by Bair, Julene
Later I would wish I’d thought to mention the four thousand Indians who, along with thousands of horses, had drunk from Big Spring during the 1857 sun dance. And what about the many native populations that had preceded the Cheyenne? How had the springs managed to sustain them and millions of bison?
Yet despite my inability to speak my heart, some invisible shift had taken place between the director and me. I’d underestimated the power of face-to-face discussion. I might have been the first person who’d ever sat across from him and asked him such earnest questions from an ecological perspective.
He now admitted that the current drought was taking a toll. “These last two years are a wake-up call. We’re going back to those heavy declines again. In fact,” he added, “our water table’s still dropping three or four inches a year.”
That didn’t jibe with the optimistic graph he’d given me at the beginning of the interview. If in such a brief exchange, I could cause this well-positioned bureaucrat to increase his estimate of the water’s annual decline, perhaps I had more power than I thought.
• • •
WITH HIS BREAD, WARD WIPED UP THE remains of balsamic vinegar and sesame oil I’d marinated and cooked the chicken breasts in. “Larrupin’ good,” he said.
“Larrupin’?”
“Cowboy talk for ‘I hain’t never had nothin’ gooder than this,’ sweetheart.”
Normally his self-mockery made me laugh, but tonight I mustered only a wan smile. My failure to answer the director’s question about what I would do if I served on his board still bothered me. Was it time to go public? Did I need to become an activist, a role that suited me about as well as sunshine suited a mole? Standing before an audience and announcing that we were pouring the planet’s precious water down the drain of oblivion would assuage my conscience a little. But as long as my family was part of the problem, what legs would I have to stand on?
I got up and scraped my uneaten baked potato into the trash barrel, then returned to the table to gather my silverware.
“Don’t bother,” Ward said. “We can do dishes in the morning.”
There was a spot on the oilcloth that wouldn’t come up, no matter how hard I scrubbed.
“Julene,” Ward said.
I sat down and tried to look at him.
“What’s eating you?”
“I don’t want to sell the farm, but I don’t want to be a party to this anymore either. Ron isn’t getting any younger or healthier. We’re going to have to make a decision soon.”
“Selling would be the worst thing you could do. Your dad would haunt you all the way to your grave.”
“And beyond, if there is a beyond. I don’t know how I could live with myself. But I can’t live with this either.”
I fought the urge to get up from the table. I wasn’t one to leave dishes, but I would have preferred leaving this conversation. Tracing the squares in the yellow-plaid tablecloth, I said,“I just wish he’d never gotten started irrigating. I wish he’d stuck with wheat. And sheep, or cattle, like he was raising near the end. There wouldn’t be nearly as much money to spread around, but I don’t think I’d be contemplating selling now either. Isn’t that ironic?”
Ward dropped his big hand over mine and bunched our fingers together in one fist. “I could help if you wanted.”
I looked at him. “You mean help turn it back to wheat?”
“I could grow wheat in my sleep. Practically did when I was a kid, working for my dad and uncle. But whatever you want. I’m willing to do anything you guys need.”
Anything you guys need. Those were sweet words, kind and well meant. I suspected, however, that they were not well considered. Ward’s smile had a beatific quality to it that would surely wear off once he realized the mistake he was making.
But I said nothing. I wasn’t thinking of what might or might not be good for Ward. I was thinking of my big reunification plan between Julene’s divided selves.
6
STOPPING AT MOM’S ON MY WAY HOME AFTER THAT VISIT, I DISCOVERED BRUCE’S ROAD HOG TAKING UP THREE QUARTERS OF THE DRIVEWAY. I needed to try my new idea on him, but I hadn’t expected to see him that very day.
He was in the dining room, turning the pages on the check register and taking pictures of each. Mom had been paying the farm’s bills and keeping the books ever since she and Dad got married. She wasn’t going to relinquish the task now, although Bruce had told me it would make his job a lot easier if vendors just sent him the bills and he paid and recorded them electronically.
