The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  “I’m not kidding!” Bruce yelled. “I could!”

  “That, that . . . ,” Mom said. She paused to search for sufficiently disparaging words. “Idiot! He calls himself a Christian. I can’t even stand to look at him.”

  Mom and Dad had voted for Eisenhower and Nixon. They’d disliked Kennedy, whom Dad scorned as a “choirboy” Catholic, and were charmed by Reagan. “Such a likable fella,” Dad used to say. But being religious, Mom admired Jimmy Carter, and during George Bush Sr.’s tenure she started saying, “That stinking Rush Limbaugh is driving me over to the Democrats. I’m sick of his stupid bullshit.” She caused consternation in many who didn’t expect such a nice-looking grandma to cuss.

  Abby laughed. “You had to ask.” She leaned down to pick up a section of newspaper.

  Jake said, “Can I see your tattoo, Ab?”

  She turned in her chair and lifted her short black hair with the raspberry-red stripe in it. Last year her hair had been auburn and long. On the back of her neck, hieroglyphs encircled a sun emblem. Jake touched it. “Is it new?”

  “Oh no. I’ve been hiding it for something like ten years.” She was twenty-six, well into official adulthood and ready to take on the world.

  Mom and Kris shook their heads at each other in maternal defeat.

  The cuckoo clock clicked to twelve, but the little bird didn’t pop out. That mechanism hadn’t worked in fifteen years. Clark had sent my mother the clock when he lived in Germany, where he taught chemistry to U.S. Army kids for a while. So it still hung on the wall, the shuttered cuckoo reminding us of the absence we seldom spoke about.

  “Ward should be here any minute,” I said.

  “Where’s he from?” Kris asked.

  “Plum Springs.”

  “My aunt Julie is dating a man from Plum Springs?” Abby said, incredulous.

  They hadn’t been gossiping about us at all, I was disappointed to realize. No one even knew that Ward was local. But it flattered me that Abby had me pegged as cosmopolitan and beyond any such backsliding. “From near there,” I said.

  “So how’d you meet him?” Abby asked.

  “In a cow pasture along the Little Beaver. I was looking for springs.”

  “Why?” Bruce asked. He seemed genuinely, if guardedly, curious.

  I spit it out without hedging. “I thought it was high time I educated myself about what we’re doing to the Ogallala Aquifer.”

  Bruce’s eyes gleamed with orneriness that hadn’t abated since he was twelve, when I’d followed him around the farmstead as he ignited stink bombs he’d made from powdered sulfur. “What are we doing to the Ogallala?” he asked with a hint of the same mimicking tone he’d gored me with then.

  “Bleeding it dry.”

  “Oh that.” He wasn’t surprised at my zealotry. I’d always been the family idealist, and I’d been complaining about wasteful irrigation practices for years.

  “I’ve got a gripe about the way people use water,” Mom began.

  Bruce beamed at me conspiratorially, as if to say, “Here she goes.”

  “I just hate the way my neighbors let it run down the street!” she exclaimed. “They water their lawns all day and let it run and run. My parents taught me that water is precious. We had a tin cup hanging on the windmill and if we filled it up, we had to drink it all!”

  “That lawn water’s nothin’ compared with what we waste on the farm, Mom,” I said.

  “You saved water because you didn’t have an electric pump on the windmill,” said Bruce, who had a penchant for cutting through other people’s delusions. “You had to conserve it because the wind didn’t always blow.” Then to me, “Better be careful. If you singlehandedly put an end to irrigation, you’ll cut your own income by two thirds. Not to mention mine. Don’t touch mine.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “No one’s going to listen to me.”

  The doorbell chimed. “There he is!” Abby said.

  Jake smiled reassuringly at me as Abby leaned sideways in her chair to look into the entryway. Through the three offset panes of the front door, my niece’s first glimpse of “Julie’s new boyfriend” was half of his mustached face, a full square of his red-and-white pinstriped shirt, his blue-jeaned hip, and half of the calf roper who cinched his middle.

