Chapter 7
Katherine left the city early in the afternoon and drove east across the mountains on Highway 2 toward the wheat fields she still called home. She had not planned this trip, but when she woke in the morning and faced two empty days before her, she decided to go.
She had brought the graduate student once, a well-planned mistake not repeated. He made everyone uncomfortable. She remembered how clumsy he looked when he walked with her in the pastures because of the importance he placed upon avoiding cow dung. She could not remember him taking a full complete step during that entire shortened visit. On the way back to Seattle a day earlier than planned, he had wondered aloud how she had ever survived without trees, without people, without buildings. It had not bothered her so much that he did not see beauty where she saw it. It bothered her that he saw nothing. It was hard to imagine Sam worrying about a little manure on his shoes.
She warned herself about putting Sam in places where someone else had been. What did she know about him? He was pleasant to her, and proper, but that meant nothing. Although he was not married, there might already be somebody special. Probably there was. What made her think she wanted to be special, anyway?
Eventually the straight roads in the wheat country cleared her mind. A person could almost fix the steering wheel, take a nap, wake every so often, and reset the course. As a child she had not liked these roads of interminable straightness. She had liked crossing the mountains, where there were exciting, winding roads with precipitous and dangerous cliffs. She no longer wished for excitement. Unlike her former friend who wondered how she could have endured the boredom, she wondered instead what she would do without the straight roads that took her home.
She could have stayed. Some of her friends had stayed, married, and lived on farms like their parents. Instead she had chosen early to leave, to go to the university in Seattle instead of the agricultural college in Pullman. She had surprised everyone except herself with that choice. She surprised them again, and this time maybe herself, when she took the job with the police department. She had tried to convince her family it was a place to use her psychology degree, although by then she was convinced that she could not use it anywhere.
The car sped over the hills, faster than the allowed limit—a liberty she took with the road. It was odd that as the car went faster the rest of her began to slow. She could physically feel the change.
She took a detour she had not taken for years on a dirt road marked with a sign that said “Low Maintenance,” which meant no maintenance at all. Fences on both sides marked the right-of-way. Except for two bare tracks in the ground, native grasses and weeds had reclaimed the land. She doubted anyone, except her father, traveled the road anymore. The ground here was too rough and rocky for wheat, and he had pastures on both sides of the road. He kept up the fences with patched barbed wire that long ago had rusted so that the strands of metal looked like filaments risen from the soil.
They had lived here until she was ten years old. Then they moved to the new farm where there was a bigger house and a better road closer to the highway. Eventually she enjoyed the comforts of the new house, but it had not been an easy transition.
At a barbed-wire gate, the driveway to the old farm began. She stopped her car in the two tracks and stepped out of the car. The grass was alive with jumping insects that rose before her like spray from the fireboats in Seattle when they welcomed special ships into port. At the fence she shielded her eyes and looked down the ruts in the grass to the trees that surrounded the old house a half-mile away. She slipped between the top two strands of barbed wire, careful to grab the lower strand between the barbs and push it down enough so that her back did not become hooked on the barbs of the top strand.
She followed the old trail. Wild oats fastened to her socks, seizing the opportunity to spread to new territory, not realizing that their predecessors had already staked out claims all the way to the house. Maybe they were hoping for wider distribution, to Seattle perhaps, where there was more rain, where it was easy growing, where they would not have to endure long droughts.
As she sat on the front steps of the old house and picked the seeds from her socks, she saw how natural forces, gradually and irresistibly, were pulling the buildings down into the wild grass. The buildings seemed to give up once the builders had gone. Sections of wire fence that once surrounded the yard stood as a reminder of the past. There was too little left to keep the cattle out, and she could see from their droppings that they now grazed up to the house.
From where she sat, she could see no other farm, no other sign of human interference—for that is what it seemed. It was country that did not easily tolerate change and began at once to heal it. It was lonely and lovely, separated from the rest of the world by hills that rolled into the sky.
Why, she wondered, had her grandfather chosen it? He died years before she was born, and she knew him only from stories and from pictures in the photo album. He was an old man in the pictures, with a round belly, a cigar in his mouth, and a nose with a distinctive bend of which she had the last diluted remnant. His hair was snow white, and his eyes seemed ready to lead the rest of him into laughter.
Perhaps the isolation had seduced him. He was a young immigrant from Ireland who had already seen too many people and did not judge the lack of them to be a liability. Perhaps he thought he could make the land do what he wished, or perhaps he was content with what it was when he arrived. She wondered how her grandmother felt. She was the small woman with the dark, lively eyes in the same photo album. Her father often said she had eyes like his mother. She, too, had died before Katherine was born, but the memory of her had been strong, and Katherine had received her grandmother’s name along with the eyes. Katherine wondered if her grandmother liked the quietness of the evenings when the sun bedded down peacefully into the hills, or if she had dreaded the isolation like Katherine’s mother, who came to this farm as a young bride from town, the second bride to take residence in the house, and the last.
