by Bair, Julene
After we’d rolled onto the plains, I dutifully exited at Deer Trail, a tiny town east of Denver. Jake took the wheel, and I tried not to seem too observant as he pulled onto the interstate.
He thought he was invincible. Closing my eyes, I imagined him standing on an on-ramp like this one, army-surplus pack on his back and his thumb out, going in search of his father. While I would do anything I could to prevent that, he didn’t believe in the dangers I warned him about. And his desire for a father had been relentless ever since he was a toddler. Only when he hit his teens had the yearning become less evident, but I knew it was there. He still had a child’s trusting heart, open despite the pain that had been inflicted on it.
Jake’s father had sent him only a couple of letters over the years and had phoned only a few times. Then he deigned to visit him once, when Jake was twelve. He’d planned to come through Laramie anyway, with some motorcycle buddies. He was several hours late. It had pulverized my emotions to watch Jake wait for his dad’s arrival. Then, when Stefan decided not to stay for the weekend as he’d promised, I’d had to watch Jake’s joy turn to disappointment. Stefan was having engine trouble. Worried that he would break down, he continued on with the others.
Jake flicked on the radio and tuned it to his favorite Denver station.
“Not too loud,” I said, although my newly opened heart was receptive to virtually any music. I grooved on the head-banging rhythm and raw emotion in the angry male voices. Their vocal cords might have been ground glass. Let it out, I thought. Feel it.
When the low-wattage station faded, it was my turn to choose. We sang along with “Eleanor Rigby,” Jake’s voice hitting the high note in “where do they all come from?” with ease. I missed the note every time, but neither of us cared. We were getting into the holiday breakaway spirit, thank providence. We could count on a car trip as recess from the mother-son wars.
Halfway between Denver and the Kansas border, I could still see the snowy cap of Pike’s Peak hovering ghostlike in my side mirror. Otherwise, nothing but smooth grasslands defined the circular horizon. The land lifted and fell gently, meandering along dry streambeds. Two pearlescent cloud wings stretched toward us from our destination, where morning rimmed the earth in turquoise. The dry air evaporated haze, giving the sky its clarity and inspiring a feeling in the chest that the early Plains explorer Richard I. Dodge described best: the magnificence of being.
“I love this point in the trip,” I said.
“I know,” Jake said. “You always tell me that.”
All flesh is grass, it said somewhere in the Bible. Grass makes flesh, and a century and a half ago we would have seen herds of antelope wheeling over the land like flocks of birds, as we often saw them do in Wyoming, veering suddenly to pour down a valley or around a long, low hill. But the only grass-turned-flesh we’d seen that day had been cattle.
And as we approached the Kansas border, all I could tune in on the radio was a moralizing talk-show hostess. “What did you think would happen when you married an alcoholic? Alcoholism is a disease, Emily, a disease. Do you remember your vows? In sickness and in—.” I cut her power off midsentence.
“Amen,” Jake said. Noise from the Subaru’s leaking windows filled the silence.
The land was flatter now, and the grass had vanished. The earth had been human stitched into a patchwork of monotones—squares and circles of bare dirt, corn stubble, and winter wheat. Many of the fields had irrigation sprinklers. Some of the sprinklers were running, unusual this late in the year. The High Plains were in the midst of a drought, but having the Ogallala Aquifer to tap into was like having a goose that laid golden eggs. Except, of course, we were doing what people always did, killing the goose.
Ward was a rancher, not a farmer. An important distinction. Much of his land would be in grass. In a letter, he’d described his place as honestly as I know how, saying it looked, at first glance, like any damned ol’ farm.
Why our ancestors thought it necessary to plow up most of the prairie, I’ll never understand. I’m just thankful that I do own some grass. You can still ride a horse here and imagine it the way it used to be and was meant to be. I can’t wait to show it to you, Julene. That longed-for moment was upon us. I would see his place the next day. Finally. His hand would envelope mine again.
“So are you going to marry this guy?” Jake asked.
