Crow Fair: Stories

Prairie Girl

When the old brothel — known as the Butt Hut — closed down, years ago, the house it had occupied was advertised in the paper: “Home on the river: eight bedrooms, eight baths, no kitchen. Changing times force sale.” The madam, Miriam Lawler, an overweight elder in the wash dresses of a ranch wife, beloved by her many friends, and famous for having crashed into the drive-up window of the bank with her old Cadillac, died and was buried at an exuberant funeral, and all but one of the girls dispersed. Throughout the long years that the institution had persevered, the girls had been a constantly changing guard in our lively old cow town. Who were they? Some were professionals from as far away as New Orleans and St. Louis. A surprising number were country schoolteachers, off for the summer. Some, from around the state, worked a day or two a week but were otherwise embedded in conventional lives. When one of them married a local, the couple usually moved away, and over time our town lost a good many useful men — cowboys, carpenters, electricians. This pattern seemed to land most heavily on our tradespeople and worked a subtle hardship on the community. But it was supposed by the pious to be a sacrifice for the greater good.

Mary Elizabeth Foley was the one girl who stayed on after the Butt Hut closed. She retained a pew at the Lutheran church, just as she had while working for Miriam. No one sat with her at first, but gradually people moved over, with expressions of extraordinary virtue. The worldly old pastor must have cited some Christian duty. It fell to Mrs. Gladstone Gander — not her real name but a moniker bestowed by others with less money — to ask the aggressive but traditional local question: “Where are you from?”

Mary Elizabeth replied, “What business is it of yours?”

Where was the meekness appropriate to a woman with her past? It was outrageous. From then on, the energy that ought to have been spent on listening to the service was dedicated to beaming malice at Mary Elizabeth Foley. Even the men joined in, though it was unlikely that they had entirely relinquished their lewd fantasies. Soon she had the pew to herself all over again and greeted it each Sunday with happy surprise, like someone finding an empty parking spot right in front of the entrance to Walmart.

The rest of the town was suspicious of Lutherans, anyway, and would have been more so if Gladstone Gander — not his real name — hadn’t been president of the bank that was the only lending institution in town, and if his wife had not been the recognized power behind the throne. Mary Elizabeth was a depositor at the bank and would have enjoyed modest deference on that basis, but everything changed when she eloped with Arnold, the son and only child of the banker and his wife, whose actual names were Paul and Meredith Tanner.

Since it was a small town, and functioned reliably as a Greek chorus, the Tanners had never been free of the pressure of being the parents of Arnold, a gay man. Now that Arnold had married, appearances were much improved, or would be once time had burnished Mary Elizabeth’s history. In town, there were two explanations for the marriage. The first held that Mary Elizabeth Foley had converted Arnold by using tricks she had learned at the Butt Hut. The second was that she intended to take over the bank. Only the second was true, and the poor Tanners never saw it coming. But it wouldn’t have worked if Arnold and Mary Elizabeth hadn’t been in love.

Mary Elizabeth was an ambitious woman, but she was not cynical. In Arnold she saw an educated lost soul. She had great sympathy for lost souls, since she thought of herself as one, too. She lacked Arnold’s fatalism, however, and briefly thought that she could bring him around with her many skills. Once she realized the futility of that, she found new ways to love him and was uplifted to discover their power. She delighted in watching him arrange the clothes hanging in his closet and guessing at his system. He had ways with soft-boiled eggs, picture hanging, checkbook balancing, and envelope slitting that she found adorable. She could watch him stalking around the house with his fly-swatter in a state of absorbed rapture. He brushed her hair every morning and played intelligent music on the radio. He had the better newspapers mailed in. Mary Elizabeth was not a social climber, but she did appreciate her ascent from vulgarity and survival. They slept together like two spoons in a drawer, and if she put her hands on him suggestively and he seemed to like it, she didn’t care what he was imagining. She had been trained to accept the privacy of every dream world.

When they returned from their elopement, in Searchlight, Nevada, the Tanners welcomed them warmly. After a preamble of Polonian blather, Paul Tanner said, “Mrs. Tanner and I are both pleased and cautiously optimistic going forward. But, Mary, wouldn’t your father have preferred to give you a big, beautiful wedding?”

“Possibly.”

“I don’t mean to pry, but who, exactly, is your father?”

