The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  He introduced himself as Stefan. I didn’t learn until much later that this, like much else he claimed to be and to have done, was an embellishment. His real name was just Stephen. Steve.

  My relationship with the man who would become Jake’s dad was the classic tale of the responsible woman who falls in love with an irresponsible man. This was the observation of an equally irresponsible but older and more seasoned cowboy friend of his, who tried to warn me that “you can’t change a man.” But I was certain that I could sand off all of Stefan’s rough edges. Hadn’t I refurbished the rock house and rebuilt Dorf’s engine? I thought I could fix anything.

  Within the year he quit drinking and I married him. Soon after, I became pregnant. And soon after that he came home nonchalantly toting a six pack. He lost jobs, we went through my money, and we had a couple of blowout fights that got physical. I resorted to looking for safety, security, and shelter in the only place I knew I could find it.

  3

  WE ARRIVED IN MY PARENTS’ GOODLAND DRIVEWAY IN THE STYLE OF THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, THE BED OF OUR PICKUP PILED HIGH, OUR DOGS RIDING ON THE LOAD, AND MY HORSES TOWED ALONG BEHIND. If anyone had told me that I would end up back in Kansas, I would have been horrified. I’d had nightmares about this while living in the rock house. I dreamed that I would wake up and, like some reverse Dorothy, discover that I wasn’t in the rugged, fanged, and taloned desert but in a weedy yard next to a broken-down old trailer house on my father’s farm. Crushing despair would greet the realization.

  It was early July, and my brothers had come home also, to help with the harvest. The morning after our arrival, Stefan went to the farm with them and my father. He was to work there until we figured out our next step. At least that was the stated plan. At noon my mother and I brought dinner out to the men, just as we used to do at harvest time when we lived in the country. We dined under a scraggly elm in the farmyard.

  “Oh!” my mother gasped. “Those damned dirty bugs!” She swiped at a grasshopper that had hopped onto the blanket under us. It hopped onto my lap. A beat too fast to conceal my disgust, I picked the bug up and flung it into the mowed weeds.

  Stefan said, “Didja hear about the American farmer who visited this sheep rancher in the outback of Australia?”

  No one answered. From this I deduced he’d been telling jokes all morning. He didn’t understand that this wasn’t a leisurely dinner. In the Mojave, cowboys were more aware of the figure they cut, whether loping a horse or telling a joke, than of getting their jobs done. Farming was serious business. It wasn’t for show. The men intended to eat and jump back into the trucks, not lollygag all afternoon telling jokes. Everyone but him had noticed the scalloped clouds in the west and knew that by nightfall those clouds might produce a full-blown storm. Rain would stop the combines. Dad’s custom cutters, who moved north as the crop ripened and had other farmers waiting in Nebraska, would start getting antsy. If it hailed, they might as well move on. There would be nothing left to cut.

  The joke went on and on. “Then the American sees this kangaroo. ‘Whoa! What is that?’ ‘What?’ says the Aussie. ‘You mean you don’t have grasshoppers in America?’”

  Bruce looked away. Clark smiled faintly. Dad took a bite out of his dinner roll and grimly chewed. A tempest raged behind Dad’s eyes at harvest time, clouds or no clouds. He certainly didn’t have the patience to be entertained.

  I was embarrassed. While Clark and my parents had come to our wedding in the Mojave and had given Stefan the benefit of the doubt, our current circumstances didn’t testify too well on his, or my, behalf. And my brothers and I rarely came home at the same time. This should have been a celebratory occasion. I sat beside Bruce, whose admiration I longed for no less than I had as a child, when he resented me for usurping his role as the youngest. Across from me sat Clark. When I was twelve, he had let me stand on his feet so he could better teach me the jitterbug. And when I was little, he would tie me in knots until I said, “Click click,” releasing the lock. I wished it were that easy now. Click click and voilà! I would escape this mortifying moment.

