Carry

by Toni Jensen

  I know the voice he uses for that phrase, of course. I know how tight his eyes get, how his face stretches into a grimace-smile. The little girl, though, doesn’t know how to read his oversized expression. She moves closer and closer to him, most likely mistaking the face for a teasing one. She blows her little spit bubbles, spit, spit, spit.

  “And then,” he says, making his grimace-smile face, “she spits, right on me.”

  We’re in the new addition room, and outside, on the new deck, my daughter runs back and forth, helping my stepmother with the flowers, checking on the birds. Really, the birds are the impetus for the new deck. My father and stepmother like to sit outside and watch the birds—cardinals and blue jays that fight over the birdseed, songbirds once the winter’s ended. Both my daughter and my stepmother have been in and outside, back and forth, and I’m grateful, as my father continues, that this, for them, is an outside moment.

  “So I snatched her up,” my father says. “I snatched up that little shit and put her across my knee—” He pauses here to grin a real grin, to shake his head and then make good eye contact, storyteller-style. “And I raised my hand up—” He shows us, his hand and arm raised high. “And you should have the seen the look on her face—”

  My stepmother comes back inside at this moment, and says, “Are you telling that story again?” She is the one to shake her head now.

  “I came in the room,” she says, “and stopped him just in time.” The look she gives him is a rare one. Generally, they get along well. In more than twenty years of their marriage, I’ve never seen the look she’s giving him now.

  He puts down his hand.

  It’s his birthday, so next we sing the happy birthday song, and people eat cake.

  My daughter’s father, my then-husband, has enormous dark brown eyes that he holds over-wide when trying to make a point, when he’s afraid, when he’s working toward focus or trying to sort through a problem. His eyes are over-wide as the candles are lit and then blown out.

  Later, my stepmother will tell me the girl had been in an abusive home, had not had anywhere to go, and so was taken in by one of her relatives who knew the parents a little.

  I don’t know where to put this information in my body, but I feel it everywhere. My arms feel weak and shaky like they do in illness, and the bad feeling settles along my collarbones where I’m sure it’s working to steal my voice.

  I’m glad I can’t eat the cake because of my celiac disease. This is a first for being glad. I’m glad we leave soon. Or at least, in the moment, I am. I am thinking this will be the low point of the day, but days, of course, have ways of heaping surprise upon surprise.

  In the car on the way back to my mother’s house, my childhood home, my then-husband drives with much more than the usual care, hands at ten and two o’clock, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. In the back seat, our daughter is nearly asleep, having run herself out on the deck and in the yard. By the time we make the turn onto the highway, her eyes are closed, her breathing thick and settled. Once he realizes she’s sleeping, her father turns his face to me.

  “Jesus Christ,” he says, and then he says it again. He’s shaken—it’s clear in his grip, his face, his failure to form other words, to form a complete sentence.

  “I can’t really believe it,” he says after a mile or so has passed. “Jesus.”

  During the eating of the cake, he had not been able to meet my eyes. In the moment, I hadn’t wanted to think too long about what this inability might mean. But it’s clear now: all the times I had told him about my father, he had not believed me, not really.

  On this day, we’ve known each other for more than a decade, have shared a house, a bed, for almost that long. He’s heard all my stories. He knows how I have to turn and twist to fall asleep most nights, how the spot on my rib cage, on my left side, prohibits easy sleep. He knows the story of the injury when I was fourteen, how it happened. He knows the other stories, too. Or at least he’s been told.

  The look on my then-husband’s face, his Jesus Christs, become a point on the continuum to how he becomes my ex-husband. He believes me now. But he didn’t before. It is all over his face—the wonder and shock, the sympathy with a tinge of embarrassment.

  This moment conjures others. When our daughter was not yet one year old, her father’s hand on her car seat handle, his tight grip, his body over mine when I say, I’m leaving, and he says, Fine, but you’re not taking her.

  I turn my face to the window, to its cool surface, to field after field of passing corn. The car is quiet. We drive on.

  II.

  When I’m in my twenties, I live for a year in Valentine, Nebraska, a town of not quite 2,600 people, which is surrounded by wilderness. I teach just over the border in South Dakota at a tribal university. Despite the myth of the vanishing Indian, the reality is that there’s a housing shortage on the Rosebud Reservation. So I live in Valentine and drive the half hour to and from work each day.

  It’s a beautiful landscape—the rise and fall of the Sandhills’ gentle slopes and dunes, the sunlight catching the sharper hills and cliffs surrounding the Niobrara River and its National Wildlife Refuge. The area is lush with water, with tall-grass and mixed-grass prairie, which house elk and deer and many birds, including Western meadowlarks, sharp-tailed grouse, prairie chickens, pheasants, and Merriam’s turkeys.

  My father hasn’t hunted deer since I was a child, but he likes to hunt birds. He hunts pheasants at home and visits primarily to see if he can get a sharp-tailed grouse. Really, I think he likes studying them as much as shooting them. They’re new to him, and he likes reporting to me their movements, the noises they make. My father visits several times while I live there, bringing along his bird dog, a yellow Lab named Frisco.

