Breaking Clean

by Judy Blunt

  We worked out a rhythm, rising and falling as the porcupine squatted lower, flat to the ground, unable to recover from one blow to the next. When he straightened suddenly and scuttled for the trees, we leaped back, then ran ahead and turned to block his way. We struck together now, Gail at his exposed head and I across the round of his back. Grunting on the downswing, panting between blows, the wet thud of wood hitting flesh—sound traveled nowhere in the heat of the meadow. But when his spine broke, I felt the pop of bones all the way up the branch to my fingers, and he began to squeal.

  Any animal will scream when that's all it has left, a long note of terror or grief so pure it lifts the hair on a killer's back and spurs the final, merciful frenzy. His cry took breath after breath, a sound like ice, numbing my hands in midswing. Even when he stopped and began clawing his way forward, dragging dead weight toward the trees he would never climb, I could not end his suffering. It was Gail who bent to the kill, her face flushed and glittering, battering him as he pulled himself along. He quit moving a few feet from the trees, and she stood over his body, triumphant.

  There were quills buried deep in the sticks we dropped back over the bank. A spray of blood along one sleeve of my coat. A small mouth opening around long orange teeth, a stubby tongue folded at the center like a heart cut from red paper. There was the look in my sister's eyes, something bloody and profane that was mine, and in me, a shame so swift and sure I still find it today in those memories marked by change. It was the moment I slid out of my soiled coat and stood in the meadow, bleeding. It was the moment childhood became no longer possible.

  At thirteen I stood where the world I knew ended, imagining no future beyond my ordained leap into the abyss at my toe tips, vanishing into the station of woman, wife and mother—storytellers with no story of their own. The things I feared were real to me. Some even came true. When the coat came off, a box of bras appeared on my pillow. I survived the mercifully brief confrontation when my mother turned up a stash of bloody pajamas I'd squirreled away under my bed. Supplies appeared in my closet. But another predetermined passage loomed for me as it did for a number of country kids, one that would require far more of me than acquiescence. I would leave home soon, to attend high school. I readied myself in a twist of dread and impatience. There was no ceremony for my eighth-grade graduation, and no other graduates; Mrs. Nesbit simply handed me my diploma on the last day of school. But at home that afternoon, the occasion was commemorated by the gift of a new suitcase, a family tradition as sensible as any other, though mine was an unlikely white with a dainty pink lining.

  I packed the new suitcase and all my resolve, and headed to Malta that fall to begin ninth grade, thirteen going on thirty. I lived in a rented room with kitchen privileges, managed my own checking account, found my first job waiting tables at the Sugar Shack Cafe for thirty-five cents an hour and tips. I studied the town kids, took what I wanted from their catalogue of cool moves and social savvy, and returned to the ranch on weekends and vacations. I did not discover myself as much as I invented myself, as a woman. What I had not foreseen in my struggle to hold on to my girlhood and my safe piece of prairie was how easy it would be, in the end, to let it go.

  Learning Curves

  Blunt. The sound of my name fell like an axe on green wood, an abrupt thud of consonants that usually made me jump. This time I was ready I slid out of my alphabetically ordained spot behind Jim Anderson and Alice Blundred and approached the makeshift podium as Mr. Miller, our English teacher and assistant football coach, walked to the back of the room and crunched his form into a desk that would have held a Z person, if we'd had one. Thirty fellow freshmen raised their eyes in wary attention, pleading to be entertained, prepared to be bored.

  I had practiced my five-minute speech for a week, pacing myself with an egg timer, and the index cards rattling in my fingers held little more than cue words. The year I entered high school, 1968, was a year that began and ended in distant riots and social upheaval, and now, in the spring of '69, we'd been given free rein to select our topics from those social issues and current events. I'd never given a speech before, but I'd heard bits and pieces of them on the television news. Kennedy and King. Listening to the first few speeches the day before, others that morning, I felt a flicker of anxiety. Odds were I had screwed up again. How carefully my classmates approached their topics, how dutifully, numbly, I took notes on urban crime, desegregation of schools, the war in Vietnam, the first Apollo space missions—all of it in numbers, dates and statistics. No whys, no taking sides except where the road had been comfortably paved with stale slogans. Crime didn't pay. Only dopes used dope. All men are created equal.

