The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  The song I hired the musician to play for Jane on that Saturday in September was Judy Collins’s “Since You’ve Asked.” The singer was blond, in her late twenties. She took her place on a park bench on that sunny afternoon and smiled at the two of us, strummed her guitar, and began to sing. Afterward I thanked her and shook her hand, pulled from the pocket of my sport coat a white envelope with forty bucks in it. She tucked the money into her guitar case, said a quick goodbye, and walked away. Then I pulled out a folded handkerchief, spread it with a flourish on the green grass, got down on one knee, and asked Jane to marry me. I gave her seven roses that day, handing them to her one by one, each with a promise. The second rose, the second promise, was that I’d always protect her.

  Now, some twenty-five years later, I was scattering her ashes.

  After the town of Columbus came three hours of freeway, then blue highways again just east of Butte. All strangely quiet. Not a single car came on or off the interstate in Reed Point, or in Big Timber, or at the three or four off-ramps marked as ranch exits, each pegged with a blue sign with the words “no services.” The movement, that lonely whine of tires on open roads, was a gift. For the first time the memories were just a little less suffocating. The grief ran down the highways with me—a mix of tenderness and sorrow that shifted with every passing town, with the far side of every mountain pass, at every place where pavement turned to dirt.

  FOR A TIME WHEN WE WERE YOUNG, IT SEEMED OUR WHOLE generation was moving. Leaving home. Leaving town. And while Jane was fond of wandering, for me it was an obsession. And if at the heart of that peculiar nomadic age I was too young to stick out my thumb, I did what I could.

  Starting when I was thirteen, with my brother fifteen, every Monday of summer vacation our parents would let us hop on our bikes for daylong meanderings. And it didn’t matter how far we went. Fueled by Corn Flakes and toast slathered with Smucker’s strawberry jelly, the two of us—sometimes with another friend or two—gathered the five or ten bucks we’d each made mowing lawns the previous week and started to ride, my brother on a Schwinn Super Sport and me on a twenty-four-inch purple five-speed Sears Stingray. First we exhausted destinations with the coolest names—Shipshewana, Diamond Lake, Wawasee—followed by trips to more practical-sounding places like Michigan City, Syracuse, Goshen. Sixty, eighty, a hundred miles in a single day.

  We left from Twenty-seventh Street in River Park, pushing off from our tiny house past the tiny houses of our neighbors—as often as not, heading west. In ten blocks came Potawatomie Park, with its greenhouse and little zoo of crowing peacocks and snorting donkeys—the place where our mother said when I was around three, I got so entranced with a geriatric lion that she and my grandmother couldn’t get me to move. Finally they started walking away, thinking it would prod me to come along. I wished them well, so the story goes, then got back to enjoying the big cat.

  A block later came the grand brick edifice from 1940 that was our high school, visually prominent thanks to a curious, medieval-looking tower that once housed a radio studio where Kate Smith stood and belted out “God Bless America.” From there it was twenty minutes to downtown, cruising past the department stores—Robertson’s and Gilbert’s (“where one man tells another”), as well as the Masonic Temple on North Main where at twelve I earned $25 as a trumpet player playing the “Charge!” refrain for three guests being honored for some civic accomplishment, long since forgotten. Then past the old Palace Theater, in 1940 host to the World Premiere of Knute Rockne: All American. And in later years, to a terminally groovy teen dance club called the Top Deck, with black walls and fluorescent cartoon paintings, hosting pop bands from Tommy James and the Shondells to Archie Bell and The Drells and The American Breed. It closed the year I started riding my Stingray past, after two sixteen-year-old boys were stabbed to death out front on the sidewalk.

