by Judy Blunt
I sat back, barely able to catch my breath. The owner gazed at a pile of loose boxes as he explained his reasons for letting me go. I was a good worker, a hard worker, but the summer season was ending and, he added with a long-suffering sigh, there had been complaints. My head swiveled toward him with a level of impertinence I had never shown before, and I snapped, "From who? Complaints about what?"
Rocking back, he sharpened his voice to match mine. "From customers," he snapped. Seems I did my job fine. I stocked, checked and bagged groceries, doubled sacks without being prompted, packed boxes of even weight and no wasted space. What I sometimes forgot to do was smile. Over the summer, two patrons had called him—their duty as friends of the family and longtime customers—to report that my sullen attitude was hurting business. I felt stricken by something close to horror. For years I had assumed my public face appeared to others the way I intended. Neutral. Pleasant. A nothing face arranged to neither cause offense nor draw attention. I had been wrong. From the outside, my neutral facade appeared disinterested, aloof, even angry. When I wasn't smiling, the speed I took pride in came across as reckless impatience. I was all job and no people, the owner summed up. Like the fabled emperor, I stood naked the moment he pointed his finger.
That night I paced the length of our shotgun trailer sharing my misery with the Grassroots and nursing a fifth of sloe gin. By the time my roommate came home I'd switched to Three Dog Night, playing "Mama Told Me Not to Come" again and again, and the bottle was half empty My two-week notice was up on September 1, and my second, part-time summer job would end about the same time. I never looked for another. Still a month shy of my eighteenth birthday and less than four months after I had packed my car and left the ranch, I wedged my belongings back into the tiny room off the ranch kitchen that I had shared with Gail since our infancy. Mom had moved the twins to town for their final year of high school, and they were gone during the week. Kenny would do a few more months of college before coming home for good. Dad charged in and out of sight, preoccupied with a dozen projects in addition to the fall work of weaning and shipping. A week passed, maybe two. I wandered in a daze, cooking meals, trudging through barn chores, taking long rides through the meadows and fields, searching for comfort in the familiar childhood landscapes. It was not there. Cross fences jerked the land into new, taut dimensions, the posts still pale and raw. Huge squares of grazing land lay freshly broken, a mare's nest of old roots and rocks, yellowed grass still clinging to sod. The world I had grown up in was gone.
The changes had not occurred overnight, and in some corner of my mind I had made casual note of them. But four years had passed since I had truly paid any attention to the cycle of life on the ranch, and in that brief span more than landscape had shifted. About the time I started high school, a boom in land values had made small family farms suddenly worth more on paper than ever before, riches that had little to do with cash flow or real income but gave operators like my parents the borrowing power to enter the twentieth century.
In terms of technology the modernization that followed was as revolutionary as the leap from horse to tractor begun by my grandfather and completed by my father. In the same decade, a third generation of sons came of age, boys like my brother who not only had been raised on the land but had studied modern agribusiness in college. Now that the draft had ended, they were coming back to the land.
In my absence, the whole community seemed to have shifted gears and found overdrive. New steel granaries jutted up from cement pads centered in the ashes of the old wooden grain bins. Four-wheel-drive tractors sporting headlights for night farming, cabs with windshields, radios and padded seats, squatted in the lee of new construction. The steel arc of Butler buildings rose over dark, oily squares of ground where tiny, dirt-floored shops had been, and fifty years of farming filled the coulees: old forges and anvils, foot-pedal grinding stones, wagon springs and hand pumps, brittle leather harness dried into swags from decades of hanging on a wall.
In the four years I spent traveling back and forth to Malta High School, the population of our community had dwindled by a third as the smaller, more marginal places were absorbed by their larger neighbors. The few remaining homesteaders were in their eighties and ready to retire. Couples with no children sold out to those who had sons waiting in the wings. Neighbor observed neighbor in an undercurrent of expectation, noting which heads came together in private conversation, who was visiting whom, listening for news of this one selling, that one buying. At the beginning of the boom, John, his father and stepmother had added another large ranch to their holdings in the Breaks and formed a ranching corporation. The year of my graduation, my parents, too, bought a second place from a retiring homesteader and became Blunt Ranches, Incorporated, a move that included Kenny as partner. Overnight, it seemed, the place I grew up on had fallen under the wheels of big business—big land, big lease, big machines. Big debt.
