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Tameless, Unruly Animals

Jeff Guay

If it hadn’t been for Father, Cal and I wouldn’t have this house. We’d still be paying rent and by now would have been priced out of Delaney. We’d be out in the scrubby hills, living on some dry rock, having to haul in all our water and propane like my brother-in-law Kentell. Mom wouldn’t be able to live on her own like she does. We owe our lives to him. I think of Father when county fair comes around.

He roped for many years as a hobby, though he also liked to compete. Father was never professional, but in our local rodeo, which takes place during the Delaney County Fair, he acquitted himself well. He was a talented horseman. He and Mom always taught me that we owe something to our talents. That we owe it it our family, our community, and ourselves; to work hard, to dress well, and be highly thought of. When Father got older and quit roping — he was twenty years Mom’s senior, and died when I was only nineteen — he continued to attend the rodeo as a spectator. He’d wear a silk kerchief, his pressed trousers, ostrich boots and felted blazer. Not like men do nowadays, in their intentionally greasy jeans and thread-worn ball caps. Their wives wearing tight black underwear pants where one gets a clear view of the southern topography. I think about Father this time of year and I miss him.

Nowadays, the county fair practically belongs Mom. Over the past decade alone she has won the following: gold medal cucumber; three tier birthday cake correctly resembling a grain silo (made it on the cover of Delaney Weekly); late entry to the quilting contest in ’18, absolutely wiping the floor with a tapestry of a large galloping horse made up of a number of other, smaller horses. Last year she even won the art contest with a photograph of a weasel bouncing across a white field of snow.

My daughter Nara has had her moments at the fair, too. In middle school she did 4H, and had hogs the size and weight of a 50 gallon drum of oil. She’s older now and plays hockey. She’s the only girl on the team, and the only one with a college scholarship offer. She’ll be heading to New Hampshire next fall. 

This year Nara will ride broncos in the rodeo. It’s a bit dangerous, and as her mother I am not without worries. But she’s put a lot of work into it the last few summers, training with a fellow named Ryan Warbler who’s got acreage and horses out in the valley. He was professional in his youth, and has the buckles to show for it. Nara likes the look of that hardware. She likes the animals, their unpredictable nature, their power. She’s gotten pretty good. Father used to say that our talents are messages from God. Of what to do. And also, what not to do.

Everything in its rightful place. I, for example, have taken the role I am successful in and run with it. I’m a supervisor at the bank because I’m good with numbers and schedules and people tend to listen to me. I don’t allow my subordinates to wear their underwear pants to work, for example. And they obey. But that’s just my day job. I pour everything else I have into being a good mother and daughter. I’ll support Mom in anything she needs, of course. But mostly I make sure to be one-hundred and ten percent available to Nara. I’m her manager, accountant, shoulder-to-lean-on, number one fan. I don’t have much time for learning an instrument, or taking pottery classes, or writing a romance novel. Because despite having an interest in those activities, I’ve other responsibilities. And even if I did have the time, well I still wouldn’t have the talent.

Besides, Nara needs me in her corner. She requires most if not all of my attention. She’s been on varsity volleyball, basketball, softball and track. The only girl on the school wrestling team. She’s a senior now, weighs one-eighty. In our house she’s become quite the alpha, and I admit it’s a challenge to maintain order. I remember the moment things changed in our family. It was her freshman year, and my husband Cal tried to reprimand her for bringing the car back thirty minutes after curfew and with an empty tank. He began giving her disquisition like he’d until then been accustomed to doing.

“This is my house” he said. “That is my car.”

But Nara knew what the score was with Cal by that time. She understood what it meant to see a grown man fall asleep in the living room chair with a bottle in his hand and the sun not set. She saw through the watery excuses as to why he wasn’t at games. He had already become quite useless, and Nara didn’t need to be told. So that night when Cal was yelling at her, she got red in the face and hockey-checked him against the fridge. He fell the ground and all the magnets rained down on him. He cried like a little girl.

I wish Father had lived to meet my daughter. Then she might have had a man in her life to demonstrate the ways of power and restraint. How to make the world go the way you want it to. As an example; Father once took me to the ranch in Whitehall where he’d worked as a young man. It seemed that, generations removed from the last cattle that had been his charge, these animals still responded to him as if they’d known him all their lives. He walked gently, slow, giving an occasional whistle, and wouldn’t you believe that every last cow and steer had gathered and were moving where Father wanted them to go, and him just walking along.