  Soon we were pedaling through the west side of town, and there the neighborhoods were poorer. Along with the usual scatter of Hot Wheels and doll buggies on the frost-heaved sidewalks, the lilac bushes and the Laundromats with revolving signs—things you’d see on the other side of the Grand Trunk Railroad tracks, as well—here there were cracks in the pavement, more broken glass and debris on the shoulders to steer our bikes around. Now and then there were little scrap yards tucked between the houses with the carcasses of a half-dozen cars scattered about, maybe a washing machine and a couple refrigerators, a beat-up bicycle on its side in front of a General Electric range, rolls of wire and piles of boards and strange gasoline-powered machines the size of suitcases. Tiny bars squatted on every other corner, their faded white Hamm’s signs hanging in the smoky windows. There were fluorescent hair salons, and markets with cardboard boxes out front filled with tomatoes and potatoes and onions and apples. There were liquor stores and gun shops with iron grates in the windows. And out on Western Avenue, women in short skirts with lots of makeup, trying to be flirty, looking like they hadn’t slept in a long while.

  Finally, in the northwest corner of the city, past Mayflower Road, South Bend just fizzled out in that blessed way of smaller cities, replaced after ten minutes of no-hands riding by empty roads and fields of corn. Now came the smell of cut alfalfa and ditches full of chickweed. The mew of catbirds in the raspberry bushes. The gossip of blackbirds on the telephone wires. We’d crossed the wall of the city, as psychologist James Hillman once called the boundary between town and country. People in trucks waved as they passed, as did old retired couples out sitting on their porches. Riding at a steady ten miles an hour, which was no big feat for about any bike with air in the tires, by lunch we’d routinely find ourselves some forty, even fifty miles from home. Under our own power. Calling our own shots.

  Early in the afternoon we’d pull into a Dairy Queen or Tastee-Freez, dismount the bikes with our chests puffed out, and swagger to the window to order a Mr. Misty, our skinny legs poking out of our shorts, hoping somebody would take notice and ask where we were from. But they almost never did. The one guy I recall striking up a conversation with us on the outskirts of Michigan City did raise his eyebrows when he heard we’d started forty-five miles to the east, but not in a look like wow, that’s great—more like geesh, you guys must be stupid. We took a pull from the straws in our drinks, made an authoritative check of tire pressure with our thumb and forefinger, remounted, and pushed on, ready for the next amazing thing, knowing full well that we were having the most fun of anybody in the world.

  The older I got, the farther I went. And not just for adventure. I needed reassurance that the world didn’t demand or deserve the brittle distrust my mother gave it, that I could fling myself to the winds and end up being blown to good places. By my senior year in high school, I was hopping into boxcars, rolling west out of South Bend on Friday nights toward Laporte and Chicago, or else north and east, through a string of small towns that would eventually lead me all the way to Detroit.

  Riding rails was the ultimate “backyard” travel, offering glimpses of things never meant to be seen; over the years I saw couples rolling around naked on blankets spread across the lawn; a man in the garden kneeling between rows of lettuce, crying; an old woman passed out in the ditch, clutching an empty bottle; two teen boys standing next to a clothes line, kissing. In college I rode further still, drifting out of Bloomington, Indiana. Late one night in July, riding through a thick forest in southern Illinois in an L&N boxcar, the train reached a long, high trestle. About a hundred feet below was a narrow valley, about as long as a football field, filled with hundreds of thousands of lightning bugs. As the boxcar creaked out across that trestle, every single one of those flashing bugs paused for a couple seconds, pulling the valley into black. When they started blinking again, it was in perfect unison. Blink, dark. Blink, dark. Blink, dark. They were still doing it when I finally lost sight of them, when the train plunged back into the trees, making for Effingham.

  When I wasn’t in boxcars, I was hitchhiking—sometimes five or six hundred miles on a weekend for no o
ther reason than I didn’t have any other plans. I traveled with next to nothing. On one trip I left Bloomington, Indiana, in 1976 for the bicentennial celebrations in Washington, D.C., with $1.36 in my pocket, hitching all the way in one ride, courtesy of a guy in his twenties in a candy-red Triumph TR6. In my junior year of college, a friend and I attempted to sail to the Bahamas in an English catamaran. We’d wrangled it for $250, rebuilding it through the spring on the back lawn of our apartment complex. We returned home from that outing early, turned back by storms on the ocean. One evening, my mother took me into the backyard, asked if I remembered how when I was little she used to point to a wink of light on the north horizon, telling me it was my star.

