Dirt That Won't Take a Print

The place McMurtry chose was a VFW hall in a town I won’t name because I couldn’t read the sign — the wind had scoured it to bare wood and someone had tacked a reflector from a bicycle to the post underneath, which caught the light when you drove past and made you slow down. That was the only reason I found it. Inside it smelled like floor wax and chili and decades of cigarette smoke that no amount of ventilation would ever lift from the paneling. The ceiling tiles were stained in a pattern I want to call continents. McMurtry was at a folding table near the kitchen pass-through, drinking from a Styrofoam cup, his hat beside him on the table like a third guest who’d arrived early.

Proulx came in five minutes later with mud on her boots and a topographic map folded wrong. She dropped the map on the table and said, “Your directions were terrible.”

“They got you here,” McMurtry said.

“The reflector got me here. Your directions had me going north on a road that runs east-west.”

He didn’t dispute this. He picked up the map, studied it briefly, and set it back down. “That’s the Sandhills,” he said, pointing at something I couldn’t see. “You can’t get anywhere on purpose in the Sandhills. You have to let the road decide.”

“That’s a romantic way of saying the roads are bad.”

“It’s an honest way of saying the roads are bad.”

I sat down between them, which in retrospect was a navigational error of my own. I had my notebook and a thermos of coffee and the combination spec printed on three pages, and I said something about being glad we were all here, and Proulx looked at me and said, “Don’t start with pleasantries. What’s the family?”

I told her. A family homesteading land that doesn’t want them. A man who believes — truly believes, down in the architecture of his conviction — that the land can be made to yield if he works it correctly, if he’s disciplined enough, if he follows the steps. His wife. Their children. The daily grind of frontier survival: broken axles, wells that go dry, a child’s fever. The seasonal cycle as narrative structure — planting, growing, surviving winter, repeating.

“And the man is wrong,” I said. “That’s the structural constraint. He’s fundamentally wrong about something, and the story reveals it through consequences, not through any moment where he sees it clearly.”

Proulx nodded once. “Good. That’s the only honest way to do it. People who are wrong about fundamental things don’t have epiphanies. They just keep being wrong until the wrongness breaks something they can’t fix.”

McMurtry tilted his cup toward me. “What’s he wrong about?”

“I was hoping we’d figure that out.”

“Well,” McMurtry said, settling back in his chair with the ease of a man who has told stories for six decades and doesn’t need to rush any of them, “the obvious answer is he’s wrong about the land. He thinks he can tame it. That’s the standard frontier delusion.”

“It’s standard because it’s true,” Proulx said.

“It’s standard because it’s easy. And because it’s been done — Cather did it, Stegner did it, I’ve done it, you’ve done it. The man fights the land, the land wins, we all feel appropriately humbled. It’s practically a genre requirement.”

Proulx was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “The problem isn’t that he fights the land. The problem is what he thinks fighting the land means.”

McMurtry looked at her. I looked at her. The kitchen behind the pass-through made a sound like someone dropping a metal bowl.

“Go on,” McMurtry said.

“There’s a difference between a man who homesteads because he wants land and a man who homesteads because he believes homesteading is a moral act. The first one — he gets beaten by drought or grasshoppers or wind, he loses, he moves on or dies, fine. That’s a contest. But the second one. The one who thinks God or the government or the natural order of things has decreed that this grass should be wheat, that this creek should be dammed, that this particular stretch of nothing should be something because he’s arrived to make it so.” She paused. “That man isn’t fighting the land. He’s performing a conversion. He’s a missionary.”

“Now that,” McMurtry said, “is something worth writing about. Because you’re right — the delusion isn’t ‘I can tame this land.’ The delusion is ‘I should.’”

I wrote that down. I should. Two words that contain the entire ideology of Manifest Destiny, the Homestead Act, the whole evangelical conviction that empty land is an affront to civilization.

