The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (18 page)

8

I
HAD ACCUMULATED EIGHTEEN CREDITS IN THE CORRESPONDENCE COURSES
I
’D BEEN TAKING IN AN EFFORT TO RETRIEVE MY EDUCATION, THE MOST THAT THE
U
NIVERSITY OF
I
OWA WOULD ACCEPT IN TRANSFER.
I promised Dad that I would come home and help him farm every summer, that my return to school wouldn’t change things too much.

At least I can say that I did come home the first summer, then the next. Each time, the smell of mothballs, dead mice, and the Rodex that had killed them greeted me as I opened the farmhouse door. I had read that naphthalene, the active ingredient in mothballs, had been linked to brain damage in infants. God knew what other damage the chemical caused, but no matter how much I insisted that the hired man not use poisons in my house, he did it anyway. Like his wife, who couldn’t comprehend why I would prefer stars to mercury-vapor light, he couldn’t understand why anyone would rather swat moths or trap mice when the pests could be vanquished with perfectly good chemicals. I opened all the windows, scrubbed every surface, and while the house aired out, slept at Mom and Dad’s house in town. Once resettled, I embarked on another summer walking up and down the pipes and knocking gates open, bleeding the Ogallala of her life-giving power.

At each summer’s end, I packed up Jake and our dog, Rex, and drove the eight hundred miles back to Iowa. I would get about halfway across Kansas before I hit the hundredth meridian, the approximate longitudinal line separating east from west, wet from dry. As the Rocky Mountain rain shadow dissipated, the land got greener, the skies diminished in both height and breadth, and I saw the sun less often. I felt like a child going inside after recess. No pale vistas. No vaulting, translucent blue. As hills and cornfields multiplied, my sun-dependent, distance-dependent soul shriveled to a nubbin of yearning.

Corn and soybeans, those sisters in the standard crop rotation, grew everywhere I looked—in glades between trees, on hillsides, and along the many mud-brown rivers and creeks. Farmers didn’t have to irrigate. The sky did that for them. And I’d spent my summer helping my father turn the Great American Desert, as the explorer Stuart Long had dubbed the plains, into a midwestern farmer’s paradise. It made no sense. In school, I’d discovered the western writer Wallace Stegner, who’d confirmed for me what I’d discovered on my first trip to Death Valley. Aridity was the West’s defining feature. Without it there would be no famously western aesthetic. Trees would conceal rugged contours
and diminish distances. A midwestern farmer’s paradise was a westerner’s hell.

How to get back? That would become the theme of everything I wrote in my Iowa writing courses and of everything I have written since. How to be the person I’d become in San Francisco and the Mojave yet also access, for Jake and me, a life interconnected with our family and land? After Dad’s eventual death, how would I manage to honor his first precept, the one most essential to my understanding of who I was?
Hang on to your land!
I hadn’t thought through the eventual consequences of my leaving, but my unconscious bit into this problem and wouldn’t let it go.

In August, a year and a half after I’d moved to Iowa and as I was preparing to enter graduate school, Bruce called to tell me that Clark had been killed in a bicycling accident in California. This was my first adult encounter with death. Clark had left home for college when I was only nine, but I had always been his beloved little sister. For weeks after the funeral, I walked around in a leaden haze by day and dreamed of him by night.

In a dream that would replay in my memory for years afterward, he was lying on top of an implement being pulled up the hill by an open-air tractor driven by Dad. I knew it was Dad even from the back, because of the way he sat the tractor—not with panache, the way a showy cowboy sits a horse, but with the acceptance of mud. His shoulders were curved downward in his wool-lined denim jacket, his brimmed field hat square above his thick neck.

The implement was a seed drill. Not the new, forty-foot-wide set that I’d used when planting wheat but one of the old, narrow sets that Dad and my brothers planted with in my childhood. It had a long flat lid over the bins containing the seed. Clark lay on his back atop the lid. Instead of falling off as the drill angled up the hill, he remained frozen, his arms crossed like one of those Egyptian funerary statues that were found in the pyramids, buried with the pharaohs. Under his arms lay Jake, also on his back and facing the sky.

I knew in my heart that the dream was about our inescapable
destiny as Dad’s progeny, and children of that land. I was in the process of breaking away from the farm and Dad, but none of us could ever really do that. It didn’t matter what our occupations were. There would always be that superior occupation, the one that we were supposed to be practicing and still were practicing deep in our psyches.

When I went through the things that Mom and Bruce had brought from Clark’s condo in Chico, California, where he’d taught chemistry in a junior college, I chose as my memento his tin Future Farmers of America sign. An eagle perched atop a circle of golden corn kernels, holding a sheaf of wheat in one talon.

