“You checked the wheat lately?” I asked Dad.
He shook his head. “I’m afraid to.” He chuckled, his head wagging back and forth, and took a long pull on his smoke.
Because we now had a tractor, we decided to take a chance and try the first wheat crop we’d planted in several years. And although we did get a little rain, we weren’t sure it would be enough to support the crop. It looked as if harvesting the wheat might be a waste of time. Dad let out a long, high-pitched sigh, smiled up at the sky, then put his arm around George’s shoulder.
“George, my boy, if you can help it, any way at all, find something to do with your life besides living off this godawful dusty country. Sit behind a desk and count beans or stand in front of a bunch of hayseed kids and scribble on a chalkboard, but don’t be a rancher.”
George kept his eyes out in the distance, and they narrowed just a little. Then he frowned up at Dad, squinting into the sun. “I want to be a rancher, Grandpa.” His voice broke on “want,” and he immediately dropped his eyes to his boots.
Dad opened his eyes like someone had just brought him a birthday cake, and looked first at George, then at me, then back at George.
“Did you hear that, Blake?” He turned his eyes back to me. “This poor misdirected kid wants to do this for the rest of his life.” He took his arm from around George’s shoulder, shook his head, and rested his hands on his thighs, turned inward so that his elbows stuck out like wings. “What did we do wrong? I never slipped up and told you this was fun, did I?” Dad smiled at George.
George blushed and looked straight down at the ground. He shook his head. “Nah.”
“Well, that’s good.” Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he turned to me. “Blake, you never told him this was fun, did you?”
I snorted. “Not a chance.”
Dad nodded, pinching his lips together.
I could tell that despite the show he was putting on, Dad was damn proud that George wanted to stay on the ranch, and it made me kind of proud myself, even if I didn’t understand it coming from a kid who’d been through what George had.
“I love pain,” George said, deadpan.
For the rest of the afternoon, George and I hefted hay into the bed of the wagon while Dad manned the tractor. When the wagon was full, we pulled the team around to a stack Dad and George had started that morning. There we pitched from the wagon onto the stack, piling the hay higher and higher, until our forks fell short of the heap, when we started another stack on the opposite end of the meadow.
Late that afternoon, I noticed a cloud of dust in the direction of the main road. This wasn’t unusual, except that the cloud lingered for the next couple of hours, moving slowly across the horizon, as if the vehicle causing it was only going about three miles an hour. It moved much slower than a team of horses, or a tractor, even in low gear. I pointed the cloud out to George, and even he was intrigued, glancing from time to time for the rest of the day. There was one explanation for the cloud that frightened me, a flashback from a few years ago. Locusts.
Dad finished raking the meadow around seven, and rather than move on to the next meadow, he came back and helped stack what was left.
“Did you notice that cloud moving along the road, Dad?”
“No, what about it?” He looked toward the road, shielding his eyes from the setting sun.
“It’s been there for a couple hours, creeping along.”
“Really?” Dad reached back into his shirt and scratched his back, pulling a stalk of hay from inside. “Hm.” I saw a hint of fear creep into his eyes. “Well, let’s finish up here,” he said, turning his back to the cloud.
We piled the last of the hay onto the top of the stack about an hour later and flipped our forks into the back of the wagon, stretching our stiff backs before we climbed up, Dad driving, George and I in the bed, and headed home. The sun was just shy of setting, and the heat had let up. I tipped the jug to my lips and savored the wetness, even though the water was almost too hot to swallow. I passed the jug to George, who drank, then replaced the cork before passing it up to Dad.
George shook his head. “Whew, that’s hot,” he exclaimed. “Like drinking from the kettle.” He shuddered.
Back at the barn, we watered and fed the horses before walking back toward the house. I noticed the cloud still floating from the road. It was a mile or so from our house, and I was relieved to see from closer up that it wasn’t dark enough to be a locust cloud. It was obvious from this distance that the opaque formation was nothing more than dust.
