“My faith is in you, Jamie,” you said with enough conviction that I should’ve felt invincible. After we slept awhile, you again offered yourself to me. I’d brought only one condom. I thought I could pull out in time, but our bodies had such cadence.
Only after putting your dress back on did you become sad. I shouldn’t have let you leave. And you almost couldn’t because your piece-of-crap car wouldn’t start. I had to clean the points and retime the ignition. I should’ve pretended I couldn’t fix the problem. I should’ve stranded us there together until I got the guts to ask you to marry me.
I’ve put up one hell of a front all these years. I finished high school after caving to my dad and turning my back on you. I drank a lot. My freshman year of college is a blur of alcohol and girls whose names I didn’t need to know. My only moments of clarity were when I allowed myself to think of you as I walked the Pullman campus in the chilly and then frigid early-morning hours. I was an eighteen-year-old college student with a baby I didn’t acknowledge. I heard you were working at the truck stop café at the intersection of I-90 and state highway 17. My cousin claimed to have seen you climbing out of a trucker’s cab. He recognized your hair. But I told him he was mistaken. I told myself you’d find some other way—any other way—to survive.
I drank so heavily my third semester that my dad threatened to quit paying my tuition. He strongly suggested the army to help get my head out of my ass. And what, back up his? When I got into one too many scrapes, the university suspended me for a semester. I returned to the farm. When I got back to college, I threw myself into my agricultural classes. My study emphasis was soil erosion, which I thought was the reason my dad had sent me to school. But he didn’t want to hear how the land he farmed, and supposedly loved, was formed. He especially didn’t want to know how agriculture has altered it—no more than he wanted to know how I was changed by what I’d done to you, Katie. My dad didn’t find it fascinating that the Palouse hills contain little or no bedrock. The light, fertile soil goes all the way down to the hard lava surface. The soil is so rich, I learned, because of enormous floods from Montana that ripped through eastern Washington. The floods actually missed the Palouse region, leaving it far less scathed than the scablands surrounding it. But years of westerly winds blew rich flood sediment back eastward, along with volcanic ash from the Cascades, to form dunes. Upon these dunes, wheat grows at a higher yield per acre than anywhere else in the United States: the only fact of interest to my dad.
He certainly didn’t want to know that the lightness of the soil is what makes it so susceptible to continued erosion. Some movement is natural, but intensive agriculture in the Palouse is washing away the land and clogging the rivers. Annually the Palouse loses an average of fourteen tons of topsoil per acre. Storms can double the loss. My old man already knew these statistics, he claimed, but he didn’t find them staggering.
Did it ever stagger him that he had a grandchild out there somewhere who might be hungry or lonely? Did all the blood ever rush to his head at the thought? Walking proudly through his fields, did he ever have to stop short for a moment as I did occasionally on campus? The time I saw a young dad carrying textbooks in his arms and a baby in a pack on his back, I followed him clear to the Children’s Center. I thought my head was going to explode. Then I went and got drunk. It was the last time I ever did.
I should’ve known my dad wouldn’t implement any of the conservation methods I was learning in my ag classes and in fieldwork at WSU research stations. My whole childhood, he and neighboring farmers were pissed off at the USDA for trying to tell them how to farm. “I’d like to tell Uncle Sam what I tell my boy,” I heard my dad say more than once when I was young. “Keep your doggone hand in your own pants.”
I finally realized my dad had sent me to college to learn chemicals and ag business in order to keep his yields high despite the erosion.
I had one “radical” professor at WSU who claimed land-grant universities, farmers, chemical and farm machinery manufacturers all had lobbyists working triple time to stymie even the mildest conservation legislation. According to this professor, the USDA had yet to grow a full set of balls. Government agents let farmers bitch slap them into turning regulations into recommendations and thus never actually withholding subsidies as punishment for lack of land stewardship. This professor wasn’t against farming. He thought it was the central relationship in any settled society. But he also wanted his students to realize agriculture hadn’t been around that long in “big history” and might even be transient. I had to rein in my fascination, which could’ve propelled me into graduate school and away from the farm and who I am at the core: I am a farmer, as I made painfully obvious to you, Katie.
I was in college to learn how to save the Palouse. But I was also trying to save myself.
