The Ox-Bow Incident Read online

  I am perhaps eccentric in responding less to Curt’s disintegration—evil destroying itself—than to the slow, tense drama of the ranch house. I feel Curt’s disaster as a necessity of the plot rather than as a realistic probability. My experience with the Curts of the world does not lead me to think that either as persons or as symbols they are ever touched by the primal gods, that they ever comprehend good and evil, that they are very often visited by poetic justice. Curt at the end of this novel is something out of Eugene O’Neill, an Emperor Jones in chaps, where the others, heightened or not, are authentic. But I will put up with both him and the black panther—excesses of the literary and symbolizing imagination—in order to experience the believable, complex, human torments of that ranch family in a crisis.

  All of Walter Clark’s novels were written from ideas, I believe, especially from a preoccupation with problems of good and evil within the context of the real West. He was a little like Hawthorne in knowing all the time what he wanted to say. The characters he created to say it through, whether historical or contemporary, have most of the time a solidity and realism that are altogether admirable. If he had a weakness, it was that sometimes his ideas outran their realistic base, and he steered his people, or talked about them, instead of letting them act. Not often. And when the symbolic larger meanings emerge, as they do so often, from realities as solid as logs, when we meet and recognize the substance before we are asked to contemplate the shadow, then I follow him with my hat in my hand. He wasn’t quite, like Hawthorne, trying to develop a usable past, or not that alone. He was trying, rather, to marry sensitivity and ideas to the half-primitive western life he knew. He kept trying to do the impossible, and he never missed it far. From 1949 on, many of us were waiting for the book that would outdo the three fine earlier books and cap the career. It never came. Why?

  Some have guessed that teaching distracted him, and certainly he was a teacher incredibly generous with his time. But he was always a teacher, even while writing the earlier books. He taught in Vermont, in the Cazenovia (New York) High School, at the University of Montana, at San Francisco State, at Nevada, with shorter stints at Stanford, (Connecticut) Wesleyan, and perhaps other places. He wrote his three novels and his volume of short stories between the demands of teaching, and I can’t believe that it was teaching that stopped him. Moreover, he told me in the early 1960s that he wrote all the time, and kept throwing away what he wrote. That was long after The Track of the Cat.

  So did he, after all, fall victim to the perfectionism that he specifically repudiated in his character Lawrence Black? Possibly. What he had written had been widely misunderstood. His clash of belief and attitude with Leslie Fiedler at the University of Montana might have made him determined to say it in some way that even Fiedler could understand, and he might have become discouraged with the difficulty. It is likely that the dramatization of his difficulty, through the Fiedler episode and the challenge that Fiedler issued in such essays as “The Montana Face” would have made him more self-critical. And yet he was always self-critical. I cannot conceive that mere difficulty or misunderstanding would have silenced him or made him destroy his work.

  What, then? I wish I knew. There is perhaps part of an answer suggested by the fact that from 1962 onward he devoted much of his creative time to editing the diaries of an obscure pioneer named Alfred Doten. To turn from fiction to history has been the tendency of scores of American writers who were reared on the thinly civilized frontiers. We have all done it, ever since Edward Eggleston started it in Indiana more than a hundred years ago. Once we have written the books that deal with the early years of our region, or with our own growing up to identity and awareness, we are likely to find neither the present nor the past rich enough to nourish the imagination. For one thing, the western past has been sanitized by myth, and cut off from the real past and real present. For another, both present and past are too new. The apparent maturity that comes with the creation of valid literature about a new region is apparent only. Culturally, the first literature, even when it is fine, may be premature, the product of importing a seasoned and organic tradition into an unseasoned place and society. And the growing of a native tradition takes generations.

  This is speculation only. I was speculating in those terms years ago, and about others than Walter Clark. I had myself in mind too. I looked at Bernard DeVoto, and Paul Horgan, and A. B. Guthrie, and H. L. Davis, and other good western writers, and I found them often slipping away from fiction and into history, as if at a certain point in their careers they found that they had done what their circumstances permitted, and had now to start digging the foundations for the real cultural house that would come only with time. In a sense, that is the history of American literature, not merely of western literature. The kind of cultural deprivation that Hawthorne and Henry James lamented is not fatal, as witness their own careers. Neither is it fatal in the West, in a newer time, as witness the strenuous effort and real achievement of Walter Clark.

  But without a more developed and cohesive society than the West, in its short life and against all the handicaps of revolutionary change and dispersion, has been able to grow—and without a native audience for its native arts—there may well come a time in a writer’s career when the clutch slips and the gears will not take hold on the materials that are most one’s own.

  If those things are true, or partly true, then it is understandable why Walter van Tilburg Clark’s years as a novelist should have been short. The remarkable thing is that he rendered his own divided inheritance with such subtlety and skill, and never took refuge in exile. His books are on the permanent shelf, and I don’t mean the shelf of mythic, easy, deluding Westerns. His theme was civilization, and he recorded, indelibly, its first steps in a new country. He naturalized the struggle between good and evil in Nevada as surely as Robinson Jeffers naturalized tragedy on the Big Sur coast.

