Breaking Clean

by Judy Blunt

  After lunch the next day, John waited for his father and the hired men to leave for the fields, then slipped the broken bed frame out the door to the shop. A bashful and private man by nature, he dreaded the off-color comments that would surely follow if he were caught. Any other day it would have worked. This particular afternoon, John raised his welding mask to find his father smirking in the doorway, old Leonard peering around his elbow with a sly grin. Within twenty-four hours, the story would spread to the ends of the county. John hauled the mended pieces to the house with his face crimson and his jaw set. We propped the old bed back together. "This is bullshit," he said. We made plans to go shopping.

  The next week, a rain shower lent just enough moisture to drive John out of the field for a day. We hauled a load of canner cows to the Glasgow market and brought the old cattle truck home filled to the top rack. John signed ranch checks for a queen-sized bedroom set, eight kitchen chairs, a plush couch and swivel rocker, and a big recliner chair that stretched to fit his lanky frame. We ordered them delivered, and headed for the grocery warehouse. I worked from a two-page list of items I needed to stock my pantry. Spices and canned goods, staples such as flour, sugar, salt and coffee. We carried out five hundred dollars' worth of groceries to fill the larder emptied when Rose had relocated to her new kitchen. When the delivery truck arrived, Frank's gaze flitted over our new purchases with idle attention, one couch as good as another to him, while John gathered up the checkbook and receipts and handed them over for bookkeeping. As I watched, Frank thumbed to the check register and read the amounts. His face went stiff, eyes widening, then going narrow. He lurched to his feet and left without a word.

  The next morning, Frank came in for coffee alone. 'Humpfing and hawing,' he dropped into his chair at the head of the table and waited for me to serve him. To the neighbors, Frank's moving away from ranch headquarters could be seen as turning over the business, a generous and wholly unexpected move for a man so involved with the daily operation of the ranch. In public Frank made great show of it, raising his arms in surrender to a question, grinning widely as he jerked his head from side to side. "Ask the boy. Hell, I don't know what's going on." The "boy" was thirty years old, and the facade was dropped at the front gate. Here, the ranch was Frank's and no one pretended differently. The lights of his pickup roared down our hill before dawn every morning, and when he slid to a stop in front of the shop, John and the hired men were on the front stoop picking their teeth and pulling on their gloves or he came storming in to get them. He lit out from the pickup at a stiff-legged gallop, throwing himself into each day's work like it might be his last. A huge man, Frank had heavyweight semi-pro titles to his name before being called to serve in World War II, and despite the onset of painful arthritis he still moved with the speed and aggression of a boxer. The stories I knew of him as a young man were violent stories, tales of fistfights at country dances, another of him evicting his second wife's daughter and her husband by physically kicking them down the steps of the house. I didn't know if they were true; even the rumors were ancient history now. But I did sense an edge to the man, something unpredictable.

  He began telling stories, speaking between slurps of coffee as I nervously wiped down counters and tidied the kitchen. How young folks in his day started out with nothing and made do, acquiring as they went along. How his mother and father walked from Lewistown to the banks of the Missouri River with everything they owned in a wheelbarrow. He shook his head, abrupt jerks from side to side. Young people these days seemed to expect everything at once—big house, nice things, everything new. Didn't want to wait for a thing. He let this soak in for a moment, then rose to leave, his smile like bared teeth. If I was going to get along here, he added, I'd better figure out we were raising calves, not minting money. Stunned into silence, I watched him clump out the door. Heat rose in my cheeks. John drew a wage of one hundred dollars per month, a fourth of which went to pay for his life insurance policy. The rest had to stretch carefully to cover personal luxuries, such as clothing, birth control pills and shampoo. How could we possibly save for furniture on that?

  Lunch passed as though nothing had happened, the men stomping in together, steam wafting through the washroom as they scrubbed their hands. Frank took his place at the head of the table, reaching for the serving bowls as I set them down. The hired men were allowed a full hour off in midday, and as they finished eating and left for the bunkhouse, Frank moved into the living room and stretched out in the new recliner. John flopped down on the new couch. I studied the two men for signs of trouble and found nothing. Puzzled, I finished the dishes and watched them stroll outside at the stroke of one. Had I imagined Frank's pointed comments?