“Look.” I pointed.
“Hm,” said Dad, who I could see was also relieved. “You want to drive up and check it out?”
I thought. “Nah. It should get this far before too long. Besides, I’m hungry.”
George looked disappointed.
“You can wait fifteen or twenty minutes, can’t you?”
We went inside and washed up; then the three of us went to the living room and stared out the front window, waiting for the cloud to come up over the last rise. Rita came in from the dining room and stood behind us.
“What are you guys looking at?”
“Well, we’re not too sure,” I said. I pointed to the cloud and told her that we’d been watching it for a few hours.
Teddy ran up to the front door, with Pup right behind him, carrying something in her mouth. Teddy pointed down at her, obviously telling her to stay, then he flew through the front door. Pup dropped her treasure between her paws. It was a gopher.
“What’s going on?” Teddy asked when he saw us staring out the window.
I explained, again pointing out the cloud. And it was only a matter of minutes before Mom’s curiosity was piqued, too. We all stood gazing out the front window until we couldn’t stand it any longer and went out into the front yard and gathered in a bunch, looking in the same direction, as if we were waiting for fireworks to start.
Finally, about the time it seemed this damn thing was never going to show up, a pickup came creeping over the ridge. We all looked at each other, confused about why anyone would drive their pickup so slowly, until a minute later, when something followed the pickup over the tiny ridge. The first we saw of the second vehicle was a big, gleaming silver blade, slick and shiny so that it looked white in the sunlight. It was a bulldozer. The big tracks along its sides rolled along the road, throwing dust straight into the air, forming the now-familiar cloud. The driver sat exposed, working the steering levers and occasionally reaching up to pull his hat down over his eyes.
And as they came close to our turnoff, the driver of the bulldozer waved to the pickup, indicating the turn. And somehow, from the way he moved, the shape of his body, and maybe just because it’s the way things are sometimes, I suddenly recognized him. It was Jack.
And at the very moment I recognized him, I heard Rita behind me. “Oh, my god.”
Mom inhaled a quick, gasping breath, and Teddy started looking around at all of us, gazing up into our faces with questioning eyes. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“It’s your father,” Rita said to him.
“It is?” Teddy looked out at the lumbering machine in disbelief. George turned and barged inside the house, slamming the door.
My heart pounded and I felt my tongue swelling up in my mouth, as if it had been stung by a bee. The sweat gathered around and on my forehead, under my arms, and on my upper lip. I wiped my mouth with my sleeve.
We stood frozen in fear or anger or whatever each of us was going through as we watched this man we hadn’t seen for ten years maneuver the huge piece of machinery through the gate, which was barely wide enough, then guide it off the drive and kill the engine. The pickup, which was brand-new, pulled right up to the yard and stopped. The fattest man I’d ever seen poured from the cab, causing the pickup to tilt to one side.
Jack hopped down off the bulldozer and strode toward us as if he’d just come in from a long day in the fields. He wore a big smile, and his walk was confident,
anxious. The other man waited for Jack, then turned and joined him.
They stopped about twenty feet from us. Jack held his hands out as though he expected us all to run up and fall into his arms.
“The troublemaker is back!” he announced.
The other man laughed, not noticing that none of us did. Then the fat man looked us all over, moving his head around as he looked at each face, and walked toward us, then particularly right toward me.
“That you, Blake?” he asked.
I was completely baffled as to who he was, and how he would possibly know my name. But there was no denying that he knew who I was. He held out his hand and stood right in front of me. I shook it.
“David Westford,” he said. “We met in Omaha a long time ago.”
“I’ll be damned,” I mumbled. I never would have recognized him. He must have weighed a hundred pounds more than he had fifteen years before. “So how you been?” I asked, but I wasn’t really looking at him or interested in what the answer might be. Once I knew who he was, my attention was back to my brother, and everyone’s reaction to him.