  My topic had filled my imagination since the first week in September, a Saturday night on the ranch. Mom had settled at the kitchen table to read while the rest of us gathered around our new color television set to watch the Miss America pageant, broadcast live from Atlantic City. As the contestants filed onto the stage, chests jutting, sashed and smiling, we analyzed their conformation with the same skills that won us awards in 4-H livestock-judging competitions, comparing features, inventing faults. The emcee gave measurements along with other pertinent information, like age, city of origin, hobbies; 36-24-36 was the accepted ideal. The contest was no more real to me than any other television show. I had never seen anyone who looked like those women, never heard anyone outside of TV talk in that gushy rush of accents and cliches. I thought the women vaguely embarrassing, the emcee who courted them with snide banter and sappy songs, altogether stupid. Still I watched, half asleep, as the outgoing Miss America launched her farewell address. She hesitated, there were shouts, the camera wobbled, and from a side balcony a group of protesters unfurled a banner reading women's liberation. Uniforms filled the balcony, and within seconds the first real-looking women I'd ever seen at a beauty pageant were pushed down, shut up and carried out. I was enchanted.

  Back in Malta that Monday, I searched the papers in the school's library for more information. Montana papers were relatively mum, but national magazines reported a few tantalizing details. I discovered that while I watched Miss Illinois bounce and flip through her winning trampoline performance without dislodging a single platinum curl, a small fire had flickered into life outside the building. As she loped down the runway in the costume that won the bathing suit competition, a group of about a hundred women, some from as far away as Iowa, had continued to feed the flames of the Freedom Trash Can with symbols of American womanhood—bras and girdles, hair curlers and false eyelashes, fashion magazines and cosmetic goop. A bottle of dishwashing liquid. A pair of spiky high heels. As Miss Illinois burst into happy tears and Bert Parks launched into song, the protesters had ceremoniously centered a tinfoil tiara on the head of a sheep. A live sheep on a rope leash.

  In study hall, I ignored algebra and daydreamed my way to Atlanta, Georgia, pondering which of a list of items I would have tossed in the fire. Nylons, I decided, and for sure the garter belt that was supposed to hold them up but in the stand-up-sit-down course of a school day tended to work its way down my rump until the stockings bagged like loose skin.

  National news in the weeks that followed concentrated on the antiwar rioting that had nearly shut down the Democratic convention in Chicago, Nixon's landslide victory in November, Yippies, hippies and black freedom marches, but here and there I gleaned snippets of information about this new commotion called the women's liberation movement. Uppity women were uniting, though not in the streets of Malta, Montana. Still, I had a name now, a rallying cry for the anger that had smoldered behind my unplucked brows since puberty. The speech I offered in freshman English was not an objective view of women in American society. Women had not been "given" the right to vote, I announced; they had fought for it, a right that should have been guaranteed by citizenship in a democratic society. But that was only the first step. The fight for women's rights would not be over until we could cast our ballots for women candidates.

  I quoted statistics gathered
by the National Organization for Women, numbers proving discrimination in the workplace, males paid twice the wage of females for the same work. I countered the then-popular notion that women were somehow emotionally or mentally unsuited to high-stress or physically demanding work, too scatterbrained to manage a business, too unpredictable to trust in positions of power, by giving examples of strong women who were doing these very things. I went on and on, looking down at my cue cards rather than at my classmates as the first sniggers and snorts punctuated my radical claims. The ending I had worked on for a long time, trying to sum it up with a punch—I have a dream!—but my voice was faltering by the time I finished, and even to myself I sounded shrill. "We cannot call our country a democracy and continue to treat fifty-one percent of our population as second-class citizens."