  I stepped outside and pulled him away from the door. He placed his hands on my waist. I laid mine on his arms and he looked into me out of his sea-green eyes. I was centered again, at home in a way that home hadn’t made me feel in years. I was a wheel in a groove, a bird in its nest, a woman with the kind of lover she hadn’t known enough to wait for.

  7

  I INTRODUCED WARD TO JAKE FIRST. Jake rose, and Ward strode across the room to shake his hand, man to man. When Josh finally arrived and dinner was served, Ward actually held a chair out for me before sitting down himself. No man had ever done that in this house. Jake sat on one side of me, Ward on the other. Abby grabbed the chair at the head of the table opposite Mom, which Bruce made a point to avoid. He wasn’t into traditional symbolism.

  Ward had gotten a haircut recently. I longed to stroke the shiny V in the blond bristles on the back of his head. His hat had left a ridge in his hair. I couldn’t imagine my father in a cowboy hat. He would have looked foolish. And Ward would have looked comical and out of character in the derby Dad had worn when dressing up. Yet both men had the anchoring presence of their largeness. It was as if the house had been a listing boat, and Ward’s stepping on deck had set it to rights.

  Was he shocked at our incivility? We didn’t say a prayer, just started handing the platters around. If Mom had called the shots when we were growing up, she would have set a different, more reverent tone in her household. Dad hadn’t gone in for all that “holy, holy, holy.” Yet he’d had more social grace than all of us put together. “Grace” was not a word that leaped to mind for a man of such blunt and coarse opinions. He did, in fact, worry that Clark was gay. He did call undermotivated hired men lazy so and so’s. But if he were still with us, we wouldn’t have been handing platters around the table in silence. He would have sparked a conversation with a tidbit of gossip or an odd fact he’d read in National Geographic. He would have plied us with questions about our lives, asking Jake how school was treating him and offering sage advice it pleased me to hear. Don’t let those grades start slippin’. Pretty soon they’ll be down so far you’ll need a bucket and a rope to get them back up.

  “Now Jasmin,” Ward said, “did you grow these pickles yourself?”

  Mom perked up at this attention from the new man at her table. “Oh no, I didn’t. But I used to grow all my pickles. Even after we moved to town. You should have seen that downstairs closet in the furnace room. It used to be plumb full of vegetables I’d canned.”

  “I miss that food, don’t you?” Ward said.

  “I saw some pretty good clouds down your way last week,” Bruce said, before she could answer. “You guys squeeze any moisture out of them?”

  “Not a drop,” Ward said.

  Bruce sighed. “Dry sponges. Oh well. Who needs rain when we’ve got the government?” He explained that the drought-relief package Congress had passed coincided with his taking out government crop insurance. “Like doubling down in blackjack,” he said. Gleefully he threw up his hands. “And winning!” He revealed both crooked canines this time. “That never worked for me in Vegas, but in Washington, the odds are stacked our way.”

  A landslide of cash had poured in, so much, he explained to Ward, that he was planning to buy a new tractor before year end, to reap the investment tax credit. “The government gives it to us. We give it back. They give it to us.”

  “That’s the merry-go-round all right,” Ward said.

  “I had a dream about your father,” Mom said. “He told me we didn’t need that new tractor.” She’d described the dream to me before. She’d been sitting in the tu
b, naked, I assume. Was there any other way to sit in a tub full of water? He’d been washing her back. That this must have been a common ritual between them amazed me. Growing up, I rarely saw my parents display affection. There were no spoken endearments, no touches other than her patting his bald head on occasion or him slapping her bottom as she washed the dishes. “Oh Harold!” I could still hear her grumble, as if truly angry.

  Discovering that my parents had been that intimate in their private lives touched me. But it couldn’t have been easy for my father to make such a vivid appearance in Mom’s dreams, especially for a man who hadn’t believed in an afterlife. He must have felt a mighty need to convey his advice. I was accustomed to thinking my father correct in all things farm related. Was Bruce frittering away Dad’s money on fancy equipment we didn’t need? Were we destined for financial ruin? It really did scare me.

  Bruce ignored Mom and her oft-repeated dream. Ward’s starched shirt and dark-blue jeans were a dead giveaway. My brother knew he had a Republican sitting between the sights of his piercing brown eyes, and he’d clearly been waiting to move in for the kill. “I’ve got an idea. The government can get out of the lives of everyone who voted for Newt Gingrich and his buds in Congress. The rest of us’ll take our Farm Program checks.”