  “Remember me saying how that star would watch over you, keep you safe?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t wear it out.”

  But by then I was out of her hands. Nothing for her to do but pray for me—that, and try to stifle the dark rumble of disquiet she still carried about the unreliability of the world. She’d been a dreamer once, smitten as a girl with the idea of becoming a professional singer. But at nine she lost her father, and then, just two years later, after tending her bedridden mother during a long bout of congestive heart disease, that parent was gone, too. Suddenly orphaned, she and her older brother, Junior, huddled together and made a solemn pact to stay with each other always, no matter what. Soon afterward, a big, dour German uncle came by the house where they were staying, stood in the living room with his arms crossed. After several minutes sizing up the siblings, he pointed to her brother.

  “We can use Junior,” he said. “Can’t use her, though.”

  Of course she knew I was a dreamer, too. Years later, I had the surprising thought that maybe she took that belt to me because she’d come to know, at a young age, how awful life could be for those who expected too much from the world. As if those big expectations led to the cruelest pains of all.

  Yet there was no knocking it out of me. On an ill-advised first date in my senior year of college, I remember talking to the young woman across the restaurant table about how someday I wanted to walk the length of the Rockies. She poked at her salad, bored. Then she asked me when I was going to grow up.

  That only made me want to go more.

  STILL THREE HUNDRED MILES SHY OF THE SCATTERING grounds, I pulled in for the night south of Anaconda, Montana, along Doolittle Creek, a fifteen-minute drive on a dirt road branching off the highway toward the tiny town of Wisdom. Just me in deep woods at the foothills of the Pioneer Mountains, the floor of the forest rife with the silky leaves of sedge and Solomon’s seal. Beyond the trees was a long roll of grassland dappled with Black Angus, and then the foothills, rising for several miles toward the highlands, tossed with thick clumps of Engelmann spruce and lodgepole pine. Exactly the sort of place Jane and I and Abby the traveling cat camped hundreds of times. I tried to read but couldn’t focus. Tried to write. But mostly I stared into Doolittle Creek, gurgling through a clear, sand-bottomed pool stirred by fingerling trout.

  My routine on the scattering journeys would end up much the same as when the two of us were together. First a cold beer from the tiny fridge in the back of the van. A little cheese, some chips and salsa. Beans, or maybe a stir-fry dinner, cooked on a Coleman stove given to us as a wedding present in 1980, the meals always served up on the brown porcelain cowboy plates Jane bought in that same year to mark our new life on the road.

  After cleaning up, doing the dishes, came fires. As great as it was across our twenty-five years to be on the move, no less pleasing was no movement at all; as often as not, fire was the bridge from one state to the other—sitting up late at night at the edge of some black woods, or in the mouth of a chiseled canyon in the Southwest, or even nestled in front of a small blaze under spruce branches, in a hollow of snow. Fires had even been a part of the work we did—burning slabs of pine for happy tourists in the Sawtooths, and later in Yellowstone, spinning tales for them about bears and volcanoes and trappers and legendary snowfalls. Sometimes on New Year’s Eve we plucked pieces of driftwood from the riverbank, decorated them into Yule logs, and tossed them into the flames. In the mid-1990s I learned how to fashion a bow-and-drill fire set from pieces of sagebrush. Even now I go out behind the house and twirl the spindle against the fire board with the bow until a tiny ember forms, lay it into a kind of bird nest made from juniper bark, blow it into a blaze. “Mother giving fire,” as a Paiute elder once described it to me.

  Late that night on Doolittle Creek, sipping on a short bourbon and poking at the fire, I recalled a conversation Jane and I had shortly after we were married around a small blaze at the base of a run of slickrock in southern Utah. It was cold and the sky was the color of ink, pricked with stars—sometime around midnight, in the hour when old memories come down to hover at the edges of the flames.

  “I was sixteen,” she said. “Struggling. One day my boyfriend just ended it. Right when I’d been trying so hard to be perfect.” She looked up from the fire to catch my gaze, brushing the bangs off her forehead, tucking them under the edge of a blue bandana.

