In Open Spaces (5 page)

“Mom, Blake won’t take me fishing tonight.”

Mom stood up, sighing, and looked at me with a raised brow. I ignored her, going back to my breakfast.

“You really shouldn’t be going out yet anyway, Katie,” Mom said, but it was clear that she knew that this line of reasoning would not work with her headstrong young daughter. “Maybe you ought to wait and ask him again when he gets home,” she added, to my relief. I hoped that by evening, Jack and Dad would be back from Belle Fourche, where they had taken a load of grain the afternoon before. Then she could pester one of them.

“We’ll see how I’m feeling when I get back,” I said, which barely pacified my sister. But Katie was soon occupied with something else, and as I prepared to leave, she was filling a bucket from the well to go water her garden. I carried the bucket for her, and studied the twisted, withered plants that bent with their own weight. Katie began pouring the water, holding the bucket awkwardly in her tiny hands. The water poured unevenly, but she didn’t seem bothered by this, moving down the line.

“Everything looks great, Katie. Looks like you’re going to have a good crop this year.”

She blushed.

As was usually true, I felt better about the job ahead of me once I got out into the open air. It wasn’t as hot as usual for July. I rode at a leisurely pace, studying the thick grass. We’d had a fairly cold, snowy winter, which meant a big spring runoff. The country had not looked this good for several years, with bright green grass and fat, healthy livestock.

My horse Ahab and I wandered along the river, following a two-rut dirt road until we came to the crossing, where the ruts descended at an angle down the slope into the muddy waters of the Little Missouri. I had to coax Ahab down the bank, as the black mud was moist, and slippery. He eased into the river, which just washed his belly. He hesitated midstream, and I found myself kicking him, harder than necessary.

George’s body had still not been found. And each time I crossed the river, I was well aware of the possibility that my brother was probably hung up beneath that rush of muddy water somewhere. The image gnawed at me whenever I crossed. And although I always glanced quickly to each side, my heart would rise into my throat, hoping that I wouldn’t catch sight of a bobbing foot, or a patch of hair poking from the water.

In the tradition of our region, we did not speak of George, and a debate raged within me about whether this was the right thing to do. I thought of him every day. Often. In the morning, I would sometimes look at his empty bed before I was fully awake and wonder why he’d gotten up so early. But the time I felt his absence the most was when I was out in the open, where the silence was magnified.

It wasn’t until a few days after the fire that I remembered the bundle of papers I’d discovered under George’s mattress. One day I tucked the papers under my shirt and snuck off to the barn, making sure I wasn’t followed. I climbed into the hayloft, settled into a comfortable spot, and piled the papers on my lap. On top was a thin paperback book—a book about the fundamentals of baseball. I leafed through it, studying the sketches that displayed proper technique for fielding a grounder, and the correct batting stance. I was drawn to sketches of a hand gripping a ball, with the fingers in different positions along the seams. This chapter explained all the various twists and downward turns you could accomplish with these grips, and by flipping your wrist at just the right moment.

I was surprised I’d never seen George reading this book, and wondered why he’d kept it hidden, as we all knew how much he loved baseball. But when I got around to the remaining papers, the reason became clear. I unfolded what turned out to be letters, which were stacked in chronological order. They were from a man named Stanley Murphy who lived in St. Louis, Missouri. And he was a baseball scout.

It seemed that George had met an assistant of Mr. Murphy’s in the fall of 1914, on one of George’s trips to Omaha, where Dad sometimes traveled to sell calves. That year had been the first that he’d allowed George to make the trip for him. Mr. Murphy’s assistant had given George a tryout, and George made a big impression. In the last letter, dated just two weeks before George’s death, Mr. Murphy spoke of George’s pending trip to St. Louis. “You’ll notice I have enclosed a train ticket. That’s how much faith I have that we’re going to like what we see.” The yellow ticket was still tucked into the folds of the letter—its price, $2.10, prominently displayed in one corner.