  “Okay, Bruce,” Ward said. “Let me know if you can spare a couple bucks.”

  Bruce leaned back in his chair and broke into appreciative laughter. “Score!” he shouted. He was nothing if not fair minded. A wave of relief passed around the table.

  “Well I just don’t know about that Bush,” Mom began.

  Time to change the subject. “Did you have fun swimming, Jess?” I asked my grand-niece. She nodded and paddled her arms over her head.

  • • •

  “WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP, LADIES?” Ward asked after dinner.

  “Oh nothing,” Mom said. She suggested he go down to the basement and watch the game with Bruce and the kids.

  He took the dishes she was stacking out of her hands. “No, you go sit.”

  “Well okay, if you insist,” she said brightly.

  How about that. A new paradigm in the Bair household. I tried to imagine Dad questioning Ward’s manhood. He was too rugged and confident. It would just never happen.

  Once finished cleaning up, we left the dishwasher churning and descended the stairs. “You might want to shade your eyes,” I said.

  “Well isn’t this something? It’s a whole other world down here.” Ward courteously refrained from commenting on the bold-print, chartreuse indoor-outdoor carpet laid when the house was new. Mom had completed the decor with green-and-gold striped wallpaper. The green stripes were flocked.

  Bruce was propped in one lounger, Abby in the other. Jake and Josh sat in the chairs closer to the TV, Jake trying to be interested in football. Bruce picked up the remote and turned the volume down. “Get up, Abby,” he commanded.

  “Now, don’t bother,” Ward said. “I’ll just—”

  “Oh it’s all right,” Bruce said.

  I sat down on the end of the couch nearest Ward. “I always thought this had to be the ugliest couch in the world. Dad called it shitmuckle brown.”

  “He called every shade of brown shitmuckle,” drolled Abby.

  Jake laughed and examined the matching chair he sat in. “Didn’t Grandma and Grandpa get these like forty years ago, when you lived on the farm?”

  “Those sonsabitches’ll never wear out,” Bruce said. “You kids can save some of Harold’s money by marking our graves with them instead of headstones.”

  “If we don’t lose it all before then,” I said.

  “We’re doing fine,” Bruce said. “The new ground averaged better than anything.” He was referring to the wheat yield on some land for which he’d traded our father’s largest pasture. The pasture had been rough prairie, sliced in two by a dry creek like the one in our childhood canyon pasture, while the new ground had been ideal for wheat. Flat as the day is long, Dad used to say about such land. “That’s a half section of new wheat we’ve got coming into the coffers,” Bruce added. “Twelve thousand bushels in a good year.”

  I was accustomed to bluffing my way through conversations with Bruce, pretending not to need his approval, but now his dark eyes brimmed with pent-up unsaid things. Was it possible he doubted himself? Did he need my approval too? Is that what he was signaling? I said, “It was a good decision, Bruce. I know that.”

  Here was the machine that was our family working in its best, limping fashion. “What choice did I have?” Bruce said. “We don’t run livestock anymore. I could have kept it just so that cowboy bastard we were renting to could play out the romance of the dying breed, or I could make us some real money.”

  I glanced at my cowboy boyfriend, who smiled lopsidedly at me and shook his head slightly, as if to say, “Don’t worry. Water off a duck’s back.”

  “You sold the pasture that had the cement stock tank in it?” Abby broke in.

  “Yes,” Bruce said.

  “God, Aunt Julie,” Abby said. “Remember the time you took us swimming in that stock tank and I couldn’t get out? You almost killed me!”

  I’d returned and was living on Dad’s farm then. Jake was a baby. “You just thought you couldn’t get out,” I said. “You were thirteen and going through a phase of girlish weakness. I had to get back in and push up on your bottom.”

  My father had inherited that pasture and some of the land around it from his father. When the grass got too short in the canyon pasture on the Carlson farm, he would drive his sheep ten miles across the county to his own place, where he, Mom, and my brothers had lived before I was born. I would ride on the bench seat of his pickup as we bounced across neighbors’ fields, cutting and mending barbed-wire fences as we went, honking the horn and thumping the outside of our doors until we finally herded the sheep into the other barnyard, then out into that pasture.

