by Bair, Julene
7
IN JUNE, JAKE WENT TO HIS SUMMER JOB FOR A TOTAL OF TWO DAYS BEFORE DECIDING HE’D RATHER DRIVE AROUND TOWN WITH HIS FRIENDS. I withdrew his driving privileges, then did as I’d threatened I would and enrolled him in a mountain wilderness camp, where he would hike all day and receive therapy. Informed of this, he stormed out of the house, shouting, “Good-bye forever!”
I took up the position that had become all too common over the last year, hanging limply in the woven chair strung from the spruce tree in my backyard, Jake’s beagle, Regina, in my lap and the one beer I allowed myself each evening dangling from my hand. Had my mother ever sat up worrying like this? I wondered. I couldn’t remember giving her much grief. If I did, though, or if my brothers did, she had Dad sitting up beside her. I was grateful that tonight I would have Ward.
He arrived right on time, accompanied by the familiar clanging noise that had heralded his arrival in my life the previous August. He’d hauled Digit, his favorite horse, up with him. In the morning, we planned to go riding in the mountains. This had been a shared dream, one that I hoped would multiply into many rides in the future.
Jake’s reaction to the wilderness camp, Ward assured me, only proved he needed the help I was getting for him. He was lucky to have a mother who cared as much as I did. And surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to sleep that night with Ward beside me.
In the morning, I opened the door to Jake’s bedroom. Heaped stale clothing covered the bed, but no teenager slept in it. “Don’t let him ruin your day,” Ward said. “He’ll come home. It’s still early.”
We were backing out of the drive when I spotted Jake walking up the block. I went to meet him on the porch. He was pale and tearful, his shoulders hunched in his black motorcycle jacket. Since Christmas, when he’d worn it to go shooting with Ward, he’d individualized the jacket further, painting the bones of a rib cage and spine on the back. Down the arms still twisted ribbons of cheerful turquoise and yellow that I wanted to think were more indicative of my son’s spirit. He had to make himself ugly. He had to shave his hair, give himself safety-pin and ballpoint-ink tattoos and wear stinky, tattered clothes in order to test the world’s and my love to its limits.
I’d been searching for the right conciliatory words. A lot hung in the balance and I was afraid I wouldn’t find them. But I saw from his defeated manner that I’d already won.
“I feel like you hate me,” he said, his eyes straying onto the pickup, where Ward sat in silhouette under his cowboy hat. “Like you just don’t want me around anymore.”
I squeezed his arm through the rumpled leather. “It’s not about him,” I said. “If that’s what you think. I’m trying to keep you from ruining your life, Jake. I worry about you every minute.”
Even if his arms hung limply as I hugged him, I sensed a lapse in his anger, a slight lift of the anguish on his face. For the moment he seemed to trust my guidance. At camp he would be required to speak his pain and hike trails not of his own choosing. I intuited that part of him knew he needed to examine himself in the clear, undistorted mirror that the counselors would hold up for him.
“I felt so sorry for him,” Ward said. “Hurting so bad. I just wanted to go up there and hug him with you.”
Why didn’t you? I thought, but contented myself with his having had the impulse.
We picked up our horses from my friend’s ranch outside of Laramie, where I pastured Henry, and took them to a trail leading up Sheep Mountain that a wild cowgirl friend had introduced me to. She and I had loped our horses through the aspens and pines. It had been an exciting ride and I wanted Ward to enjoy the same thrill. But he didn’t seem his usual self. “Go on ahead,” he told me and proceeded at a walk.
At the top we dismounted and tied our horses to a tree so I could show him the view. Lake Hattie lay at our feet, a blue eye reflecting clouds and the mountain. “Isn’t the valley beautiful from up here?” I said.
“Not to me,” Ward replied.
“What’s not to like?”
“I don’t know. Too . . . desolate or something.”
His reaction baffled me. Wasn’t this the kind of wide-open western territory that cowboys were supposed to love?
• • •
“HOW’RE YOU DOING?” HE ASKED THAT NIGHT in bed.
