The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  Not Darrel’s field, I thought, but Darrel.

  “His son shot himself,” my father added. “He hasn’t been the same since.”

  “Not many people would be after something like that.”

  “No, but the weeds keep growing.”

  • • •

  SUCH PRAGMATISM HAD RUINED THIS LANDSCAPE IN the first place. It ignored the heart’s knowledge, devalued its needs. I turned to the few remaining pasturelands as my only hope. Occasionally on my drives I would see a small white farmhouse surrounded by buffalo grass. I believed that I could live in such a place. At least I could see a short distance over land that enchanted rather than assaulted the eye—the quiet, the mild blues and greens, the reliable sunshine, and the all-embracing sky. Although I knew I would be lonely in such a place, and although loneliness had rolled me flat and pulverized me in the desert before I met Stefan, at least I would be an independent spirit, a free adult.

  My parents thought the idea was preposterous. They suggested I rent a place in town. To me, that would be a worse fate than the farm. So when I couldn’t find a rental on a remote scrap of prairie, I reentered the nightmare I’d had in the desert, of waking up on my father’s farm. Only this time I wasn’t dreaming.

  My uncle Johnny wasn’t dreaming either. He had returned to Kansas too, and was working for Dad. He had lost the money from selling the land he’d inherited by investing in city real estate. “Let what happened to Johnny be a lesson,” Dad warned me. “Hang on to your land!” I assured him that I would, and I meant it. No matter how much I treasured the desert or how little I wanted to be stuck back home, I wasn’t so spoiled as not to be grateful for the secure foundation that Dad and his land put under me.

  Johnny, with his shock of brown hair and blue eyes, was the handsomest and the youngest of my uncles, and in some ways the kindest. When he could be spared from more pressing work, he helped me refurbish the two-story, barn-shaped house where Mom and Dad had lived before they took over the Carlson farm. Since then, the house had provided little more than crude shelter for hired men and their families. Johnny and I removed cracked plaster, sheet-rocked the walls, and laid new linoleum in the kitchen. I hung new light fixtures, built a vanity for the bathroom sink, glued vinyl over the walls above the tub, painted everything and, employing the wiles that only a returning daughter possesses, got Dad to buy me the carpeting I wanted.

  “Solid colors show dirt,” he argued.

  “Where’d you figure that out? You’ve never used a vacuum cleaner in your whole life.”

  “Well, you’ll be using yours plenty. I can guarantee you that.”

  I knew he was right, but so what? I would willingly vacuum every day if I could have the rose-colored carpets I remembered so fondly from fifties living rooms. If I had to live on the farm, then I would do my damndest to recreate the ambience of my childhood—when Kansas had last been my true home. In the kitchen I hung wallpaper with a strawberry pattern. Over the counters, I glued red Formica to match.

  I moved into the house in November, three months before Jake was due. Today I recall only the nights during that winter hibernation. I see enclosed overlit and underfurnished space. I hear the loud furnace that, because there was no basement, we’d installed in my bedroom closet. The carpet’s barren plush undermined its rosy optimism, reminding me that I was not a family knee-deep in its own reassuring history and therefore content even if the rug was threadbare.

  I hear the whirr of my thrift-store sewing machine as I raced to cover the windows. The house’s lights reflected in the black panes, magnifying my isolation. When I turned the lights off, I looked onto an empty farmyard where a mercury-vapor light, designed to come on at sunset, illuminated Quonsets and the corrugated-tin fence Dad had built to protect his sheep from north winds. He’d sold his sheep a decade before—too much work for a man his age. So I didn’t even have their baaing to keep me company. Across the farmyard, a trailer housed a hired man and his family. But I had nothing in common with them, and it would have been awkward inserting myself into their nights even if I did. A few other blue yard lights floated in the distance, marking farmsteads where no one lived anymore. Only tractors and their implements dwelled on those places, awaiting the return of spring and their owners.

  In my house, the furnace’s blowers mixing new smells with old, I stood before the mirror, draping sleeper jammies I’d made over my shoulder and trying to imagine the heft of a baby. I hadn’t held many infants in my life, and I didn’t know what to expect. When I studied the blurry ultrasound picture, I couldn’t decide which white smudges might be Jake. I loved the idea of him enough to cut those jammie patterns out of cuddly, soft velour and painstakingly stitch the pieces together, even though it was beginning to be uncomfortable to sit. But only as my belly expanded and he began to kick did I truly understand he was real. Even then, I could not foresee how much he would change my life.

