by Bair, Julene
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING I AWOKE WHEN THE first rooster crowed, before dawn. I grabbed a blanket from my bed and went onto the pool deck, where I lay down in a plastic lounger, watched the last stars fade, and tried to think. With my eyes closed and drifting in and out of sleep, it was easy to imagine this whole foreign escapade as one of those dreams where I hadn’t attended class all semester, and now it was time for the test. I was about to be flunked out of my own identity.
Somehow, I’d managed to go on thinking that I was synonymous with my family’s land through all the changes, even through my parents’ abandonment of the Carlson farm, and my own and my brothers’ abandonments of our father, the man who kept it going in our absences. When I was eighteen and hadn’t wanted to settle for being just a wife married to “just” a farmer, I’d depended on Dad to be a farmer. Even as I refused to embrace the unglamorous lifestyle, I took pride in his mastery and success and in the land that empowered him. Through him, it empowered me. I could go make my mark in the world, and the ground of my being would be there waiting for me anytime I wanted to touch in. Now it seemed that I’d been playing hooky for decades. Until Ward came along, I hadn’t even realized I’d been absent.
Those tears Dad cried when I wouldn’t stay home that summer and farm—they were for me. They were for all of us. He foresaw this day as clearly as if it were tattooed on his hairy forearm.
I rolled over and was startled to see Jake getting a cup of coffee from the urn the waiter had set out for early birds. The sun had only just begun to burnish the tops of the palms. When he lived with me, he never got up without my practically having to throw firecrackers under his bed. I closed my eyes. Maybe he would think I was sleeping.
The legs of a patio chair screeched against the concrete as he dragged it over, making that pretense impossible. “Good morning,” I said. “You’re up early.”
“I didn’t sleep much.”
“I don’t think any of us did.”
He leaned his elbows on his knees and cradled his coffee cup between his hands. “So what do you think?”
I knew the vision that danced in Jake’s head. He saw himself working side by side with Josh, Ron, and Bruce. Male solidarity. “Jake, it’s not realistic. You don’t know all you’d have to give up.”
He took a gulp of coffee. “You’re not going to let me do this, are you?”
“Let you? It’s not up to me.”
“Don’t stand in my way!” he shouted. Somewhat inadvertently but also somewhat purposefully, he tipped over the chair he’d been sitting in, dumped the remainder of his coffee in a bougainvillea bush, and left.
That night I knocked on Bruce’s door.
Kris opened it a crack. Her protective instincts had kicked into full gear. Behind her, Bruce sat on the bed, hunched over his guitar. “Come in,” he said resignedly, that jagged edge to his voice. Kris opened the door.
“I cannot bear to look upon that which I have wrought,” he confessed.
“That which Harold wrought,” Kris corrected.
She was right. Dad had placed a guilt bomb in each of us and set it to explode shrapnel in our brains if we ever contemplated selling. Bruce had merely detonated the bomb.
I said, “Our kids aren’t equipped for it, Bruce.”
“Why not?” he almost shouted. “Maybe Josh will surprise you. Maybe Jake will.”
“That’s what they think, but we didn’t raise them in the life.”
“That’s exactly why they want it,” Bruce said. “Anyway, it’s out of my hands.” He got up and reached into the room’s refrigerator. “Want a Presidente? Bottled right here in the Caribbean.”
“No, thanks.”
He sat down with a groan, opened his beer, and picked up his guitar.
I returned to my room. Mom had her yellow hairnet on, which matched her yellow nylon nightgown. She looked fragile, but less so than when we’d first arrived. The trip was doing her good. Her back didn’t even seem to hunch as much. She had the beginnings of osteoporosis, but was trying to stave it off with the calcium tablets she chewed with every meal. “I think I’ll sit up and read a little,” she said, getting one of the Newsweeks she’d brought from her suitcase. She flicked on the lamp over the corner stuffed chair. “I’m not very tired tonight.” Unlike everyone else, she seemed undisturbed by Bruce’s news. Not much bothered her anymore. This calm was not solely the product of her habitual repression. She seemed to have entered that state of saintly acceptance achieved by the most gracious of the elderly.