“What business is it of yours?”

This could have been a nasty moment, but the Tanners’ eagerness to sweep Junior’s proclivities under the rug resulted in their pulling their punches, which was much harder on Mrs. Tanner, who was bellicose by nature, than on her husband. At times like this, she gave out a look that suggested that she was simply awaiting a better day.

The luxury of sleeping with someone threatened Arnold’s punctilious habits. It was his first experience of sustained intimacy, and it had its consequences, which weren’t necessarily bad but were quite disruptive. Arnold was a homely man, and one local view had it that his homeliness was what had driven him into the arms of men. He had big ears and curly hair that seemed to gather at the very top of his head. He had rather darty eyes except when he was with Mary Elizabeth or when he was issuing instructions at the bank. His previous love had been the only lawyer in town who had much of a standing outside of town, and whatever went on between them did so with fastidious discretion. Their circumstances made it certain that they would never have any fun.

“Where is he now?” Mary asked.

“San Juan Capistrano.”

“And that was the end of your affair?”

“Here.”

“You know I don’t mind.” And she didn’t. The sea of predators who had rolled through the Butt Hut had seen to that.

“I’d like to be a good husband.”

Arnold was the vice president of the family bank and dressed like a city banker, in dark suits, rep ties, and cordovan wing tips. He had a severe, businesslike demeanor at work that put all communications, with staff and customers alike, on a formal basis. He and Mary Elizabeth lived thirteen blocks from the bank, and Arnold walked to work, rain or shine. If the former, he carried an umbrella, which was an extremely unusual object in town. Everyone knew what an umbrella was, of course, but it seemed so remarkable in this context that, on rainy days, it was as though the umbrella, not Arnold, was the one going to work. In any case, what anyone might have had to say about Arnold in town, no one said to his face. People were confused, too, by the motorcycle he rode on weekends. He did a fifty-yard wheelie down Main Street on a Saturday night that really had them scratching their heads. When Mary asked him to wear a helmet, he replied, “But then they won’t know who it is.”

The last thing Paul Tanner did before he died was send Mary off to be trained in banking skills. She’d told him that she wanted to work. She went to a loan-officer and mortgage-broker boot camp and returned to town well versed in the differences between F.H.A., V.A., and conventional forward mortgages, as well as reverse mortgages and loan models. And she was going to have a baby. Arnold said, “I hope he’s a nice fellow.”

“We don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl!”

“I mean, the father.”

“Sweetheart, that was a joke.”

“Okay, but who is he?”

Mary said, “What business is it of yours?” But she quickly softened and said, “You, Arnold, don’t you see?”

Paul Tanner died in his sleep, of an embolism — or something like that. Arnold wasn’t sure. He and his father had never been close and had viewed each other with detachment since Arnold was in kindergarten. Paul had been so anxious to see Mary’s baby that Arnold concluded that his father’s hopes were skipping a generation and was more pissed off than ever. But now Arnold was president of the bank, which was merely a titular change, as he had run the place for years and run it well, with a caution that allowed it to avoid some of the ruinous expansions that had recently swept the banking community. With Paul gone, Mrs. Tanner was slap in the middle of their lives, and Mary knew from the beginning that Mama was going to need a major tune-up if they were to live in peace.

It happened when Mary’s water broke and labor commenced. Arnold promptly took her to the hospital and sat by her bed, grimacing at every contraction. His mother arrived in a rush and with a bustle and consumption of space that indicated that she intended to be in charge. After she had removed her coat and scarf, tossed them over the back of a chair, and bent to pull the rubbers from her red shoes, she made a point of seeming to discover Mary and said, “Breathe.”

“I’ll breathe when I want to breathe.”

“Of course you will, and no one is at their best going into labor.” Mrs. Tanner went to the window and raised her arms above her head. “I’m about to become a grandma!”

Arnold and Mary glanced at each other: it was ambiguous. Was Mrs. Tanner happy to become a grandmother? Hard to say. Mary groaned through another contraction unnoticed by Mrs. Tanner, who was still at the window, craning around and forecasting the weather. Arnold was keeping track of the contractions with his wristwatch while Mary dutifully gave a passing thought to the stranger at the loan-officer school who was about to become a father. She hoped that Arnold was having a fond thought for his friend in San Juan Capistrano and that the arriving child would help to sort out all these disparate threads. Family-wise, Mrs. Tanner already stood for the past, and it was urgent that she bugger off ASAP. Arnold knew of Mary’s aversion to his mother and had survived several of Mary’s attempts to bar her from their home. “We can’t just throw her under the bus,” he said. This was an early use of the expression, and Mary took it too literally, encouraged that Arnold thought such an option was in play.