I met my wife at the end of my junior year. She was a business major at the University of Idaho, only eight miles from WSU. She comes from a large potato farming family on the Snake River Plain in lower Idaho. Her extended family owns two tractor dealerships, and she’d hoped to manage one after college, before I proposed. Her dad had never wanted his only daughter’s help on the farm. My parents more than approved of our engagement, as did hers. Everything fell into place. We got married as soon as I was graduated. She never finished her program at UI. With financial investments from her parents and mine, we acquired our own wheat farm, a foreclosure from earlier in the decade, almost adjacent to my father’s. But not my father’s. Before long our son was born. Then we acquired more acreage as the overseas markets began to recover, another combine as the markets steadied, more debt to my father and the bank, another healthy son, another harvest, then a bumper year and another. Something was missing, but I tried never to let it show in my step. I thought I could redeem myself by being the best husband and dad. By working the land as faithfully as my father, grandfather, his father, but with smart soil-conserving methods. From the beginning, I’ve let USDA field agents and WSU researchers and extension workers give me all the help and advice they can to save this place for my boys. I don’t care if it means I have to labor longer hours turning over stubborn stubble, instead of burning it, or growing peas and beans so as not to leave any of my acres fallow and more susceptible to erosion. I don’t care if my dad thinks I’m nuts, a tree hugger, a Communist, an overeducated plowboy, a traitor for advocating conservation to local legislators, an embarrassment for always talking stewardship to fellow farmers at county ag meetings and picnic days.
For the first five years of my marriage, questions about Emmy consumed my thoughts on large family holidays, especially if both families were gathered: my parents, in-laws, cousins, uncles, nieces. I’d have to leave. “Let him go,” my mom would say. She knew. My dad knew too, but I’ll be damned if he still didn’t shake his head. I had long ago quit blaming him for my lack of character when it came to you. And as far as what I did with my portion of the Palouse—I told my dad, as well as my father-in-law, when they helped me secure my first acreage, that it was either my land to manage how I learned to in college or I was walking away from it all.
If only I’d had half the courage when it came to you, Katie.
At first my wife thought I split during holidays because I was rebellious and restless. She claimed to like a man with an edge. Probably because her brothers are bores and have their potato heads so far up their old man’s ass. She also didn’t harp that I never attended church with her and our boys. What right did I have to sit in a church?
Then, Katie, I ran into your brother-in-law, Matt, in a café right here in Colfax, the café where we ate together right before you found out you were pregnant. We sat close on the same side of the booth. You seemed so open at camp and in that motel room, so eager for life and hungry for knowledge about anything: farming, places I’d visited with my family, subjects I took at school, news stories. But in that café, when kids from my high school came in, you shrank behind my shoulder. It still breaks my he
art. You were embarrassed by your old-fashioned dress. I was too. What was wrong with me? Especially after I’d seen what was underneath it. I followed Matt out to his truck that day. He told me you’d left the state with our baby before she was a year old and hadn’t been heard from since. You hadn’t even been in touch with your little sister, whom you loved and protected so fiercely that I used to be jealous. I am to blame for separating you from your sister. You wanted to give me everything, Katie, and goddamn if I didn’t take it from you, despite turning my back, and without realizing. It’s mind-boggling what a boy can take from a young girl.
The photo Matt gave me of little Emmy unhinged me. I am so ashamed to admit that I hadn’t heard our daughter’s name, had purposely not found it out, until that day. Emmy. You named her after Emmylou Harris, whom you heard sing for the first time in my truck, in my damn arms. I confessed to my wife. She was shocked. A little too much edge. And she’d desperately wanted a daughter, having had only brothers growing up. She gathered “her sons” and left the house, went back to her family’s farm in southern Idaho. I didn’t care. My apathy must have terrified her. She’d given up her dream of being a businesswoman to marry me. And she’d been a good wife. She’d loved me as much as possible. Not with all of herself, as you had, Katie, but she tried. Maybe she held back simply because she sensed a portion of me was already gone. The week she was away, I drove to Moses Lake and ate in the truck stop café where you had once worked. I drove past your dad’s house. It looked more run-down than ever, and another family was living in it. I’d forgotten over the years how poor your family was. Maybe that’s why your dad was such a mean son of a bitch. I’d promised you at camp, and afterward, that I’d get you away from him. That you wouldn’t have to have his last name any longer. Now my daughter has it.
