In Open Spaces

by Russell Rowland

  in

  open

  spaces

  RUSSELL ROWLAND

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  To my parents

  and

  In loving memory of my grandfather Frank Arbuckle

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Book I

  1 fall 1916

  2 summer 1917

  3 winter 1918

  4 summer 1921

  5 fall 1924

  6 summer 1929

  Book II

  7 spring 1932

  8 winter 1933

  9 fall 1935

  10 winter 1937

  11 spring 1938

  12 summer 1939

  Book III

  13 spring 1940

  14 spring 1942

  15 winter 1943

  16 fall 1944

  17 summer 1945

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for in Open Spaces

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  I read somewhere, years ago, that “montana” is Spanish for mountain, or mountainous. As a native of eastern Montana, I’d venture to guess that Mr. Ashley, the man who suggested this name for our fair state, never traveled east of Billings. Because if he had, he wouldn’t have seen anything resembling a mountain.

  What Mr. Ashley would have seen instead is a fraternal twin to its other half, a rolling expanse of land that shares little or nothing with its western sibling besides the same birth date. While western Montana rises up like the front end of a head-on collision with Idaho, our half lies quietly dramatic, its treeless knolls and dry gullies twisting and rippling for miles in every direction.

  Carter County, my county, forms the far southeastern corner, sprawling like an old wool blanket spread carelessly across the ground, complete with ridges, wrinkles, hollows, and an occasional hole. The closest thing Carter County can claim to a mountain is the buttes—a series of sandstone flattops that look like the beginnings of mountains, as though some ambitious fellow came along and started building a mountain ridge, but didn’t have the energy to finish it. The Finger Buttes cross the county at an angle, south to northwest, like giant stones laid out to keep the wind from blowing the blanket away.

  But back to Mr. Ashley. I understand his mistake. He had obvious reasons. For one thing, Montana is a damn fine name—a noble-sounding name that rings especially full and rich when spoken by a man with a deep voice and a steady character. Someone calm and patient enough to linger on the n’s so that the word hums slightly, bringing a smile to your face in the same way that a nice song would. And it’s impossible to deny that the mountains cluttering western Montana are magnificent. Maybe the only creation that can crowd into the perfection of a blue sky and improve on it.

  But despite all that, I prefer the prairie. Mainly because I’ve lived my whole life here, of course. But there’s more to it than that. When I finally had a chance to see the Rocky Mountains, they affected me in a way I didn’t expect. I was still a young man—twenty-three, to be exact. My older brother Jack and I drove to Bozeman in the spring of 1925 to buy some oak flooring for the big house my folks were building. On that clear spring day, we rounded the curve into the Bozeman Pass, and I’d never seen anything so beautiful. There the mountains sat, blue-purple and surprising, like two black eyes.

  Up until then, I had not seen any ground higher than the Black Hills of South Dakota. My glances at the sky were brief, just long enough to figure out what kind of weather we could expect. So my neck wasn’t used to holding my head at the angle required to view these towers of rock. Jack and I stared for fifteen minutes, rotating, squinting into the bright sun, shading our eyes. We paid the price later, too, with necks so stiff we had to sleep without pillows. But it was well worth it.

  We decided to get closer, so we drove until the two-rut road ended, gawking, saying little. Then we climbed from the flatbed and stared a while longer.

  “Let’s climb the damn thing,” I said.

  Jack, in a rare moment of skepticism, peered up at the rising slope of pine, his eyes small and dark. It looked as if we could reach out and brush our hands across the tops of the trees. “I don’t know, Blake. I think it’s a little further than it looks.”

  “Ah, come on. Let’s climb it.”

  Jack gave in, but he proved to be right. Just as our necks weren’t used to bending backward, our legs weren’t prepared for ground that pushed back. We didn’t make it far before we had to rest our cramping calves. I could barely breathe. I began to feel a little stifled up there. I panted hard as we kneaded our aching muscles. “I don’t know if there’s a special shoe for this type ofthing, but if there is, I bet that it doesn’t look anything like a cowboy boot,” I said.

  Jack laughed, and although his smile quickly faded, he seemed more relaxed than he had in years. Something about being up in the middle of those trees seemed to affect him in a different way than it did me. And for a brief moment, I thought about asking him about all the things I’d always wanted to know. About the army, and the years he had disappeared, and about his wife Rita. I wanted to know about his intentions for the ranch. Now that he was the oldest, he was the natural heir, but because he’d spent so much time away, I had more time invested, and I wanted to know whether he planned to take over when Dad and Mom couldn’t take care of the place anymore. I even felt like I had a case for taking over the ranch myself, but we had never discussed the possibility. Just as we had never discussed any of this with our father. For that tiny moment, that conversation seemed possible. But I hesitated, and that was all the time it took for those small dark eyes to narrow, and for his thin lips to purse. He sighed, and looked away, and I could feel him drift. And I knew it was too late.

