Jackson Hole News

New West Book Review

Things That Go Bump in Wyoming: Alyson Hagy’s “Ghosts of Wyoming”

By Jenny Shank, 2-01-10

Ghosts of Wyoming
By Alyson Hagy
Graywolf Press, 192 pages, $15

Some places feel more haunted than others.  As Alyson Hagy explores in her new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, Wyoming is one of those places where the past seems to overlap with the present, where the rough frontier that she writes of in “The Sin Eaters,” set in 1889, seems to have plenty in common with the oil rig-riddled Wyoming of today, in which Hagy sets the story “Oil & Gas.” Throughout many of the stories, details about the Arapaho and other tribes that settled the area first set a somber tone underneath the main narrative.  Some of these stories touch on issues that are also raised in the work of Annie Proulx, Alexandra Fuller, and other contemporary Wyoming writers, but as with all good fiction, Hagy isn’t trying to convey a message.  She’s just telling some first-rate ghost stories.

Only one of the eight stories, “Superstitions of the Indians,” is a ghost story in the classic sense, but they all have ghosts in them in the form of people who have died or characters haunted by the past.  One of the best stories is the lead-off, “Border,” which conceals its ghost until the very end in an effective twist that works as such endings should, not as a “gotcha!” moment but as a revelation that makes sense of and lends gravity to all the prior events.  In “Border,” a young man hitchhiking his way out of Wyoming, aiming for Denver or beyond, pauses in his journey to steal a collie pup in Meeker, Colo. 

Although his theft is deliberate, he seems in desperate need of that puppy, and feels sorry for the young woman who will get in trouble because of his actions.  “She’d take the blame, no matter what.  That was how it worked.  But there was a pile of pups in that crate.  At four hundred dollars apiece, nobody’s feelings or whipped ass was going to hurt for long.” The young man is hungry and determined to put as many miles as possible between him and Wyoming, and you root for him as he makes his way south with the puppy.  Even when you learn more about the incident that set him on his course, you feel inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The next story, “Brief Lives of the Trainmen,” jolts the reader into the life of a crew at work laying railroad tracks across the Wyoming Territory, over a century ago.  It’s told in brief sections from the perspectives of men with different jobs, such as “The Callboy” and “The Transitman,” and together these vignettes create a full, immediate picture of the day-to-day difficulties and interpersonal struggles of the crew.  All of them live in fear of offending the demanding cook, who could make their lives miserable at suppertime.  “Brief Lives of the Trainmen” is wonderfully dense, a complete world packed into less than ten pages.  One compressed biography reads, “He started as a yard boy in Nebraska, kept all his digits, lost his wife to typhoid, tried the mines in Colorado, and hated the tunnels.  He has more affinity for steam and rail.”

Hagy is adept with historical settings, her diction and details ably transporting the reader to the past.  Her other story set in the past, “The Sin Eaters,” concerns an idealistic reverend who sets out in 1889 from Iowa to Wyoming, where he plans to convert Indians to Christianity.  But he becomes caught up in a war between established and upstart cattle ranchers (somewhat suggestive of the 1870’s Lincoln County War in New Mexico that famously involved Billy the Kid), and he loses his will before he even reaches the Indian reservation on the Popo Agie River.  Hagy shows the naïve Reverend Morgan reacting strongly and feeling out of place in passages like this one about Laramie City:

“The air smelled of cattle and the cantankerous musk of hogs, which he knew well from his home in Iowa.  There was also the acrid stench of night soil across the tracks where a loose skein of women displayed themselves on porch railings and in doorways.  Visible, but unremarked upon, the women mirrored the decorative bunting strung along the façade of the mercantile that stood just beyond the station.”

Hagy’s historical stories feature men the most prominently, but women take the forefront in several of her contemporary tales.  In “How Bitter the Weather,” a hard-edged female newspaper reporter becomes concerned when an acquaintance, an old man named Armand, goes missing.  Hagy, who lives in Laramie and teaches at the University of Wyoming, describes Laramie with apt affection and rue through the eyes of her protagonist in this passage:

“You aren’t supposed to strive in Wyoming.  You take what’s available.  That’s how we do it here.  I try to see it another way.  That I have a job—maybe even a purpose—that lets me patrol this pioneer place I love and don’t love.  I was born before the last big boom so I’ve seen my hometown crown itself with great plans.  Then dwindle.  Laramie: a city awry, shredded like a prayer flag by the constant gusting wind.”

Another strong female protagonist is 14-year-old Livia in “The Little Saint of Hoodoo Mountain,” who is trying to keep everything running on her parents’ ranch.  She’s left to her own devices frequently, as her mother is mentally unstable and her father is busy with ranch work.  On one of Livia’s solitary hikes, she ventures into an abandoned cabin of a old settler, digs around and finds the bones of a baby in a shallow grave.  Without knowing why she does it, she transports the bones to a nearby cave, where a passing hiker finds them, initiating a great uproar among the media, some wilderness activists, and several tribes that believe the bones might belong to an ancestor.  Livia worries that her actions might cause her father’s cattle herd to be banned from the pasture they graze on public land near the cave. “The Little Saint of Hoodoo Mountain” has a compelling plot and rich characters that portray contemporary Wyoming in a nuanced, insightful way.

The only story that doesn’t achieve the same depth of characterization is “Superstitions of the Indians,” about a graduate student who applies for a summer grant on a subject he doesn’t have any interest in because he needs the money.  He’s agreed to study in the archives of “the late Grace Francis Bedard, former reservation schoolteacher, former university librarian, original old bat.” Ms. Bedard, dead since 1932, begins to appear to the student and his girlfriend, and various comic incidents ensue.  But the humor is corny, and the premise doesn’t justify all the disparate bits of history and contemporary life it tries to bind together.  Hagy is more surefooted when she creates believable ghosts out of the bloody history of Wyoming.
With the stories in “Ghosts of Wyoming,” Alyson Hagy makes a convincing case that restless and unquiet spirits haunt her home state.  Or maybe it’s just the wind.

Alyson Hagy will read from Ghosts of Wyoming at the Albany County Public Library in Laramie on February 21, 2 p.m.  She will also participate in a Graywolf Press reading at the AWP Convention in Denver on April 9, 12 p.m.

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