The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  “We’d have to be fools and ingrates to complain,” Bruce went on, “but I spent too many years being Dad’s tractor dog. I told him a long time ago, I really don’t want to farm. Neither does Julie.” He looked at me. “I don’t think.”

  I shook my head reluctantly.

  “Hell,” Bruce continued, “neither of us can farm it. All I can do is watch the grain markets on my computer screen and call our guy on the farm once in a while. He lets me think I’m the boss. I don’t have the stamina for farm work. Too old. Arthritis. I can put myself out of commission for a week throwing a Frisbee for my dog. And Julie doesn’t know enough.” He looked at me. “No offense.”

  His smirk irritated me. “I do know a little,” I said. During those years I’d spent on the farm when Jake was a baby, then a toddler, Dad had taught me all he could. He’d even entertained the idea of me as his successor.

  Bruce flung his arm in Jake’s and Josh’s direction. “Our boys weren’t raised to farm.” Jake glowered at this, making eye contact with me. If you were among my father’s descendants, you soaked up his conceit, that farming was the only valid work in the world. It didn’t matter that Jake had never driven a tractor, or that he made fun of Garth Brooks, or that he played drums in a punk-rock band that went by an absurd moniker—the Kilted Monarchs. None of that immunized him any more than the Beatles and Bob Dylan had spared Bruce and me.

  Thinking this, I realized that my nephew, Josh, looked like John Lennon. Dark eyes behind wire rims, the long Grecian nose, the tender, intelligent mien. Except that now his lips had pressed together with a bitterness I’d never seen in him before.

  Abby sat frozen too. Had she noticed that her father had made no mention of her?

  Bruce seemed unaware of Jake’s reaction or of Abby’s and Josh’s studied nonreactions. “Ron, the guy who lives there and does the real work, isn’t getting any younger,” he went on.

  “What will we do if he gets sick?” I added.

  “If he gets sicker,” Bruce said. “He has emphysema.”

  “Farm dust, or cigarettes?” Ward asked.

  “Both. Julie’s right. It would be a catastrophe if he had to go to the hospital in the summer, when irrigation’s in full swing. I don’t know how fast we could find a renter.”

  “Even if you did, there’d be no tellin’ how it would work out,” Ward said. “You don’t know the proof of that pudding until it’s congealed and all you’ve got is lumps.”

  “It’s an age-old question,” Bruce said. “What to do with the farm.” He allowed a dramatic pause. “Do you want to manage a thirty-five-hundred-acre dryland wheat and irrigated farm?” He was being facetious, but also a tad bit serious, honoring Ward and messaging approval to me. Did he think I’d finally made a sane choice in a man?

  “I’m afraid I’ve never been much of a manager, Bruce,” Ward said.

  As Harold’s daughter, it baffled me how a man could say such a thing about himself. Was it just his humility talking? My brother only nodded. Subject closed, for now.

  8

  CAN IT, SPIDER!” Ward shouted out his open window. The dog was growling just as he had in the summer, when he first laid eyes on me. I stepped around the back of Ward’s pickup. We’d met at a country intersection. He said he wanted to show me something before he took me to his house, our planned post-Thanksgiving rendezvous.

  “Pardon my idiot friend,” Ward said as I got in. “He’s on a mission to fend off any woman who tries to come near me.”

  “Poor dog. Must have his hands full.” It was drizzling lightly, and I’d gotten a little damp. Not all bad, I mused. Although I hoped the drought was ending, my focus right now was on my appearance. Every plainswoman knew she looked better when the normally dry air had moisture in it. My hair would pouf up and have more body. My wrinkles would soften. I was three years older than Ward. All of his past girlfriends had been younger than him. This troubled me even more than knowing he might be an irremediable bachelor. He’d come close to marrying once, in his early twenties, he’d told me, but had bolted shortly after his town’s newspaper, the Handshake, ran the announcement of his and the local girl’s engagement.

  We rode together in his pickup, which doubled as his office, apparently. Receipts stuck out from beneath both visors. American Quarter Horse Journals littered the floor behind the seats. He turned onto a narrow trail between fields of wheat stubble left from the previous harvest.

