Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon by John D. Nesbitt, and: Antelope Sky: Stories of the Modern West by John D. Nesbitt

Abstract

B o o k R e v i e w s 103 ing World War II. The story of comfort women had to be told, and Keller proves to be the right writer to brave that unchartered territory. Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon. By John D. Nesbitt. New York: Walker, 1997. 181 pages, $20.95. Antelope Sky: Stories of the Modern West. By John D. Nesbitt. Torrington, Wyo.: RR Productions, 1997. 166 pages, $8.95. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitts SUN Y-Buffalo John Nesbitt’s Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon follows the trials of Henry Sommers as he struggles to build a life in a canyon on the plains of Wyoming in the late 1800s. His problems are, in this order, a sleazy fellow homesteader named O ’Leary, who tries to lure Henry into a mavericking scheme; O ’Leary’s suffering wife, Dora, who seems to want something else from Henry; and Molly, the shopgirl in town, whose tanned skin, dark hair, and sparkling eyes are the vision Henry needs to keep working on his little place and riding for the Box Elder Ranch— familiar stuff, of course. Henry’s prob­ lems are all solved in the end, and you know that from the first page. Nesbitt knows that you know, and he knows what you want in a Western: comfort­ able characters on horses making short work of whatever rides into their way. This is to say that Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon is indeed “another fastreading Western,” as the publicity blurb says. I liked the novel in the way we usually like formula Westerns— they give us our formula, fast. Henry is the boyish, morally pure hero threatened by, but invulnerable to, the cor­ rupt temptations of men like O ’Leary out on the plains. If Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon can be accused of a lack of ambition, this is because Nesbitt’s considerable talent as a writer is too limited by the genre. The characters shouldn’t be too complex, the conflict too tangled or meaningful. Nesbitt does his job, but he obviously has the ability to do more. For instance, as in the best of the formula Westerns, Nesbitt gives us moments we recognize from our own thrilling experiences alone in the western landscape. Sitting in the shade of his sorrel, Henry saw the herd spread out below him for a half mile in the rolling grass country. The animals were grazing, but from this dis­ tance the scene looked motionless. The sun overhead had not seemed to move in the last hour, and the land stretched away for­ ever in all directions. Although there was almost always some breeze or stronger wind in this part of Wyoming, the afternoon was almost breathless. (86) I hope Nesbitt continues to write fast reading Westerns, but I also hope that he finds some way to let his talent expand into a more substantial, chal­ lenging space where we can enjoy his writing more slowly. 104 W A L 34(1) SPRING 1999 He’s already good at the small things, as he shows in his collection of stories, Antelope Sky: Stories of the Modem West. In the best of these, the characters muddle through everyday life while the land and its wildlife fol­ low their own, often inscrutable, order. These people are familiar to those of us who have lived in the West— most of them could be people we know; some of them are us. In “In the Land of the Bucking Bronco,” Brent takes a job at a restaurant in Wyoming while hoping to get work on a ranch. Three rodeo cowboys drive up in a brand-new pickup for drinks, and in their drunken bar talk offer the awed Brent a job on their family ranch. Tiny, Brent’s wise old boss, warns him about entertaining cowboy dreams, but these dreams are deep and they die hard. As the title of Nesbitt’s collection suggests, the stories explore the con­ tinuing existence of the western dream in its many, often hallucinatory guises. In “Road Hunter’s Neighbor,” the narrator watches from his kitchen table as his neighbor, who hunts from the cab of his...