  4

  HE ANNOUNCED HIS IMMINENT ARRIVAL ONE JANUARY AFTERNOON WHEN I’D GONE INTO TOWN TO DO ERRANDS AND HAD STOPPED AT THE CAR WASH TO SPRAY FROZEN MUD OUT OF THE WHEEL WELLS OF DAD’S BIGGEST PICKUP. At first I thought the spray wand had a leak, then I realized that the warm water seeping down the insides of my legs was not coming from the wand. Jake wasn’t due for another month. I instantly regretted driving that stiff-clutched, stubborn nag of a truck to town. Had manhandling it caused this to happen? Or all the pounding I’d been doing last week as I hammered together shelves for the porch?

  I’d heard rumors that even moderately premature babies had died in the Goodland hospital. Suddenly my maternal instincts were strong and fierce. I insisted on Flight for Life. Amazingly, the hospital complied. Paramedics strapped me onto a gurney, loaded me on a plane, and allowed Mom to board too. They stuck electrodes onto my chest and belly and turned out the lights. Our two green heartbeats blipped on the screen as a hundred miles of farms, then another hundred of yellow Colorado prairie rolled under us. In Denver they transferred me to a helicopter and Mom to a taxi. The helicopter landed on the roof of St. Luke’s, and next thing I knew I was lying in a softly lit hospital room with oak wainscoting and yellow wallpaper. Soon after, my mother was beside me. I was a little embarrassed by all the attention I was receiving but also deeply relieved. Jake would have every chance of being born safely.

  In the vacuum left by the husband I’d exiled, Mom held my hand through my pains, wiping my forehead with the washcloth the nurse provided. How soothing her hands felt, how reassuring her grasp! Now that she had a legitimate reason to show physical affection, the reserve that had overtaken her once I was too big to hold in her lap anymore vanished. We were in a cocoon together, enacting a ritual, mother to daughter, that predated our own sterile culture by all of human time.

  “Oh, look at the little guy,” Mom said, her voice quaking with joy as the nurse handed Jake into her arms. She laid him on my chest. He weighed only four pounds, thirteen ounces. Because he was tiny and because I viewed him through a new mother’s fearful eyes, he had mortality written all over him. Or ephemerality, the implicit likelihood that he would fade into his mysterious origins.

  I recall that fear whenever I look at the overexposed photograph taken at the hospital within hours of his birth. His edges bleed to glaring white, as if he were a visitation, a possibility, not an actual presence. He wears a little peaked knit cap like a Tibetan’s, and his tiny fingers splay like the rays of a star. He looks out of the picture at me sideways, his features seemingly Oriental, his eyes deep black pools.

  I’d never felt so invested before. In my living, his living. “Isn’t it amazing how you love them?” another new mother said to me as we sat in the day room, nursing. How, I wondered, had I carried so much power so darkly within me?

  No longer did I lie awake plotting my return to the desert. I was too busy taking care of Jake. His fussing woke me several times each night. I would stumble over to his crib, lift him out,
nurse him if that’s what he wanted, or change his diaper. But usually he didn’t need those things. Maybe he had colic. Whatever the cause, only one thing could give him peace. I would stuff him in the chest pouch and walk loops through the kitchen, living room, and bedroom, counting the rounds. He usually succumbed at about one hundred laps. His contentment would then fill me like cream in a glass pitcher—the round-bellied kind that wanted nothing more than to be filled with just that substance. After a tortuous hour, wishing for my own bed, I couldn’t tear myself away from him. I would collapse in my recliner and sleep with him.

  It took four months for the fretful nights to end. Meanwhile, spring arrived.

  I was toting Jake on my hip one evening, headed for the burn barrel carrying a bag of trash, when beauty stopped me in my tracks. I was arrested not only by the sky’s fanfare and glory but by the serenity it draped over the farmstead. All the men had driven away in their pickups.

  Regardless of what the deed of ownership says, a place most belongs to the people who remain after everyone else goes home. Jake and I were those people. I liked the feeling. Up until that moment I had gone through the motions, fixing up the house as if it would be our home for years to come, but I hadn’t felt that I could truly abide there.

  I hadn’t stood outside without shivering since I moved in. Now the earth was warming up, damp and fertile. I pulled the musky smell into my lungs, held it. Took another swig, and another. I went inside, got Jake’s baby swing, and set it up near the flower bed that some hired man’s wife had planted.

  The bed had not been cared for in years, but now that the soil had thawed, it was loose and moist. The ease with which the weeds released their hold satisfied me so much I forgot about the time. When I finally stopped, Jake had long since gone to sleep. I leaned down to lift him, but his plump bowlegs brought the swing’s chair with them and he awoke.

  I rotated in the surround of dusk, letting him gaze at the last powder of mauve in the west, the sheen of abalone in the east. The sky was one part of western Kansas that farming hadn’t messed up. In the daytime, rarely overcast, it radiated the most genuine sky blue imaginable. At this quiet hour, with darkness lowering over the fields, I could almost forget that the grass that once stretched, infinite green under infinite blue all the way to the circular horizon, had been plowed. Was it possible that with Jake in my arms, an unfarmed sky would be enough?

  His mouth hung open as his black eyes absorbed the wonder. “Nighttime coming,” I explained. “Look! Venus! Pretty soon there’s going to be a star party.”

  When I was a kid, Dad had held me up under the sky exactly like this, filling my head with the big questions: Astronomers say the stars go on forever. How could that be? They have to end somewhere. But if they do end, what comes after? Nothing? How can there be nothing? There has to be something. And how did it all start? The Christians say that God made the universe. Well then, who made God?

  “And see that one,” I said. Jake fixated on my finger as I tried to point out another star bobble, perhaps Mars. Just then, the mercury-vapor “security” light blinked on.

  I turned Jake away from me and thrust him skyward. He let out a peal of squeaky-hinged giggles, his frog legs paddling sideways. “See that light, Jake? Someday I’m going to get you a BB gun. First thing I want you to do? Shoot that thing out!”

  5

  THE NEXT MORNING THE MUD-PORCH DOOR SLAMMED AND THE GLASS IN THE KITCHEN DOOR RATTLED. I looked up from tipping a spoonful of Cream of Wheat into Jake’s mouth.

  There Dad stood. Unannounced, uninvited, light streaming around him through the east windows. He was wearing his field hat, its brim wrinkled by many washings. His cheeks jowly. His old shoulders clothed in a thin, blue, short-sleeved work shirt. His jeans bunched at his waist.

  Cocking his head at Jake, he made a big smile full of silver and gold crooked teeth. Jake’s mouth opened wide on vacant gums, cereal dripping down his chin. He beat his hands at his sides. “Oooh, ooh,” Dad said. “It’s good to see you too, Jake!”

  I said, “Why doesn’t it ever occur to you to knock?”

  He hunched his shoulders and flinched at my reprimand, then pulled out a chair. “Got a spot of coffee for your old man? How’s he eating?”

  “Great,” I said, pouring. “He’s eating great.”

  “Good,” he said. “Keep on feeding him that wheat cereal and he’ll make a good farmer someday. I thought you would’ve taken him to the sitter’s by now.”

  “I’m going to take him, but as I told you, I can’t leave him with her all day. I can’t keep expressing that much milk, for one thing.”

  “You should never have gotten started on that business.”

  That business was breast-feeding. “Don’t you get it?” I said. “I told you I could work mornings, but not afternoons.”

  “That so?”

  I detected a whiff of insult. Did he think I was lazy? Was that it? Had he treated Bruce and Clark this way? After sacrificing their childhoods to field work, they had abandoned him and the farm so they could have lives, complete with weekends and vacations.

  He stood up—headed for the bathroom, I assumed. Instead, he opened the silverware drawer. I dashed to intercept him before he got to the freezer. “A teaspoon of ice cream isn’t going to kill me,” he complained.

  “Yes, it will.” The diet Mom had him on was working. His cholesterol had gone down with each blood test.

  “Well, all right, damn it. You women just want to get another harvest out of me.”

  “Poor guy. You’re just surrounded, aren’t you?”