“Fine,” David Westford said. “Never better.”
Teddy stood right out in front of us all so he could get a good look at his father. Mom straightened her spine. Rita took a step back, crossing her arms. Dad made the first move, stepping forward, not all the way, but within a couple steps. He put his fists on his hips and lifted his chest a little, taking a deep breath.
“So, what exactly do you expect us to do, bend down and brush the dust off your boots?”
Jack let his hands drop to his sides. He stood like that for a second or two, just standing, not showing anything in his face. He looked off to the side, out into the fields, and took his hat off, rubbing his other hand through his hair. Then he put his hat back on and faced Dad again.
“I guess I didn’t expect nothing except that I wouldn’t get drawn and quartered, that I might get a chance to sit down with my family and have a meal and maybe give them an opportunity to benefit from my success.”
He turned and held his hand out to the bulldozer. “I come to offer my services to my family. If there’s anything this country needs right now, it’s water, and if there’s anything that’s going to help people get water from where it is to where they need it, it’s irrigation. And if there’s one thing that’s going to make irrigation easier…” And again he turned and gestured to the machine.
The whole speech was so pat, so polished, that I knew he’d been practicing it all the way from Belle Fourche or wherever he came from. That bothered me. He sounded like one of the guys that came through trying to sell things—carpetbaggers. He sounded like the same old Jack.
Dad turned to Mom. “You s’pose we got enough to feed a couple of swindlers?”
David laughed, again not noticing that none of us did. Or maybe it just didn’t matter to him.
Mom shrugged. She looked over at Rita, whose arms were still crossed. Rita looked down at her shoes, and for the first time, Jack turned his eyes toward her. Without thinking, I moved in Rita’s direction, taking two steps to the side until I stood in Jack’s line of vision, directly between him and his wife. He eyed me, his lids lowered, then a slight grin curled his lip, and he turned his head to the side.
“Is this Theodore?” he asked, moving slowly toward his younger son.
Teddy stepped a few steps closer to his father, his hands behind his back, and stood up straight. “I’m not real fond of that name,” he said. “I like Teddy better.”
Jack laughed, and I noticed his teeth were shiny white. He’d had some work done on them, either caps or false teeth. He looked as though he’d done fairly well for himself, which went against most every scenario I’d imagined during his absence. I had generally pictured him either parked in some dingy small-town bar or riding the rails, working odd jobs. But under the coat of dust, I could see that the dungarees and work shirt he wore were new, with no holes. His boots were also hardly worn, and the band on his hat was leather, and polished. His stomach was flatter than it had been last time we saw him.
“Well, shall we eat?” Mom said, turning quickly toward the house. Dad and David Westford walked close behind, then Rita, who took one last glance at Jack before going inside. Jack’s eyes followed her, measuring. Then he turned to Teddy, who stood unwavering, studying his father up and down.
“So how old are you, Teddy, nine or ten?”
“Eleven,” Teddy answered with conviction.
Jack looked at me, a touch of amazement in his eye. “Has it been ten years?”
I just stared at him.
“It sure has,” Teddy said with no hint of bitterness. I felt a great swelling of pride for this kid, who had as much reason as anyone to hate this man but who seemed ready to forgive everything right on the spot. I thought back to Jack’s return from the army, and to how angry I had been. And I knew that most of the credit went to Teddy’s mother, whom I’d never heard speak badly of Jack in all the time he’d been gone.
“God damn,” Jack said into his shirt. “Ten years. Time sure does pass quicker than you think.” He looked back at Teddy, whose steady gaze seemed to unnerve him. He patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, then turned to me. “So should we go on inside?”
I didn’t respond at first. The range of things I could have said, wanted to say, questions I would ask, covered such a wide swath that it was impossible to focus on any one thing.
“Hey, I didn’t expect a big hug or nothing,” Jack said. “I might do dumb things sometimes, but I’m not that stupid.”
