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    In later years, we called that time the Year of the Fiddler’s Wife or, sometimes, The Summer of the Indian. It was a turning point.

    It began in late August, toward the end of a day, when a dusty, wood-paneled, rust-red station wagon with a silver ornament on its hood pulled up before Joyce’s, the bar, the grocery store, the gas station, the post office, the only business left in Roadside Tables. It was two stories built into the side of a hill. The top story was the bar and restaurant. The bottom held the grocery store with two gas pumps out in front. In the back of the store was the post office, a counter on one side with combination lock mail boxes in a file to the right, with letter sized boxes on the top and bigger boxes on the bottom. They were brass with a black rim around the combination lock and a narrow strip of glass where you could look through to see if you had any mail.

    A narrow porch in front of the restaurant and bar was the roof of the gas-station-store-post-office, and that’s where we liked to be in late summer, leaning back in chairs against the wall, shaded from the day heat by the overhang of the roof. Sometimes we’d come in the morning for the mail and a cup of coffee and to talk.  But when it got hot, we’d wait ‘til the afternoon and have a beer.

    On this day in late August, we watched as the dust settled around the station wagon. Joyce got some tourist business so it wasn’t so unusual to have people pull up in fancy cars. Gave us somethin’ to talk about.  Not that this car was fancy. It showed all the signs of a long trip, lots of dust and some road tar spotted here and there. Some of the wood paneling seemed cracked.

    The front doors opened on the wagon and a man and a woman climbed out, both a little stiffly. The man looked like a Hollywood star of the 1930s, the kind we’d see once in a while when a man came through with a projector and a bunch of old movies, with the slicked down hair and a line of mustache that looked as if it had been penciled in. The woman wore one of those clingy dresses that would move over her body with any kind of wind, not the sturdy clothes we was used to seein’ women in. We knew then that she should never have come out here, not out to these dry plains, even as a visitor. That dress wasn’t built for it. The wind would go right through it. So would the grit. A lot of folks thought then—and some still do—that Montana is mountains and trees and big rivers—pretty country. That’s part true—over west. That’s what the state tourist people are always promotin’.

    But here we’re mostly flat so the wind blows snow all the way from northern Canada through the cracks in our shacks, and it gets colder than a witch’s kiss. In summer it gets hotter ‘n hell, too, and so dry we’ve had three-year-old frogs don’t know how to swim. The only way most of us survive is to hunker down into coulees where, sometimes, old rotten cottonwoods grow by a dry crick bed and spoil the wind. Even so, the grit gets in our food and wears down our teeth.

    Mrs. Marley, that’s the only name we ever knew her by, although someone said later that she got mail addressed to “Stella.” But until then we never knowed then if she had a first name or not and only learned her last name later. She climbed outa that battered old Ford station wagon lookin’ frail beside her husband. We was to find out he was the new schoolteacher, the first anybody could remember we’d had a man schoolteacher. We’d heard there were some up at the high school in town, but we’d never seen one out here. Women always taught the grade school. Somebody said afterwards he’d had trouble in the school he’d been teachin’ in back east. But somebody is always sayin’ things. Whatever, when we advertised for a new teacher, he wrote old Sam Wilhelm and we hired us somebody we thought could teach the big boys. And he was a big man, with shoulders a couple of ax handles acrost.

    Anyway, he and his wife had drove this rattletrap wagon out from Billings where they’d come in from the east on the narrow roads through the Dakotas and the plains that plumb wore you out then. She looked like she hadn’t slept for days. Her face was pale, and she seemed barely able to move when he tried to hand her out of the car in front of Joyce’s. Then, the man stretched and she smiled up at him uncertainly, and it was like her face lit up.

    It was comin’ up September, and there hadn’t been any rain but thunderstorms—gullywashers—since June and not enough of them. It was dry, and the heat and the dust was puddlin’ up in the potholes and under the sagebrush. The Marleys had hit a few of them dust holes before they reached Roadside Tables. That Ford was gray and Mrs. Marley had dust streaks all down the right side of her face, looked like she’d been cryin’, and squinted that eye shut real hard. In those days, cars didn’t come with air conditionin’ and so the windows was always open when you drove them roads in the summer and the dust got in even if you closed the windows and then you broiled in them old cars.

    We all thumped our chairs back to all four legs on that porch that Joyce called her veranda to see who’d drug all the new dust in. It even boiled up around the porch. At the sound of them wooden chair legs clunking against the wood of the porch, the woman looked up at us, startled, with great big eyes. Even when her husband kinda tugged her up the steps with a hand under her elbow, she kept watchin’ us like a antelope ready to bound off ‘crost the flats. I couldn’t blame her. We’d been out fixin’ fence that afternoon and sweatin’, and the salt and the dust mixed in our clothes, and when she got up the stairs, our stink must’ve made us somethin’ less than she was used to, even if we was outside. She kept staring at us, turning her head to look at us with those wide eyes as they crossed the porch.

