ACT II
The land came first, before fences and survey lines, before any man gave it a name. It rose where the plains were cut and set apart, a long shelf of red and buff stone, cleaved clean by time and by water that no longer runs. The face of it shows the work of ages. Soft strata lie exposed to the eye. Caliche holds to the ribs of the country like old mortar. Iron in the soil stains the cuts a deep rust, and the wind lifts that color into the air so that even the light seems to have passed through some ancient fire.
The sky is not a roof here. It is not a border. It is a widening, a great bowl turned over and set upon the earth. In the morning it comes pale and thin, a washed linen that brightens without hurry. By noon it is a hard and level blue, a clear burn that makes the distance look close enough to touch. At evening it softens again, and the edges of things glow, and the old breaks, gullies and shelves, seem to breathe.
Grass holds where it can. Buffalo and bluestem each claiming what rain and soil will allow. In the hollows the grass grows thick and pale and full of seeds. On the crawl of the slope it is clipped short by wind and hoof. Yucca lifts green spears that do not concede. Prickly pear sets down to the light like flat green stones. Mesquite puts up thorn and leaf, starved and elegant, each tree making a private shadow that a steer will learn by heart. Sand sage runs low and silver, a taste of salt in the air where it grows.
In summer the light is a weight. It settles on tin and stone, on horn and hide, and it stays there until the sun gives it up. The wind runs long and thin over the top, whistling a single note in wire and grass, then fades, then starts again. Heat comes up from the red soil, dust hangs in the still places, and a man could read time by the ripple of air above a fence post. The stock tanks pull a circle of green out of the ground and throw bright coins of reflection at the sky. Dragonflies write brief sentences over the water. Cattle stand in the shallows with a patience that looks like wisdom.
In winter nothing is false. Cold moves in without flourish. A blue front drops from the north and the temperature falls as if a hand had removed the fire from the room. The windmill shudders and clicks as it takes hold, the tail vane squares itself to the new wind, and the pump begins its steady talk with the aquifer. Ice feathers along the edges of the tank and the grass turns crisp underfoot. The air smells like iron, like old stone, like something clean enough to hurt.
The rain comes in fits and is always a matter of argument. Some years it passes and leaves a dark line on the horizon to show where it went. Some years it comes upright and honest, a curtain that sweeps across the pasture so that the cattle are there and then not there, and then there again with water crawling slick down the notch of the back. The land does not beg and it does not complain. It takes what is given. It remembers.
There are sounds if you stand still for them. The creak and settle of a cabin that has known a hundred days of wind. Tin on the roof that warms and cools and answers both acts with the same small tic. The pulley and sucker rod in the wellhead counting its strokes. A meadowlark stringing yellow music across a fence line. Coyotes lifting a thread of song that climbs the cold air and thins to nothing. Cattle talk in low notes, a language of distance and reassurance. The wind speaks without grammar, long vowels over the open land, a consonant hiss in the broom weed, a quick whisper through cholla spines.
Night is not an ending here. It is a letting in. The sky turns black and the stars take their time coming forward. First the bright ones, then the fainter ones, then the clouded sash that belongs to no single place. The horizon goes wide and the eye learns new measures. Far lightning walks the edge of the world with silent steps. An owl will take a line of air across the tank and leave no word of it behind. The earth cools. Smell returns, clean and mineral, a drift of cedar smoke if there is any, the cold fat scent of cattle standing their ground.
The cabin is a modest thing and it has the right to be here. Cedar posts, a scarred door, a squared table under a small window that allows the morning to enter without ceremony. The boards are gray with sun and rain. Shoes and boots have known the stretcher on the porch. Mud has fallen from them and baked hard and fallen again. A hat peg keeps its history without remark. At the back a shallow shelf holds the tools that outlast owners. A coffee tin of nails, a knife with a new edge and an old handle, a roll of baling wire that can put right nearly anything that goes wrong. The bed is short on romance and long on rest. The place smells of dust and pine pitch and the faint old sweetness of feed.
Water is pulled from the ground by hand and by wind. The wellhead looks simple, a pipe and a pump and a tank. Under the surface there is a column of water that has traveled through sand and rock for the length of a patient story. It arrives without speaking. It shows itself in a steady trickle and the trough darkens. The light on that water is not like other light. It is close to a blessing. Birds come, then bees, then the cattle. The cattle arrive like sure ideas. They drink with deep and clean gulps. They step away and share the shade.
The breaks below the cap are red and cunning. They hold trick water after a storm. They hold shelter when the wind has sharp teeth. A fox knows each cut and each back trail. A horned lizard will slow its heart and become the color of the soil until the danger passes. The bones of old things lie shallow and do not ask for notice. A shard of bottle green from some hand that passed through thirty years ago glows among the pebbles like a small truth.
Distance is not a number here. It is a feeling. The eye will rest on a stand of cottonwoods that look near and friendly and you will walk to them and they will stay where they are. The land is honest in every other way. It asks for no praise and it accepts no argument. It will give you the measure of yourself in silence. It will give you work to do if you stay. It will take the sound of your voice and flatten it out and hand it back to you plain.
Storms build without hurry. A bank of cloud stands up along the far rim and grows until it is its own small county. Shadows walk the fields in long steps. Wind runs ahead of the rain to tell the grass what is coming. The first drops are cold enough to make a body laugh, and then the laugh is taken by the noise. Hail leaves its white punctuation in the grass and melts to nothing as if it had never come. Afterward the air is washed and smells of clay. The birds approve. The light returns to its work.
There are days when the sky is a clean sheet and the sun writes with a fine hand. There are days when the wind treats every living thing as an equal. There are nights when the cold comes in close and sets its teeth gently on the bare wrist and reminds the flesh that it is part of something older. There are mornings when the frost has traced delicate laws upon every wire and stem, laws that will be repealed by nine o’clock.
Nothing here is new. That is its promise. A man can go to ground in a place like this and find that the ground had been waiting without concern. The old paths are still readable, cattle trails stitched across the slope in a brown thread, deer slots in the soft dust near the tank, a two-track fading off toward a gate that hangs on its memory of square. A hawk will hang at a fixed point in the air and consider its business. Shadows of cloud walk slow. The land receives every step without drama.
If there is welcome here it is not a human welcome. It is the welcome of a thing that has no reason to lie. The wind will sit you down and take your measure. The light will tell you what hour it is without apology. Water will offer what it has and then save the rest. You can bring a whole life with you, loud and complicated, and the land will set it down, piece by piece, until only the parts that matter remain. The rest will blow away without fuss.
Toward evening the caprock gives back the day in small coins of light. Each stone and blade and thorn holds a little sun and then lets it go. Bats turn on their secret hinges and begin their dark harvest. The windmill takes its last few turns and the rod in the well goes quiet. The tank holds a round of dull gold in its center, then silver, then only a memory of both.
Night gathers by degrees. Stars come forward in ranks and file. The rim of the land draws a hard circle around the world and for a long time nothing moves. Then a small sound begins, the kind that is there even when you think it is not, and the country breathes. The cabin keeps its counsel. The sky keeps its counsel. The earth rolls forward whether a man is watching or not.
This is a high, spare country, honest to the bone, harsh when it chooses, kind in ways that do not flatter. It will not call you by name. It will make room for you if you behave properly. It will show you the size of your questions. It will not answer them. It will hold them until morning, and then the wind will come up, and the light will return to its work, and the day will be new because the land is old.