The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (14 page)

I hopped after him, tugging my sandal straps over my heels. “What?” I said, climbing in as he turned the key in the ignition. He always started the engine and began driving before his passengers could even get their doors closed.

“Don’t try that here! You’ll get arrested.”

“Dad,” I said, “the tank where I swam in the Mojave was in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It’s not like here.”

“That it is not.” His voice rang with the same finality of the pronouncements he’d made in my childhood. Feeling like a child brought up short by a spanking, I stared silently out my window at the long shadow the truck cast in the ditch and kept my arms folded across my swimsuit’s bulging stripes.

He drove right past the farmstead. Apparently, our workday was over. Acutely aware of my exposed upper thighs, on which strands of sun-bleached pubic hair were yet another indication of my recent craven past, I grabbed my jeans from the floor and struggled to pull them on over my damp skin.

Closing my eyes, I pictured the sun shimmering in the leaves of the grandfather cottonwood that towered over the stock-water storage tank I’d swum in every summer afternoon when I lived at the rock house. Beside it the windmill was probably spinning right now. Were I there, I would be standing on Dorf’s hood, performing my ablutions. First I would dip my head in. My scalp burning with cold, I would shampoo my hair and rinse onto the ground using the old aluminum sauce pan I kept there for the purpose. After washing, I would dive in. I loved that first thrill. Once my body had unclenched and acclimated, I would float on my back in the silken water, my arms spread, and stare up into the cottonwood’s branches, where a pair of tanagers—their bodies yellow, the male’s head fire orange—flitted back and forth, bringing food to the nestlings.

Imprinted on my memory were the conical peaks of the Pinto Mountains, dappled in juniper. They and the craggy sandstone pinnacles of the New York range beyond them spoke the layered language of geology. To float in that valley had been to float on the sea of time. Daily I revolved, my arms and legs extended like clock dials, at the center of everything, water and desert, the water being the desert’s most profound expression of itself. The antithesis without which desert could not exist, the joy that made its barren beauty habitable.

Now, riding in the pickup. My father driving. Immersions in water on hot days, whether in cold groundwater pumped into that tank or in mountain lakes filled to their granite brims with snowmelt, were the closest I had ever come to ecstasy. Yet were I to describe those swims to my father, all he would see was a naked woman, his daughter.

How had the largeness of my desert life been reduced, so suddenly, to the smallness of this one? Never mind. I knew how. But having brought myself to this pass didn’t make it any easier to take. Looking out my window, I saw bare dirt and stubble on the wheat fields, and rows of corn and soybeans made green by irrigation. What grass our pioneer ancestors hadn’t broken out by my childhood, Dad and his neighbors had plowed since. To his eye, each new quarter section of pasture ground turned to grain production was an improvement. It meant more money in the bank for someone. Only land that could be farmed was beautiful.

That was what angered him about me. I wasn’t as domesticated as his land. It disgusted me that I’d wound up back here, under my father’s protection, infantilized. I wasn’t his little girl anymore, ever seeking his approval or whatever bone of equality with my brothers he might toss my way. I’d made my own life, and now I’d thrown that life away. I would be leaving here as soon as I could.

The truck slowed as Dad gazed at a neighbor’s summer fallow. It seemed he’d forgotten our quarrel. You could put disputes behind you, I guessed, if you were the uncontested boss of your world.

“Brr,” I said. I reached over and turned the fan down. Dad didn’t seem to notice. A meadowlark’s call pierced the closed windowpane so sharply I imagined it carving scrollwork in the glass. I am going to find my own place, I thought. I knew it wouldn’t be anything like my desert house, but there might be some haven with a modicum of wilderness nearby. I envisioned an old frame house surrounded by pasture, perhaps on the way up to Bonny Dam, just over the Colorado border. Eventually, in a year or two, I would make my way back to the Mojave. I might get the caretaker’s job at the Granite Mountain ranch where Stefan and I
had lived for a while. That ranch had since been sold to the University of California, for a desert research center.

Then a vision flitted through my mind of a small child amid rattlesnakes and scorpions, and another of unwanted male visitors driving into that child’s and its mother’s remote yard. It was one thing to put myself in danger but quite another to put a child in harm’s way. I couldn’t reconcile my passion for the desert with the new facts of my life. I felt like Gulliver, waking up tied to the ground with those Lilliputian facts swarming all over me.

The pickup began to veer toward the ditch. “Dad?” He crept along, studying a neighbor’s field.

“Dad!”

He corrected his steering just before we drifted into the ditch. “Darrel’s full of weeds,” he said.

Not Darrel’s field, I thought, but Darrel.

“His son shot himself,” my father added. “He hasn’t been the same since.”

“Not many people would be after something like that.”

“No, but the weeds keep growing.”