In the years when Dad had lived alone during the week, he had acquired the habit of calling neighbors to visit and discuss business as he fixed his solitary meal or drank coffee in the break between chores. I had no place in the new dealings. Our mealtimes together were silent aside from the jangle of the phone. One-sided conversations filled the kitchen at noon hour and took up again at dark. When Mom arrived on weekends, I slid further into silence, making sly but steady progress on the cache of sloe gin in my underwear drawer. Sundays when the house emptied I stepped back into place, clearing away supper dishes and straightening the rooms with a boozy attention to detail. One area of my life remained safe and familiar, and that was John.
The first evening call was often from John, and he regularly followed up with a thirty-mile round-trip to visit. As my father and I drifted through the week of empty evenings, anticipation of John's visits became our one shared experience. I cleared away the supper dishes while Dad watched the evening news, both of us alert for the muffled woof our dog gave when lights turned off the county road onto our lane. At the signal, Dad rose from his chair and turned off the television, then stepped into the porch to click the yard light on and hail him in. Pulling up a chair at the kitchen table, John would risk an eyebrow cha-cha in my direction while Dad wasn't looking, grinning as I turned to hide my smile in the task of making coffee.
I filled cups and served wedges of pie, ready for the tease of backhanded praise as John finished and pushed his plate forward. "I can't decide if that pie's any good or not—might have to have another piece to make up my mind." Not to be outdone, Dad would lean back in his chair and suggest I might improve my pie-making if I just practiced a little more, say a pie a day until I got it right. Beyond that, I had little to offer as they shuffled news and gossip across the cracked linoleum. I listened carefully to their talk of breeding programs, feed grains and land swaps, hungry for the feeling that comes of knowing every story, yet coming up empty. I felt suddenly rootless, invisible in a way I had never known. Grown beyond my child's role in the community, I did not yet fit in the adult world. I held no place of value on my family's ranch and was not yet a part of John's. My options were as frightening as they were simple. I could marry, or I could leave.
October. From the road, the prairie looks barren, all the grass thinned to stalk and stem, empty of seeds. At that distance, only the sagebrush stands out, big sage, silver sage. In a dry year, hunters and visitors to the region drive the trails in search of game, shaking their heads at the sleeping prairie, believing it dead. It's all there, though, if they thought to squat down and part the brittle guard hairs. Below is the short grass grazed by buffalo for centuries, blue grama and wooly plantain cured low to the ground, the last of its strength drained into the roots for safekeeping. It will come back with the rain. It can wait for years.
Since childhood I had believed that the plants and the people who live here were alike in that respect. If they survived for long, they knew one of two things. Some of them were landed, immovable—men like my father, plants like big sage. Sage drops a taproot like a
n anchor and settles against the wind, drawing what it needs from deep below Those without size find another kind of strength. They must ride the surface, bowing to the uncertainty of seasons. The ones that live happily here are flexible, adaptable, willing to lie dormant when the rains don't come, able to move quickly on the strength of one good storm.
I rode out in the teeth of the west wind, the grumpy, half-flat cant of Sunny's ears offering his opinion of late-autumn rides. A plush layer of winter hair had begun shading out his palomino tan, giving him the pale wheat color he would wear until spring. Nerve sweat bloomed along his neck. I hunched and straightened my spine, pulling at the knot of muscles between my shoulders. We were both on edge. Like most horses, Sunny hated facing into a hard wind. For me, it was the noise of the wind that did it, a hiss and rush like static on a radio tuned to nowhere. We might have grown immune to a steady blow, but the volume of prairie wind shifts constantly. Unpredictable bursts of silence broke through between gusts, snippets of still air that carried the jingle of snaffle rings, the squeak of saddle leather, and we'd have one or two calm breaths before the next gust snatched them away.