  He brings his dog and his gun, and he arrives with a couple bottles of discount wine. Part of the fun is how I’m supposed to guess each bottle’s original price and then how much he paid for it. It is usually a bottle of wine that once cost $8 to $12 and that he’d bought on sale at the pharmacy for $2 to $4. The discount tickles him, as does the game, and we have a glass of wine with dinner but not much more than one because he wants to be up early to go hunting.

  One glass of wine, too, serves for each of us as indicator—the ability to enjoy ourselves a little, the ability to stop. According to Webster’s, the first known use of indicator comes in 1666, under the primary definition—“one that indicates: such as an index hand (as on a dial),” or, of course, as on the trigger of a gun.

  Other definitions include:

  2: any of a group of statistical values (such as level of employment) that taken together give an indication of the health of the economy

  4: an organism or ecological community so strictly associated with particular environmental conditions that its presence is indicative of the existence of these conditions

  These visits with my father occur in the time I think of as the post-apology years. He has said he was sorry to me for the physical abuse of my childhood, for a few incidents from my early teen years, in particular.

  We have made a sort of peace with each other. I don’t necessarily consider whether or not this peace will be lasting. I do consider this time to be a good indicator, definition two, for the health of each of us as individual people, if not for us as part of a collective, as part of that thing we call family.

  I enjoy these visits and this new peace. I enjoy the look he gets on his face when I get close to guessing the right amount for the wine—how it’s the same look he’d get when I was a child and we’d skip church sometimes and stay home without my mother. He, my sister, and I would play games and watch television.

  I liked church, in particular the way the light filtered through the stained glass, the smell of the polished woodwork and pews, the singing. Singing was something I could do, was something my d
ad could do, also, and I looked forward to our voices rising together on Sundays.

  But we had church to look forward to each and every Sunday.

  I can only think of two or three times we stayed home from church without our mother—we overslept, perhaps, or one of us had a fever but was not very sick. That window—well enough to play but not well enough to be out in public—was such a delicious sliver, such stolen time. It was special for its rarity—our father happy and playing with us.

  The most usual game is hide-and-seek, and the two-story house offers plenty of nooks and small spaces. This is before my brother is born, so I am the smallest. Most often, I hide in the white wicker hamper. If it’s full of laundry, I leave the laundry in a careful pile, hidden but nearby.

  It takes a long time for my sister and my father to find me. They call my name in a singsong way I like, and my father sometimes makes my name into a silly song. It will be a long time before I figure out they know I’m in there all along—that the search is a faux one.

  Years later, I will teach my brother to hide in the hamper, too, and then I will turn his name into a song. I will be in on the fun of letting him hide longest.

  Those hide-and-seek moments are few, and maybe that’s why I remember them so precisely. In those years, we’re coming into the Reagan era, right before the bottom falls out of the local economy, the state economy, the regional economy. We’re coming to the end of life as everyone’s known it who farms or makes a living off farmers, which, here in rural Iowa, is everyone.

  The farm crisis of the 1980s included record foreclosures on farms, small farms in particular; it was the worst financial crisis in rural America since the Great Depression. The Department of Agriculture had encouraged everyone to buy more land and more equipment, to plant more crops or to get out of farming altogether. So the number of acres of corn planted, for example, rose dramatically in the late seventies, peaked in 1980, and then plummeted a few short years later.

  So many families lost their farms. So many families lost their land.

  Of course, all the land I mention is land first stolen or bought at an extraordinarily discounted price—from the Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Otoe, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Mandan, Osage, and Ponca. The Meskwaki, Sauk, Kickapoo, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi were some of the last tribes to make Iowa home; many Métis lived there, too, then and now, though not all mark themselves “Native” on the census. Today, the Meskwaki Nation is the only one to have a formal land base still in the state. The state’s Native population at the last census was 0.5 percent.

  For my father, who grew up on his parents’ farm, who grew up hunting and fishing and trapping, there is no other place.

  When the foreclosures began, in addition to the loss of land, so many others lost their jobs, including my father. My father sold MoorMan brand animal feed to area farmers, and he was laid off like many workers during the farm crisis. He enjoyed driving the rural roads, farm to farm, talking to farmers and their families.

  After the firing, for a year or more, he didn’t get another job. Instead, he hunted birds in the fall and trapped in the winter. He’d always done both these things, but now what he made was no longer extra. He trapped and sold the pelts from otter and mink, beaver and raccoon, and sometimes muskrat.

  The late seventies and early eighties brought the height of prices for pelts, and their subsequent fall in value was accelerated by the stock market crash on Black Monday in 1987. Russia had been driving the fur market prices until then, along with demand from Japan, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. PETA, formed in 1980, also began to put pressure on the market.

  My mother began to put pressure on my father, as well, especially once we moved to town. It was an embarrassment for my mother, having fur pelts strung out on the lawn and in the basement. There also was less money in those years, and even before, there had never quite been enough.

  In those years, my childhood, my mother and father began to argue increasingly about so many things—money and politics and what it meant to make a good life. My father and many others in the region who’d always voted Democrat voted Republican, voted for Reagan in the 1980 election.