•   •   •

S
UCH PRAGMATISM HAD RUINED THIS LANDSCAPE IN
the first place. It ignored the heart’s knowledge, devalued its needs. I turned to the few remaining pasturelands as my only hope. Occasionally on my drives I would see a small white farmhouse surrounded by buffalo grass. I believed that I could live in such a place. At least I could see a short distance over land that enchanted rather than assaulted the eye—the quiet, the mild blues and greens, the reliable sunshine, and the all-embracing sky. Although I knew I would be lonely in such a place, and although loneliness had rolled me flat and pulverized me in the desert before I met Stefan, at least I would be an independent spirit, a free adult.

My parents thought the idea was preposterous. They suggested I rent a place in town. To me, that would be a worse fate than the farm.
So when I couldn’t find a rental on a remote scrap of prairie, I reentered the nightmare I’d had in the desert, of waking up on my father’s farm. Only this time I wasn’t dreaming.

My uncle Johnny wasn’t dreaming either. He had returned to Kansas too, and was working for Dad. He had lost the money from selling the land he’d inherited by investing in city real estate. “Let what happened to Johnny be a lesson,” Dad warned me. “Hang on to your land!” I assured him that I would, and I meant it. No matter how much I treasured the desert or how little I wanted to be stuck back home, I wasn’t so spoiled as not to be grateful for the secure foundation that Dad and his land put under me.

Johnny, with his shock of brown hair and blue eyes, was the handsomest and the youngest of my uncles, and in some ways the kindest. When he could be spared from more pressing work, he helped me refurbish the two-story, barn-shaped house where Mom and Dad had lived before they took over the Carlson farm. Since then, the house had provided little more than crude shelter for hired men and their families. Johnny and I removed cracked plaster, sheet-rocked the walls, and laid new linoleum in the kitchen. I hung new light fixtures, built a vanity for the bathroom sink, glued vinyl over the walls above the tub, painted everything and, employing the wiles that only a returning daughter possesses, got Dad to buy me the carpeting I wanted.

“Solid colors show dirt,” he argued.

“Where’d you figure that out? You’ve never used a vacuum cleaner in your whole life.”

“Well, you’ll be using yours plenty. I can guarantee you that.”

I knew he was right, but so what? I would willingly vacuum every day if I could have the rose-colored carpets I remembered so fondly from fifties living rooms. If I had to live on the farm, then I would do my damndest to recreate the ambience of my childhood—when Kansas had last been my true home. In the kitchen I hung wallpaper with a strawberry pattern. Over the counters, I glued red Formica to match.

I moved into the house in November, three months before Jake
was due. Today I recall only the nights during that winter hibernation. I see enclosed overlit and underfurnished space. I hear the loud furnace that, because there was no basement, we’d installed in my bedroom closet. The carpet’s barren plush undermined its rosy optimism, reminding me that I was not a family knee-deep in its own reassuring history and therefore content even if the rug was threadbare.

I hear the whirr of my thrift-store sewing machine as I raced to cover the windows. The house’s lights reflected in the black panes, magnifying my isolation. When I turned the lights off, I looked onto an empty farmyard where a mercury-vapor light, designed to come on at sunset, illuminated Quonsets and the corrugated-tin fence Dad had built to protect his sheep from north winds. He’d sold his sheep a decade before—too much work for a man his age. So I didn’t even have their baaing to keep me company. Across the farmyard, a trailer housed a hired man and his family. But I had nothing in common with them, and it would have been awkward inserting myself into their nights even if I did. A few other blue yard lights floated in the distance, marking farmsteads where no one lived anymore. Only tractors and their implements dwelled on those places, awaiting the return of spring and their owners.

In my house, the furnace’s blowers mixing new smells with old, I stood before the mirror, draping sleeper jammies I’d made over my shoulder and trying to imagine the heft of a baby. I hadn’t held many infants in my life, and I didn’t know what to expect. When I studied the blurry ultrasound picture, I couldn’t decide which white smudges might be Jake. I loved the idea of him enough to cut those jammie patterns out of cuddly, soft velour and painstakingly stitch the pieces together, even though it was beginning to be uncomfortable to sit. But only as my belly expanded and he began to kick did I truly understand he was real. Even then, I could not foresee how much he would change my life.

4

H
E ANNOUNCED HIS IMMINENT ARRIVAL ONE
J
ANUARY AFTERNOON WHEN
I
’D GONE INTO TOWN TO DO ERRANDS AND HAD STOPPED AT THE CAR WASH TO SPRAY FROZEN MUD OUT OF THE WHEEL WELLS OF
D
AD’S BIGGEST PICKUP.
At first I thought the spray wand had a leak, then I realized that the warm water seeping down the insides of my legs was not coming from the wand. Jake wasn’t due for another month. I instantly regretted driving that stiff-clutched, stubborn nag of a truck to town. Had manhandling it caused this to happen? Or all the pounding I’d been doing last week as I hammered together shelves for the porch?