Had he been silent all this time because he was mulling over the radio diatribe? Had he connected that poor Emily’s husband to his dad, whose drinking had led to our divorce, then to “this guy,” who, as far as he knew, could be a drinker too? “Gee, Jake,” I said, “we’re nowhere near that point. For now, I just hope you’ll like him.”
“You think I will?”
I paused. “I want you to, but I can’t promise.”
He greeted this with no words, only silence that I could read too well. I reached across and squeezed his shoulder. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, sweetie.”
“Thanks, Mom. I know. I don’t have to like him. I just want you to be happy.” He blessed me with a smile.
• • •
SHORTLY AFTER CROSSING THE KANSAS BORDER, WE exited the interstate. With a population of five thousand, Goodland was the largest town since Denver. We shot past the new Walmart Supercenter, which had put all three grocery stores and half the other stores on Main Street out of business.
After the Farmer’s Co-op, where my dad used to fuel his pickup before heading out to the farm, we zoomed over the railroad tracks past peeling white grain elevators, then threaded the grid of square corners and straight streets. Paint had weathered off the older clapboard houses. Many had for-sale signs in their front yards.
The town was as predictable as tic-tac-toe. On the west side came Sherman Street, then Custer. Naturally, I thought. Two generals in the war against the Plains Indians. The settlers had named the county after Sherman too. I’d never made the connection as a child, but this seemed entirely appropriate to me now. The army’s chief commander had taken the flat, arable land from the Cheyenne and delivered it to us on a silver platter.
We rumbled down brick-paved Main Street. When I was Jake’s age, Goodland had been a bustling town. Back then mannequins with aquiline features and long, expressive hands posed in the many clothing-store windows. The only downtown store that sold clothes now was a Penney’s. I pointed to the fried-chicken take-out place. “You won’t believe this, Jake, but when that building was a shoe store, they had an X-ray machine you could stand on and look at the bones in your feet. I must have done it a hundred times.”
“No kidding? It’s amazing you didn’t get toe cancer or something.”
“We used to eat there,” I said, pointing to the once elegant, now seedy, Waters Hotel. We would go on the rare Sundays Dad had joined the rest of us for church. I remembered linen tablecloths, heavy silverware, and other diners stopping by to tease my father. Did she have to bribe you with dinner to get you off the farm, Harold?
“If I could eat like this every Sunday, I’d become a holy roller.”
The store where we’d bought our first TV, when I was six, had been taken over by a Mexican vendor of candies and other “cosas de México.” Mexicans had come with irrigation, to hoe weeds from between row crops. They’d stayed and prospered, in relative terms.
The previous summer, when I’d dared mention my concerns for the Ogallala to one of our old farm neighbors, he’d warned that I shouldn’t knock irrigation. It had been “good for Goodland.”
I’d nodded politely. I didn’t want to alienate this old family friend, who took time out of his busy schedule, running a large farm, to pay regular visits to my mother.
“If they’d put through that zero depletion,” he said, “you could shoot a bullet down Main Street and not hit anyone.” Zero depletion had been a water-control policy proposed in the early nineties that would have reduced t
he amount farmers could pump until the withdrawal rate reached a sustainable level, meaning no more would be taken out of the aquifer than rain and snowmelt returned to it each year. The plan hadn’t gone over well among irrigators, but having completed our tour of Main Street, I could see that a bullet’s hiting anyone was less likely than ever before.
Goodland was dying despite irrigation, and to some extent, because of it. As irrigators drained the aquifer, irrigation drained the countryside of farmers. In order to pay for sprinkler systems—and compete in the depressed grain markets caused by overproduction, due partly to irrigation—they had to “get big or get out,” as Ezra Taft Benson, President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, had famously advised farmers to do. My aunts and uncles who’d sold their land and left in my early teens were among the many lacking the will or the means to get big. So they got out. The stores had gone the way of the farmers.
I glanced at the clock. Eleven a.m. We were close. A few more blocks to the house, then one hour before Ward was due to arrive. My heart swelled with my unbelievable good fortune. Who would have thought I could love a rural Kansan?