  “I thought if I was perfect, the world would be perfect, too. That’d be my reward. Proof from God that I was doing a good job.”

  That night was the first time she talked of her mother being the daughter of an alcoholic—child of a man who abandoned his family when she was just a girl. And how, for a long time before he left, Virginia had this strategy of not making waves, of pleasing. Thinking she might keep that last straw off of the camel’s back. Jane said she picked it up, too—this sometimes-desperate feeling of not being in control.

  Meanwhile her father, though he’d later mellow, was a hardboiled perfectionist. Fierce in his expectations. And very serious about that notion common to the rural Midwest, which says appearances are exceedingly important. His lawn was clipped. His house and wife and kids and tractors were clean. His furrows were straight as good lumber.

  She leaned forward and stirred the fire, gathering embers from around the edges of the ring. “I made mistakes. I was sure I’d failed the family. Failed my boyfriend. Failed the whole town.”

  She was in high school when the anorexia started, though back then no one called it that. For two years she sat at the dinner table picking at the pot roast and potatoes and corn and cottage cheese, then excused herself to tie on tennis shoes and slip out the back door to run six miles along the county roads that framed the farm. At night she went to the bathroom, locked the door, and gobbled down ex-lax. I later saw photos of her from that time, alarmingly thin, showing the dim, weary eyes of the underfed; always with a thin smile, though, maybe for the benefit of whoever was taking the pictures. When she finally started eating again, at seventeen, she fell off the other side of the fence, gaining more than eighty pounds in under a year.

  “People didn’t know what to say. I went to see the pastor. He patted me on the shoulder, said I looked good with a few pounds on.”

  Then one night, in some dark bottom where even now I can’t imagine her, out of energy and ideas, she choked down a handful of sleeping pills.

  She woke up in the hospital, her parents standing beside the bed, the two of them worried and fumbling, trying to be encouraging. Her father looking slightly embarrassed. But more than that, like he was about to cry.

  “There was a lot of love. They couldn’t get it, though. But then neither could I.”

  There was no more purging, but she kept running, still using the six-mile loops along the cornfields and woodlots near her family’s farm to hold on to some feeling of sanity. And there was therapy, too—lots of hours spent trying to figure out what she wanted and, in particular, what she wanted for herself. She also started perusing what was for nature lovers a kind of underground reading list of poets and scientists and storytellers: Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Loren Eiseley, John Hay, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Edward Abbey. Works that invited her to go outside and reconsider things she’d long been told weren’t open to reconsideratio
n. Over time, things got a little better.

  Around that late-night fire in Utah, she also talked about going back to Kentucky as a counselor for the Girl Scouts. And how, from then on, the work seemed different—how there was this feeling of seeing smiles on the faces of girls who didn’t have much to smile about. Poor girls. Abused girls.

  “They didn’t see going outside as a vacation, or as some kind of time out from school. It was more about making peace with the world.” The fact that the woods didn’t judge, didn’t condemn, didn’t expect anything, was never lost on them. All they wanted—and by then, all Jane really wanted, too—was to find a place that would let them in. And nature was always willing.

  But there was something else, too. The natural world, even at a summer camp, was uncontrollable, unpredictable. And yet unlike in the daily lives of those girls, here the unpredictability was pure, utterly lacking in agendas. Nature had no intentions. It might sound odd, but more than a few of the struggling girls would, on first arriving, interpreted a cold, rainy day as some kind of punishment for their shortcomings. In a few days, though, they put such ideas away. They began to see that not every discomfort was their fault. They didn’t want the bugs to be biting, but there they were. They would’ve preferred the headwinds to stop pushing against them while out paddling in the lake. But unlike when they had such thoughts at home, out in nature those kinds of wishes seemed a waste of time. Things just were as they were. And that difference made it easier to start thinking about their own lives differently—things they could do something about, versus things that for the time being they had to learn to accept. There was enormous relief in that lesson. Powerful not just for those campers, but for Jane herself, who used it as a motivation to start looking for her next big outdoor experience.