“Buffalo Bill’s

defunct

  who used to

    ride a watersmooth-silver

                                              stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat”

-e e cummings

I waited for spring and then loaded the truck and headed west with the dog. I’d sold the house in December, moved into a small hotel near the highway onramp after that. I’d entertained fantasies of dousing the rooms of my former house with gasoline, tossing a few hundred lit rags in all directions. But I needed the money and so I sat in the motel room and lit cigarettes instead. On the eve of the sale of the house I’d spent an hour on my hands and knees before the fireplace. In Caleb’s absence I’d had to teach myself the simplest tasks: how to mow the lawn, how to clear the gutters, how to ignite a fire. By the time I had the fire roaring my hands were cracked and blackened. I carried clothing by the armful and tossed them singly onto the fire, watched each one burn before tossing on another. He’d forgotten or left behind a box filled with the clothing he wore for outdoor activities, hiking and fishing and similar, and I’d taken to wearing his clothing in place of my own. I anticipated spending more time out of doors than in. Indoors I felt restless, anguished. I sat still and my only thoughts were of him.  I slept in his flannels, woke in the night to light more cigarettes, the only activity I could find to busy myself within the confines of the motel room.

For six days I kept faithfully to the highway, stopping every two hundred miles to get gas or let the dog sniff the ground. At night I pulled the truck to the side of the road, climbed in back with a shotgun and the dog, one on either side. I slept four or five hours a night and then eased back onto the freeway. Only once did anyone bother me. I awoke the second night to headlights trained on my face. I wasted no time pulling onto my knees, aiming the gun in the strange car’s direction. A man stepped from the driver’s side and when he saw me, quickly stepped back in. I kept the gun raised until the car had pulled back onto the freeway and down the road, out of sight. Only after it was long gone did I fall back against the truck’s wall, light a shaky cigarette; and when that one was extinguished, another. The gun was a prop I hadn’t yet taught myself to use, like so many others.

As I approached the far southwestern corner of South Dakota and the signs for Wall Drug grew in size and persistence, my resolve weakened. A few miles farther down the road I turned off the highway onto a rural road. I drove into Badlands National Park at sunset, parked the truck, and set off on foot. There were numerous trails leading up into the hills that surrounded the campground, and I chose one at random and the dog followed. Caleb and I had hiked these trails together once and I looked out from atop the hill to the expanse of land around, wondering where we might fit. He was in a city somewhere with a woman he trusted more and loved less than me and thinking of the two of them sitting down to dinner together, her conscience clear in a way mine hadn’t been in years, brought me to my knees where I tore at the ground, driven by an animalistic impulse to dig, dig, dig. I dug at the earth until long after the sun had set. I was as filled up with aggression as I was pain and unwilling to rid myself of either. In many ways, they were all I had left of him. I dug and the dog dug beside me. I dug until my fingers were bloodied and numb with digging then collapsed onto the pile of dirt that fit my head like a pillow. When I woke it was morning and the dog and I made our way back down the hill to the truck and carried on out of the park and westward into Wyoming, the aggression and anguish still in my belly, but quieter now, subdued in the daylight.

In better days, when Caleb and I had sat on the back porch at night, sipping whiskey and studying the worn road atlas that had seen us through so many of these United States, we’d fumble quickly through the pages until we came to Wyoming. Then we’d sit and stare at her diversity, her mountains and forests and wide open spaces, and giggle like the whiskey-drunk frontiersmen we envisioned ourselves becoming. I was driven now to carry out that vision for the both of us, as though I were a widow, rather than a woman whom had driven her man off with a series of wrongdoings. I wanted to station myself somewhere he could find me, in case he ever got the notion to look.

I spent two days driving through the eastern half of the state, turning occasionally off the main road to get a look at the smaller towns it harbored. It was on the outskirts of Buffalo, down a dusty road bordering a river, that I discovered the land I would come to think of as ours, even as I was the only one of us muddying myself in its fields. There were no houses anywhere in sight, and I pulled to the side of the road and let the dog out of the truck and walked fifteen minutes across the yellow grass until I reached a riverbank and stooped beside the dog for a drink. I cupped my hands and filled my mouth several times before remembering the warnings I’d read about the ingestion of unfiltered water. I looked down at the dog, his mouth drenched and dripping, and wondered what made human beings so damn fragile.

