Those timid young men in high school had long since graduated and gone into the service. Rumor held that in the Army, innocence was quickly lost. However, Ray apparently had worked away into adulthood, stuck out here on this farm. He was as lost as one of those pimple-faced and innocent boys on a first date back in high school, more self-conscious and jittery than I’d imagined a grown man could be.
I wondered if I should move back next to the window, but then, how would he take that? I didn’t know what to do, so I ended up staying penciled in the seat next to Ray. But as we drove through some curves, I made certain I didn’t accidentally fall over and brush up against him.
He showed me the bean fields, the onions fields, and finally the “head gates” that brought water from the canals onto his land and down feeder ditches to the crops. “We get our water from the Fort Lyon, the longest canal in Colorado. A hundred and thirteen miles long.”
“Ah,” I said.
We never left Singleton land. We never saw another soul, either. On the way back, Ray started telling me the names of weeds growing along the roadway. Rabbit brush, apparently, had just finished blooming.
Over the next few days, I saw Ray early in the morning before dawn and late in the evening just before sunset, when he arrived back at the house, sweaty and hungry. For dinner, I experimented with baking the beef, pork, and chicken I found in the icebox, fresh meat Ray had swapped with other farmers in the area, and for side dishes I heated cans of vegetables. Eating out of cans was considered most luxurious in those days, but the only fresh vegetables Ray brought in were some of the last tomatoes, so I had little choice. Usually I started my preparations way too early, then I had to let the meal sit and wait on the table until Ray returned. After he tromped in, he headed for the shower first, then sat and silently prayed for long minutes while the food continued to turn older.
During the day, I cleaned the house and swept off the porch. I ironed all the clothes in my closet and refolded my lingerie in the drawers. Outside, the animals snorted and brayed to remind me I wasn’t totally alone, but Ray stopped coming back and checking on me midday. The only reading material I had was the La Junta Tribune, which came a day late, delivered by the rural mail carriers on the star route. We had no telephone, and no one came to call.
In the evenings, Ray and I ate dinner together at the table. After eating, Ray always took an hour or so to work on farm business. He spread out receipts and ledger books on the table, pondered over them, and scratched down notes with a pencil. After he finished, he shoved everything back into one manila folder, marked simply “1944,” and crammed it inside a kitchen drawer. Afterward, he usually opened his Bible and read a few pages, then we listened to radio programs or worked on making conversation.
After four long days of this, I told him over dinner, “We could stand to stock up on groceries.”
He glanced up between bites of bread. “Sure thing. I’ll drive you into town tomorrow.”
“I can drive a car.”
He rumpled the napkin to his face and said, “Sure enough?” But his eyes told me he was uncertain. “Sometimes the clutch on that truck tends to stick.”
“I’ll learn how to handle it.” I wanted to pat his hand or his back in the same manner one assures a child, but most certainly he would’ve crumbled into ash if I’d touched him. “If it would make you feel better, I’ll drive with you along first, so you can see for yourself.”
He still looked as if he had just chewed cactus. “Tomorrow, then,” he said.
The next morning, I drove with him in the truck, the “beet box,” as Ray called it, west toward La Junta, where I got my first glimpse of Japanese interns toiling in the fields along the way, their dark hair like ripe blackberries among the greenery.
Ray gestured that way and said, “They’re from Camp Amache.”
“But isn’t that a long way east of here?”
“The government brings them in, puts them up, so they can work where needed.”
“Will they come to your farm?”
“You mean our farm?”
A second later, I nodded.
“Sure enough.”
We passed through La Junta and drove the paved road south-west all the way to Trinidad. Ray said it had a feed store with the best prices, and therefore justified the farther traveling. But as I was driving, I realized he had chosen the route purposefully. Maybe he wanted to drive all that distance so I could see some variety in terrain, or maybe he wanted me to get a long drive under my belt, or maybe he wanted to observe my driving skills on less-traveled roads. I didn’t know or ask why. At any rate, I enjoyed taking the same route that had once been part of the Santa Fe Trail, the path that had brought pioneers, trappers, and traders into the former hunting grounds of roaming bands of Arapaho and Cheyenne. Now the road passed quickly through farmlands that changed to range lands, then through virgin prairie land still not tilled or grazed.
By the time we reached Trinidad, I was used to the stiff clutch and loose steering of Ray’s truck. I even backed it into a spot between two others along the former trail, now Main Street.
The town of Trinidad struck me as a conundrum of differences: adobe buildings next to brick Victorians, coal miners among sheep and cattle ranchers, citizens of Mexican descent among Anglos. Cobblestones covered the hilly streets of old downtown not far from the smoothly paved blacktop highway. Without a military base nearby, the town was distinctive for extremes of ages, too. Children ran in and out of the shadows cast by store-fronts, whereas a prevalence of older men and women seemed to thrive inside the shadows, becoming a denser part of the darkness themselves.
“I’ve read about Trinidad,” I told Ray and handed him back the keys to the ignition. “This is one of the oldest towns in the state.”
Ray headed for the feed store while I headed for the library. I hadn’t opened my book on Egypt yet; somehow I couldn’t do it here. But I was desperate for something to read.
