The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (7 page)

I stepped outside and pulled him away from the door. He placed his hands on my waist. I laid mine on his arms and he looked into me out of his sea-green eyes. I was centered again, at home in a way that home hadn’t made me feel in years. I was a wheel in a groove, a bird in its nest, a woman with the kind of lover she hadn’t known enough to wait for.

7

I
INTRODUCED
W
ARD TO
J
AKE FIRST.
Jake rose, and Ward strode across the room to shake his hand, man to man. When Josh finally arrived and dinner was served, Ward actually held a chair out for me before sitting down himself. No man had ever done that in this house. Jake sat on one side of me, Ward on the other. Abby grabbed the chair at the head of the table opposite Mom, which Bruce made a point to avoid. He wasn’t into traditional symbolism.

Ward had gotten a haircut recently. I longed to stroke the shiny V in the blond bristles on the back of his head. His hat had left a ridge in his hair. I couldn’t imagine my father in a cowboy hat. He would have looked foolish. And Ward would have looked comical and out of character in the derby Dad had worn when dressing up. Yet both men had the anchoring presence of their largeness. It was as if the house had been a listing boat, and Ward’s stepping on deck had set it to rights.

Was he shocked at our incivility? We didn’t say a prayer, just started handing the platters around. If Mom had called the shots when we were growing up, she would have set a different, more reverent tone in her household. Dad hadn’t gone in for all that “holy, holy, holy.” Yet he’d had more social grace than all of us put together. “Grace” was not a word that leaped to mind for a man of such blunt and coarse opinions. He did, in fact, worry that Clark was gay. He did call undermotivated hired men lazy so and so’s. But if he were still with us, we wouldn’t have been handing platters around the table in silence. He would have sparked a conversation with a tidbit of gossip or an odd fact he’d read in
National Geographic
. He would have plied us with questions about our lives, asking Jake how school was treating him and offering sage advice it pleased me to hear.
Don’t let those grades start slippin’. Pretty soon they’ll be down so far you’ll need a bucket and a rope to get them back up.

“Now Jasmin,” Ward said, “did you grow these pickles yourself?”

Mom perked up at this attention from the new man at her table. “Oh no, I didn’t. But I used to grow all my pickles. Even after we moved
to town. You should have seen that downstairs closet in the furnace room. It used to be plumb full of vegetables I’d canned.”

“I miss that food, don’t you?” Ward said.

“I saw some pretty good clouds down your way last week,” Bruce said, before she could answer. “You guys squeeze any moisture out of them?”

“Not a drop,” Ward said.

Bruce sighed. “Dry sponges. Oh well. Who needs rain when we’ve got the government?” He explained that the drought-relief package Congress had passed coincided with his taking out government crop insurance. “Like doubling down in blackjack,” he said. Gleefully he threw up his hands. “And winning!” He revealed both crooked canines this time. “That never worked for me in Vegas, but in Washington, the odds are stacked our way.”

A landslide of cash had poured in, so much, he explained to Ward, that he was planning to buy a new tractor before year end, to reap the investment tax credit. “The government gives it to us. We give it back. They give it to us.”

“That’s the merry-go-round all right,” Ward said.

“I had a dream about your father,” Mom said. “He told me we didn’t need that new tractor.” She’d described the dream to me before. She’d been sitting in the tub, naked, I assume. Was there any other way to sit in a tub full of water? He’d been washing her back. That this must have been a common ritual between them amazed me. Growing up, I rarely saw my parents display affection. There were no spoken endearments, no touches other than her patting his bald head on occasion or him slapping her bottom as she washed the dishes. “Oh Harold!” I could still hear her grumble, as if truly angry.

Discovering that my parents had been that intimate in their private lives touched me. But it couldn’t have been easy for my father to make such a vivid appearance in Mom’s dreams, especially for a man who hadn’t believed in an afterlife. He must have felt a mighty need to convey his advice. I was accustomed to thinking my father correct in all things farm related. Was Bruce frittering away Dad’s money on fancy
equipment we didn’t need? Were we destined for financial ruin? It really did scare me.

Bruce ignored Mom and her oft-repeated dream. Ward’s starched shirt and dark-blue jeans were a dead giveaway. My brother knew he had a Republican sitting between the sights of his piercing brown eyes, and he’d clearly been waiting to move in for the kill. “I’ve got an idea. The government can get out of the lives of everyone who voted for Newt Gingrich and his buds in Congress. The rest of us’ll take our Farm Program checks.”

“Okay, Bruce,” Ward said. “Let me know if you can spare a couple bucks.”

Bruce leaned back in his chair and broke into appreciative laughter. “Score!” he shouted. He was nothing if not fair minded. A wave of relief passed around the table.

“Well I just don’t know about that Bush,” Mom began.

Time to change the subject. “Did you have fun swimming, Jess?” I asked my grand-niece. She nodded and paddled her arms over her head.

•   •   •

“
W
HAT CAN
I
DO TO HELP, LADIES?”
Ward asked after dinner.

“Oh nothing,” Mom said. She suggested he go down to the basement and watch the game with Bruce and the kids.

He took the dishes she was stacking out of her hands. “No, you go sit.”

“Well okay, if you insist,” she said brightly.

How about that. A new paradigm in the Bair household. I tried to imagine Dad questioning Ward’s manhood. He was too rugged and confident. It would just never happen.

Once finished cleaning up, we left the dishwasher churning and descended the stairs. “You might want to shade your eyes,” I said.

