The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (15 page)

5

T
HE NEXT MORNING THE MUD-PORCH DOOR SLAMMED AND THE GLASS IN THE KITCHEN DOOR RATTLED.
I looked up from tipping a spoonful of Cream of Wheat into Jake’s mouth.

There Dad stood. Unannounced, uninvited, light streaming around him through the east windows. He was wearing his field hat, its brim wrinkled by many washings. His cheeks jowly. His old shoulders clothed in a thin, blue, short-sleeved work shirt. His jeans bunched at his waist.

Cocking his head at Jake, he made a big smile full of silver and gold crooked teeth. Jake’s mouth opened wide on vacant gums, cereal dripping down his chin. He beat his hands at his sides. “Oooh, ooh,” Dad said. “It’s good to see you too, Jake!”

I said, “Why doesn’t it ever occur to you to knock?”

He hunched his shoulders and flinched at my reprimand, then pulled out a chair. “Got a spot of coffee for your old man? How’s he eating?”

“Great,” I said, pouring. “He’s eating great.”

“Good,” he said. “Keep on feeding him that wheat cereal and he’ll make a good farmer someday. I thought you would’ve taken him to the sitter’s by now.”

“I’m going to take him, but as I told you, I can’t leave him with her all day. I can’t keep expressing that much milk, for one thing.”

“You should never have gotten started on that business.”

That business was breast-feeding. “Don’t you get it?” I said. “I told you I could work mornings, but not afternoons.”

“That so?”

I detected a whiff of insult. Did he think I was lazy? Was that it? Had he treated Bruce and Clark this way? After sacrificing their childhoods to field work, they had abandoned him and the farm so they could have lives, complete with weekends and vacations.

He stood up—headed for the bathroom, I assumed. Instead, he opened the silverware drawer. I dashed to intercept him before he got to the freezer. “A teaspoon of ice cream isn’t going to kill me,” he complained.

“Yes, it will.” The diet Mom had him on was working. His cholesterol had gone down with each blood test.

“Well, all right, damn it. You women just want to get another harvest out of me.”

“Poor guy. You’re just surrounded, aren’t you?”

At thirty-five, I was reliving my brother’s childhoods and, I hated to admit, feeling what was probably the same mix of emotions. I remembered how they used to follow him out the door after summer breakfasts—begrudgingly on the surface, pridefully beneath.

I pulled on my oldest pair of jeans and a tan work shirt I’d torn the sleeves out of and drove ten miles up the road to an even flatter irrigated operation. This farm belonged to an ambitious, humorous couple who had two great girls but clearly wished they also had a son. I trusted this woman to babysit Jake, but I wanted Jake to be one of us, not one of them. I couldn’t explain this concern to my father, who thought that rearing children was women’s work, so any woman could do it.

A good tractor driver, on the other hand, was a rare commodity. Back at the farm, I stuffed my hair up under my cap and shoved my pliers in my pocket. “Only until noon,” I reminded him on the way out to the field. Even that was too long. My breasts were already beginning to fill. By noon they would be hard and sore. Thinking of the relief that would come as I nursed Jake caused my nipples to twinge. Nothing had prepared me for the instinctive nature of this animal love I was in. Alarms sounded inside me every second we were apart. I grabbed my water jug off the seat.

“Remember, cultivating’s a slow job. You’ll pile dirt up on the corn if you drive too fast.”

“I know, okay? You told me five times.” As usual, I’d had to sit scrunched up beside him on the arm of the tractor seat while he demonstrated for far more rounds than necessary. Then I’d felt his eyes watching my every move, just as I could feel them doing now. I pulled the engine and hydraulic dipsticks, put them back, and climbed up on the front tire to unscrew the radiator cap. “Always checking up on me,” I grumbled, but when I looked over my shoulder, dust hung in the air where his pickup had sat idling a minute before.

Finally. God. Good riddance. It was easy, cultivating. Slow, sure, but satisfying to look behind me and see the ground perfectly worked between straight seams of untouched corn. It gave me this neat, all-is-well-with-the-world feeling. I could understand what made Dad’s farming heart tick. I liked making things orderly too. It was the way I felt after vacuuming my carpet, seeing a clean swath—no dog hair, no clumps of dirt at least for a little while. Dad had been right about the color though.

I put my hand under my breast, lifted it, gauging its weight, let it down gently, did the same with the other one. Get realistic, I thought. You are here for Jake. Nothing else matters that much. His grandparents are here. He’s loved here by more people than he would be anyplace else. We’ll have more financial security here than if I decided to teach. I’d been taking secondary ed correspondence courses ever since coming home but wasn’t sure how or if I’d ever get a degree.

I was coming to the end of the field and would have to turn soon. Turns had scared me at first, with so many things to remember all at the same time. Gear down, reduce speed, pull the hydraulic lever to lift the implement out of the ground, hit the turn brake. This stopped the back wheel on the turn side from revolving so the tractor could pivot, but you didn’t want to go too far around or you’d wind up redoing rows. Straighten out, push the hydraulic lever forward, gear up, throttle up. I had turning down so well now, though, that it was practically automatic.

It wouldn’t be that bad, I thought. I could get away for vacations in the winter. Maybe they would let me have the rock house to stay in on those trips. Say Dad gave me a fourth of the profits. That would be fair. This crop could make two hundred bushels to the acre. That’s two hundred times—

How come the turn brake isn’t working?
I pressed harder and spun the wheel more to the left, but the tractor still didn’t whip around. I was overshooting the next rows that I needed to be in. I would have to back up.