  I turned my attention to the view from where we sat. We could see nothing but trees except far in the distance, where rolling farmland stretched out in patches of green and brown. It was beautiful in a different way from our own ranch—the colors were darker, and the landscape had more abrupt angles.

  “I wonder what land is worth out here,” Jack said.

  I shrugged. This question had not even occurred to me. “Probably a hell of a lot more than out where we are, huh?” I said.

  Jack chuckled. “Oh yeah,” he said.

  It wasn’t much longer before he suggested we head on in to Bozeman.

  In town, we argued about where to stay. Jack thought we ought to treat ourselves to a room in the Grand Hotel, the most expensive place in town.

  “We can’t spend that kind of money,” I said. “Mom would kill us.”

  Jack frowned. “What’re you going to do, squeal? How’s she gonna know? Come on, let’s live it up for once. How many chances like this are we ever going to get?”

  I was too intimidated to put up a fight, knowing Jack would get surly if I did. But I could hardly look at my parents for the next two weeks, especially when Jack told them a bold-faced lie about how much money we spent.

  That night in Bozeman, as I lay in that fancy hotel room, something about the day gnawed at me—something besides the ache in my muscles, or the argument with Jack, or the money. I tossed through a couple of sleepless hours before I figured out what it was. It finally struck me when I imagined being back home, standing at the top of a divide, looking at the circle of open space, the miles and miles of grass around me.

  I realized that the mountains just don’t give you much. You hike a ways, and the trees are thick as hair around you, so you walk a few painful yards further. And maybe you find a small clearing, and can see a little further. Even at the top, you might be able to see forever, but everything is miles away.

  Tha
t’s what bothered me about it, and still does. I realized that the lack of breath I experienced halfway up that mountain was not just the result of the climb. I felt closed in, smothered, up there with so little space around me. I didn’t like not being able to see what was coming, or where we’d been. And I know that if I lived in mountain country, I could never love the land around me like I do my own. That night, I figured out why people like me fall in love with the prairie, even as brutal and unforgiving as it can be. Because when the earth spreads itself out in front of you, completely vulnerable, completely naked, you simply can’t help yourself.

  Book I

  fire

  1

  fall 1916

  The windows of the old Model T rattled as the mail truck bounced along the winding gravel road from Belle Fourche, South Dakota, to Albion, Montana. It was well past midnight, and I tried to sleep, but my head bonked against the window each time I dozed, until it felt as if I’d grown a corner on my forehead. There was also the matter of Annie Ketchal, the driver, who loved to talk. When I saw that Annie was the driver that night, I cringed, because I knew I wouldn’t get much sleep. Because of her job, she knew everyone, and not only did she know them, but she had a gift for finding out more about them than anyone else knew. At the age of fourteen, I usually found the information she passed on interesting, and sometimes even shocking, but on this night I simply wasn’t interested in lives outside of my own.

  “Sorry about your brother, Blake,” she said after a few miles.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Ketchal,” I answered, feeling my jaw tighten, my lower teeth settling against the upper.

  My heart seemed to press against my chest, as if a strong hand had a firm grip on it, squeezing it tightly, telling it, “Don’t beat…don’t you dare beat.” And I knew as sure as anything that this pain would never go away. I thought I would feel this bad for the rest of my life. My fourteen years hadn’t taught me that you feel this kind of pain sometimes, and that although it may never completely disappear, it does fade. And if anyone had tried to explain that to me then, I would have silently told them to shut up and leave me alone, to let me get a little sleep. Just as I now silently wished that Annie Ketchal, as friendly as she was, would be quiet and let me and my struggling heart be.

  I had been standing at the blackboard doing a math problem when the telegram arrived. I was an eighth-grader, just beginning my second year at the Belle Fourche School, fifty miles from the ranch. I boarded with an older couple during the week and caught the mail truck home most weekends to help with the harvest, or haying, or feeding the stock.

  Brother George drowned in river.

  read the telegram. My mother’s words, as always, would never pass for poetry, but it told me everything I needed to know.

  I gave the telegram to my teacher, and standing there as she read it, my mind reviewed all of the immediate concerns of a fourteen-year-old boy. First, I knew that I would be going home immediately. And I knew that there was a good chance that I wouldn’t be coming back. I thought about the dollar a day I could earn if I stayed home, and wondered what I might be able to save up for. And I felt a certain sense of relief about not coming back, because in the year and change that I’d been in Belle Fourche, I had never adjusted to life in town. I didn’t like the pace. I spent most of my time in the classroom wishing I was sitting on a horse in the middle of a broad pasture. I couldn’t keep my mind on the books in front of me, especially when the sun was shining. And although I did well in school, I never felt the same satisfaction from getting a test with a big blue A on it as I did from stepping back and admiring a stack of hay I’d just pitched, or pulling the forelegs of a calf, watching it slosh to the ground and shake its moist head, ears flopping. At my core, I relished the thought of going home.

  What I did not think about in the moment was that my life would completely change with this news. I thought about George and his baseball, and how he could scoop a ground ball and whip it to first base with such fluid grace that it seemed as if he caught the ball in the middle of his throwing motion. But I guess I wasn’t ready to think about the fact that I would never see him again.

