The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (16 page)

Dad’s eyebrows shot up. And his lips took on their inverted U. “That friend of yours, Beatrice,” he said, “manhandling that tiller? I don’t know about her.”

This again. He’d already told me he suspected she was a lesbian. I wrapped Jake in the towel and picked him up. Inside, I grabbed a diaper and went into the living room. One nice thing about motherhood, you always had some task you could use to avoid unwanted conversations. But not for long. Dad’s hands, wet from washing in the mud-porch sink, dripped onto the carpet beside me. “I
said
I don’t know about that Beatrice.”

Apparently, he was hell-bent on badmouthing my best friend whether I bit or not. With all the sarcasm I could muster, I said, “What don’t you know about Beatrice, Dad?”

“Gawd! I came out here and there she was, strutting around the house in her nightie at eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“It was a flannel nightgown, Dad. It was Sunday. What were you doing out here then anyway?”

“And when I took her for a combine ride, it was Oh Harold this, Oh Harold that, blinking those big eyes at me. She practically sat on my lap. A guy could have had her right there.”

I let my jaw drop. “You could have what?! Don’t flatter yourself.”

In the kitchen, Dad took his sandwich out and began chewing in a workmanlike manner. Mom made a good sandwich, he often allowed, but it wasn’t like eating a hot dinner. “I’ll tell you one other thing,” he said now. “I had a talk with your friend Larry.”

“What about?”Larry was the hired man who’d stomped off that morning. It seemed everyone was my friend today.

“He almost quit on me, said he wasn’t going to take orders from a woman.”

This news hit hard. Until today, Larry had never let on he didn’t like me. I’d been so innocent, thinking that I could be accepted among men here. “So what did you tell him?”

“I will tell you what I told him,” Dad said, enunciating every word. He picked up his iced-tea jug, took a long drink, put the jug down. All for effect, I knew. “I told him, quit then, or get your ass back out there. She’s your boss today.”

Above the table I’d hung a picture of the Virgin Mary. Her exposed heart was encircled by a crown, had fire coming out of the top of it, and shot rays in all directions. Don’t ask me why I’d chosen that image. Maybe because as a new mother I found Mary exquisitely beautiful. Or was it for some frivolous decorative purpose? The heart’s shape and color did mirror the strawberries in my wallpaper. Or maybe I put it there to irritate Dad. He hated all religious iconography, even if it was something camp like this and he knew I was in no danger of converting to his least favorite brand of Christianity. I do know now why I remember that image, though. It was because my heart felt as jubilant as Mary’s looked.

She’s your boss today.
Sexism was alive and well in Kansas. Larry had proven it and so had Dad, calling Beatrice a lesbian one day, implying she was a harlot the next. But as Harold’s daughter, I got special dispensation. I might have been six again and he’d employed his old trick, slipping an ace into my hand when we were playing rummy.

•   •   •

W
ITHIN TWO WEEKS, WEEDS THREATENED TO SUFFOCATE
the seedlings. Dad had me hook his smallest set of spring teeth to our smallest tractor. With the random planting I’d wanted, we couldn’t have hoed an acre of trees without sacrificing several days, not to mention our backs. With rows, we could drive between them. For close weeding, we could weave the rototiller in and out. And drip tubing kinked when you tried to bend it. You couldn’t lay it in tight curlicues to water trees planted randomly.

“You see,” Dad said. “Your old man knows a thing or two. Half of your forest would have died.”

By the time I was ten, he would hold his cards until he had a complete rummy, and then he would go out leaving me stuck with all the discards he’d snookered me into thinking I could safely pick up. He didn’t have to coddle me anymore. He’d invested me in the game so much that all defeat did was make me want to play another hand.

So it was now. After messing up the cultivator and learning how wrong I’d been about the trees, I reminded myself to consider my father’s long experience before mouthing off next time. But being the uncontested boss for that one day of tree planting had also filled me with heady power. I realized that not only did I have tools at my disposal, I also had men. I could choose my fantasy. A sidewalk? Sure. After the next rainstorm, while we waited for the fields to dry out, the forms were built and the concrete poured. A fence so that Jake wouldn’t toddle out in front of a wheat truck? Done.

