The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  Back at the house, I called the sitter, who said she had enough of my milk stored to get Jake through until midafternoon. Then I pumped my breasts so she’d have plenty for the next morning, and to relieve the pain. The process was messy and slow and always frustrated me, failing to yield as much as I thought it should.

  I threw together a peanut butter sandwich and ate it as I headed for the shop Quonset. Dad must have eaten lunch in his pickup. I could hear his sledgehammer clanging on steel. This wasn’t welding, really. He was just using the torch to heat the iron so it could be pounded straight. Broken equipment could be fixed. I’d learned this simple, comforting truth in the desert. And now the shop smells of argon, hot metal, and greasy dust had a settling effect on me despite my guilt.

  “What can I do?”

  “Go take another one off and bring it to me.”

  I did my best to redeem myself, lying on my back on hard ground to reach the least accessible bolts, applying the wrench and ratchet with skill it would have made me proud to demonstrate, if only the circumstances were different. When two o’clock rolled around and we still weren’t finished, Dad could see I was getting nervous.

  “You don’t have to break your behind puttin’ ’em back on until the morning,” he said. “The pintos can wait another day.”

  “I guess I’ll just go get Jake then.”

  He assented with a slight tuck of his chin. Either he had learned his lesson the hard way when his sons defected, or age had softened him—or he actually did understand I had something more important to worry about. Every day, with every lesson, he’d been conveying to me the same values he had to Bruce and Clark: Kill all weeds at first sight. Get in the field now, while you can. I don’t care if it’s Sunday and the weatherman says it won’t rain. Assume it will rain. Before you know it those weeds will be a foot tall. But he was doing it with less rigidity. If you’ve got a baby to feed, okay, goddamn it, go.

  • • •

  “OKAY, GODDAMN IT, HAVE IT YOUR WAY,” he said after we’d argued for a month over what kinds of trees to plant in the new windbreak. He liked seeing the place come to life and must have figured he owed me a little consideration for my effort putting in a garden and lawn. Although Beatrice had done most of the hard work on the lawn. She’d come for a visit to meet Jake and had wound up, as she always did, helping me. Decades of hired men and their wives had parked their cars right outside the front door, and the tiller bucked and bumped through the hard ground. But Beatrice had kept it tracking straight.

  For the windbreak, Dad had wanted me to choose either junipers or the new variety of elms immune to disease. I wanted both—and lilacs, Russian olives, and sandhill plums.

  Okay, goddamn it. But he drew the line when I argued for planting them randomly like in a real forest. I might have suggested we put them in the ground upside down. They had to be planted in rows.

  “You don’t understand!” I said. “I’m trying to make a home here. My home. You live in town. Why does everything you do have to be in a straight line?”

  If there was one expression that made Dad Dad, it was this one. Eyes mischievously alight. A smile stretched across his face with double parentheses on it. His old heart kept going well beyond what should have been its limits for two reasons—the chance to plant and harvest a new crop, and the entertainment value he got when other people were acting like idiots.

  The three hundred sprigs from the Soil Conservation Service arrived in June. The two men working for Dad at the time helped me plant them. We’d already tilled the ground. Now we had to dig the holes, in straight, separate rows the way Dad insisted. That I hadn’t been able to convince him of my forest idea ate at me, but there is immense hopefulness in planting trees. I was having fun.

  I asked one of the hands to go find a garden hose. He threw the posthole diggers down and stomped off. Had I done something to make him angry? I worked my way down the row, planting seedlings, until I ran out of holes and had to start digging them myself. Where in the heck was he? I wondered. It must have been a hundred degrees out. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, then sensed someone behind me. How long had he been standing there? Without a word, he dropped the hose on the ground and took back the diggers.

  At noon, I retrieved Jake from the trailer across the drive, where he’d spent the morning with that same hired man’s daughter. He had sticky Popsicle juice all over him, so I put him on the front step, took his clothes and diaper off, and turned on the hose. Jake grabbed it and tried to drink out of it, the water running down his front.