  Suddenly the land dropped away and we were bouncing down a road carved into a bluff. Before us yawned the Smoky Valley, the river concealed by cottonwood trees, their branches bare. I rolled my window down and Ward followed suit. He threw his head back, swilling the air into his lungs. “Wet grass on a fall morning,” he said. “I haven’t smelled that in so long.”

  Me neither. The smell was intoxicating, restorative, and pungent due to the willows that hugged the gullies leading to the river. They were leafless like the trees, but their burgundy branches, streaked in orange, flamed against the yellow prairie. The grass was tall for our part of Kansas, calf high on the hills and deeper along the edges of the trees and willows. In one place far up the valley, where the sun smiled through the clouds, the grass smiled back. The innocent color of a toddler’s blond hair, it literally glowed.

  I have remembered that moment ever since as the beginning of my love affair with Ward’s Smoky Valley ranch. Visiting his pastures reassured me the way visiting my mother did. She was old. She couldn’t do all the things she used to do, but she was at least still with us, very much alive. Knowing this was a creature comfort. The same was true of that valley swath of intact prairie. Its beauty and smells gave me respite from the loss I felt on the tablelands where I’d grown up.

  I envied Ward for being able to ride in these pastures as a kid. His family had lived in town, but he’d come here to play with his cousins for as long as he could remember. When his uncle died, his aunt, wanting to move to Arizona for the warm winters and to be near her kids, had put the land up for sale. “I couldn’t stand seeing the place leave the family,” he said. He’d bought the headquarters and valley pastures. There was farmland too, but his aunt had hung on to it and rented it out to a neighbor.

  He had taken me there to see his mares. About twelve of them came trotting out of the nearest copse when he banged a bucket and called, “C’meat!” It took me a while to realize he was saying “Come eat.” He moved casually among the herd, pouring grain in piles as the mares jockeyed for position. “Take it easy, sisters,” he said. “Whoa, Alice.”

  I breathed deeply, relishing the fragrance of wet horses, willow, and grass all mixed together. “‘Las yeguas jóvenes, las yeguas salvajes y ardientes,’” I said. Cormac McCarthy’s hero had whispered the erotic phrase into the cocked ear of a high-strung, pure-blooded stallion he’d ridden to a lather.

  “And that means?” Ward asked as he emptied the bucket into a final pile.

  “The young mares, the wild and ardent mares,” I purred.

  “Gr-r-r-r,” Ward said, grabbing me around the waist and jamming me against his hip as we walked. Oh, the deliciousness of desire. It had been too long since I’d wanted anyone like this. He led me to stand before what seemed to be the lead mare, a bay. I noted her wide belly. “She’s pregnant?”

  “All of them took this year. A record.” We stepped back as the mare squealed and nipped at the roan beside her. Ward said, “If this one didn’t have the best blood in the herd, I’d sell her in a whinny. She’s got the temperament of a rattlesnake.”

  An apt description, I thought. With her ears laid back on her long neck, her nostrils flared, and her teeth bared, she had looked like a snake.

  “The bitchiest mares make the best mothers though. They really defend their babies. Now watch out, stand back so you don’t get kicked.” Bitchier, that’s what I need to be, I thought. I needed to boss Jake more and keep those invaders—drugs, alco
hol, bad influences—at bay. Of course he already thought I was the parent from hell, insisting on obsolete concepts like homework and curfews. But where were the horse dads? How come we human animals supposedly needed two parents, while others got by with one?

  “Some breeders don’t pay much attention to the dam,” Ward said, “but I think the mother is actually more important.”

  “Huh,” I said noncommittally. “Why’s that?” Had he read my mind? Was he making a bow toward Jake’s fatherlessness?

  “She’s half the bloodline, and she also establishes her offspring’s position in the herd. You want to buy a lead horse, not a follower. They’re more competitive, if you’re into roping or barrels, anything like that. And they’re more confident too. Less likely to get scared or blow up in the middle of whatever work you’re trying to do.”

  “So this one’s Alice?”