It had been almost twenty years since there had been immediate family on the farm. Seeing the way Dad undertook and enthused about these improvements, it occurred to me that the move to town in the sixties might have been as disorienting for him as it had been for me. Of course, no one acknowledged the shock at the time. I’d been excited about the move, thinking it would add to my family’s status and make me more popular at school. The new house was more luxurious than our old one, and it was airtight, meaning Mom and I didn’t have to dust nearly as often. Instead of landing on cold, pine boards in the morning, my feet now sank into a thick, royal-blue carpet. That room was fit for a princess—with knotty pine walls, western furniture, and my own sink. But the new brick house was also empty of history. Even if the farmhouse had been surrounded by weathered outbuildings, it had been gracious and grand. And it had enough prairie around it to remind us of our land’s former grandeur. Instead of pasture hills, the new house had a weed-free, chemically green lawn as level as my brother Clark’s butch-cut hair in his graduation picture.

That’s what I’d been doing when I moved to the desert, I realized—
not only seeking to live surrounded by natural beauty again but also trying to get back the gritty, real life of my childhood. I’d once had dozens of pets, ranging from crows and cottontails to calves and colts. Yet Mom had wanted nothing, not even a housecat, to mar the new house’s perfection. Our dogs and cats, along with my horses and Dad’s sheep, were moved to this farm. And Dad had begun commuting here, like a suburbanite going to any job.

Even if he’d never breathed a word of complaint, I suspected that after a lifetime of no separation between home and work, it felt alienating to leave his family in the morning. He wasn’t able to cool down in his own house at midday anymore or eat the noon meal at his own table or take an afternoon nap in his own easy chair. Or watch his children and grandchildren grow into the only life that made sense to him.

But now he had Jake and me. And we had him. The possibilities of the paradise we could make together seemed endless. A swimming pool? Possibly. I’d learned that with the loader tractor, we could dig a hole as deep as we wanted. That’s how the in-ground silos had gotten there. And we’d proven we could pour concrete. A hydroponic greenhouse? A herd of bison? Maybe someday, but I knew better than to mention those things yet.

Dad had his own ideas. “What you need is a sow.”

“Do I?”

“There’s good money in pigs.” Within a week, I had a pregnant sow. Then it was thirteen piglets and pulling the afterbirth out of their noses and keeping them warm with heat lamps and shoveling the stinkiest shit I’d ever smelled.

6

H
UMBLED AFTER BENDING THE CULTIVATOR SHANKS,
I
BECAME A MODEL APPRENTICE.
I got so good that the following spring Dad rewarded me with the most prestigious job, planting
corn. Corn rows had to be straight so that they could be cultivated and then furrowed for irrigation without the implements tearing out any of the crop. A marker extended from the edge of the planter, making a groove in the ground to follow on the next round. I had to keep the chrome arrow on the John Deere’s hood centered perfectly in that groove.

Every so often I stopped the tractor and opened the cab door onto the day’s mounting heat, climbed down the ladder, and circled the idling mammoth as Dad had told me to do, making sure the hydraulic hoses were still connected and that no weeds were balling up in the blades that opened the ground ahead of the seed spouts. I manually turned the planting gears, then checked beneath each spout for the pink, chemically dusted kernels that spilled out. I looked in the planter boxes and made sure the seed levels were even. When they got low, I called Dad on the two-way. “I’m out of seed.”

“So fill it.”

“No.”

“Jesus Christ. Okay then. I’ll send Larry out.”

I refused to open the sacks and pour the seed. I didn’t want to breathe the pink dust. The one time I did come in contact with the insecticide, it stung my skin. Trying to wash it off, I poured all the water in my field jug over my arms. I’d looked up to see the amused look on my father’s face. “Think about it,” I said. “If it kills the corn borer and cutworms, it can kill you.”

“Hasn’t yet.”

“Who knows? Maybe that’s what happened to the other seventy-five percent of your heart.”

That was the only thing I refused to do. Work with chemicals. The so-called Green Revolution had arrived in my absence, brought about by chemical fertilizers and pesticides with macho names like Roundup, Lasso, Prowl, Bladex, Lance, and Bicep.

I’d read
Silent Spring
and knew that while the chemicals were cowboying weeds into submission and magnificently boosting our yields, they were also leaching into our groundwater and our bloodstreams.
Poisons developed to kill enemies and clear forests so enemies couldn’t hide in them were now being used to make war on unwanted vegetation and insects in our fields. The compounds all had carbon in them, the chemical basis of life. They could interact with our cells and cause damage in us just as they could in the life forms they were intended to destroy. We couldn’t depend on the government to protect us. Regulations were few and lax. As with everything, you had to use your own brain, and my brain sensed danger whenever I smelled a farm chemical as readily as it did when I heard a rattlesnake buzz.