“But how can I complain?” he asked. The books were Mom’s one thing. Habituated by a lifetime deferring to Dad, she now left all the important decisions to Bruce and me. The arrangement involved a pecking order, though. When Bruce had suggested that I become the family’s investment guru, I had seized the role. Ever the youngest, it was great having sole responsibility for something here at home. I’d read books and studied, then began transferring Mom and Dad’s CDs into a conservative mix of stocks and bonds. Bruce managed the farm. That was the division of labor. Understood. Until, perhaps, now.
“Orph!” I said, bending to pet Bruce’s giant black dog. Part Newfoundland, part anybody’s guess, Orph accompanied Bruce on all of his solitary trips to Goodland. I buried my nose in his fur, inhaled his doggy scent. “What a nice old guy.”
“Abby says he has a three-ounce brain, all devoted to niceness.”
Bruce’s daughter had inherited his humor gene. I laughed on cue, stood up.
“Where’s Mom?”
“Who knows? Hair appointment. Isn’t that always where she is?”
“Or over at the church with her ladies’ circle, quilting.”
“Oh yeah, quilting. Or at the grocery store. Or the doctor’s.”
“So I’ve been thinking about the farm.”
“Yes?” Bruce said in that tremulous voice of his. “What’s new? So have I.” He closed the register and zipped his camera back into its case.
“We could farm it ourselves if we grew only wheat. If we didn’t irrigate, we wouldn’t have to worry about finding a new manager or renter.”
“You can farm it if you want,” Bruce said. “I’m too old to bust my ass pounding steel.” That would be the truth of it, I knew. Dad spent half his life in the shop Quonset, pounding on implement parts. All farming was hard work. Even when I was thirty-five, driving air-conditioned tractors, I’d gone home exhausted at day’s end. But Ward was strong the way Dad had been strong. That same stocky build.
“Ward and I could do it together,” I said.
“As long as it’s not my ass.”
Over one hump, and so easily, at least for now. I knew Bruce wouldn’t just hand over the keys to the farm. There would be a lot of proving up to do. “I thought we might do it organically.”
“That’s the way we used to farm until we played out the land,” Bruce said. It was true. Our grandfathers and Dad, when we were kids, had gotten good crops because of the fertility that had accumulated in the prairie sod since the Pleistocene. “We’d be lucky to get five bushels to the acre without fertilizer now,” Bruce added. “And if you grow organic wheat, you’ve got to have organic fertilizer.”
“A Colorado farmer I read about is using kelp,” I said.
“Kelp,” Bruce huffed. “From where?”
“The Gulf of Mexico.”
“It would cost a fortune to ship. And what about the saline content? Anything from the ocean is going to be full of salt.”
“Maybe. I mean, I don’t know how we’d do it, yet. But will you send me your spreadsheet on our current inputs? So I can do some estimates?”
“I’ll send you anything you want,” Bruce said. He picked up his farm hat, a straw pith helmet. Above his grizzled beard, and with his hair sticking out around his ears, the hat made him look like an eccentric scientist on safari. “You stay
ing or leaving?”
The conversation was over, I guessed. “Leaving, unless Mom comes home soon. I’ve got to get to Laramie and make sure Jake does his homework tonight.”
“So you lock up Fort Knox.” Dad’s old joke. All three doors to Mom’s house and the two in the garage had to be locked at all times. If she came home and found one left unlocked, she would go on a tirade. “Did the farmhouse even have a key?” I asked her once. I couldn’t remember it having one. But all she had to do to defend her security obsession was mention the time a few years ago when “that disgusting trash” blew into Goodland off the interstate and broke into old Addie Newton’s house and raped her. “What would two strapping young men want with an old hag like Addie or me?” Mom had asked. “It’s barbaric!” The crime had shocked me too, deeply. But it shocked me almost as much hearing Mom mention herself in the same sentence as the raped Mrs. Newton and the two strapping young men.
