by Judy Blunt
"Not this time, Sis."
Mom opened the door on my side. I was holding up the show. Gary stood at her hip, smug but wary, edging a prudent distance from the cab as I jumped out. The door shut with a solid chuff. I pulled at the fingers of my gloves, casually removing the evidence of my folly as the grind of the motor dwindled and dissolved into the clamor of wind in the cottonwoods. Mom's arm lifted as if to circle my shoulders, and I ducked it smoothly There were sandwiches to be made. "God knows we'll be feeding the Russian army when this is over," she said. Her voice carried behind me halfway to the house, until it, too, was lost in the roar.
Hours later, I stared out from the shelter of the tall windbreak fence at the familiar outlines of the farmyard blurred by smoke, willing myself not to blink, calming the hitch in my chest. The weakness that came over me that spring had grown worse as the weeks wore on. It started out gradually, like a tightness in my chest, then moved up, swelling my throat until I could no longer swallow. The cure was crying, gut-deep and out of control, the sort of watery-eyed, lace-panties, town-girl behavior I especially detested. I pushed up a sleeve of my coat and ran a thumb along my inner arm. A faint pattern of yellow and lavender stippled with fresher blue began at the tan line on my wrist and disappeared under the coat cuff at my elbow. I folded a patch of clear skin carefully between two knuckles and began to twist.
The coat was a hand-me-down from my brother, charcoal-gray fake fur bristled in a buzz cut, cool nylon lining against my skin, baggy enough to hide the disfiguring lumps on my chest. I'd worn it straight through the heat of summer, perfecting a mute and sullen shrug for adults, turning so savage under teasing that my brothers and sisters left me alone. I hated being looked at. I would not be touched. I relaxed my fist and focused on the bright throb that bloomed on my inner arm, a clean pain that calmed me and helped me focus, then opened my coat and rubbed my face against the inner lining.
Across the barnyard, house lights burned and women moved behind them, passing in shadow along the west window. All afternoon my mother and the neighboring wives had circled the cramped kitchen, sidestepping from sink to stove with the grace of square dancers. Chairs had been shuffled aside and the table shoved tight against the wall to make room. A two-gallon coffee urn burped and moaned, dripping progressively darker drops into the cup under its spout. The enamel dishpan of canned venison sandwiches and a half a dozen cakes were draped with flour sack towels to keep the flies off.
The fire had traveled the miles between ranches in a matter of a couple of hours, and in the time I spent indoors, smoke had closed in around the buildings. The wind was visible, streaming overhead until it ran out of sky. I took a deep breath and rested against the haystack. My arms and legs trembled, my throat still tender where the knot had unraveled. The fire had moved within sight of the windbreak, and I became conscious of distant shouts floating up whenever the wind eased. I sat up, burying the past hour with a fresh sense of purpose. Hay bales leaned against the windbreak like giant stairsteps. Where they left off, I jumped to grab the top and swing a leg over. A four-by-six brace ran along the top of the boards, a narrow bench I could straddle in relative comfort, fifteen feet in the air.
Clamping my heels to the rough boards, I swiveled away from the house, balancing the wind gusts by reflex, leaning to offset the steady push against me, rocking back so I didn't fall forward when they turned loose. My cheeks pulled taut in the heat. I held on with my legs and tongue-wet my jacket cuff, scrubbing at the salt crust around my eyes before I looked up. Squinting one eye shut, I held my hand at arm's length in front of my face and located the sun, a lighter-gray smudge in the sky two fingers above the Little Rockies. The wind churned smoke four fingers higher than the sun, then blew it straight east like chaff off a flat palm.
On the near horizon, flames topped a ridge and poured down the other side. A quarter mile closer, a slash of raw dirt opened slowly behind a rust-colored road grader. From the north, another neighbor stood over the steering wheel of his John Deere tractor, legs spread for balance as he careened toward the firebreak in high gear, a three-bottom plow bouncing along behind like a child's pull toy. The tractor slowed and veered to one side of the grader's path, and the driver dropped to the seat to shift down, reaching behind with the other hand to jerk the plow line and set the shovels to sod. The plow skipped once, twice, then it bit and the tractor squatted with a jerk, bellowing a thundercloud of diesel smoke. Behind it the prairie began to boil.
