The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  At night, across the land, along with toad song in the prairie potholes, droned the snores of once sleepless farmers, their dreams overflowing with burgeoning grain bins. The people who’d made the first offer came back with a higher one. Still too low for Bruce, and our accountant warned it would be risky to carry the note for the buyers, who had never farmed on this scale.

  Even though I could see it would be a gamble, I argued for accepting their offer. If we were going to commit identity suicide, I wanted to pull the trigger and get it over with. But I needn’t have worried, or perhaps I should have, because the revolver’s chamber clicked forward and within a week came a third offer, fully loaded. The amount we were asking, in annual installments. It came from three brothers. They were megafarmers headquartered in a little town not far over the Colorado border, where they had a big feedlot. Altogether they owned one hundred sections—one hundred square miles. I didn’t like the idea of the farm’s being absorbed by such a huge operation and suggested that our other prospect should be granted an opportunity to counter. But the accountant and bank officer who oversaw Dad’s trust took comfort from the megafarmers’ solid financial statement, assuring us that an operation that size would never renege on the loan. The consensus was that we shouldn’t let them slip away.

  • • •

  BEFORE WE COULD REGISTER THE SOUND OF the hammer cocking, Bruce and I found ourselves in Goodland for the final negotiations. We met at Mom’s house, although she didn’t live there anymore. On one of my visits, she and I had toured Wheat Ridge Acres, the appropriately named local assisted-living place. In the dining room, she ran into some farm neighbors she and Dad used to play pitch with on winter Saturday nights. That comforted her, and in her usual reasonable manner, she had agreed to move. She’d remained reasonable throughout our discussions of the farm sale too, compassionately reiterating that “Harold foresaw this. He said it would be all right.”

  In advance of this day, I had e-mailed Bruce, suggesting we have lunch together in order to come up with a negotiating strategy. “I’ll go,” he said now, “but there’s no way to wriggle out of this. We signed a good-faith contract with the agent, remember? And he got our asking price for us.”

  “I didn’t say anything about wriggling out of it.”

  We must have planned to pick up Mom after lunch. That must have been why we took her car. I chose one of Goodland’s only bows to the yuppie aesthetic, a restaurant in an old brick building overshadowed by grain elevators on the north end of Main. It had big swaths of plateglass I’d never noticed before, probably because the windows had been heavily draped back when it was home to the Moose lodge.

  I’d always been curious about what went on in the town’s male hangouts—the pool halls, for instance, that I’d envied Bruce for frequenting as a teenager. Surely, he was having way more fun in them than I would ever be allowed to have in Goodland.

  I marveled at the building’s splendor, for this town. An embossed-tin ceiling painted a sumptuous chocolate-brown. A new wood floor. Was it ash or birch? A copper countertop. “Where do you want to sit?” I asked.

  “I don’t care. Anywhere.”

  A corner table seemed appropriate, given that we had private business to discuss. All week long, ever since I’d heard, I’d been reviewing my reasons. I had no faith in our ability to replace Ron, as I remembered too well the many hired men who had become fired men in our childhoods. Renting would be no less of a gamble. What if the renter didn’t work out? Even if we were physically able to farm ourselves, which we weren’t, we wouldn’t have the equipment anymore to farm with. Equipment depreciated rapidly. You couldn’t just let it sit in case you might need it again someday. If we heeded what the climate scientists were saying, the drought might return soon and settle in for decades or longer. And I’d taken Bruce at his word in the Caribbean. He needed to quit, for his happiness and to lower his stress. If he continued, then got sick or died, what would I do then? Even if I had the know-how, I didn’t want to run the chemically intensive, water-guzzling farm our place had become.

  Bruce flipped open his sandwich, sighed with disgust, and scraped off the feta cheese and dried cranberries. I said, “So I was thinking, we don’t have to roll over and take whatever terms they offer. If you have any doubts—”

  “I invited Ron to the meeting,” Bruce said. “I know he doesn’t have a direct role in this financially. But we owe him that. I don’t care what you think.”