  “They’re all Alice. That’s just what I call ’em. They have their own names too. Here,” he said, leading me to the end of the line. “I want you to meet Virginia.”

  “Virginia must be low gal on the totem pole. She got the last pile of grain.”

  “They lose rank as they age. It’s just nature’s way.”

  I’d never seen a horse quite like her—smoky gray with a black stripe down her withers and black bars on her front legs. “She’s a grullo,” Ward said. “The horse folks along the Front Range will trade their jodhpurs for this color, but I could never bring myself to sell her.” He reached down with a leather-gloved hand and scratched the mare’s ears. “Virginia’s my oldest girl. She’s thrown ten foals and still goin’ strong. Easy labor. No misses.”

  I felt his eyes move on to me. “You know, Julene, it’s always made me uncomfortable when a woman wanted to visit me here. But you’re different. I couldn’t wait to show you everything. I want you to know everything about me.”

  “Really? Everything?” I teased. Was he trying to flatter me? Why would he not want his prior girlfriends to come here? Wouldn’t he want to impress them? It was all pure sex appeal. Horses and hats.

  Ward whistled one short note through his teeth. In response, Spider leaped off the bed of the pickup and bounded ahead of us as we threaded our way into the woods along a trail the horses had made. The drizzle was getting heavier, droplets falling from the brim of Ward’s hat and darkening the back of his canvas jacket in a V. I wore my impervious Gortex parka and waterproof hiking boots self-consciously. I knew the local opinion of people who bought special equipment for hiking. Western Kansans didn’t hike. They walked, but only when they couldn’t take their pickups.

  We stepped through downed limbs, tall yellow grass, and wet drifts of fluff the cottonwoods had shed. A forest was a veritable paradise on the plains, where a single tree was a rarity. As always, there was water to thank, and soon we came to a wide, sandy riverbed, sparsely strewn in yellow leaves. A shallow, narrow stream twined down the middle of the bed. It was hard to believe that the Smoky was once plentiful enough to water thousands of Cheyenne, not to mention the horses they kept in numbers many times their own and the buffalo that had sustained them.

  “We used to have family picnics here,” Ward said. A frayed, rain-blackened rope hung from one of the trees. He pulled it to the edge of a broken-down homemade picnic table. “Us kids would take turns. ‘Tarza-a-a-a-n!’”

  Even though sand had long since filled the swimming hole, I could imagine the scene. Ward’s family might have included fewer farmers than mine did. Most of the men were probably ranchers, like my grandmother Bair’s brothers. From the Colorado side of the border, they wore cowboy hats and narrow trousers with triangles embroidered on the pocket corners. But I was sure that the women had all dressed like my mother and aunts used to do, in Betty Crocker housedresses they’d sewn themselves. They would have covered the old table in the food that had delighted me in childhood—fried chicken, potatoes that were first boiled then fried in butter, pies made from bright-red sour cherries picked from the tree that grew in every farmyard. The wind would have made that enchanting running-water sound through the leaves of the cottonwoods, just as it had done at Smoky Gardens, the county park some forty miles west of here on this river, where my family had gone for picnics. Those giant old trees rendered an August afternoon pleasant rather than unbearable. They didn’t stop the flies from biting, though. The men ignored the flies, but the women, who had softer, more exposed skin, shooed them until they couldn’t stand it any longer and began packing up.

  No coals remained in the fire pit now, no bottles or cans to show it had been used in the recent past. Just coarse, grayish-pink sand. The drizzle intensified the color. As a child, I’d loved seeing the sand in the Little Beaver redden after a rain.

  I walked to the center of the bed and took my knit glove off to test the rivulet that ran there. The water was as cold, on that late-November day, as the glaciers whose melt had first suffused the Ogallala formation.

  By now, I’d winnowed the decipherable from the incomprehensible in several geology texts and had a basic grasp of how the formation had been created five million years ago by rivers flowing out of the Rockies. The rivers braided, unbraided, and rebraided themselves, depositing the eroding mountains over the terrain to their east. Glacier melt and rain filled the spaces between the eroded materials with water. Our “cussed wind,” as Mom called it, had then deposited a couple of hundred feet of our highly prized, fertile loess over the top. Together, those rivers and the wind had made the High Plains.

