Vital Laughter

I DON’T know who they are,” Gram would say, “but I wish they were in hell.” And she’d put the binoculars back on the sill of the kitchen window and study for a while, with the naked eye, the potential visitors coming along the road that wound down Uhl Hill, through fields, and along our willow lane.

When Gram felt the need of people beyond the ranch, she dropped everything and took off, down country, on horseback or with team and buggy or, it it were winter, on skis that Gramp had made for her. She preferred going to people rather than having them come to her. It was annoying to have guests come to the ranch; they knocked her routine into a cocked hat; they upset her spontaneous plans. But she never suffered from a guilty conscience over upsetting the plans of others. Yet ranchers were glad to see her arrive, if for no other reason than to hear her laugh. She was the only person we three children knew who could laugh a mile. More than once we had heard her laugh move, full and clear, across the wild, wild fields.

She had known sorrow and uncertainty before she came to Jackson Hole. Here she found her heaven and no one was going to make it hell for her if she could help it.

In 1896, when Gram met and married Gramp — a powerful, handsome Dutchman with a quick limp — he was already established on 160 acres in the upper reaches of the Jackson Hole valley in Wyoming. Gramp —John Shive — took up the land, by squatter’s right, about 1892, Since no man could outwork him and few even keep up with him, by the time he married Gram and found himself with a ten-year-old stepdaughter, he was doing as well, in ranching, as could be expected in this high valley in the 1890s.

Gram was thirty-nine years old when she married Gramp. She was not beautiful—never had been; she wasn’t even pretty. Her body was short, sturdy, compact, and nail-hard. Her ankles were thick. She was high-chested, fiat-breasted. Her face was full, her skin well broken into wrinkles. Her nose was short and round — an unusual nose, unlike anyone else’s. Her prematurely gray hair came to a widow’s peak on a high forehead. Her eyes were large, wide apart, intelligent, mischievous, and a lovely gentian blue.

Her coarsened skin and her white hair made her seem, upon first appearance, much older than Gramp (she was four years his senior), but not for long. Her high spirit, vitality, and rough gaiety could match those of anyone of any age. Because she did things other women did not do, and didn’t give a damn, she was envied.

Her childhood had been free but not happy. She grew up in a harum-scarum fashion in the gold camp of Bannack, Montana. She was given the name of Lucy Priscilla, but it was second choice. Since she was born on the eighth of May, her mother wanted to call her Eighthy May, but fortunately her father put his fool down.

That, she learned to read is a wonder; she never went beyond the first few grades, and life around her was too interesting and too full of work to be varied with reading. Yet she read well, spelled will, and wrote a pleasing hand. But her English sounded as though it had been chopped with an ax, and always sailed out on a high, harsh voice.

In her teens she was inveigled into marriage by an old man. They had two children: a son that died in infancy, and a daughter, Frances-Fannie. The old, old man could not support his family, so Gram divorced him and hired herself out as a ranch hand. She labored in the hayfields and even broke saddle and work horses as a man might do; in fact, not all men could do such work.

When Fannie was six or seven years old. Gram remarried. Her second husband, James Nesbitt, was a young, meticulous, good-looking Irishman. Because he owned a “photographic studio" in Dillon, Montana, he was known as an “artist.”His hair lay beautifully curled on his high forehead and he played in the “city” band. With Jim for a husband Lucy Priscilla—Lou—lived, for a few years, the life of a lady — she who was in the habit, of riding horseback over the folded hills around Dillon, herding cattle, chasing wild horses, killing rattlesnakes, cursing the prickly pear, loving the smell of sage, open fields, and log barns. This new life must have been stifling, but she probably would have forced herself to remain in fancy harness for the sake of her two daughters, Fannie and little Carrie Maybelle, if her husband had not been a drunkard. When Carrie was three and Fannie thirteen, she divorced Jim Nesbitt and took pride in hating him and whiskey the rest of her long life.

So she was twice widowed-by choice and probably good sense.

2

SHE worked her way through hard years. And always with her was the sorrow of Fannie’s chronic ill health. A year or two after the girl’s marriage Fannie died — a tragic invalid. Gram dispelled her sorrow through heavy work; she scattered her grief over the fields and through the mountains—Fannie had been a gentle, lovely girl. Gram all but fought her heartache with her two fists.

