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this.” He cuts it close to the mole. “We’re going to get you pretty enough to go to town, Mama.”
    Mr. Copeland worked hard at rubbing in Glo-Tex and it took him a pretty good while, but Grandma didn’t seem to mind too much. He put a little line of red marking along under her lower lip, which he said would make her look like she was smiling, but it didn’t. Then when he was doing her neck she got one of her laughing spells and didn’t stop until he mixed some Remove-All with water and cleaned her up. “You don’t mix in water with that stuff, it’ll take paint off a wagon,” he says.
    Then Sister rolled her out to her room with Star going alongto see how to do it. There’s a ramp. You got half-inch hickory strips across the ramp so you can stop the chair and rest going up or down. If the weather’s bad, and we can’t roll her out there, she sleeps with Mrs. Copeland, and Mr. Copeland sleeps on a army cot in my room.
    Mr. Copeland took him a chew of tobacco, and smoked a cigarette along with it, sitting on the porch steps. That’s one of his habits. He don’t like to sit in a chair except when he eats.

STAR
    I have settled into my little cabin. And despite the atrocious English everyone out here speaks, I am adjusting merrily. I am inclined to think I may remain out West for a very long time because, in part, of the clean taste and feel of the air, the majestic beauty and encyclopedic range of colors of the mountain rock and soil (every shade of red, pink, orange, and brown imaginable), the availability of church services in town—and also, and perhaps in large part, because of my lovely cabin.
    The cabin belongs to Mr. Merriwether and sits on a knoll between Uncle P.J.’s saddle shop and the Merriwether Ranch. The Merriwether Ranch is the normal one hundred sixty acres, with a long low sprawling house, a huge hay barn, two windmills, three other outbuildings, pens, cattle, sheep, hay, Mexicans, cowboys, horses, and occasional Mescadeys. Somewhere I got the idea that Mescadeys were little worrisome animals. I didn’t realize they were members of the Mescadey Indian tribe.
    And beyond the ranch flows the wide, swift Bright Owl River, sparkling in the sunlight as it jumps among rocks and boulders.
    And then across the river is the mighty Mesa Largo.
    Behind my cabin runs a lovely stream with rocks and pebbles, Bobcat Creek. Trees grow all along the creek bank and up in the yard, cottonwoods, tall for this valley—short compared to the long-leaf pine back home—though some are gnarled and bent over. From the little front porch I can also see three mountain peaks in the distance—Johnson’s Point, the Steeple, and Captain’s Rock. Those are beyond the town to the north, and below their high bare or snow-capped peaks the mountains are green. Toward the mesa, the land is more bare, more desolate. It is all breathtaking, and produces in the viewer a sense of boundless, open, expansive freedom that speaks of the mysterious handiwork of God. And a kind of scary openness where anything can happen. It’s almost as if, out here, God is farther away than back home.
    The cabin itself has two rooms. A bedroom and the main room, in which Uncle P.J. has installed a shiny new three-eye Premier cookstove. I’m almost sure Aunt Sallie sent him the money to buy it, because she and I had talked about the need for such a commodity before I traveled west.
    When Aunt Ann and I finished our four-day task of setting up the cabin, the floor was scrubbed smooth and the windows shone clean and clear behind fresh, ironed pink-and-white checked curtains. In one window is an old blue cracked vase, filled with thistles, which like other dry things out west—like that ancient mesa visible through the same window—seem to possess aninward, cracked, and weathered beauty you thought not possible, but somehow find working on you, in a positive way.