BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 39

1918

DANIEL

You can get so you think a Mormon is a Mormon, one like the next like the next, but scratch one like you'd scratch a rock for gold and you'll find every one a little bit different. One believes in blood atonement, one doesn't. One thinks we wait in line in a preparatory heaven to choose a body for this earth—even an animal's, so prized is earthly existence—the next one unaware of such an idea. Some say one thing and others another about colored folk, women, having extra wives or prayer. And there are those that believe they have a direct connection to God and Joseph Smith (rarely Jesus Christ), as if the telephone company ran a special wire to connect their genuflections to the genuflectee. That connection doesn't seem to make their behavior more Christian but it does seem to make them more eager to behave however they wish. After all, they have license by the authorities to act as they see fit.

Nora ran into one of those. Mrs. Johnson pulled her in, threw a little chum out as if she were fishing, hooked Nora when she took the bait, so gently she didn't even know she was captured. T.R. warned her, I warned her, but like a chicken with a pencil on its beak she was hypnotized, immediately comparing her own impressions to our faulty ones and adjudging us as mistaken. She was leaving me from the moment she met Tillie, I see now—I should have just waved good-bye and chuckled, watched until I couldn't see her no more, but instead I kept trying to get her back.

There's a lot of ways to go about doing anything and I tried a number of methods to get her on my agreeable side again but as she grew close to Tillie she grew further away from me. She made a few efforts, I admit, but whatever enchantment I once had I didn't have anymore. It wasn't but six months before we were just nodding when I happened to be at the office instead of on the canals. The looks I got from the other canal men lasterdlonger than hers.

I lapsed into being morose at times but mostly I was kind of cross-eyed, lacking a proper understanding of what it was that was going on. It was like I was going two ways at once and couldn't get my bearings, a little like having little Henry along with me years before, paying attention to both where I was going and where he was wandering off to.

This went on for some time, was an affliction that wouldn't go away. It would dissipate for awhile and then come back with a vengeance, surprise me about the time I thought it was gone. It made me jumpy. It made me suspicious. I got so I avoided the office when I saw her horse tied up outside, though sometimes I had business to do and couldn't help but attend to it being as she was secretary.

I steeled myself at those times and it worked, for the most part, but about the time I let down my guard she'd give me a plate of cookies or a little embroidery she'd done. She might touch my hand for a moment, not long, but long enough to send me down a path of hope I didn't want to go down, knowing its destination. And if she walked in or rode up without my being prepared I could easily be undone, and no doubt I turned alternately cold and flustered, smitten, angry or shamed.

Occasionally, someone would offer advice, always along the gist of method—how to "get" a woman back, "win" a woman back—and always in a sideways manner, never mentioning Nora by name or referring to me or us, but about women in general. This didn't become tiresome only because it started out at tiresome, for what made Nora and I work was the ease with which our getting together happened. An engineer, you might think, is an expert in forcing his will upon the physical world, and there are those types, but I am the sort who models his creations on the least effort theory. I understand the other way of doing things, can appreciate the elegance of a design that imposes an idea on the landscape despite that landscape's resistance—can, in fact, as my professors would attest, design such a building, bridge or system—, but I prefer simplicity and ease and don't crave obstacles that I might gloat about overcoming. It's a good thing, you'll agree, that I landed in irrigation, where water always takes the easiest path and gravity always dictates that. Nora and I went that way, at least for awhile, and then she went her way and I went mine, not so different, I suppose, than the Skeen Canal and the United hugging each other for twenty-some miles and then parting.

It was Grace Peck that cured me not just of Nora but women in general. Surprise, I suppose, was her modus operandi—her "way of accomplishing," my professor would say—and she wielded it effortlessly. I may have been a blank spot she instantly recognized, a possibility, though she wouldn't have considered it in those terms. She wasn't a thinker though she was intelligent, she operated as a force of nature and my appearance just happened to coincide with hers. I was in her grasp instantly.

And out of it about as quick.

We had a few months is all, starting at the Sterling Chautauqua which she had organized. 1917, late summer it was, it was her first work with the traveling company that had a base in Boise and another back east and one in Portland, plus one in Canada. She was a Blackfoot girl, the mayor's daughter, and had been in the proceedings that linked Blackfoot to the first area Chautauqua. Not one to mince words or play coy, she asked the company director for work first chance she got and he gave it to her, first as a telephone answerer and paperwork distributor before enlisting her to drum up business at the little towns along the Aberdeen Branch. Sterling was first, later Aberdeen. Moreland a couple times, American Falls every year through the early twenties. She didn't organize them all, having moved to Calgary "to see the world". For her exit from the area anyplace would have served equally well, so fed up she was with the area politics that her dad was cozy with.

She and her dad parted ways when the war started up, when he riled up Blackfooters and hired a train, took it out to Taber and put down a German uprising. Word was the dry farmers were flying the enemy flag.

Those locals too old or scared to join the real war effort considered it their duty to take on an easy mark, a bunch of farmers who together lacked enough English to put a child's primer together. Grace fumed at her father after the event, word of which hit all the Idaho papers, and it was two decades before she spoke another word to him, even when she returned home to put together a Chautauqua.

I had stumbled in on the Sterling event. Hadn't intended on going as I had to scout out the Low Line Canal for breaks, as was my duty and habit. That lateral ran within about a mile of the townsite and as I rode down its banks toward its outlet on the flats I could increasingly hear the goings on. Once I'd finished investigating the canal banks, I had to check it out.

When I got to the shindig, took in the tents and the crowd, the dressed up and the drunken (some, no doubt, on contraband I'd provided through the Guttings), the reckless children snaking through the staid citizenry, it was Grace that took my attention and I can't tell you why.