At last, being adventuresome, she made her way to the wild, remote Jackson Hole country. Here with John Shive she found her paradise. They and the West were young together, rough and unbounded. Where the rivers of this valley came from and ran to was no concern of Gram’s. Who first saw them and the Teton Mountains meant nothing. She knew no curiosity about their past. The rivers and the mountains were here; wasn’t, that enough? Life began in this valley with her and Gramp, not beyond. The wind and the rain against her and the sun on her head — that was important. And work and laughter. She never lived in the past; there was no name among her ancestors that she pickled, guarded, and talked about with starched pride. She was not even inquisitive about Grump’s ancestors or his past.

They were simple people, Gram and Gramp. Their original buildings, clustered at the far side of the west field, were entirely utilitarian. But when Gramp built his first house, he saw to it that one window opened to the Teton Range. Later he built Gram a bay window from photographer’s glass plates discarded by her. This window swept into view her feeble flower garden that was choked by what nature flung into the yard. The garden was enclosed by an elkhorn fence. The antlers had been hilariously and laboriously gathered by Gram and Mother Carrie during those first years in Jackson Hole, when Mother was a child. The two would travel horseback up through open wild meadows into the hills back of the ranch, taking Topsy with them — a mare who would stand perfectly still while being piled high with antlers. After two or three had been roped to a packsaddle, the rest would interlock and cling one to another — a great bleached network of arms.

All the old buildings wore sod roofs. In the spring they were green with foxtail.

And each spring the old house was papered inside with interesting material. Gram would make a trip down country with team and buggy, gathering magazines and newspapers. She was hardly home when they were slapped on the walls, which was always disappointing and frustrating to Mother, who was thirsty for knowledge; she always hoped for a little time to read before the magazines became a part of the house. But Gram could never see the necessity of learning through reading. However, she would condescend to hang the sheets right side up so that Mother could get a page of a story here, a column of an article there. And she gleaned, through opera glasses given her by a dude, what the ceiling had to offer.

But in time the old house was ready to fall in on them, so they were willing to move. Gramp always said, “Wear out the old before using the new.” Literally this had been done.

In all the rest of Jackson Hole there was nothing quite so elegant as the new two-storv buildings—the Big House and the Little House — built by my father with all of Gram and Gramp’s savings and thousands of dollars more. The houses stood on a bare knoll backed by sage-covered hills that rose into mountains and a wilderness of aspen and pine. The knoll commanded a sweeping view of fields cut by the Buffalo River; a view of many-ridged mountains. And jagging the western skyline were the pinnacles of the Teton Range, standing without foothills, as though they had sprung up overnight. Dad was proud of these buildings he had designed ancl built. But to Gram and Gramp these buildings were no more pleasant than were the old ones in the west field with the elkhorn fence, the bachelorbuttons and weeds in the yard, and hop vines climbing the house logs.

Work was the one significant thing in ranch life. Gram, having the strength of a horse, expected the same strength of everyone else. Everyone had to work. To get ahead of what? Perhaps Mother Nature, perhaps Gram. Gramp was the only one who could keep ahead of both from spring until fall, through winter, and back to spring again.

3

SPRING! It never came until May. March would be filled with wind, sunshine, snow flurries, and melting icicles — and worry over lack of hay for the stock. April meant hot sun, cold wind, deep snow, more worry over hay, and a restlessness and a longing for spring. It was hell underfoot, as Gram said. The snow was dejected, dirty, porous. One foot went through the crust, the other stayed on top. Damn!

Gram was one of the main reasons we never missed the outside world during those slow months of late winter. Though she ruled us with an exacting hand and tongue and made us do our share of work, she could never hold from us her laughter or her spontaneous fun, and she never tried.

She would come in from outside work looking like the “ragged end of hard times” and pour a cup of coffee. Always the spoon stood in her cup ready to gouge an eye. If Mother and we children were at work in the house, she made our work light with her clowning. She would put down her coffee cup, jump up on a chair, and crow like a rooster or roar like a lion, her eyes big, round, and startlingly blue. Sometimes she drew her skirts tight between her legs and stood on her head for us, against the wall. She could never master this feat without a wall to fall against. We’d howl with laughter and beg, “Do it again, Gram! Do it some more!” If, in our delight, one of us tried to kiss her, she would either hiss like a snake or open her mouth wide so that we’d come within an ace of falling in. She’d say, “You’re a bunch of little warriors,” and then she’d pretend to swear at us in Chinese, “Afleeuumbaya-a . . . a-eunna-combaya-a. . . .” We never knew whether she made up the Chinese words or had in her childhood heard them in the Montana mining camp. If Gramp happened to be in the kitchen, his face would turn red with his silent laughter. He always enjoyed her raucity.