  If not for three nights ago on the trip here, when we’d camped in the Utah desert; if not for Stefan having kicked his dog, Bear, in the ribs for getting underfoot when we were putting up the tent; if not for the dog’s yelp echoing in my ears, I might have roused a laugh in support of my husband. But I was preoccupied, as I’d been ever since that incident, adding two plus two. If Bear and I were on the receiving end of his violent impulses, it could happen to our baby. Seeing that sweet, mild-mannered dog punished so severely, my chest had begun draining of the last remnants of love. Ever since, it had been filling with the embalming fluid of resolve.

  That night we lay together in the darkness of the basement bedroom my mother had assigned us. Stefan complained that I hadn’t upheld him among my family.

  “What do you mean I didn’t ‘uphold’ you?”

  He pinned me beneath him and struck me with his open hand. It was almost a play slap, and I saw right through it. He was intentionally breaking the promise he’d made not to lay a hand on me ever again so he would have an excuse to go get a drink. “Do you want me to leave now?” he asked.

  “Yes, please. Now.”

  In less than five minutes, he was gone, bar hopping to Denver in our pickup, a newer Ford that I’d cosigned on. I went through the house’s ashtrays, looking for the butts of Bruce’s and our cigarettes. Finding one with a half inch left, I lit it and took two puffs of burning filter, then crushed it in the empty driveway. I’d smoked for seventeen years and had been trying to quit for the last five. But in that clarifying moment, with Jake on his way into my life, I understood that my priorities must change. I would not let Stefan come back, and I would not smoke another cigarette.

  Unable to make my feet descend the stairs to the basement bedroom we’d shared, I slept on the living-room couch. As humiliating as my predicament was, lying there at the center of the home I’d instinctively run to was a comfort. In the morning, I heard my mother starting the coffeepot and stirring batter for pancakes, a ritual when we kids visited. Then she noticed me. I’d lain awake most of the night dreading the question she was about to ask.

  “Julie?” she said, with such innocent concern I couldn’t bear to open my eyes. “Why are you here? Where’s Stefan?”

  • • •

  AS CLARK PASSED ME THE PANCAKES, I dropped my napkin on the floor so that, picking it up, I could wipe away tears. “Want some cholesterol for those?” he asked when I resurfaced. He was offering me a yellow brick on a saucer. Since having a heart attack a few years before, at forty, he’d reinvented himself as a triathlete and lectured us all frequently on risks in our diets.

  Mom said, “That’s not butter. That’s margarine.” After a visit to Dad’s cardiologist, where she’d learned that Dad’s heart was working at only 25 percent capacity, she’d performed this remarkable feat for a farmwoman. Gone were the fried chicken, pork chops, and steak. Gone the mashed potatoes and gravy. Her recipe file had filled with low-fat and low-sodium dishes.

  “Should get some butter,” Bruce said. “Growing babies need fat.”

  “So do old men,” Dad said. “She’s starving me to death.”

  Instead of judgment, my family offered ordinariness. Stefan was probably sleeping off a hangover in Denver, expecting that as soon as he apologized, I would let him come back. That was the pattern he’d grown up with, the pattern from his own previous relationships, and he’d probably assumed it would be our pattern.

  When the first call came, his empty apologies were like being exposed to a viral disease I’d already had and was now immune to. I hung up. But the calls kept coming. He was staying in Denver at a cousin’s house, and his promises began to ring more sincerely.

  I now understood why I had come home. If I were anywhere else, I would have been tempted. At night, I hugged my pillow, pretending it was him
. I wanted our life back, the one we’d had before his drinking had undermined it. I recalled the square dances we had gone to every week—I in a bright-pink, full-skirted traditional outfit complete with bric-a-brac, he in his turquoise cowboy shirt with white piping and his white hat. What fun we had being teased by everyone. Not about our clashing outfits, although they certainly did clash, but for the bloom that love had put on our faces. Since returning to Kansas, I’d had an ultrasound. That Stefan would never be an acting father to the son I’d conceived with him was too brutal a truth to absorb.

  But I was not going to insult my parents’ generosity by continuing on a ridiculous, even dangerous, path. We Bairs were not melodramatic people. We were emotionally contained and sensible, what my parents would call decent people. Stefan, they now knew, was not decent.

