Breaking Clean

by Judy Blunt

  In one pile near the door, I found a large bundle of bank calendars, the ones with every month's page made into a pocket to hold receipts. My mother used these until they quit making them. Shaw had kept years of them tied together with string. I popped the bundle open and fanned them out on the floor, wondering what sort of vital record they held, to have been collected like this, but my search through pockets came up empty. On the face of each page, in the corner of each square, beside the date, someone had written numbers, pencil marks starting sharp and getting fatter as the days progressed— I imagined a pencil on a string dangling from the same nail that held the calendar. I knew these numbers, or ones like them. They were the careful milk and egg records kept by someone who sells a few eggs, a little cream, keeping track of business.

  Month after month, year after year, the calendars painted our seasons by number. Spring days produced "2 dz egg, 2 gal milk" far into June, then the numbers gently tapered off as the hot weather set in. Here, the bump in egg numbers in late August, early September—Shaw's pullets have started to lay. The old hens will be butchered then, as soon as cool weather allows. Here, at the end of September, where the eggs go from "3 dz" to "2 dz" again; that's when the old hens are gone and the young ones have come into full bloom. Two dozen eggs. Probably thirty hens, maybe a few more. That's a good number for the bigger breeds of chicken. They don't lay every day, but the egg breeds, the leghorns, are too scrawny to be popular as farm hens.

  In December the egg counts dwindle and the milk numbers disappear, replaced now, by another number, another sort of record as the temperature sinks to the depths of winter and stalls. The milk cow is dry, her calf long weaned. Chickens won't lay much when they're chilled, just enough for the table. "-12 snow, -17, -25 and wind, -34." The new year dawns with rows of manila squares that testify to the cold, spilling the length of January without break and into February. The weather breaks in March, early or late, and there are a few eggs beside the dates. By Easter, they're back in production. The cow comes fresh in April, "2V 2 gal" and all her calf can drink, and more as the weather warms and the grass greens. The hens are let out to range in the sunshine, the yolks of their eggs going from pale butter to rich orange as they gorge on bugs and weeds. "2 dz, 2 gal." Year after year, bound tightly together amid an ocean of loose paper, the calendars had survived the elements, telling their tale in numbers instead of words.

  I wired the door shut and climbed into the pickup, rolling down the window to let the breeze cool the cab. The weather-burned legacy of Shaw Andrews sat before me, a shrunken cluster of buildings returning, one year and one board at a time, back to the prairie they had sprung from. Stories of the homesteaders were the stuff of my childhood. What they told were the big storms, the births and deaths, the clever or outrageous or humorous. No one talked about what was important, the way they made it day to day, season to season. Did they, too, settle for small victories in the face of overwhelming odds? Were they happy?

  If "ranch wife" was a job, I'd spent my entire life in training, surely. But never had I felt more childlike and more alone than I had in these first months of being a ranch wife. It seemed I had learned nothing. Then I thought how these past weeks would look on the old man's calendars—one page, two pages in a knee-high stack. Everything I knew seemed small in the measure of Shaw's years, his simple story of patience and perseverance told in dozens and gallons. I felt no need to take the calendars with me when I left. I knew the numbers. All I needed was faith—faith in myself, and faith in the seasons to come.

  Winter Kill

  "What in the hell do you do out here?" The woman ran a finger across her brow, tucking in the lank strands that fell across her forehead. I glanced over from the stove as she settled her bright orange cap and shrugged out of her coat, sliding it carelessly over the back of her chair. The hunting party she belonged to was camped on our hay meadows about a mile down Fourchette Creek, her husband and three other men.

  The question she'd asked was as familiar as the worn tiles under my feet. I studied her as I poured the coffee. She fussed at layers of long Johns and woolen shirts now, opening buttons, rolling sleeves, adjusting to the warmth of the kitchen. Maybe thirty, trim. The long dark hair snarled under her cap would be pretty when she washed it. The guys had dropped her off on their way to scout for deer on the other end of the Breaks, two riding in the cab, two who hadn't yet filled their tags perched on the fender wells in the back of the pickup, guns at the ready. Eyeballs spackled with red veins, and not a shaved chin in the bunch. They were having a great time.