“Don’t do that there!” I shouted the first time Dad pulled his spray rig up to my garden spigot, which happened to be less than twenty feet from the well that brought water into my house.

Disgruntled, his shoulders hunched, he climbed back into the tractor cab and drove to the other side of the yard. “Is this far enough for ya, Miss Prissypants?” he said as I dragged the hose over to him.

He was mixing Treflan, a chemical he used on his pinto beans. The orange liquid splashed above his protective gloves and onto his arms. When he sprayed Treflan in the field, it turned the ground that same sickly yellow orange. “Just drink it why don’t you?” I said, then it occurred to me that I possibly was drinking it.

I insisted that we have my house’s well water sampled. Concerned that he might be poisoning his grandson, Dad agreed. The test came out okay, but going through the process heightened his consciousness a little. Mom helped too, saying she was worried about what Jake might get into when he started roving about the farmstead on his own. Dad gathered all the cans, some bulging as if about to explode; jugs, some lying on their sides beside syrupy puddles they’d leaked; and sacks, some torn open and spilling lethal powder, and locked them into a little trailer house that had once been sleeping quarters for his sheepherder.

But even with this precaution, exposure to chemicals was unavoidable on the farm. In my childhood, Dad had put temporary electric fences up on his wheat stubble so that his sheep could eat the weeds and volunteer wheat, fertilizing the ground as they grazed. Instead of
sheep, he now had big brawny tractors that pulled five hundred-gallon tanks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and forty-foot implements with V-shaped blades that undercut the stubble, killing weeds at the same time they infused the fertilizer into the soil. While applying ammonia fertilizer, he had to wear goggles and be careful not to breathe any of the gas. It could blind him or burn his lungs.

When I drove out to the field to give him a lift back to the farmstead, he would stand with the pickup’s passenger door ajar, playing peekaboo with Jake, while ammonia mist hovered in the wake of his last tractor round.

“God, shut the door! The ground smells like cat piss.”

“Small price to pay for fifty-bushel wheat,”
he would say, dropping his iced-tea jug in Jake’s lap as he climbed into the pickup. Jake would giggle and hug the thermos, the dust on it smearing his shirt.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
WASN’T TRAINING A
J
OHN
D
EERE’S
chrome arrow on some fence post or distant patch of weeds, I was one of my father’s “floodmen.” He would eventually convert to center-pivot sprinklers, but when I lived there, we were still irrigating mostly out of huge pipes laid along the tops of the fields. Each summer morning and evening I would belt Jake into his car seat in the blue Chevy pickup Dad had bought me for both farm and personal use and drive out to the corn.

As I knocked the floodgates open, the water would gush out in beautiful arcs and with such force that if I tried to slice my hand through it, my arm would be thrown back, almost dislocating my shoulder. To direct the water into the furrows, I placed “socks”—tubes of woven plastic mounted on wire hoops—over gates in the pipe.

Having lived in the Mojave, I quickly adjusted to working in hot sun, and the work led to sensuous exhaustion at each day’s end.
In
Main Street, I wrote in my journal,
Sinclair Lewis calls the look of the land at sunset ‘fulfilled.’ True of the land’s creatures too. Work and my past here make me one of these.

But life in the desert had also sensitized me to the value of water.
Because the rock house had no well, I had borrowed a tank from my neighbor. Whenever the tank ran out, I would hook the Cruiser up to the flatbed trailer it rested on, drive the two miles to his house, and refill from his carefully conserved windmill supply. I have since learned that Americans, on average, use between eighty and one hundred gallons of water each day. I made that five hundred-gallon tank last for more than a month.

Imbued with the respect water demands where it is not readily accessible, I greeted the appearance of so much of it coming out of the ground in our desertlike heat as surreal. Why didn’t all High Plains farmers—who had surely grown up conserving water just as my mother had, her father making her drink all she poured into the tin cup that hung on their windmill—not mistrust such bounty?

I had not yet seen any of the maps that would later trouble me. No brown blots where the aquifer had been exhausted. All I had to go on was a gut feeling. I knew we couldn’t draw that much water from the ground and expect it to keep flowing forever. What would we do when we ran out? What would the next several thousand years of High Plains inhabitants do for water?

