About the Author
Joe Henry received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, but he attributes much of his learning to his many years as a laborer, rancher, and professional athlete. A renowned lyricist, he has had his words performed on more than one hundred recordings by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra and John Denver to Garth Brooks and Rascal Flatts. In addition to his many music awards, he also received a National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation and the Colorado Governors Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ANGELS
She came on the train with her folks, Spencer says. For the waters. For the mineral hot springs in that part of the state. Her daddy suffered from the lumbago and in those days it was thought to be a cure. And too, the journey would be another facet of her education before she went back to one of those eastern girls’ colleges. She was nineteen years old. Course I was young too, twenty, and fixing to go back to school myself. Which was my book learning, but I still knew the horses better than anything else.
And that summer I was breaking and starting the roughstock on a great big spread at the foot of the Wind Rivers while my own folks were still busy with their hay back home, which was maybe sixty or seventy miles to the north. And you know I druther be bucking broncs than haybales any day that the sun comes up. I been able to talk sense to animals, especially the horses, since I was a boy. And in the early evenings when her folks’d retire before dinner, Elizabeth’d come out by herself and watch me working the unbroke creatures in the big corral.
The red disk of the sun is setting directly in my eyes whenever I look up from this lovely two-year-old bay colt that I’m working. And every so often he’ll snort and tense and prepare to throw me away from him, with my left hand smoothing down his neck and my right arm resting over his withers. I keep talking to him rubbing softly up and down the bridge of his nose and he snorts again but still doesn’t jump away because by then he already knows that he likes the sound of my voice.
And who knows how long I stand there like that, with my hands on him and speaking softly and all the while watching his eye and his ears. Which go from wanting to lie back and get away from me to coming forward again so he can hear what I’ve got to say. His brow lifts up real nervous-like and he snorts again with his eye big and showing all its white, and then for whatever reason he glances at me one more time and looks away like he’s finally figured out that I’m not gonna be a danger to him and so maybe he can ease down enough inside his fear to allow how good my touch feels too.
It’s full-on dusk and I’m still talking to him, rubbing the corners of his mouth as I position myself where he can look into my eyes whenever he wants to. But by now I can see that he’s decided that he can trust me. I always carry this length of braided rawhide that my granddad’d given me when I was a boy, and I take it out and let him smell it and taste it too as I slowly move it past his teeth. And then I make one turn with it around the back of his lower jaw, Indian-fashion.
I rub his back down from his shoulder, talking all the while and leaning against the barrel of his body with more and more pressure until he’s actually supporting my full weight. He walks ahead a few steps with some concern, because by now I’m pretty much hanging off him with my arms across his back. He stops and I leave my right arm over him holding both sides of the rawhide rein snubbed up in my left hand, and without altering the calm reassurance of what I’ve been telling him I slide up and onto his back.
He locks his knees and starts to hump up his spine and his ears begin to come back and then go forward again. He snorts and kind of bounces once or twice stiff-legged like that and then just relaxes and walks me over to the fence. Where Elizabeth is perched up on the top railing watching us with this funny expression on her face. Not hard but not smiling either. In a green sweater. I’ll never forget that green . . . a green coat-sweater. Isn’t that foolish after all these years?
Back across the dark, the clashing of the iron triangle calls everyone to come and eat, the hands at one long table and the foreman and his family and the guests of the ranch at another. Elizabeth walks a pace or two ahead of me as I come up behind her coiling my piece of rawhide. She turns when I get alongside and says, They always seem to trust you, don’t they? And I say, Ma’m? And she says, The horses. They trust you because you don’t try to trick them, do you?
It’s too dark to see her eyes and I say, No’m, I just put myself in their place until we both seem to understand what the other’s thinking. Well I think they’re lucky, she says. And I say, Ma’m? And she says, The horses. I just think they’re lucky. And as we approach the wide veranda I mumble mostly to myself I guess, Well I reckon I probably am too.