After they moved, her father tried to preserve the house. He worried when he found a door open, when a window was broken, when the paper began peeling from the walls. He nailed boards over the broken windows and cleaned out the excrement of animals. In the last years he had resigned himself to the decay of an empty house.
It was a place where she had always come when she wanted to get away. She laughed silently to herself when she thought about the little farm girl wanting to get away. What was there to get away from? How much peace, how much quiet did a person need? Here it was absolute, and she supposed the need was a result of the possibilities. On Silver, her misnamed golden palomino horse, she would come riding bareback down the road or across the pastures early in the spring before the cattle were in and all the gates were still open. Silver was too big for her to mount unless she positioned the horse next to some structure that she could climb up on, and she remembered how disgusted she would become if the horse dumped her in the middle of the pasture after shying from some perceived danger. She had never been hurt, perhaps because she was so lightly mounted. Her short legs were unable to grip across the horse’s broad back with any real authority. She would have to lead Silver to the closest fence, which was not always close, and use the fence as a ladder to climb onto the horse again. Silver would stand patiently and blink her enormous eyes in response to the scolding delivered on the way.
It was easy to sink into the comfortable lap of these hills and listen to their stories. Good stories. Even the sad stories were good stories. There were no abandoned babies in these hills, no men with knives. The little Kathy who rode her horse here was another person, someone remembered with fondness like a little sister or her own child.
Katherine had planted herself in new and uncertain ground. She had exchanged this land that had nurtured her for a strange place where no one reached down to the soil to pick it up and break it apart in the hands for the simple pleasure of feeling it. As she sat on the step of the abandoned home,
she reached down for that soil in imitation of her father and grandfather and unknown generations before them. There was no turning back, she reasoned, without knowing why. There was no turning back, but there was something inside her, some attachment she felt as she stood and clapped the soil clean from her hands, that prevented her from turning away completely from these pastures.
The dog met her halfway down the driveway of the home farm and barked ferociously as he nipped at the front wheel of her car. “Enough, Fritz,” she told the collie through her open window. Upon hearing her voice, the dog stopped barking and began wagging its tail. He could be intimidating to strangers, and over the years had held, among others, a number of young suitors at bay. She remembered with amusement the fearless linebacker from the football team who stood cooling his heels beside his car until she came out of the house and silenced the dog. It was not quite as amusing at the time.
Fritz’s alarm brought her father and brother out of the machine shed, wiping their hands on their coveralls. Her mother opened the back door and waved. Fritz, the closest and most aggressive, received his greeting first along with her admonishment to stay down, which he ignored until sternly called away by her approaching older brother. She waited for them to join her and then hugged her father.
“We’re dirty,” he warned as if she knew nothing about farmers. Her older brother, John, stuck out his cheek so that she could avoid contact with his greasy clothes. She kissed him and hugged him anyway, not worrying that anything they wore could stain her. As a troupe they walked through the kitchen door her mother held open.
The farm kitchen was large, and in the center there was a metal table colored to resemble wood. It was here people gathered to hold discussions. It was no longer hot enough to use the air conditioner. An overhead fan, a new addition to the kitchen, circulated the air. They sat in their accustomed places—her father at the end farthest from the stove, her mother at the end closest to it, John next to her father. She sat across from John, next to her mother. There was an empty chair beside her for Susan, her sister two years younger, who was at college in Pullman, and another next to John for the unexpected guest. There were more chairs on the back porch if needed. She wondered if her mother would take the section out of the table one day and make it smaller, or if it would remain the same until John and his wife moved into the house—the plan for some vague day in the future. She could not imagine what her father would do if he moved off the farm.
She was pleased that her father and brother had stopped working in the middle of the afternoon to sit at the table with her. They had unzipped their coveralls to the waist. It was a signal that they intended to talk. When she had come home from college, she would have to go out and find them.
It was her job that made it different. It was the same at family gatherings when her aunts and uncles would circle around her, would look at her curiously, would ask what it was like, what she had seen, what she had done. More times than she wished to remember, she had been asked if she ever shot anybody.
She could still remember her father’s disbelieving, drawn out “whaaat?” when she told them she was going to be a cop. His way of expressing that word had at one time been sufficient to stop all further discussion. Sometimes a chocolate cake would soften him enough to change his mind, but when he said it that certain way, there was usually no point trying anything else. She would have held her ground this time no matter what he said or how he said it, but her mother stepped in first, shrugging away that word with a sense of triumph, slapping the table with such force that it caught everybody off guard, and announcing that all those lectures about education had finally paid off. She did not explain what education had to do with the choice, and she did not consider how she would worry later. Nevertheless, it was a moment for which her mother had been waiting.
“The pastures seem dry this year,” Katherine said.
“It’s September, little sister. You forget what it’s like here in the dry lands.”
