Book II
dust
7
spring 1932
There are a few events that can’t be exaggerated—that no matter how much people talk or write about them, the full force of the experience can’t be appreciated unless you were there.
From what I’ve read and imagined about living through a war, the Depression came as close to that particular hell as anything in terms of taking hold of people’s senses and shaking the life out of them, day after day, until we weren’t always sure where the sun would rise the next morning.
I guess death has a way of affecting you whether you know it or not. With our livestock toppling over every day, we had to become indifferent toward death to prevent it from overwhelming our spirit, and our will to survive. Carcasses were strewn everywhere, the bones pushing through withered hides, their necks twisted in unnatural positions. It was as if they, in their last moment, noticed something that would save them, reached for it, only to die a tongue’s length away. There were also dead people, some walking beside the road, some showing up at the door, paper-thin hat in hand, begging to work for a meal or a bed for the night. And although we obliged them, often even giving them a few days’ work, it felt as if we were only delaying the inevitable.
There seemed to be a part of us all that was dead, the part that would normally take note of death and ponder it for a moment, or feel something. It was as if this was energy we could not afford to use, as we had to work harder than ever just trying to keep ourselves and our livestock alive. As the grass became thinner, and the locusts became thicker, we had to rotate our stock more frequently, and make sure their sources of water hadn’t dried up. And as our hay became less plentiful, we had to find creative ways to keep them fed in winter.
Our family was more fortunate than most. Ironically, I think George’s and Katie’s deaths played a role in that success. Because we tried to forget those deaths by working like hell, we had a little more reserve than most. Dad, Bob, and I also worked extra jobs during the Depression years, just to get by. We worked on the road crews up by Alzada, and Dad even tended bar from time to time. We were able to afford feed. But I heard that some folks had to peel bark from trees to feed their sheep.
We had to keep moving, and for this reason, as much death as there was around us, we were also more alive than ever. Both things were true, at once and together, and both were merely a result of being scared as hell. And it was clear that what killed a lot of people, in body or in spirit, was that they sat down and stopped. Like someone lost in a blizzard. They gave in to the fear, or to the loneliness.
The interesting thing about our county was that by the time the Depression hit, we had already experienced a difficult decade. In the twenties, half the banks in Montana had closed, rainfall had been well below average, livestock and grain prices were down, and many of the honyockers that inundated our little corner of the state had gone against conventional wisdom and used farming methods such as a machine that pounded the ground until the topsoil blew away with the slightest wind. Much of the topsoil in our county was gone before the Depression even started. Because of this, the amateurs, the less dedicated, the disillusioned, were mostly gone by 1929. Most of us who were left were survivors already, so we knew what it took.
But if we had known in 1929 that the drought was going to last another ten years, we could have set our fields on fire, and shot three quarters of our stock. It would have had the same effect.
We took four steps back for each step forward. But every now and then, one foot crept out and made a mark in the dust just ahead of the last one. An inch or two felt a lot like a mile. And each of these tiny successes seemed to come just when we needed it. Just when we were about ready to sit down. Every time the sky surrendered a few drops of moisture, or the price of beef rose a penny or two, we held that in the front of our minds, running it over time and again for confirmation, and straining our spirits to will this to be the point where things would turn.
We had to believe that each little step represented the beginning of the end. And to help ourselves along, we had to create a few bright spots of our own. A lot of people got married, and too many babies were born. A woman in Capitol had eight babies during the thirties, and told anyone who would listen that she was trying to force a little mercy from God. Just doing her part.
Soon after Rita’s accident, and Jack’s disappearance, the Stillwell girl that Bob wasn’t sweet on became a regular guest at our dinner table. And even more often, Bob spent the evening calling on her. On the nights that he didn’t eat at Stillwells’, or she wasn’t here, Bob would attack his plate as if he’d never eaten before, then sit in the living room, pretending to lounge around. His knee would bounce up and down as if it was about to run out of the room on its own. And his eyes, which were already round, would get that wild, jerky look of someone who thought the law was after him. Finally, he would get up, stretch, and announce, to no one’s surprise, “Well, I think I’ll take a little drive.”
About the time he stopped trying to fool anyone, Helen went back to Spearfish, where she attended the teachers college. And I’ve never seen a good hand go bad so fast in all my life. Bob’s skill as a handyman saved his hide. Because once a week he ran some piece of equipment over a rock or into a ditch. After a few weeks of this, our team of horses even figured out that someone was in love. They’d get stubborn each time Bob took the reins, refusing to move. Thankfully, Helen came home most weekends, so he didn’t completely lose his head.
Helen finished school the following spring, and in a stroke of good fortune for Bob, the teacher at the Albion school decided to move back to Missouri, so Helen got the job. She and Bob courted for another year, at her insistence, and they took their vows on a beautiful May afternoon, when the tips of the grass were just beginning to green. We had a reception at our house, and there just happened to be a dance in Alzada that evening. Around nine o’clock, a string of honking vehicles, led by Bob and Helen, snaked the fifteen miles from our place to Alzada.
The first few times Bob brought Helen Stillwell around the house, I thought she was the friendliest person I’d met in a good long while. She was curious—asking question after question. She made me feel as if my life, my opinion, were interesting to her. And I watched the effect of this ability on other people, too. She had a gift—people’s guarded manner would melt away in a matter of minutes. Their arms would uncross. Their eyes stopped wandering to other parts of the room. And most significantly, their jaws loosened until it looked as if she’d have them talking all night.
And all the time Helen listened, intent, staring directly up at you. She was small, with short curly hair, schoolgirl cheeks, and soft blue eyes, all of which helped remove any sense of threat from her incessant questioning.
But her charm only worked on me for these first few meetings. I started to feel uneasy with her probing, and the long strings of compliments. There was an element of intrusion to her methods, and I began instinctively to slam the door when she started knocking. I was then faced with the problem of conversing with her without blatantly, rudely dodging her questions. I tried, but she was very aggressive, and I’ve never been a comfortable liar. It seemed the only way to avoid her questions was to avoid her. It wasn’t long before I’d gotten on her bad side. I became close to invisible when she was around. Conversations would bounce around the dinner table, under her deft hand, touching on the events of each person’s day except mine.
“You’re awfully quiet tonight, Blake,” Mom observed on one of these occasions.
“Oh, he’s the deep one,” Helen jumped in, smiling at me. “Still waters, they say. Right, Blake?”
And thus she shut me up before I could even respond. And at the same time charmed everyone else. But actually, I couldn’t have been happier about it. Because verbally she was an expert, and that made me nervous. And because I had so little experience at verbal sparring, I knew I was no match for her.
“Blake, are you going to da
nce with your mother?” Mom’s round face was shiny with sweat and pure joy. She stood in front of me, her hands clasped behind her back.
I grabbed her waist and swung her onto the floor. She squealed, then laughed, throwing her head back, her mouth wide open. We fell into a two-step, shifting and sliding our feet in unison, tilting from one side to the other. The back of Mom’s dress was cool and moist, and I felt the moisture in my own shirt, under my suit jacket.
“So what do you think?” Mom asked, smiling up at me.
“I think I’m going to be the old maid in this family.”
She laughed and nodded. “You are the steady one, aren’t you?”
Mom, now in her fifties, still looked much the same as she had twenty years before, younger than her slender peers, who stooped from years of lugging kids, firewood, and buckets of milk and water. The creases in her face seemed to have always been there. She’d earned them, and they looked good and right on her brown, broad cheeks. Her hair was still the color of a muted sunset, and the color was striking set against the black cotton dress she had made for the occasion.
“Helen and Bob are going to need more space than he has in his room,” Mom said, looking earnestly at me.
I dipped a little as the music did, but my mind worked, and I saw what was coming. “Yeah. I suppose they will.” I looked down at her, but she wasn’t about to say anything more. It was up to me to make the offer. “They can have my room. We can switch.”
She nodded, but her distracted manner told me that this wasn’t the answer she was looking for. She waited a few more bars before readdressing the issue. “I’m wondering if maybe Rita and the boys shouldn’t move to the big house,” she said.
The song ended, and we stood in the middle of the floor, waiting for the next one. Mom was looking at me, but her eyes were focused more on my forehead than on my eyes. I did some figuring. Bob and Helen in one room. Rita in another. The boys in the third. Muriel in the fourth. And of course Mom and Dad. This left only one person, and no more rooms.
“You want me to move to the old house?”
Mom threw her arms around me, and for a second I thought she was doing it out of remorse for this request, but in fact the music had started again.
“Just for a while,” she said. “Until Jack comes back, or until Bob and Helen start having kids. Who knows? Muriel might even get married soon.”
This seemed unlikely. Muriel was busy with college in Spearfish, and she hadn’t mentioned any suitors. I was amazed to hear that Mom assumed that Jack would return.
I thought, and knew the suggestion made some sense. I even liked the idea of living alone for a while. But what gnawed at me was who had hatched the plan. I was certain it had been Helen, and the fact that she wanted to submit me to this little exile made me wonder what other tricks she might have up her sleeve. I had a feeling that my new sister-in-law was about to liven things up at the Arbuckle Ranch, and soon.
We had heard nothing from Jack. Nor from anyone else. No sightings, no rumors, nothing.
The initial effect of this on Rita broke my damn heart. Jack’s behavior toward her when she fell off the horse had not gone unnoticed, of course. She had been moved by this rare show of tenderness and concern, and I’m sure it gave her brief hope of seeing more of the Jack she had fallen in love with. But when she woke up the next morning, and we told her he was gone, she rolled her head across her pillow, and tightened her lower lip against her teeth. We all crept from the bedroom except Mom, whose murmurings we heard from within.
As far as I know, no one told Rita what happened that night with Jenny. I don’t think it would have mattered, anyway. Because after several months, it was clear that something else was keeping Jack away—something we’d probably never understand. By now, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was George, but I didn’t tell anyone else that.
When it became clear that Jack wouldn’t be back any time soon, we all expected Rita to pack up the kids and return to New Jersey, to her family. Not that we suggested it. We didn’t want her to go. Especially me, of course. But we did discuss it briefly, and we all agreed that in the same situation, we would probably want to be with our family. So we waited for her to announce her departure. And because I was so sure she would leave, I gave little thought to the effect it would have on the dynamics of the ranch if she stayed.
One night when she and the boys came for supper, Rita was reluctant to leave, and it seemed the time had come. We muddled through lull after lull in the conversation, finally settling into a mutual silence that wouldn’t have been unusual except for Rita’s persistent fidgeting. She obviously had something she wanted to talk about. But she waited until the kids fell sleep.
After she had tucked Teddy into Muriel’s bed, she sat down, folding her hands in her lap, and looked around at each of us. “Mom, Dad,” she began, “I don’t know what’s going to happen with Jack. And I know things are difficult around here right now, that the boys and I are pretty much nothing but a burden. But if there’s any way I can do something to make it worth your while, I would really like to stay here…if that’s possible.”
Because none of us expected this, our silence lasted a good minute, which no doubt made Rita wonder.
“What about your family?” Mom finally asked.
Rita leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and staring down at her tan, callused hands. She held them out in front of her, spreading the fingers, studying the backs of them. “My family…” She stopped, inhaling deeply, covering her eyes. “I’ve never felt as strongly about my own family as I do about this one.” Her voice broke, and I felt a lump rise in my throat.
Again, our silence filled a long gap, and who wouldn’t have thought just as Rita did? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked. This is awful,” she said. “I’ve put you all on the spot.”