  An hour later, I watched uneasily as Rose's old car pulled up in front of our gate. She tapped at the door with her foot until I opened it, then bustled through, her hands full of empty boxes. Weeks after leaving, she was still emptying closets in the upstairs rooms and gathering pictures off the walls, finishing the move in small loads that fit the ancient Studebaker sedan. Rose was Frank's third wife, a plump Polish woman already middle-aged when she traded a populated area of Wisconsin for this ranch seventy miles from town. With no children of her own, Rose had lived a lonely and solitary life for several years, surrounded by men, a relative newcomer to the circle of ranchwomen and the business of ranching. She had no experience and little aptitude for the outside work, but she knitted and crocheted beautifully and in a community of standard meat-and-potatoes cooks, she earned her reputation in the kitchen. Her everyday meals surpassed company fare in most homes. Still, she remained at the edge of the circle, connected to community neither by family name nor by place name, but by marriage alone. She came with no set of expectations based on family or personal history, and if she behaved in strange or surprising ways, there followed a general lifting of hands—what could one expect, after all?

  I had known little about her until I began dating John. Then, having the keen ears of a child just recently come to sit among adults, I tallied the hushed stories that passed among gossips and the sort of edgy silence preferred by the other half of the room, combined these with John's hilarious—and, I assumed, exaggerated—stories of life in Frank and Rose's household, and felt myself equal to the task before me. True, though I visited at their ranch fairly often in the year before the wedding, I still panicked if left alone with Rose for long—I could feign an interest in needlework and crafts only so long before our conversations stumbled and ground to a halt. But most of what the community knew of her seemed fairly benign, by my teenage standards.

  One aspect of urban civilization that she had brought west set her ranch kitchen apart from any other I knew, and that was the institution of Happy Hour. When the workday was done and the hired men slouched off to the bunkhouse to clean up and await the clang of our big dinner bell, Frank and John entered to the sound and smell of supper on the way, no different than most men in the community. But unlike their counterparts, their meal was not dished up and waiting. Their meal was timed to hold. While they washed, Rose hauled out mix and makings, and then joined them for a couple of stout whiskeys. If company was present, Happy Hour included hors d'oeuvres and lasted into the evening, as the hired hands waited patiently on their bunks for the bell to summon them for the meal. On a typical winter evening, she might garner half an hour of conversation before the taciturn Frank demanded his dinner.

  As John wryly noted, Rose's personal approach to the cocktail hour was less rigidly scheduled. She frequently got a jump start on the drinks during dinner preparations. Perspiring from the heat of the kitchen, her round cheeks flushed a cheery red, she would greet the men's arrival with a jovial wave of the spoon as she orchestrated the finishing touches to the meal. Frank and Rose were always careful not to drink in front of the help. A measure of hilarity and her somewhat uncertain gait between table and stove as she served the meal were the only evidences of Happy Hour that remained by the time John pulled the bell rope to summon the crew f
or supper.

  I laughed at John's stories and waved the rumors aside. What she did in her own home was her own business, I figured. In the months before John and I were married, only one episode gave me pause. I arrived at the ranch house as her guest the autumn day she hosted a meeting of the Near and Far Club, a group we more commonly referred to as Ladies Club. There was only one, and though my mother did not regularly attend, I had been dragged along to the occasional meeting since early childhood. Many of the older members of the community arranged their social lives around the monthly meetings. Members paid dues, donated to worthy projects and gave craft lessons to one another—needlework, crocheted tissue covers, egg carton art, pinecone wreaths for Christmas. They brought along their current projects to share with the only audience able to honestly appreciate the procession of intricate fancywork that kept their fingers busy on rainy days, hot afternoons and after supper, that lull between dishes and bedtime.