As usual, Jake failed to slow down for the dips that served as the newer east side’s drainage system. We almost bottomed out on one of them, and the tires squealed as he rounded the turn at the First Christian Church, with its swooping roof. Our journey ended as it always did, at Mom’s house. “Where’s that smoke coming from?” I asked. I opened my door, peered under the car. “Oh my God! The tires are on fire.” My brother Bruce had arrived before us, I saw. His “road hog,” as he called his twenty-year-old Pontiac, was parked at the curb.
“I was going the speed limit,” protested my son.
6
JAKE CARRIED ALL OUR BAGS IN AT ONCE AND DROPPED THEM IN THE ENTRYWAY. We exchanged whispery hugs with my mother and heartier ones with my more substantial, unreserved sister-in-law, Kris, and niece, Abby.
Bruce was sitting on the couch, his twelve-string guitar leaning beside him. “Hi, Uncle Bruce,” Jake said.
“Hello.” He wore his usual scruffy attire. Loose-fitting jeans, old work shoes. The laces didn’t match. What was left of his hair hung below his collar, and he still had his hippie beard, although he kept it trimmed better than he used to.
“Is that a new guitar?” Jake asked.
“No, just the same ol’ noisemaker,” Bruce said, holding it out for Jake, who took it and started strumming the few chords he knew.
“Show Bruce that song you wrote,” I said to Jake.
“Oh,” Bruce groaned. “Sure, show me what you’ve got.”
I kicked myself for submitting Jake to his uncle’s seeming disdain. He put the guitar down. “Nah. Maybe later. Where’s Josh?”
Josh was Bruce’s twenty-two-year-old son. He was at the motel, Bruce said, with his girlfriend and their toddler daughter, who loved the motel pool. “Don’t worry. They’ll get here in time for gobbler.”
Kris and Mom had returned to the kitchen, which seemed like a safer place. I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched Kris convey herself between the counters with her customary flat footfall, serious intention, and efficiency. Mom was mincing broccoli with a food processor. She wore one of the outfits she’d sewn in the sixties. Bright-orange polyester pants with a vest in the same color over a flowery pink, voluminously sleeved blouse. All of her old clothes still fit her. On my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, I’d persuaded her to put on the tiny lavender party dress she’d gotten married in. To save money, they’d eloped. It had been the final year of the Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties. They were poor then. We got ours by going without! Dad.
Now, more than sixty years later, Mom still looked great. Her hair wasn’t really gray, but silvery blond, the same color mine had begun to turn in my late thirties. It was from her that I’d gotten my Scandinavian features. We had high cheekbones, fine noses. But her skin still shone like porcelain, while mine had begun to show sun damage.
Her needlepoint pictures competed for wall space everywhere in the house. Here, above the picture rail, she’d hung the cute ones. Snoopy slept on his doghouse roof, big-eyed cows munched flowers, kittens played with balls of yarn. “Shall we set the table, Mom?”
“Oh sure, I guess it’s time.”
I rescued Jake and took him with me into the dining room. First we pulled the gold tablecloth from the blond, built-in hutch, then we draped it, making sure the edges were even. This was our job. We’d done it dozens of times before. Getting out the good china plates with the autumn leaf pattern, we did the tally—Bruce and Kris; my niece, Abby; nephew, Josh; and his little family. Mom, Jake, me. There would be nine of us.
No plate for Dad. I looked over at his college graduation picture on the buffet. His dark eyes, under heavy brows and set in a young, smooth face, stared fixedly into a future now spent. “Just look at that handsome rascal,” my mother liked to say, as she gazed at the picture. “Is there any wonder why I married him?”
But without the cap and tassel, Dad wouldn’t have looked so rakish, even back then. Mat burns he’d suffered in a high school wrestling match had caused the hair on top of his head to fall out, and it never grew back. We’d razzed him about his baldness. He always played along. Like the gold teeth that accented his smile, a vein of humor glinted in him despite his serious approach to work and what one of my aunts called his hard-assed opinions.