  In the late 1800s, the geologist who discovered the Ogallala deposits exposed in cliffs cut by the South Platte River in Nebraska had named them after a nearby town. Ogallala, the town, had gotten its name from the Oglala Sioux, who favored that region along the Platte. I’d seen “Oglala” variously translated as “spread throughout,” “to scatter one’s own,” and “she poured out her own.” All appropriate, as the aquifer was spread throughout the High Plains and scattered or poured out her own to all who lived there.

  I lifted the water in my cupped palms. It was wonderfully clear. Without pumps or wells, the natives and early pioneers could only live near springs like the one where Ward and I had met, or along spring-fed streams such as the Smoky. But we were no less dependent on the Ogallala than those earlier people had been, and not just for irrigation. Life needs water. The only water we had came from the aquifer. If we were mindful of this, we would call ourselves the Ogallala People, not after the tribe that lost its home to our invasion but in recognition of our life source. The name would cascade as water does, down stairs of years—the tribe, the town, the aquifer—onto us.

  “The Cheyenne called this Bunch of Trees River,” I said, standing up.

  Ward looked around at the grove. “Makes sense. Did you learn that in your Dog Soldier book?”

  I nodded. A couple of months ago I’d been excited when I read that the famous Cheyenne warrior society’s favorite campground had been on the Smoky, only about thirty miles south of Goodland, on what was now the Colorado-Kansas border. The divide where I grew up, the sweeping prairies between the Smoky and the Republican rivers, had been their prime hunting grounds. My grandparents’ deeds gave them ownership of land taken ninety years before my birth by soldiers led by the likes of General Custer, Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson, and Wild Bill Hickok.

  “Was this where Dull Knife came through?” I asked.

  “No, they think it was west of here. I’ll take you there sometime, but this afternoon I have other plans for us.”

  Mmm. Other plans.

  • • •

  WARD’S PLACE—A NARROW, TWO-STORY HOUSE WITH A garage tacked on to it and a bunch of outbuildings beside a wooden windmill—looked like a ranch to me, not a damned ol’ farm, as he’d lamented in his letter. The place had an old-timey feel and, positioned on a bluff overlooking the Smoky, was far more romantic than a farm. To see the valley, we had to walk behind the house, which his uncle
had built facing the road instead of the river, and through a maze of weathered wood corrals, where several horses searched the ground for strands of the morning’s hay. From the edge of the bluff, we looked out on the mile-wide bottomland.

  It was the kind of low-key vista that could thrill only a native Kansan whose eye had not been jaded by mountains or the sensational. “Thrill” is probably the wrong word. “Satisfy” might be better, or “fulfill.” Not even in my childhood had I seen so much uninterrupted prairie. This is what the Indians saw, I thought. There were no buffalo, of course. All of those had been wiped out by hide hunters—with the encouragement of the generals overseeing the Indian wars, who knew full well that the natives couldn’t survive long without their food supply. “You kill the buffalo, you kill the Indian’s commissary,” General Philip Sheridan had cynically recommended. But the grass was the same grass that had supported the immense herds, and the trees and yucca were the same trees and yucca.

  Where the cedar shelterbelt didn’t break our view, the aspect in the other directions alternated between square expanses of young, green winter wheat and lusterless stubble on the fallow ground, interrupted by remnants of frost-cured buffalo grass along the serpentine gullies. Even if surrounded by farmland on three sides, the place had a “poky” feel to it. That word, one of Ward’s favorites, described a certain lazy, western quiet that emanated from where cowboys lived. Here the pokiness was evident in the iron dinner bell beside the door, the solid round corral made of cottonwood limbs, the cattle-loading shoot, the brand some welder had worked into the filigree above the front gate, and the hitching post beside the garage, which Ward had converted into a tack room. I especially liked the quiet. The concepts of peace and quiet go together for good reason. I breathed the quiet in, letting the peace run through my veins.