As I walked the downtown area, I noticed the lack of attention I received. People passing me on the street looked beyond me, as if one sideways glimpse had already told them I didn’t belong. During the war, we were taught that anyone could be a spy, even a nice-appearing or pleasant person. Posters everywhere featured Uncle Sam holding a finger to his lips. “Shhh.” Don’t give away secrets. “Loose lips sink ships.” The message was on the radio, in the newspapers, and in movies. But as I walked on, I doubted that distrust was the reason I was being ignored in this place. In the city, passersby on the street didn’t notice each other, either, but it had to do more with preoccupation and hurriedness. Here, I got the impression that newcomers or visitors simply didn’t matter.
I sped up. By the time I reached the library, I was salivating like Pavlov’s dog. Inside the door, I paused for a minute, breathing it in. I loved everything about the library, even the smell of dust on the bookshelves. I loved fingering through tight card catalogs, perusing the rows of endless subject matter, lifting books so word-heavy they felt as though they might break my arm. In the local history section, I read up on Trinidad. First a favorite camping spot for nomadic tribes and later mountain men, the town became a stopping point for Conestoga wagons heading south over Raton Pass on the trail to Santa Fe.
When I ran out of reading time, I signed up for a library card and checked out the most detailed local history book I could find, a basic cookbook, and The Sun Also Rises. I had read some of Hemingway’s later books, but had always intended to read this early one that had made him famous. Now would be my chance.
On the way back, Ray drove. I tried enjoying the silence. Before me, the domed sky was even larger than the sage lands below it. As we passed under the shade of high clouds, I turned to face Ray across the seat. “Do you know much about the history of this land we’re driving through?”
He shrugged and kept his eyes focused on the empty road ahead. “Can’t say that I do.”
“I found it in this book.” I spread my fingers over the wrink
led leather cover. “It was once part of a huge land grant belonging to Mexican citizens.”
He shook his head. “Didn’t know that.”
“The grant covered four million acres, but U.S. courts threw out Mexican claims for lack of written proof, and the lands were opened up for homesteading, for example, to your family.” I only wanted to share a conversation, but as the words came out of my mouth, I realized they sounded like a school report.
“That so?” Ray said. He glanced over his shoulder at the things he’d piled in the truck bed. Clearly he wasn’t interested in what I was saying.
“What about your family, Ray? How did they come here and why?”
He crunched himself deeper into the driver’s seat. “Well. They came out here and started farming.”
“In what year? Where did they live?”
Again, he focused straight ahead. “Don’t rightly know the details. Better ask Martha,” he said. “Our grandma used to tell us all about that stuff, but I’m sorry to say I’ve gone and forgot it.”
Now I looked straight ahead, too. Shimmering distances on the horizon never came closer. After we passed a train going in the opposite direction, I waited until the high whine of the steam whistle left the still air, then I pointed to the tracks. “In some places the ruts are so deep you can still see the old Santa Fe Trail. Right there, between the tracks and this road.”
“Sure enough?” he said, but that was all.
Afterward, I tried reading my book but had to stop because it was making me motion sick. And the only other thing Ray told me was the name of the high point along the road, Jack’s Point, a grazing spot for mules. When we stopped for groceries in La Junta, I couldn’t think of anything to talk to him about as we walked the few aisles picking out canned goods and produce together.
Before we left town I bought a copy of the other La Junta newspaper, the Democrat, and looked over copies of both the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post, all of which I found out were available for mail delivery. I decided to subscribe to the Denver Post. Reading about events a day late was better than not reading about them at all.
The following morning, I got up out of a sound sleep to make Ray breakfast. He shoveled it down and headed out the door, then I returned to my room and napped until a more reasonable time for awakening. The next two days, however, Ray started staying around later in the mornings. I heard him up before dawn, just as before, but then he’d be shuffling around the house instead of leaving it. When I got up, there he was, waiting around in the kitchen for breakfast and drinking down coffee.
One morning I told him, “You don’t have to stay in because of me.”
He had continued sipping out of his mug and didn’t look up. “I just been more tired, is all.”
I opened my mouth, just about to do it, to correct his English. Most of the time Ray spoke correctly, but every so often he slipped up. He reminded me of fellow students I’d known who had grown up without proper English having been spoken in their households. They knew the correct ways from schooling, but sometimes what they heard at home accidentally sneaked out of them, and how those errors embarrassed them, especially around students such as me, who rarely even slumped to slang. So I closed my mouth before I could say a word to Ray.
The next morning, after I’d made pancakes and fried eggs for breakfast, Ray drank coffee and lingered until the sun was well up into the eastern sky. I asked him about the harvest, and he answered by naming machinery and listing a nondescript course of events I had difficulty following. He told me about various fields, reminding me that he had shown them to me during our drive. But I couldn’t remember one field from another, although I pretended I could.
After he went out to the truck and drove away, I sat until my coffee turned cold. I finished cleaning the kitchen and watched the breeze coming in through the window screen, how it lifted the curtain into an arc, dropped it, then lifted it again.
