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AS English Language and Literature

Wyke College

Summer holiday task

Read the following short story by Annie Proulx. Its from a short story collection entitled
Close Range, published in 1999 and containing the story Brokeback Mountain, which was
made into a film starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

As you read the story, check the meaning of any words or phrases you are unfamiliar with.
Feel free to annotate the text with your thoughts and ideas as you read.

When you have read the story, answer the two questions at the end of the booklet. There
are specific instructions underneath each one and an indication of how long you should
spend on each answer. You need to answer both questions.

Please bring your work to your enrolment interview in August/September. We will need
to see this work as an indicator of your commitment to the course.
___________________________________________________________________________

Job History
Annie Proulx

Leeland Lee is born at home in Cora, Wyoming, November 17, 1947, the youngest of six.
In the 1950s his parents move to Unique when his mother inherits a small dog-bone ranch.
The ranch lies a few miles outside town. They raise sheep, a few chickens and some hogs.
The father is irascible and, as soon as they can, the older children disperse. Leeland can
sing That Doggie in the Window all the way through. His father strikes him with a
flyswatter and tells him to shut up. There is no news on the radio. A blizzard has knocked
out the power.
Leelands face shows heavy bone from his mothers side. His neck is thick and his
red-gold hair plastered down in bangs. Even as a child his eyes are as pouchy as those of a
middle-aged alcoholic, the brows rod-straight above wandering, out-of-line eyes. His nose
lies broad and close to his face, his mouth seems to have been cut with a single chisel blow
into easy flesh. In the fifth grade, horsing around with friends, he falls off the schools fire
escape and breaks his pelvis. He is in a body cast for three months. On the news an
announcer says that the average American eats 8.6 pounds of margarine a year but only 8.3
pounds of butter. He never forgets this statistic.
When Leeland is seventeen he marries Lori Bovee. They quit school. Lori is
pregnant and Leeland is proud of this. His pelvis gives him no trouble. She is a year
younger than he, with an undistinguished, oval face, hair of medium length. She is a little
stout but looks a confection in pastel sweater sets. Leeland and his mother fight over this
marriage and Leeland leaves the ranch. He takes a job pumping gas at Egges Service
Station. Ed Egge says, You may fire when ready, Gridley, and laughs. The station stands
at the junction of highway 16 and a county road. Highway 16 is the main tourist road to
Yellowstone. Leeland buys Loris fathers old truck for fifty dollars and Ed rebuilds the
engine. Vietnam and Selma, Alabama, are on the news.
The federal highway program puts through the new four-lane interstate forty miles
south of highway 16 and parallel with it. Overnight the tourist business in Unique falls flat.
One day a hundred cars stop for gas and oil, hamburgers, cold soda. The next day only two
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cars pull in, both driven by locals asking how business is. In a few months there is a FOR
SALE sign on the inside window of the service station. Ed Egge gets drunk and, driving at
speed, hits two steers on the county road.
Leeland joins the army, puts in for the motor pool. He is stationed in Germany for
six years and never learns a word of the language. He comes back to Wyoming heavier,
moodier. He works with a snow-fence crew during spring and summer, then moves Lori
and the children the boy and a new baby girl to Casper where he drives oil trucks. They
live in a house trailer on Poison Spider Road, jammed between two rioting neighbours. On
the news they hear that an enormous diamond has been discovered somewhere. The second
girl is born. Leeland cant seem to get along with the oil company dispatcher. After a year
they move back to Unique. Leeland and his mother make up their differences.
Lori is good at saving money and she has put aside a small nest egg. They set up in
business for themselves. Leeland believes people will be glad to trade at a local ranch
supply store that saves a long drive into town. He rents the service station from Mrs. Egge
who has not been able to sell it after Eds death. They spruce it up, Leeland doing all the
carpenter work, Lori painting the interior and exterior. On the side Leeland raises hogs
with his father. His father was born and raised in Iowa and knows hogs.
It becomes clear that people relish the long drive to a bigger town where they can
see something different, buy fancy groceries, clothing, bakery goods as well as ranch
supplies. One intensely cold winter when everything freezes from God to gizzard, Leeland
