Blood Land (3 page)

Light, diffused by the storm, began its retreat. Pruett could no longer see the spattered earthen floor in the shallow hole. He kissed the cold metal urn and bent stiffly, placing Bethy’s ash remains in the ground. He picked up a shovelful of muddy earth, but stopped short of dropping it in.

His wife would have demanded a prayer; would have said no body deserved burying in the ground without some words spoken to God on behalf of its soul.

Anger notwithstanding, Pruett did his best to speak to God:

“We've had our disagreements. Neither one of us lives up to the other. I can't apologize for that now. Don't want to. But I loved Bethy with everything I had. And she loved you. Now, since you took her from me, I am asking you to open the gates of heaven wide. You welcome her into your arms, because she's never done anything to hurt another living soul, and she damn well deserves it. Amen.”

He stared again at the shovel in his hands.

Tools felt nothing.

They existed only to make trails for men; to build homes for them; to make their lives more productive.

And tools existed to bury them.

Arthritis seared Pruett’s joints as he dropped the muddied earth on Bethy. Towering there in the freezing mist—implement in hand, prostrate inside—Pruett lamented the will of God. 

“One of these days

I'm gonna run
I'm gonna leave these fields behind

To find what's over the horizon
One of these days

I'm gonna go
When you look at me

you're not gonna see a scarecrow.”

Montgomery Gentry,

Scarecrow

“CATTLE THIEVES beware.”

The auditorium barely contained Professor Hanson’s booming voice. The students’ chatter pursued a hasty diminuendo. Rustling papers stopped rustling; the girl smacking gum in the front row paused.

The only sound left to Hanson was his ego, serenading him.

Hanson was tall and lanky, with so little fat that his features looked as if they’d been chiseled from stone. He was not handsome, exactly—too skinny for that—but he had an intriguing look about him; a look that drew people in, and his perfect blue eyes looked as if they’d been intentionally etched by a divine artist to fit his gauntness and bring it to life.

Still, were he to stand unmoving at night, outlined in shadow, one might believe a scarecrow had come in from the field for a dutiful rest.

“Given the choice between burning alive or being cut down by a truckload of gunfire,” he said, “which do you choose?”

The gravity of the question was intentional—it was, after all, the segue to the lecture’s core.

“Another question: would any of you…would
I
…have the temerity to write an entire journal while facing imminent
execution?”

Years ago, when a younger version of Hanson had commanded the courtrooms, the galleries came to expect rapture. Lecturing to a hundred college students proved more of a challenge. They constituted a collectively fickle will. Prone to boredom, likely to move in one direction as well as another; they were not unlike pieces of driftwood on the shoulders of wide, ever-changing current.

 “Nate Champion, a poor cattle rancher—a man who didn’t even own the property on which he ran his nominal twenty head of livestock—was murdered in eighteen ninety-two by the hired guns of the Cattlegrower’s Association of Johnson County. Anyone care to guess why?”

No takers. The fear he might pluck a name from thin air was palpable. His reputation from the Law College preceded him, and Hanson enjoyed the ambiance of discomfort such possibility instilled.

 “Moving on,” he said, mercifully. “It was uncomplicated, like the razing of the countryside while civilization moved westward. The Johnson County War was nothing more than a systemic reality taught to us by history: the politically staked, super-rich—in this case, cattle barons—making themselves richer on the backs of the poor, uneducated proletariat. What happened in this part of Wyoming’s history is no worldly mystery. It is a microcosm of the way society has always been.

The words hung there like ephemeral wisps of winter breath.

“Nate Champion made a courageous stand. He owned a single handgun, had a few reloads, and one knife. He took out a few of those who intended to steal from him one of the only valuable things he owned—his life. But it was hard to make do against those kinds of odds. We’re talking
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
here.
Bonnie and Clyde
.”

He paused.

“Scream versus the babysitter.
”

A ripple of laughter.

 “There was no storybook ending coming. No hero in the midst. The mob started piling Champion’s own firewood against the cabin, meaning to burn him down or flush him out. Either way, the mob didn’t care because it was the same end result.

Lucky for posterity, Champion had been writing journal entries all along. While the bullets tore the cabin apart—with his friend lying dead in a pool of blood outside the front door—Champion put down his final testament.

Here is what he wrote last, just before he signed the final page, stuffed the book in his shirt pocket, and broke out the back door to a hail of gunfire:

‘
Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me so we could watch all sides at once….Well, they have just got through shelling the house like hell. I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break when night comes, if alive. Shooting again. It's not night yet. The house is all fired. Goodbye, boys, if I never see you again.
’”

Professor Hanson let the words hang there. The symphony conductor, holding forth his baton; the notes still resonating.

“Land,” he said quietly. “In the end, it wasn’t the cattle. You can own a thousand automobiles, but if you don’t have the highways to drive them on, they are just so many parts.

And owning livestock isn’t like owning cars. Cattle
breed
. You can grow a herd,
but not if there’s no land to put them on
.

Free-grazing, cattle rustling, ‘don’t fence me in’…it’s all about the same song.

Woody Guthrie had a great thought:

‘
This land is your land, this land is my land
’.

But not in Johnson County.

Not then, and not now.