I sat with my eyes closed, trying to comprehend what these letters implied. There was no one I knew who seemed more suited to living on the ranch than my brother George. I thought. I thought he loved it out here. Like everyone in our county, I had expected George to take over the ranch when my folks were too old or too tired. No other possibility had ever entered my mind. And I didn’t understand. The mystery haunted me enough that for a short time, I considered going to St. Louis myself. After all, Mr. Murphy had never met George. I could pretend to be George. They would eventually figure out that I wasn’t, of course. But by then, maybe I would understand the attraction.

A week or so later, I wrote to Mr. Murphy. I explained who I was, and told him that George had drowned. I returned his ticket, and after pondering whether it was appropriate, I asked whether George had told him for sure that he was interested in playing pro ball. A month later, I received this letter:

The letter disappointed me. He didn’t answer the most important question. I wanted to hear Mr. Murphy report that George had changed his mind, that he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the ranch. I ended up stashing the letters in a coffee can, along with the ticket. And I buried the can in a corner of the barn.

“C’mon, boy.” I buried my heels into Ahab’s flanks, and he reared and heaved forward twice. His front hooves caught the bank with the second lunge, and the momentum carried him right up the slope, into the pasture, where he settled into a comfortable trot. A light dew brightened the grass. Blue-white clumps of sagebrush, immune to the moisture, squatted stubbornly, as unchanging as stone.

I came to the top of a ridge where the view always left me breathless, with our world opening up in front of me. I climbed from Ahab’s back and gazed out across the flowing sea of green. Only the distant, square brown outline of a homestead cabin, an occasional lone tree, and a cluster of cattle broke up the expanse of green. The deserted cabin reminded me of the day that the wife of the young couple marched up to our front door and defiantly dropped a basket of food my mother had prepared for them on the stoop.

“We don’t need anybody’s charity,” she declared, turning proudly on her heel. We knew then that they wouldn’t last.

The silence was so strong that when I walked, the rustle of my
boots against grass sounded as if my head was right between my feet. I looked at the land around me, at the wheat field I had plowed the previous spring, and at the stack of hay George and I had pitched a month before.

Even before George’s death, every time I was in this pasture, I recalled an incident that happened when I was ten years old. One day Dad, George, Jack, and I were stacking hay in that pasture. It was a hot day, a rare muggy day in this dry part of the world. After lunch, Dad had shocked the three of us by suggesting we take a little break. We were even more surprised when he pulled a bat and ball from the back of the wagon, meaning that he had planned the diversion ahead of time. So we laid out a couple of bases, and George and I took on Jack and Dad.

The game started out light, with cutting remarks tossed between each pitch. George had his usual running monologue going, teasing Dad about his swing, which was pretty bad, and telling Jack he threw like a sheep. Jack laughed, and made a bleating noise. But after a few innings, something shifted. Both George and Jack had always been competitive. When we played against other local teams, they were both there to win. But their competitive natures showed in different ways. George was cool but relentless. He never appeared ruffled, and he kept the same patter going on the baseball diamond as he did in the fields. He talked to the first baseman after he’d gotten a single, he talked to the catcher when he was batting—always trying to bait them into an argument, trying to rattle them.

But Jack was out to prove something. Playing baseball didn’t come as naturally to him as it did George. So he clenched his teeth and turned each play into a personal war. He never spoke. He stood at the plate squeezing his bat until his knuckles turned blue, his lips pursed, eyes raging. And he fought. About once a year, he would get into a fight during a game, and someone would have to tackle him and calm him down.

But they had rarely been on opposite sides of the field. We usually didn’t have time to play outside of the local fairs. So as the game progressed, their competitive tendencies kicked in, and it was like the weather had changed. George’s banter became more pointed. Jack’s mouth tightened. The laughter stopped.

With Dad and Jack just a run down, George stepped to the plate with two out and peered out at Jack, who was pitching. “Hey, Jack, you got something between your teeth there.” He pointed to his own teeth. “Something stuck in there.”

Jack smiled at him and fired a pitch. I was catching, and I was afraid to get in front of the ball, he threw it so hard. But I blocked it and tossed it back.