“Oh no, no, no,” Dad said, bounding from his chair. He started toward her, but that was too much for him, and he paced the room. “My god, Rita…” He tried to go on, struggling to find the words, but his head moved from side to side and his mouth hung half open, making no sound.
Mom rose, walked over and sat next to Rita on the sofa, putting an arm around her. “Please stay,” she said.
So Rita stayed, and it created an interesting scenario. As was common with most ranches of that generation, there were no written guidelines to determine who would take over our ranch, or how it would be split up among the survivors once my father and mother passed on. And because it was a source of potential conflict, it wasn’t a subject that was discussed openly.
So what usually happened was that the siblings forged ahead year after year, each of them drawing their own private conclusions about how much of the ranch they were entitled to, and measuring their case against the others. And when the time came, when the owner died, and decisions had to be made, they fought it out. After years of silently creating their justifications, the reasons were strongly felt, and it often got ugly.
There were three major determining factors. First, of course, was age. The oldest was the natural heir—usually the oldest boy, or if the oldest daughter married someone who was interested in running the place. But it was rare for a woman to run a ranch in those days.
Second was need, which came in the form of dependents. The more kids you had, the bigger share of the ranch you could expect. And the third was investment, which was measured in time spent devoted to the ranch.
So in our case, if Jack had stayed, the decision would have been clear. He was the oldest, and he was also the only one with kids. But now that he was gone, each year that he stayed away would weaken his position, and shift it to me. Of course, I knew he wasn’t interested anyway, but then I also knew that Jack was capable of changing his tune if it was to his advantage. But having Rita and the boys there complicated matters. How would they fit into the formula? We never discussed it.
The dance was crowded. And once everyone found out that there were newlyweds in the room, Bob
and Helen were swamped with well-wishers, requests for the next dance, and invitations to step outside for a toast. Bob, who wasn’t used to all the attention, spent his evening whirling around with a goofy grin on his face. He blushed and laughed and even talked a little.
But he was clearly not the eye of this little hurricane. The whirlwind of activity and sound swirled through the small community hall, into the kitchen, out into the parking lot, and back, with Helen rotating squarely in the middle of the twirling fray. She wore the delicate white wedding dress she’d sewn herself, and its whiteness pulled the flow of browns and blacks and blues wherever she went. It was what everyone dreams their wedding day should be, and I was willing to put my feelings about Helen to one side long enough to grant her that. Especially for Bob’s sake.
“When do you take the fall, Blake?” I turned to find Steve Glasser at my elbow, chewing a sandwich.
“Well, Steve, I guess I ought to find someone who’s available before I start thinking about that.”
Steve smiled and started ticking off names of single women around the county. He counted the names on his fingers, gathering the digits on one hand, then the other, into a bunch.
“All right, all right,” I said, chuckling. “You made your point.” I looked out across the dance floor, pretending to be searching for someone. Steve kept his gaze fixed on me, the fingers in his left hand still gathered in the right. His good eye stared me down.
“So you done your calving yet?” I asked.
“Oh, ho,” he laughed. “So we’re changing the subject, are we?” He dropped his hands, then threw them in the air. “All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be. How about I buy you a drink?”
Steve and I wandered out to his pickup, where he reached under the seat. We handed the bottle back and forth a few times. I was hoping that Steve wouldn’t bring up the subject of women again. It was not a topic I enjoyed discussing. Mainly because I had so little to talk about. From the time I left school, I hadn’t been around women much outside of the occasional dance, card party, or rodeo. Between work and the years I had spent honing my pitching, I had found little time to even think about women, much less court them. And this lack of contact had made me much more bashful than I used to be. Each year, I thought that I would make an effort to get to know somebody in particular, or to talk to more girls at the next dance. But being alone got to be pretty comfortable after a while, to the point that the thought of making the effort was a lot more uncomfortable than being alone.
In Open Spaces Page 16