He could not abide what he considered sloth in others. I remembered him pacing the sidewalk outside our farmhouse when my brothers and the hired men tarried over dinner, the noon meal. With his thudding gait and hulking shoulders, his bulb-toed work boots, and the crooked brimmed work hat he jammed low over his ears, he was a caricature of frustrated ambition. “Go in there and tell them to get their lazy butts in gear,” he would command me. In I would go, repeating his orders, eliciting laughter and a shuffle of boots and chairs. Empowered by my father, I’d felt like a toy poodle herding bulls.
No plate for my brother Clark either. If he’d lived, would we be setting a place for Noelle, the woman who drove to meet him after his 1988 bicycle trip down the California coast? When he didn’t show up, she made the calls to all the local hospitals, then performed the dreaded task, identifying his body in the morgue.
Clark, the eldest. He had been my protector when we were kids. According to family legend, he had even saved me from getting killed when we were traveling in Arizona and I’d toddled onto the highway in front of an oncoming truck. Then all those years later he slipped on a gravel shoulder and was himself hit, by a lumber truck. In the stoic way of farm families, we had absorbed the shock of his death into our interiors and moved on. But the loss was an untended wound.
Jake opened the velvet-lined, wooden box of silver. Watching him work his way around the table, I recalled the Thanksgiving when Clark had apologized to me for not helping in the kitchen. “I want to,” he said, “but if I did, Dad would think I was a homo.” Screw that! had been my attitude. Ever since Jake was little, I had made it a point to insist on his helping with every meal at Grandma’s house.
“Don’t be late.” I heard Kris command. She was speaking to Josh on the kitchen phone. “Julie’s new boyfriend’s coming to dinner.”
Jake looked at me and pressed his lips together in a flat smile.
Clark and Noelle hadn’t married, although Noelle told us that they’d been on a marriage track. “Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?” Mom had said many times. Was my family feeling hopeful on my behalf now? Did they envision Jake and me made more complete by the balance Ward would bring to our lives? A fork on the left to accompany our knife and spoon on the right? I envisioned that myself, but at no time more than now, here.
• • •
WE SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, WAITING for the oven timer to go off. Here Mom hung her more serious needlepoint efforts. A replica of John Millet’s The Gleaners, in which peasant women collected
stalks of wheat left behind by a rich farmer’s harvest wagons. A large-antlered bull elk. And a romantic rendering of our old farmhouse, the one her father had built and that we’d both grown up in. “If I’d known they would burn it down, I never would have left it,” she often said.
I hoped the conversation wouldn’t stray into politics while Ward was here. I’d tried to warn him that he’d be entering a den of liberals. He’d said not to worry, it wouldn’t be his first rodeo. But I didn’t think we were ready for any rodeos yet.
Secretly I believed I could sway Ward over to our side. After all, I’d openly stated my views in my book, and he’d been a fan of that before we met. He didn’t seem to see the contradictions in himself that I did. A poetic soul, I reasoned, trapped in a prosaic, repressive region.
I didn’t need my atypical family exacerbating our differences. Maybe I could defuse the bomb before Ward arrived. Bracing myself, I asked, “So what do you think of our man in the White House now, Bruce?”
He stopped strumming. “Oh,” he groaned in his usual fashion. He went back to practicing a short riff. I waited. He’d spent most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter. His cynicism suited the profession, but not the small-town papers he’d worked for. “I went to a city council meeting and wrote what I heard,” he’d said when I asked him what had caused his last dismissal. Now he managed the farm Dad had left us. He could do that even though he lived more than a hundred miles east of Goodland because the excellent farming couple Dad had hired years before his death still did all the real work.
Finally, he put his guitar down and sighed. One side of his mouth lifted wryly, revealing a crooked canine. “I can’t say what I think about our president. I could get arrested.”
I said, “It might get better. We might win next year in the midterms.”