  “Of course we owe him. I want him there too.” Bruce and Ron had become close over the last ten years of working together, and Bruce had always bent over backward to be fair to him. Ron probably had one of the only profit-sharing agreements in Sherman County. That treatment would have elicited anyone’s loyalty, but Ron would have given it to us anyway. He was made that way. Bruce had once told me that he and Ron were alike—a type of plainsmen who hardly existed anymore. Bruce was too original to say “dying breed,” but he might as well have. Me too, I had wanted to tell him. I’m one of us too.

  He was eating his sandwich as if it were a chore. “The terms are fine,” he said, dismissing my whole reason for wanting to talk. Because really, maybe it wasn’t too late. All we’d have to do was put up a fuss over a detail. Demand an extra half point of interest perhaps. That’s if Bruce wasn’t 100 percent on board. There had been that one e-mail when he’d done an about-face in the middle of a discussion of real estate agents and land values and had put forth what must have struck him as a brilliant idea: He would continue managing the farm if I would grant him 51 percent ownership so that I couldn’t sell it out from under him when Mom died.

  Although I’d been offended at the thought of his having all the say, the idea had appealed to me somewhat because it would have granted me a reprieve. I wasn’t sure who I was going to be when this was all over. But the thought of Bruce taking on the farm, given his age and previously stated concerns, didn’t inspire much confidence in me.

  I said I would make it easy for him to buy my half if that’s really what he wanted. He replied that the proposal had been just a backup plan in case we couldn’t sell.

  What I hadn’t understood was the inordinate power that uncertainty cedes to certainty, even if the certainty is just an act.

  So here we were. Me with my unfailing appetite. Bruce dutifully chewing.

  “We’re going to have to find places to put all the money,” he said.

  “I’ve been working on it. My financial guy says we can make five percent even if we—”

  “Five percent how?” Bruce asked.

  “CDs, except—”

  “Five isn’t that good,” he said. “The farm did better than that every year for the last—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t interrupt me when I’m trying to explain something.”

  Bruce abruptly shoved his plate aside, then got up. Without saying a word, he walked out the door. I watched through the remarkably large, remarkably clear glass beside me as he tossed the keys through the open window of Mom’s LeSabre.

  He crossed the street, his back and shoulders hunching as Dad’s used to do when he or Clark had done something really stupid, like twist a field implement around a telephone pole or forget to turn off the diesel tank so that all the fuel siphoned out onto the ground.

  And they were left just standing there, wondering if they’d lost his love.

  • • •

  IT WAS AS IF WE’D ALREADY TAKEN the step down in stature that our imminent landlessness foretold. The First National Bank’s trust officer ushered Mom and me into the staff break room in the basement. Bruce, Ron, the real estate agent, our lawyer, and two accountants were sitting around a table with a Masonite top and folding metal legs like those you see in church basements. The last time we met at the bank, to sign papers shortly after Dad’s death, we’d been given the plush conference room. The coffee was made in this room and brought to that one, paneled in m
ahogany and carpeted in green. To symbolize money, I assumed. On this day the casters of its big cushioned chairs were no doubt straining under the weight of the farm’s prospective buyers. The three brothers were as large as linebackers, our real estate agent told us.

  Earlier, Bruce had been wearing jeans and a blue Levi’s shirt, both faded and baggy. Now he wore white pants and a white jacket over a bold orange-and-green shirt. His Panama hat lay upside down on the chair beside him. Here would be our Pablo Neruda, except he didn’t look dapper in summer linen. He looked rumpled and distorted. His beard and hair and eyebrows were all out of hand, as usual. But this seemed preferable today. Any trimming would have left a face and eyes too glaring in their nakedness. I wished he hadn’t stomped out earlier. But what had I expected? If we could talk, we probably wouldn’t be here.

  “Tell ’em we’ll throw the wind rights in for free,” Bruce said to the real estate agent, then grinned. He was lampooning his own efforts, in the late nineties, to lease our land’s wind rights to a Dutch developer, who, during the six-year term of the option to explore, never set up a single wind meter.