I’d heard rumors that even moderately premature babies had died in the Goodland hospital. Suddenly my maternal instincts were strong and fierce. I insisted on Flight for Life. Amazingly, the hospital complied. Paramedics strapped me onto a gurney, loaded me on a plane, and allowed Mom to board too. They stuck electrodes onto my chest and belly and turned out the lights. Our two green heartbeats blipped on the screen as a hundred miles of farms, then another hundred of yellow Colorado prairie rolled under us. In Denver they transferred me to a helicopter and Mom to a taxi. The helicopter landed on the roof of St. Luke’s, and next thing I knew I was lying in a softly lit hospital room with oak wainscoting and yellow wallpaper. Soon after, my mother was beside me. I was a little embarrassed by all the attention I was receiving but also deeply relieved. Jake would have every chance of being born safely.

In the vacuum left by the husband I’d exiled, Mom held my hand through my pains, wiping my forehead with the washcloth the nurse provided. How soothing her hands felt, how reassuring her grasp! Now that she had a legitimate reason to show physical affection, the reserve that had overtaken her once I was too big to hold in her lap anymore vanished. We were in a cocoon together, enacting a ritual, mother to daughter, that predated our own sterile culture by all of human time.

“Oh, look at the little guy,” Mom said, her voice quaking with joy
as the nurse handed Jake into her arms. She laid him on my chest. He weighed only four pounds, thirteen ounces. Because he was tiny and because I viewed him through a new mother’s fearful eyes, he had mortality written all over him. Or ephemerality, the implicit likelihood that he would fade into his mysterious origins.

I recall that fear whenever I look at the overexposed photograph taken at the hospital within hours of his birth. His edges bleed to glaring white, as if he were a visitation, a possibility, not an actual presence. He wears a little peaked knit cap like a Tibetan’s, and his tiny fingers splay like the rays of a star. He looks out of the picture at me sideways, his features seemingly Oriental, his eyes deep black pools.

I’d never felt so invested before. In my living, his living. “Isn’t it amazing how you love them?” another new mother said to me as we sat in the day room, nursing. How, I wondered, had I carried so much power so darkly within me?

No longer did I lie awake plotting my return to the desert. I was too busy taking care of Jake. His fussing woke me several times each night. I would stumble over to his crib, lift him out, nurse him if that’s what he wanted, or change his diaper. But usually he didn’t need those things. Maybe he had colic. Whatever the cause, only one thing could give him peace. I would stuff him in the chest pouch and walk loops through the kitchen, living room, and bedroom, counting the rounds. He usually succumbed at about one hundred laps. His contentment would then fill me like cream in a glass pitcher—the round-bellied kind that wanted nothing more than to be filled with just that substance. After a tortuous hour, wishing for my own bed, I couldn’t tear myself away from him. I would collapse in my recliner and sleep with him.

It took four months for the fretful nights to end. Meanwhile, spring arrived.

I was toting Jake on my hip one evening, headed for the burn barrel carrying a bag of trash, when beauty stopped me in my tracks. I was arrested not only by the sky’s fanfare and glory but by the serenity it draped over the farmstead. All the men had driven away in their pickups.

Regardless of what the deed of ownership says, a place most
belongs to the people who remain after everyone else goes home. Jake and I were those people. I liked the feeling. Up until that moment I had gone through the motions, fixing up the house as if it would be our home for years to come, but I hadn’t felt that I could truly abide there.

I hadn’t stood outside without shivering since I moved in. Now the earth was warming up, damp and fertile. I pulled the musky smell into my lungs, held it. Took another swig, and another. I went inside, got Jake’s baby swing, and set it up near the flower bed that some hired man’s wife had planted.

The bed had not been cared for in years, but now that the soil had thawed, it was loose and moist. The ease with which the weeds released their hold satisfied me so much I forgot about the time. When I finally stopped, Jake had long since gone to sleep. I leaned down to lift him, but his plump bowlegs brought the swing’s chair with them and he awoke.

I rotated in the surround of dusk, letting him gaze at the last powder of mauve in the west, the sheen of abalone in the east. The sky was one part of western Kansas that farming hadn’t messed up. In the daytime, rarely overcast, it radiated the most genuine sky blue imaginable. At this quiet hour, with darkness lowering over the fields, I could almost forget that the grass that once stretched, infinite green under infinite blue all the way to the circular horizon, had been plowed. Was it possible that with Jake in my arms, an unfarmed sky would be enough?

His mouth hung open as his black eyes absorbed the wonder. “Nighttime coming,” I explained. “Look! Venus! Pretty soon there’s going to be a star party.”

When I was a kid, Dad had held me up under the sky exactly like this, filling my head with the big questions:
Astronomers say the stars go on forever. How could that be? They have to end somewhere. But if they do end, what comes after? Nothing? How can there be nothing? There has to be something. And how did it all start? The Christians say that God made the universe. Well then, who made God?

“And see that one,” I said. Jake fixated on my finger as I tried to point out another star bobble, perhaps Mars. Just then, the mercury-vapor “security” light blinked on.

I turned Jake away from me and thrust him skyward. He let out a peal of squeaky-hinged giggles, his frog legs paddling sideways. “See that light, Jake? Someday I’m going to get you a BB gun. First thing I want you to do? Shoot that thing out!”