By the time I reached the truck it was nearing sunset again and the dog lay down in the field close by and watched as I attempted to build a fire. From the riverbed I’d carried back an armful of twigs and deadwood and now I got down on my knees and cleared the grass from a round patch of earth. In the center of the clearing I laid a layer of grass and then the smaller twigs and then the larger twigs and then the deadwood. I lit a match and ignited the grass and blew gently as I’d seen Caleb do, but the grass only flickered for a second and then went out. I lit the grass again and again over the course of an hour and each time there would be a spark but not enough for the first layer of twigs to catch. I sat back on my heels, sighed, and stared apologetically at the dog. I went to the truck and opened a can of beans and ate them cold and as I ate I felt my stomach cramp and worried it was the bacteria from the water and that before morning I’d be sick.

I washed the can and dried it and set it on a log for something to practice shooting at later. By now the temperature had dropped several degrees and I insulated myself from the cold with a double layering of Caleb’s jackets. I unrolled the sleeping bag in the back of the truck and called the dog up and crawled in with the gun beside me. I opened a bottle of bourbon and drank from it for warmth and courage. The tent was in a bag in the corner of the truck. I’d never set it up on my own and I worried this would prove another source of frustration like the fire. I took several long pulls from the bottle and wondered what I was doing alone in the middle of Wyoming. I had come to this state to feel closer to Caleb but somehow, here in this territory we’d talked of discovering together, I felt farther from him than ever. I stared up at the wide sky and thought about Annie Oakley and how on the day she died, her husband gave up eating. Eighteen days later he was gone, too. Eighteen days felt like a comfort. Eighteen days and I’d adapt to this new land or succumb to it. Either way I wouldn’t bemoan the outcome. Either way I belonged to Wyoming now.

Over the next few days, through a method of trial and error, I taught myself the basics of frontier survival. The grass I’d pulled the first night had been too wet for burning. I dug deeper the next, found the old, dry grass at the root. I spent the daylight hours walking back and forth between the river and camp, carrying high stacks of twigs and wood for the fire and buckets of water for washing. I cleaned what clothing was soiled in the morning then spread it out in the grass to dry in the afternoon sun. After that I’d take a slingshot I’d constructed out of a Y shaped stick, a couple rubber bands, and the tongue of one of Caleb’s old boots and go out into the woods near the river in search of small mammals. I wasn’t very adept at using it yet however and had only managed so far to bring down a single squirrel. Most of the time it was easier to catch a fish or frog with my sapling pole or net or spear. I had my rifle, but I hadn’t shot it at anything other than the empty bean cans I’d stacked one atop the other on the low limb of a tree. I was waiting for late fall or winter when my aim would be better and I’d have a way of preserving the meat. In the evenings I built a fire and cooked atop it what fish or game I’d managed to kill during the day, then cleaned and dried the pot and utensils and sat around the fire a while longer with my mug of whiskey and the dog for warmth and company.

During the day I kept busy and my thoughts were busy with the business of finding firewood and food. But at night, my mind was filled up only with thoughts of Caleb. Even with the whiskey I drunk down in an attempt at drowning him quiet, I awoke several times a night. Often I had to leave the tent to breath deeply the night air and cool my face with water from the bucket. I had to sweat him out of me, the way you sweat out a fever or a bottle of whiskey or the devil. It was possible my body contained all three. I wasn’t what you call a believer, but I couldn’t bear the thought that I alone was to blame.

Days came and went and turned into weeks and I felt more and more confident that I could survive on the land. My aim with both the slingshot and rifle had improved, and the dog and I had feasted on rabbit and duck, as well as the fish that had become our mainstay. My recent successes had forced me to make plans that extended beyond the current day’s goals of finding food. I’d begun to consider the construction of a more permanent shelter.  I did not think I would survive the winter in the tent.