  The social atmosphere and the familiar homes of my neighbors changed when it was their turn to host Ladies Club. Even as a small child, I recognized the formal atmosphere of the meetings as something out of the ordinary Whereas a typical drop-in visit was spent at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and the stuff of neighborhood news, at Ladies Club the same women sat on parlor chairs in starched dresses and good shoes and shared news of distant relatives, old neighbors, new grandchildren, and all seasonal work in progress. Children were threatened into passable behavior. Young girls were encouraged to "sit in" on the program, though as a youngster I spent my rare afternoons of Ladies Club running outside with the other tomboys. The only lure for me was the luncheon. After the business meeting and the presentation, they stood adjourned and the mood relaxed a bit as women traded in eggs and cream, swapped plant cuttings and tomato starts, returned borrowed patterns and visited. Children would begin to sift in from outdoors and join the short food line while the hostess dished up the luncheon on her best china, perhaps a savory salad or tea sandwiches, some nuts and mints, and always, always a dessert whose calories measured in the quadruple digits.

  I sat among the neighbor ladies as Rose's guest that day, comfortable among the familiar faces. My engagement was the news of the moment, but early conversation died as the meeting was called to order. I no longer remember the program offered at the meeting, but I do remember Rose mysteriously disappearing into the kitchen every so often, and wondering what breed of outlandish dessert could account for so much last-minute attention. By the midpoint of the meeting, Rose's cheeks were in bloom and her interruptions and additions to the president's message had taken on a raucous note. Judging by the grim circle of women in the parlor, this had happened before. I watched with rapt attention as the eyebrows lifted over a flurry of knowing looks and narrow-eyed glares. These did not pass over my head, as they might have the year before, but met my eyes before moving on. Soon I would be a daughter-in-law here, privy to the secrets kept by the family, but more than that, as an adult I had a place in this stiffly posed, silent circle of women; it would be as close as I ever came to an initiation.

  As next of kin, it fell to Rose's sister, Irene, and me to assume the duties of hostess as the formal meeting ground to a close and Rose staggered to her bedroom and passed out on her bed. Irene and her husband had driven from Wisconsin to hunt deer, and though she had never met the women in her sister's parlor, she seemed to know a disaster when she saw one in the making. Irene eased the door to Rose's bedroom tightly shut, and the two of us made bright conversation to cover the moans and snores that crept beneath the door and into the kitchen. I understood the disapproval emanating from the older women in the group, though I didn't necessarily subscribe to it. They were teetotalers, and in the terms of their era, gentlemen might have a drink, common men might drink to excess, but nice women didn't drink beyond the occasional glass of Christmas wine. Only the coarsest women would be seen drunk in public.

  My mother's generation had made inroads into that Victorian statute, and my generation had modified it yet further, but I still couldn't shake the embarrassment I felt for Rose. At my age, I would not have been as roundly condemned by my peers for drunkenness. At her age, with no excuse of youth or immaturity, she could not avoid it. Irene and I spread cheese crackers, set out the mints, scooped Mississippi Mud Pie onto china plates and brewed tea for twelve, doing our duty as best we could in an unfamiliar kitchen, the flurry of desperation shared in our maddening search for the silver dessert spoons, the sugar and cream service, whatever it took to advance this day to completion. No one left without a nod or a word of thanks, admiring a good job of saving face in the same way they would have admired any nicely turned piece of fancy-work.

  Though irked at her sister, Irene spoke of her with generosity in the hour we spent alone, the menfolk studiously sticking to shop or field until the last car left the yard, lest they arrive like a band of ruffians in the midst of our genteel company. As the door closed on the last look of pity and word of condolence, Irene turned, and with an uncanny instinct, stepped to the shelf over the washing machine and spooked Rose's bottle of vodka out of hiding. The two of us killed it as we sat waiting for the lady of the house to get up, the men to come in, someone to take over the sweaty reins of this kitchen. One of the few women who reached out to offer advice before I was married, Irene unfolded a frank twenty-minute diatribe that left me speechless. She shared an uncompromising tale of alcoholic parents, the lives she and her sister had known during the Depression. In an effort of will that I was to relive for fourteen years, I worked to interpret Rose's response to pressure, her craving for praise and attention, her sometimes bewildering demands upon me, as those of a needy child. But nothing is ever that simple.

