by Judy Blunt
The prairie rolled along as it always had. On an unfenced stretch of road we called the Veseth Pasture, a small band of antelope crossed in front of the car, and I pulled over and stopped for a moment to watch. Overhead, a pair of red-tailed hawks coasted on a lazy round of air, the dip and glide of pronghorns chasing the shadow of their wings on a landscape largely unchanged since the day I left. But I knew better. The changes had occurred over the rise, back from the road a ways, where the people lived. Fewer than half the families I grew up knowing still lived in the Regina and Sun Prairie communities, and fewer still had another generation beginning on the land. Although still locally owned, many of the ranch buildings I'd passed on my way south from Malta stood vacant, their secret given away by the stripe of tall weeds that grew down the center of the lanes leading in from the county road. Some, nearer to the highway, had strands of wire stretched across the cattle guards, a deterrent to hunters and joy-riding high school kids, but no real defense against thieves and vandals in four-wheel-drives—the sort of outsiders ranchers worried about now
The school's sale day began with a cool rain shower that cleared the air and stopped before the roads became too slick to get around. My sisters, Margaret and Gail, drove with me to Second Creek School in the morning to thumb through the amassed boxes and make up auction lots of our own choosing. Midway through disassembly, the schoolroom and the teacher-age were chaotic. Larger items were already moved to the auction site, while supplies and materials with mostly sentimental value had been pulled from shelves and piled in heaps. The offerings ran the gamut from worn turn-of-the-century primers to the little Apple II computer the community had helped acquire in the eighties by collecting and redeeming Campbell soup labels. The old brass handbell our teachers had rung to call us in from recess had disappeared from the school one hunting season years before, but some obvious plums—like the old Red Wing drinking crock—were expected to draw spirited bidding. I searched for the alphabet story cards we'd used in first grade, but they were missing, perhaps buried under tons of books and materials, but more likely discarded in favor of the more modern, cartoon-style ABCs in primary colors that circled the schoolroom.
All the boxed lots accumulated by neighborhood volunteers in the morning were numbered and moved to the auction site at the First Creek Community Hall that afternoon. Margaret and I drove over together, and in the end bid ten dollars for a box we'd handpicked that included a dented tin globe, a couple of sets of Winston readers, and a dozen storybooks from the thirties and forties that I remembered reading as a child.
Driving back to the ranch from the Hall, we paused, with time to kill, at the site of our first school. Only a jog in the barbed wire fence told us where South First Creek School had been; no sign marked the spot and no man-made artifacts remained visible from the road. The grass had grown up thick and green where our feet once trampled it to bare dirt, and recent rains had set the prairie blooming with the small, close flowers we both remembered. The wild parsley we called cat's-paw, curlycup gumweed and broom snakeweed glowed yellow and gold. Here, the lick of scarlet globe mallow and pincushion cactus, there, a sprinkle of cool lavender and pale blue in the low mounds of moss phlox.
We poked around through the grass, keeping one eye and one ear tuned for rattlesnakes, and quickly found the concrete step that once led into the school's entryway. With that to center my gaze, I could see a vague outline of the building in the vegetation, and on the south side, a couple of shallow, parallel troughs in the grass where our swing set had been. We laughed at how tall the grass had grown at the western end, where the outhouses used to stand. The old South First Creek building had been sold to a Sun Prairie rancher to use for storage, the outhouses relocated to Second Creek School the summer it was finished. We'd just watched them sell for a few dollars apiece. Little else remained.
It was a beautiful afternoon, and we were in no hurry. I smiled as I shook off the buzz of town life and breathed in the absolute silence, the rich smell of spring sage after a rain. I was back in the cradle of my childhood, surrounded by everything, and nothing. Blank horizons marked north, Malta some fifty miles away, and south, where the Missouri River Breaks lay invisible, tucked below the surface. To the east, a slim blue streak marked the Larb Hills; to the west, the Little Rocky Mountains stood in silhouette, and though the profile had changed gradually since the seventies, I found my eyes drawn back to the huge bite dredged from the center of the range by Pegasus gold mines, the missing peaks visible a hundred miles away.
It was on the prairie itself, a short distance from the schoolyard, that I found a solid piece of my past. There, half buried in sod, were the rock houses built by a generation of grammar school girls in the fifties and sixties. Not three-dimensional except in concept, a rock house was made like a floor plan, with a rectangle of large, same-size rocks outlining the exterior "walls" and smaller ones marking off the interior rooms; gaps in the walls denoted doorways. The rest of the house existed only in our imaginations. For years we had played rock house during recesses when the weather was mild, returning to the same small plot when the snow drew back in spring, as a bird might return to its old nest. Every autumn when school began, we reseated any rocks dislocated by grazing cows over the summer, then scoured the prairie for more to expand and improve the walls. The best rocks were quite difficult to find, like the highly prized pink granite and the darker green-flecked field stones, and more than once I sneaked rocks to school from home in the back of the pickup.
I recognized my house at once by the layout, though I recalled it being much larger. The living room and kitchen made up more than half the house, and the three small "bedrooms" alongside were just large enough for an adult to sit in cross-legged. Some old lessons survived with the stones—one did not step over the wall of a rock house. On that June afternoon, thirty-odd years after I had last done so, I walked around the perimeter and entered through the front door. Inside these rooms, we had enacted the social rituals of our grandmothers and mothers, the formal invitations crayoned one recess, guests assembling the next. We younger girls took our cues regarding proper rock house decorum from our elders, the seventh and eighth graders. The older the girl, the bigger the rocks used in her house, and the more impressive her collection of broken crockery and glassware scavenged from the homesteader's dump over a rise to the west. Bits of prairie foliage, even an insect or two, served as imaginary luncheon on the salvaged china. I'd been a fifth grader when the school closed, one of the last to serve "air tea" and grasshopper drumsticks on broken Depression ware to a circle of ranchwomen-in-training.
How I had grieved for this land, that first spring in Missoula. Gardenless, landless, craving anything secure and familiar, I had bought seeds and planted an edge of the alley to bachelor's-buttons, the hardy, familiar flowers of my childhood. I did everything the same as I had done at the ranch, but I barely recognized the results. Plant varieties that grew a few inches tall in compressed gumbo grew waist-high here, their blossoms twice the size of their eastern Montana cousins. My neighbors did not understand my enthusiasm for this back-alley plot of pink and blue monster-flowers. When one after another took me aside and explained how bachelor's-buttons spread like dandelions in this climate, I could only nod, unable to give an accounting for my poor judgment. Everything about my former life seemed so odd, then, so hard to explain.
In the years that followed, I would find other elements of my old world growing in this new one, with no less surprise. I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings
. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here.
I left my house as I found it, settling into the sod a year at a time. The prairie will reclaim its squared corners and straight walls as it has gradually, patiently, taken back the tepee rings left centuries before. Driving the narrow, familiar road back to my parents' ranch, I felt a sense of peace, imagining my house hundreds, thousands of years from now, suspended far below the surface of the shortgrass plains, five stone rooms that hold apart of me, still.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Judy Blunt spent more than thirty years on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana, before leaving in 1986 to attend the University of Montana. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship and a Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Breaking Clean was awarded a 1997 PEN/Jerard Fund Award for a work in progress, as well as a 2001 Whiting Writers' Award. She lives in Missoula, Montana.