“I’m worried,” I admitted. If he asked, I would begin with Jake. Would he come home from camp restored to himself, bright of spirit and potential, or as an even more defiant rebel? In which direction was I pushing him? I hoped there would be an opening for me to add, “I’m worried about us too.” But Ward made no response and soon went to sleep.
Waking at seven to an empty bed, I went to look out my office window. The spot where his truck had been was empty. I’d scarcely recorded this absence when he reappeared, his stock trailer in tow, his horse darkening the space between the rails. I met him in the front hall.
He placed his hands on my hips. “How are you?” he asked, the way he always did, emphasizing the “you.”
“All right. Except I woke up and you weren’t there.”
“I want to go back to bed with you now. I woke about six like always. Thought I might as well go get Digit.” My friends’ ranch, where he’d stabled Digit, was fifteen miles from town. We’d planned to go there together after breakfast.
Ward trailed me up the stairs, our fingers interlaced. We lay down on the bed, but I sensed that he was marking time. He feigned contentment as I nuzzled up to him. He still had his long-sleeved blue Levi’s shirt stuffed into his belted jeans. He was a stuffed man, his feelings buried deep inside the stuffing, under wraps. An uncooperative guy doll.
By eight he’d drunk his coffee, refused breakfast, and suffered through a tour of my summer garden. He kissed me good-bye and left.
• • •
I WAS SITTING IN THE TALL DIRECTOR’S chair in my kitchen, spilling the tears I’d held in while he was preparing to leave, when I heard the front door open, then footsteps in the hall.
I dabbed my eyes with the dish towel, fixed a smile. He was thudding through the living room. The dining room. In seconds he would wrap me in his arms. He would say, “I just couldn’t leave without one more kiss.” Or maybe I would find out what had been troubling him.
He entered the kitchen, glanced at me. “Forgot my hat,” he said. He picked it up from the counter, dropped it on his head, and left again.
I greeted his call, later that night, with an accusation. “Things just got too dicey for you here, didn’t they?”
Ward denied this, saying he had to get home earlier than usual so that he could shoe a couple of horses before the jackpot roping that week.
“I need you to take part in my life, Ward, not just disappear when things get a little rough.”
He said he was there for Jake and me every step of the way. I told him that wasn’t what it felt like. He’d been receding from me for some time now, like a prairie dog digging down into his burrow. Would he please just come out and tell me what was going on?
“Nothing’s wrong, sweetheart. I swear.”
“I don’t buy that for one minute, Ward.”
“Okay,” he said hesitantly. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure, but I just can’t see myself moving to Laramie.”
Was that all he was worried about? I shared what I’d been thinking. We could keep seeing each other one weekend a month, and after Jake graduated, I could come down to his house for longer periods. Eventually I would move there.
“That won’t work,” he said, his voice stepping down in pitch on each word.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“It’s just not practical, Julene. That’s all I’m trying to explain here. You’re an idealist. I’m a realist. That’s the difference between you and me.”
Not fair! He’d been the big romancer from the beginning, using all that corny language, saying I was “
the one.”
“This is bigger than us, Ward. Remember when you said that?”
“It is bigger than us. We can’t make it work.”
“How dare you turn that around on me!”
He hung up.
• • •
GETTING JAKE TO THE WILDERNESS CAMP WAS like stuffing a cat into a cardboard box, and when he came back, he said he couldn’t put up with my rules anymore and announced he was leaving home. He wrote me a kind letter, telling me that he understood why I’d made the rules and realized he should have obeyed them, but he was practically grown up now and if he could survive in the wilderness, then Laramie would be no challenge at all. Talk about a plan that had backfired! I will not disapoynt you, Mom. I promise. Stand back and watch me sore! He was an immature seventeen and nowhere near ready to survive on his own, but I put on a brave face and kissed him good-bye on the front porch, reminding him he would be welcome back anytime and to please come on Sundays, for dinner.
When I came inside after saying good-bye to him, Beatrice was waiting for me, her expression grave and empathetic. She had come to see me through the final throes of the breakup with Ward and to lend support with Jake. She was his godmother and had known him since he was a baby.