“But you can’t make him a villain,” McMurtry said, pointing his cup at Proulx now, a gesture I’d learn was his version of a raised hand. “That’s the trap. The man who believes homesteading is a moral act — he’s also feeding his children. He’s also building something with his hands. He’s also getting up before dawn and working until dark and doing it again the next day. The wrongness and the labor coexist. They have to.”

“I’m not interested in villains,” Proulx said. “I’m interested in damage.”

“Same thing, sometimes.”

“Never the same thing. Damage is what happens. Villainy is why we think it happened. I don’t care why a man is wrong. I care what his wrongness does to the ground he stands on and the people who stand near him.”

McMurtry set down his cup and folded his hands. I recognized this — from interviews, from the preambles to certain passages in his novels — as the posture he assumes when he’s about to say something he’s been turning over for years.

“My grandfather ranched outside Archer City,” he said. “Not homesteaded — ranched. By the time he got there the Comanches were gone and the buffalo were gone and the grass was mostly gone too, because the first ranchers had overstocked. He ran cattle on land that had already been ruined by the generation before him. And he knew it. He’d say, ‘This land was better before me and it’ll be better after me.’ But he stayed. He stayed and he worked it and he died on it. And his sons stayed and their sons stayed and now there’s a highway through it and a Dairy Queen on the corner and the grass still hasn’t come back.”

He looked at Proulx. “The question isn’t whether the man is wrong. The question is what the family does with his wrongness after he’s gone.”

“After he’s gone?” I said. “He dies?”

“Everybody dies in a western,” Proulx said. “The question is what kills them.”

“Not the land,” McMurtry said. “The land doesn’t kill people. People kill themselves on the land. They work too hard or drink bad water or get thrown from a horse. The land is just where it happens.”

“That’s where you and I disagree,” Proulx said. “The land kills people. Not with intent — the land doesn’t have intent. But the land has physics. Gravity and temperature and wind and the specific mineral composition of the water table. Those aren’t neutral conditions. They’re conditions that select for certain outcomes. A man drinks alkali water because it’s the only water, and his kidneys fail, and you can call that the man’s choice if you want but the land chose the water.”

McMurtry smiled — the first real smile I’d seen from him, not warm exactly but appreciative, the way you smile at a good hand in cards. “We’re going to disagree about agency for the rest of the afternoon, aren’t we.”

“Probably for the rest of our lives.”

I was scribbling fast. “Can we talk about the wife?” I said. “The combination spec mentions the family as the smallest viable unit of civilization — that’s from Wilder, the Little House structure. Seasonal cycles, practical details of making a home from raw land. If the man is the one who’s wrong, what’s the wife’s relationship to his wrongness?”

“She knows,” Proulx said immediately.

“Not necessarily,” McMurtry said.

“She knows. Women on homesteads always knew. They couldn’t afford not to. The man could believe whatever he needed to believe because his delusion was productive — it kept him working. The woman had to count the flour. The woman had to decide whether the child’s cough was a cough or diphtheria. The woman had to know what was actually happening because her survival — and her children’s survival — depended on an accurate assessment of reality. Not the man’s moral narrative about reality. Reality.”

“You’re making her the smart one,” McMurtry said. “That’s just as reductive.”

“I’m making her the practical one. There’s a difference. She can be practical and still stay. She can know the land won’t yield what he promises and still plant the garden and still mend the fence and still heat water for his bath when he comes in from the field with his hands bleeding. That’s not stupidity. That’s love under conditions of scarcity, which looks nothing like love in a novel.”

McMurtry was quiet. I saw something shift in his face — not agreement exactly, but the recognition that she had said something he wished he had said first.

“There’s a technique in epigraphy,” I said, and they both looked at me with the wariness people reserve for non sequiturs. “Called estampage. When you find an inscription carved into stone — something old, something that might erode — you press wet paper against it and let it dry. The paper takes the shape of the carving. A negative image. And then you take the paper away and you have the inscription, portable, readable, but reversed. The marks that were cut into the stone now rise from the paper.”

Proulx tilted her head. McMurtry waited.