Bruce’s Dylan-esque voice reverberated across the stone tile of the hallway. From this valley they say you are going / We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile.
Mom leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “My,” she said, “isn’t Bruce getting good on his guitar?”
He’d probably been anguishing for months over this decision. Kris was right to be protective of him.
• • •
ABBY WAS FEELING PROTECTIVE TOO. THAT NIGHT when I joined her at the bar, she said, “The farm was going to kill Dad, and now it’s going to kill Josh. I won’t stand for that!”
“Oh come on, Abby.”
“I mean it, Aunt Julie.”
“Your grandfather survived until he was eighty-two.”
“But my dad is not Harold. Thank God! And neither is Josh.”
“Nor is Jake,” I said. Although he’d apologized for his anger earlier, this was the first night he hadn’t come out to the bar.
Abby took a drag on her cigarette. “Nor Jake. It will kill them and we can’t let that happen!”
“Those are just clove, right?”
She leaned down to reach into her purse, her blouse so tight and low cut that I wanted to suggest she go put on a comfortable T-shirt. “Be natural, be wholesome,” I wanted to say. But she was well into her twenties, the man-alluring years. And judging by the stares of the young island men sitting near us, she was succeeding. Their white shirts and loosened ties indicated they were clerks, free for the remainder of the night from their jobs in nearby hotels. She sat up, handing me a cigarette. I said, “I quit again a year ago. But this won’t do any harm, right?”
“No, you’ll be fine.” With a bar match, she lit the slender, delectable, brown cigarette for me. “I could go back there and do it,” she said. “I’m smart. I could manage it.”
It amazed me how strong the call of farm duty was in the kids. Except for a couple of years when she was little and Bruce was attempting to work for Dad, Abby had never lived on the farm. The complete animaled and peopled Carlson farmstead that Bruce and I had grown up on was ancient history by then. But Dad bought her a goat, Schwanlea, that she loved. Schwanlea and her grandfather’s passion had apparently been enough to ensnare her too.
“I would go and do it if only to save Josh,” she said. “But who would I ever find to love me there?”
“I can tell you from experience. No one.” Ward had been a grass man, not a dirt man, I reminded myself. He had not been the answer to this dilemma. There was no answer except complete personality changes and sacrifices none of us would be willing to make.
“Maybe you could do it, Abby,” I said.” But you’d have to really want to. You’d be throwing away all hope of a social life, and forget about your real career plans. And you would hate the chemicals and the irrigation as much as I do.”
She reared back on her barstool. “Oh the folly!” she shouted at the palm fronds above us. The island men laughed, and I resisted putting my hand on her arm.
“The sheer unadulterated folly! Folly, Aunt Julie—I know you know this—is totally nonclassist and doesn’t care which old patriarchal noggin it invades. Whether it’s King Lear’s or Harold Bair’s.”
“Let’s move over to the pool chairs,” I suggested.
Once we were resituated, Abby picked up her
theme. “Okay, Jane Smiley keyed in on it too, but it doesn’t take a genius to see, if you’ve read Shakespeare and you ever knew any old farming geezers like Grandpa, that they’re all on a power trip.”
I felt dizzy, as if I’d downed a barbiturate laced with speed. I looked at the brown wand in my hand. Was there tobacco in it? I’d thought they had only clove in them. Through a gap in the curtains, I could see Jake’s profile as he sat watching the TV. I didn’t want him to catch me smoking. I remembered the night we’d gone to the Fellowship of the Ring with Ward and I’d bought him a pack of Marlboros. Ward had reprimanded me, not for buying them but for complaining about buying them. “Cut it out,” he’d said, as if he’d earned the right to interfere. Only later, postbreakup, did Jake’s unannounced return to his grandmother’s the following morning make sense. How had it made him feel to see the only authority figure he could count on curtly silenced by the cowboy dude she’d gone all ape over? Which was the worse addiction, his to cigarettes or the one we shared to the myths attendant on dads? Which drug had I been pushing to the most ill effect?