  So when the teacher asked me if I was okay, I nodded without hesitation, and it was true at that particular moment.

  “All right,” she said. “You go on ahead then.”

  So I walked to the boarders’ house, told them the news, packed my bag, and caught the mail truck home. But after several hours in the truck, the reality started to penetrate. I remembered a day the previous winter—an early morning when we were out feeding the stock. It was colder than hell that morning, and George, Jack, Dad, and I were doing whatever we could think of to keep warm, pounding our gloved hands together, running in place, working our jaws to keep the skin on our faces from freezing. George was talking, as he often did. He was talking about cattle, and sheep.

  “People talk about how stupid animals are,” George said, stomping his boots against the ground. “But just look at this. Every morning, we get up and come out here to feed these bastards, who aren’t at all cold. We come out here and risk our lives to wait on these animals, and they’re the stupid ones? I think we’re the stupid ones. Not only that, but we paid money for these sons of bitches. We paid money for the privilege of waiting on these goddam animals.”

  He kept along in the same vein, a half grin on his face the whole time, and the rest of us were laughing so hard, we felt warmer than we had all morning. Even Jack, who usually had little tolerance for George’s monologues, was laughing. It was one of those simple moments where the presence of one person made life better for all of us for a time.

  “So many youngsters dying,” Annie Ketchal said. “What was he, nineteen?”

  “Yes, ma’am, nineteen in July,” I said, taking a deep breath. Besides wishing that Annie Ketchal would let me sleep, I was annoyed that she was breaking the custom of our people, which was not to pursue a potentially unpleasant line of questioning. She knew better, but as I noticed in my previous rides with her, Annie didn’t think much about what she said. I suppose that with such a lonely job, having an audience was more important to her than etiquette.

  “So many,” she repeated. “I lost a nephew last year, and another three years ago.” She shook her head. “Smallpox, the first one was, and the other just had a bad cold. That was all it took.” She snapped her fingers, indicating how quickly it happened. “This country is rough on the children,” she said. “The women and the children.” She continued shaking her head. “’Course the men don’t fare much better, but you’d expect to lose a few of them, as hard as they work just to break through this ground.”

  I nodded, not knowing what to say—actually, knowing that it didn’t matter what I said, or whether I spoke at all.

  “What was he like?” Annie asked. “I started driving after he quit school. So I never really knew him.”

  Besides being offended by the indelicacy of the question, by having to explore something I didn’t want to think about, I was also fourteen and answered accordingly, shrugging. “I dunno. He liked baseball.”

  But the question echoed in me. I thought of it often over the years, when others died. In terms of George as well as the rest. And it seemed that the answers changed as I grew older. If I were to answer the question now, I would say that George was solid—even-tempered, unusually even-tempered for such a young man. That despite taking his work seriously, he was also extremely capable of enjoying life. He never seemed to be overwhelmed by the more overwhelming aspects of our existence.

  I guess my manner told Annie that I didn’t want to pursue this line of questioning, as she did not press for more details.

  “You’re not planning to stay and work, are you, Blake?” she asked.

  I swallowed hard, thinking to myself that this was none of her business, but not wanting to be rude. “Don’t know. They’re probably going to need me.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she muttered. “I’m sorry, Blake, but I just think that’s a sham
e, you being as bright as you are and all. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that.”

  That would be the most accurate statement you’ve made all night, I thought to myself.

  In the best of conditions, the fifty-mile drive along the winding gravel road from Belle Fourche to our ranch took about three hours. But Annie had to drop a mail sack at each box along the way, an average of every couple of miles. So we traveled all night. And Annie didn’t miss a beat, sawing away hour after hour with her stories, most of which I’d already heard, about the people on each ranch we passed. There was Tex Edwards, whose first wife, the heir to one of the bigger local ranches, mysteriously drowned in a puddle four inches deep. And Lonnie Roberts and his wife Ruth, both of whom Annie claimed to be consistently unfaithful. And finally, there was Art Walters, whose wife Rose had been one of the many locals who fell victim to the “loneliness.” Someone found her wandering along the road one day with her baby son in her arms. Rose, who moved out from Ohio to teach school, had been muttering to herself about bathtubs when they found her. Bathtubs and maple trees. They sent Rose back to Ohio, and no one had heard a word since.

  I pointed my eyes straight ahead, at the road, answering questions when asked, but mostly letting my mind drift. I thought about George, and about how my parents would take the loss. Dad would take it more personally, like a punishment from God. He would work even harder, trying to gain favor, trying to get more land to prepare for the inevitability of more tragedy. And he would spout invectives, throwing blame in blind directions—at the government, and the weather, and the “goddam banks.” Mom would turn it more inward, saying things like. “We should have…” or “Maybe if we’d…”

  While Dad worried about what we should do, Mom would plan what we would do. And we would follow her plan. It was a system that worked well for them, as Dad worked harder than any man I knew, and Mom was a skilled organizer.