Lonesome Land (2 page)

And the landscape of
Lonesome Land
is always there, at the heart of the story itself. Bower uses it to open the story, emphasizing its powerful scale when she writes that “[i]n
northern Montana there lies a great, lonely stretch of prairie land, gashed deep where flows the Missouri. Indeed, there are many such—big, impassive, impressive in their very loneliness, in
summer given over to the winds and the meadow larks and to the shadows fleeing always over the hilltops.” This Montana topography is dramatic and impressive, beautiful and indifferent, and
always overwhelming in its scope and scale. There are elements of literary naturalism in the depictions of landscape; this is especially evident in passages where Bower emphasizes its tremendous
power over human life, as she does when Val, in a fit of despair, “stared out over the great, treeless, unpeopled land which had swallowed her alive,” and as she does when describing
the townspeople in a state of constant fear and anxiety over the possibility of prairie fires. But Bower moves beyond literary naturalism and its diminished sense of human freedom by giving Valeria
the agency to survive the battle of will she wages against this vast geography. As the novel progresses, Val herself observes that “[s]he was alone again; she rather liked being alone, now
that she had no longer a blind, unreasoning terror of the empty land.” Undergoing dramatic changes over the course of the narrative, Val transforms from a naïve Easterner with
starry-eyed ideals about the West, into a woman with the strength to separate herself from a failed marriage and to exist on her own in a strange, remote geography.

During an era when writers and thinkers like Frederick Jackson Turner and Theodore Roosevelt predominantly celebrated the American West as a space of exhilaration and freedom from constraint,
Bower’s
Lonesome Land
is a narrative that is more disorderly, more unstable: it is a western filled with landscapes and with characters that disrupt the artificially clean lines of
frontier mythology. As she herself acknowledged in a 1924 letter in
Adventure
Magazine, “[t]here’s more of loneliness and monotony in pioneering than there is of battle. I can
personally vouch for the fact that pioneering was—and still is—about ninety percent monotonous isolation to ten percent thrill. It is scarcely fair to turn the picture upside down and
present the public with ninety percent thrill and ten percent normal, everyday living.”
³
Lone some Land
was praised by
reviewers for its authenticity and pathos upon its publication, and it has been named by more recent critics like Victoria Lamont and Pam Houston as one of Bower’s boldest—and perhaps
best—novels. Perhaps this is because, in writing the novel, Bower took up what is arguably one of the most distinct and unique subjects of American literary tradition: a character whose
untested and dreamy ideals become eroded and, ultimately, broken by actual experience. Time and again this narrative repeats itself in the American canon. Thus we have Mark Twain, who gave shape to
this idea when he admitted, in
Old Times on the Mississippi
that “[a]ll the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river” once he “had mastered the
language of the water.”
⁴
We have Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, whose youthful and girlish naïveté about the big city
is shattered by her actual experiences in Chicago; we have Steinbeck’s Joad family, desperate to get to California yet discovering, upon their arrival, that there is no salvation from abject
poverty even there. In
Lonesome Land,
B. M. Bower takes her place among these classic American writers who remind us that romantic views of America cannot always survive the tests of mature
and sometimes painful experience.

Laura Gruber Godfrey
teaches English and American Literature at North Idaho College. She has published articles on Mary Hallock Foote, Mourning Dove, and Ernest
Hemingway in
Western American Literature, Arizona Quarterly
, and the
Hemingway Review
; her more recent publications focus on Emily Brontë and Cormac McCarthy.

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE
A
RRIVAL OF
V
AL

I
N NORTHERN
M
ONTANA THERE LIES A GREAT, LONELY STRETCH OF
prairie land, gashed deep where flows the Missouri. Indeed, there are
many such—big, impassive, impressive in their very loneliness, in summer given over to the winds and the meadow larks and to the shadows fleeing always over the hilltops. Wild range cattle
feed there and grow sleek and fat for the fall shipping of beef. At night the coyotes yap quaveringly and prowl abroad after the long-eared jack rabbits, which bounce away at their hunger-driven
approach. In winter it is not good to be there; even the beasts shrink then from the bleak, level reaches, and shun the still bleaker heights.

But men will live anywhere if by so doing there is money to be gained, and so a town snuggled up against the northern rim of the bench land, where the bleakness was softened a bit by the
sheltering hills, and a willow-fringed creek with wild rosebushes and chokecherries made a vivid green background for the meager huddle of little, unpainted buildings.

To the passengers on the through trains which watered at the red tank near the creek, the place looked crudely picturesque—interesting, so long as one was not compelled to live there and
could retain a perfectly impersonal viewpoint. After five or ten minutes spent in watching curiously the one little street, with the long hitching poles planted firmly and frequently down both
sides—usually within a very few steps of a saloon door—and the horses nodding and stamping at the flies, and the loitering figures that appeared now and then in desultory fashion, many
of them imagined that they understood the West and sympathized with it, and appreciated its bigness and its freedom from conventions.

One slim young woman had just told the thin-faced schoolteacher on a vacation, with whom she had formed one of those evanescent traveling acquaintances, that she already knew the West, from
instinct and from Manley’s letters. She loved it, she said, because Manley loved it, and because it was to be her home, and because it was so big and so free. Out here one could think and
grow and really live, she declared, with enthusiasm. Manley had lived here for three years, and his letters, she told the thin-faced teacher, were an education in themselves.