At table she was funny too. When we had uncooked cabbage at a meal, one or all of us would say, “Oh, be a rabbit, Gram; eat like a rabbit, please! If she was in the proper mood, she would draw in her cheeks, leaving her lips pinched until they stood up and down, and then she would rabbit-chew. We would sit with our mouths hanging open and watch the cabbage disappear like magic.

Gram’s musical entertainment usually came in the evening during that brief period between late chores and early bed. Once in a while she sang for us in Chinese and played her own weird accompaniment on the fiddle. When she played something other than her Chinese specialty, Mother chorded for her on the piano (a small grand that Dad bought Mother when we children were babies), but the accompaniment would be drowned out. When Gram sat at the piano, she played with such gusto that I’m sure the strings vibrated for the rest of the night. Whenever we attended a party at Moran or the Elk schoolhouse or at some ranch, Gram played the banjo or fiddle and called a square dance at the same time, one foot pounding the floor. When she chose the banjo, she always used a nickel as a pick because it made more noise than her fingers could make. Her playing was out of tune, but there was such zip to it no one could keep his feel still. As she said herself, she could play to beat hens a pecking. If she caught the eye of one of us, she would wink as much as to say, “Pretty good, ain’t it?" She’d end a fiddling tune suddenly on a bass note as though she had run amuck and struck something head-on. Once in a great while she played a slow waltz such as “Over the Waves” and it. would sound so sorrowful that I would fill with tears. It is probably a good thing her playing was no better than it was or I couldn’t have stood it!

When happy, Gram was happy all over; she whistled, laughed, and yelled. When she was mad she was mad all over. When she was sick, she was sick all over — and funny too. She would groan, “I’m going to die. Yes, I’m going to die. Oh, my God, why can’t I die?”

She gave herself such drastic treatment for any and all ailments that it is a tribute to her constitution that she lived to be eighty. Once she put a bit of Iye into an aching tooth; the pain almost took off her head — and ours too. She gradually lost her hearing in one ear because she put oil into it that was too hot for the sensitive drum. But Gram, always making the most of any situation, slept with the deaf ear up so as not to be disturbed with night sounds. And her partial deafness brought pleasure to the rest of us in a roundabout way. She would laugh hilariously over amusing things some drab person said to her; someone whom the rest of us had never heard emit a clever word. She would repeat the remarks and we’d all laugh. We finally realized that Gram was laughing over what she thought the person said; she never knew that she was the clever one.

Once a cow she was milking kicked her in the face, breaking her nose. Gramp and Mother did what they could to repair the damage with the help of a can of Denver Mud. But when the nose was swollen as big as a washtub (it felt that big to Gram), a bee stung her on the chin, swelling it to meet the nose. She looked so tragically funny that no one could keep from laughing Gram couldn’t laugh — there wasn’t any place on her face for laughing — but she was a good sport even though she suffered so loud that she could be heard all over the ranch.

One March, when the crusted snow was dangerously glistening, she was struck with snow blindness after a long ski trip. Willingly she took a severe cure, since it was her own idea. Rocks were heated verv hot and placed in a tin tub on the floor; Gram was seated on a low chair beside the tub with a heavy blanket thrown over her, tub, and rocks. Slowly sugar was sprinkled on the boulders, sending up a stinging smoke, making the eyes water and burn. Gram wailed and laughed under the blanket, but she lived through the cure. How could her eyes remain their lovely blue?

Grant loved horses. Her love for them was fearless, aggressive, and often took the form of open hostility. Now and again, when she drove a team, the team ran away. Gram would brace her short, thick legs, curse and yell at the horses, and enjoy herself immensely. When she rode Nemo, Mother’s dainty chestnut sorrel, the mare ran away, scattering Gram’s hairpins over field or hill. However, Nemo never ran away with Mother. She rode the mare with a martingale and checkrein, but Gram couldn’t be bothered with a checkrein — she never wore one herself.