  I snared a quart jar of cream from the refrigerator and slid a knife through the thick slab that formed on top, pouring the lighter cream into a pitcher. She gazed moodily out the window. The clean center of her face faded to a sooty patina where cold water hadn't reached. I plunked the cream beside her coffee, pulling my tenth cup of the day in front of me as I slid into a chair across from her.

  "Sugar?" The woman turned as I spoke. Her eyes were smoky, distant.

  "No, really" She waved her spoon at the bowl and I set it back in the center of the table. "I mean, what do you do out here all day, you know? You must go nuts." She was leaning forward, more outrage in her voice than interest. I smiled at her over the rim of my cup.

  "I keep busy," I said, evenly as I could. "You get used to it."

  The first zillion times I answered that question, I was tempted to tip the polite cover and let a little sarcasm ooze across the table. What I did was everywhere around me, falling off the countertops, stacked to the rafters, visible to the naked eye. I knew what she was saying, this disillusioned hairdresser from the coast, even if she didn't. Others posed the question as an honest statement. "I don't know how anybody can live out here," they would say, sweeping one hand to describe some endless barren arc beyond my kitchen.

  Only once did my patience snap when I heard that question, my victim an older woman named Carol who dunked a homemade doughnut in her coffee with one hand and spread the other in that same wide gesture that denoted ice floes and bottomless pits. She'd stopped at a bad time, dishes still piled in the sink, canning jars and late-season tomatoes filling the countertops, three preschoolers mewling around underfoot, ready for naps.

  "What does it look like I do?" I sputtered, mocking her wide stare. She laughed as I caught myself, cringing in embarrassment. Carol loved to hunt, one of the handful of women I met who packed rifles and filled their own tags. Each fall, when her deer hung from a tree by her camper, she spent the balance of her time hiking and photographing the Missouri River Breaks. But she couldn't shake the desolation she felt after a few days and nights of our solitude. Spooky, she called it. Yes, she admitted, she had been asking not about me but about herself: What would I, a college professor, do on this cattle ranch at the end of this dirt road seventy miles south of a nowhere little town? How would I fill my time two hundred miles from anything resembling a decent restaurant or shopping mall or library? She shook her head at my apologies, chuckling over the trade of insults, amused that I had brought it to her attention.

  "Show me around," she said, draining her cup. We toured the barnyard while the children slept, and then the enormous garden that surrounded the house on three sides. When I moved there, the yard held a couple of scrubby lilacs, a Cottonwood and some bunchgrass fenced with woven wire, typical of a region that boasted ten or twelve inches of moisture a year, most of it snowmelt. The deep artesian well provided drinking water laced with fluoride and alkali, salty enough to kill some plants outright and sour the soil permanently if it was used for irrigation.

  That first year we had leveled the hillside in our backyard with terraces, stealing rocks from the tepee rings that dotted the bench above and building two stone retaining walls thirty feet long and three feet high. The second year, the men laid pipe from a deep reservoir a quarter of a mile away to a feedlot near the house. Almost as an afterthought, they extended a branch to the yard and rigged up a hydrant. To have rainwater easy as liftin
g a handle and moving a hose was an unheard-of luxury. I tore up the sod and planted lawn grass around the house, mulching the new seed with a layer of straw. Rattlesnakes had taken over an old wolf den up the hill decades before, and whether they moved down to the yard for the mice the straw attracted or the moist shade it offered, I never knew. For a while it seemed I was growing a layer of snakes under the straw. Hoe in one hand, hose in the other, I would spray the seedbed twice a day, listening for a buzz through the rustle of water. But the grass grew. When the lawn could be clipped and the straw raked away, the snake population dwindled to an occasional migrant I'd catch napping in the flowerbeds.