  I looked up at the class and braced myself for the final hurdle. In Mr. Miller's class, the audience earned extra credit for asking questions and the speaker could raise a mediocre grade by answering well. "Are there any questions?" I asked a second time. No one raised a hand. Mr. Miller's mouth turned up in a lazy smile as he shifted his gaze around the room, his pencil rap-tapping a drumroll on the grade book. "Well?" The silence seemed louder than his voice, a hiss of muffled breath, empty echoes. He turned to me again with the same slow swing of shoulders, and with a comic expression of fear widening his eyes he raised one hand to touch his eyebrow in a mock salute.

  The tension broke on a wave of laughter. I laughed too, as I threaded my way like a drunken sailor down the aisle to my desk, my legs rubbery and nearly spent. The next speech passed in a blur as I shielded the tremors in my fingers by hunching over my notebook, trying to breathe slowly as my knees danced against the underside of the desk. That the topic was shoplifting I remember only because Jim Anderson ad-libbed his final line, drawing a second gust of hilarity. "Judy forgot to mention another area where women are proven superior—most shoplifters are women."

  By the end of my high school years I had gone underground, though I never grew immune to jokes about women's liberation. The only thing rescued from the Freedom Trash Can, it seemed, was one label, a twisted and blackened fragment of ideology used to dismiss the larger issues. Yeah, she burned her bra in the '60s and nobody noticed. Ah, she's one of those bra burners, all smoke and no fire. Fighting the jokes was like sweeping feathers—the harder you worked, the higher they flew All in fun, of course.

  The saddest versions were those we told on ourselves. Called out to run the vaccine gun or help sort cattle, a ranch wife enters the kitchen at noon, the table bracketed by hungry men—a husband, a couple of neighbor men or hired hands— whose contribution to the noon meal is to tune in to Paul Harvey's radio news and wait with good-natured forbearance while she scrubs manure from her hands and jerks the roast from the oven, microwaves a few potatoes. By the time she sits down, the guys are done eating. They catch a thirty-minute nap while she bolts her food, clears the table, tosses a load of underwear in the washer, runs a broom over the floor, throws the hose on the tomato plants. Then they all go back out to "work." "They can stuff their women's lib," she snorts to a friend. "I've got about all the liberation I can handle."

  At the root of the joke lies our most seductive mythology, one that suggests rural Montana women are a special land-tilling, snake-killing, rope-swinging breed for whom liberation is unnecessary, if not redundant. Women who work in the barns and corrals and fields are doing a man's work, this myth tells us, and by doing it have achieved equality. Strong-woman stories stem from the earliest days of white settlement, a time when Victorian standards demanded a way to justify the rustic conditions and "unladylike" activities required to scratch a living out of the dirt. But the fact remains that even as gender roles blurred and gave way to practicality, very few women either sought or found increased social status in the physical labor of farming. Women of my grandmothers' generation fought hard to maintain a veneer of gentility that belied hard work. They hid their chapped hands in white cotton gloves, attended social gatherings in starched shirtwaists, crossed their legs at the ankle and addressed each other by formal titles. Their daughters grew up learning the value of appearances, the knack of doing without seeming to do. When women's lib hit the headlines many of these second-generation ranchwomen sniffed around its edges and pitched it back like a dead carp. If equality meant doing a man's work, you could have it. That brand of equality had dug their mothers an early grave and was three feet down on their own. They'd come a long way, baby, and were on the road back to being real ladies—or so it appeared.

  I grew up admiring a community of women whose strength and capacity for work I have yet to see equaled, true partners in the labor of farming and ranching. Where the occasional man fell short, whether drunken and reckless or merely selfish and careless, his wife maneuvered carefully to make up the deficit. To be accused of "wearing the pants" remained the worst form of insult. In public she held steadfastly to the role of silent partner. I saw this quiet endurance as a choice women made, one that made them secretly superior. Men did not drop what they were doing to tend to women's work, nor did anyone imagine they might. Only women did it all.