Mrs. Tanner turned from the window, beaming at everything and animadverting about the “new life.” Arnold winced at these remarks as sharply as he did at Mary’s contractions. Mary was just disconcerted by the number of unreciprocated statements, more bugling than dialogue. Arnold held her hand, and then leaned across so that he could hold both of her hands, while Mrs. Tanner strode the linoleum. He loved to hold Mary’s hands: they were so strong. He thought of them as farmer’s hands.

Mary owed her hard hands and a confidant horsemanship to her childhood on a ranch a mile and a quarter from the Canadian border, a remote place yet well within reach of the bank that had seized it and thrown Mary and her family into poverty. The president of the United States had told them to borrow, borrow, borrow for their business; thus, the bank had gotten the swather, the baler, the rock windrower, the tractor, the front-end loader, the self-propelled bale wagon, and eight broke horses and their tack, while the family had hit the road. Mary used to say that “bank” was just another four-letter word, but eventually she’d put that behind her, too.

“Mrs. Tanner,” Mary said, “I seem to be oversensitive tonight. Could you stop talking?”

“Is it a problem?”

“ ‘Is it a problem?’ ” Mary repeated. Arnold’s face was in his hands. “Mrs. Tanner, it is a huge problem. This is a time when people want a little peace, and you just won’t shut up. I’m about to have a baby, and you seem rambunctious.”

Mrs. Tanner reassembled her winter clothes and departed. Mary looked at Arnold and said, “I’m sorry, Arnie.”

The boy was born at two o’clock in the morning. Mary was exhausted and so was Arnold, who was both elated and confused but truly loving to his bedraggled wife. They had never chosen a name for the baby, thinking that it was presumptuous to do so before seeing whether it was a boy or a girl. They agreed that a list of gender-based alternatives was somehow corny. But Mary’s suggestion, based on a sudden recollection of the aspirant at loan-officer school, startled Arnold.

“Pedro? I don’t think I’d be comfortable with that, Mary.”

They settled on Peter, which left Mary with her glimmer of rationale and pleased Arnold, who liked old-fashioned names. Mary’s affectionate name for him, however, would always be Pedro. And, without question, he had a Pedro look to him.

Mary bought a horse and, as Peter grew, Arnold spent more and more time in San Juan Capistrano; the day came when he told Mary that he would not be coming back. As foreseen as that must have been, they both wept discreetly to avoid alarming Peter, who was in the next room. They tried to discuss how Arnold would spend time with Peter, but the future looked so fractured that they were forced to trust to their love and intentions.

“Will I always be able to see Peter?” Arnold sobbed. Mary was crying, too. But she knew where to put her pain. She had her boy to think of, and where to put pain was a skill she’d learned early on.

“The house is yours, of course,” Arnold said with a brave, generous smile that suggested he was unaware that he was speaking to a loan officer who had already begun to do the numbers in her head. She couldn’t help it. It was her latest version of tough.

“Thank you, Arnold.”

“And my owning the bank with my mother means that your job is assured.”

Mary loved Arnold, but this airy way of dispensing justice hurried her agenda.

“Don’t you find that a little informal?”

“You must mean divorce.”

“I’m not the one going to San Juan Capistrano. You are.”

“No doubt we’ll have to get something written up.”

“This is a no-fault state. When couples split the sheets, they split them fifty-fifty.” Mary laughed heartily. “I could keep you on at the bank, Arnold, but not from California.”

He’d let Mary see his origins, and Mary had reminded him of hers. Arnold sighed in concession.

His mother was not pleased when she learned of her new partnership. Her mouth fell open as Mary explained the arrangement, but Mary reached across the conference-room table and gently lifted it shut. News of all this was greeted warmly as it shot around the bank.