“Really, Jack,” George continued. “Right in the front there.” He pointed again to his mouth. “Looks like…I don’t know…”

Jack threw again, his smile gone now, this time buzzing a fastball close to George’s knees. George dodged the pitch, chuckling calmly to himself. He turned and winked at me. “He’s getting rattled,” he muttered. I didn’t respond. I didn’t want Jack throwing one of his fireballs at me.

Jack took my toss back, and got set to throw again.

“Oh, I think I see what it is now,” George said just as Jack began his windup. “It’s chicken, Jack. You got chicken in your teeth.”

The words left George’s mouth just as Jack was about to throw, and when he let the pitch go, he threw it as hard as I’d ever seen him throw a ball. The pitch came in so fast that George didn’t have time to get out of the way, and it nailed him right in the ear. The crack of ball against bone flew across the prairie. And George went down.

Dad rushed in. I shouted, bending over my brother. And Jack rushed up to George, falling on his knees next to George’s head. George was conscious, holding his ear, growling in pain. Blood trickled between his fingers.

“I’m sorry, George,” Jack muttered. His face was so pale, I thought
he was going to faint. The sweat soaked his shirt, and he ran his hand across his forehead so many times that the skin began to turn red. “I didn’t mean to hit you in the head. I was just trying to scare you.”

“Goddamit, Jack, I was just kidding around,” he muttered.

“I know,” Jack said. “Like I said, I’m sorry.”

George had some trouble with his balance for a few weeks after that, and he sometimes couldn’t hear very well from that ear. That was the last time we took a break to play baseball.

But the incident told me something about the relationship between my brothers. George had always been protective of us all, but particularly Jack. The buffer George provided between Dad and the rest of us was particularly thick in Jack’s case. I don’t think I realized how much this meant to Jack until that day. It was the most frightened I’ve ever seen him.

I climbed back on Ahab, and we passed through the field where we had planted oats the previous two springs. This experiment—Dad’s idea—had raised a few eyebrows around the county. The general feeling was that we didn’t get enough moisture to support an oat crop. And I could tell by Dad’s pinched brow when we checked on the oats that he wasn’t entirely sure himself. But he had proven to be a prophet, as we’d been blessed with consecutive wet springs. The extra money provided enough to buy the McCarthy place—three thousand acres added to the six thousand we already had.

I arrived at the big meadow, which formed the northwest corner of our property, and I went to work. I let Ahab drift, free to graze, while I wrestled with the grub hoe, which consists of two handles leading down to a blade across the middle. I hacked away at the solid, twisted plants, trying to break through the hard gumbo to their roots. I rested every now and then, breathing hard, gazing at the scene around me. At my back, the ground was clear except for the drying clumps of sage that I’d extracted from the hard ground.

By mid-afternoon, I had cleared several acres, and my hands were sore and bleeding inside my gloves. My back felt like a clenched fist. The corn bread and jerky Mom had packed were gone, as were the dried apricots I’d pilfered from the root cellar. I watched the sun closely, wishing it would sink a little faster. I even took a guilty break, pulling George’s baseball from my saddlebag. I threw it at the trunk of a cottonwood a few times, but I got tired of fetching it when I missed. So I started winging rocks instead, winding up and kicking high with my left leg before letting each stone fly. I had been practicing a lot, so I was getting pretty good, and I hit the trunk more often than not.

I had painted two stick figures on the back barn wall—one right-handed—one left-handed, along with a rectangular strike zone between them. And I threw George’s old worn ball against the gray planks almost every evening, studying his book until I learned to throw a respectable curveball. Occasionally, the old milk cow complained from inside the barn, telling me she needed some sleep.

Around four o’clock, I heard an odd sound from the direction of Hay Creek. I stopped hoeing. But after waiting a moment, and hearing nothing, I went back to work. A minute passed, and I heard the sound again. It sounded like a cow. The third time, I decided I’d better check on it. So I called Ahab, and we sauntered toward Hay Creek. I dismounted and led Ahab cautiously along the creek’s edge. The ground was soft in places, but I didn’t see anything. We strolled along the bank for several minutes before a low moan filled the air, growing into a rich “mooo” that climbed higher and higher upon itself. The sound was coming from behind us, so I turned Ahab around and stalked, still cautious, toward the noise.