“Well isn’t this something? It’s a whole other world down here.” Ward courteously refrained from commenting on the bold-print, chartreuse indoor-outdoor carpet laid when the house was new. Mom had
completed the decor with green-and-gold striped wallpaper. The green stripes were flocked.

Bruce was propped in one lounger, Abby in the other. Jake and Josh sat in the chairs closer to the TV, Jake trying to be interested in football. Bruce picked up the remote and turned the volume down. “Get up, Abby,” he commanded.

“Now, don’t bother,” Ward said. “I’ll just—”

“Oh it’s all right,” Bruce said.

I sat down on the end of the couch nearest Ward. “I always thought this had to be the ugliest couch in the world. Dad called it shitmuckle brown.”

“He called every shade of brown shitmuckle,” drolled Abby.

Jake laughed and examined the matching chair he sat in. “Didn’t Grandma and Grandpa get these like forty years ago, when you lived on the farm?”

“Those sonsabitches’ll never wear out,” Bruce said. “You kids can save some of Harold’s money by marking our graves with them instead of headstones.”

“If we don’t lose it all before then,” I said.

“We’re doing fine,” Bruce said. “The new ground averaged better than anything.” He was referring to the wheat yield on some land for which he’d traded our father’s largest pasture. The pasture had been rough prairie, sliced in two by a dry creek like the one in our childhood canyon pasture, while the new ground had been ideal for wheat.
Flat as the day is long
, Dad used to say about such land. “That’s a half section of new wheat we’ve got coming into the coffers,” Bruce added. “Twelve thousand bushels in a good year.”

I was accustomed to bluffing my way through conversations with Bruce, pretending not to need his approval, but now his dark eyes brimmed with pent-up unsaid things. Was it possible he doubted himself? Did he need my approval too? Is that what he was signaling? I said, “It was a good decision, Bruce. I know that.”

Here was the machine that was our family working in its best, limping fashion. “What choice did I have?” Bruce said. “We don’t run
livestock anymore. I could have kept it just so that cowboy bastard we were renting to could play out the romance of the dying breed, or I could make us some real money.”

I glanced at my cowboy boyfriend, who smiled lopsidedly at me and shook his head slightly, as if to say, “Don’t worry. Water off a duck’s back.”

“You sold the pasture that had the cement stock tank in it?” Abby broke in.

“Yes,” Bruce said.

“God, Aunt Julie,” Abby said. “Remember the time you took us swimming in that stock tank and I couldn’t get out? You almost killed me!”

I’d returned and was living on Dad’s farm then. Jake was a baby. “You just thought you couldn’t get out,” I said. “You were thirteen and going through a phase of girlish weakness. I had to get back in and push up on your bottom.”

My father had inherited that pasture and some of the land around it from his father. When the grass got too short in the canyon pasture on the Carlson farm, he would drive his sheep ten miles across the county to his own place, where he, Mom, and my brothers had lived before I was born. I would ride on the bench seat of his pickup as we bounced across neighbors’ fields, cutting and mending barbed-wire fences as we went, honking the horn and thumping the outside of our doors until we finally herded the sheep into the other barnyard, then out into that pasture.

Jake’s memories of the pasture were probably not as pleasant. When he was six and we’d come home for a visit, Dad invited us to ride with him to survey his heifers. Rex, our dog at the time, jumped out of the pickup bed and began chasing them. This was a high-stakes catastrophe. In ten minutes, he could run a week’s worth of weight gain off the heifers. Dad barreled over the hills, threatening to run Rex over. “Don’t kill my dog!” Jake wailed.

“Drive away! Fast!” I shouted. Rex, fearing abandonment, ran after us. We rode in silence back to the farmstead, my heart rate returning to normal only as Dad’s anger subsided. It wouldn’t have been the
first time he’d killed a family dog. He treated his sheepdogs like kings, but didn’t suffer chicken eaters or cow chasers. In this way and a thousand others, my brothers and I had learned from him our society’s values, rooted in production and finance.

Killing the dog to protect our financial interests. It was the same value system that Bruce had exercised selling the pasture. We both had romantic ties to that grass. It was one of the last places in our corner of the county where you could still imagine what the original Kansas had been like. But he was trying to fill the shoes of a father whose only focus had been the bottom line.

Hang on to your land!
Dad had always commanded us. If we didn’t, he warned that we would die broke, just as he predicted our aunts and uncles who’d sold out would do. He’d been right. Many of them had. But in trading for the wheat ground, Bruce had not only improved our financial security, he’d also demonstrated that we were still in the game. He hadn’t let Harold down, as just about everyone had expected him to do.

Bruce retrained his gaze on Ward, who hadn’t folded the recliner back, but looked comfortable, resting one polished boot on his knee. “You’re a grass man, I suppose?”

“I have some cattle and I breed horses,” Ward said. “Grass doesn’t make you money the way farmland does though.”

“Right,” Bruce said. “I hated to sell the pasture, but renting it out was one helluva drag.” He explained that the cowboy renter neglected the fence and his cows were always getting out. The neighbors would call Bruce, complaining, so he insisted that the renter put in all new posts and wire. Then the Errington “girls,” as Dad, and now Bruce, called them, put that section of good wheat ground up for sale. Dad had lusted after that land his whole life. Bruce couldn’t resist. He worked out a like-kind exchange, trading the pasture for the farmland and avoiding capital gains taxes in the process.

“It made our renter pretty mad,” he said. “The bank trust department that handles Dad’s estate didn’t like it either. You know, people in this country form alliances. There’re the insiders and the outsiders,
the ones who drink together out at the country club and cook up land schemes and get rich off each other, and the ones like us who’ve always gone along by ourselves, making money the dumb way.”