  Dad stood behind me, holding the lunchbox Mom had packed for him that morning. “Look at the little devil,” he said. “He likes it.”

  “He’s a water baby like his mama. It’ll be nice when the grass gets established. We can do this on the lawn.”

  Dad said, “Too bad you planted fescue. I like a bluegrass lawn.”

  “Growing bluegrass in this climate makes about as much sense as growing corn. But oh,” I added, “You do grow corn.”

  Dad’s eyebrows shot up. And his lips took on their inverted U. “That friend of yours, Beatrice,” he said, “manhandling that tiller? I don’t know about her.”

  This again. He’d already told me he suspected she was a lesbian. I wrapped Jake in the towel and picked him up. Inside, I grabbed a diaper and went into the living room. One nice thing about motherhood, you always had some task you could use to avoid unwanted conversations. But not for long. Dad’s hands, wet from washing in the mud-porch sink, dripped onto the carpet beside me. “I said I don’t know about that Beatrice.”

  Apparently, he was hell-bent on badmouthing my best friend whether I bit or not. With all the sarcasm I could muster, I said, “What don’t you know about Beatrice, Dad?”

  “Gawd! I came out here and there she was, strutting around the house in her nightie at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  “It was a flannel nightgown, Dad. It was Sunday. What were you doing out here then anyway?”

  “And when I took her for a combine ride, it was Oh Harold this, Oh Harold that, blinking those big eyes at me. She practically sat on my lap. A guy could have had her right there.”

  I let my jaw drop. “You could have what?! Don’t flatter yourself.”

  In the kitchen, Dad took his sandwich out and began chewing in a workmanlike manner. Mom made a good sandwich, he often allowed, but it wasn’t like eating a hot dinner. “I’ll tell you one other thing,” he said now. “I had a talk with your friend Larry.”

  “What about?”Larry was the hired man who’d stomped off that morning. It seemed everyone was my friend today.

  “He almost quit on me, said he wasn’t going to take orders from a woman.”

  This news hit hard. Until today, Larry had never let on he didn’t like me. I’d been so innocent, thinking that I could be accepted among men here. “So what did you tell him?”

  “I will tell you what I told him,” Dad said, enunciating every word. He picked up his iced-tea jug, took a long drink, put the jug down. All for effect, I knew. “I told him, quit then, or get your ass back out there. She’s your boss today.”

  Above the table I’d hung a picture of the Virgin Mary. Her exposed heart was encircled by a crown, had fire coming out of the top of it, and shot rays in all directions. Don’t ask me why I’d chosen that image. Maybe because as a new mother I found Mary exquisitely beautiful. Or was it for some frivolous decorative purpose? The heart’s shape and color did mirror the strawberries in my wallpaper. Or maybe I put it there to irritate Dad. He hated all religious iconography, even if it was something camp like this and he knew I was in no danger of converting to his least favorite brand of Christianity. I do know now why I remember that image, though. It was because my heart felt as jubilant as Mary’s looked.

  She’s your boss today. Sexism was alive and well in Kansas. Larry had proven it and so had Dad, calling Be
atrice a lesbian one day, implying she was a harlot the next. But as Harold’s daughter, I got special dispensation. I might have been six again and he’d employed his old trick, slipping an ace into my hand when we were playing rummy.

  • • •

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS, WEEDS THREATENED TO SUFFOCATE the seedlings. Dad had me hook his smallest set of spring teeth to our smallest tractor. With the random planting I’d wanted, we couldn’t have hoed an acre of trees without sacrificing several days, not to mention our backs. With rows, we could drive between them. For close weeding, we could weave the rototiller in and out. And drip tubing kinked when you tried to bend it. You couldn’t lay it in tight curlicues to water trees planted randomly.

  “You see,” Dad said. “Your old man knows a thing or two. Half of your forest would have died.”

  By the time I was ten, he would hold his cards until he had a complete rummy, and then he would go out leaving me stuck with all the discards he’d snookered me into thinking I could safely pick up. He didn’t have to coddle me anymore. He’d invested me in the game so much that all defeat did was make me want to play another hand.