▪

DAY ONE OF THE COUNTY FAIR. I drove Mom early, before sun up. Even the broncos were still asleep in the trampled fields, blue in the moon-wash. I helped her enter the following items into the various craft, garden, baking and art contests: ceramic punchbowl with abalone inlay; cinnamon pear cake; one of them big giant pumpkins, took two of us to carry; crocheted burgundy sweater of organic Scottish wool. I began setting things up on the shelves and arranging pieces in just such a way where I know the item is going to best catch eyes. I was surprised then, when Mom, rather uncharacteristically shy, said she had one more thing at the house, and asked if I could come with.

We drove over and she opened the garage. Right in the middle, next to my step dad’s PT Cruiser, was some big old thing under a white canvas sheet. This she gently removed to reveal a large painting.

I’ve never known Mom to paint, so I stopped short. I’m no art student, but I do know that a painting can be judged on how well it looks like the thing it’s trying to look like. And in that category, I’d say this piece was squarely in the C minus territory.

It was a portrait of Dinny, her late second husband, my step dad. At least that much was clear. I could tell it was him so I guess that’s a positive. He wore his old varsity sweater and had that mole on the edge of his nose. But in Mom’s rendering, the mole looked like a black spider. And part of his face sagged as if he’d recently had a stroke. That seemed unintentional, to make him look like he had a spider on his face and recently suffered a stroke. Also, I never knew my step dad to have cross eyes or a lump on his shoulder.

I thought: tell her. “Mom,” I ought to say, “this ain’t up to snuff. Not for the Delaney County Fair.” And that would be that. I had to think of Nara, who would be competing in the rodeo against professional male bronc riders. The last thing she needed was a family shame to weigh on her. Not to mention Father’s memory, which would be tarnished.

But Mom was looking at the art and gently crying.

“It’s my Dinny boy,” she said.

“That it is,” I said.

▪

THE DAY DINNY WAS TO MOVE into Bear Grass Assisted Living, I took Mom wakeboarding. She had been feeling badly about all of it, because she told Dinny a small fib. She said she’d be moving into the home with him. Which was only a fib insofar as she wasn’t going to live there. It was just thirty minutes down the road from her house so I didn’t know what the difference was. She could visit whenever. But Mom was second guessing everything. I didn’t like seeing her so uncharacteristically self-questioning. She wasn’t doing wrong by him as far as I could see. Where would Dinny be without Mom? She was using Father’s money to pay for everything, so I thought he ought to be grateful.

“Mom,” I said. “You have so much life left to live. You are way too young to hang around all those diapers. Dinny’s getting to a point where he needs that.”

Mom taught Tai Chi on Tuesdays, walked two miles daily with her cousin Lula, hauled and split her own wood for winter heat. The idea of her living in a home was ridiculous.

Despite the logic of what I told her, she had misgivings. So I asked her to leave it up to me. I figured it was best not to tell my step dad anything. The day he was set to move in to Bear Grass, I gave my husband the following instructions: tell Dinny y’all are going to McDonald’s so he better pack a bag. Cal can be counted on for very basic things like that, if you spell it out. If the drive isn’t too far. I figured Dinny might not take it like a man, being put in assisted living, and I thought it would be best if Mom wasn’t around to see that. I thought it best that she and I head out to the lake, clear our heads. She could check on him in a day or two when he got settled.

I remember her out on the wakeboard, the blue water unzipping behind her in a small, white-flaking surf. I’m sitting on the back of the boat, our dear family friend Donna is driving. She’s yelling something at me and pointing up at the bright blue sky. It was a helicopter, a big army-green Chinook. But a stunning thing was dangling beneath it on glinting steel cables; an armored tank. What power! In this country we really rock and roll. We don’t wait around for instructions.

This visage lifted me. I was feeling proud to be born in the USA. So I looked over at Mom, to draw her attention to it, so she too could look at the tank and feel that patriotic invisible-under-God feeling, and all while wakeboarding behind Donna’s powerboat no less! But she had crashed some ways back. I put the orange flag up and we circled the boat around to get her. We found Mom laying on the water, floating, stretched out like the five points of a star. She was fine, just thinking about things I guess. Dinny died a year later.

▪

WE CARRIED THE PAINTING into the craft fair. I was hoping no one had yet arrived but people were everywhere, the shelves already thick with vegetables and cakes, hand-forged swords and rehabilitated civil-war rifles. I perused the artworks to have a look at our chances. Claire DeBoche’s standard entry of water-color wolves. Competent but no surprises there. Honey Bradford’s tiny ceramic mice that she makes. Very detailed but don’t exactly catch your eye. Also, shouldn’t they be entered in the craft portion of the contest, along with the other ceramics? But every year she claims no. I’m an artist, she says. This is art.

