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last desperate effort, reached for and almost seized her new straw hat.
    The subdued group returned to Wyoming the next day. Again and again they told each other that she had not even cried out as she fell, something they believed denoted strong character.
     
    Ray Forkenbrock resumed his memoir the next weekend. Berenice waited a few minutes after Beth arrived before taking up a listening post outside the room. Mr. Forkenbrock had a monotonous but loud voice, and she could hear every word.
    “So, things was better for the family after he got the jobs driving machine parts around to the oil rigs,” he said. “The money was pretty good and he joined some one of them fraternal organizations, the Pathfinders. And they had a ladies’ auxiliary, which my mother got into; they called it ‘The Ladies,’ like it was a restroom or something. They both got real caught up in Pathfinders, the ceremonies, the lodge, the good deeds and oaths of allegiance to whatever.
    “Mother was always baking something for them,” he said. “And there was kid stuff for us, fishing derbies and picnics and sack races. It was like Boy Scouts, or so they said. Boy Scouts with a ranch twist, because there was always some class in hackamore braiding or raising a calf. Sort of a kind of a mix of Scouts and 4-H which we did not belong to.”
    Berenice found this all rather boring. When would he say something about the Bledsoes? She saw Deb Slaver at the far end of the hall coming out of Mr. Harrell’s room with a tray of bandages. Mr. Harrell had a sore on his shin that wouldn’t heal and the dressing had to be changed twice a day.
    “Now don’t you pick at it, you bad boy!” yelled Deb, disappearing around the corner.
    “Anyway, Mother was probably more into it than Dad. She liked company and hadn’t had much luck with neighbors there in Coalie Town. The Ladies got up a program of history tours to various massacre sites and old logging flumes. Mother loved those trips. She had a little taste for what had happened in the long ago. She’d come home all excited and carrying a pretty rock. She had about a dozen rocks from those trips when she died,” he said.
    In the hall Berenice thought of her sister toiling up rocky slopes, trying to please her rock hound husband, carrying his canvas sack of stones.
    “The first hint I got that there was something peculiar in our family tree was when she come home from a visit to Farson. I do not know what they were doing there, and she said that the Farson Auxiliary had served them lunch—potato salad and hot dogs,” he said.
    “One of the Farson ladies said she knew a Forkenbrock down in Dixon. She thought he had a ranch in the Snake River valley. Well, my ears perked up when I heard ‘ranch,’” he said.
    “And Forkenbrock ain’t that common of a name. So I asked Mother if they were Dad’s relatives,” he said. “I would of liked it if we had ranch kin. I was already thinking about getting into cowboy ways. She said no, that Dad was an orphan, that it was just a coincidence. So she said.”
     
    At dinner that night, once Forrie Wintka’s dramatic demise had been hashed through again, Church Bollinger began to describe his travels through the Canadian Rockies.
    “What we’d do is fly, then rent a car instead of driving. Those interstates will kill you. The wife enjoyed staying at nice hotels. So we flew to San Francisco and decided to drive down the coast. We stopped in Hollywood. Figured we’d see what Hollywood was all about. They had these big concrete columns. Time came to leave, I got in and backed up and crunch, couldn’t get out. I finally got out but I had a bad scratched door on the rental car. Well, I bought some paint and I painted it and you could never tell. I drove to San Diego. Waited for a letter from the rental outfit but it never came. Another time I rented a car there was a crack in the windshield. I says, ‘Is this a safety problem?’ The guy looks at me and says