The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (19 page)

10

O
NE
M
AY NIGHT FOUR YEARS AFTER
I
’D MOVED TO
L
ARAMIE, AND SEVEN YEARS AFTER THAT FINAL DEFECTION,
I
GOT A CALL FROM MY MOTHER.
Dad was so weak that he hadn’t been able to make it to bed by himself. She’d had to call the neighbor over to help her with him. I made arrangements for a friend to watch Jake and get him to school, then rushed down there, arriving in the early morning.

The first task that greeted me was helping Dad from his easy chair to the bathroom. Mom and I had to brace him from both sides, guiding him down the hall and through the door. We backed him up to the toilet and I left them in there together. But Mom called out for me when he was through. I kept my eyes averted as I struggled to pull up his boxers.

Later I would be ashamed of my embarrassment. This had been my father dying, crouching, all his weight on my free arm and my mother’s bad shoulder. His hands, which had obeyed his will in a lifetime of manual labor, were too weak to fasten the snap.

Mom called the doctor, who said he would send an ambulance. “Thank goodness for Ron,” Dad said. For almost his whole life, he’d complained about the laziness or ineptitude of the men he’d hired, but he had finally found a man able to take over the daily operations. Ron and his wife, Nila, had been living on the farm by then for six years.

He turned to me. “Cook me something to eat.” I scrambled an egg, nuked a cheese-filled hotdog, and lacquered a slice of toast with the good margarine, not the watery kind that Mom normally gave him. There wasn’t much point in being careful about cholesterol anymore, I
was prepared to say if she objected. He was lifting his first forkful to his mouth when the doorbell rang.

Three blue-smocked paramedics rolled a gurney into the room. A rude invasion, it seemed to me. He should be allowed to leave his own house on his own feet. “He can walk with a little help,” I said.

The tallest attendant motioned for me to move aside. “We need some room here.”

Ordinary locals, the medics wore scrubs and outdated shoes with thick Vibram soles. They pulled out blood-pressure cuffs and stethoscopes, but they had no tricks in their bags to reverse the toll age was taking on my father’s heart, or that this moment was taking on my mother’s and mine. We looked on, our lips set and our lungs drawing shallow, reluctant breaths of the changed air.

The tall attendant took the readings without commenting on them, then signaled the other two. They lifted my father from the recliner, laid him down, tightened straps over him. I reached out and wiped a speck of egg from his chin, squeezed his white-socked foot as they wheeled him out the door, then, with my mother, watched through the kitchen window.

As the medics bustled around him, Dad stared straight ahead toward the garage. There was the aspect of a trapped animal in his gaze, fear and reckoning blending in his brown eyes. It had always been his body that made the first impression—his hunched shoulders; arms that bent a little even when they dangled, muscle strung; and his round shape. His bald head. His determination. This last quality was so much a part of him that it seemed a physical feature. At least it animated everything physical about him. Now he was down to his eyes, puzzling it out, grizzled brows slightly knit, his gaze focusing inward. He knew he was up against something that he held no sway over.

The attendants opened the ambulance doors, emblazoned with two identical snakes and staffs, then dropped the gurney’s accordion, chrome rear legs first. My father might have been a pharaoh, his attendants carrying him prone up the stairs of the Sphinx. His wind-scuffed,
sun-worn face seemed geologic and I wondered how they could lift so much rock.

•   •   •

I
N PAST CRISES, THE AMBULANCE HAD TAKEN
him all the way to Denver. The heart doctor would adjust his meds and it would be, as Dad joked, like starting an old tractor engine on a cold morning with a burst of ether sprayed in the carburetor. But this time he wasn’t sent to Denver. The doctor didn’t seem to think that was necessary. What the doctor was really telling us, we realized later, was that there would be no point. This old workhorse had plowed his last field.