She couldn't tell you why her eyes locked on me, either, but it wasn't for the same reason, that I know. She was a force. You might say she glowed. She stood out, though no more beautiful than other girls—beautiful enough, though, I assure you. Her dress drew one's attention, but almost all the young women wore their fanciest and so also were a source of awe. Charisma, I suppose you might describe her as having, though there's a Shakespeare play, "The Tempest", I believe, that has a character called an earth spirit in it. Ariel, I believe was its name. That was her. An energy. A whirlwind, really, and I was a piece of straw in her vortex that she took for a ride. I didn't mind.

She made a beeline toward me when she saw me and I was already off my horse when she got to me. "I need a hand," she told me, expecting submission. "You look like you might provide one."

I tipped my hat. "At your service, ma'am."

"Don't go formal on me," she said. "Grace." Daniel, I told her. "You, Daniel, are my ice hoddie," she replied, and directed me over to Gutting's cellar, which I knew well. The Chautauqua company had stored enough beverages to fix up drinks for both the Gentiles and Mormons attending, their tastes temporarily slipping over to those of the other side's. The youth not yet acquainted with the perils of alcohol were hanging close by, devising methods to evade their parents' attention for what might be a once in a lifetime sample.

She worked me for three or four hours until it was into dusk, passed me from time to time, exchanged the smallest of talk but with a flavor that left me both sated and hungry. I would have been her slave, had she asked, and that may be what in fact she asked of me, what I consented to be. In any case, I performed my task well enough and sufficiently parried her quips to earn a respite that started with her just telling me to put the ice down. "You're coming with me," she said. "Time for a break."

Grace took my hand and dragged me down over the bluff, an act that normally might draw attention. But it was nearly dark, everyone had their own lives and interests to attend to at that moment, all of them gawking at something more important than a couple escaping the crowd. We fairly slid down the pathway to the old town of Otis, just moved six years earlier to up by the railroad in order to take advantage of the new line. A few buildings still stood, the others having been moved to other uses up above the bluff, and a graveyard with but a few headstones lay on the flat, in the shade of the old Mercantile. She pulled me into that shade which gave us cover had we needed it to escape prying eyes and she kissed me before I could even consider that possibility. It astonished me for a moment and then took me into a natural progression of small behaviors that, while no doubt incurring the censure of the Presbyterian minister had he been aware of them, couldn't have felt more right and natural than they did. Against the Big Red Barn that served as the Presbyterian Church on Sunday and a meeting place at other times for the community, she lifted her skirt and took my hand, thrust it inside her knickers as she pulled me toward her and took her pleasure. "I thought you might know what you were doing," she said in a voracious whisper, before biting on my lip and digging her fingernails in my neck. I didn't have room to consider my own pleasure given the pain I received from those maneuvers but it didn't last long before she collapsed and let go of her hold.

When we made it back above the bluff we were a couple, hand in hand, and before she went on to complete her duties with the company she told me where to find her in American Falls in two weeks. "I'd better write it down for you," she then said. "You being a man." She left me with a note bearing the address of her lodging for that time period.

I am tied to the canals but not like a dairyman to his herd. I can't be everywhere at once on the system but I need to be there—that is, everywhere—at one time or another just to ward off what chaos I can. So I managed those next couple months to wind up in American Falls, at the end of the canal, when she was working Chautauqua there, and at Blackfoot and Moreland, near the head of the canal, when she worked the events at those communities, the last one in the winter at Moreland, inside their new school building. It was a trick finding time and place for pleasure in the below zero temperatures but we managed.

The weather was icy, being between Christmas and New Year's, and the hall there was full of the reverent, being in Mormon country, making it even icier for us Gentiles. For we obviously had a look, given the glares we received, a few of the attendees knowing me from my work with the canal and still angry about the old Skeen-United war. And a few of them knowing Grace from being associated with Blackfoot goings-on, but the most of them just recognizing us as outsiders and therefore threats. They didn't mask their wariness.

Though technically Grace was with the company, whose entourage they treated graciously, she was snubbed, in slight but fully evident ways, throughout the entire three nights the Chautauqua ran. We had little time together, that time under the gaze and judgment of the brethren, but I could sense her tensing up as Thursday became Friday became Saturday. She exuded a sort of anger, or more precisely a kind of repelling force to deflect both the Mormons' scathing looks and their insipid—and patronizing, and hypocritical—employments of ingratiation. And her anger being of such a great force, it enveloped all within reach—which included me.

She left for Calgary on Sunday with an explanation and no apology and I wasn't about to ask why or implore her otherwise, having learned the ways of women. Easy come, easy go, simple as letting the water in from the Snake in April, shutting it down in October.

After the fall turnout, water still trickles on down the canal through the winter months, just enough to supply the farmhouses and animals. It ices up, sometimes overflows because of jamming, sometimes breaks the banks as a consequence. I still rode the banks to look for these events, trying to time my rides for good weather days but that being a losing proposition. Having experienced a winter of fifty breaks in '11, I had the men cut the banks if I perceived a danger of greater damage—a little repair was easier than fixing major breaks come spring.

The ride down the Low Line couldn't help but bring reminders that winter. I'd lose attention on the matters at hand, my mind straying to still-fresh memories of Grace but also working on building a wall of sorts to keep those thoughts at bay. I'd catch a cup of coffee at Gutting's, checking on their need for supplies from me, consider the difference between summer's Chautauqua and the desolate atmosphere of winter.

I was icing up inside, not much different than the canal surface. Water was available, just difficult to retrieve, even though on a warm day, one of good thoughts, I guess you'd say, there was just too much of a resource, enough to break all the vessels that had held it contained.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston