by Jon E. Lewis
Grant is back in his chair, but now he’s thinking about his dead father, and before long Grant sees him. The whole room smells of him, the cold cattle blood he brought home under his fingernails every day from the yards, ten crescents of decay. He’s wearing his overalls, worn to the white warp everywhere but the pencil pocket. His neck is long, and bunches into dark sinews as it slides into his shirt. He walked five hundred miles in the furrows before he was fifteen; they changed teams at either end, but the boy held the reins all day and he walked alone so long that he learned to hear the voices in the ripping sound of parting roots; he walked in the furrows so much as a child that he tripped on smooth floors as a grown man, even years after the farm was lost.
Seems to me, boy, you got some things to attend to.
Grant nods; he’ll do anything not to meet that gaze of the father he loved. When he seemed beaten by life and by cancer, his look burned with coal fires, as if he’d been there before and would come back again. Grant would do anything to finish it, to be done with him for good.
How long can you last out here like this? A couple of days? A week?
He gets up at last and looks at his watch for the first time that day: it’s almost three. He’s hungry, and he goes into the kitchen and tries to find something to eat, not just something, but something good to eat. There’s nothing, just some American chop suey left over from the night before, a few hours before she opened her thighs for him and then stopped him and then was gone. He steps through the back door and out into the dusty yard. He doesn’t know who owns this place or any of the land around it; the owner probably doesn’t know he owns the place. Grant sends his rent to a lawyer in Pierre. It doesn’t matter, the place was Grant’s, and could have been always, but Lonnie missed the birds out here on the grassland, that’s what she said. She missed the sound of birds, the wave of wind through leaves, she missed the sound of people just passing the time.
He goes inside to the bedroom, gets dressed, and then walks back to his truck. He pulls around halfway into the garage, and then crawls under the camper top to off-load his welder and his tools. He brings one of the mattresses from the kids’ room and lays it out in the bed of the truck, and follows with a pile of blankets and pillows. He makes up a box of canned food and juice from the pantry and throws in a handful of knives and forks. He doesn’t really know what clothes the kids wear, but he does the best he can into four shopping sacks. He gets his razor. He gets his gun. He takes one last look around the house and then drives off.
Muellers’ is about two miles down the road, in a slight hollow that shields them from the worst of the winds but gathers the frost like low fog. It’s a big house, two floors and a porch, built by a farmer back when they thought bluestem grass could survive the winter. Grant drives up and Tillie meets him on the porch. “They’re havin’ supper,” she says.
“I’m leaving Leila with you.”
“I can’t take no babies,” says Tillie. She’s not as old as she thinks, but she’s telling the truth.
“That ain’t the plan,” Grant answers. “Just my oldest.” Tillie nods and the flesh bunches around her chin; she’s gotten fat out here, that’s what happens to good women when the kids are grown – they just keep cooking the same as before.
“I’ll explain myself to Hans,” he adds.
Grant waits on the porch. He listens to his children finishing their supper and tells himself he’s got nothing to be ashamed of.
“Evening, Grant,” says Hans, passing him a bottle of his best ale.
Grant takes it, and takes the plate of pork chops that Tillie brings out to him. They sit on the porch; it’s good to the west, clear and bright.
“I need a hundred, Hans,” says Grant.
Hans goes back into the house and brings back three hundred. It’s not kindness, it’s just what it takes. Inside, Tillie is running a bath.
“This happens out here,” says Hans. “Sometimes the women can’t see beyond the day-to-day. I can’t tell you why.”
Leila comes out to the porch, she’s got too much burden on her just now to cry or to be frightened. “Tillie wants to know if you want them in pj’s,” she says, and Grant nods.
Grant sees Tillie walking over to the truck from the back door and watches as she gathers the four sacks of clothes and carries them back to the house. She’s getting a limp and Grant knows it’s her hip, just like his mother. He hears the washing machine start up, and sits while Hans smokes his pipe, and then hears the clanking of overall buckles in the dryer. Pete and Scott come out, and they’re excited about sleeping on a mattress under the pickup cover. Scott has his teddy bear, and he’s telling Teddy all about it, about how maybe they’re going to Disneyland, which makes Grant think he may cry yet in front of Hans. Instead, it’s Tillie on the lawn who brings a Kleenex to her eyes, and she draws Leila back, right under her bosom, and crosses the loose flesh of her biceps over the girl’s soft cheeks. The baby is running hard back and forth over the lawn, and each time he makes a circuit he pats one of the truck wheels. “My turk,” he says.
Leila helps them pack the clothes up again, and Hans brings his Coleman stove from the barn. They get the baby into the car seat in front, and the two big boys onto the mattress. Grant hugs Leila, but she’s still afraid of love, still too brittle to let herself bend and knows it, even though Grant’s been good to her and will always. He starts the truck up and sees Hans listening carefully at the engine, until he’s sure he likes what he hears, because everything has to be smooth out here, the rhythm of a day’s work that leaves enough for tomorrow, and tomorrow.
“Sometimes,” says Tillie, “ God just wants to make sure He’s got your attention, is all.”
Grant nods and backs out. It’s a clear night, but there’s enough rain in the sky to bring out the musty acid of the grass. It’s sharp on his nostrils, but clean; he thinks he can trust it. He turns for Nebraska even though the hunter in him shouts, Why are you going south? She went west, she’s trying to outrun us to the mountains. Grant looks back through the sliding window into the camper; the older boys are asleep now. It’s in their blood to feel comfortable on the road, like Grant’s great-grandfather, who left his first, maybe even his second, family and jumped off from St. Louis and went all the way to the Pacific before he turned around back to Nebraska. He arrived in time to gather in the farms the first wave had won and lost, the wives mad, the husbands strangled with worry, the children sick and ancient.
Grant is tired, but the baby is alert in his car seat, his large blue eyes shiny. “ See big turk,” he says as a triple rig blows past. They’ve come down the Interstate to Murdo, and are now heading south again toward Rosebud. Grant doesn’t want to camp in the reservation, he’s hoping to get across the border and stop outside Valentine. He’s nodding a little, so he says, “Lots of fun,” to the baby. “See Auntie Gay.”
“See Mommy.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” he answers, and he realizes he hasn’t, in all this time, really thought about her, about Lonnie. He can’t start now; he can’t think of the sharp line of her jaw, or her easy laugh in bed. The baby is asleep now, his lower lip is cupped open like a little spoon. Grant crosses the Nebraska line, and he pulls into the first creek bottom he finds. He finds a level place to park under the steep sides of a sandhill, and carries the sleeping baby around to the back. He pushes Scott and Pete to one side, takes a moment to piss, and crawls in beside them. He can feel their three hot bodies, Grant and his boys curled together. He doesn’t know if this will ever happen again, or what will see him through the next few days, or whether his family will ever again be whole.
Everyone wakes crying, even Grant. The baby is soaked, and the air in the camper is strong with the smell of urine and shit. Scott’s whimpering for Mommy. Grant sets up the Coleman stove and starts to warm up two cans of corned beef hash, and Pete says, “ Where’s the ketchup. We always have ketchup.”
“There ain’t no ketchup,” says Grant.
�
�I don’t want to be here,” the boy whines, and that starts another round of tears from the other kids. “I want to go home.”
They eat, even without ketchup, and that makes everybody feel better. Grant sends Scott and Pete off to the small creek to rinse off the dishes and the frying pan, and when they come back he leads them off a bit behind an outcropping of sandstone and tells them to squat and poop. They think this is funny, and so does the baby, who joins them in the line and pretends to push as the other two drop hot brown fruit onto the dry soil. They’re back on the road, all four of them in the cab, a few minutes later, driving down the wide main strip of Valentine. They turn east, through Brown County, then Rock, and Holt. There are so many cars and trucks on the road that the baby kicks his feet with excitement; the boys keep asking him what color they are and he says, Red, and they laugh. There are so many pheasants along the road that Grant thinks for a moment of his shotgun, almost as if this was the hunting trip he’d always planned to take when they got older.
They pick up the Elkhorn River at Stuart and follow it down into O’Neill, where they stop and eat at McDonald’s. It’s as good as Disneyland for the boys; they each come out holding the plastic sand buckets and toys that came with the Happy Meals; by now they’ve figured out they’re going to Grandma’s. Grant wants to tell them what his father said years ago: these places suck the spirit right out of you. Grant was an eager boy then, but he knew his father was telling him this because they’d lost the ranch and now they were moving back to live with his mother’s family.
