Brown-Eyed Girl by Virginia Swift Page A

She was finishing up, too, taking courses in history and political economy, tall and straight and smart and blond and fired with the cause of woman suffrage.
    OK, Sally noted. Height, hair, and feminism ran in Meg’s family.
    At that picnic, Mac had noticed that Gertrude wore a purple and gold votes for women pin on the bodice of her starched white shirtwaist. He’d made a joke about it, and she’d let him have what-for. They loved to argue with each other, to match wits. Mac proposed in April, and Gert said she would marry him after graduation.
    They graduated in May, and married at her parents’ ranch on a brilliant June day in 1903. The next morning, they awoke to ten inches of snow. The lilac bushes in the ranchyard, heavy with blooms, were bowed to the ground. Gert got up, went out, shook the heavy white clumps off clusters of blossoms that sent out grateful bursts of perfume. Then she went inside, made coffee, woke her husband, dressed. There was no hope of getting a wagon to Laramie to catch the train that would take them, ultimately, to a new home in Texas. A week passed before they could leave.
    What was she thinking? What did he promise?
    Gert never learned to like flat, dry, dusty West Texas in the five years they were there, working on Mac’s fortune. His family were all dead. The young couple were on their own, a hard thing in a hard country. Wyoming was a hard place too, but she knew its bleaknesses as her own, and there were Parkers everywhere to lift some of the weight of the long cold time. Mac swore to Gert that once his wells came in, he’d take her back home to Wyoming and start buying up every pretty piece of property for sale in the entire state. They’d ranch some of it, and leave some of it for the deer and the elk and the moose.
    She must have loved him. Must have shared that dream. Watch it, Sally, you dim-witted romantic.
    They’d both seen Meg’s birth, barely a year after they’d married, as a blessing, but it had come at a cost. Gert had a hard time. The doctor told her that baby Margaret would be her last.
    A lonely way to be born, no?
    Meg had only one dim memory of her first years in Texas. She had later asked her mother if the remembered moment had actually happened, but her mother couldn’t say for sure. Meg couldn’t have been much more than three. It had been a typical West Texas summer day, windy, sere, no prospect of relief. Her mother had been doing the wash, hanging it up to dry. Meg remembered how hot and gritty her skin had felt, how she had toddled over to her mother and fallen beside the basket of heavy wet linen at her feet. Her mother had snatched her up, wrapped her in wet sheets, and stuck her in the shade of a lone spindly cottonwood tree, brought her a cool cup of water and held it to her dry mouth. She had grown cooler, drowsy, slept.
    Sally’s semidistracted thought: So that’s what they did before air-conditioning!
    Meg was awakened by her father’s voice, whooping in exultation. She opened her eyes to see him jumping up and down, covered with filthy sticky black stuff. His first well had come in.
    They were off to Wyoming within the year.
    Mac and Gert took out extended homestead claims on land shading up into his beloved Sierra Madres, not far from the town of Encampment. Though he had to spend time in Texas tending his oilfields, he bought up range land and mountain meadows scattered across Wyoming: in the Bighorn basin, on the south flank of the Absarokas, in the shadow of the Tetons. But the Woody D Ranch, just a day’s ride from Bridger Peak, was the place Mac determined to call home. He paid a neighbor to come in with a mule team and grade a dirt road in to the place he built his ranch, and started hounding the Carbon County commissioners to lay down gravel on the road to Baggs. He bought himself a 1908 Maxwell touring car, which sat idle in the barn nine months of the year, waiting for snow to melt,