Not only could she break horses to ride, but she could also shoe them. However, Gramp never allowed her to do so. He was such a silent man I never knew whether he thought it was unladylike or that Gram might do some damage to the horse.

When Nig died — the co-star of her top buggy team, Nig and Hix — his death brought grief in high comedy. Gram found him dead in the barn one early spring morning; he had gradually wasted away with some horse disease, he all heard her crying as she returned to the kitchen. She didn’t want to show weakness, so in the middle of her tears she laughed at herself. She leaned over the stove and actually dripped tears into the huge can of garbage she was heating for the chickens. Oh, my God, how’ll I get on without Nig?" She threw her apron over her face, sat on the arm of a chair, and wailed. Then she laughed for being such a fool over a horse. We gathered around her in sympathy and laughed too, to ease her embarrassment. Ruff, my younger brother, suggested sympathetically that Nig be skinned and the hide tanned, to be hung on a wall somewhere. “Oh, no, no!" she moaned. “I’d just as soon have Jack’s hide nailed to the wall as the hide of my favorite horse.”

4

WEATHER in this high country was always interesting. It either hindered or helped crops, livestock, and work. And it was interesting just in itself. Gram would say, “Well, I’ll go out and see what the sky has to say.” She would brace her sturdy legs, facing the southwest where our storms came from. If it looked like snow she would conic into the house, saying, “We’re going to get more of The Beautiful, damn it.” And we always got more of The Boautiiul. Danin it.

But May always came, even though Gram was sure it would not. May! The soft air moved one’s hair, and the sun brought up good odors from the earth. The bare, lacy aspen branches held an expectant glow. Cattle found a few green things, the hay had lasted or it had not, and that was that.

All winter Gramp kept a pile of manure in the barn so that it would heat. In the spring he would put about four feet of the manure into a very deep pit, top it with four to six inches of rich soil, and cover the whole thing with a glass frame made of photographer’s plates which had been carefully saved from the early years when Gram took her first, fling at photography. The manure would heat the soil and within three days some of the plants would he up.

All through the long winters we had nothing fresh to eat in the way of vegetables, except cabbage. As soon as the first dandelion greens peeped above the ground in May, Gram would call us and we’d be down on all fours unearthing them. Digging around in the dark, clean soil and smelling the fresh open earth was part of satisfying our hunger. Gram would say, “I know just how a cow feels when she tastes her first spring grass.” But soon the dandelions were too big and strong to be palatable, and we hungered afresh for other greens.

But food on the ranch was good. Mother cooked with imagination and beauty and she did most of the cooking, but Gram had a way of putting things together, all her own, that made plain food wonderful. Since she had little respect for reading, she didn’t bother much with a cookbook; she made things out of her head. She and Gramp both had a taste for unusual dishes. Every year or two a bear would be killed. The grease — pale yellow and soft like honey — would he used, among other things, for deep frying. Gramp was sure that no fat could equal bear grease for doughnuts. And he always carefully skinned and prepared the feet for pickling. What a rare treat — pickled bear’s feet!

Other specialties were pickled tongue of elk or pig; the marrow from a fresh boiled bone on delicate bread; hot boiled egg-bag, eaten with fresh bread; wild field mushrooms fried in butter (sometimes a dishpanful could be picked from the west field after a gentle rain, but they always had to be gathered young before the worms found them).

The majority of ranchers in Jackson Hole cooked the life out of any kind of meat, so the way Gram and Gramp prepared their elk steaks became known up and down the valley. In our kitchen galvanized pie plates would be heated piping hot in the warming oven while the fire was antagonized with pitch until the top of the stove turned red with heat. T-bone elk steaks were seared quickly on both sides, turned into the pie plates, spread with butter, and eaten immediately. Often they were served with rings of onion sliced into thick sweet cream.

We were very proud of Gramp’s cooking. It never failed to be good. And the nearest he ever came to bragging was on his food. He said, “If I have a frying pan and a little flour I kin live a long time in the mountains. But with you kids it’s different. You’ve got to know something. You’ve got to git an education.”

5

BY JUNE the frogs were singing like mad in every pond and there was the voice of killdeer and crane, goose and duck. Cow elk could be heard barking to their calves near the rushing Buffalo River. From the river itself came the grinding sound of uprooted trees that were carried along the swollen current. Snowslides roared like early spring thunder high in the Tetons; we could hear them on warm, dripping days.