  So it was now. After messing up the cultivator and learning how wrong I’d been about the trees, I reminded myself to consider my father’s long experience before mouthing off next time. But being the uncontested boss for that one day of tree planting had also filled me with heady power. I realized that not only did I have tools at my disposal, I also had men. I could choose my fantasy. A sidewalk? Sure. After the next rainstorm, while we waited for the fields to dry out, the forms were built and the concrete poured. A fence so that Jake wouldn’t toddle out in front of a wheat truck? Done.

  It had been almost twenty years since there had been immediate family on the farm. Seeing the way Dad undertook and enthused about these improvements, it occurred to me that the move to town in the sixties might have been as disorienting for him as it had been for me. Of course, no one acknowledged the shock at the time. I’d been excited about the move, thinking it would add to my family’s status and make me more popular at school. The new house was more luxurious than our old one, and it was airtight, meaning Mom and I didn’t have to dust nearly as often. Instead of landing on cold, pine boards in the morning, my feet now sank into a thick, royal-blue carpet. That room was fit for a princess—with knotty pine walls, western furniture, and my own sink. But the new brick house was also empty of history. Even if the farmhouse had been surrounded by weathered outbuildings, it had been gracious and grand. And it had enough prairie around it to remind us of our land’s former grandeur. Instead of pasture hills, the new house had a weed-free, chemically green lawn as level as my brother Clark’s butch-cut hair in his graduation picture.

  That’s what I’d been doing when I moved to the desert, I realized—not only seeking to live surrounded by natural beauty again but also trying to get back the gritty, real life of my childhood. I’d once had dozens of pets, ranging from crows and cottontails to calves and colts. Yet Mom had wanted nothing, not even a housecat, to mar the new house’s perfection. Our dogs and cats, along with my horses and Dad’s sheep, were moved to this farm. And Dad had begun commuting here, like a suburbanite going to any job.

  Even if he’d never breathed a word of complaint, I suspected that after a lifetime of no separation between home and work, it felt alienating to leave his family in the morning. He wasn’t able to cool down in his own house at midday anymore or eat the noon meal at his own table or take an afternoon nap in his own easy chair. Or watch his children and grandchildren grow into the only life that made sense to him.

  But now he had Jake and me. And we had him. The possibilities of the paradise we could make together seemed endless. A swimming pool? Possibly. I’d learned that with the loader tractor, we could dig a hole as deep as we wanted. That’s how the in-ground silos had gotten there. And we’d proven we could pour concrete. A hydroponic greenhouse? A herd of bison? Maybe someday, but I knew better than to mention those things yet.

  Dad had his own ideas. “What you need is a sow.”

  “Do I?”

  “There’s good money in pigs.” Within a week, I had a pregnant sow. Then it was thirteen piglets and pulling the afterbirth out of their noses and keeping them warm with heat lamps and shoveling the stinkiest shit I’d ever smelled.

  6

  HUMBLED AFTER BENDING THE CULTIVATOR SHANKS, I BECAME A MODEL APPRENTICE. I got so good that the following spring Dad rewarded me with the most prestigious job, planting corn. Corn rows had to be straight so that they could be cultivated and then furrowed for irrigation without the implements tearing out any of the crop. A marker extended from the edge of the planter, making a groove in the ground to follow on the next round. I had to keep the chrome arrow on the John Deere’s hood centered perfectly in that groove.

  Every so often I stopped the tractor and opened the cab door onto the day’s mounting heat, climbed down the ladder, and circled the idling mammoth as Dad had told me to do, making sure the hydraulic hoses were still connected and that no weeds were balling up in the blades that opened the ground ahead of the seed spouts. I manually turned the planting gears, then checked beneath each spout for the pink, chemically dusted kernels that spilled out. I looked in the planter boxes and made sure the seed levels were even. When they got low, I called Dad on the two-way. “I’m out of seed.”

  “So fill it.”

  “No.”