“May God watch over him,” she said, in her somber, low-pitched voice. Also a mother, she knew it was unthinkable what I’d just had to do. She put her arms around me and as I crumpled within them, followed me down, onto the floor.
• • •
JAKE AND HIS GIRLFRIEND STARTED FLOPPING AT a house in the worst part of our poor neighborhood. The house had a dirt yard and black curtains so thoroughly drawn that not one lumen of light could pass through them. The man who rented the house was rumored to be a meth addict. Mornings, when the principal called to tell me that Jake and his girlfriend hadn’t made it to school, I went over there and banged on the blackened windows until Jake exploded out the front door. “What? Jesus Christ, Mom!” Then “Oh.” They’d forgotten about school.
I consulted a psychotherapist, telling her I would stop at nothing to get my son out of the danger he was in. Together we devised a plan. I lured Jake home by allowing his girlfriend to move into my basement with him, then proceeded to finesse them both through high school one day at a time. This went against the advice I’d received from the wilderness-camp director, who took the tough-love, “he has to save himself and won’t do that until he hits bottom” approach. But methamphetamine addiction was not a bottom I was willing to let my son reach.
Meanwhile, Ward kept calling me sporadically, stirring flames in the embers by saying he missed me and still loved me, then dousing the flames with the insistence that our relationship was impractical and we had no future.
Finally, in response to my demands for an explanation for his about-face, he sent a letter.
You want to ride and camp in the wilderness. I want to ride checking my own fences. When day ends, you want to sleep under the stars. I want to sleep in the bunkhouse. You worry about the environment. I worry about making a living. I believe work should be its own reward. I don’t care about the masses, I care about me!
What else did I need to know? How much more directly could he have put it? I told him he shouldn’t call me anymore “unless something changes there,” a request he honored a little too readily. I thought I could starve him back to his senses. But of course it was I who starved.
My inability to let Ward go reveals to me now that my indoctrination as a woman in a patriarchal culture ran deeper than I’d ever realized. “When are you going to find another dad for me, Mom?” Jake had asked me often in his early childhood. “When are you going to marry me a farmer?” Dad had asked, only half joking. It seemed that the sole means I had of contributing to the happiness of these two people I loved most in the world was to use my feminine appeal to gain the real prize. A father for Jake, a farmer for Dad. That’s why the time I’d spent helping Dad during Jake’s toddlerhood had seemed so healing. I had proven I could be that farmer if I wanted to, and Dad had even accepted that I could. I rejected all those sexist implications, asserted my own truths, became equal in my own right, but look at me now.
“He just couldn’t do it, Bair,” Beatrice said. Knowing this didn’t help. The thought that I had somehow become a daunting chore only infuriated me. During Beatrice’s visit we browsed through a Laramie antique store, where she picked up a beautiful little carved wooden box. On the lid she pasted a picture that I had taken on a canoe trip down the Green River in western Wyoming. The water in the foreground was pale green and so clear that you could see the boulders underneath, a surface netting of sunlight drifting over them. A slightly opaque strip of turquoise water mirrored the turquoise on the box’s sides. And the ripples where the water reflected the shoreline glinted gold, the same color as the metallic paint on the box’s rim. The water had flowed out of the base of Flaming Gorge Dam, so cold I didn’t think I could go in at first. But that strip of turquoise had been irresistible. Of course I’d gone in, every time we’d beached the canoe. “Remember who you are,” Beatrice seemed to be telling me with that gift.
Another friend, Susan, who’d grown up in Iowa farm country and felt stifled there, told me simply, “He’s a settler. You’re a seeker. Settlers don’t like seekers. They ask too many unsettling questions.” She also observed that until I met Ward, I’d centered so much on Jake and work that it was as if I’d forgotten I was a sexual being. Loving Ward had awakened that part of me again, and however painful losing him was, that would be a good thing in the long run.
The wisdom of friends like these—the community I had built up over the years through that forceful urge to connect with the like-minded or like-spirited—would settle in after this crisis in my romantic affairs ended. But the road to acceptance has no shortcuts. I had to walk the distance step by step.