A FUTURE

FARMER

LIVES

HERE

CLARK L. BAIR

I looked at that sign and recalled Clark in his blue corduroy Future Farmers of America jacket, with that same emblem on his chest. He wore the jacket without the least bit of irony, fully intending to excel at the occupation. A teenage perfectionist, he’d followed the chrome arrows across our father’s fields with purpose as sure and straight as the rows of wheat he planted. But he worked hard and excelled at everything, especially science and math.

When he graduated as valedictorian from high school, he made it clear he was finished with farming. Feeling that he was never good enough for Dad, whether he slaved his heart out or not, had embittered him. Yet he’d kept this sign. I knew how fraught his choice must have been, between science and city friends and sophistication on the one hand, and approval in our father’s huge willful heart on the other. I’d been a future farmer too.

9

I
N ONE PICTURE OF
J
AKE FROM THE SUMMER HE WAS THREE, HE’S SMEARED HEAD TO FOOT IN MUD.
That was the day I’d been so focused on rototilling weeds from around the trees that I hadn’t noticed him wandering toward the lagoon, a low, boggy spot in the surrounding field. I ran to extract him, a half-buried frog. At four, he stands shoulder deep in wheat, his hair wet and recently combed, wearing a wide-striped, old-fashioned shirt I’d bought because it reminded me of the ones my mother dressed my brothers in when they were little. Beside that picture in my album, I placed a shot of Dad in the same field, examining a seed head for ripeness. It is impossible to look at those two pictures and not think about succession, a way of life continuing through the generations.

But after Jake turned five, there are no more pictures of him on the farm. That was the third summer after we’d moved to Iowa. In May, I had a scholarship to attend a writers’ conference in Utah. After the conference, I planned to pick up Beatrice from the airport in Denver and go camping in the Colorado Rockies. I longed to see the earth’s jutting bones again, not just its outline beneath crops. I had to return to Iowa by the second week of June. I’d been offered a summer teaching assistantship. It was an honor, and better pay than I earned on the farm. I stopped in Kansas only for a brief visit.

The young man whom Dad had pegged as management material had quit. His family didn’t enjoy living so far from town. That was okay. Dad wasn’t that happy with him anyway. The guy hadn’t been willing to make the sacrifices. Sundays he went to church regardless of what the crops needed, and his wife was always “running up and down the road” to town. Dad hired a new man. The Oddball, he called him.

Over supper during the first night of my visit, Dad said, “The Oddball told me he can remember being born. Well, if that isn’t a crock.”

“Are you going to fire him for that?” I asked.

“If I’ve gotta pry him out of bed in the morning, I might as well can him and go on without.”

“It would kill you to do all that work by yourself,” Mom said.

As I ladled her lean hamburger stew into my bowl, Dad’s eyes, as menacing as the sky before a hailstorm, moved onto me. “Want to earn eighty dollars?” he asked.

“Why? What do you want?” I should have said no, I thought. It was the kind of question you asked a teenager.

He tore a dinner roll in half and slathered it with margarine. “Go out and do those girls’ eighty. I’ll pay you a dollar per acre.” The Errington “girls” had gotten Dad to farm their wheat ground for them by “wiggling their pretty asses,” he normally would have said, adding that of course their asses were about ten feet wide and wiggled naturally. But not tonight.

“I’d like to help, Dad, but what would Jake do? He can’t sit on the tractor with me all day. I’m worried he’s getting a cold.”

“Jasmin can take care of him.”

“No, I can’t. I have a hair appointment, and then I have club in the afternoon.” Mom and Dad had an understanding. She’d earned her right to refuse. If he wasn’t willing to sell the place or rent it out, well then, that didn’t mean she had to work herself to death too.

All through the next day I replayed the conversation. Did he really need my help? “Grandpa needs us,” I could have told Jake. “Bring Kermit the Frog and he can help too.” So what if Jake fidgeted and cried, having to ride on the ledge behind my seat in the tractor cab all day? Even if his cold got worse, even if it led to the inevitable ear infection and the trip to the hospital emergency room for an antibiotic and I missed going to Utah. After all that Dad had done for me, didn’t he deserve my help?

But besides the Oddball, he had also hired a neighbor man. Surely with the two men he had enough help to get the Erringtons’ and his own field work done. I suspected that he just wanted to see me out there.

I remembered that dream image of Clark lying statuelike, holding Jake frozen in that same posture, pinned under his uncle’s arms. They hadn’t rolled off, even though the top of the seed drill had been flat
and narrow. It looked as if they were permanently affixed and had no choice but to lie there and be pulled up the hill by Dad. But nothing visible held them in place. That’s how I felt now, as if breaking invisible ties. Refusing Dad was like denying the very structure of my universe.

I had looked up the Egyptian figures the dream reminded me of.
Shawabti.
The figures represented “deceased persons and were intended to do agricultural work in place of those persons in the afterlife.”

“Like little clones,” the article had said. Little replicas.

The wonders of the subconscious! Agricultural work, no less. The replicas were entrusted with “sowing the fields, filling the water-courses with water, and bringing the sands of the east to the west.”