“I keep thinking about the wife as an estampage of the husband. Everything he carves into the land — every furrow, every fence post — she’s the paper pressed against it. She carries the impression of his work, but reversed. Where he sees accomplishment, she sees cost. Where he sees progress, she sees depletion. She’s a faithful record of everything he’s done, but what she records isn’t what he thinks he’s inscribing.”

The VFW hall was quiet for a moment. Someone in the kitchen ran water.

“That’s not bad,” Proulx said, which from her meant something.

“It’s a metaphor,” McMurtry said. “It’s a good metaphor. But don’t let it replace the actual woman. The actual woman isn’t a piece of paper. She’s a person who decided to stay, every single day, in a place that was killing her, for reasons that probably shifted year by year and that she couldn’t have articulated if you’d asked her. Some days she stayed for the children. Some days for the man. Some days because leaving was more terrifying than staying. Some days because the garden came up in April and for two weeks the world looked like the place he’d described when he proposed.”

“That’s the McMurtry in this story,” Proulx said, and it wasn’t entirely a compliment but it wasn’t entirely not one either. “The warmth. The insistence that people are more than what happened to them.”

“And the Proulx?”

“The wind,” she said. “The well going dry. The specific weight of a sod brick in a woman’s hands. The temperature at which flesh stops feeling cold and starts feeling nothing.”

I wrote it down. I wrote all of it down. And then I said, “The man’s wrongness — let me try to name it specifically. He believes that his suffering is proof that what he’s doing is right. That because the land resists, his effort to subdue it is noble. Every setback confirms his conviction instead of undermining it. The broken axle isn’t evidence that the road is bad — it’s evidence that the journey matters. The dry well isn’t evidence that they should leave — it’s evidence that God is testing them.”

“And the children?” McMurtry said.

“The children are what he puts on the other side of the scale. Every time the wife — or the land, or his own body — says stop, he points to the children. We’re doing this for them. We’re building something for them. And the children don’t want it. The children want a creek to swim in and a friend within walking distance and dinner that isn’t the same five things from the garden. But the father has made them into a justification, and that’s the part he can’t see.”

McMurtry nodded slowly. “That’s the cruelty that doesn’t know it’s cruelty. The most dangerous kind.”

“Aldo Leopold wrote about thinking like a mountain,” Proulx said. “The idea that an ecosystem has a kind of intelligence that operates on a timescale we can’t perceive. The mountain knows that killing the wolves means the deer overpopulate and strip the vegetation and erode the soil. The rancher only sees the wolf. Your man only sees the wheat. He doesn’t think like the mountain. He thinks like a sermon.”

That was when the title landed, or something near it, though I wouldn’t have it exactly right for days. A man who thinks like a sermon. Every fence post a verse. Every plowed furrow a line of scripture written into land that can’t read.

“How does it end?” I said.

“With weather,” Proulx said.

“With the wife,” McMurtry said.

They looked at each other.

“Both,” I said.

“You can’t have both,” Proulx said.

“Why not?”

McMurtry picked up his hat and looked at it and put it down again. “Because weather is indifference and the wife is everything indifference isn’t. If you end with the storm, the story says the land won. If you end with the wife, the story says something survived. You have to choose. What’s the last image?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have it yet. But I knew — and I wrote this in the margin of my notebook, circled three times — that the man would never know he was wrong. That was the whole thing. He’d go to his grave believing he’d done right. And the wife would tend the grave, and the children would leave, and the grass would come back over the furrows, and some of those things would be mercy and some of them would be erasure and the story wouldn’t say which was which.

Proulx stood up. “I need to get back before it gets dark. The road was bad enough with daylight.”

“Take the reflector,” McMurtry said. “They won’t miss it.”

She didn’t laugh, but she almost did, and that seemed like the right note to end on — two writers who would never agree about whether the land has agency, standing up from a folding table in a VFW hall that smelled like chili, leaving their Styrofoam cups for someone else to throw away.