The teacher had already learned that the slim young woman, with the yellow-brown hair and yellow-brown eyes to match, was going to marry Manley—she had forgotten his other name, though the
young woman had mentioned it—and would live on a ranch, a cattle ranch. She smiled with somewhat wistful sympathy, and hoped the young woman would be happy; and the young woman waved her
hand, with the glove only half pulled on, toward the shadow-dappled prairie and the willow-fringed creek, and the hills beyond.

“Happy!” she echoed joyously. “Could one be anything else, in such a country? And then—you don’t know Manley, you see. It’s horribly bad form, and undignified
and all that, to prate of one’s private affairs, but I just can’t help bubbling over. I’m not looking for heaven, and I expect to have plenty of bumpy places in the
trail—trail is anything that you travel over, out here; Manley has coached me faithfully—but I’m going to be happy. My mind is quite made up. Well, good-by—I’m so glad
you happened to be on this train, and I wish I might meet you again. Isn’t it a funny little depot? Oh, yes—thank you! I almost forgot that umbrella, and I might need it. Yes,
I’ll write to you—I should hate to drop out of your mind completely. Address me Mrs. Manley Fleetwood, Hope, Montana. Good-by—I wish—”

She trailed off down the aisle with eyes shining, in the wake of the grinning porter. She hurried down the steps, glanced hastily along the platform, up at the car window where the faded little
schoolteacher was smiling wearily down at her, waved her hand, threw a dainty little kiss, nodded a gay farewell, smiled vaguely at the conductor, who had been respectfully pleasant to
her—and then she was looking at the rear platform of the receding train mechanically, not yet quite realizing why it was that her heart went heavy so suddenly. She turned then and looked
about her in a surprised, inquiring fashion. Manley, it would seem, was not at hand to welcome her. She had expected his face to be the first she looked upon in that town, but she tried not to be
greatly perturbed at his absence; so many things may detain one.

At that moment a young fellow, whose clothes emphatically proclaimed him a cowboy, came diffidently up to her, tilted his hat backward an inch or so, and left it that way, thereby unconsciously
giving himself an air of candor which should have been reassuring.

“Fleetwood was detained. You were expecting to—you’re the lady he was expecting, aren’t you?”

She had been looking questioningly at her violin box and two trunks standing on their ends farther down the platform, and she smiled vaguely without glancing at him.

“Yes. I hope he isn’t sick, or—”

“I’ll take you over to the hotel, and go tell him you’re here,” he volunteered, somewhat curtly, and picked up her bag.

“Oh, thank you.” This time her eyes grazed his face inattentively. She followed him down the rough steps of planking and up an extremely dusty road—one could scarcely call it a
street—to an uninviting building with crooked windows and a high, false front of unpainted boards.

The young fellow opened a sagging door, let her pass into a narrow hallway, and from there into a stuffy, hopelessly conventional fifth-rate parlor, handed her the bag, and departed with another
tilt of the hat which placed it at a different angle. The sentence meant for farewell she did not catch, for she was staring at a wooden-faced portrait upon an easel, the portrait of a man with a
drooping mustache, and porky cheeks, and dead-looking eyes.

“And I expected bearskin rugs, and antlers on the walls, and big fireplaces!” she remarked aloud, and sighed. Then she turned and pulled aside a coarse curtain of dusty, machine-made
lace, and looked after her guide. He was just disappearing into a saloon across the street, and she dropped the curtain precipitately, as if she were ashamed of spying. “Oh,
well—I’ve heard all cowboys are more or less intemperate,” she excused, again aloud. She sat down upon an atrocious red plush chair, and wrinkled her nose spitefully at the
porky-cheeked portrait. “I suppose you’re the proprietor,” she accused, “or else the proprietor’s son. I wish you wouldn’t squint like that. If I have to stop
here longer than ten minutes, I shall certainly turn you face to the wall.” Whereupon, with another grimace, she turned her back upon it and looked out of the window. Then she stood up
impatiently, looked at her watch, and sat down again upon the red plush chair.

“He didn’t tell me whether Manley is sick,” she said suddenly, with some resentment. “He was awfully abrupt in his manner. Oh, you—” She rose, picked up an
old newspaper from the marble-topped table with uncertain legs, and spread it ungently over the portrait upon the easel. Then she went to the window and looked out again. “I feel perfectly
sure that cowboy went and got drunk immediately,” she complained, drumming pettishly upon the glass. “And I don’t suppose he told Manley at all.”

The cowboy was innocent of the charge, however, and he was doing his energetic best to tell Manley. He had gone straight through the saloon and into the small room behind, where a man lay
sprawled upon a bed in one corner. He was asleep, and his clothes were wrinkled as if he had lain there long. His head rested upon his folded arms, and he was snoring loudly. The young fellow went
up and took him roughly by the shoulder.

“Here! I thought I told you to straighten up,” he cried disgustedly. “Come alive! The train’s come and gone, and your girl’s waiting for you over to the hotel.
D’ you hear?”

“Uh-huh!” The man opened one eye, grunted, and closed it again.

The other yanked him half off the bed, and swore. This brought both eyes open, glassy with whisky and sleep. He sat wobbling upon the edge of the bed, staring stupidly.