The fire ran low to the ground, rearing up on its haunches when the wind fell off, then dropping down to sprint on the next gust. Men with pitchforks fought to clear the fence line ahead of it. A stream of tumbleweeds raced for the firebreak, bouncing over each other as they neared the line and crossed the ribbon of dust without slowing. Heat devils rose from the flames and skipped through the grass a few feet ahead of the fire. A flatbed tank truck crawled by the fence, collecting the pitchfork crew, then jounced across the plowed strip and stopped. The figures tumbled off the truck with wet sacks and formed a line facing the fire, ready to slap out airborne sparks.
Another jagged stretch of men laced the south edge of the fire, arms lifting and falling, funneling the fire north toward the meadows. I studied the size of the silhouettes along the line. Boys were out there behind the lines, making things happen. I worked myself up and spit deliberately over the side of the windbreak. Kitchen duty had not been without satisfaction. Assigned to the sandwich team, I'd pushed up my sleeves so they didn't drag and set to work without back talk. A little nod of encouragement and Mom went about her own business. She was as immune to my coat as I was. Dot and Jane were not at all immune, and stared dumbfounded as I plunged a lightly rinsed hand cuff-deep into the pickle jar and began hacking homemade dills into chunks, absorbed by the growing ache in my throat and chest. My fellow sandwich makers drew up on either side of me.
"Aren't you hot in that jacket?" Jane asked sweetly. She smiled, eyes wide with effort, fanning her face with a potholder. A clue, perhaps, to the correct answer.
"Not at all." I smiled back at her. Sweetly. Dot seemed mesmerized by my sleeve, and I glanced down, gratified. Mine was truly a coat of many colors. In addition to hay and oat chaff, the clipped gray pile carried evidence of a palomino mare, a Black Angus steer and half a dozen cats. To me it smelled doggy and comfortable, but I wasn't stupid. From the corner of my eye, I saw Dot wrinkle her nose and look first toward Mom, on the phone with a finger stuck in her other ear, then at Jane. I breathed through my clenched teeth. I did not belong in this kitchen. I knew that. Everyone but my mother knew it. But their eyes measured me with, what—scorn? pity? disgust? I would make their job easier.
Baiting them, I set down the knife and scooped a drippy fistful of pickles into a huge bowl of ground venison and onions, squishing the mess together with plenty of arm action. Their mouths drew down, but they kept up an idle chatter, poised on either side of me. I paused in my venison mashing and held my slimy hands over the board, as if considering what to do next, and they moved in. Jane snatched up the paring knife, Dot went for the pickle jar, I took one easy step back and their elbows met midway in the space I left. Wiping my hands on my pants, I sidled out of the kitchen, easing the door shut in a thrill of restraint.
The new job description I worked out was a natural. The windbreak and some cottonwood trees around the yard screened the fire line from the house. In the next twenty minutes, the fire would reach the firebreak of raw dirt and either deflect toward the meadows or jump straight across and aim for our buildings. If the fire crossed, all hell would break loose, but somewhere a pickup waited, ready to carry a warning to the house. They would pass the very windbreak I perched on. My duty, as I saw it, was to beat the pickup and spread the alarm myself. I would be a Fire Scout.
I flexed my legs one at a time, feeling for pinpricks, staying limber, planning the steps. I would launch the second I read panic on the fire line, cut across the feedlot, fall and roll under the pole fences rather than
waste time climbing. I would slow to an urgent stride by the house, calm, in control. The women would turn to look at me when I stepped into the kitchen, my shoulders filling the doorway. "Gather up," I'd say, "we're clearing out. The fire jumped the line." My mother would wheel around to the window and turn back slowly. I imagined the fear in her eyes, and shivered.
I modified the scene every five minutes for the next hour, but my dream died with the wind at sunset. Pickups that had raced through the farmyard for hours now lurched and rolled to a stop, as if hit by sudden waves of exhaustion. The men climbed out slowly and lined up at the basin set up on a bench by the front door next to a pile of ratty towels. They ate in shifts, new rigs rolling in as others pulled away. The breeze, when it reappeared, smelled damp. Lying hidden on top of a haystack, I fingered my collar, holding it snug around my neck, waiting for the yard to empty and the people to go home.