and his father lose 112 hogs. They sell out. Eighteen months later the ranch supply
business goes under. The new color television set goes back to the store.
After the bankruptcy proceedings Leeland finds work on a road construction crew.
He is always out of town, it seems, but back often enough for what he calls a good ride and
so makes Lori pregnant again. Before the baby is born he quits the road crew. He cant
seem to get along with the foreman. No one can, and turnover is high. On his truck radio
he hears that hundreds of religious cult members have swallowed Kool-Aid and cyanide.
Leeland takes a job at Tongue River Meat Locker and Processing. Old Man Brose
owns the business. Leeland is the only employee. He has an aptitude for sizing up and
cutting large animals. He likes wrapping the tidy packages, the smell of damp bone and
chill. He can throw his cleaver unerringly and when mice run along the wall they do not
run far if Leeland is there. After months of discussion with Old Man Brose, Leeland and
Lori sign a ten-year lease on the meat locker operation. Their oldest boy graduates from
high school, the first in the family to do so, and joins the army. He signs up for six years.
There is something on the news about school lunches and ketchup is classed as a vegetable.
Old Man Brose moves to Albuquerque.
The economy takes a dive. The news is full of talk about recession and
unemployment. Thrifty owners of small ranches go back to doing their own butchering,
cutting and freezing. The meat locker lease payments are high and electricity jumps up.
Leeland and Lori have to give up the business. Old Man Brose returns from Albuquerque.
There are bad feelings. It didnt work out, Leeland says, and thats the truth of it.
It seems like a good time to try another place. The family moves to Thermopolis
where Leeland finds a temporary job at a local meat locker during hunting season. A hunter
from Des Moines, not far from where Leelands father was born, tips him $100 when he
loads packages of frozen elk and the elks head onto the mans single-engine plane. The
man has been drinking. The plane goes down in the Medicine Bow range to the southeast.
During this long winter Leeland is out of work and stays home with the baby. Lori
works in the school cafeteria. The baby is a real crier and Leeland quiets him down with
spoonsful of beer.
In the spring they move back to Unique and Leeland tries truck driving again, this
time in long-distance rigs on coast-to-coast journeys that take him away two and three
months at a time. He travels all over the continent, to Texas, Alaska, Montreal and Corpus
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Christi. He says every place is the same. Lori works now in the kitchen of the Hi-Lo Caf
in Unique. The ownership of the caf changes three times in two years. West Klinker, an
elderly rancher, eats three meals a day at the Hi-Lo. He is sweet on Lori. He reads her an
article from the newspaper a strange hole has appeared in the ozone layer. He confuses
ozone with oxygen.
One night while Leeland is somewhere on the east coast the baby goes into
convulsions following a weeks illness of fever and cough. Lori makes a frightening drive
over icy roads to the distant hospital. The baby survives but he is slow. Lori starts a
medical emergency response group in Unique. Three women and two men sign up to take
the first aid course. They drive a hundred miles to the first aid classes. Only two of them
pass the test on the first try. Lori is one of the two. The other is Stuttering Bob, an old
bachelor. One of the failed students says Stuttering Bob has nothing to do but study the
first aid manual as he enjoys the leisured life that goes with a monthly social security check.
Leeland quits driving trucks and again tries raising hogs with his father on the old
ranch. He becomes a volunteer fireman and is at the bad February fire that kills two
children. It takes the fire truck three hours to get in to the ranch through the wind-drifted
snow. The family is related to Lori. When something inside explodes, Leeland tells, an
object flies out of the house and strikes the fire engine hood. It is a Nintendo player and not
even charred.
Stuttering Bob has cousins in Muncie, Indiana. One of the cousins works at the
Muncie Medical Center. The cousin arranges for the Medical Center to donate an old
ambulance to the Unique Rescue Squad although they had intended to give it to a group in
Mississippi. Bobs cousin, who has been to Unique, persuades them. Bob is afraid to drive
through congested cities so Leeland and Lori take a series of buses to Muncie to pick up the
vehicle. It is their first vacation. They take the youngest boy with them. On the return
trip Lori leaves her purse on a chair in a restaurant. The gas money for the return trip is in
the purse. They go back to the restaurant, wild with anxiety. The purse has been turned in