  My daughter was born at the end of the second year. In the five years since then, my garden spot had doubled and doubled again, and still when the seed catalogues arrived in the spring, I grew restless for more space. As soon as the ground thawed, I was outside, moving a fence back, digging up rocks and sagebrush, spading out cactus. There was never a shortage of manure: cow, horse, chicken, wet or dry, we had it all. My harvests were spectacular, even in the drought years— bean crops measured in five-gallon buckets per picking, corn and cucumbers by the wheelbarrow, spuds, onions and carrots by the gunnysack. Flowers, more than fifty varieties, bloomed along the foundation of the house, in rock gardens and tractor tires filled with topsoil, though fewer than half of them really thrived. I kept moving the perennials, digging new beds, looking for a corner with just the right shelter, just enough sun.

  The skill was not so much in the planting, I told Carol as we walked the rows of frost-singed vines, but in selecting the seed stock. Only specially developed hybrids could stand the heavy gumbo soil, the late springs and harsh winters. While I dug potatoes and sorted them by size into buckets, she talked about her own work, teaching English at a community college, how she'd cut down to one semester when her husband retired but couldn't quite give it up. As we talked, a pickup load of hunters topped the hill above and began inching down the rutted road that led past the garden and around to the front of the house. I recognized the truck and waved them on from the garden, permission granted. Carol looked back toward the trail that led up and out, silent for some time.

  "So then there's winter," she said, turning back to my harvest operation. "What happens in the winter?" The soil had packed rock hard between rows of plants, and her question caught me jumping on the spade like a pogo stick. Stepping off, I wrenched the handle back and down. The bush lurched into the air and red potatoes boiled up through the dirt with a dull pop of roots. I stabbed the spade back into the loosened ground and leaned on it with crossed arms, not as winded as I seemed to be. Her question, the wise look in her eyes, unsettled me.

  "Well, winter's winter," I said lightly.

  "Can you get out, then, after it snows?"

  "Most days," I said, slowly, wondering what getting out meant to her, exactly. Visitors tended to see social life connected to town. We had many acquaintances in Malta, some good friends, but going to town was a different trip. More often than not, I traveled alone, John unable or unwilling to tear himself away from ranch work. On a routine trip to Malta, I would orbit the streets for hours, my three children growing dingier and crankier with each pass, no time or place to sit down but the cab of the pickup. I had business in Malta, a long list of vet supplies to find, repairs for broken-down machinery, bills to pay, banking to be done, checkups and immunization shots and a month's shopping to fit around feeding, watering and pottying a trio of excited preschoolers.

  In winter, groceries were the last stop. I grabbed something fast to fix for supper and whatever fresh produce would fit under our feet in the cab of the truck. The rest fit in back, packed to survive the wind chill of the ride home. Store clerks insulated the cardboard boxes with items that could freeze and not be damaged, saving the center for canned goods and glass jars. Stopping to visit in town meant unloading the boxes into someone's kitchen or porch, and loading them back up when we left. In milder weather, it was simply a long, late drive, kids asleep in frazzled heaps, arms flung limp over siblings and laps and sacks of oranges, all the unpacking to face at the end of the trail. We could get to town a hell of a lot more often than we did.

  "If you have to get out, generally you can," I said. "It depends on the wind, if the snow's deep or hard or whatever. The roads can change from one day to the next."

  Carol raised one eyebrow, shifting her weight to one hip. "So when do you have to get out?" she asked. A thrill of irritation puckered the skin on my arms. Visitors usually wanted details of a pioneer lifestyle, questions I could answer. What if someone gets sick? They don't, I'd say. When you're snowed in, you're not exposed to anyone else's germs. I could tell about blizzards, close calls. I took pride in my "tough guy" stories, and most city folks gasped and cooed in awe. "Weren't you afraid?" they'd say. "Don't you worry?" I'd bluff it on through. I had a favorite. "Well," I'd say, "when you're stuck in a drift you can either get out and shovel or you can sit in the cab and wring your hands for a while and then get out and shovel."

  I slid my hands down the handle of the spade and rested one foot on the blade. When did I have to get out? I looked at her blankly, a silence that should have changed the subject.

  Carol pressed on, oblivious. Her voice took on a persistent tone as she approached the question from another angle.

  "What if you just wanted to have dinner, see a movie?"