  My longing lost its heat when, after weeks of my resistance, Stefan showed his true colors by shouting insults at me. Shaken by his vitriol, I hung up the phone, pulled on my dignity like an apron, and returned to the kitchen to help Mom. Finally, he returned to California in the truck, leaving it up to me to make the payments.

  • • •

  STUCK. WHENEVER I RECALL HOW I FELT that first summer home, I see myself standing in my father’s tail-water pit, my tummy stretching the bright stripes of the swimming suit I’d bought to impress Stefan shortly after we met. The tail-water pit was a topographic feature that hadn’t existed in my childhood—a bulldozed, rectangular pond that collected runoff from Dad’s flood-irrigated fields.

  Dad kept it stocked with bullheads and channel catfish. He stood holding a cane pole over the water, his grin communicating that I was making a fool of myself. Thanks to the diet Mom had imposed on him, he was at a healthy weight for the first time in my memory. But it pained me to see how much he’d aged. What hair he had left had gone from the gray I last remembered to almost white, and folds of skin hung at the front of his once thick neck. Instead of overalls, he now wore dark-blue baggy jeans, and instead of his gray work hat, a Farmers’ Co-op cap shaded his face. But the same gold teeth bejeweled his smile. The same hulking, somewhat stooped shoulders and frog’s back, together with the beaked hat, created a profile reminiscent of his huge four-wheel-drive tractor, the chartreuse-green Versatile. Because his land was flat and treeless, I could still see the tractor where I’d parked it, a half mile away on the summer fallow I’d finished cultivating that morning.

  I had no money and no health insurance and was determined not to accept any more help than I was already getting from my parents unless I earned it. Each morning I rode out to the farm with Dad and drove tractors for pay. At least I could hold my head up about that. When I was a kid I’d begged him to let me drive tractors. Anyone could tell that was the most important work on the farm, and I’d wanted to be as important as my brothers. My mother had put her foot down. No daughter of mine is going to bake out there in the sun like a man! But a lot had changed since then. The tractors all had cabs now with air-conditioning, my brothers had both refused to pick up the farming mantle, and I had acquired enough confidence and skills in the desert to finally be a boy on my father’s farm.

  Make that a pregnant boy.

  Before my feet became so mired in the clay bottom that I would have to ask Dad to pull me out with a rope, I pushed off and swam a few tentative strokes. A white pickup appeared on the gravel road, swerving as the driver braked, then sped back up, causing a cloud of dust and road sand to rain onto the water. I paddled to the shore, if you could call the mud bank a shore, grabbed a willow branch and pulled myself out.

  “Feel refreshed?” Dad asked.

  I slapped a fly off my clay-streaked, sticky thigh. “God, no.” The water had been tepid and full of silt, and the afternoon felt more sweltering than before. Having left my sandals where I’d gotten in, I picked my way barefoot through the weeds. “Ouch! Damn!” Wobbling on one foot, I lifted the other and yanked a goat-head sticker from my heel.

  “You almost had old man Noelstrom and his pickup in there with you. He’s probably never seen a naked woman outside Sears and Roebucks.”

  “I’m not ‘naked,’ Dad. And neither are the women in catalogues. They have underwear on.”

  He gave me that I-guess-you’re-telling-me look.

  “You should have seen me in the Mojave,” I added. “I did swim naked there.” I wasn’t concentrating on our exchange but was mourning the end of my swimming life. It was over. Although I might be able to immerse myself in clean, cold water if I used the loader tractor and moved that stock tank I’d noticed in the implement lot into the farmyard.

  “Je-sus Christ,” Dad said. With a flick of his hand, he dropped his pole in the knee-high kocia weeds and stomped off toward his pickup.

  I hopped after him, tugging my sandal straps over my heels. “What?” I said, climbing in as he turned the key in the ignition. He always started the engine and began driving before his passengers could even get their doors closed.

  “Don’t try that here! You’ll get arrested.”

  “Dad,” I said, “the tank where I swam in the Mojave was in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It’s not like here.”

  “That it is not.” His voice rang with the same finality of the pronouncements he’d made in my childhood. Feeling like a child brought up short by a spanking, I stared silently out my window at the long shadow the truck cast in the ditch and kept my arms folded across my swimsuit’s bulging stripes.