One week later, a long funeral procession snaked through Goodland, paying honor to a man who had lived righteously by the true local religion. Not Christianity but production agriculture, which bowed only to getting crops into the field and getting them out the moment the weather allowed, and to grain mounting in the elevators on the south end of town so that when your family buried you in the north end, they would not have to suffer the deprivations you once suffered. Traditionally, the religion demanded at least one son who would carry on. But the world had changed enough now that a daughter would have done.

At the cemetery, we immediate family were ushered under the awning and given chairs. It was a windy Memorial Day weekend, and around us, petals of artificial blooms fluttered at other gravesites. Everything was artificial. The Astroturf that surrounded the incision they’d made in the earth to accept my father. The embalming fluid in his veins. The manner of burial. I didn’t like thinking how effective the brushed-metal casket and the vault around it would be, preventing him from decaying into the ground.

I wanted to see the casket lowered. I wanted to toss dirt on top of it and hear the minister say, “Dust unto dust.” But it was now customary to lower the caskets later, said my mother. Why? I wondered. So that the family isn’t traumatized? We were already traumatized. If it was closure we needed, like all the experts on “death and dying” said, then give it to us. Let us spade in the dirt and seal the wound.

W
ARD
AND
J
ULENE

Time and again I discover that I have not completely let go of the notion that salvation will come to me in the form of a man.

—
S
IGRID
N
UNEZ
,
A Feather on the Breath of God

1

F
ROM MY JOURNAL, A CONVERSATION
J
AKE AND
I
HAD WHEN HE WAS FIVE:

Mom, will you ever marry another dad?

Maybe someday, Jake. Would you like that?

Yes because I want a dad really bad, and the only one I have is in California.

Well I understand your wanting one, Jake, and I’ll try, but they are hard to come by.

Because you have to go to a ball? Like in Cinderella?

No, Jake. That’s just a fairy tale.

I was not an earnest seeker of a husband for me and a father for Jake. I couldn’t spare the time from my teaching job and from raising him to look for one. And I couldn’t let our happiness depend on some man I may or may not find who may or may not turn out to be compatible with both of us.

Yet from his earliest babyhood, Jake seemed eager to bond with any man of a likely father’s age. When Bruce jiggled him on his knee or Clark held him, Jake stared up at his uncles with idolatrous wonder. At age one and a half, when a male friend from California visited us on the farm, Jake begged to be carried on his shoulders again and again.

Then at two, looking through my photo album, Jake saw a picture of one of my friend’s daughters being playfully dangled from her father’s hands. “Sage’s Daddy?” Jake asked.

“Yes, Jake.”

“Where’s my daddy?”

I’d been steeling myself for this question but hadn’t expected it to come so soon. As casually as I could, I told him that his father was in California. I didn’t know exactly where.

The cruel irony of a missing parent is that the absence shapes the child at least as strongly as the participating parent does. My son’s heart formed around that shadowy figure he dreamed of meeting one day. His dad was out there somewhere, carrying around Jake’s identity. It was truer than the one he got from me because his father was male, like him, and his father’s name corresponded to the second, more fundamental half of Jake’s hyphenated last name. My son obsessed on the lack in his life, asking about Stefan often. I could only show him pictures and assure him that the man he saw branding calves and riding horses across the desert was a good man. He just had some problems that made it impossible for him to be with us.

If he couldn’t have his own father, Jake must have reasoned, maybe he could pick one up somewhere. At the cooperative day care, he would try to fend off his best friend so that he, instead, could be taken home by the boy’s father. When the UPS man brought a package to the door and spoke kindly to him for a moment, Jake would suggest I marry that guy.

After a long wait, I was able to get him a big brother through the Big Brother/Big Sister organization, but when we moved to Laramie, we had to go back on the waiting list, and the Iowa brother failed to stay in touch.

The open craving went on for years, with Jake falling in love with every male teacher he had and each of my male friends. A mother not only feels her child’s pain, it magnifies in her. Each of his pleas for a father was a goad to find him one. And I tried—reconnecting with an old California boyfriend after moving to Laramie. The one and only
reason? He was good with Jake. Anyone could have predicted where that would lead.