I put the cigarette out in the same bougainvillea bush he’d dumped his coffee in. That poor bush.
Like Lear, Abby continued, Harold had been self-deluded about the incomparable value of his domain. “His estate,” she said, “meaning everything he had to offer, not just his land. His place in the universe. His mightiness.”
“Wow, you’re so smart, Abby. How’d you get so smart?” A tobacco high and my second beer induced a sisterly solidarity, along with a euphoric sense of tragedy.
“And of course, you know who played the role of Cordelia.”
“Me? That would be the obvious choice since I was the only girl in the family.”
“No. Dad did. Bruce. Your brother!”
“Oh right. The falsely judged, least rapacious one of our lot.”
“More sinned against than sinning. He tried to farm with Grandpa because that’s what he loved doing more than anything else, growing things. Look at his gardens. He has ripe tomatoes in June! Not even Grandma has ripe tomatoes in June. But Grandpa treated him like a slave, so he resorted to newspaper work. I’m sorry, Aunt Julie, but you got help from Grandpa. Dad didn’t.”
It’s demoralizing to learn a sibling’s opinion of you from his child. How widespread and solidified had this version of ‘Julie’ become? “Oh Abby. Your father doesn’t know how much I hated having to go back home.”
“All broke and pregnant?”
I downed my beer. “Exactly how I like to put it.”
“And you didn’t have a wife to support you,” Abby said, conciliatorily. Bruce had lived off Kris’s wages for a while after he quit small-town journalism.
I felt around in the bougainvillea pot.
“I’d give you another, but I’m all out,” Abby said. As she went to reposition herself on the lounger, her foot shot out and kicked over her beer, breaking the bottle.
“God, Abby, you’re drunk. Don’t cut yourself.”
“I won’t. I guess you weren’t exactly Regan or Goneril either. And I don’t think Clark was, certainly. He didn’t take anything, just disappeared honorably, as Cordelia did. Actually, you were all Cordelia. All any of you ever wanted was to make him proud.”
“True.”
“Me too, Aunt Julie,” she pleaded.
“Oh Abby.” I reached and she leaned into my hug. A sob escaped her. With one hand, I pushed her long dark-auburn hair behind her ear, dropping its weight onto her back. I rested my hand on the corsetlike blouse she wore. The flesh over her shoulder blades felt cool—soft and foreign. I wished I’d held her more often when she was a child, wished we had all lived closer. I knew how she must have suffered, as we all did, glimpsing displeasure in Dad’s glances. She had a brilliant mind but wore a few extra pounds. Dad judged women primarily by their physical characteristics.
Perhaps that’s why I’d dreamed of him dressed as Pablo Neruda. I’d always longed for some refinement in him—the understanding of each of our souls that would have come with that.
That night, Abby and I figured everything out for everybody. We would sell the farm. I would invest the proceeds, continuing my role as the family’s money manager. The boys, if they wanted to be family heroes, could learn a trade, then we could set them up in business together. We could buy them a house to renovate in the central Kansas town where Bruce lived. He could supervise the first project, and then they’d be on their own.
It all sounded so sane to me then, after two beers and one clove cigarette.
2
ABBY’S AND MY PLANS FOR JAKE AND JOSH NEVER MATERIALIZED. Jake said he wanted to try farming, so I encouraged him to demonstrate his eagerness by moving to Goodland. He could show up on the farm every morning and make himself useful. I would clear the way for him—arrange it with Ron, help him find a house to rent, and then help him move. Understandably, he didn’t take me up on that offer. It would have required uncommon determination and self-confidence to go down there and foist himself, a green beginner, on Ron, who could not have hidden his disdain. Those raised in the life don’t respect those who weren’t.
