
though shooing something away, “Dad
was a failure, always flying off the han-
dle. My mother ran away during the war
to build ships. Never seen again, never
in touch, had me and vamoosed. Dad
used to look at me and talk to himself:
‘Can’t figger out why the little sumbitch
is swarthy.’ Went broke trying to sell pres-
sure cookers. Once left a town in Idaho
in disguise. He told me it was plumb hard
to be born on unlucky land.” In the pro-
jection booth, Cary’s grandfather said
that he was busy and told Cary to get
lost. Cary’s father stayed behind, and Cary