  —

  WALLACE EARLE STEGNER (1909–93), the prolific novelist, biographer, historian, essayist, environmentalist, and longtime head of the creative writing program at Stanford until his retirement in 1971, is best known for his writings about the American West. His novels include The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose, and The Spectator Bird, winner of the National Book Award.

  Stegner’s nonfiction works include The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wolf Willow, and the acclaimed biography of Bernard DeVoto, The Uneasy Chair. His novel Crossing to Safety and his final collection of essays about the American West, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, are available in paperback from the Modern Library.

  THE

  OX-BOW

  INCIDENT

  1

  Gil and I crossed the eastern divide about two by the sun. We pulled up for a look at the little town in the big valley and the mountains on the other side, with the crest of the Sierra showing faintly beyond like the rim of a day moon. We didn’t look as long as we do sometimes; after winter range, we were excited about getting back to town. When the horses had stopped trembling from the last climb, Gil took off his sombrero, pushed his sweaty hair back with the same hand, and returned the sombrero, the way he did when something was going to happen. We reined to the right and went slowly down the steep stage road. It was a switch-back road, gutted by the run-off of the winter storms, and with brush beginning to grow up in it again since the stage had stopped running. In the pockets under the red earth banks, where the wind was cut off, the spring sun was hot as summer, and the air was full of a hot, melting pine smell. Rivulets of water trickled down shining on the sides of the cuts. The jays screeched in the trees and flashed through the sunlight in the clearings in swift, long dips. Squirrels and chipmunks chittered in the brush and along the tops of snow-sodden logs. On the outside turns, though, the wind got to us and dried the sweat under our shirts and brought up, instead of the hot resin, the smell of the marshy green valley. In the west the heads of a few clouds
showed, the kind that come up with the early heat, but they were lying still, and over us the sky was clear and deep.

  It was good to be on the loose on that kind of a day, but winter range stores up a lot of things in a man, and spring roundup hadn’t worked them all out. Gil and I had been riding together for five years, and had the habit, but just the two of us in that shack in the snow had made us cautious. We didn’t dare talk much, and we wanted to feel easy together again. When we came onto the last gentle slope into the valley, we let the horses out and loped across the flat between the marshes where the red-wing blackbirds were bobbing the reeds and twanging. Out in the big meadows on both sides the long grass was bending in rows under the wind and shining, and then being let upright again and darkening, almost as if a cloud shadow had crossed it. With the wind we could hear the cows lowing in the north, a mellow sound at that distance, like little horns.

  It was about three when we rode into Bridger’s Wells, past the boarded-up church on the right, with its white paint half cracked off, and the houses back under the cottonwoods, or between rows of flickering poplars, every third or fourth one dead and leafless. Most of the yards were just let run to long grass, and the buildings were log or unpainted board, but there were a few brick houses, and a few of painted clapboards with gimcracks around the veranda rails. Around them the grass was cut, and lilac bushes were planted in the shade. There were big purple cones of blossom on them. Already Bridger’s Wells was losing its stage-stop look and beginning to settle into a half-empty village of the kind that hangs on sometimes where all the real work is spread out on the land around it, and most of the places take care of themselves.

  Besides the houses on the main street and the cross street that ran out into a lane to the ranches at the north and south ends, there wasn’t much to Bridger’s Wells: Arthur Davies’ general store, the land and mining claims office, Canby’s saloon, the long, sagging Bridger Inn, with its double-decker porch, and the Union Church, square and bare as a New England meeting house, and set out on the west edge of town, as if it wanted to get as far from the other church as it could without being left alone.

  The street was nearly dried, though with wagon ruts hardened in it, so you could see how the teams had slithered and plowed in it. It drummed hard when we touched up to come in right. After all the thinking we’d done about it, the place looked dead as a Piute graveyard. There were a few horses switching at the tie rails in front of the inn and Canby’s, but only one man in sight. That was Monty Smith, a big, soft-bellied, dirty fellow, with matted, gray streaked hair down to his shoulders and a gray, half-shaved beard with strawberry patches showing through, sore and itchy. Monty had been a kind of halfhearted rider once, but now he was the town bum, and kept balanced between begging and a conceited, nagging humor that made people afraid of him. Nobody liked him, but he was a tradition they’d have missed. Monty was leaning against a post of the arcade in front of Canby’s, picking his teeth with a splinter and spitting. He looked us over out of his small, reddened eyes, nodded as if he was thinking of something else, and looked away again. We didn’t see him. We knew that soon enough he’d be in to sponge on us. The notion made Gil sore, I guess, because he pulled in so sudden I had to rein Blue Boy around sharp to keep from climbing him.

  “Take it easy,” I told him.