  He drove right past the farmstead. Apparently, our workday was over. Acutely aware of my exposed upper thighs, on which strands of sun-bleached pubic hair were yet another indication of my recent craven past, I grabbed my jeans from the floor and struggled to pull them on over my damp skin.

  Closing my eyes, I pictured the sun shimmering in the leaves of the grandfather cottonwood that towered over the stock-water storage tank I’d swum in every summer afternoon when I lived at the rock house. Beside it the windmill was probably spinning right now. Were I there, I would be standing on Dorf’s hood, performing my ablutions. First I would dip my head in. My scalp burning with cold, I would shampoo my hair and rinse onto the ground using the old aluminum sauce pan I kept there for the purpose. After washing, I would dive in. I loved that first thrill. Once my body had unclenched and acclimated, I would float on my back in the silken water, my arms spread, and stare up into the cottonwood’s branches, where a pair of tanagers—their bodies yellow, the male’s head fire orange—flitted back and forth, bringing food to the nestlings.

  Imprinted on my memory were the conical peaks of the Pinto Mountains, dappled in juniper. They and the craggy sandstone pinnacles of the New York range beyond them spoke the layered language of geology. To float in that valley had been to float on the sea of time. Daily I revolved, my arms and legs extended like clock dials, at the center of everything, water and desert, the water being the desert’s most profound expression of itself. The antithesis without which desert could not exist, the joy that made its barren beauty habitable.

  Now, riding in the pickup. My father driving. Immersions in water on hot days, whether in cold groundwater pumped into that tank or in mountain lakes filled to their granite brims with snowmelt, were the closest I had ever come to ecstasy. Yet were I to describe those swims to my father, all he would see was a naked woman, his daughter.

  How had the largeness of my desert life been reduced, so suddenly, to the smallness of this one? Never mind. I knew how. But having brought myself to this pass didn’t make it any easier to take. Looking out my window, I saw bare dirt and stubble on the wheat fields, and rows of corn and soybeans made green by irrigation. What grass our pioneer ancestors hadn’t broken out by my childhood, Dad and his neighbors had plowed since. To his eye, each new quarter section of pasture ground turned to grain production was an improvement. It meant more money in the bank for someone. Only land that could be farmed was beautiful.

  That was what angered him abou
t me. I wasn’t as domesticated as his land. It disgusted me that I’d wound up back here, under my father’s protection, infantilized. I wasn’t his little girl anymore, ever seeking his approval or whatever bone of equality with my brothers he might toss my way. I’d made my own life, and now I’d thrown that life away. I would be leaving here as soon as I could.

  The truck slowed as Dad gazed at a neighbor’s summer fallow. It seemed he’d forgotten our quarrel. You could put disputes behind you, I guessed, if you were the uncontested boss of your world.

  “Brr,” I said. I reached over and turned the fan down. Dad didn’t seem to notice. A meadowlark’s call pierced the closed windowpane so sharply I imagined it carving scrollwork in the glass. I am going to find my own place, I thought. I knew it wouldn’t be anything like my desert house, but there might be some haven with a modicum of wilderness nearby. I envisioned an old frame house surrounded by pasture, perhaps on the way up to Bonny Dam, just over the Colorado border. Eventually, in a year or two, I would make my way back to the Mojave. I might get the caretaker’s job at the Granite Mountain ranch where Stefan and I had lived for a while. That ranch had since been sold to the University of California, for a desert research center.

  Then a vision flitted through my mind of a small child amid rattlesnakes and scorpions, and another of unwanted male visitors driving into that child’s and its mother’s remote yard. It was one thing to put myself in danger but quite another to put a child in harm’s way. I couldn’t reconcile my passion for the desert with the new facts of my life. I felt like Gulliver, waking up tied to the ground with those Lilliputian facts swarming all over me.

  The pickup began to veer toward the ditch. “Dad?” He crept along, studying a neighbor’s field.

  “Dad!”

  He corrected his steering just before we drifted into the ditch. “Darrel’s full of weeds,” he said.