When the fire died and the smoke began to clear, I had worked my way along the tall fence to a power pole and stood for a better view of the mop-up. Fire rigs lumbered over the naked landscape, patrolling for live embers, gathering in groups of two or three on hilltops to watch for flare-ups. A raw black scar narrowed as it rounded the north end of the firebreak, flowed east for another mile, then dipped through the barrow pit and stopped in a neat line. Tank trucks stretched nose to tail along the county road. Pressing my arm against the pole, I turned, finally, to the wet and stood for a long time.
The glow of dusk seemed part of the air, a soft light that washed the gentle step of hills evenly, without direction or source. The grass had burned clean and fast, but wisps of smoke still rose from the range fuel, the cow chips and sagebrush. A row of stumps flared along the fence like candles, flames that bled out and disappeared against a blaze of sunset. Five thousand acres of grazing land and grain fields, once as comfortable and taken for granted as the coat I pulled around me, stretched to the horizon in black waves, stripped to meat and muscle. The soft contours were gone, coulees and draws naked of grass rose stark as bruised skin, every wrinkle and rock exposed to the air. I slid down and kicked a bed in the top of the hay, lying hidden as true darkness grew under a thin blanket of clouds.
There are moments of recognition that empty you, times when no amount of arm pinching can mask the who and what of you that stares back up from the hollow Eventually I would come to understand that the rules and roles I fought were less about me than they were about my place, this piece of earth I came to identify with as clearly as I did my family. This lesson was inexplicably difficult for me, and I have no explanation other than to say my sisters appeared to step around the restrictions and freedoms of our family and our community, selecting what fit them and moving on with far more grace than I mustered. I suspect I wanted too much, but maybe I simply wanted more and grew bitter when it came clear what was, and what was not to be.
Some childhood games are played for real. My brother had learned that in one harsh lesson, standing in the ashes of a play fire gone wrong, the blackened boards of our barn an accusation that stood for years. It seemed to be taking me longer to get the message. Some things couldn't be taken back, and some games lived in consequence far beyond my precocious urge to be grown-up and powerful. I recalled the day two years before, when I tethered a half-grown kitten we called Tiger to the headboard of a hayrack, measuring the twine leash carefully so he couldn't jump off either side, tying him so he would be there when I came back to play after lunch. I left him some water, I studied the shade that the headboards cast, ladderlike, across the bed of the rack, made a nest for him in the coolest spot and walked away, confident of my own brilliance. Unable to escape off the sides, the kitten did the one obvious thing I hadn't seen. He crawled between the boards he was tied to and jumped for the wagon tongue. When I returned with my pockets full of lunch scraps, he was already cool, his eyes open to the wind that swung him gently, the tips of his hind toes brushing softly, back and forth, as if smoothing the faint scratches he had left in the silvery wood of the wagon tongue, or perhaps pointing out how close he had come to surviving, how unforgivably cruel his death had been.
Years later, pushing my son on a playground swing, I would catch our shadow at the corner of my eye, the sway of a baby seat with the stripe of bars overhead, and the memory would punch through the surface so fast I would plead aloud, I didn't know I didn't know, standing with one fist buried in my hair, mindless of the stares I drew, the way my two older children gathered close to my legs, watchful, protecting me for long seconds until it passed.
Mercy, I've discovered, is hard learned and slow to stick. A whiff of burning grass can still fill my head with color, the terrible bloom of sunset through smoke, the endless, aching stumble of hills over the land below From this distance I can see myself squirming a bed in the top of a stack and know it was not disappointment that held me there, nor defiance that made me crouch lower when the dinner bell clanged and my father's whistle pierced the silence. It was failure, a shame so pure I absorbed it in tiny gusts, flinching when lights and voices drifted up from the house. Inside, they would be telling stories of the fire, a community of men and women pulled together by the work they had done for each other, and their pride in doing it well. Work had to do with the land, with people big enough to fight fire with a wet broom if that was what they had to work with. I had not set myself aside and pitched in. In the end, I had done the one thing worse than doing nothing. I had rooted for the fire.