  I laughed. "Yeah, what if?" I pressed my foot down on the shovel to start it, then jumped and lit on the blade with both feet. Balancing, I began working it back and forth, cutting deeper and deeper into the packed clay.

  "You mean you could, but you don't," she said with a nod, as if she'd made her point once and for all.

  "No, I mean we could if we had to," I replied, still bouncing back and forth. I leaned back on the handle and another hill of potatoes erupted from the row between us. Carol moved with me, two paces to the right, as I set the spade at the base of a new plant with a solid chuck.

  "Most people would have to," she said simply. "I don't care where you live, a woman with nobody but babies and men all day, I don't know." She touched her forehead with one finger. "I suppose it's all up here, how you look at it, but I'd need time for myself. I think anyone would to be happy."

  Even as I felt the clean heat swell through my chest, I knew it was wholly out of proportion to what she'd just said. Hers was the fantasy world I read about in Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal, "Finding Time for You," "Take Care of Yourself First," articles that applied to me about as much as "Office Wear—How to Dress for Power." The shovel bit savagely into the dirt, too close to the plant, and I swore at the sound of metal grating into flesh. Moving back, I stomped once and unearthed the split potato. A film of dirt clung to the exposed meat, and I rubbed the halves down my pants leg before hurling them into a bucket.

  I looked at this woman, her legs so solidly planted in the broken earth, and I wanted to swing the shovel. If it wasn't courage that let me live out here, what was it? Apathy? Ignorance? Struggling to keep my face empty, my jaw loose, I opened my fist and dropped the spade, my silence another sacrifice. No. Carol was not like me. This was all part of our strength, dealing with these clueless outsiders.

  If I opened my mouth, where would I start? With the wind? Well, Carol, when the wind blows, a few inches of powder can drift the roads shut in an hour. Sure, we could shovel out—if we had to. Fifty miles to the highway, and when it fills back in behind you, you can shovel the same fifty miles back home. Before dark, if you're smart. Then there's the kid equation. Mine are five, four and two. Only an idiot would take a bad road with a kid too little to walk in deep snow or head for town when it's below zero with more kids in the rig than arms to carry them. Unless they have to. In winter, getting stuck is only one worry. A frozen fuel line, a broken fan belt, an engine failure at thirty below zero on a road where someone may or may not pass by for hours or days—for what? A movie? If no one ever froze to death on our county road it was not be
cause it couldn't happen, I thought furiously. We didn't let it happen.

  But even as I assembled my defense, my anger faded. I was sick of the taste of lies. The truth was harder than that, more complicated. There were times we couldn't have gotten out if we had had to, monthlong stretches in the winter when the roads were plugged solid with drifts, weeks during spring thaw when travel was done on the frost—early morning or late at night—or not at all. Other times the roads stayed passable all year. Good weather, you live here because you want to, I'd tell visitors. In bad weather you live here because you have to.

  Sometimes it was the not knowing that kept people close to home, a fear that passed for caution or common sense. A storm might blow up in the middle of a clear day, a few hours of wind, an inch of snow, and by suppertime a road the county plows took two days to clear might be socked in or blown bare. You never knew A shift and the mercury might rise, a chinook wind gust in from the west, and the cattle humped up by days of bitter cold would turn to face it, arching and stretching as the snow melted from their backs. The drifts would settle and glaze, but by night the air could grow still again. Sounds dulled by warmth all day turned sharp and brittle as the temperature followed the sun, sliding past zero and down, ten below, fifteen, twenty below

  Thirty-below-zero cold threw the senses out of kilter. The loose stretch of shale ridges above the creek bottom puckered into sharp pleats, drawn up in a common thread, squeezing closer as if the land itself were shrinking. In the eerie twilight of midwinter I could listen to chores from the doorstep, sounds looping the barnyard, chasing their own echoes—the ring of axe against ice in water troughs, the creak of boots on snow at the far end of the feedlot, the pop of a neighbor's tractor as loud as the slam of our shop door. We traveled on educated guesses then, calculating the risk. Could we put off the trip? Did we really need to get out? Wanting had so little to do with it. The whole business wasn't about "me" anymore.