Bruce had already gone into the living room and grabbed his guitar, which went everywhere he did. He was waiting in the entry for Orph, but the dog’s toenails skittered on the linoleum as he tried to rise. I straddled him and gave him a boost, as I did for Mom when she had trouble getting up from her easy chair. That was another thing Bruce and I should be talking about. Probably time for assisted living. How were we going to orchestrate that?
Orph’s slinking gait, as he lumbered across the kitchen on ill-strung hips, then out the door with his helmeted master, reminded me of Simba, the regal lion. Bruce always left me standing somewhere, wanting more engagement than he was prepared to provide. I’d envied his wives and girlfriends for his presence in their lives. I’d even envied his kids. But this was the first time I’d ever envied his dog.
• • •
DREAMING ALONG WITH ME OVER THE PHONE, Ward said, “This is what I’ve always wanted.” I pictured him in his upstairs easy chair, one boot resting on the rope trunk that served as a coffee table. “We’ll be going through life together, pulling each other’s loads.” All those other relationships that hadn’t worked out made sense to him now.
My past failures, too, were beginning to make more sense in light of this new development. I had never believed in romantic destiny, but our circumstances seemed beyond providential. Following the dry Little Beaver across the prairie that day we’d first met, I’d felt as if I were tracing the lines of my family’s origins in the land. Not more than fifty feet from the water I’d needed to find, to assure myself that we had not yet thoroughly destroyed what we once professed to cherish, I’d found Ward. Now we were preparing to do right by my family’s land and the water together.
I would be skating along like this, then a line from one of Ward’s early e-mails would pop into memory. What is going to happen when we wake up? If anything was going to wake up a cowboy, it would be driving a tractor.
But how was I to know what was right for Ward? Maybe he needed to make a genuine sacrifice for love. A lasting relationship demanded some self-denial, and maybe he faulted himself for never having been able to rise to the challenge.
He continued to insist that moving to Kansas would be disastrous for me. He would still come my way, to Wyoming. We would drive to Kansas as needed, to plant, cultivate, fertilize, harvest, etcetera. He would sell his cattle, and pasture his horses on rented land near Laramie and on our farm. He confessed that he’d been fantasizing about my father’s old sheep barn ever since he’d first laid eyes on it. It would make a perfect indoor riding arena in the winter. His own place had no such amenity.
Jake was part of our plans too. True, his problems had worsened in the last few months, but he was still young and receptive to good influences. With Ward’s tutelage and a big tractor to drive, he might straighten out and start taking school and the concept of work in general more seriously.
Bruce sent me an Excel worksheet listing everything it took to grow dryland winter wheat—the cost of fuel, the rate our tractors consumed it by the hour, the number of hours in each field operation—and equally exacting particulars for every other expense imaginable. Crop insurance, property taxes, maintenance, custom cutters, and the one thing I hoped we’d be able to do without—chemicals.
In the years since I’d worked on the farm, we’d been gradually switching over to a new method called no-till farming. In our case, Bruce said, it would more appropriately be called low-till. This meant that we killed weeds in our stubble fields with chemicals instead of undercutting them with sweeps, and we cultivated less often in advance of planting. Low-till left stubble on the field longer, preventing wind and water erosion and preserving moisture in the soil. Bruce said that ever since the drought had begun two years before, the new method had been the only reason we’d had decent crops. “Go out there and dig. See for yourself.” He promised I would find damp soil in our low-till fields and no moisture in those where we still farmed the old way.
Every farm magazine I picked up in my mother’s house sang the praises of no-till. None mentioned the risk to streams and aquifers posed by additional chemicals, much less aesthetics. Only immediate profits counted. But I hated the dead, gray look of our wheat stubble after it had been sprayed. It used to glitter gold for months after harvest. Gold was a color I associated with the fall, when pheasants, jackrabbits, kit foxes, and killdeer had found cover in the fields beneath a banner-blue satin sky, but their numbers had diminished drastically since this new chemical approach had come along. The drabness reminded me of postapocalyptic movies in which a future poisoned world was drained of color and light.