  “Jesus Christ. Okay then. I’ll send Larry out.”

  I refused to open the sacks and pour the seed. I didn’t want to breathe the pink dust. The one time I did come in contact with the insecticide, it stung my skin. Trying to wash it off, I poured all the water in my field jug over my arms. I’d looked up to see the amused look on my father’s face. “Think about it,” I said. “If it kills the corn borer and cutworms, it can kill you.”

  “Hasn’t yet.”

  “Who knows? Maybe that’s what happened to the other seventy-five percent of your heart.”

  That was the only thing I refused to do. Work with chemicals. The so-called Green Revolution had arrived in my absence, brought about by chemical fertilizers and pesticides with macho names like Roundup, Lasso, Prowl, Bladex, Lance, and Bicep.

  I’d read Silent Spring and knew that while the chemicals were cowboying weeds into submission and magnificently boosting our yields, they were also leaching into our groundwater and our bloodstreams. Poisons developed to kill enemies and clear forests so enemies couldn’t hide in them were now being used to make war on unwanted vegetation and insects in our fields. The compounds all had carbon in them, the chemical basis of life. They could interact with our cells and cause damage in us just as they could in the life forms they were intended to destroy. We couldn’t depend on the government to protect us. Regulations were few and lax. As with everything, you had to use your own brain, and my brain sensed danger whenever I smelled a farm chemical as readily as it did when I heard a rattlesnake buzz.

  “Don’t do that there!” I shouted the first time Dad pulled his spray rig up to my garden spigot, which happened to be less than twenty feet from the well that brought water into my house.

  Disgruntled, his shoulders hunched, he climbed back into the tractor cab and drove to the other side of the yard. “Is this far enough for ya, Miss Prissypants?” he said as I dragged the hose over to him.

  He was mixing Treflan, a chemical he used on his pinto beans. The orange liquid splashed above his protective gloves and onto his arms. When he sprayed Treflan in the field, it turned the ground that same sickly yellow orange. “Just drink it why don’t you?” I said, then it occurred to me that I possibly was drinking it.

  I insisted that we have my house’s well water sampled. Concerned that he might be poisoning his grandson, Dad agreed. The test came out okay, but going through the process heightened his consciousness a little. Mom helped too, saying she was worried about what Jake might
get into when he started roving about the farmstead on his own. Dad gathered all the cans, some bulging as if about to explode; jugs, some lying on their sides beside syrupy puddles they’d leaked; and sacks, some torn open and spilling lethal powder, and locked them into a little trailer house that had once been sleeping quarters for his sheepherder.

  But even with this precaution, exposure to chemicals was unavoidable on the farm. In my childhood, Dad had put temporary electric fences up on his wheat stubble so that his sheep could eat the weeds and volunteer wheat, fertilizing the ground as they grazed. Instead of sheep, he now had big brawny tractors that pulled five hundred-gallon tanks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and forty-foot implements with V-shaped blades that undercut the stubble, killing weeds at the same time they infused the fertilizer into the soil. While applying ammonia fertilizer, he had to wear goggles and be careful not to breathe any of the gas. It could blind him or burn his lungs.

  When I drove out to the field to give him a lift back to the farmstead, he would stand with the pickup’s passenger door ajar, playing peekaboo with Jake, while ammonia mist hovered in the wake of his last tractor round.

  “God, shut the door! The ground smells like cat piss.”

  “Small price to pay for fifty-bushel wheat,” he would say, dropping his iced-tea jug in Jake’s lap as he climbed into the pickup. Jake would giggle and hug the thermos, the dust on it smearing his shirt.

  • • •

  WHEN I WASN’T TRAINING A JOHN DEERE’S chrome arrow on some fence post or distant patch of weeds, I was one of my father’s “floodmen.” He would eventually convert to center-pivot sprinklers, but when I lived there, we were still irrigating mostly out of huge pipes laid along the tops of the fields. Each summer morning and evening I would belt Jake into his car seat in the blue Chevy pickup Dad had bought me for both farm and personal use and drive out to the corn.