and nothing is missing. Lori and Leeland talk about the goodness of people, even strangers.
In their absence Stuttering Bob is elected president of the rescue squad.
A husband and wife from California move to Unique and open a taxidermy business.
They say they are artists and arrange the animals in unusual poses. Lori gets work cleaning
their workshop. The locals make jokes about the coyote in their window, posed lifting a leg
against sage-brush where a trap is set. The taxidermists hold out for almost two years, then
move to Oregon. Leelands and Loris oldest son telephones from overseas. He is making a
career of the service.
Leelands father dies and they discover the hog business is deeply in debt, the ranch
twice-mortgaged. The ranch is sold to pay off debts. Leelands mother moves in with them.
Leeland continues long-distance truck driving. His mother watches television all day.
Sometimes she sits in Loris kitchen, saying almost nothing, picking small stones from dried
beans.
The youngest daughter baby-sits. One night, on the way home, her employer feels
her small breasts and asks her to squeeze his penis, because, he says, she ate the piece of
chocolate cake he was saving. She does it but runs crying into the house and tells Lori who
advises her to keep quiet and stay home from now on. The man is Leelands friend; they
hunt elk and antelope together.
Leeland quits truck driving. Lori has saved a little money. Once more they decide
to go into business for themselves. They lease the old gas station where Leeland had his
first job and where they tried the ranch supply store. Now it is a gas station again, but also
a convenience store. They try surefire gimmicks: plastic come-on banners that pop and tear
in the wind, free ice cream cones with every fill-up, prize drawings. Leeland has been
thinking of the glory days when a hundred cars stopped. Now highway 16 seems the
emptiest road in the country. They hold on for a year, then Leeland admits that it hasnt
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worked out and he is right. He is depressed for days when San Francisco beats Denver in
the Super Bowl.
Their oldest boy is discharged from the service and will not say why but Leeland
knows it is chemical substances, drugs. Leeland is driving long-distance trucks again
despite his back pain. The oldest son is home, working as a ranch hand in Pie. Leeland
studies him, looking for signs of addiction. The sons eyes are always red and streaming.
The worst year comes. Leelands mother dies, Leeland hurts his back, and, in the
same week, Lori learns that she has breast cancer and is pregnant again. She is forty-six.
Loris doctor advises an abortion. Lori refuses.
The oldest son is discovered to have an allergy to horses and quits the ranch job. He
tells Leeland he wants to try raising hogs. Pork prices are high. For a few days Leeland is
excited. He can see it clearly: Leeland Lee & Son, Livestock. But the son changes his mind
when a friend he knew in the service comes by on a motorcycle. The next morning both of
them leave for Phoenix.
Lori spontaneously aborts in the fifth month of the pregnancy and then the cancer
burns her up. Leeland is at the hospital with her every day. Lori dies. The daughters, both
married now, curse Leeland. No one knows how to reach the oldest son and he misses the
funeral. The youngest boy cries inconsolably. They decide he will live in Billings,
Montana, with the oldest sister who is expecting her first child.
Two springs after Loris death a middle-aged woman from Ohio buys the caf, paints
it orange, renames it Unique Eats and hires Leeland to cook. He is good with meat, knows
how to choose the best cuts and grill or do them chicken-fried style to perfection. He has
never cooked anything at home and everyone is surprised at this long-hidden skill. The
oldest son comes back and next year they plan to lease the old gas station and convert it to a
motorcycle repair shop and steak house. Nobody has time to listen to the news.
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Analytical question
How has Proulx created a sense of Leelands character? In your answer, you should
consider Proulxs language choices.

How to plan your answer:
make sure that you know exactly what the question is asking you;
make a list of points that you wish to make in response to the question;
choose quotes to use as examples alongside the points you wish to make.

Spend about 40 minutes writing your answer.

Production question
Imagine that Lori keeps a diary in which she records her thoughts and feelings about events
in her life. Write an extract from this diary which she writes in the hospital just before she
dies.

Things to consider:
the events from her life that might be foremost in Loris mind at this time
the feelings she would have about the different people in her life
things that she might be proud of
things that she might regret
what style of writing she would use in her diary.

Spend about 50 minutes writing your answer.