  At thirty-five, I was reliving my brother’s childhoods and, I hated to admit, feeling what was probably the same mix of emotions. I remembered how they used to follow him out the door after summer breakfasts—begrudgingly on the surface, pridefully beneath.

  I pulled on my oldest pair of jeans and a tan work shirt I’d torn the sleeves out of and drove ten miles up the road to an even flatter irrigated operation. This farm belonged to an ambitious, humorous couple who had two great girls but clearly wished they also had a son. I trusted this woman to babysit Jake, but I wanted Jake to be one of us, not one of them. I couldn’t explain this concern to my father, who thought that rearing children was women’s work, so any woman could do it.

  A good tractor driver, on the other hand, was a rare commodity. Back at the farm, I stuffed my hair up under my cap and shoved my pliers in my pocket. “Only until noon,” I reminded him on the way out to the field. Even that was too long. My breasts were already beginning to fill. By noon they would be hard and sore. Thinking of the relief that would come as I nursed Jake caused my nipples to twinge. Nothing had prepared me for the instinctive nature of this animal love I was in. Alarms sounded inside me every second we were apart. I grabbed my water jug off the seat.

  “Remember, cultivating’s a slow job. You’ll pile dirt up on the corn if you drive too fast.”

  “I know, okay? You told me five times.” As usual, I’d had to sit scrunched up beside him on the arm of the tractor seat while he demonstrated for far more rounds than necessary. Then I’d felt his eyes watching my every move, just as I could feel them doing now. I pulled the engine and hydraulic dipsticks, put them back, and climbed up on the front tire to unscrew the radiator cap. “Always checking up on me,” I grumbled, but when I looked over my shoulder, dust hung in the air where his pickup had sat idling a minute before.

  Finally. God. Good riddance. It was easy, cultivating. Slow, sure, but satisfying to look behind me and see the ground perfectly worked between straight seams of untouched corn. It gave me this neat, all-is-well-with-the-world feeling. I could understand what made Dad’s farming heart tick. I liked making things orderly too. It was the way I felt after vacuuming my carpet, seeing a clean swath—no dog hair, no clumps of dirt at least for a little while. Dad had been right about the color though.

  I put
my hand under my breast, lifted it, gauging its weight, let it down gently, did the same with the other one. Get realistic, I thought. You are here for Jake. Nothing else matters that much. His grandparents are here. He’s loved here by more people than he would be anyplace else. We’ll have more financial security here than if I decided to teach. I’d been taking secondary ed correspondence courses ever since coming home but wasn’t sure how or if I’d ever get a degree.

  I was coming to the end of the field and would have to turn soon. Turns had scared me at first, with so many things to remember all at the same time. Gear down, reduce speed, pull the hydraulic lever to lift the implement out of the ground, hit the turn brake. This stopped the back wheel on the turn side from revolving so the tractor could pivot, but you didn’t want to go too far around or you’d wind up redoing rows. Straighten out, push the hydraulic lever forward, gear up, throttle up. I had turning down so well now, though, that it was practically automatic.

  It wouldn’t be that bad, I thought. I could get away for vacations in the winter. Maybe they would let me have the rock house to stay in on those trips. Say Dad gave me a fourth of the profits. That would be fair. This crop could make two hundred bushels to the acre. That’s two hundred times—

  How come the turn brake isn’t working? I pressed harder and spun the wheel more to the left, but the tractor still didn’t whip around. I was overshooting the next rows that I needed to be in. I would have to back up.

  Stop. Put it in reverse. Check to make sure the hydraulic lever is back. What? Please tell me I didn’t. Please?

  • • •

  “GOD, DAD. I’M SORRY. I DON’T KNOW what I was thinking.” I knew exactly what I’d been thinking. I’d been computing how wealthy this life I didn’t deserve and would probably never be good at was going to make me.

  His eyes passed over me as if I were a fence post. The only objects of interest to him were the bent shanks on the cultivator. Iron is not made to take turns when it is buried in four inches of dirt. Dad didn’t take hard turns very well either. Now he would have to readjust his calculations. He’d been pushing me to finish cultivating so he could sow pintos with this tractor. I steeled myself for what was bound to be one of those classic dressing downs that Bruce had told me about. But amazingly, Dad didn’t cuss at all. All he said was, “Well, now you’ll learn to weld.”