“I haven’t forgotten. It seems drier than normal.”
“It is dry,” her father said, pursing his lips together as he did when reminded of something unpleasant. “We’ll be feeding the cattle pretty soon the way this summer has gone.”
“It’s about like every other one,” her brother insisted. “It doesn’t make much difference if we start a week or two early with the hay.”
“So, how’s work?” her mother asked. She was used to changing the subject when the two men disagreed.
“It’s okay,” she lied.
“Does that Cicero in the rowboat still work in the car after you?”
“Yes.” She smiled that her mother would use that name again. It made everyone at the table smile. It was a name that once described all of Katherine’s weekend boyfriends and lumped them together into one insignificant sum. She wondered how Sam would like being summed up that way.
“Did you ever find his book of poems?”
“Not yet.”
“I don’t see why you don’t just ask him for a copy. An autographed copy. Tell him your mother wants to read them.”
“Do you?”
“Why, of course. Don’t you?”
“Yes. Maybe I will ask him. I’ll bet Dad would read them, too. You read poetry in school, didn’t you, Dad?”
“You bet—‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee …’“
There was laughter at the table, and the dry-weather thoughts disappeared from his cracked lips as he demonstrated that it was not out of his league to recite a little poetry. He remembered a few more lines and repeated them while Katherine applauded approval. Brother John enjoyed the oration, too, and sat back in his chair with his cap tilted back and a toothpick working in his mouth to control his smile.
“My father used to read that to me when I was a little fellow.”
“What other poems do you know?” Katherine asked.
“Yes. What other poems?” her mother asked. “You never recited poetry to me.”
“You never asked.”
“Well, what else?”
Her father thought for a minute, then cleared his throat and began to sing. “O tannenbaum, o tannenbaum …”
“Karl, that isn’t a poem. That’s a Christmas song,” her mother said.
“How do you know? You don’t speak German. My mother taught me that song in German.” Then he laughed, confident that he had shown his wit. He enjoyed the attention paid to his poetry.
When her mother turned the conversation back in the direction of Sam, the other poet, her father shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and at the first pause, or perhaps before it, told John that it was time to go back to work. Katherine watched the two men disappear out the door. Through the kitchen window, she saw their green coveralls moving in tandem.
For supper, there were only three of them at the table eating fried chicken, mashed potatoes with white gravy, and fresh tomatoes from the garden. Katherine ate more than she ever ate in Seattle. By the time they finished, it was almost nine o’clock. Her father pushed back from the table and lit a cigarette, using his dinner plate as an ashtray. Katherine and her mother began clearing the table. They put all the edible food scraps and bones on one plate for the dog. He was going to feast, too.
“So how did the old place look today?” he asked Katherine.
“Not so good. It’s kind of sad how it’s falling apart.”
“It’s not like it used to be, that’s for sure. What’s it been, fifteen years since we moved? Time went so fast, it seems like I’ve hardly had a chance to talk to you.”
It was a strange thing for him to say, and Katherine stopped working at the table and looked at him. That made him nervous, and he reached for his coffee cup although it was empty. Katherine picked up the coffeepot from the counter and poured him more. Then she slowly and quietly cleaned the table.
“Say, June, do you remember the day Susie was born?”
“How could I forget?” her mother replied, barely turning her head to respond from
where she stood at the sink.
For a moment Katherine thought he was going to tell the story to her mother’s back, but then his eyes returned to her.
“You were just walking good. Couldn’t have been any taller than this.” He spread his callused hand a couple feet above the linoleum floor, and as he did so, Katherine slipped into her brother’s chair. “It was close to Christmas. Mother had gone to town for groceries when the snowstorm started. It was a bad one, and she had to stay there with Grandma. Johnny had gone along, so it was just the two of us out here—over at the old place, I mean. The next day Mother calls and says her time has come.
“Well, I knew I’d never get out of there in the pickup. That was one bad thing about that place. You could never get out when it snowed. I wrapped you in so many blankets I don’t think you could move, and we drove over to Uncle Max’s on the tractor. You just fit here in my arm,” and he crooked his arm and looked down at it as though he still saw the little girl there. “I didn’t hear a peep out of you the whole way, and every time I looked, all I could see were those two big brown eyes staring up at me.”
Katherine smiled with half-tears in her brown eyes. She had heard the story many times and knew every gesture that went with it, but her father always told the story to someone else, and she had only heard it from the side.
He took a sip of coffee, and she saw that his hand was trembling.
“It doesn’t seem that long ago. But now, here you are, grown up, doing a job I can’t even do. Pretty soon you won’t need your old Dad anymore.”
His face turned red as he said it, darkening the deep tan on his cheeks and giving color to the white skin on his forehead where his cap blocked the sunlight. Katherine slipped onto his lap, surprising him so that he didn’t know where to put his hands. She placed her own around his neck and kissed him on the cheek.
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