  These men were out of work or had lost their farms. They listened to other men like radio host Paul Harvey, a precursor to Rush Limbaugh, who would come onto the air in the late 1980s. Harvey was there first, in those recession years. In Harvey’s New York Times obituary, he was described as someone who “personalized the radio news with his rightist opinions, but laced them with his own trademarks: a hypnotic timbre, extended pauses for effect, heart-warming tales of average Americans and folksy observations that evoked the heartland, family values and the old-fashioned plain talk one heard around the dinner table on Sunday.” He also was known for railing against the unemployed and unwed mothers, for being good friends with both J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy.

  In my father’s blue Chevy LUV pickup, we bounced the hills and curves of local roads, on the way to the turkey timber, the traplines, my grandparents’ farmstead. The truck needed new shocks, but there was no money for new things. A truck’s shocks and struts keep it in contact with the road by mitigating the transfer of energy, especially on bumpy roads. We bounced through potholes and sharp curves, the old, loose seatbelt allowing enough give for my body to rise up, for my head to touch the ceiling. My father made “whee” sounds like we were on a roller coaster, like this was all some grand adventure. And sometimes it was or seemed to be.

  And sometimes on a particularly sharp curve or deep hole, my head made too much contact, made a sharp whack, and my father’s eyes made contact with mine, and the fun left, the warning beginning. His face conveyed so clearly that I’d better not cry. I learned to hold my body more tightly, clenching my muscles and grabbing hold of the bench seat’s edge, and I did not cry, and everything hurt after.

  My father turned the truck radio up the loudest for Paul Harvey. His program, The Rest of the Story, ended each time with the catchphrase “And now you know…the rest of the story,” with “rest” being made emphatic, being dragged into almost bisyllabic territory. I remember the cadence and the volume more than the content. But the content—gun ownership, men as strong heads of households, men as protectors of their homes—clearly had an impact on my father and those like him, who were out of work, feeling disrespected, longing for what they’d had only a minute or year ago, driving in control over their hills and back roads versus bouncing over them.

  The Paul Harvey years started before and bled into 1987 when the Fairness Doctrine was repealed. The Fairness Doctrine policy had ensured radio coverage of controversial issues was “honest, equitable and balanced.” Mark Fowler, the Federal Communications Commission chairman at the time of the repeal, had first been a staffer on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. So the repeal made way for conservative talk radio to begin officially, for voices like Harvey’s to grow more radical, for Rush Limbaugh and his compatriots to begin spinning without any counterbalance their particular narratives about America.

  In the same time frame, the seventies and eighties of my childhood, the National Rifle Association backed a presidential candidate for the first time since it began in 1871, choosing Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter. Pre-1970s, the NRA had no political action committee, no lobbying arm.

  The before-and-after nature of the organization’s focus can be seen clearly through the covers of its primary magazine, American Rifleman. Before the 1970s, covers mostly featured wildlife, nature scenes, and many, many scenes of trees and hills with a hunter and dog duo or a lone hunter, depicted as much smaller than the rest of the natural world, the hunter’s face not featured or necessarily discernible, the hunter’s face not a primary focus.

  In the 1970s, the covers shift to put the lone hunter in focus in the hunting scenes, and by the 1980s, the hunting scenes make way for the more overtly political. Ronald Reagan makes the cover
in 1982, 1983, and 1985. A 1994 cover features the headline “Too Many Politicians Show Their Stripes” with the accompanying image of a man’s back with a painted yellow stripe running between the last two words of the caption. For the NRA, apparently, Reagan was the last in-favor president of the century. He also was the last president to date to carry a gun in office.

  In voting for Reagan during those years, my father switched not only parties but alliances. He remained a sportsman, a hunter who valued gun safety and eating what you killed, but he also began in those years for the first time to espouse the rhetoric of using guns for protection. Men needed their guns to protect their families. His guns in our home, kept locked on the highest shelf in those years, came down more often whether we were going hunting or to the trapline or to the grocery store. My father in those years shifted from someone who used a gun for shooting birds, which we then ate, to someone who believed the gun was to protect what was his. We were his, apparently. We were to be protected. Never mind the only one who menaced us was him.

  Overseeing the NRA during the Reagan years was a man named Harlon Carter. Born Harlan Carter in Granbury, Texas, Carter later moved with his family to Laredo, where his father worked for the U.S. Border Patrol. In 1931, Harlan was convicted of the murder of a fifteen-year-old, Ramón Casiano. The family’s car had been stolen a few weeks prior to the murder, and Carter’s mother had seen “three Mexican youths loitering” near their house. A confrontation ensued, and Carter, the only one armed with a gun, shot and killed Casiano. Carter pled self-defense since Casiano had held a knife. But Carter was convicted; he served two years in prison for taking Casiano’s life before the Carter family’s work to overturn his conviction was successful. He changed the spelling of his first name after he left prison but before he became the president of the NRA.

  It’s easy to get lost in the craziness of Carter’s story. It’s harder, perhaps, to avoid seeing how that time laid the groundwork for our present day. It’s harder, perhaps, to ignore the parallels between that time and our current moment.