Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory
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Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

Chapter 1:  Historical Erasure and Recovery in Gretel Ehrlich’s“The Solace of Open Spaces” and Janet Campbell Hale’S “Bloodlines”: “Odyssey of a Native Daughter”
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McKay thought about his parents, how they had been extracted from their car and pulled dead from the canal, up through a thin layer of ice that broke over his mother’s head in long translucent staves; how her gray hair had come unbraided and floated like seagrass. He remembered his father’s wounded, wistful eyes—how they had still been open and when he went to close them with his own hand he couldn’t; how the lariat, always kept on the front seat of his parents’ car in strict coils had opened across his father’s chest as if to spell out one last cry of dismay: Oooooooo.
Snow fell from the horse’s back and knees. The whites of his eyes shone, and he worked his ears. McKay grabbed the rein and led the horse from the collapsed drift. He sighed deeply, then his head fell into his blue hands, and he cried. (66–67)

—Gretel Ehrlich, “McKay” (1991)

Gretel Ehrlich’s short story “McKay” depicts a day in which McKay, a stoic Wyoming cattle rancher, visits his deceased parents’ gravesite after he is abandoned by an old lover and ends up rescuing his horse from a snow storm. These encounters with loss on the thirteenth anniversary of his parents’ tragic death break down McKay’s tough exterior, revealing his suppressed loneliness and grief. The exposure of McKay’s inner pain is suggested by the “[b]locks of snow [that] fell away, exposing” the horse’s body. As McKay digs through the deep snow to uncover the horse, his tough exterior is peeled away, revealing inner wounds that are paralleled with the memory of his father’s “wounded, wistful eyes.” The function of “digging” away protective layers to reveal an essential, “authentic” self is a primary trope in much of Gretel Ehrlich’s work. Moreover, McKay’s final surrender to his grief in the concluding image where “he cried” reflects the tenderness and vulnerability underlying his tough exterior. The function of this sympathetic portrayal is to convey the fragile core hidden beneath the cowboy’s stoic demeanor, an image that resurfaces in Ehrlich’s nonfictional portraits of cowboys in Wyoming.