At twelve Jake began to realize that his yearning caused me pain. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was witnessing the suffering of others. “I don’t need a dad, Mom,” he insisted when I apologized to him for not being able to supply him with a father. “You’re enough.”

After another long wait, Laramie’s Big Brothers/Big Sisters organization found a new brother for him, but this guy lasted less than a year.

What was so special about men anyway? I reasoned. What could they give him that I could not? I could teach him “male” chores like carpentry, plumbing, and engine repair. But Jake fought me when I showed him how to do things. I couldn’t imagine my brothers resisting my father in that way. They had no choice but to conform to the work ethic. True, Dad had worked them too hard, succeeding only in robbing himself of farming sons. But there was also such a thing as working kids too little. If Jake had a real dad, as I’d had, not his ne’er-do-well father, and not the substitutes I’d tried to get for him, maybe he wouldn’t be having so much trouble now in school—or so went my thoughts as alone, I wrestled with our daily challenges.

In the fall of his junior year, Jake refused to go back to the regular high school and was now enrolled in Laramie’s alternative school. Even though his teachers demanded little of him, his attendance was poor. He put me in mind of Bartleby in the famous short story of that name by Herman Melville. “I prefer not to,” Bartleby said whenever his boss asked him to do anything. “I prefer not to,” Jake also seemed to be saying. Like Bartleby, Jake followed his own inscrutable lights.

Into this thicket of worry and regret stepped Ward, an iconic man’s man who, despite his obvious self-sufficiency, emanated a willingness to belong and be belonged to. On Christmas Eve, he abided with us in the glow of my mother’s fake tree. Jake and I always arrived on the twenty-fourth, while Bruce and his family showed up on the twenty-fifth, excruciatingly late, in Jake’s opinion. He wanted to open presents on predawn Christmas morning, as he was convinced every kid in
America except for him got to do. Images of perfect holidays and perfect families played in both our imaginations. On most holidays, I feared that Jake would sense my despair and be infected by it. But on this Christmas I didn’t have to pretend. I experienced holiday bliss, not because my family behaved according to fantasy, but because I had my own man now, and he did.

His presence beside me on the couch made Mom’s house seem aligned and balanced, as it used to feel when Dad sat in his easy chair with Mom beside him in hers. Diane, a girlfriend from Laramie en route to a temporary nursing job in eastern Kansas, had stopped to spend the holiday with us. Ward suggested a board game, and I dug the old Pictionary box out of the basement closet.

“What do you think, Jake?” Ward said. “You want to partner up against these gals?”

I noted a brightening of Jake’s dark eyes, a perceptible upward tilt to his lips. He settled into team-ship with Ward the way I’d seen him settle into barber chairs as a child, the mirror reflecting his pride in his temporary male milieu. My son was finally getting the attention he needed from a man, and Ward made his regard for me apparent too. I couldn’t have been happier. As Diane, who knew Jake well, observed the magic unfolding, her cheeks puckered around her barely contained smile. My mother laughed louder than she had in years. All of us—Mom, Jake, and I, and even Diane—lit up like a string of lights restored by the replacement of one missing bulb.

Ward went home, and the next morning Bruce and his clan descended on the house, bringing with them their ongoing battles and obsessions. My brother and his family were in their own solar system, Jake and I visible within it only when the holidays drew us into their orbit. Now we had our star too. It radiated across the plains from Ward’s house. The others sensed the magnetism, the weight of that star.

“Will Ward be coming to dinner?” asked my sister-in-law, Kris.

“No, he’s spending Christmas with his own family.”

“I suppose he has a pretty nice spread,” Bruce said.

“Not really. You know, an old house, the kind that Dad would’ve
hated. No farmland. No irrigation.” I paused. “But he pastures his horses and cattle on the Smoky.”

The Smoky had been one of Bruce’s favorite haunts as a teenager. “Sounds pretty sweet,” he said.

“Yeah, it does,” Jake said.