I was not sure what the sands were needed for, but I knew all about sowing and filling water-courses. “I am here and will come whenever you bid me,” the clones pledged to their masters.

Well, I will not come, I vowed. I am going to have my own life.

•   •   •

D
AD RETURNED FROM THE FARM THAT EVENING
as I stood at the kitchen sink, tipping a teaspoon of Tylenol into Jake’s mouth.

“I’m getting medicine because I’ve got a sick head,” Jake told him.

Dad looked beat, dust collected in his frown lines and the crevices around his eyes, but this didn’t prevent him from putting on a cheery face for his grandson. He leaned down and gave Jake’s forehead a loud kiss. “Did that help?

Jake closed his eyes, taking a reading, then opened them. “No,” he said, unable to hide his smile.

“No? It helped your mom when she was little.”

How could I have spent the whole day steeling myself against this man? As always, he’d proven larger than I was.

But over a supper of baked chicken, he said, out of the blue and with obvious derision, “Camping.”

“You want to talk about this, Dad?” I struggled to keep my voice even. “If I’m such a huge disappointment?”

“You’re not a disappointment,” Mom said. “It’s just a busy time of year.”

Dad gnawed the cartilage off the end of a leg bone. “Eating everything but the saltshaker,” Mom usually observed, but no one was willing to make jokes in this climate. Dad dropped the bone onto his plate, scooted his chair back, and went into the living room.

Wordlessly, Mom and I did the dishes, then I took Jake downstairs to play with his barn animals. I helped him hook together little sections of white fence, much more idyllic than the corrugated-tin fencing on our real farm. Inside his corral, Jake placed “three sheep like Grandpa used to have. See Mom? And our horsies.” For turf, the animals had Mom’s loud, sixties-print, chartreuse carpet to graze. One of the horses whinnied and reared. “Oops,” Jake said. “Broke the fence.”

While mending the damage caused by the unruly white mare, I heard footfall on the stairs. Then he was standing behind me. “You want to talk about it. Well then.”

Chilled by the resentment I glimpsed in his eyes, I sat down beside him in one of the cast-off basement recliners.

He launched his first volley. “You could relieve the situation here a lot, but you’re not gonna.”

“I’ve got a kid to take care of, Dad. He’s getting sick, and we have to leave in two days. I have my work too.”

“Oh sure. Running up and down the road. Camping. I tell you, you’re not getting another nickel or dime out of me unless you get up off your ass in the morning and help out.”

The insult came at me like a broad board. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen his anger before. It was just that he’d reserved it for my brothers. “I’m not asking for any money,” I said.

“Sure. Not until you need it.”

So that was how he saw me? A freeloader, as he called my aunts and uncles when his father had given them “handouts.” I vowed to live on my student loans and my assistantship and not give him the satisfaction of asking for anything ever again. Not ever!

“What you need to do,” Dad added, “is stay here this summer and learn how to take over this farm.”

“I’ve learned a little,” I said.

“A little. Not enough.”

So this was the other side of it—what it really felt like being in direct line of our sun’s rays. Those rays could scorch as easily as they could warm. It was a wonder Clark hadn’t torn that Future Farmers sign and stomped on it.

Jake jumped the white mare over the fence and trotted her up Dad’s chair and onto his arm, but Dad didn’t even look at him. All innocence, Jake had no idea what was in store for him if he ever got the full attention of his grandpa.

“What about me?” Dad said. “I need some quality time. I’ve been working at this for seventy years. What about me?”

He had a right to ask that, I knew. But a son or daughter with ideas and dreams is an irresistible force, and even though my father was the immovable object, I would go over, around, or through him. Whatever it took. “I wish I could help, Dad. It’s just that I need to have my own life. Bruce has his own life. So did Clark. He wasn’t such a failure was he?”

I watched him chew on that, his old body a container for a lifetime of stress. “Clark was a good teacher.” His voice was a little softer.

“He was his own man too. No one told him what to teach, how to plan his lessons. We want to make you happy, Dad, but we can’t always do that and make ourselves happy too.”

Another person’s pain is often invisible if you let it be, if you have a stake in not seeing it. But when I next looked at my father, tears were etching trails down his cheeks. This I couldn’t ignore. “Dad?”

He didn’t say anything. I placed my hand on his. He looked straight ahead and made no move to accept or acknowledge my touch. In my whole life, I’d seen only one tear fall from his eyes, at Clark’s funeral. He’d reached up and wiped it off his cheek with his knuckle.

I owed it to him to understand, not by issuing any more statements of arrogant sympathy but by breathing the same air he did. When I did
this, when I aligned myself with my father’s heart, I felt the earth shifting below me. He was my underlayment, the source of almost everything I took for granted, always stalwart and so certain of himself, I’d never considered it possible that he might give way.