“Is it you, Emmy?” I asked when she called.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said. “Emmy Nolan.”
Her name should’ve been “Emmy Kagen.”
If I’d known my little girl wouldn’t make it to my front door the next day, as she and I had arranged, I would’ve kept her on the phone longer. I would’ve asked her questions. I would’ve told her things.
“I’m pregnant,” you told me over the phone. “I can leave here.” In other words, “Come and get me.” The snow kept us apart, but my truck could’ve made it. I knew that even then.
“Don’t tell anyone just yet.” That was my initial response, and it got worse from there. “How do I know it’s even my baby?”
Katie, I’m sorry.
Our daughter showed up here in the quiet before harvest. My mechanic, two of my brothers-in-law, an uncle, a few WSU and UI students, my dad, his hired crew, and I had been working on the combines and equipment for weeks. My back was bracing for the long hours of labor ahead, the danger of plowing on steep hills with hulking machines. My adrenaline was pumping. The wheat in the fields was bountiful, the stalks heavy with grain. I’m glad Emmy saw my fields before they were plowed.
They are her fields too. My older boy will inherit my dad’s place. Emmy has equal rights to my fields with her younger brother. I told myself this during harvest, told myself I was harvesting for her. My wife told me to put Emmy out of my mind until after harvest. She said for now I had my boys to consider. For the first time I lost control of a combine. I’ve been driving large farm equipment since I was twelve years old. I came out less scathed than the combine, but harvest was slowed on my land and my dad’s. He just shook his head. As did my wife’s brothers. From the beginning they’ve thought I was a cocky bastard, that all dryland farmers are because we don’t have to constantly move irrigation pipe. And maybe I am cocky. I try not to be when I go to southern Idaho every year for two weeks to help my in-laws with their harvest. I’ve never felt more humbled than when Emmy drove away in that truck.
She told me you’re in Europe. I hope you get to see the world, Katie. I hope the man you are with loves you. I hope he takes better care of you than I did.
I found you by a lake, stuffing rocks into your pockets, like a girl of seven, rather than seventeen. Over the years I have put many a rock in my pocket. My wife finds it endearing and then irritating when she finds them in her washing machine. She has no idea.
I was never afraid for you. I should’ve been. I’m afraid for our baby. Why was she so far from you? Does that boy love her? I keep watching the road for that truck to return.
If I could go back, I’d start by rubbing your back the time you threw up in front of me, sick from pregnancy, instead of looking away in disgust and in fear. That was the last time I ever saw you, Katie. I was terrified that day of far more than losing my birthright. I was afraid of your love. I was afraid of the life inside you, which was there even before I got you pregnant. My greatest fear now is never seeing our daughter again. “She’ll come back when she’s ready, James,” my wife says. She’s trying hard to be understanding, but she’s terrified again and wants to try once more for a girl. She wants a daughter to quilt and can and ride her horses with. Our boys prefer to ride dirt bikes and quads, fish with my dad, shoot their rifles. I tell my wife no more children for me. I don’t think Emmy is in Washington anymore. It’s been months, and I feel her absence heavily in the plowed fields. I don’t even want to replant them.
I start attending church with my wife and boys. She begs me to make peace with God. But this has nothing to do with the old man upstairs. It never did. Nor does it have anything to do with my old man down the road.
I stand now looking down at Palouse Falls. Remember I took you here, Katie, but for the wrong reasons? I wanted you to understand why I was about to choose the land over you. You looked so stunned, your hair and dress blowing in the wind. For the briefest moment I thought you’d jump. Many nights I’ve reached out my arm to stop you.
The Palouse River starts in the Rockies, flows across the Idaho state line into Washington, through my hometown and into the scablands, where it plunges hundreds of feet off the edge of a basalt canyon before it reaches the Snake River. The Snake carries my wheat to the Columbia and then to the sea and to Asia. The falls are still muddy with rich topsoil. Soil from my land. Soil that has settled, after thirty-five years, into the crevasses of my skin. I’m sorry, Katie. Send Emmy back to me. I will make it up to her. I will make good. I will find a way to deserve our daughter.