The loveliest sign of full spring was the wild clematis trailing from the cow’s horn that hung against one wall of the dining room. Busy as Mother was, she would take time to walk to a pinedarkened hill beyond the ranch buildings and bring back the delicate purple flower and its vine. Gram would tramp into the house, drink her coffee with the spoon standing in it, admire the clematis briefly because she loved any and all flowers, and be gone — back to barnyard, hill, or field.

The beastliest sign of June was the mosquitoes. Gram would say, “Oh, my God, the mosquitoes.”

They whined over and around and through us.

I hey were breat bed in. They hung in a cloud over our heads when we stepped outside; they blackened the screen doors. There was no section of Jackson Hole where they were worse. The horses and cattle stamped in anger. We children had bloodstained arms and legs from the bites we scratched. Gram fought the abominable things with her two fists. Sometimes she wore netting over her hat, pulled down, double, to her shoulders. “It won’t keep out the damned little things,” she once said, “but by doubling it, I befuddle them.” Surely, her cursing helped too.

But in spite of mosquitoes and heavy work outdoors, Gram was seldom in trousers. She generally wore a house dress or a shirtwaist with divided skirts—known in Jackson Hole as doublebarreled skirts —made of khaki, buttoned or hooked over well-laced corsets. A drive to Jackson, forty miles down country, called for dressing up in fancy shirtwaist and wool skirt with an added piece of jewelry, such as her handmade gold ring set with garnets, or the enormous sterling belt pin covered with her curlicued initials — LPS.

The only jewelry Gram wore at home was a pair of small, rough nugget earrings and a heavy gold band on the third finger of her left hand. Until her death, when she was eighty, I took for granted that this wide ring had been placed there by Gramp when they were married. But when the ring came to me I found engraved inside it: Carrie to Mama, 1902. Why should Mother give this ring to Gram? Perhaps she was embarrassed because Gram wore no wedding ring. I shall never know the trul h.

For Gram and the rest of the grownups summer was a short, warm breath filled with work: haying, seeing to the cattle on the range, repairing fence, washing, ironing, baking — and laughing. The days were longer now, so more work and more laughter could be crammed into the hours between daylight and dark. When haying ended, fall was a swift, bright breath.

And in the fall, hunting for the winter’s meat was a natural part of ranch life in the valley. However, any season of the year meant big game hunting for the people of Jackson Hole if they wanted fresh meat, in spite of an established season by the state.

There were guns all through our house; sometimes they stood three deep in a corner. Gramp was the best shot on the ranch, but he took no special pride in it. He hunted methodically, without lust, to get meat we needed. We were sure he couldn’t miss an elk if he tried, because one moonlit night in the dead of winter, when a herd of fifty or sixty elk came, in single file, into the north field to pilfer the haystacks that had been fenced away from them, Gramp got up from his bed, took up his gun, and from the bedroom window shot and killed the lead bull. Much to his annoyance he had to get into his clothes, go down into the field, and bleed and dress out the animal so that no meat would be wasted.

Mother was a very good target shot with a sixshooter, but she despised killing. Gram loved the hunt. Apparently it helped to satisfy the animal in her. Gram’s theory was this: If it’s fit to eat it ought to be killed; if it ain’t, fit to eat, it certainly ought to be killed.

When she first came to Jackson Hole she always went big game hunting with Gramp if meat was needed on the ranch. (A rancher, in those days, seldom killed his beef. Cattle were raised to be sold, not to be killed and eaten at home. To bring them successfully to maturity was too expensive and too worrisome for ranch butchering.) Gram would help dress out an elk and drag it home by the saddle horn, or quarter it and bring it in on a pack horse if it were shot any distance from the ranch. Finally she ventured out alone, when meat was needed and Gramp was too busy to go. Within a few hours she returned.

“I got an elk, Jack. A dandy cow.”

“ Where is it ?”

“Why . . . back where I shot it.

“Did you bleed it? Did you gut it:”

Gram looked sheepish. “I bled it; that’s all.’

He shook his head. “ You’ve hunted enough with me to know better than that.”

“It ain’t easy to dress out alone. I thought you’d —”

He cut off her words. “Anybody that shoots an elk around here cleans it and drags it in or they don’t go hunting. Go bring in your game.”