The great state of Wyoming, perhaps more than any other, was built on the value of the land, and it is the value of the land that makes her both wonderful and as dangerous as a merciless, murderous posse.”

Hanson stood. Surveyed the sea of flesh-colored ovals. He’d infused them with his interpretation of the song. He walked languidly around to stand at the front of the lectern, his posture both reflective and authoritarian.

“How many have heard of the murder in Wind River?”

A surprising number of hands.

“Brother murdering sister, it’s not a pleasant thing. But when one pays particular attention to history, and to the current stakes, not entirely unexpected.”

A lone student rose in the center of young adults. Hanson recognized her. Wendy Steele, one of his best students. Older than most of these young ones, yet declared pre-Law.

“I thought you were an attorney,” Wendy Steele said.

 “Retired,” said Hanson.

“I can see why,” she said, loudly.

“Excuse me. Ms. Steele, isn’t it?”

“I believe the legal system presumes a person innocent until determined guilty by a jury of peers,” she said flatly. “One would think a defense attorney to be intimate with this basic core of his profession.”

“I think you’ve found the wrong class, madam,” Hanson said in his best lawyerly tone. He was reaching deep for his courtroom swagger. Steele’s surety and tenacious accusation surprised him; he needed a reacquisition of equilibrium.

“This is
Wyoming History
,” Hanson stated. “My law classes gather in a different building altogether.”

“As do your principles, apparently,” Wendy Steele said.

A snicker from the rear. A few gasps.

Hanson just stood there.

Statuesque.

Incredulous.

Spellbound.

Unsure of whether his mouth was truly agape or whether it was simply the jaw of his ego.

She’d sabotaged his entire concerto. Skewered him in front of his student body. Worse, he felt an embarrassingly cool attraction.

One predator’s respect for the other?

There was no time to decide. Wendy Steele picked up her backpack and, deftly as she had attacked, climbed the stairs, two at a time. Up and away—away from the muted, smitten presence of the great J.W. Hanson.

The wind takes few holidays in Laramie, Wyoming. It sweeps over and down from the Medicine Bow forest. Right to left; front to back; top to bottom. More often than not, it’s all of them in the same few minutes. One moment it will swirl in place, aimless and punch drunk—as if it’s forgotten what it came for. Then it will suddenly blow all its force directly under a person, rendering them near weightless; as if they will relinquish their belief in the physical laws of the earthbound and fly away.

To the environmentalist, wind is the power of the future. To the physicist, it is not an entity at all but, rather, equalization: air rushing from a zone of high pressure to one of lower.

Pressure and time formed much of the earth. The historian learned the same lesson regarding society. Professor J.W. Hanson knew that history proved society a construct of the various pressures of the ages, both sociological and technological:

Race.

Industry.

Religion.

Classes.

For Wyoming it was the pressure between ranchers and free-grazers; the Cavalry and Native Americans; women and the vote.

Most recently, because of the gas boom in many parts of the state, it was between those with mineral rights and those without.

Hanson actually summarized his own theories of the social strife in an interview he did with a reporter from the
Laramie Boomerang
:

“
In every county, township, or parcel, regardless of population or relevance, there is high pressure, low pressure, and the force of greed between.
”

Friday night at the Buckskin, the crowd surged with the explosive release of a week’s tension. A few hardscrabble regulars sat at the bar, but the pool tables and other open areas teemed with young men and women in the prime of their lives.

Professor Hanson sat at his usual table in the corner, near the basement stairs. It was the best observation point in the place and the least likely to suffer the hips and elbows of drunks. One sip into a two-finger whiskey, Hanson noticed Wendy Steele. She was looking at him across the room; a partial smile bent her left cheek, belying the hostility of their first brief encounter.

She walked over, dressed in tight Wrangler jeans, a belt with an oversized rodeo buckle, a white cotton sweater, and red boots. She carried a half-empty bottle of beer; her gait was keen and clearly unaffected.

“May I sit down?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard.

The smile was authentic, so Hanson acquiesced, pointed to the empty chair, and sipped at his drink apathetically. He tried to hide his admiration of her sturdy beauty—tomboyish, unbreakable, she carried both rural curves and soft, womanly swells. Her eyes were haunting, charcoal windows that promised you no access to the complications that lay deep within.

Hanson knew several faculty members who ignored the largely unenforceable rule against teacher-student relations. His own abstinence was far less ethical than practical. Adherence to principle was, in the absence of opportunity, simple mathematical surety. Wendy Steele was a young, beautiful woman with a sovereign intelligence—there was no reason for him to fear the possibility of opportunity, though a strange, oblong throe in his gut made him strangely sorry for the fact.

“As you walked from the midst of my class, you must have been thinking, ‘
That asshole is not from Wyoming
’.”

“I’ve thought it.”

“Would it surprise you to know I was born in Buffalo?”

Wendy took a pull on her beer. “No, but you graduated from Penn Law. You spent your best years in New York. You’re no more Wyoming than Wall Street.”

Hanson’s ego bristled. Externally, he forced a grin.

“Touché.” Less pithy than he’d intended.

“And yet you came back,” she said.

“
This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past,
” Hanson said.

“Agathon,” Steele said. “They teach Greek poetry at the state schools, just like in the Ivy League.”