    She tugged the man’s arm and whispered in his ear, until he stepped a little livelier, too, and they disappeared into the restaurant side of the place. We looked at each other. It had been a long, hot, dusty, afternoon. Len said, “I need to wash the rest of this. Let’s get a beer.” So we got up and clumped into the bar side, and they was sittin’ at a table just beyond the arch that divided up the bar from the restaurant, sippin’ at glasses of water. The man grinned when he saw us, nervous like, just the corner of his mouth jumped a hitch or two. She gave us a quick look and then looked out the window. A long ways out there you can see mountains, and she sure seemed to be longin’ for them. Joyce told us later she’d asked about the wash room and looked kinda like she was goin’ to cry when she heard it was out back. Oh, we had flush toilets by then instead of two-holers, and faucets with runnin’ water, even if they was outside the buildings. She had looked back out the window when Joyce told her that. She sat at the table instead and turned away from the window to watch the man.

    She had the kind of female good looks we saw only in magazine ads, like the ones for the new Frigidaires the women kept pointin’ out to us. When she lifted her glass, she moved kinda gentle, like she wasn’t used to holdin’ a regular glass. Still, she’s hard to describe. Like something you see out of the corner of your eye that seems to be the wind fluttering a branch when you look, one of those things you hear about where they disappear when you look straight at them.

    About all we can ever remember is that pair of shinin’ eyes, brown, some people say; dark hair that always looked goin’-to-the-dance shiny, not blown snarled; skin that showed like it was lit up inside it was so clear and pale; and real skinny ankles and wrists. We wondered how she could walk or pick things up without breakin’ a bone. We couldn’t keep our eyes off her, and right then and there my heart turned a flip. I was in love and when I looked around at the others, I knew I wasn’t the only one.

    We may not remember her looks real well, except like we’re in a dream, but what we do remember, when we can stand to, is her music. After sitting staring at her man as he talked pretty hard for a long while as if trying to convince her of something, she looked away and spotted Joyce’s old upright piano in the doorway between the bar and the restaurant. It was battered and scraped, but Joyce kept it shined up. The woman shrugged at her husband, then went over and turned back the keyboard cover. She looked at the keys. The piano had been there when Joyce bought the place, and those keys was yellow and chipped. As like to say, “never you mind,” or, “It’s what I expected,” she kind a sighed, put her hands on the keys and looked over at Joyce.

    “Help yourself,” Joyce grinned. “It isn’t much.”

    Mrs. Marley, we still didn’t know her name then, sat down, and put her hands on those keys and somethin’ came out of that old piano that talked about moonlight and settled land with sun sparklin’ ponds and love, and loneliness and trees and rosebushes. It wasn’t our usual two-steppin’ type a songs, but it reached down into us anyway. That piano probably hadn’t been tuned in twenty years, but she didn’t seem to mind and it didn’t keep her from making’ it sing. Course most of us couldn’t hold a tune or know the difference if it wasn’t western that we could stomp around to.

    She didn’t look weak, then. Her hands, not a callus on them, not a piece of work-roughened skin, ordered somethin’ out of that old battered box beside creaks and mutters. It sang. She musta played fifteen, twenty minutes, then the man went over and touched her elbow. She stopped playin’ and bowed her head above the keys, sighed, nodded jerkily at him, looked back at the piano, then rose slowly. She did look a purt happier.

    Joyce smiled at her. “That was beautiful. Play anytime you want.”

    As far as we knew, she never went back to play there, after her husband told us who they was and Joyce sent them out with Walter Packard to find Sam Wilhelm. We was all out on the porch watchin’ when Sam helped them move into the two-room cabin a ways up the road that was the teacherage, across from the school. Once, teachers had boarded out with the families, but that was before we’d hired the widow lady with two daughters. We built the cabin for her, but she’d never lived in it because she come up one day, met Lazy Joe Kincaid who ran the Kay Bar up at the top of Two Dead Dogs Creek, and married him the next day. He ain’t been Lazy Joe since. And now they got four boys as well as the girls.

    The teacher’s house wasn’t right next to the school, but off on the other side of the road up out of the crick bottom where the wind blew all the time; all this happened before Herman Jakes plowed up where the old school had been and planted wheat. We don’t go near that field much, and Jakes says he don’t even like to work out there hisself. Must be why the weeds take hold so strong every year.

    Anyway, we was watching when she got out of the car when they got back from Sam’s place—the cabin was just down the road from Joyce’s and up higher where you could see more of the mountains—and we could see her plain. She looked up at us, then off at the mountains, then at the cabin. Her shoulders slumped a bit. She looked back at Joyce’s and at the few cabins around it, then straightened her shoulders and went inside like she was facing punishment.

    For her, maybe Roadside Tables was kind of a punishment.