“Western Folk”

by Tom Shafer

February 5, 2018

So, several years ago, my wife and I were meeting her dad and his new wife at the Western Writers of America conference in Idaho Springs, Idaho.  To be honest, I was viewing this as a vacation opportunity — Grand Teton National Park was a short 100 miles away and Craters of the Moon National Monument was even closer.  However, father-in-law Richard Seifried, a successful writer in his own right, convinced me to submit a story of some sort to the WWA conference committee.  Each year, three written works (winners!) in a variety of categories were featured in Western Writers magazine.  Now, I love everything about the West, but at that time I knew around-the-corner from next-to-nothing about “Westerns.”  But I enjoy writing and like a challenge, so I gave it a shot.  What follows is my first — and actually last — foray into Western writing.  And guess what?  Yep, I didn’t win — though I did get a nice certificate of participation.  I would like to report to you that the winners were outstanding Western works and that the authors are now world — or even regionally — famous.  But I can’t tell you that.  The “winners” were predictable and mushy (my term for beyond overly romantic), and their writers were longtime “groupies” of the WWA.  Anyway, I had fun roaming the local parks — and visiting with family.  So, while I am enjoying my sour grapes, hopefully you will enjoy my short story entry from so many years ago.

For weeks, early spring rains hammered our town relentlessly. We woke to a gentle patter on our rooftops. Hunched over, as if we were carrying the weight of the world on our backs, using newspapers as shields, we ran-walked through the heavier drops on our way downtown. The rain soaked us as we returned to our homes in the evening, and eventually lulled us to our slumber.

But no one bore witness to the water creeping over our town’s retention wall . . .

Living in a small town like Pastura, Nebraska, is a little like living in your parents’ basement. There, you have a certain amount of privacy to protect yourself from an ever-encroaching world. There, you can pretend that other people have problems, that other people envy your lifestyle. There, transient happiness reigns.

And yet, for all of its intimacy and fantasy, it is still your parents’ basement. People do know your real world, your real life. They know your victories and your losses. They know your lost dreams and your spent dreams. And, in spite of all that they know, they accept you and you accept them, for they too have experienced their own losses and broken dreams.

For all practical purposes, I wasn’t all that far from my “parents’ basement.” At thirty-one, I should already be comfortable, working a nice, comfortable job, living in a big, comfortable home, maintaining an easy, comfortable relationship. I should be talking investments and retirement, IRAs and Roths and mutual funds. I should be taking my kids to tee-ball practice and ballet class. I should be.

But I’m not. I’m living in a one-room flat with a barren gravel alley for a backyard and the Dismal River off my front porch. I know everything and am skilled at nothing. Twelve semesters in New Haven guaranteed that. Right now, I am a night janitor at Fallen Oaks Retirement Home, and I deliver pizza on weekends for a local diner. I fall in and out of relationships like the river rises and falls in the spring. I am a perennial bachelor with a perennial itch. A faulty carburetor on my 1950 Victory Chief kept me here for a few nights when I was headed to the west coast two years ago. The fact that I am still in Pastura after two plus years, almost three, amazes me to no end.

And yet, here I am.

And frankly, I’m not sure why I stay here. Pastura is certainly not a boomtown. In many ways it is dying. At the turn of the century, it was a thriving county seat with a bustling business district; now, that title, and that business, belongs to neighboring Thedford. The only industry, the United States Shoe Corporation, has been gone for twenty years. Kids no longer attend Pastura Local; they now travel twenty miles to the county’s consolidated school. And, just last year, Rand McNally excluded Pastura from its regional maps (they later explained that it was an oversight). Today, four hundred or so odd characters inhabit the town, all seemingly misfits in one way or another. Perhaps that’s why I am here.

Many of them, I know, are drawn to the Dismal. Some of the old boys who have seen Pastura’s better days gather daily on a nearby riverbank trampled down to mud and limestone, gather to talk of better days and friends gone by. They talk of grand times, of FDR’s visit in ’36, of WWII hero Stoneyboy Watkins, of the warehouse fire in ’54, of the floods of ’24, ’37, ’58 . . . well, actually, the Dismal floods yearly, but some of them are more memorable than others. And, the men revel in these stories.

It was at these gatherings that I learned much of the history of these parts, a history that will never make it to any school book, or be discussed at a latte-bookstore signing. No, these tales were an oral history, perhaps somewhat embellished, that created near-mythic characters living near-epic lives and taking near-epic journeys. Homer himself could have done so well to craft such tales.

