The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (24 page)

“I could grow wheat in my sleep. Practically did when I was a kid,
working for my dad and uncle. But whatever you want. I’m willing to do anything you guys need.”

Anything you guys need
. Those were sweet words, kind and well meant. I suspected, however, that they were not well considered. Ward’s smile had a beatific quality to it that would surely wear off once he realized the mistake he was making.

But I said nothing. I wasn’t thinking of what might or might not be good for Ward. I was thinking of my big reunification plan between Julene’s divided selves.

6

S
TOPPING AT
M
OM’S ON MY WAY HOME AFTER THAT VISIT,
I
DISCOVERED
B
RUCE’S ROAD HOG TAKING UP THREE QUARTERS OF THE DRIVEWAY.
I needed to try my new idea on him, but I hadn’t expected to see him that very day.

He was in the dining room, turning the pages on the check register and taking pictures of each. Mom had been paying the farm’s bills and keeping the books ever since she and Dad got married. She wasn’t going to relinquish the task now, although Bruce had told me it would make his job a lot easier if vendors just sent him the bills and he paid and recorded them electronically.

“But how can I complain?” he asked. The books were Mom’s one thing. Habituated by a lifetime deferring to Dad, she now left all the important decisions to Bruce and me. The arrangement involved a pecking order, though. When Bruce had suggested that I become the family’s investment guru, I had seized the role. Ever the youngest, it was great having sole responsibility for something here at home. I’d read books and studied, then began transferring Mom and Dad’s CDs into a conservative mix of stocks and bonds. Bruce managed the farm. That was the division of labor. Understood. Until, perhaps, now.

“Orph!” I said, bending to pet Bruce’s giant black dog. Part
Newfoundland, part anybody’s guess, Orph accompanied Bruce on all of his solitary trips to Goodland. I buried my nose in his fur, inhaled his doggy scent. “What a nice old guy.”

“Abby says he has a three-ounce brain, all devoted to niceness.”

Bruce’s daughter had inherited his humor gene. I laughed on cue, stood up.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Who knows? Hair appointment. Isn’t that always where she is?”

“Or over at the church with her ladies’ circle, quilting.”

“Oh yeah, quilting. Or at the grocery store. Or the doctor’s.”

“So I’ve been thinking about the farm.”

“Yes?” Bruce said in that tremulous voice of his. “What’s new? So have I.” He closed the register and zipped his camera back into its case.

“We could farm it ourselves if we grew only wheat. If we didn’t irrigate, we wouldn’t have to worry about finding a new manager or renter.”

“You can farm it if you want,” Bruce said. “I’m too old to bust my ass pounding steel.” That would be the truth of it, I knew. Dad spent half his life in the shop Quonset, pounding on implement parts. All farming was hard work. Even when I was thirty-five, driving air-conditioned tractors, I’d gone home exhausted at day’s end. But Ward was strong the way Dad had been strong. That same stocky build.

“Ward and I could do it together,” I said.

“As long as it’s not my ass.”

Over one hump, and so easily, at least for now. I knew Bruce wouldn’t just hand over the keys to the farm. There would be a lot of proving up to do. “I thought we might do it organically.”

“That’s the way we used to farm until we played out the land,” Bruce said. It was true. Our grandfathers and Dad, when we were kids, had gotten good crops because of the fertility that had accumulated in the prairie sod since the Pleistocene. “We’d be lucky to get five bushels to the acre without fertilizer now,” Bruce added. “And if you grow organic wheat, you’ve got to have organic fertilizer.”

“A Colorado farmer I read about is using kelp,” I said.

“Kelp,” Bruce huffed. “From where?”

“The Gulf of Mexico.”

“It would cost a fortune to ship. And what about the saline content? Anything from the ocean is going to be full of salt.”

“Maybe. I mean, I don’t know how we’d do it, yet. But will you send me your spreadsheet on our current inputs? So I can do some estimates?”

“I’ll send you anything you want,” Bruce said. He picked up his farm hat, a straw pith helmet. Above his grizzled beard, and with his hair sticking out around his ears, the hat made him look like an eccentric scientist on safari. “You staying or leaving?”

The conversation was over, I guessed. “Leaving, unless Mom comes home soon. I’ve got to get to Laramie and make sure Jake does his homework tonight.”

“So you lock up Fort Knox.” Dad’s old joke. All three doors to Mom’s house and the two in the garage had to be locked at all times. If she came home and found one left unlocked, she would go on a tirade. “Did the farmhouse even have a key?” I asked her once. I couldn’t remember it having one. But all she had to do to defend her security obsession was mention the time a few years ago when “that disgusting trash” blew into Goodland off the interstate and broke into old Addie Newton’s house and raped her. “What would two strapping young men want with an old hag like Addie or me?” Mom had asked. “It’s barbaric!” The crime had shocked me too, deeply. But it shocked me almost as much hearing Mom mention herself in the same sentence as the raped Mrs. Newton and the two strapping young men.

Bruce had already gone into the living room and grabbed his guitar, which went everywhere he did. He was waiting in the entry for Orph, but the dog’s toenails skittered on the linoleum as he tried to rise. I straddled him and gave him a boost, as I did for Mom when she had trouble getting up from her easy chair. That was another thing Bruce and I should be talking about. Probably time for assisted living. How were we going to orchestrate
that
?

Orph’s slinking gait, as he lumbered across the kitchen on ill-strung
hips, then out the door with his helmeted master, reminded me of Simba, the regal lion. Bruce always left me standing somewhere, wanting more engagement than he was prepared to provide. I’d envied his wives and girlfriends for his presence in their lives. I’d even envied his kids. But this was the first time I’d ever envied his dog.