Ajax
Like most farm kids, I can count the years of my childhood by the procession of animals, those born to the farm and those "rescued" from the wild, that I knew and cared for and claimed as my own. Early on, I came to see the animal kingdom as divided into three more or less distinct groups. The first were the protected species, like the horses, the dog and cats, that provided a service in exchange for their care. They were intentional animals, like the livestock, but they belonged to us in a way the cattle did not. These were animals designed to live out their natural life span in our care, barring accident or illness, and assuming they earned their keep. My passion might be safely spent here, stuffing kittens into doll clothes, harnessing our collie dog to the sled, galloping horseback through the creek bottoms.
The presence of animals in my life was as important as the presence of my siblings, and our interactions were no less weighted. The cats, especially, brought out a side of my mother I seldom evoked in my own right, a lovely gift of language and gentle wit, mock disgust and play anger, brief lapses in the strict, no-nonsense tone that guided our lives. My mother's parents were middle-aged when she was born, and in lieu of siblings, she had grown up surrounded by an expanse of empty prairie and a multitude of dogs and cats, horses and bantam hens. In the humorless grind of tending five children with few resources and less money, she found her imagination and her sense of play in the presence of her animals, bringing it all together in quiet moments. "Streak, you're a big platter-footed fool," she would begin in a conversational tone as the big white cat with tiger patches lumbered toward his dish. Something in his answer always sparked an argument. Back and forth they would go: "Don't you use that tone of voice with me, buster. I'll dust your pants. Well, quit blundering around underfoot if you don't want to be stepped on, you big goon. Go catch a mouse if you're hungry." All this as she strained the milk from morning chores into clean jars and poured the last cup or so into his dish.
We children worked to create those moments, greedy for the softness of eye and tone, thrilled by the cleverness of words, the roll and rhyme of language. Cats, we learned, did not simply rub against us—they polished our shins or stropped their whiskers on our pants legs. They purred like teakettles or thundered through the kitchen like a herd of wild elephants. If they got too rambunctious with their claws, one told them to haul in their toenails, that they had the manners of a warthog. Little Bits, Pantaloons, Beetle Tracks, Ginger and Cocoa. Friendly, a glossy black little mama cat with a milky moustache, belly and paws who was not especially friendl
y to anyone but Mom. In her litters of two or three huge kittens appeared an occasional solid chocolate or ginger-brown one with white markings. Her tail felt like a string of rosary beads, each bump another lesson in the behavior of teething toddlers. Her son, Streak, was a fat torn my sister and I decked out in doll clothes and propped up on pillows in a clothes basket, where he lay for hours licking a doll bottle gripped in his front paws. In those days, it would have been unusual to spend money neutering farm cats or dogs, and no one I knew vaccinated, wormed or purchased special food for pets. Cats and dogs ate table scraps and hunted for themselves. Extras were shot. But the ones we claimed did not go without love.
There were limits, of course, practical guidelines to observe, places a cat didn't belong, behavior that earned dogs wholesale beating or horses a kick in the ribs. But these rules seemed sensible, the punishment little different than that accorded our own transgressions, and in neither case did I doubt my mother's authority.
The orphans we rescued or kidnapped from the prairie around us were animals I loved at my own peril, for they did not belong in a barnyard and those that lost their fear of humans generally signed their own death warrants. The wild ones—mallard ducklings, cottontails and jackrabbits, the white-tail fawn and the blind, hairless baby skunks—span a decade in the family photo albums. They pop up like seasonal flowers, small doomed creatures swaddled in rags, cradled in well-meaning hands and fed makeshift milk from makeshift bottles—part of the scenery for a snapshot or two, then gone.
Most were casualties of the hayfields, either orphaned or injured as the machines made their rounds in early June. The hay mower's seven-foot sickle bar did not follow directly behind the tractor, it jutted to one side, slicing through the tall alfalfa a few inches from the ground. A driver paying attention to the tractor's path also kept watch for obstacles hidden in the thick, uncut hay to the right. Pheasants leaving their nests ran low to the ground for a number of yards before breaking cover; ducks crouched over clutches of pale-green eggs until the last possible second. Skunks and porcupines might run from the sound of the tractor directly into the path of the cutting arm.