I’d begun plotting out the dimensions of the one room log home Caleb and I had talked of building. I’d brought bucketfuls of rocks back from the river and used them to mark the foundation of the house. Soon I would have to make a trip into town to pay for the land and when I did I would ask about for a person who might help me with the construction of the cabin. But first I wanted to search the riverbed and forest for fallen trees, haul back as many logs as I could find or cut myself.

The dog and I went into the forest one afternoon on just such a mission. Recently I’d made the discovery of an old flask at the bottom of Caleb’s toolbox. I’d given it a thorough washing before filling it with whiskey and I carried it with me always now, as I did that afternoon, for a nip to see me through the day. We’d been walking for some time without finding any logs of the size I wanted and in my newfound confidence I was eager to use my axe and to expend some of the aggression that was still within me and perhaps magnified by the whiskey.

We’d been walking a good half hour or longer when my restlessness got the better of me and I picked a tree at random and began to hack into it with my axe. My thoughts had turned toward Caleb, as they did most often when I’d been drinking, and I began to feel a familiar sense of outrage at his inability to forgive and, consequently, his abandonment of me and all we had planned.  I had never felled a tree before, of course, and likely would have been much less apt to do so had my rage and the whiskey not impaired my judgment and bolstered my sense of infallibility. I chopped at that tree as I’d dug at the ground in the Badlands, losing all consciousness, caught up in the power my body was wielding. It is impossible for me to know if I chopped thirty minutes or an hour or longer. I only know that once I began, I did not stop until the tree began to sway and by then it was too late. I tried to escape its path. I do not remember deciding which direction to turn. I merely turned and ran. Perhaps if I had not been weighed down by the whiskey in my belly I could have run faster. Then, too, without the alcohol to cloud my thinking, I may have been aware the most likely direction the tree would fall or would not have felled the tree to begin with. But it is impossible to know what might have been and a waste of time to speculate. The fact is I was unable to outrun the tree. The tree caught my right shoulder and felled me with it, pinning my arm under its heavy trunk.

The pain at first was excruciating and I tried for a long while to use my left arm to push the tree off of me, but I couldn’t get it to budge even an inch. I cried and yelled out and the dog came and sniffed my face and I was glad he had not been caught under the tree as well for this meant I was not entirely alone. I felt around my pocket with my left hand, took out my flask, and had a long drink. I thought the whiskey might keep me from panicking and also ease the pain. I may have drifted in and out of consciousness a while, though it’s hard to trust my memory. It was light and then it was dark. The pain was excruciating and then it was gone, and this scared me even more as I knew it meant I’d lost all feeling in my arm.

I’d read enough stories of wilderness survival to know I would very likely die if I failed to amputate my arm. There was almost zero chance of anyone finding me and less chance I could free my arm any other way. I may have been in shock or rendered temporarily insane by the violent nature of the accident or the loneliness of the days leading up to it or all three, for I swear I remember thinking it a lucky break, the tree falling on me, the fact that I was going to have to cut off my own arm. All those months I’d been searching for something I could do to show my contrition, a sacrifice I could make as a way of atonement. I envisioned newspaper articles detailing my survival making their way across the country:  Wyoming woman felled by tree walks three miles and drives ten to hospital after amputating own arm. I pictured Caleb’s face as he stared at the accompanying photograph: the squint of his eyes and hard line of his mouth as he considered our history in crime and punishment terms. I had done bad things, but not so bad that the amputation of an arm could not overshadow the bad things I had done. He was not an unreasonable man. It was likely he'd been waiting for something like this, same as me.

I took another long drink from my flask, careful to reserve enough whiskey to clean the wound once I’d freed myself from the tree. I didn’t want to wait any longer. I was afraid of losing consciousness or of sobering to the point of reason. It seemed another lucky break that the axe had not been pinned by the tree or knocked out of reach in the fall. I turned onto my side and reached for it with my foot, kicking it near enough that I could grab it with my left hand. Once I had a hold of it, I knew I could not hesitate even a moment. Everything hereafter was going to have to take place quickly and without thought. I pulled my arm back as far as I could and swung down hard.