I speak to the wind. The sound of my voice is muted by the roar of the falls.
14
Emmy
Uncle Matt insisted I leave Spokane the morning after I almost met my dad. I tried to argue. I pleaded. But I was a mess and only adding to his worry. I couldn’t quit thinking about Jamie on his knees, my two brothers, the lack of wrinkles in Aunt Beth’s hospital bed, and if I’d have to leave Reuben soon and for good. The doctor said that in addition to Aunt Beth’s miscarriages, her heart had been weakened over the years by severe anemia, and she’d suffered other undiagnosed health issues since childhood. Uncle Matt said I could return to Spokane in a few days. He assured me Beth would hold out for Mom, with whom we still hadn’t made contact. Saying good-bye to my aunt in that hospital room was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I made my confession and begged her to squeeze my hand if she could hear me, if she forgave me. I told her that I used to look for her during the night when I was younger. “I’ll look for you always,” I whispered into her ear.
Matt gave me permission to go back to the reservation with Reuben for one more day. Reuben drove me all around, crisscrossing the reservation. There was an urgency, as if he too were fearing it would be his only chance to show me his world. In a clearing in the pines, we saw elk. He showed me a particular mountain where clouds hovered—in response, Reuben told me, to whites’ wanting to mine its minerals. For miles, we were the only people on the reservation roads. We unrolled the truck windows. I didn’t ask him to slow down.
He showed me the various towns on the reservation, which were depress
ing and far apart. The poverty was severe. The east side of Omak seemed the worst, given that the west side (the white side) wasn’t. Nearly every house in east Omak was run-down with broken vehicles parked haphazardly around it. The only businesses in east Omak, besides the closed-down rail yard and mill, were a few dilapidated firework stands and cigarette shops. Reuben told me about gangs and drugs on the rez, about high unemployment, suicide, diabetes, teen pregnancy. He said drugs used to come just from Canada by floatplanes landing on secluded lakes or cars sneaking across the international border. Now drugs also came from Mexico. In fact, Mexicans snuck onto the Colville to grow pot in the woods, big operations, and there weren’t enough tribal cops to monitor. He told me he’d got his arm broken a few years back when he and Benji stumbled across some mean Mexican dealers in the woods. His arm still ached sometimes, he said, and during football he had to wrap it with rolls of athletic tape. Benji knew the dealers were there, no matter what he claimed. This alarmed me. I wanted to tell Reuben to be more careful, but he was one of the most careful people I knew. He drove me past all four longhouses, the tribal jail, a couple of shabby health clinics, and, I swear, forty different relatives’ houses. He pulled over so I could read the graffiti on a wall in Nespelem: WHY CHOOSE A GANG? YOU ARE A TRIBAL NATION. WHY SPEAK STREET LANGUAGE? YOU HAVE A NATIVE TONGUE.
He took me to Chief Joseph Dam, where like at Grand Coulee, there were no fish ladders. He explained about hatchery fish versus native stock and how the hatchery stock was further destroying the native salmon runs by interbreeding. Prone to disease and pumped with chemicals, hatchery salmon left native fish unable to find their birth streams. But without hatcheries, no one, Indian or white, could fish.
Reuben wanted to save the best place for last. We went slightly off the reservation, north to a place called Kettle Falls, where Reuben’s people used to fish for thousands of years before Grand Coulee Dam drowned the falls in backwater. Every Memorial Day, Reuben told me, there’s a Ceremony of Tears. I’d already told him I’d seen the marker for Celilo Falls on the lower Columbia with my aunt. So much loss. We took another ferry across the Columbia. It looked more like a narrow lake than a river, and it was even called Lake Roosevelt. But the river was still in the lake, Reuben insisted. He pulled off the road, and we climbed through a few scattered pines and down an embankment to a sandy strip of beach. There he tried to teach me how to see the river in the lake, how to use the memory of those who had already crossed into the spirit world, but I couldn’t. We walked up and down the beach, studying the currents, and I tried to see the ancient shorelines far below the surface as Reuben could. Finally he held my hand in the water—the first time I’d touched the Columbia. He told me to close my eyes so I could feel the river’s pulse. It was faint under all that backwater, but it was definitely there. It was the most spiritual experience I’d ever had.
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