  Ron, sitting beside Bruce, laughed sarcastically. “He’s a firecracker,” Dad had often said about Ron. Tightly wound, high-strung, he had the look of a classic cowboy—scrawny bowlegs and nonexistent butt, ruddy skin and face. I’d found out when I’d pastured my horse Henry on the farm for a while that he had no affinity for equines, but that didn’t prevent him from wearing shirts that snapped.

  The real estate agent had been a popular kid in high school. The banker, also a hometown boy, still called him Butch. When first we asked for a shorter term on the note, then wanted to tie the interest rate to prime, Butch said, “Okay,” his voice quaking as if he were afraid to risk the linebackers’ wrath. But we hurled him out our room’s door and down the hall anyway, like a ball we were working toward our questionable goal.

  What would we really be losing? I asked myself. Only some minor conveniences and imagined possibilities. I wouldn’t be able to leave my dog on the farm when I traveled anymore. None of us could park our old vehicles in the implement lot as we’d always done, with intentions of rebuilding the engines someday, then watch as, over the decades, they became classics, their book value increasing and their conditions worsening as their tires cracked and hired hands’ children shattered the windshields with stones or bullets. When the big flu epidemic or nuclear war hit, we wouldn’t be able to reunite on the farm, a cohesive family once again, raising our chickens and watering our vegetable garden with the aid of a windmill.

  While we waited for Butch to return from the conference room, one of the accountants said he’d begun investing in Conservation Reserve Program ground, land that the government paid farmers to set aside. Once the contract term ran out, the land could be grazed.

  “Lots of farmers in the Texas Panhandle are grazing cattle on their former corn land,” I declared, true, as ever, to my obsession over the declining Ogallala. “Only because they have to, of course. They don’t have enough water left to raise corn or soybeans. Used it up.”

  Was it my imagination, or were those scoffing looks on the faces of the men around the table? “We should start doing that here,” I added, “before we use up most of our water too. We could sell the beef directly off the grass and just skip the corn-fattening step.”

  “Oh no!” objected Ron. “We’re not going back fifty years.”

  Fifty years to when no one had ever heard of a feedlot. I didn’t want to challenge Ron, whose invitation to this meeting was meant to honor him. The accountant spared me that, saying, “People underestimate the organic and natural-meat markets. The demand has more than doubled over the last several years.”

  The banker said that his daughter had made the mistake of ordering a sirloin from a grass-finished steer in a fancy city restaurant. Finding it tougher than shoe leather, she had coveted his juicy conventional filet.

  “Argentine beef is fed nothing but grass,” I said.

  “And it’s supposed to be the best in the world,” added the accountant.

  That’s not fair, I imagined Bruce saying. Comparing Argentine to American beef is like comparing sun perch to carp, but when I glanced over at him, he didn’t even seem aware we’d been talking.

  Butch opened the door, but paused with his hand on the knob. Beaming, he cast his gaze slowly around the room. That fetching schoolboy smile must have been the cornerstone of his teenage popularity. He gently closed the door.

  The gun fired.

  “We have a deal,” he said.

  “Yahoo!” said the accountant.

  The banker said, “I’ll draw up the acceptance.”

  Bruce began to speak but interrupted himself. “I can’t—” He placed his Panama hat on his balding head and stood. “Send me anything you need me to sign,” he said, his voice breaking as he rushed from the room.

  Had I been twenty years younger, I would have begun to question our accomplishment in that moment, based solely on Bruce’s reaction. At fifty-seven, determined to experience my own feelings, I went through a brief elated phase—that of winning a game or concluding any business successfully. I hugged each of the people there, Kansans all, who only hug their moms and spouses.

