The Books: “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” – ‘The Bunchgrass Edge Of the World’ (Annie Proulx)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx – excerpt from the story ‘The Bunchgrass Edge of the World’.

Like ‘People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water’, another story in the collection (excerpt here), ‘The Bunchgrass Edge Of the World’ is the story of a family – How do you get a “saga” into 25 pages? I don’t know, but Annie Proulx does. In quick brush strokes, she creates an entire family. The Touhey family moved to Wyoming during the Depression, and have been ranching there ever since. There’s Old Red, the patriarch, born in 1902 – his son Aladdin, Aladdin’s wife – and their kids, all grown-up now. Shan and Tyler, two of Aladdin’s kids, have taken off for Vegas – and the last child, Ottaline, stays. She’s an odd one. The family is embarrassed by her. She is not a social being. She is obese. She shuffles along, doing the work on the ranch, and it’s pretty obvious that she will never marry. Shan, the other daughter, moved to Vegas and became a bodybuilder – she sends home pictures of her in a bikini, flexing her muscles. It is as though she has moved to Jupiter. The plains and mountains of Wyoming have nothing to do with who Shan has become. Ottaline stares at the pictures. Old Red is still alive, and feisty – in his 90s – but he can feel himself being pushed aside in his own home. The tragedy of old age. But this is really Ottaline’s story. Ottaline takes over the narrative, which begins as a group tale … but seriously, she dominates.

I can’t describe it without making it sound “cute”, or imposed – you’ll just have to read the story yourself. Ottaline is a hard worker. She does not question her lot in life (although looking at the pictures of her sister makes her think that maybe she should lose weight? Maybe?) – just puts her nose to the grindstone. There’s a gravel pit on the ranch, with an enormous tractor sitting there, idle … and one day Ottaline goes and sits in it, to rest. It becomes a daily thing for her. Just a half hour or so, sitting in the tractor. And one day, as she approaches the gravel pit, the tractor starts talking to her. Confused at first, Ottaline does not know where the voice is coming from. The voice is grumpy, disgruntled, and yet not cruel. It’s a voice full of complaints – rust, peeling paint, etc. – but somehow the tractor has chosen Ottaline as his confidante. Ottaline starts to talk back. And she and the tractor soon become best friends. See? Hard to “describe” … Ottaline sits in the tractor and the tractor tells her all of its problems, and at the same time – really for the first time in her life – she is noticed. She is chosen. And so something begins to stir in the sludgy quiet heart of Ottaline. Something like life. Something like hope.

This is Annie Proulx territory. She covered it brilliantly in The Shipping News, with Quoyle … and Ottaline, in her way, wearing muu muus and muddy boots, lying in bed listening to cell phone conversations on her scanner – falling into other people’s lives … is a counterpoint to Quoyle.

There’s so much in this story – it’s a novel in miniature – but I’ll pick one of the excerpts about Ottaline.

EXCERPT FROM Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx – ‘The Bunchgrass Edge of the World’.

What was there for Ottaline when the work slacked off? Stare at indigo slants of hail forty miles east, regard the tumbled clouds like mechanics’ rags, count out he loves me, he loves me not, in nervous lightning crooked as branchwood through all quarters of the sky.

That summer the horses were always wet. It rained uncommonly, the southwest monsoon sweeping in. The shining horses stood out on the prairie, withers streaming, manes dripping, and one would suddenly start off, a fan of droplets coming off its shoulders like a cape. Ottaline and Aladdin wore slickers from morning coffee to goodnight yawn. Wauneta watched the television weather while she ironed shirts and sheets. Old Red called it drip and dribble, stayed in his room chewing tobacco, reading Zane Grey in large-print editions, his curved fingernail creasing the page under every line. On the Fourth of July they sat together on the porch watching a distant storm, pretending the thick, ruddy legs of lightning and thunder were fireworks.

Ottaline had seen most of what there was to see around her with nothing new in sight. Brilliant events burst open not in the future but in the imagination. The room she had shared with Shan was a room within a room. In the unshaded moonlight her eyes shone oily white. The calfskin rug on the floor seemed to move, to hunch and crawl a fraction of an inch at a time. The dark frame of the mirror sank into the wall, a rectangular trench. From her bed she saw the moon-bleached grain elevator and behind it immeasurable range flecked with cows like small black seeds. She was no one but Ottaline in that peppery, disturbing light that made her want everything there was to want. The raw loneliness then, the silences of the day, the longing flesh led her to press her mouth into the crook of her own hot elbow. She pinched and pummeled her fat flanks, rolled on the bed, twisted, went to the window a dozen times, heels striking the floor until old Red in his pantry below called out, “What is it? You got a sailor up there?”

Her only chance seemed the semiliterate, off-again, on-again hired man, Hal Bloom, tall legs like chopsticks, T-shirt emblazoned Aggressive by Nature, Cowboy by Choice. He worked for Aladdin in short bursts between rodeo roping, could not often be pried off his horse (for he cherished a vision of himself as an 1870s cowboy just in from an Oregon cattle drive). Ottaline had gone with him down into the willow a dozen times, to the damp soil and nests of stinging nettles, where he pulled a pale condom over his small, hard penis and crawled silently into her. His warm neck smelled of soap and horse.

But then, when Ottaline began working on the ranch for hard money, Aladdin told Hal Bloom to go spin his rope.

“Yeah, well, it’s too shit-fire long a haul out here anyways,” Bloom said, and was gone. That was that.

Ottaline was dissolving. It was too far to anything. Someone had to come for her. There was not even the solace of television, for old Red dominated the controls, always choosing Westerns, calling out to the film horses in his broken voice, “Buck him off, kick his brains out!”

Ottaline went up to her room, listened to cell-phone conversations on the scanner.

“The balance on account number seven three five five nine is minus two hundred and oh four ….”

“Hey, is it rainin there yet?”

“Is it rainin yet?” she repeated. It was raining everywhere and people were alive in it except in the Red Wall country.