It’s Grant’s sister Geneva who comes to the door when he rings, and she tries not to look surprised. His ma used to say to him, “ It ain’t Gennie’s fault she was born without the gift of laughter.” She’s so slow unlatching the screen that Grant thinks maybe she isn’t going to, but Scott and Pete have already run around to the tire swing they remembered in back, and it’s just Grant holding the baby.
“We didn’t hear about this new one,” she says. She doesn’t ask about Lonnie; just the sight of Grant tending the youngest tells her she isn’t with them.
“I’m leaving the kids here for a few days.”
Grant knows she’s about to say he can’t leave no baby with them, but just then his ma comes around the corner pushing her walker. She’s shrinking, as if she’s just folding together through her disintegrating hips, but she’s tough; she’s sheltered Geneva all these years. She’s got room under those frail arms. Grant leans down to give her a kiss, and she smells like ashes.
“Where’s Lonnie?” she asks.
“She’s left me. I’m taking the baby to Gay’s,” he says.
“That ain’t going to work,” his ma answers. “She’s alone now, too.”
The baby squirms in his arms, and finally works himself upside down, reaching for the floor.
“Put him down,” his ma says. “There’s no fire in the stove. No one delivers coal anymore.” The baby comes over to the walker and slams his small hand on the tubing, and then starts to climb.
His ma brightens, but this gives Geneva her chance. “We can’t keep no baby.”
Grant goes out to the truck and brings back two of the remaining three bags of clothes. They still smell fresh from Tillie’s dryer, all folded and carefully placed, even though they’ve been knocked around some. He looks to either side, at the other green lawns and pleasant houses on this quiet, tree-lined street. He doesn’t know how his ma did this, how she kept the house after the meat-packing plant was locked one night without word from the owners. Two days earlier the steers had stopped coming in, and when they had split and carved their way through the emptying stockyards, there was nothing more to kill.
Grant takes a nap in the back room, the vacant sleep of townspeople; his dreams are wild, but they don’t mean anything. He wakes drugged but rested, and he eats supper with his ma while Geneva gets things ready for the boys to stay. “Go home, Grant,” says his ma. “Go home and wait.You can’t take the baby with you. Gay can’t and Gennie won’t keep him.”
He knows she’s right. He can’t take his baby with him, but he can’t wait either, because there is another baby that will need him when he finds Lonnie, a baby that may have to die anyway, but will most certainly not live if he waits for her at home. He says his goodbyes to the boys and gives Geneva fifty dollars. His ma works her way out to the truck and watches him put the baby back into the car seat. She’s standing there as he drives away, with the baby waving both hands, fingers straight out and spread like two small propellers. “Bye, bye,” he sings. “Bye, bye.”
They’re back out into the farmland in a few minutes, retracing their way toward Valentine. He’s still fevered from his nap, and even though he keeps shaking his head and has the windows wide open to the chilly air, his eyes feel puffy and heated. The baby’s content to ride high in his car seat, looking around at the land as they begin to roll into the sand hills. Grant doesn’t know how he’s going to work this: when he finds Lonnie she’ll see the baby and that may be the end of it right there, because two hours before she left, the baby had brought her to tears, had finally made her understand that never again in her whole life would something happen easy, that she would forever be fighting just to get through the day. And Grant had tried to comfort her first with love, and then sympathy, and then passion, and it had not worked.
“Piece of milk,” the baby sings. Everything from him is melody.
Grant reaches down for one of the bottles he filled at his ma’s. “No one wants you,” he says to the baby.
“O-kay,” he sings back, unblemished.
“No one but me,” says Grant finally, and he gives him one of his large round fingers to hold, and the baby drinks his bottle and falls asleep like that. When Grant gasses the truck in Valentine he puts him in back. The little warm head rolls into the soft of Grant’s neck; there’s a firmness about this body, an energy even when so completely at rest. This time he remembers to put on a dry Pamper, and then checks to make sure the screens on the sliding windows are strong and secure, and locks the tailgate from the outside.