Mary learned more about banking every day. Mrs. Tanner, despite her claims at the beauty parlor, however, knew nothing except how she had come to acquire what equity she had, and she spent more and more of her time and money on increasingly futile cosmetic surgery. As a figurehead at board meetings, she wore costumes and an imitation youth that contrasted with the professionalism of Mary Elizabeth Tanner, who ran the bank with evenhanded authority. Over time, there came to be nothing disreputable about Mary whatsoever. Wonderful how dollars did that, and Mary had a little gold dollar sign on a chain around her pretty neck.

Considering the hoops he had to jump through, Arnold did his very best to be Peter’s father, virtually commuting from California. This was even more remarkable once he had sold his share of the bank to Mary, since this occasioned a rupture with his own mother. Peter was consoled by the fact that his parents were now sleeping together once a month, and Arnold called him Pedro at intimate moments. He never let on to his friend in California how much he enjoyed these interludes of snuggling with Mary.

Peter was already a star at little-guy soccer. Mrs. Tanner came to the games, and Peter ran straight to Grandma after each game, which softened the smirk on her well-stretched face. Finally, Arnold and his mother reconciled, under the leafless cottonwoods shadowing the battered playing field, during a 3–1 win over the Red Devils of Reed Point, Montana. All the fight went out of Mrs. Tanner, who never made another board meeting but spent her life estate as she saw fit, letting her face sag and reading bodice rippers on her porch, from which she could watch the neighbors during the warm months, and by the pool in San Juan Capistrano during the cold.

Arnold got out of banking and into business, at which he did well. Arnold always did well: no one was more serious about work. Peter had a girlfriend, Mary’s hair was going gray, and Arnold’s domestic arrangements were stable most of the time, except during the winter, when his mother interfered.

“She’s driving me nuts,” Arnold complained to Mary.

“You’ll have to stand it,” Mary said. “She’s lonely, she’s old, and she’s your mother.”

“Can’t Peter do winter sports? What about basketball?”

When Mrs. Tanner’s advancing dementia and prying nature made Arnold’s companion, T.O. — tired of her referring to him as a “houseboy”—threaten to leave, Arnold popped her into assisted living, and that was that. Mrs. Tanner did not go easily; as T.O., a burly Oklahoman, drawled, “She hung on like a bulldog in a thunderstorm.”

“She’s my mother!” Arnold cried without much feeling.

Before Peter left for college, Mary decided to take him to see the place where she had grown up. This was a reward, in a sense, because Peter had always asked about it. No doubt he had heard rumors concerning his mother, and he wanted to confirm her ranch origins. This was straightforward curiosity, as Peter was the furthest thing from insecure. Well brought up and popular, he was the first in his family to trail neither his past nor his proclivities like a lead ball.

They set out in the middle of June, in Mary’s big Lincoln, heading for the great, nearly empty stretches of northern Montana, where underpopulated counties would deny the government’s right to tax them, attempt to secede from the Union, and issue their own money in the form of scrip. Some radicalized soothsayer would arise — a crop duster, a diesel mechanic, a gunsmith — then fade away, and the region would go back to sparse agriculture, a cow every hundred acres, a trailer house with a basketball backboard and a muddy truck. Minds spun in the solitude.

Peter said, “Where is everybody?”

“Gone.”

“Is that what you did, Mom?”

“I had to. We lost the place to the bank. I liked it where I was. I had horses.”

“Don’t you wish you’d gone to college?”

“I got an education, Peter, that’s what matters. And now I can send you to college. Maybe you can go to college in California, near Pop.”

“Where did your brothers go?” Mary understood that Peter would have liked to have a bigger family.

“Here and there. They didn’t stay in touch.”

“Did you ever try to find them?”

Mary didn’t say anything for a moment. “I did, but they didn’t want to stay in touch with me.”

“What? Why’s that?”

“They had their reasons.”

“Like what?” Peter could be demanding.

“They didn’t like what I did for a living.”

“What’s wrong with working at the bank?”

She thought for a moment. “Well, a bank took away our home.”

Peter said, “I still think it’s totally weird. They’d better not be there.”

Mary glanced over from the wheel, smiled a bit, and said, “It was a long time ago, Peter.”

She watched him as he looked out the window at the prairie. She thought that he was beautiful, and that was enough. It didn’t hurt that the car was big and smelled new and hugged the narrow road with authority. She said to herself, as she had since she was a girl:

“I can do this.”