After he’d opened what he thought was his last present, I went to the hall closet and retrieved my father’s .22 rifle. I unzipped the sleeve from the gun, revealing its walnut stock. I’d promised Jake that he could have his grandfather’s gun when he turned seventeen, which was in just two weeks.

“Wow, Mom. Thanks!” He received the rifle as if it were a precious artifact.

I said, “You can bring it with you when you come over to Ward’s tomorrow. He promised to take you shooting.”

“Now be careful,” Mom said. “There are safety rules you need to learn.”

“I learned ’em,” Jake said. “Mom taught me. I got my first BB gun when I was eight.”

“That rifle is no BB gun,” Bruce said.

•   •   •

D
IANE DROVE ME OVER TO
W
ARD’S THAT
night as planned. Jake would bring my car in the morning, and she would continue east to her nursing job. She slept in the guest room and had coffee with us in the morning. Then Ward and I walked her out to her car.

She thanked Ward and complimented him on his place.

“Well,” Ward said, “it may not be much, but it’s almost paid for. Five more years and I’ll be a debt-free man with a dowry.”

Diane winked at me as those words trickled warmly through my chest. I imagined a neighbor seeing our wedding picture in the
Handshake
, and saying to his wife, “Well I’ll be damned if some gal didn’t finally tackle ol’ Allbright!” People would want to call me Mrs. Allbright. Would I be the first woman in the region who kept her own last name?

Ward said good-bye and headed to the barn to finish his morning chores. Diane smiled up at me from the driver’s seat. “He’s a keeper.”

“You really think so?”

“Oh, Julene, are you kidding? It’s obvious.”

“I know this is schmaltzy, but it’s almost as if we were made for each other.”

She smiled. “Your job is to keep him thinking that way.”

“Not to keep myself thinking that way? I mean, it could all go poof. What if I don’t like the way he dances?”

Diane laughed and started her engine. “You’re gone on him and you know it.”

After she left, I put a note on the door for Jake, and Ward and I drove down to the pasture to grain the mares. Returning, I was disappointed to see no Subaru in the front yard.

“That’s all right,” Ward said. “We have plenty to do while we wait.”

I revised the note, and, the weather being good, we saddled a couple of horses for a ride down the bluff and along the Smoky.

Ward gave me Joe, a docile buckskin. I kept trying to get him to step out, but he just plodded along. As I looked down at his short neck, he reminded me more of a mule than a horse. Riding him made me wish I’d brought Henry, one of the horses that the owners of the rock house had given me. I’d sold the mare, but I’d kept Henry, now pastured at a friend’s place near Laramie. He was a tall, energetic, raw-boned gelding with long legs and a true sorrel coat. At twenty-two, he still walked faster than most horses trotted. He held his head high on his long neck, stuck his tail out, and liked to move. These were not characteristics cowboys looked for in a horse. They liked them built closer to the ground, with more quick turning ability, and they liked them less hot. “I have enough trouble wrapping a rope around a steer without pulling on leather and wrestling with my horse,” Ward explained.

Back home, still no Subaru. We made sandwiches from the leftover Christmas ham Ward’s mother had sent home with him. While eating, I got up every so often to look out the window over the sink.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Ward said. “He just slept late. He’ll make it pretty soon.”

I envisioned Jake standing at the Walmart ammunition counter, the Christmas gift card my mother had given him pulsing in his wallet. What if he’d gone shooting on his own instead of waiting until Ward could take him out, as we’d agreed?

I tidied up the counter as slowly as possible so I could continue looking out the window without seeming to. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I called Mom. She said he’d left more than an hour ago. It took me less than an hour to drive to Ward’s. If Jake didn’t show up in the next few minutes, I wouldn’t be fit company. I would have to excuse myself and go sit in a corner of the barn.

Spider barked, sounding my reprieve.

“Here’s our boy,” Ward said.

Jake stepped from my car wearing his black motorcycle jacket over one of his dirty white T-shirts. Not what I’d hoped for. “How was the drive?” I asked.