I guided Sunny gently toward the summer fallow, trying to loosen his stiff-legged walk, alert for the bunchy feel he got a second before he bogged his head. Riding a green horse is work—no gazing at scenery, no searching the dried pan for arrowheads or agates—but in Sunny's case we were edging beyond "green" into the territory of "spoiled." He had mastered only a basic primer of skills before high school began carving months-long gaps into his training. Our sporadic weekend reunions did little more than reopen the skirmish. Half the time he bucked me off, the other half I rode him to a standstill. Although neither of us was learning much in this process, we were both getting craftier. I had discovered that a thirty-minute workout in soft dirt generally took his mind off of bucking. He tried every evasive action outside of actual balking to avoid the long grain fields west of the corrals, working himself into lathers of frustration as I countered one sly shift of direction after another, each move plotted to end at the barn door.
When I finally gave him his head, he lined out like a greyhound up the center of a plowed field, his feet sinking fetlock-deep with every stride. The intended runaway soon became a labored gallop, and by midway across he had thrown in the towel. I walked him out to cool him, then let him stand, tail to the wind, to blow On the field before us lay the lopsided figure-eight pattern we'd worked over the past weeks, reining work done at a steady lope, turn after turn, no beginning, no end. Not today. I turned and rode east, leaving the tilled fields for the firm spring of grassland, preoccupied and restless. The early-summer wedding that had once loomed too near now seemed suddenly very far away My head throbbed with a need for something I could not name—somewhere to belong, some way to be important.
The dry prairie that passed beneath my horse's feet felt cold and unfamiliar to me, even as I rode past landmarks and called up the stories that created them. Why didn't I belong here? Didn't the contours of this land fall under my gaze like a quilt under a smoothing hand, my eyes counting every knot of silver sage on the patchwork of cactus and hardpan? Not unless I was the eldest son it didn't. Nursing a wave of bitterness, I pulled Sunny to a stop and swung down, leading him along the trail toward the road. We stopped at Lupe's Rock, a broad slab of granite dragged to the edge of a wheat field by Lupe Luna and his big Caterpillar bulldozer more than a decade before. I squatted in the lee of the boulder to smoke, cupping the coal carefully in one hand and reins in the other. The rock had been nearly as tall as we were, still raw and pink as an uprooted tooth, when the twins and I claimed it. It became our destination the morning we announced we were running away from home for the first time. Mother had brightened perceptibly at our news, and set about packing lunch into a red kerchief while we scrounged up a suitable stick for our hobo pack.
"Wear your shoes. Watch for snakes." She waved from the doorway, so unconcerned at our leaving that little fires of self-pity fueled the first leg of our journey.
It seemed a long hike to Lupe's rock then, out of sight of any house, any road other than the trail that bordered the fields. We spent half an hour rolling smaller rocks to the base so we could climb on top, all of us fitting easily, with room for the picnic spread between us. Later the three of us stood on the rock and shaded our eyes against the sun, telling stories about how far and what all we saw in the wavery line where the heat met the earth at the edge of our world. Stretching my arms east and west, I claimed my legacy of land, shouting that this part would be mine—my land, my cattle grazing the green lip of the reservoir there, my meadowlarks, my grasshoppers. It seemed impossible to have grown any larger than I had been that afternoon.
I stubbed out my cigarette and buried the butt, aware of a twinge of loss as I left the big boulder and remounted. Gail and I once borrowed luck by swinging from one stirrup to slap the rock as we galloped past, but that was impossible now. For years, dirt blown from the fields had drifted against it, and grass had seeded and regenerated around its base. Sod had filled in around the smaller rocks we once used for steps, forming a low mound with only the top stone exposed, like a bald spot in a head of curly hair. Lupe's Rock seemed bent on drawing itself back into the earth.