“Neddie Barker. Now that was a man’s man,” quipped Dusty Bernard, a white-haired, stoop-shouldered former fireman and elder statesman of the town. He had been the Ben Franklin of his age: mayor of Pastura for several years, frequent contributor to the Thedford Ledger, a bit of a tinkerer and architect (he designed the firehouse constructed in ‘72), and a known womanizer.

“Yeah, Neddie was a man’s man,” he repeated for emphasis. “’Member that rescue on Burnt Creek? When Neddie pulled that kid from the ice floe?”

“The Beadleman boy?” answered Slim Turner. Slim actually looked much younger than his counterparts. In fact, to look at him, you would swear he wasn’t a day over fifty. But George Strong, owner of the local diner, once told me that Slim had quit school during the depression to help make ends meet for his family. After the Second World War, he returned to the family farm and worked the land until the late ‘80s when he sold it off to a big farming outfit.

“Yeah, the Beadleman boy. Ernie Beadleman,” Dusty recalled. “Neddie just clambered over those ice chunks and plucked him out of the water. Got a citation from the governor.”

“Didn’t Beadleman die a couple of years later?” questioned Billy Frye. No one knew much about Billy Frye. He had bought the old Howell place in ’94 and was still working to refurbish it. Gossip whispered that he was fixing it up for a woman he was bringing back from the East. No woman ever materialized, and Billy took a job helping out in the hardware store. So, in reality, Billy had only been here a couple of years longer than I had been. Like me, he didn’t know Ernie Beadleman or Neddie Barker either, but he too had heard these stories many times and could recall them as if he had lived here his entire life.

“Seems to me he died in a car accident out on old 83. He was always a bit of a hellion. Think we all knew he wouldn’t live to see thirty.” Slim threw his head back and glanced at the tops of the overhead trees as if he were trying to glimpse a young Ernie spying on the old boys like he had done in his youth.

The wind suddenly gusted and stirred all of us to shudder. Though spring had officially arrived, it apparently could not find the town of Pastura either. The hard winter snows had finally subsided and begun melting, but daily temperatures were still holding in the forties, and the constant northwest winds kept a chill on the air.

“Sure wish the weather would break,” shivered Billy. “When they say April showers bring May flowers, I don’t think they mean snow showers. Think I’ll make a fire.”

Billy shuffled off into the tree line to retrieve driftwood left by the yearly flooding. It was only then that I noticed the river itself. Though the sky was threatening and overcast, this was first day without real rain in at least a couple of weeks. The Dismal was swollen and turgid, and lapped closer and closer to the road. Today we were sitting far up on its bank; tomorrow we might have to sit on the road.

“Jimmy, you’re pretty quiet,” observed Dusty. “Kitty cat got your tongue?”

With that, Dusty chuckled aloud to himself, and the rest of us followed suit. All of us knew that he was seeing Kitty Stevens, a waitress at Strong’s Café in town. Jimmy Lyons was the second youngest of the regulars (I was the baby), and perhaps the favorite. Simply put, he was the nicest man I’d ever met. It was a running joke in town that Jimmy couldn’t keep a job because he was always helping someone with something. And, truth be known, this was probably truth. Jimmy had been a star basketball player from the last graduating class of Pastura High, and by all accounts had had the best chance of escaping Thomas County and making a name for himself. But, upon graduation, he enlisted in the Army instead and found himself being shipped off to some desert in the Persian Gulf. He returned from that war physically unscathed, but mentally – and perhaps emotionally – he had changed. In his teens, he had been a rather selfish young man; now, he was a courteous, conscientious, and generous gentleman whom the town loved and admired. It’s so cliché, but it’s still amazing how war can change a man.

“Don’t pee yourself!” snickered Jimmy. Of course, just the way he said this, the way he himself was enjoying Dusty’s gentle barb set us all into a giggling frenzy. We were all gasping for air and trying to compose ourselves when Billy returned with wood and kindling.

“What? Somebody step on a cat?”

Once again, we doubled over with laughter, with Dusty nearly capsizing to the ground close to the water’s edge, while a quizzical Billy set the kindling in a tepee-like fashion and with a match lit some shredded paper he pulled from his pocket. The first piece of paper caught fire, but the flames quickly disappeared with a hiss when they contacted the damp ground. With a second match, Billy carefully held the paper just above the moisture until the smaller pieces of kindling slowly lit, and the flames grew rapidly as they devoured the river’s spent debris.

The laughter and tears eventually subsided quietly, and all of us fell to staring at the fire, mesmerized by the growing blaze, spiritually rejuvenated by its warming glow and the warmth of the moment.