It’s two in the morning when he crosses back into South Dakota. The grass doesn’t speak to him anymore, Grant’s at peace in the cab with his sleeping baby behind him. He knows Lonnie can be saved, he knows this now for the first time, as he and the baby dart back across the Rosebud Reservation. He sees the contempt that comes to his sister Geneva’s eyes when she thinks of Lonnie, and he knows why he loves Lonnie, because she’s chosen the living, the light. She’s not a whore, she did not become a whore on the plains; she became a mother. And she was not a whore when they met, in Pierre, just a nineteen-year-old from east river who had enough fire and humor not to panic when she was dropped by her boyfriend hundreds of miles from home. Grant was twenty: what difference did it make that they left the Elkhorn bar an hour later and he wasn’t even trying to cover up the erection stretching his jeans but wearing it out there for every man to see and to wonder what it would feel like to slip, once again, into a young body that was bony and tense and shivering with desire. What difference did it make that she was pregnant with Leila when they got married in Philip, in the lobby of the Gem theater because the usher was the only justice of the peace who wasn’t hunting. After the ceremony, if he wanted to call it that, they went to Marston’s store and were invited to pick a few things off the shelf, free, and all Lonnie wanted, or thought she should have wanted, was a giant-sized box of Pampers.
Grant pulls over finally behind the fairgrounds in White River and wakes up the next morning to the baby’s big grinning face. “Daddy, Dad-dee,” he says, pounding on Grant’s back. They stop at a café for breakfast – he doesn’t have the time to cook out anymore – and Grant feels a little funny there with the baby among the farmers and the road crew, as if they thought he was half man, and it hasn’t really occurred to him he’ll need to bring or ask for some kind of special seat for the baby. But the waitress is older than she looks, she gives the baby a handful of coffee stirr
ers to play with, and they are back on the road fast and up on the Interstate by ten, heading west.
He hopes to make Sheridan by mid-afternoon, then up into the Bighorn and through the Crow Reservation before he sleeps again. In front of them the grassland buckles and slides, building for the Black Hills. The baby gets restless and starts to cry and then scream, and Grant lets him out of the harness. It’s the tourist route, and there are billboards for Wall Drug and the Reptile Gardens, and exit signs for the Badlands and, later, for Mt. Rushmore. He knows she’s been this way, he knew it before he started, but now he feels it.
They’re in Wyoming, coming first into Beulah and now into Sundance. Grant wonders what the people who started this town were thinking of when they named it Sundance. He knows what it stands for: he’s heard the stories about ghost dancing and the sun dance, about men stitched to buffalo skulls with pegs through their breasts. He knows what it stands for, but he doesn’t know what it means; no one does, maybe not even the Indians, maybe not even the Indians who danced. It was something for the spirit, not the body; it was too powerful, and forbidden, nothing like this town that is so quiet a generation could live and die before anyone noticed.
He has to stop a few times at rest areas to let the baby run around, and at Gillette he buys a grab bag full of small toys, and a long tube of Dixie cups that he hands back one by one through the window for two hours until the whole camper is covered with them. “Nother cup!” squeals the baby with delight and surprise, each time. Grant’s begun to catch the rhythm of the two-year-old. He wishes he didn’t have the baby with him for this last dash to the mountains, but as long as he’s got him, he’s grateful for the company, for a pal. Grant’s got his friends stretched across the plains: they’ll never leave the plains. But maybe he’s never had a buddy, and maybe he’s never guessed that a baby could be a buddy, willing and cheerful to go along, always surprised by events. The land is getting drier, baked hotter over the shining stones and the white rim of alkalai at the waterlines. Lonnie is headed for the mountains, just the way the wagon trains kept the mountains ahead of them, no one worrying about snow in the high passes. Nothing was more foreign to them than the plains. At night, they sang their hymns and hoped the sounds carried beyond the glow of the campfires. They knew they were up against something on the plains. Something that, if they chose to wrestle, they would never be able to let go. He drives past a car wreck and it’s a terrible one, two bodies laid out under tarpaulins, casualties on the way to the Bighorn. This is how it was told to him, like every schoolchild – that Custer would be alive today if he had stayed in South Dakota, but he was teased deeper and deeper into the grass. And it was the same for Lewis and Clark, led by the trapper Charbonneau, but they had a girl with them, an Indian girl, a sign of love and the promise of a gift. She was pregnant just like Lonnie, and it must have been pain, pain beyond the reckoning even of Indian fighters from Virginia, that Captain Lewis and Captain Clark saw the night she gave birth to the child.