Gram did as she was told, and though she laughingly cursed Gramp for being no gentleman, she was proud that he made her complete the job. After that she often went alone for meat and brought home the kill.

After the quick brilliant beauty of fall, grass, trees, river, and clouds all moved with the wind, carrying everything into winter. Heavy clouds would shroud the Teton Mountains and, when they lifted, the peaks would be covered with fresh snow. Gram would say, “The mountains are putting on their winter underwear, and shake her head and talk about the gosh-damned wind, and insist that the weather had turned to the devil, and complain about winter coming wrong-end-to. She didn’t like winter and she fought it.

But, in truth, she was never held in or down by weather or anything else. She had too many interests and too much work. In winter she carried out her hobbies. Once she decided to study taxidermy. She tried to mount a hawk, but she failed to apply the knowledge she had learned to the whole bird, flies got to the wings — maggots dropped out. The hawk had to be burned. After a little more study, but not enough, she tried to mount a skunk, but the tail wouldn’t stand up, it dragged on the floor, so she lost interest in “the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals in lifelike form.”

Photography was of more lasting interest - and far more expensive. Gramp said, in his quiet way that it took the price of one steer a year to keep her in film and other necessary supplies. She snapped pictures of everyone, coming and going. Usually the clothesline, the woodpile, or the toilet was in the background. Gram had no eye for setting. Or had she? Maybe her goal was to get all three in one picture — clothesline, woodpile, and toilet!

She spent the evenings of one winter braiding a fancy horsehair bridle for Mother — sixteen strands. It was professionally done, with tassels hanging all over it and along the braided reins. She always had some other kind of handwork in progress too: paste beads, a melon-seed bag, delicate embroidery. Gram had no eye for color where her clothes were concerned — she might combine green, blue, purple, and red — but the embroidery that lay waiting to be picked up would be white, intricate, and expertly done on linen. Now and again, of a winter evening, Gramp would pick up the embroidery and work ten or fifteen minutes, his huge hands dwarfing the piece; yet one could not tell where Gram left off and Gramp began — his work was that well done. How proud we were to think he could brand a call and embroider with the same two hands! But, of course, Gram could also do both.

We never knew from month to month what her next interest would be. Neither did she.

Gram never wanted Mother to have children, but after we sneaked by her into the world, she was proud of us, though we would never have guessed it by her words. Once when we all got in her way she said to Mother, “Carrie, it’s a good thing you didn’t have triplets and quadrupeds too or I’d a wrung their damn little necks. If there s anything I hate it’s a snarl of kids around. She would fuss about the stringiness of my hair, about Buff’s mouth forever hanging open, and would tell Bill, my twin, that his sharp shoulder blades reminded her of the running gears of a katydid. And she would say to Mother, “My God, Carrie, you don’t make these kids eat right and you don’t make them comb or wash. Mother, with a week’s work piled ahead of her to be done in one day, would only laugh in her light, musical way and tell us what a joy we were to her, what a satisfaction, no matter what we ate or didn’t eat, or how we looked. “You are my life, she would say, I couldn t live without you.”

But through Gram’s harsh words of ridicule we could feel her pride in us, and read it in her eyes when we didn’t neglect our duties. And we could feel her love for Mother anchored on bedrock, even though she continuously yelled, “Hurry, Carrie, hurry!” as Mother moved slowly through her work. She leaned on the broom or mop and read a magazine until Gram yelled, “My God, hurry!” The handle of the churn slowed down with her reading until Gram screamed, “ Hurry, hurry!” She washed and ironed and scrubbed and sang, and though Gram tried to drop a rock into her thoughts, Mother was always mentally free. She could never be chained to scrub pail, broom, churn — or to Gram; she lived an inner life of her own, unrestrained.

And so lived the rest of us.

But Gram was the freest of all. She never tried to be anything but her own unbounded, funny self. Her life was complete. She needed no one from beyond these mountains so long as we all were here. And seldom knowing the need of anyone beyond the ranch, she never ceased wishing her neighbors were in hell — a cheery sort of hell.

For twenty-two years she and Gramp ranched in Jackson Hole. In this valley Gram found her happiness and in this valley she held it.

Work was her life — laced with laughter. And the laughter came easy because the work was good.