Stop. Put it in reverse. Check to make sure the hydraulic lever is back. What? Please tell me I didn’t. Please?

•   •   •

“
G
OD,
D
AD.
I
’M SORRY.
I
DON’T KNOW
what I was thinking.” I knew exactly what I’d been thinking. I’d been computing how wealthy this life I didn’t deserve and would probably never be good at was going to make me.

His eyes passed over me as if I were a fence post. The only objects of interest to him were the bent shanks on the cultivator. Iron is not made to take turns when it is buried in four inches of dirt. Dad didn’t take hard turns very well either. Now he would have to readjust his calculations. He’d been pushing me to finish cultivating so he could sow pintos with this tractor. I steeled myself for what was bound to be one of those classic dressing downs that Bruce had told me about. But amazingly, Dad didn’t cuss at all. All he said was, “Well, now you’ll learn to weld.”

Back at the house, I called the sitter, who said she had enough of my milk stored to get Jake through until midafternoon. Then I pumped my breasts so she’d have plenty for the next morning, and to relieve the pain. The process was messy and slow and always frustrated me, failing to yield as much as I thought it should.

I threw together a peanut butter sandwich and ate it as I headed for the shop Quonset. Dad must have eaten lunch in his pickup. I could hear his sledgehammer clanging on steel. This wasn’t welding, really. He was just using the torch to heat the iron so it could be pounded
straight. Broken equipment could be fixed. I’d learned this simple, comforting truth in the desert. And now the shop smells of argon, hot metal, and greasy dust had a settling effect on me despite my guilt.

“What can I do?”

“Go take another one off and bring it to me.”

I did my best to redeem myself, lying on my back on hard ground to reach the least accessible bolts, applying the wrench and ratchet with skill it would have made me proud to demonstrate, if only the circumstances were different. When two o’clock rolled around and we still weren’t finished, Dad could see I was getting nervous.

“You don’t have to break your behind puttin’ ’em back on until the morning,” he said. “The pintos can wait another day.”

“I guess I’ll just go get Jake then.”

He assented with a slight tuck of his chin. Either he had learned his lesson the hard way when his sons defected, or age had softened him—or he actually did understand I had something more important to worry about. Every day, with every lesson, he’d been conveying to me the same values he had to Bruce and Clark:
Kill all weeds at first sight. Get in the field now, while you can. I don’t care if it’s Sunday and the weatherman says it won’t rain. Assume it will rain. Before you know it those weeds will be a foot tall.
But he was doing it with less rigidity. If you’ve got a baby to feed, okay, goddamn it, go.

•   •   •

“
O
KAY, GODDAMN IT, HAVE IT YOUR WAY,”
he said after we’d argued for a month over what kinds of trees to plant in the new windbreak. He liked seeing the place come to life and must have figured he owed me a little consideration for my effort putting in a garden and lawn. Although Beatrice had done most of the hard work on the lawn. She’d come for a visit to meet Jake and had wound up, as she always did, helping me. Decades of hired men and their wives had parked their cars right outside the front door, and the tiller bucked and bumped through the hard ground. But Beatrice had kept it tracking straight.

For the windbreak, Dad had wanted me to choose either junipers or the new variety of elms immune to disease. I wanted both—and lilacs, Russian olives, and sandhill plums.

Okay, goddamn it. But he drew the line when I argued for planting them randomly like in a real forest. I might have suggested we put them in the ground upside down. They had to be planted in rows.

“You don’t understand!” I said. “I’m trying to make a home here. My home. You live in town. Why does everything you do have to be in a straight line?”

If there was one expression that made Dad Dad, it was this one. Eyes mischievously alight. A smile stretched across his face with double parentheses on it. His old heart kept going well beyond what should have been its limits for two reasons—the chance to plant and harvest a new crop, and the entertainment value he got when other people were acting like idiots.

The three hundred sprigs from the Soil Conservation Service arrived in June. The two men working for Dad at the time helped me plant them. We’d already tilled the ground. Now we had to dig the holes, in straight, separate rows the way Dad insisted. That I hadn’t been able to convince him of my forest idea ate at me, but there is immense hopefulness in planting trees. I was having fun.

I asked one of the hands to go find a garden hose. He threw the posthole diggers down and stomped off. Had I done something to make him angry? I worked my way down the row, planting seedlings, until I ran out of holes and had to start digging them myself. Where in the heck was he? I wondered. It must have been a hundred degrees out. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, then sensed someone behind me. How long had he been standing there? Without a word, he dropped the hose on the ground and took back the diggers.

At noon, I retrieved Jake from the trailer across the drive, where he’d spent the morning with that same hired man’s daughter. He had sticky Popsicle juice all over him, so I put him on the front step, took his clothes and diaper off, and turned on the hose. Jake grabbed it and tried to drink out of it, the water running down his front.

Dad stood behind me, holding the lunchbox Mom had packed for him that morning. “Look at the little devil,” he said. “He likes it.”

“He’s a water baby like his mama. It’ll be nice when the grass gets established. We can do this on the lawn.”

Dad said, “Too bad you planted fescue. I like a bluegrass lawn.”

“Growing bluegrass in this climate makes about as much sense as growing corn. But oh,” I added, “You do grow corn.”