  At sixty-three, my mother-in-law-apparent could not have been more pleased with the growth of her immediate family, and having a potential crop of grandbabies to show off made her giddy with excitement. She took such a sudden and serious interest in her new role of ranch matriarch that I drew back in alarm, too young to recognize what having the bond of extended family could mean to her in this community. I had always had that connection. Before my marriage, when she confided in a girlish whisper that mine would be the only wedding she would ever help to plan, I sighed and added her suggestions to the list of those compiled by me, my mother, John and John's birth mother, Nellie. As I recall, only a lavish amount of broad hinting dissuaded her from wearing a white dress to the wedding, but hers was the widest smile there.

  In my first dealings with them, I sensed that she and Frank shared an Old World view of family. As modern as ranching corporations were with respect to tax and inheritance laws, their structure reflected an ancient patriarchal model. In every case it seemed, the father and son became the president and vice president, Mom was named secretary, and all generations worked for the common good of the ranch. They could deduct the costs of doing business, with income derived from the division of profits based on the ownership of shares. The extreme example would be one multi-generation household where Papa directed the sons in working the land and Mama directed the wives in preparing communal meals, and the earnings all tunneled into a common purse. That sort of lifestyle was not unknown during the settlement days, when immigrant families worked together to establish their footing in the New World, and later in the Depression days when a couple might live with one set of parents or the other while they saved for a place of their own. A few of the county's larger ranches still supported two or three generations of family headed by the patriarch of the clan. But more familiar to me were the husband-wife partnerships like that of my parents, couples who bought improved land in the forties and fifties and worked it together, an arrangement that often rewarded a woman's strength and independence. It was left to young women of my generation to discover the vast difference between entering a marriage partnership like our mothers had and becoming the daughter-in-law in a ranching corporation.

  I was not caught totally unaware. With Frank and Rose as the major shareholders, I
assumed they would control the purse strings to a certain extent. John would draw wages, the bulk of our expenses would be paid by the corporation. But never in my wildest dreams had I expected to run my life as an extension of Frank and Rose's. We were married in 1973, not 1873, I assured myself. Somehow I pictured a corporation as just like a marriage partnership, but with two households serving as the members of the team, both sides working respectfully and cooperatively, but separately.

  After allowing us the first week to "get settled," Rose had arrived on my doorstep one morning without warning, her round face beaming, eager to caution and advise my first steps on her old stomping ground. She had arrived nearly every morning since on the pretext of packing, though the cartons often sat unused in the porch while she addressed the arrangement of my cupboards. I was nearly a foot taller than she and tended to use the high shelves for storing everyday items. She seemed determined to break me of the dangerous habit of placing glasses and heavy pots where she had to stand on tiptoe to reach them. I listened patiently as she shifted items from shelf to shelf, victim of an upbringing that allowed no sassing of elders. After she left, I would move everything back. A day or two later she would open the cupboard doors and stand with her plump hands on her hips, tsk-tsking. She must have thought me terribly slow As the days progressed, the sound of her car pulling up filled me with dread.

  Stung by Frank's words that morning and confused by his silence at lunch, I warily poured Rose coffee from the still-warm pot, watching her closely Her usual cheerful greeting had been dampered. She pulled out one of the new kitchen chairs, hefting it in her hand, then lowered herself toward the seat with exaggerated caution, as though testing the heat of a bath. When it held her satisfactorily, she leaned back and squinted through the living-room doorway at the brown-plaid couch, her mouth a moue of disapproval. She hoped I wouldn't have trouble keeping the couch clean. It was pretty now, but the fabric didn't look practical. She rummaged through her purse while I talked about the new soil-guard treatment, the lifetime warranty, my voice trailing off as she drew out the long receipt from the grocery warehouse. She spread it on the table and settled herself more firmly. So here it is, I thought wearily. From where I stood braced against the counter, I could see several of the items had been circled. Beer. Cigarettes. Kotex. Soda pop. Five pounds of bacon. A gallon can of pie cherries. My throat tightened with humiliation. I took my time, pausing a second with my eyes closed, hoping to hear truck or tractor approaching from down the creek. Where the hell was John in all this, I wondered. He had helped pick out every stick of furniture, had trooped down the grocery aisle adding to the pile on the huge cart and had written the checks without a murmur.