I had no idea how I could wean our farm off chemicals. A few farmers in Montana and the one in Colorado I’d told Bruce about were raising organic wheat on a large scale. But to be realistic, Ward and I would certainly not be able to grow organic wheat in our sleep. The less harmful and invasive methods were more labor-intensive. We would have to rededicate our lives. Splitting our time between Laramie and Kansas would prove impossible.
Then I ran the numbers. Raising only dryland wheat with the conventional approach would support Ward and me, but it wouldn’t support Bruce or allow either of us to continue putting aside profits to secure our kids’ future. Neither would the organic approach, even if I factored in the current premium on organic wheat, which was selling for three times what conventional wheat sold for. Fertilizer costs would be higher, and there might be times when we had to hire manual labor to hoe weeds we couldn’t spray. And to market our grain, we would have to ship out of state. The undertaking might have been more profitable than conventional wheat even with those extra costs and demands, but the more I considered what would be entailed, the more I understood how major the sacrifice would be. I was not actually prepared to give up my writing for the endeavor. It would certainly not be fair to ask Ward to give up any of his business interests.
“That’s really too bad,” Ward said when I told him that the financial projections hadn’t worked out. But he didn’t offer to pore over the numbers himself to see if he might get a different read. And I could hear the relief in his voice.
• • •
TRUTH WAS, I DID LOVE THIS MAN. Although he claimed to be readying himself for a move to Laramie, I couldn’t help thinking that it would be as disastrous for him as he believed moving to Kansas would be for me. But I thought our love would deepen and mature over time until we were able to cross this seemingly impassable mountain as if it were a little hill. It didn’t really matter that we had to live separately right now; I was happier than I’d been in years.
In the meantime, I allowed myself to imagine spending longer and longer periods in Kansas after Jake graduated. I imagined not only making Ward’s house my part-time home, but I also saw myself driving over to Goodland often to see Mom. I didn’t want her to live her last years alone, then die with no immediate family nearby.
Ward was not going to save our farm. But he might make it possible for me to have a life while I did. If I lived there duri
ng the growing season, I could learn to drive the new tractors. Then I could help Bruce fill the labor gap if Ron’s health failed during the summer when we needed him most. I could maybe get Ron and Bruce to let me experiment on the dryland corners of our irrigated fields. These extended beyond the circles the pivot sprinklers traveled, and tended to be planted as an afterthought anyway. I imagined experimenting with more dryland crops such as commercial sunflowers or canola. Or teff, an Ethiopian cereal grain that some farmers had been trying.
I should have told Ward that my mind had started going in the Kansas direction and that it didn’t seem to be turning back. But these ideas were amorphous balloons, rising in my thoughts at night as I lay in bed. Like those splotches that float in the darkness right before going to sleep, they were gradually forming into decipherable images and then into dreams.
I didn’t sense any need to rush those imaginings into words or share them with Ward. But I didn’t realize he was sitting up in his easy chair on those very same nights, unable to sleep.
Not, that is, until I returned home after another visit and called him.
He tried to speak, cleared his throat, began to say something again, cleared his throat again. “I’m sorry,” he managed. “I seem to have lost my voice.”
“Ward, if there’s anything you need to tell me, if this isn’t working out, then just say it.”
“No, no, it’s not you, it’s only . . . I can’t seem to speak right now.”
The next day, my inbox dinged.
I would do anything in my power to reassure you that I’ll always love you.
I grasped at that reassurance because I couldn’t allow myself to acknowledge what I suspected. That he was anguishing. That he was suffering. When will I ever learn? he must have been asking himself.
Yet again he’d made promises to a woman that he would not be able to keep.
