Tramp by Marne Davis Kellogg

Author:Marne Davis Kellogg [Kellogg, Marne Davis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80826-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

23

SUNDAY MORNING

The Circle B takes up two hundred thousand acres and employs so many hands—up to sixty full time from early spring through late fall, and more during the roundups—that one of the first things my great-great-grandfather built on the ranch in the 1860s was a small Anglican, now Episcopal, church. Since that time, people from ranches and country homes all around Bennett’s Fort have attended Communion there on Sunday. It’s a typically English country church, constructed of rough, hand-hewn stone with a slate roof and granite floor, beautiful stained glass windows, and dark wooden pews that glisten from hard-rubbed cedar oil.

I love it, especially on days like today when my cousin, the Very Reverend Henry “Hank” Caulfield Bennett, bishop of the Wind River diocese, performs the ceremony, because he stands up there in his crimson robes and bishop’s miter—tall, white-haired, handsome—sunbeams flashing from his jewel-encrusted, antique cross, and thunders at all of us, scarcely pausing for breath.

And then my father, who in the summer months is always the lay reader, gets up and thunders along with him.

We still use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, so everyone knows the service by heart—no surprises, no hugging, no guitars.

It’s quite a sight, these two gentlemen—one a bishop, the other a business tycoon, both cowboys and Westerners. They are the culmination of several generations of Wyoming-born and -bred Englishmen. A lot of that old-time upper-class, public school noblesse oblige remains, the part that pertains to Duty above all else, but the doing of that Duty has been polished to solid, squinty-eyed rock by Wyoming’s incessant gritfilled wind, where one is always, above all else, suspicious.

And now, when they visit England, they talk about retiring to live there, as though they’d just been gone for a few weeks. Done their time in the colonies and had now been captured by, or surrendered to, a primal pull that sleeps somewhere deep down in all of us. The instinctive longing for the gentler climate, gentler life, for Home. Like salmon.

Today I sat in the front pew with Richard and my parents, across the aisle from Christian and Mimi, who had on an electric blue Escada suit, had pulled her blond hair up beneath a pillbox hat, and looked better with no effort at eight o’clock on Sunday morning than I could after an entire day’s dedicated grooming. I tried to pay attention, but all I could think about were Cyrus and Vanderbilt, and how I wished Hank would speed it up a little so I could get into town.

Although Jack Lewis said they’d already questioned Nurse Kissy—he kept forgetting to fax over her statement—and had come up with nothing, it would be unprofessional not to talk to her myself, ask my own questions, test her veracity. After all, she was the only one who had been a regular on the scene.

“I’m expecting all of you to breakfast,” Mother announced once the family had gathered in the windblown churchyard where a few hardy roses clung for their lives to the rocky walls and where our ancestors who hadn’t been cremated were buried.

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