8
IN THE DISTRICT’S NEWSLETTER, THE WATER TABLE, I READ THAT OUR BOARD WAS GOING TO HOLD AN ANNUAL MEETING. It would be open to the public, an opportunity to learn how decisions were made. And who knew? I might run into Ward. He warehoused his livestock equipment in Colby. And he sometimes shopped at the grocery store there.
The director greeted me with courteous surprise and ushered me to a row of empty seats reserved for the public along one end of the small conference room. Ten board members, all of them men, sat around the table.
I was forced to sit almost sideways to avoid knocking my knees against the back of a chair occupied by a red-faced cowboy farmer with a handlebar mustache. He was the man who’d once rented our pasture from Bruce. He looked the same today as he had when I’d first met him, at a party Ward had taken me to—Wranglers so crisp and indigo they must have been brand-new, his chest prominent and proud under a starched-white, snap-up shirt. At the party, he made it clear to me that he’d felt hoodwinked when Bruce sold the pasture after getting him to install all new posts and wire. “You owe me,” he said, quite seriously. “What are you and your brother going to do with your farm?”
“I don’t know. Run it?”
“Really?” he said, holding my eyes with an amused look on his face. “How are you going to do that when that man of yours, Ron, quits?”
“Well, hello, Miss Bair!” he said now, a little jokingly. As the meeting was called to order, he took out a pen and scribbled something on the back of his copy of the agenda. He passed it to me and watched while I read it. I want to rent your farm. I gave him a wan smile and nodded mere acknowledgment. After the contentiousness between him and Bruce, there wasn’t a chance in hell we’d choose him as a renter.
Ward had told me after that party that I’d rattled his friends by hanging out in the room where the men gathered and striking up my own conversations with them. Men and women normally formed separate clumps at Kansas get-togethers. Now those tables had turned. It was I who felt rattled. Women did not participate in public farm business, I knew. With pad and
pen, I pretended to be a journalist, but as a member of a farm family who irrigated, I would normally be thought a partisan. Truth be known—and I believed that some of the men present did intuit this truth—I was a turncoat. They were kind to me anyway. The director introduced me and offered me coffee, and the men smiled and said hello, extending their welcome to the daughter of an old-timer many of them had known.
The cowboy farmer turned in his chair every so often to stare at me unabashedly, like an overconfident suitor undressing the object of his desire. Except his lechery was not sexual. It was fiscal. I thought I could read his mind as he multiplied our acreage times yields and dollars per bushel and estimated our annual Farm Program subsidies.
He knew that heirs usually sought a renter first. Then they sold to him. He and the other board members and their fathers and grandfathers had gotten big this way. Like my own forebears, theirs had made it through the Depression and the droughts, adding sections of land to their holdings as their neighbors either failed or died, leaving nonfarming sons and daughters. Each acquisition reinforced their confidence in their families’ special mettle, their plains hardiness, their survivability. I knew that pride well and had basked in it my whole life. This suitor presented no immediate danger, but he clearly smelled opportunity. He traveled in Ward’s circle and must have known that we’d broken up. Now that it was certain I would not be coming home, there would be spoils.
The men around the conference table kept stealing glances at me. The looks on their faces seemed to go beyond mere curiosity. Was it suspicion? Guilt? These men were some of the area’s biggest irrigation farmers. A few of them grossed more than a million dollars annually and were among the top twenty government-subsidized farmers in their counties. Ron told me that one of the board members had thirty-eight sprinkler systems on his land.
Ron was an opinionated man, and he believed in playing by the rules. Each year he called me with accurate meter readings so we could properly record the amount of water we’d used. He didn’t like the fact that most irrigation farmers weren’t even required to have meters, whereas we’d had to have them ever since Dad cut a deal with the district allowing us to use water from any of our wells on any of our land. Once, Ron had told Bruce and me that he would run for the board himself, except if he did, and tried to get stronger meter controls passed, he couldn’t step outside anymore without wearing a bulletproof vest.