  Mom smiled graciously and thanked everyone as they congratulated her. I held her arm to steady her as she eased her walker into the elevator, then helped her into the car so that I could drive her back to Wheat Ridge Acres. Not only had she lost her husband and most of her friends to death, she was now reduced to living in two small rooms. But ownership, the clinging to stuff, she knew on some unarticulated level, was a misplaced passion. She maintained her equanimity by focusing on each moment—that and the immediate future. Her next hair appointment. Or her favorite TV program, Wheel of Fortune.

  She tilted back her lift chair and pushed the button on her remote control. “Oh good,” she said, “It’s starting. I didn’t miss a thing.”

  It frustrated me that she seemed to have no misgivings about what we’d done. In me, remorse was setting in. I had closed my eyes and kept them closed until the gun fired. They now opened onto unendurable fact.

  “One hundred years,” I said to Mom.

  She pulled her eyes away from the TV. “What?”

  “One hundred years. Your dad traded his Texas land for his Kansas land in 1906.”

  “That’s right. He did. Sight unseen,” she said proudly.

  “And now it’s 2006. Isn’t that strange that we’d choose to sell exactly one hundred years after your family arrived?”

  “Uh-huh, it is strange,” she said, returning her attention to Vanna White’s spin of the wheel.

  It was like trying to get an emotional reaction out of a turnip, and it was probably wrong to try. What did I want? For her to feel as bad as I did? The one person who did was probably heading down the interstate toward his home. If he’d stayed, he couldn’t have hugged me or forgiven me anyway, and if he’d blamed me out loud, I would have cried. Tears in this family were an abomination, as ugly as cutworms, green and squirming in spring soil, and as dangerous to us as the actual worms were to crops. They might cut off our dignity at its roots in our stoicism.

  So I did what instinct always told me to do when I was upset in Kansas. I drove out to the farm. The three hundred trees I’d gotten Dad to purchase from the Soil Conservation Service the year Jake turned one were now full grown. The cedars had thickened so much I couldn’t see through them to the back row of sandhill plums. “Quit if you want to,” Dad had told the hired man, “but she’s your boss today.” The entitlement I’d felt over that! The ownership.

  The old windbreak west of the farmstead, planted God knew how long ago, raised a few rheumatoid fingers against the winter sky. Ron had taken his chainsaw to most of the dead trees. He burned the logs in the double-wide’s fireplace, the one I’d ordered with the intention of hanging on to the
promising young couple Dad had hired. Not long after that couple quit, Ron and Nila made us all grateful that they had.

  Kittens rolled and mewed on the double-wide’s front steps. Black, black and white, yellow, gray. Needing a drink of water and to use the bathroom, I knocked, but Ron and Nila must not have come home from town yet. I turned on the step and took in the silence, ubiquitous, like the sun.

  In the shop, breathing the scent of dusty grease and oil; in the old house, staring into the living room where Dad and Jake used to take naps together on the couch; in the sheep barn, remembering the joy implicit in so much baaing life; in every inch of the farm, I recalled my father’s presence. I drove past the cattle troughs, unused since his death. The hog pens, quiet since my departure in the eighties. If one quality most characterized the place, it was vacancy.

  In the old implement lot, I stopped and got out of my car. The grass stretching from there to the first sprinkler-irrigated field was the only flat pastureland for miles around that hadn’t been plowed. Sitting on the iron seat of an ancient, rusted wheat drill, I floated for a few final moments on the quietude.

  A red-tailed hawk was perched on a fence post opposite me, watching the ground for mice. At dusk the coyotes would be yodeling over their conquests and yearnings. When spring came and the grass greened, the satiny ribbons of the meadowlarks’ calls would wind through the sky, as absent in its blueness as my absence would be. I would never again hear those calls winding around me in that particular place, tying me to it with their gentle, melodious bonds.

  Sliding to the ground, I ran my palm over the grass. The blades were curled and tawny, many of them streaked in red and burgundy. It comforted me knowing that at least this one patch of mild, short-grass prairie would outlast me. Each evening of every season in the years to come, it would swallow the setting sun, as it had always done. I wished that, rather than burying Clark and Dad in the Goodland cemetery, we had cremated them and spread their ashes here.