No one spoke for several minutes, each man consumed by his own thoughts, his own musings and perceptions. I couldn’t help but wonder what each man was thinking: was he thinking about a past encounter, a moment that he would like to change with words or action, a moment that was life altering, though he didn’t recognize it at the time? Perhaps he was replaying a previous glory, a time of revelry and happiness. Maybe he was pondering the imponderables. “Why are we here?” “What is our purpose?” Or, maybe he wasn’t thinking at all. Maybe he was just enjoying the comfort of a near-dusk fire and the camaraderie of strange souls drawn to the Dismal River.

Surprisingly, my voice broke the silence.

“Does the river flood every year?”

The fire crackled to life and spit an ember toward the growing river.

“That answer it for ya?” Slim replied, amused by his own quick wit.

“Can’t recall a spring that didn’t see the Dismal jump its banks somewhere,” Dusty said as he spat a seed at the water. “I mean, we don’t always see it downtown because of the retention wall, but almost every spring it seems to cover the road out here by Three Mile Creek. Inconvenience a few families down river, and travelers, I guess.”

“What about big floods, ones that do make it over the wall?” I asked.

“Well, it’s been over twenty years since we’ve had one like that,” answered Jimmy. “I remember because it happened on my sixteenth birthday. We spent all day baggin’ sand, but it didn’t matter. The water just kept on comin’.”

“Yeah, that was a bad one,” Slim recollected as he handed a piece of driftwood to Billy for the fire. “Kind of town killer, that one was. Lots of folks packed up and just moved on. Guess I don’t blame ‘em though. Town never did recover.”

“But you guys are still here. I know a lot of those people probably moved to Thedford and others moved further west. But you guys stayed here. Why stay here?” I know I must have seemed rather persistent in my questioning, desperate almost. But in a way, I was questioning myself. Perhaps in their answers I would find my own.

Silence once again found the riverbank, and fortunately, the fire pulled my gaze toward it. At first, I thought I may have offended them with my insistence. The conversation to that point had been like always, light-hearted, fun, and thoughtful. However, I may have crossed that invisible line, one that indelibly changes a moment, one that can change relationships permanently.

Just as the silence was becoming uncomfortable for me, Dusty stood up gingerly and slowly bent over to pick up a cane that had been just out of view.

“I never thought about leavin’. None of us did.” His hand swept across the glowing circle of light, and as it did, I saw the steady nods of both Slim and Jimmy. “See, there’s a misconception about people of the West. Old movies and those western novels stereotype us as gypsies and roamers, movin’ on when the gold runs out, or when the land dries up, or, in this case, when the river jumps its banks. That’s all just a bunch of bullshit. See, those is Eastern folk. Those townies who left after the last big flood were all Eastern folk. Nothin’ but squatters. But the Western folk, the real Western folk, well, they’re all still here. And, they ain’t goin’ nowhere soon.”

He carefully stepped around the flickering embers and started toward the road where his F-10 was parked. Just as he reached the edge of the circle of light, he paused and turned back toward the four of us huddled next to our struggling fire.

“Ya see, we love the land. We all work it in our different ways, and yeah, we curse it sometimes and threaten to move on, but the threats are empty. There’s a bond here that’s hard to explain, and even harder to break. No matter what, we live on.” Dusty paused again, and as he turned and limped out of the light, he called back again from the darkness.

“I figured a smart fella like you would know that. I mean, you are Western folk, ain’t ya?”

Later that evening, I crawled into bed with a greater sense of belonging than I had ever known. When I was back East, I merged right in with the hustle and bustle world of big city life. I lived at break-neck speed because everyone else was doing the same. I remember a business associate of mine once telling me that you never notice the smog if you don’t take time to breath it in. I remember thinking how stupid that sounded, but I chuckled as I nodded and probably repeated the same line a couple of dozen times or so with other friends and colleagues.

That world seems so far away now. As I lie here in my little flat facing the Dismal River in decaying Pastura, Nebraska, a new awareness has taken hold of me. I say it is a new awareness, but really, it is one that has been here for countless generations, and will be here for countless generations to come. It is steeped in the tradition of the West, and thanklessly handed down from Westerner to Westerner. I only had to travel fifteen hundred miles and thirty-one years to find out that I was Western folk. That evening, I knew that I had traveled fifteen hundred miles and thirty-one years to find out that I was home.

. . . And, that evening, while Pastura dozed comfortably and I dreamed happily for the first time in years, the water finally slipped furtively over the retaining wall.

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