  He didn’t say anything. We swung down, tied up, crossed the boardwalk, our boots knocking loudly, and went up the three steps to the high, narrow double door with the frosted glass panels that had Canby’s name on them, inside two wreaths. Smith was watching us, and we went in without looking around.

  It was dark and cool inside, and smelled of stale beer and tobacco. There was sawdust on the floor, the bar along one side and four green-covered tables down the other. There were the same old pictures on the wall too. Up back of the bar a big, grimy oil painting in a ponderous gilded frame of fruits and musical instruments showing a woman who was no girl any longer, but had a heavy belly and thighs and breasts, stretched out on a couch pretending to play with an ugly bird on her wrist, but really encouraging a man who was sneaking up on her from a background so dark you could see only his little, white face. The woman had a fold of blue cloth between her legs and up over one hip. I’d been around back once, and knew the picture had a little brass plate which said, dryly, Woman with a Parrot, but Canby called it “The Bitching Hour.” On the other wall was a huge, yellowish print, like a map, of a reception at the Crystal in Virginia City. On it President Grant and a lot of senators, generals, editors and other celebrities were posed around so you could get a good, full-length view of each. The figures were numbered, and underneath was a list, telling you who they all were. Then there was a bright-colored print of a bleached Indian princess in front of a waterfall, a big painting of a stagecoach coming in, the horses all very smooth, round bellied and with little thin legs all in step and all off the ground, and an oval, black and white picture of the heads of three white horses, all wild eyed and their manes flying.

  Four men were playing poker at a back table with a lamp over them. I didn’t know any of the men. They looked as if they’d been playing a long time, hunched down to their work, with no life showing except in the slits of their eyes or a hand which one of them moved once in a while to pick up his glass or a silver dollar from his pile, or to throw out a card. They were quiet.

  Canby was behind his bar, a tall, thin, take-your-time kind of man with seedy gray hair combed to cover a bald spot. All Canby’s bones were big and heavy, and those in his wrists were knobby and red. His arms were so long that he could sit on the back counter, where his glasses and bottles were arranged, and mop the bar. It was clean and dry now, but he mopped it while he waited for us. He looked at us, first one and then the other of us, but didn’t say anything. He had watery, pale blue eyes, such as alcoholic old men sometimes have, but not weak, but hard and uninterested. They suited the veined, pitted, but tight-to-the-bone look of his face, which always seemed too large, the nose too large, the mouth too large, the cheekbones and black eyebrows too prominent. I wondered again where he’d come from. He looked like a man who knew he’d been somebody. Nobody ever found out, that I know of. He drank a lot, but he didn’t talk except to pass the time of day, and he always kept that quiet, who-the-hell-are-you look.

  “Well?” he said, when we just stood looking from the Bitch to the bottles.

  Gil pushed his hat back so his red, curly hair showed, and folded his arms on the bar, and kept looking up at the Bitch. Gil has a big, pale, freckled face that won’t darken and never shows any expression except in the eyes, and then only temper. His nose has been broken three times, and his mouth is thick and straight. He’s a quick, but not a grudgy kind of fighter, and always talks as if he had a little edge, which is his kind of humor. It was Canby’s kind too.

  “That guy,” said Gil, still looking at the picture, “is awful slow getting there.”

  Canby didn’t look at the picture, but at Gil. “I feel sorry for him,” he said. “Always in reach and never able to make it.”

  They said something like this every time we came in. It was a ritual, Gil always taking the side of the woman with the parrot, and Canby always defending the man. Canby could deliver quite a lecture on the mean nature of the woman with the parrot.

  “I got a feeling she could do better,” Gil said.

  “You’re boasting,” Canby told him, and then said again,

  “Well?”

  “Don’t rush me,” Gil said.

  “Take your time,” Canby said.

  “It don’t look to me,” Gil said, “like you was so rushed you couldn’t wait!”

  “It’s not that. I hate to see a man who can’t make up his mind.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I either have to put them to bed or listen to their troubles, depending on what they drink,” Canby said. His mouth only opened a slit when he talked, and the words came out as if he enjoyed them, but had to lift a weight to get them started.
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  “I ain’t lookin’ for either sleep or comfortin’,” Gil said. “And if I was, I wouldn’t come here for it.”

  “I feel better,” said Canby. “What’ll you have? Whisky?”

  “What have you got?”

  “Whisky.”

  “Did you ever know such a guy?” Gil said to me. “All this time I’m thinkin’, and all he’s got’s whisky.

  “And that’s rotten, ain’t it?” he asked Canby.

  “Rotten,” Canby agreed.

  “Two glasses and a bottle,” Gil said.

  Canby set them out in front of us and uncorked the bottle.

  “I wouldn’t have the heart to open any of this other stuff,” Canby said, taking a bottle of wine down and polishing it with his cloth. “I’ve had it ever since I was a boy; same bottles.”

  We put our fingers around the tops of the glasses, and Gil poured us one apiece, and we took them down. It was raw, and made the eyes water after being dry so long. We hadn’t had a drop since Christmas.