Even Cowboys Carry Cell Phones

Eight Fragments from My Grandfather’s Body

87 J o e W i l k i n s Eight Fragments from My Grandfather’s Body Coyote Bait I touch my grandfather’s hand, trace the seam of scar that runs his palm from wrist to pinky. The mark is ragged, loud and white against his sun-dark skin. Beneath, the flesh is ridged and drawn, hard to the touch. The cyanide shell, shot from a powdered coyote-getter gun, practically tore his hand in half. I have heard the story many times: He’s setting the gun near a sheep-kill along the north bank of Willow Creek, when it accidentally fires. There’s blood and black poison all over his hands and his boots, blood splashing in the dust, and his daughter, my mother, just a skinny kid of thirteen, is screaming. He’s calm. He says, Swede—short for sweetheart, what he always calls her—just settle down and drive, drive me on in to town now, Swede. She listens, he lives, and I know my grandfather was lucky or strong. For though I am young, maybe five or six, I have seen sheep drop with a bullet to the ear, the belly laid open, what was inside laid out, and I know there is death somewhere back of this scar. My grandfather grins at me, suddenly wraps his hand around my finger like a vice. His gray eyes, not stone but blue-green and silver, like sage, light as he twists my arm up and around and behind my back. He says it’ll take more than a bit of coyote bait to put this old boy under and holds for a second longer, then lets go. I rub my arm, careful to look down so he does not see my watery blue eyes. He’s always giving me Indian burns, putting me in head locks, pinching the backs of my arms a little too hard—but I love him anyway. Love him because the barrel-chested fathers of my friends and the old men drinking coffee at the Lazy JC Mercantile and Donny Kicker who runs the sawmill down by the river all look at me strangely. I talk more than a child should and have been put up in the higher grades for math and reading at school, and my mother went to college. But this one man, uneducated and burly as any of them, my grandfather, whose crib was a shoebox on a woodstove, who sat on the jug when his daddy ran whiskey, who’s broke a thousand horses and been struck by lightning twice, does not care. He grins and tosses me into the world of scars and bodies, the world of cyanide shells 88 and sheep-kills, the world of his dark hands. There is the craggy bark of the cottonwood in front of the house, the soft brown shag on the front room floor, and my grandfather’s hands, tough as worked leather. Come on pardner, he says, clapping me hard on the back. Let’s go get some grub. 80 Proof They are men in their prime—rifles slung across broad backs, grinning winks at wives and children, antelope blood all over blue jeans. The men, my father and three of his college buddies, say my brother and I, at six and eight, are too young for the hunt—You’ll have to ride with your grandfather. I am indignant, sure that my successful summer of prairie dog hunting with the old .22 caliber , bolt-action Winchester passed down from my grandfather qualifies me to ride with them. And I am stunned that my grandfather, an expert tracker and the best rifle shot in the county behind Buster Knapp, stands for what amounts to a day of babysitting. But we three ride together in Old Blue, my grandfather’s flatbed Ford, following the men down draws and coulees, over the snapping bunchgrass and sage of the prairie, despite my protests. My grandfather drives slowly across the hills of eastern Montana, across these nine sections of the Big Dry he calls his own. And he tells us stories. Like the one about skinning squirrels for stew in the dirty ‘30s, or the coyote he once shot at nearly four hundred yards running. He drives on and tells us that wild game is fine meat cooked on the stove with plenty of pepper, and even better over a pine fire. With a flick of his wrist he slips...