•   •   •

D
REAMING ALONG WITH ME OVER THE PHONE,
Ward said, “This is what I’ve always wanted.” I pictured him in his upstairs easy chair, one boot resting on the rope trunk that served as a coffee table. “We’ll be going through life together, pulling each other’s loads.” All those other relationships that hadn’t worked out made sense to him now.

My past failures, too, were beginning to make more sense in light of this new development. I had never believed in romantic destiny, but our circumstances seemed beyond providential. Following the dry Little Beaver across the prairie that day we’d first met, I’d felt as if I were tracing the lines of my family’s origins in the land. Not more than fifty feet from the water I’d needed to find, to assure myself that we had not yet thoroughly destroyed what we once professed to cherish, I’d found Ward. Now we were preparing to do right by my family’s land and the water together.

I would be skating along like this, then a line from one of Ward’s early e-mails would pop into memory.
What is going to happen when we wake up?
If anything was going to wake up a cowboy, it would be driving a tractor.

But how was I to know what was right for Ward? Maybe he needed to make a genuine sacrifice for love. A lasting relationship demanded some self-denial, and maybe he faulted himself for never having been able to rise to the challenge.

He continued to insist that moving to Kansas would be disastrous for me. He would still come my way, to Wyoming. We would drive to Kansas as needed, to plant, cultivate, fertilize, harvest, etcetera. He would sell his cattle, and pasture his horses on rented land near Laramie and on our farm. He confessed that he’d been fantasizing about
my father’s old sheep barn ever since he’d first laid eyes on it. It would make a perfect indoor riding arena in the winter. His own place had no such amenity.

Jake was part of our plans too. True, his problems had worsened in the last few months, but he was still young and receptive to good influences. With Ward’s tutelage and a big tractor to drive, he might straighten out and start taking school and the concept of work in general more seriously.

Bruce sent me an Excel worksheet listing everything it took to grow dryland winter wheat—the cost of fuel, the rate our tractors consumed it by the hour, the number of hours in each field operation—and equally exacting particulars for every other expense imaginable. Crop insurance, property taxes, maintenance, custom cutters, and the one thing I hoped we’d be able to do without—chemicals.

In the years since I’d worked on the farm, we’d been gradually switching over to a new method called no-till farming. In our case, Bruce said, it would more appropriately be called low-till. This meant that we killed weeds in our stubble fields with chemicals instead of undercutting them with sweeps, and we cultivated less often in advance of planting. Low-till left stubble on the field longer, preventing wind and water erosion and preserving moisture in the soil. Bruce said that ever since the drought had begun two years before, the new method had been the only reason we’d had decent crops. “Go out there and dig. See for yourself.” He promised I would find damp soil in our low-till fields and no moisture in those where we still farmed the old way.

Every farm magazine I picked up in my mother’s house sang the praises of no-till. None mentioned the risk to streams and aquifers posed by additional chemicals, much less aesthetics. Only immediate profits counted. But I hated the dead, gray look of our wheat stubble after it had been sprayed. It used to glitter gold for months after harvest. Gold was a color I associated with the fall, when pheasants, jackrabbits, kit foxes, and killdeer had found cover in the fields beneath a
banner-blue satin sky, but their numbers had diminished drastically since this new chemical approach had come along. The drabness reminded me of postapocalyptic movies in which a future poisoned world was drained of color and light.

I had no idea how I could wean our farm off chemicals. A few farmers in Montana and the one in Colorado I’d told Bruce about were raising organic wheat on a large scale. But to be realistic, Ward and I would certainly not be able to grow organic wheat in our sleep. The less harmful and invasive methods were more labor-intensive. We would have to rededicate our lives. Splitting our time between Laramie and Kansas would prove impossible.

Then I ran the numbers. Raising only dryland wheat with the conventional approach would support Ward and me, but it wouldn’t support Bruce or allow either of us to continue putting aside profits to secure our kids’ future. Neither would the organic approach, even if I factored in the current premium on organic wheat, which was selling for three times what conventional wheat sold for. Fertilizer costs would be higher, and there might be times when we had to hire manual labor to hoe weeds we couldn’t spray. And to market our grain, we would have to ship out of state. The undertaking might have been more profitable than conventional wheat even with those extra costs and demands, but the more I considered what would be entailed, the more I understood how major the sacrifice would be. I was not actually prepared to give up my writing for the endeavor. It would certainly not be fair to ask Ward to give up any of his business interests.

“That’s really too bad,” Ward said when I told him that the financial projections hadn’t worked out. But he didn’t offer to pore over the numbers himself to see if he might get a different read. And I could hear the relief in his voice.

•   •   •

T
RUTH WAS,
I
DID LOVE THIS MAN.
Although he claimed to be readying himself for a move to Laramie, I couldn’t help thinking that it would
be as disastrous for him as he believed moving to Kansas would be for me. But I thought our love would deepen and mature over time until we were able to cross this seemingly impassable mountain as if it were a little hill. It didn’t really matter that we had to live separately right now; I was happier than I’d been in years.

In the meantime, I allowed myself to imagine spending longer and longer periods in Kansas after Jake graduated. I imagined not only making Ward’s house my part-time home, but I also saw myself driving over to Goodland often to see Mom. I didn’t want her to live her last years alone, then die with no immediate family nearby.

Ward was not going to save our farm. But he might make it possible for me to have a life while I did. If I lived there during the growing season, I could learn to drive the new tractors. Then I could help Bruce fill the labor gap if Ron’s health failed during the summer when we needed him most. I could maybe get Ron and Bruce to let me experiment on the dryland corners of our irrigated fields. These extended beyond the circles the pivot sprinklers traveled, and tended to be planted as an afterthought anyway. I imagined experimenting with more dryland crops such as commercial sunflowers or canola. Or teff, an Ethiopian cereal grain that some farmers had been trying.