Josh and Lace broke up, and the cable company he worked for promoted him and transferred him to Corpus Christi, where he could go scuba diving every weekend if he wanted to. He met a woman, married her, and his daughter, Jess, now had a baby brother. Josh’s new wife was a showy dresser from the Dominican Republic. She lived in a sea of family who’d immigrated to Corpus Christi. Imagining her in the old farmhouse or in the double-wide, surrounded by fields of corn and wheat, was as absurd as picturing a toucan roosting among the pigeons in our old sheep barn.
The summer after our trip to the Turks and Caicos, I found my own new love. My attraction to Jim, an engineer who lived and worked a two-hour drive south of Laramie, in Colorado, was rooted in my wilderness passions. We swam in mountain lakes, paddled rivers, camped and skied together. Jim also shared my politics, and when we danced, our bodies moved in natural rhythm, like two ocean waves.
On our second date, for a swim in Lake Hattie, I happened to ask Jim if he knew my cousin’s ex-husband, who, like Jim, had once worked for Hewlett Packard. I didn’t think it likely, as Jim said there had been more than fourteen hundred employees at the Colorado division when he worked there. It turned out that my cousin’s husband had once taken Jim pheasant hunting on his mother-in-law’s—my aunt Bernice’s—land in western Kansas. During the trip they visited a farmstead that had a couple of Quonsets, a barn-shaped house, and a double-wide trailer on it. Jim distinctly remembered meeting an old man on that farm. They’d talked for quite a while. For an atheist who once compared what happens when we die to the fate of a jack rabbit hit by a car—Bang! When you’re dead, you’re dead!—my father sure had an uncanny way of making his presence felt after his own death.
After dating Jim for a little over a year, I sold my beautiful old house and moved to Colorado to live with him. Almost immediately I made new friends, many of them writers whose work inspired my own.
My professional horizons had widened and I was in a committed relationship. So when Bruce e-mailed to say he’d “had about enough”—of farming, that is—and that a real estate agent he’d been flirting with said he had a “hard offer,” I believed I was ready to let the farm go as easily as I had Laramie and the beautiful old house.
I thought I understood things so much better now. How lucky I was that I hadn’t moved back to Kansas to be with Ward. I recalled the dream I’d had after Clark died. At first I had tried to put a pleasant spin on it, thinking wasn’t that nice? Clark was protecting Jake from falling off that seed drill, the same way he used to protect me. But the dream’s vibe had been grim, not reassuring. And I knew it had been about all of us, not only Clark and Jake. To be born in Dad’s lineage was to be conscripted into subliminal servitude to his passions. When Ward broke up with me, I reasoned, he s
aved me from a fate worse than my own death—accompanying my father into his. I still believe this. But today I know that you can’t cast out your demons with one decisive or, as it would be in Bruce’s and my case, indecisive act.
That supposedly hard offer didn’t come through, but Ron’s emphysema had gotten so bad that he now needed oxygen in order to sleep at night. The “end game,” as Bruce called it, was on. We both thought we should sign before what was obviously a national real estate bubble collapsed, but neither of us was ready.
Despite his apparent certainty in the Turks and Caicos, Bruce now wrote in an e-mail that he was having a lot of problems dealing with the sale of the farm as it has given us all nice lives. For a man in my family to say he was having a lot of problems with anything was like my saying it was tearing my guts out, which it was.
When we finally signed, the real estate agent succinctly boiled the work of our parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes down to thirteen words:
SHERMAN County
21 Quarters irrig., dry land, grass,
CRP. Nice improvements. 5 wells.
The farm stayed on the market for a year before we had an offer, for a third less than we were asking. “I am not going to give it away,” Bruce said.
Another year went by. Then Congress passed a new energy bill upping the percentage of biofuel required in gasoline. The main source of that, given the cropping patterns already established, was ethanol from corn. Ethanol distilleries sprang up in the Midwest and on the Great Plains, and corn prices began to creep higher. It had also begun to rain again.