His hours in the dentist’s chair taught him something of pain.
“Mr. Brawls,” said the dentist, “I can make you a good set a nutcrackers, pull out these diseased teeth, and after she heals up, with the new plates you’ll be free from pain forever. And the new set will look good, not like these bad gappy ones.”
“Do it,” said Brawls, and within a month his bad old ivories had been replaced with dentures that seemed carved from a glacier.
Archibald Brawls’ business was lively in the 1920s, despite his youth. He acted for an important rancher north of Casper, a man with political connections whose deeded land abutted the Emergency Naval Oil Reserve No. 3, just then becoming infamous as Teapot Dome. The rancher, John Bucklin, had more than once dined with the Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, a political animal who wrested control of the reserve away from the Navy and then leased it to oilman Harry Sinclair in a classic sweetheart deal. Fall was a man who disdained the nascent conservation movement in favor of full-throttle resource exploitation, setting a certain tone for the future. Big money changed hands and Bucklin worried about being swept into the government’s dustpan of investigation. The accumulating legal paper crowded Brawls’ office. But, as he said, showing his icy smile, it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody a little good. The Teapot scandal was a turning point in his career, and after Fall went to prison, young lawyer Brawls’ interests shifted from petty affairs such as deeds and wills to representation of timber and oil interests, railroads, irrigation rights settlement, and the wonderfully cloudy law of mineral leases.
He increased his storage space, stacking his father’s papers and books in the back of a deep closet. He added his own legal junk, the boxes jammed high and tight.
He made money all through the Depression. Others in Natrona County got rich as well. While the rest of the country was suffering dust storms and bread lines, Casper enjoyed a flood of oil profits. It set off a building boom. The Brawls Commercial was no longer the premier structure in the town.
In 1939 Archibald Brawls bought a ranch north of Casper—the former property of Bucklin, whom he had counseled in the Teapot Dome affair—and on weekends began to live the life of a distinguished rancher. It pleased him to improve his herd with pedigreed stock. The property was mostly yardang and trough, the tops of the ridges shaved smooth by eons of westerlies. It lay just on the northern edge of the great wind corridor that sweeps the state from the Red Desert to the Nebraska border. But, although Brawls and his wife, Kate, a blond with a face she had clipped from a magazine and the caramel eyes of a lizard, entertained important politicians and ranchers, although their New Year’s galas and Fourth of July ranch barbecues were great events in Wyoming society, somehow their lives were tragic. Brawls wanted to build up a ranch kingdom with his boys, but his oldest son, Vivian, was killed in the Second World War. Basford, the second son, who was something of a drinker, steered his Ford into a fatal draw and died alone in the sagebrush. Then Kate sued for divorce, moved to Denver, and remarried a podiatrist. The third son, Sage, graduated from Boston University Law School in 1959 and joined his father’s practice. He always wore a suit, in contrast to his father’s boots, twill pants, and many-pocketed vest.
“Somebody in this outfit has to look like a lawyer,” he joked.
Archibald raised one eyebrow, exposed his cold teeth. “You still don’t know, even at your age, that it’s ranching interests run this state? They come to us because they recognize”—and here he hooked a thumb in his vest armhole, omnipresent cigarette dribbling ash down the front—“that we know their problems.” He adjusted his Stetson, which like a Texas sheriff, he always wore in the office.
Clients saw how strongly the Brawls men resembled one another, compared the framed photograph of Gay G. Brawls that hung in the anteroom with the living examples of Archibald and Sage. They were all rangy, all with heavy dark beards that showed immediately after they shaved, all too tall for doorways. When finally Archibald Brawls died of lung cancer in 1962, the year lightning demolished the stubby spout of Teapot Dome, his Sinclair stock and his holdings in the oil-rich Salt Creek fields north of Casper had made him wealthy. The son, Sage, inherited the ranch, the law practice, the money.
Sage Brawls, after a notorious period of wild-oats sowing, married Georgina Crawshaw of Wheatland, fifteen years younger than he. Her great-grandfather, Waile Crawshaw, had been known throughout the west as a sharp judge of horseflesh. In 1910 he had bought dozens of fine thoroughbreds for the proverbial song in New York when that state moved against horse racing and the thoroughbred market crashed. He shipped them to Wyoming and bred them to his polo ponies. His children continued the business, and Crawshaw mounts played on the polo fields of the world.
Georgina, raised on the family ranch, was as blond as Sage’s mother, but thin and athletic, with a body like that of a strong boy. She had big, wiry hands and bit her thumbnails. It was she who introduced Sage to polo and crossword puzzles.
They had no children, and perhaps this accounted for the ossification of Sage’s interests and character. As a child he had had an inquiring mind, had caught snowflakes on a piece of black velvet, wondered how many lodgepole pollen grains were in the yellow mountain clouds of summer, worked mathematical puzzles. But Georgina won him over to polo, and within a few years he thought of little else. The crosswords were too much for him.
Like many who admire horses, Sage Brawls let his affection become an obsession. He loved the sport, the gallop, the danger, the players’ athletic skills, the aggressive thrust of the riding-off maneuver, the heavy breathing, the smell of dust and torn grass, even the sight of the spectators, heads bent like those of treasure seekers after coins, replacing divots of turf between chukkas. Polo in Wyoming was not exclusively the sport of the wealthy but also the pleasure of ranch hands and working people. Individual riding skill counted for more than money, but as Sage sometimes remarked, it didn’t hurt if you had both. He was handicapped at 6 and Georgina, who was a ferociously expert horsewoman, at 7.
Sage’s clients became inured to the sight of their lawyer suddenly twisting around until he touched the ground behind his left heel with his right hand. When he rose in the morning he did other flexibility exercises that a later generation would have recognized as yoga. The Brawls had a polo pit built where they could practice difficult strokes. There were photographs throughout their house—Sage delivering a nearside forehand shot, an offside under-the-neck stroke, posing sweaty and triumphant with his team, and one of Georgina mounted on Quickstep, holding the Wyoming Cup.
The years rolled along, and little by little Sage neglected his law practice as it kept him from polo matches. Time and money went into their ponies, and they built a second house in Sheridan so they could be nearer the Big Horn Polo Club. On a seniors’ match trip to Omaha on the last day of June in 1994, when Sage was riding Cold Air, a new mount he was trying out, a spectator’s child, impatient for the Fourth of July, set off a forbidden bottle rocket that struck the animal on the flank. Now in his early sixties, Sage Brawls was no longer lithe and flexible. Arthritis had seized his hips and shoulders despite his exercises. A few years earlier he would have been able to spring free. The terrified animal reared and fell over backward, crushing the rider. Two days later he died, and that was that. The Brawls, as the dinosaurs, were gone from Wyoming.
Georgina, grieving and guilt-ridden, sold most of the ponies, donated Sage’s and her own tack and mallets to the polo club, and swore to leave the sport. Decker Mell, who played the number one position on her team, telephoned, Decker with his face like an arrowhead, eyes so pale a blue they looked turned inside out, and atop his lip a drizzly mustache. He was a brand inspector with a weakness for horseflesh.
“I had real mixed feelins when I heard you give your gear to the Club. Goddamn, Georgina, don’t do this, throw everthing away. Your friends, your family, your life is mixed right up with polo.”
“The sport didn’t do me any favors.”