We don’t really get to talk again for their stay is at an end the following morning and they’re bound back east. And in a few days I’m headed home myself and then back to school too. In Cambridge. In Massachusetts of all places. And as they say, the die seems to’ve already been cast without me understanding or even being aware of the wheels that’d been set in motion a long time before I looked up like that squinting into the setting sun and probably smelling not unlike the dust and rank horsehide of my then present occupation. For I’ll soon be taking my own train ride. In the same direction too. And I remember my father and me leaving a little after three in the morning for Cheyenne, where the railhead’s at.
My last night home, my ma comes in while I’m still packing and sits on my bed watching me choosing from the stack of clean clothes she’s brought that’re all folded perfectly like a pile of books, but soft and warm from her ironing. And without looking up, as I’m arranging everything in my case the way I want it, I say, You know I met a very lovely girl down at the Y-Cross Ranch. And I think I’m gonna marry her.
And when the words come out in the open like that so they can’t be taken back, with my ma setting on the corner of my bed for a witness, it shocked me even more than her. And scared me too I have to say, because I hadn’t had the time or maybe just the courage to dwell on it. But to tell the truth, when I heard those words myself spoken right out loud, it was as if I was just repeating what had already been signed and sealed and delivered even though I hadn’t stopped to wonder if Elizabeth had gotten the same message too. Like as if it was already a settled and complete thing although it hadn’t hardly even begun yet. Ma, I says, I met this beautiful girl and I’m gonna marry her.
South Station in Boston early Sunday afternoons, and then back again from Connecticut on the last train north every Sunday night. All through the winter, with me in my old hat and even older sheepskin coat that was permanently soiled from years of working and feeding animals in it. And seeing that I probably wasn’t to be deterred by obstacles of distance or weather, her folks weren’t all that happy with me as a prospective suitor for their younger daughter. A student in good standing at one of the world’s great learning institutions, I was still by their lights an interloper in a cowboy hat who walked bowlegged in strange boots and talked like he came from a foreign country. Which Wyoming surely was, even though they had had a recent taste of it, compared to the neat and familiar coastline of their Puritan forebears where they had lived all their lives beside the constant ocean. With Boston to the north and east and New York City to the south and west.
Well February roars in and New England or at least that part of it is being battered by what they call an old-fashioned nor’easter. Gale-force winds and nearly two feet of snow that close down just about everything from New York to Boston. Excepting of course the trains, which are still running although on a greatly reduced schedule.
Elizabeth says they’re midway through their dinner, each of them at least a little preoccupied with the wild sounds of the storm that if anything seems to have gotten worse, and Mr. Putnam glances down the table at his two daughters and says to Mrs. Putnam, Well the hearth-fire will be a welcome place on a night like this. Carrots please, dear. And Elizabeth says that something makes her turn and look around. And her mother says, It’s just the oak limb against the roof, dear. And excusing herself, Elizabeth rises and hurries toward the front entrance where whatever it is seems to knock once again.
And standing there all crusted with snow, she yanks me into the foyer with the wind blowing the snow in too and then shoves the door closed behind me. She doesn’t say anything while she wipes the snow from my face and helps me unbutton my coat. For it’s at least a three-mile walk from the train station, and I never have gotten into the habit of wearing gloves I guess. And she says, Don’t you have any sense at all?
And I say, Ma’m? And then, You mean this little perturbation of wind and weather? Why this is the first time since I left home that it seemed that maybe I really could almost get used to your climate here. And like Pa always said, if horse-sense’d help a jackass be a mule, well nary a man could do any better.
She’s standing there trying to keep from shaking her head, with her mouth set and that look in her eyes that is not quite scolding at me just yet. And I say, And besides, I wanted you to marry me. And something in her eyes changes while she tugs on either side of my open coat with her fists against my chest and my back against the door and the snow just beginning to melt onto her arms. And I say, Will you? And she looks into my eyes and just barely tips her head, but nowhere near to actually nodding it. And whispers, Yes.
And I just remember saying, Well then, with the doorknob still in one hand and my hat in the other. And without thinking, or perhaps a bit stunned too along with everything else, I open and close the door behind me lurching down the stairs and back out into the night. And with the wind driving the snow under my open coat ...