Further down the shelf there’s Debrah Laughlin’s crazy diorama. An orange five gallon bucket on its side with the taxidermy bust of a fox coming out of it, a cigarette glued to its jowls. Moss and plastic frogs all around its head. Next to the bucket: an assortment of tin cans, prescription bottles and candy wrappers all suspended with epoxy in various states of motion. I looked at the info card.

“Whimsical Bucket Situation.”

A young woman named Luisa showed up with Mr Robbins, the English teacher. She’s a foreign exchange student from Spain or Mexico or some such. Robbins and his wife are her host parents for the school year, and I’ve come to some conclusions about that. I think he does her homework for her.

Nara’s told me a lot about this young Luisa. They’re in some of the same classes together. Luisa is clearly a foreign beauty, tall with long dark shiny hair, but has dyslexia and a terrible lisp. She flunked most of her classes first quarter which is supposed to be grounds for deportation, but probably Robbins pulled some strings on her behalf.

“Mom,” Nara told me just the other day, “I saw her crying like a bitch to Mr Mueller after she failed the ecology test. She goes ‘I’m tho thorry mithter Mueller, I am tho bad at tetht, I try tho hard.’”

“Mueller should not allow students to cry to him,” is what I said. “But I guess if you want to get ahead nowadays, in addition to all your hard work and talent, you better get a speech impediment and learn to weep on command.”

“And guess what?” Nara said. “Luisa doesn’t even know how to tell time.”

“We used to have a word for that,” I said. But tastefully didn’t say the word.

▪

SO THERE’S LUISA SETTING UP her paintings. Despite her severe troubles she’s some kind of painter? I have to hand it to her though, these were five beautiful pieces. Big ones. They all seemed to go together with an ocean motif. Very colorful, with dynamic blues and oranges and lithe arcing lines that made you think of sunsets over tidal vistas. Birds in flight, orcas jumping, lighted buoys in undulant motion. At the center she painted a baby on a bed of straw, floating there in the sea. Everything looked real and vivid but also strange, like a dream. This Luisa is either a talented artist despite other disabilities, or Robins hired someone to do the paintings for her. Whatever the backstory, one could tell this series would run away with victory.

Mom approached Luisa after setting up her own painting, and I’m thinking: Mom, take a good hard look at what a real piece of art is. There’s still time to grab yours off the shelf and hide it behind a hay bale somewhere.

“You are such a beautiful, talented woman,” Mom said to Luisa.

I admit to having made an audible groan.

“Thank you so much,” said Luisa. “Is this your painting here?” She walked over to the portrait of Dinny, and folded her arms like she was admiring a piece in the Louvre.

“Yes, it’s my first ever painting,” Mom said.

“Oh! For your first time is really good!”

“Oh it’s really not!” Mom was petting this poor gal’s hair now. “But it’s of my second late husband. I’m twice widowed, you see. I painted Dinny here because I miss him so much.” Tears came silently to her eyes.

“Oh I am so sorry! I paint this picture here,” Luisa pointed to the baby on the bed of straw, “because it is of my brother. He was my twin. He die when we were just a baby.”

Mom sobbed to hear this, and leaned her head into the tall beautiful exchange student’s shoulder, her attractive collarbone.

“Everyday I draw my brother,” Luisa said, patting Mom on the back of her neck. “Every day I think my brother: I love him.”

“Everyday I miss my Dinny,” Mom said. “Everyday for the rest of my life until I die.”

“Yes, this is me, too. Everyday.”

▪

TONIGHT AT THE RODEO, we think Nara broke her back. Maybe. Fractured something in her spine, probably. We don’t know anything yet. The worst part is; she had done well. Eight seconds of synchronous animal motion. Rode that bronc with more grace and control than anything I’ve seen anywhere other than ESPN or YouTube. Received a score of eighty which ended up putting her in fourth place. Very good for her first competition. But after eight seconds, the bronc was still jumping like crazy to remove her. I’m not sure she knew quite what to do. The horse twisted its rear end as it bucked, sending Nara off to the left side. That foot didn’t come out of the stirrup. Her body flipped over, her head hit the dirt and her foot was still stuck. The bronc dragged her for a few seconds. Then flicked its back hoof at her, making a quick crack at her lower spine. Like he was wiping his shoes on a welcome mat. Got rid of her and walked casually on.

The crowd was quiet, I’ll give them that. Those bleachers were full to the brim, a lot of local people we’ve known our whole lives. Yet no one hopped up with fake concern trying to wedge themselves into things. People around here can be like that. Tonight, everyone knew they better leave it to me. So when I ran down the steps, all I could hear were my own feet on the ribbed aluminum. Nara lay with her face in the dirt, not moving.