Perhaps the wind lifted the edge of the saddle blanket and it popped against Sunny's back, or maybe a tumbleweed bounced at the corner of his vision. More likely he sensed my mind's wander from the task at hand as I stepped down to open the gate on the way back to the barn. Instead of leading through the gate, he reared suddenly and sat back on his haunches, jerking the reins from my hand, then wheeled toward home at a dead run. It was not a long walk in the sense of distance, less than a mile to the buildings. I had plenty of time to wonder whether he would hit the fence between him and the barn or would slow down enough to find the open gate. Time to watch as he bogged his head and crow-hopped until the empty stirrups banged against his ribs and he took off again. Plenty of time to wish he would step on a rein and break his fool neck.
He was waiting at the barn door, eyes rolling white, nostrils flared, greeting my approach as he would have greeted a pack of wolves. I stopped a few yards from him, calling him filthy names in a soothing tone, calming him until he stood to let me gather the reins. I led him forward to show him we were attached again, and he followed anxiously, his legs trembling when we stopped, head slightly turned to keep track of the door. Barn sour, we called them, horses whose one focused thought from the time they left the corral was not turning the cow in front of them or watching the trail beneath their feet but finding some devious way of getting home. I could hear my mother's voice in the back of my head telling me what I had to do. He had shown the worst possible manners for a range horse and I couldn't let him get away with it. Climb back on. Ride him half a mile from home. Ride back to the barn and get off, then get back on and ride him away. Again and again and again. And again tomorrow. And the next day. He associated the barn with comfort and freedom, and I would have to break that connection, ride him until he forgot what barns were for. 'No more combing or brushing or unsaddling him indoors. He'd be eating his oats out of a bag far from home.
He stamped his feet against the chill as the sweat dried in stiff streaks along his neck, tugging the reins as he sidled closer to shelter. To turn him loose now would be rewarding his crime, the first leg of a short journey to the sale ring. Standing in the cold wind I watched his ears flick, his eyes shift from me to the barn. I'd made a bad job of him too, pure and simple. The thought settled quietly around my shoulders. A bad job it was, then. We turned toward the barn. He stepped on my heels going through the door, urging me forward, and took his place near the rail, standing quietly, almost poised as I worked the cinches loose. Stripped of tack, he arched his neck and trotted smartly across the big corral, straight to a closed gate that led to the horse pasture, and stood there, worthless and wise. I could muster no feeling, one way or the other, no energy to cross the corral and turn him out.
Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning . . . When the song ended, I lifted the needle and set it back in the first groove. I danced a slow figure eight through the room. And again. When the whiskey ended, I poured some from a different bottle.
Memories of my grandfather's death were tied to another small death, the day I discovered that as a girl, I would never own my childhood ranch. In retrospect, it seemed I should have always known this, but I didn't. Grandpa Blunt's funeral was held in the same small nondenominational church where I planned to be married. The building dated back to the first years of the town's history, a steepled square with a foyer, dressed in spotless white clapboard except for the wide double doors in the front, and aptly named the Little White Church. Capable of seating perhaps fifty people in its double row of pews, the church had been too small to hold the county full of friends and neighbors who attended Grandpa's funeral. Mourners spilled into the adjoining funeral hall to listen to the service via a loudspeaker. I remember a thick damp in the hall, the muggy crush of bodies, the extra folding chairs set up between the rows. Uncle Junior, the eldest son who had worked Grandpa's ranch since returning from the Korean War—I remember him crying. And I remember Aunt Marie scolding a pack of us same-sized cousins for being too noisy at the potluck that followed. But more clearly than all that, more clearly than the sunken, icy face of my grandfather in its unlikely nest of tucked satin, I remember the talk my parents had with us children a few weeks later. We were lined up on the smooth red-vinyl benches built into the walls on two sides of our kitchen table. After the death of her husband, Grandma Pansy had elected to sell the ranch to the boys, my dad and Junior. In a family of seven remaining children, this decision left the five sisters high and dry, and apparently some of them had complained and threatened to challenge her. Dad had stubbed the table with one thick finger, emphasizing there would be no such fight when it came our turn to bury him. In our family the sons would follow the father; Kenny, the elder, would have first refusal. We girls would be left something of value, but we should know at the outset that we would never inherit the land.