How could something as big as this farm feel so confining? I’d only been here a week, but it felt more like a month. And I’d never spent so much time alone before. Already I’d discovered the weird things I was capable of doing, the thoughts I was capable of entertaining, during too much free time. I’d already examined my hair up close in the mirror and categorized all the different strands of color I found there. I’d studied my toes, counted clouds in the sky, and tried to discern the different facial expressions that could be made by a cow. I’d wondered how many people would die overseas in the time it took me to make up my bed.
Soon I folded up my apron, changed from loafers to sneakers, and headed for the outbuildings I’d been staring down ever since my arrival. I found the barn guarded at the open doors by a milk cow that was so big up close I hate to admit it scared me. From behind the cow, a long-eared hound plodded out the barn doors. I had seen him from afar several times before, but he’d kept his distance from the house. Now as I stood outside the barn, he chugged up to me like a streetcar going uphill. He padded circles about me, sniffing my scent that had fallen down into the dust. I reached down and rubbed the bony top of his head and stroked down his backbone—a string of marbles set out under a rug.
“Hey, boy,” I whispered to him.
Now he sniffed around my neck and huffed out dog breath that made me smile and remember. When I was a child, we’d never been allowed a pet. But Abby, Bea, and I had often visited a neighbor who kept a yard full of schnauzers and miniature poodles, so we grew up with some knowledge of pets and no fear of dogs. When one of the poodles gave birth to a litter, we each chose a favorite before those pups had a chance to open their eyes. Although we couldn’t take them home, Abby and Bea chose fat white ones, and I picked a wriggling black that reminded me of a caterpillar. I still remember the name I gave him: Shadow.
That old hound padded along with me as I moved on. We passed by rows of crops lined out to the horizon. This was a place of leaves, stalks, and stems in every shade of green, ordered and watered by man but grown by the blue, dry sky. The land was breathing deeply. Human exchange of air seemed meager compared to all the synthesis going on at ground level, and the houses and buildings seemed simply like small boxes of right angles and deadwood planks surrounded by all these big, buzzing fields.
A clay-colored tumbleweed wedged between rows of green leaves caught my eye. Thorny, trapped, and out of place, it let me know the insignificance of any one, distinctive thing caught in a place so mapped with sameness. Aunt Eloise and Aunt Pearl had once accused me of hiding out in school. Instead Father had sent me into hiding here, where the openness of land and sky made hiding out about as unlikely as finding clover among the sage.
I went past a windmill that pumped water out of the well, a wind charger that Ray had told me provided our electricity, and a gasoline storage tank. Behind the barn and next to the livestock pond, I found the last of the outbuildings. Stacked with crates and old tools, the inside of the shed smelled like the attic where my mother had once kept boxes of our old dolls and dresses. On a shelf, I found the hand tools Ray’s mother must have used for flower gardening. I picked up a small trowel, brushed off the dirt, and passed it slowly from one hand to the other. It was already too late to start summer annuals, but in the fall, I could still plant bulbs.
I searched over and under the other shelves in the shed and found things I hadn’t expected to find. In the house, there seemed to be room for only the most practical of items. But here, I found pieces of the past—an old wooden butter churn, a small pie safe, buttonhooks, and a flat pan with a long handle that was once used to heat bedding. Pioneers would heat the pan over the fire, then run it in between the sheets to warm them before slipping in for the night.
The butter churn and the pie safe needed to be sanded and refinished, but the buttonhooks and pan simply needed polishing. Everything I found could be worked on and restored. I could even learn to do the restoration myself. Soon I found an empty burlap bag, shook it open, and began stacking it inside with the things I wanted.
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br /> That evening, Ray came in early. I was just about to tell him about the shed when he asked, “What do you say we go and visit my sister tonight?” Then he headed for the bathroom.
Maybe he sensed I needed a change, or maybe he needed one himself. “For dinner?” I called after him.
“You bet,” he said as he closed the door.
I looked about for the telephone before remembering we didn’t have one. “Don’t we need to let her know we’re coming?” I called back.
“No need,” he answered from behind the door.
While he showered, I chose my khaki-colored dress with collar and shoulder pads that I had bought while shopping with my friend Dot shortly after Mother’s death. Never before had I bought anything so military-inspired, as was the latest fashion, but after I had tried it on at May Company and with Dot’s reassurances, I had decided it was a good fit and quite flattering. I donned the dress, polished my shoes, and then combed out my hair and put it up in pincurls so that just before we left, I could take it down and style it in a bob to graze my shoulders.
Ray came out dressed in his better slacks and a clean plaid shirt. He had washed his hair and combed it over the thinning area on top, but obviously hadn’t checked the back of his head. Open to the air, his biggest bald spot shined like an Easter egg in the grasses.
Finally ready, Ray and I slid into the truck. As he started the engine, Ray looked my way. “Onions are ready. This’ll be the last chance to get out for a long time coming.”
The trip took us nearly twenty minutes of travel down rutted dirt roads, over wooden bridges without railings, and past wind-mills that creaked around in silent currents of air. As we passed by some spare green plants I hadn’t seen before, I asked Ray, “Are those tomatoes?”
“No. Those are potatoes.”
The Magic of Ordinary Days Page 4