“We’ll see about that,” I muttered.
“Fair enough.” Jack nodded.
We walked inside, where Mom and Rita were getting the food ready while Dad set the table. George stood off to the side, away from the nervous energy, in the corner. David was the only one already seated at the table.
“Where’s Bob and Muriel?” Jack asked.
I answered after a moment in which nobody seemed anxious to. “Bob’s living in his own house near the river with his wife. Muriel lives in Butte. She’s married, too.”
Jack shook his head once, absorbing more new information. “And how you doing, George?” He nodded toward the mirror image of himself crowding in the corner. He moved toward George, a little more sure than he had been outside, feeling more comfortable in his old home, as minutes passed and no one told him to go away.
When he got within a few feet of George, he held out his hand to shake. But instead of shaking, George hit him, a fist right to the jaw, a crack of bone that happened so fast that even those of us who were looking right at them didn’t register the act for a second or two. A collective gasp rose like a chorus, and those of us who weren’t looking turned their heads toward the sound of the punch. Everything stopped. George whirled and marched out of the room, not appearing to fear retaliation so much as having finished what he intended to do.
Jack stood motionless for a full minute, sixty seconds of him standing with his back to us, and us first staring at him then looking at each other, dazed. Would he leave? Would he go after George? Or turn on us all, and start in about not being wanted? But when he turned, he had his head tilted to the side and he let out a big, heavy sigh that puffed his cheeks out. He started nodding.
“Well, I guess I had that coming,” he said, with no trace of humor. He said it sadly, and truly. He held his hand to his jaw, resting it there as if preventing the jaw from falling off his face. And he stepped to the table, where he sat down next to David, who seemed oblivious to the world around him, acting as if people hitting each other was a daily occurrence.
Jack’s response, or lack of one, set everyone back into motion again. Dad finished setting the table, Mom and Rita placed the food in the center, Teddy and I walked into the kitchen to see if there was anything else that needed doing, while David Westford rubbed his hands together, staring at the food. He cast a couple of quick glances at Jack, and it made me wonder what Jack had told him to expect f
rom this homecoming.
“Where did you get the dozer?” Dad asked Jack as we ate. It was the first anyone had said since we sat down.
Jack tilted his head toward David Westford. “Bought it from David.”
“That’s right. You were selling farm machinery even back when I met you,” I said to David.
His pink face brightened, and he nodded. “Ah, so you do remember me.” He smiled. “That’s right, Blake. That machine out there has made me a very rich man, even with things going the way they have the last few years.”
This seemed pretty obvious, considering most people in America couldn’t afford food to maintain the bulk he carried, much less gain a hundred pounds. His bravado embarrassed everyone, and silence again fell over the room. We focused on our portions of canned venison, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cooked carrots.
“You didn’t drive that thing all the way from Omaha, did you?” Dad finally asked.
David laughed loud and long, much too long, making everyone uncomfortable again. “No, no,” he said. “We shipped the machine by train to Belle Fourche, and drove Jack’s pickup up there to pick it up.”
“That’s your pickup?” Dad asked Jack.
Jack nodded, eyes down.
There’s little doubt in my mind that everyone at that table was going through the same thing I was that night. The questions asked were not what we wanted to know—not even close. Nobody gave a damn about where the bulldozer came from, or how they got it there, or how Jack and David happened to meet, although that was quite a remarkable coincidence.
What we really wanted to know, nobody asked. But the questions were there, sitting on the end of our tongues, waiting to be sprung, to have their shells cracked open so some things could be explained. But we couldn’t do it, and we all knew that. There was no chance of asking Jack where he’d been for the last ten years, or where he’d gotten the money to buy not only a bulldozer but a new pickup, and some new teeth. Even Teddy, whose curiosity was without bounds and who probably wanted to know worse than anybody, knew the rules. He did not ask. Instead, we resorted to small talk, chitchat.
In Open Spaces Page 26