Chad Bundles, the fireman, was quick on the radio to dispatch. An ambulance came right over. Nara was quiet on the stretcher, her jaw tight and her eyes staring straight off into the vanishing sky. I have no idea what she was thinking, but I do not believe it was fear. Though it ought to have been. She was just snapping out of the concussion, is probably what it was.

Mom and I got in an argument while we drove to the ER in Great Falls. I was angry about how things had turned out. I was angry about the rodeo, I was angry that I let Nara compete. Likewise I felt as if I’d let Mom down by allowing her enter the art contest.

“Why did you have to show everyone that painting?” I finally asked her, about a half hour into the drive. “Why did you have to put it in the competition?”

“Why shouldn’t I enter it?” she asked. She looked surprised that I could even think such a thing.

“You know you aren’t a painter,” I said. “You know you have other talents. So many of them. You took first in everything except the painting, which got a measly participation ribbon. If there is one embarrassment I cannot countenance, it’s a participation ribbon. Even ‘Whimsical Bucket Situation’ got third.”

“What difference does it make?” Mom asked. “The painting is what I loved the most.”

I thought about Father. Thank God she didn’t paint him.

“You and Father always taught me to follow my talents,” I said. “Your first husband, remember him? You both liked to say that everyone has talents. That if everyone would just stick to what they’re good at—”

“I’m sorry I taught you that,” she said. Her voice was quiet, she looked out the passenger window at the highway reflectors passing in the dark.

“Excuse me?”

“I really am sorry,” she said. “I know I once believed it but now I know it isn’t true. I’m so happy to have met Luisa. She’s gonna teach me to paint. She’s here for all of first semester and she’s going to paint with me every weekend until she leaves.”

“That young woman needs to focus on her studies. She needs to learn to tell time. Not give art classes. And as far as painting goes, Father would be embarrassed for you.”

“I loved your father, baby. I did. But then I fell in love with Dinny. I woke up next to him everyday for fourteen years and when he died, well —”

“When he died you and I were at Nara’s hockey game.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly where I was. But —”

“But what?”

“But I would give anything do things different. To have been with him when he passed. That’s why I want to paint. Because my spirit is like that baby floating on the ocean. The buoys on the sea. There is something I can never explain to you until you feel it for yourself.”

▪

WE’VE HAD TO KEEP MUM about Nara’s recovery in the months since the rodeo. Thank God it was only a small fracture in her lower back. Still, if New Hampshire found out she’d been injured, they might take her scholarship away. I’ve tried my best; I made sure to chaperone Homecoming dance, for example, so I could admonish anyone taking a picture of her in the wheelchair. Nara’s doing pretty well all things considered. She recently started walking, and goes to plenty of physical therapy appointments. She’ll have to play hockey this winter so as not to arouse suspicion. But I got myself a spot as an assistant to Coach Dedmon and I think we can arrange things so she’ll sit out most games until she gets cleared from her doctor. By the time I drive her across country in August, she’ll be in decent shape to play college. Freshmen don’t get on the ice during games too much anyhow.

When I lay awake at night I think: why did I allow her to ride that bronc? It’s not as if I can strap her down and shove a hockey puck in her mouth, after all. Women in my family are obstinate. Still, things are happening that feel beyond my control. People say that you have to learn to let go, that you can’t control everything. But I prefer to at least try. I like to have my hand on the wheel. It bothers me that Nara isn’t too interested in hockey anymore. It’s almost as if she’s lost that passion. I remind her that it’s on account of her talent at the right-wing position that she’s gotten a full ride scholarship to a good university. What did rodeo ever do for her, besides almost wreck it all? But it doesn’t matter what I tell her. In her dreams she is riding those wild horses. She talks about the broncs often, seems to have a taste for them. That bastard horse rung her bell, broke her back, and she won’t say so but I can tell she’d like to return to the saddle and ask for a bit more.

Where are you, Father? There is no one to put things right out here. You could rope steers with such perfect authority. You could but whistle and the herd would follow. I am a mere bank manager. My family, sometimes I hardly recognize them. I’m uneasy and will feel this way at least until Nara is in New Hampshire, far from the grassy plains of the west and these tameless, unruly animals.

▪ ▪ ▪

Jeff Guay is a musician, writer and teacher, living in Boulder, Montana with his wife. He derives the greater part of his personal philosophy from the late works of Tolstoy, as well as Kevin Costner’s monologues in Bull Durham. Jeff won the 2023 Rick Bass/Montana Prize for Fiction and has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana.

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