  As a young ranch wife, I wed my sixties-style feminism to a system of conflicting expectations and beliefs only slightly altered by a century of mute nobility. My brand of feminism celebrated strength through silence. A woman could do anything, so long as she did it quickly, quietly and efficiently. It never occurred to me then that silence looked passive from the outside, or that the two served the same purpose of not making waves, maintaining the status quo. It would take me ten years of doing it all to finally get it. The work we do isn't the issue. Work is the tool that wears us down, draws us in and keeps our eyes on the next two steps ahead. The issue is power. And it's the silence that kills us.

  The sixties were slow getting to our little corner of the world, and even as the more visible social changes began to tiptoe across the city limits, small Montana Hi-Line towns like Malta tended to bustle about their own business, eyes averted in polite dismay. Our region boasted no goat-milking communes, no sit-ins or protests unless the theater showed a movie with sex, and few of the town's residents indulged in any pinko talk against the war in Vietnam. The majority voted conservative— Nixon in '68, citizenship, patriotism and family values right down the line. Still, by the end of the decade, town kids had picked up on the sixties signature rock music, mod bell-bottoms, groovy slang and assorted recreational chemicals. Beer was still the drug of choice and not hard to come by, but other options had arrived by 1968, and by the early seventies were not uncommon in high school circles. Even the doctrine of free love was becoming popular in theory, although for girls it remained anything but free. The birth control pill was available, but as in any small town, prescriptions were written by the doctor who had delivered you and filled by the pharmacist who went fishing with your dad. Only the few, the proud, the brave succeeded without sneaking out of town to anonymous clinics in Havre or Glasgow

  What the media called the generation gap seemed a less-than-serious affair in some ways, like a game of rebellion passed down from one generation to the next. "Never saw a teenager who wasn't revolting," one of the old geezers at the cafe used to cackle, slapping his knee and repeating the joke like a scratched record until everyone "got it." Friction between generations was a game that required a fair degree of hysteria on the part of our elders, like panic before a predicted storm, worry that it would get worse, great tearing of hair when it did, all the while knowing everyone was going to survive it just fine. The young rebel's role was easy. Being a badass takes little time and less effort in a place where everyone's paying attention. Why go to the trouble of bombing city hall when a pair of tight jeans or smoking in public got the same reaction?

  Outsiders were another matter. Out there, the Antichrist prowled the country in a Volkswagen bus with flowers painted on the side. Stories linger on about this Long-Haired-Draft-Dodger or that Stinking-Barefooted-Hippie who pulled off H
ighway 2 and walked into the Mint Bar or the Stockman for a cold drink, stories of righteous head shearings and beatings delivered by local cowboys, but like most urban myths, the stories are impossible to pin down with facts, always the cousin of a neighbor's hired man who held the guy down while somebody's best friend's brother did the dirty work, a set of clippers mysteriously at hand. Where, I always wondered, did the deed take place? Surely not in one of the turn-of-the-century, false-fronted, brick-sided Main Street bars. One imagines two or three cowboys lugging their bewildered victim around the barroom a few times, then out the door and up the street looking for an electrical outlet.

  So the sixties stormed on "out there" somewhere, while around town, talk of weather, crop prices and high school sports rose with the steam of morning coffee as it always had. And that was town. Fifty miles south, I'd grown up in a world yet another step removed from the mainstream. We dressed in our best clothes for a trip to Malta. Our parents often went alone while the four of us younger kids were in school, but every few weeks the trip was planned for a Saturday. Going to town was not all entertainment for youngsters, for there was endless shopping in mostly boring stores, but there were high spots like lunch in a restaurant or a visit to the library. And of course we had our own shopping. We earned a dime a week for doing chores, and with a month's wages jingling in pocket or purse, we were set loose after lunch to wander the aisles of the Ben Franklin store, deliberating over trinkets and candy, stretching out our purchases to last however many hours our parents were occupied with parts and hardware, banking and insurance business.