The Books: “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” – ‘People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water’ (Annie Proulx)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx.

‘People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water’ tells the story of two ranching families – the Dunmires and the Tinsleys – going back in generations, to the early days of the 20th century. Drought, flood, and some man-made horrors (like Mrs. Tinsley throwing her infant baby into a river – who knows why – she seems a little touched in the head – the baby was swept away, never to be heard of again) – Proulx also describes the development of the character of a particular family, and how that happens. The Dunmires are survivors – and saw the worst of the worst in their lives – locust plagues, drought, all that … they are ranchers, they work livestock, and Proulx writes:

The country, its horses and cattle, suited them and if they loved anything that was it, and they ran that country because there were eight of them and Ice and they were of one mind. But there builds up in men who work livestock in big territory a kind of contempt for those who do not. The Dunmires measured beauty and religion by what they rode through every day, and this encouraged their disdain for art and intellect. There was a somber arrogance about them, a rigidity of attitude that said theirs was the only way.

The Dunmires – obviously righteous people (in the good and bad sense of the word) – and the Tinsleys who, uhm, are a little bit “off”.

Eventually, through the generations, we get to the present one. Ras Tinsley, one of the Tinsley boys, goes off – leaves Wyoming – and disappears. Until they get a postcard from some preacher in Schenectady saying that there is a horribly injured person in the hospital there, who has been in a coma for weeks (I think – can’t remember) – or at least couldn’t speak or identify himself … but finally regained enough speech that he told him his name and that he hailed from Laramie. He had been in a terrible car wreck. The minister pays his train fare back to Wyoming – and Ras returns. He is now a wreck of a man, with one leering gleaming eye – and he’s obviously been brain damaged. He speaks in monosyllabic grunts. He goes out for horse rides and doesn’t come back for days. There’s a bad feeling about him. Eventually, a neighbor complains: Ras exposed his penis to his wife. It becomes a common complaint. People are pissed. The Tinsleys try to handle the situation, they reprimand Ras – who is now a 25 year old man – telling him he can’t go around exposing himself like that, people don’t “‘preciate the show” … and it is unclear whether Ras is conscious of what he is doing or not. It seems like he is. And it seems like there is a deep rage in him towards his mother (the woman who tossed her own baby into a rushing river, for no apparent reason whatsoever) … She’s a fanatic, she cleans her house like a maniac, she can’t stand sex – finds marriage itself disgusting … and when Ras left, for the first time, he never wrote. He never looked back – you get the sense that he was running as far away as he could from his stifling family. And now, injured and helpless, he is back in their midst … and even though he doesn’t say anything, Proulx has a way of suggesting the deep rage and trapped feeling he must have. Anyway, things finally get so bad that a group of men attack Ras and castrate him. He is so beyond language and normal human behavior that he lies in bed at home, sick, and doesn’t say what happened to him. His is the mute suffering of an animal.

The story is a mini-novel, and has elements of East of Eden in it, with its stories of the two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – and how their development runs alongside and is important to the development of America. They are intertwined. Without families like the Dunmires and the Tinsleys, America wouldn’t have prospered. But thank God we, as a nation, are not ONLY made up of the Dunmires and the Tinsleys (see Proulx’s paragraph above) because that’s some, well, fucked up shit, frankly.

But look (in the excerpt below) at how Annie Proulx begins this horrifying story, with its violence and blood and plagues and its cast of specific characters. Amazing. Like I said in my post about The Shipping News, Proulx is unafraid of going for the big and grand gesture. She does it sparingly, but when she goes for it? Look out!

Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx – ‘People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water’

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country – indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky – provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.