As I lay in my bed at night, the backs of my lids strobing with images of all the rows of corn I’d driven past that day and of silver water snaking down each furrow, the incessant growl of the pumps plagued my conscience. The big truck engines, converted to run on natural gas and mounted on concrete pads at the edges of the fields, seldom stopped, even at night.

The water didn’t belong to the farmers, although most of them seemed to think it did. The state allowed us to use it, but only up to the limits of the rights granted to us. Many farmers, however, didn’t even bother to fill out forms reporting how much water they used. Dad was apparently among them. One day over dinner he fished a letter out of his lunchbox and handed it to me. It was from the Kansas Water Office, informing him that from now on, farmers would be fined for not reporting.

We didn’t know how much water we’d pumped that year. The Water Office hadn’t made us install meters yet, so the only way to
figure it out was by using the bills that the utility company sent for each engine. Dividing the total gas usage by an estimate of how much the engines used in one hour, we could estimate the number of hours we’d pumped, then multiply by the engines’ pumping rates. Dad said he’d tried to do all this himself, but he couldn’t get his “ol’ noggin to do the numbers.”

I can still see the utility bills scattered over my kitchen table. I remember how confusing it was to discover that two of the wells shared a gas meter. But mostly I remember my shock when I totaled the numbers. We’d pumped 139 million gallons that season. Even though we irrigated more than seven hundred acres at the time, half of that amount went onto our eighty-acre cornfield. That was more than four thousand gallons of water for every bushel of corn we’d harvested.

Hoping to prove that irrigated corn wasn’t really profitable, I suggested I do a spreadsheet computing the cost of labor, fuel, depreciation, chemicals, seed, property taxes, everything. “Go ahead,” Dad said. “Compute your heart out.”

The conclusion I reached: We barely broke even on corn—until I factored in the subsidy checks, which put us ten thousand dollars in the black.

“Are you satisfied?” Dad asked.

“No. They’re paying us to throw away water. And it’s so irrational. The only reason people out here grow corn is because of the subsidies. But there’s a corn surplus. The more we grow, the lower the price, so the more subsidies they have to give us. It’s a vicious circle.”

That might be true, he allowed. But if the government paid midwestern corn farmers to the east of us to grow corn, it wouldn’t be fair to draw a line down the middle of the country and “separate our poor, dry old plains asses from those lucky so and so’s who get rain.”

I sighed.

“Don’t despair
,
” Dad said. “Big Daddy will put the plug in before it’s too late.”

By Big Daddy, he meant the government. He had faith in this. It was the government’s job to look out for the general good, preventing
any serious harm individuals might cause in the pursuit of private gain. In his lifetime he’d seen the feds bust trusts, protect unions, and protect the environment with clean air and water laws. The Farm Program dictated many of his practices. In return for his subsidy checks, he had to leave a certain amount of organic matter on the surface. He’d been required to terrace his hillier land. The Soil Conservation Service, set up in FDR’s presidency, enforced these measures to prevent our topsoil from abandoning itself to water erosion, or the wind from picking it up and dropping it on Oklahoma, as it had done during the Dust Bowl. Big Daddy always had his hand in, and he would certainly reach in and do something before the water was all gone.

In the meantime, my daddy would raise his brows, cock his head at me, and smile with overstated cheer. “Until then, I got mine!”

How had we managed to farm before we had access to all that water? The same way we still farmed on our dry land. We employed the art my grandfathers and other plains farmers had developed by hit and miss. The first hits had been the wet years during the early half of the 1880s, when settlement boosters claimed that the rain had indeed followed the plows westward as they’d predicted it would. Farmers heartily embraced the rhetoric even if many agronomists warned that the science was extremely dubious.

The misses had been the dry years, culminating in the worst drought ever, in the Dirty Thirties. The thirties were called that because when the wind blew, which was practically all the time, the air filled with topsoil that had been tilled to a powder. My mother told stories of dirt blizzards so thick that they couldn’t see the barn from the house. After those storms, they resorted to using scoop shovels for dustpans. Through those tremendous trials and errors, farmers figured out that to grow wheat on the plains, they would have to let half their fields lie dormant each year, leaving stubble on the surface to prevent erosion and to allow enough moisture to accumulate to support the next crop. To keep weeds from taking over the field, they undercut the stubble with sweeps, the implement we now used in combination with ammonia fertilizer. When, after a year of dormancy, the stubble had to be
removed to make way for a new crop, the two-way disk came into play. It piled dirt up in opposing directions, thwarting the wind.