Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx Read Free Book Online Page A

the Nether Regions and, of course, a catalog of human vices and evils, of plummeting sinners.
    His ideas tumbled out. In one of the museum’s galleries he would set up the Musical Inferno which Hieronymus Bosch had painted so cleverly. He would have all of Goya’s witches and his stinking hordes, toothless, pierced, howling, wracked and terrified. He would have every piece of Satanic art even though many showed him as humbled by upward-gazing saints; he always had the last laugh there. Venusti showed a fatuous Saint Bernard holding him chained, but a moment later the chain had melted. The painter had not dared to show that. Michael Pacher had given him a fabulous frog-green skin, but the deer antlers and the buttocks-face were overdone. Gerard David’s portrait was finer. A special room for Gustave Doré, whose inventiveness he cherished. Very pleasant as well were the many harvest pictures where he tossed damned souls into his fireproof gunnysack. He would crowd the museum with all the Last Judgments, the damned dropping into the inferno like ripe figs from a tree. Signorelli—he couldn’t understand how Signorelli had known to give his demons green and grey and violet skins—a lucky guess perhaps. And surely one of Signorelli’s demons was Duane Fork biting at a man’s head? He might ask the painter—if he could find him. They had to start compiling a database of the damned and their particular niches; it was impossible to find anyone in Hell.
    Still on the idea of the art museum, he planned a solitary room with no other paintings where he thought he would hang William Blake’s Satan Instigating the Rebel Angels, which showed him as the most beautiful angel of all, more handsome than any Greek god, before the rebellion failed and he was cast down and out. But thinking of that time made him morose and he decided to eschew the Blake; he’d have Rubens instead and Tiepolo. As he made his mental list of the paintings and sculptures he intended to gather, he realized what a terrific labor it would be to pry them away from the Prado, the Duomo, the Louvre, the Beaux-Arts, various art institutes and bibliothèques, private collections and monasteries, cathedrals and churches. The plan abruptly crashed. Well, well, there was the rub; he was not going into any monasteries or churches. And there the renovation plans stopped. His one-track mind could not get past the monasteries, cathedrals and churches.
    He ought to have plucked some professional art thieves from their fiery labors and sent them up to do the job, but the story says nothing about that.

Them Old Cowboy Songs

There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten.
    ARCHIE & ROSE, 1885
    Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P. H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source. Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface as though scratched in with a knife. All his natural decoration was in his red cheeks and the springy waves of auburn hair that seemed charged with voltage. He usually lied about his age to anyone who asked—he was not twenty-one but sixteen. The first summer they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size Archie could handle with a little help from their only neighbor, Tom Ackler, a leathery prospector with a summer shack up on the mountain. They chinked the cabin with heavy yellow clay. One day Archie dragged a huge flat stone to the house for their doorstep. It was pleasant to sit in the