  Jake’s memories of the pasture were probably not as pleasant. When he was six and we’d come home for a visit, Dad invited us to ride with him to survey his heifers. Rex, our dog at the time, jumped out of the pickup bed and began chasing them. This was a high-stakes catastrophe. In ten minutes, he could run a week’s worth of weight gain off the heifers. Dad barreled over the hills, threatening to run Rex over. “Don’t kill my dog!” Jake wailed.

  “Drive away! Fast!” I shouted. Rex, fearing abandonment, ran after us. We rode in silence back to the farmstead, my heart rate returning to normal only as Dad’s anger subsided. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d killed a family dog. He treated his sheepdogs like kings, but didn’t suffer chicken eaters or cow chasers. In this way and a thousand others, my brothers and I had learned from him our society’s values, rooted in production and finance.

  Killing the dog to protect our financial interests. It was the same value system that Bruce had exercised selling the pasture. We both had romantic ties to that grass. It was one of the last places in our corner of the county where you could still imagine what the original Kansas had been like. But he was trying to fill the shoes of a father whose only focus had been the bottom line.

  Hang on to your land! Dad had always commanded us. If we didn’t, he warned that we would die broke, just as he predicted our aunts and uncles who’d sold out would do. He’d been right. Many of them had. But in trading for the wheat ground, Bruce had not only improved our financial security, he’d also demonstrated that we were still in the game. He hadn’t let Harold down, as just about everyone had expected him to do.

  Bruce retrained his gaze on Ward, who hadn’t folded the recliner back, but looked comfortable, resting one polished boot on his knee. “You’re a grass man, I suppose?”

  “I have some cattle and I breed horses,” Ward said. “Grass doesn’t make you money the way farmland does though.”

  “Right,” Bruce said. “I hated to sell the pasture, b
ut renting it out was one helluva drag.” He explained that the cowboy renter neglected the fence and his cows were always getting out. The neighbors would call Bruce, complaining, so he insisted that the renter put in all new posts and wire. Then the Errington “girls,” as Dad, and now Bruce, called them, put that section of good wheat ground up for sale. Dad had lusted after that land his whole life. Bruce couldn’t resist. He worked out a like-kind exchange, trading the pasture for the farmland and avoiding capital gains taxes in the process.

  “It made our renter pretty mad,” he said. “The bank trust department that handles Dad’s estate didn’t like it either. You know, people in this country form alliances. There’re the insiders and the outsiders, the ones who drink together out at the country club and cook up land schemes and get rich off each other, and the ones like us who’ve always gone along by ourselves, making money the dumb way.”

  “Insiders. Outsiders. That’d be how a lot of folks see it,” Ward said. He didn’t point out that he sold horse tack and water troughs to real estate agents and bankers. He played golf and roped calves with them too, but had somehow failed to get rich.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what the future holds for the Bair Farm,” Bruce said.

  I caught my breath. Our forbidden topic was being broached. Just look at us, I thought. To Ward, we must have seemed less like a farm family than any he’d ever known. With the exception of Mom, asleep upstairs under the quilt she’d made from gaudy polyester squares, not one of us had a Norman Rockwell glow. We didn’t speak the vernacular. The older among us voted for liberal presidents. The younger dyed their hair funny colors and cut it into weird shapes and got tattoos. But our patriarch’s blood ran thick in our veins. He’d implanted his values in my brothers and me by the time we were three, the most important one being that first commandment, Hang on to your land!

  Whether we kids would find the wherewithal to obey it had hung in the air our whole lives. Even Harold’s grandkids had drunk the commandment with their baby milk. Of the three, only Jake showed overt interest in our conversation. He leaned toward us with his arms planted on his knees, making himself available should there be an opening for him. But I knew that Abby and Josh were listening too. It didn’t matter that the Raiders had just scored a touchdown on TV. Every one of Bruce’s and my words, when we talked about the farm’s future, lofted through the air into the ears of surefire receivers.