Modern American Memoirs (44 page)

“You're a very serious person,” I told him.

“Thank you,” he said, looking at his hands. “I want to be a surgeon, you know.”

Looking out of our window a few evenings later, my wife and I saw Dick and his wife carrying a small porcelain tub from a rented truck into their trailer. It was the kind of tub one takes sit-baths in, and was, he later told me, just the right size for the hot water heater. He built an enclosure for it that had a hinged and padded red plastic top.

My growing irritation with Dick was connected with my awareness that both of us soon would be leaving Hector's field. Both Dick's wife and mine had become pregnant, and as a consequence we were eligible for university housing in converted army barracks. Because of a surfeit of student trailers in town, neither Dick nor I was able to sell ours there; I contacted a firm in Davenport that sold used trailers, and they hauled off our home. I followed it in my car for a few miles out of town, for I found it painful to let that little world, whatever its flaws, vanish in a moment. The weighted rear end swayed dangerously. A week later Dick—he asked me first if I minded—phoned the same Davenport firm. The two trailers were displayed side by side on the lot. My wife and I drove to Davenport to have a look at them. Ours, of course, was the shoddier; the sight of it, gathering dust inside and out, was dispiriting. Dick's trailer sold almost immediately, and for nearly as much money as a new one; at the summer's end I had to retrieve mine and return it to Hector's field in the hope that I could find a renter for it.

 

Hector helped me re-connect the water and sewer lines. The day was humid, and both of us became hot and thirsty. His wife made iced tea; the three of us sat in old wicker chairs on their front porch. The rat terrier, of course, jumped into his lap. Rowena to me had been a shadow, for Hector conducted all business matters while she stood behind him; I had thought of her simply as his wife, a woman with thick legs and varicose veins who wore shapeless dresses and
was really too old to be a fraternity cook. But it was she who now did most of the talking. “We've been proud to have a writer and a doctor with us for a year,” she said.

I demurred. Dick and I had yet to prove ourselves, I said, and he was likelier than I to gain his goal. I said that I supposed Dick eventually would be a very successful surgeon.

“You both work hard!” Rowena cried. She had a high, expiring voice. “We could see your lights late at night! ‘The doctor,' I would say to him”—and she nodded at Hector—“and he would say, ‘And the writer.'
He
used to be the nicest whittler, carving little things out of wood! Toys I mean, for the children.”

I expressed my surprise, for I hadn't known of their children. I had thought Hector and Rowena too ancient ever to have been parents.

Hector said that when children grow up, they leave. Both his boys lived to hell and gone, the other side of Cedar Rapids. His daughter had died so many years ago that he could no longer see her face. “Tell him,” he said to his wife, “about my arm.”

Trivial though it was, my misfortune with my trailer had made them sympathetic and friendly. It was apparent in the tone of Hector's voice that he was allowing me to enter, now that I was living elsewhere than his field, a part of his past that had previously been kept from me. Rowena's account was macabre. In his middle years Hector had caught his arm, as many farmers do, in a corn picker. The arm had been so mangled at the elbow that amputation was the only medical recourse possible. Hector demanded that the surgeon give him back the arm. He preserved it with formaldehyde in a glass container, which he kept on the kitchen table. When he regained some of his strength, he put a block of walnut between his legs and, looking at the embalmed arm, attempted to create it in wood. He wanted to capture precisely each wrinkle, vein line, and fingernail. He used three blocks of wood before fashioning an arm to his satisfaction; and then he built a harness of leather and steel to fasten the wood to his own stump. But of course he could not breathe life into it; it could never become the arm that lay uselessly in the formaldehyde.

Hector, Rowena went on in her high but gentle voice, had been unable to eat. He spent most of his waking hours in the kitchen simply staring at the container. She knew what she had to do! One night she had crept out of his bed and removed the arm from the
fluid. She found a wooden box and stuffed it with cotton. She tied the fingers down, for she knew that one who has lost an arm feels pain from the missing member when the flesh shrivels and the little bones clench up to make a fist. Oh, she wouldn't have hurt Hector for the world! With a lantern perched on a fence post to help her see, she had buried the box in a far corner of the field. To herself she vowed never to tell him what she had done. But she hadn't realized how terrible he would be to live with that spring! In his anger at her he splintered the wooden arm against the coal stove! Finally she had to tell him. He dug up the box and opened it to see his own bones. Everything was all right after that. Habit and routine took over.

Rowena smiled at me. Hector, too, was smiling; he was glad that I had heard his story. We were friends. It had not been his intention to bring me down to my mortal size or to suggest any limitations in the areas of medicine or art. And, though he had every opportunity before I left, he said nothing to me this time about a share out of my poke.

 

I saw Dick only once more before I moved from Iowa. We met by chance on a downtown street. He told me about his infant daughter, and I told him about my infant son. The novel upon which I had been working with such haste in the trailer had never managed to capture the purity of the idea behind it; I told him I had discarded it. He said he had been admitted to medical school. His last hurdle had been the personal interview. He frowned, as if hesitating to tell me about it; but then he spoke with frankness. I remember Dick as an exceptionally honest person. “I came into this room where the interviewer sat,” he said. “I had bought a new suit, for I thought, you know, that this was an important thing. But he had only one question to ask.” Dick took a breath. “He asked, ‘Tell me, young man, what is
your
view about socialized medicine?'”

“What did you say?”

“God, I hadn't thought about it. It had never entered my mind that he would ask something like that. I've been thinking ever since that socialized medicine isn't so bad. You know, helping these poor people with their cataracts and cancers. But I knew what I had to say. ‘Sir,' I said, ‘I am firmly opposed to it.'” I had never seen Dick so agitated; he kept clenching his fists to make the knuckles crack. “Think of it,” he said. “Even before you start, you've got to lie.”

 

In the years since I left that trailer in an Iowa field, I have slowly and methodically become placed. I am as placed, as surrounded by my possessions, as Hector ever was. I now have three children, two horses, two dogs, two cats, two cars, a large field tractor and a small garden tractor and a Rototiller. I recently phoned my lawyer that I wish to buy the rest of the land—I particularly want the woods—that once belonged to my farmhouse; soon I will own nearly everything I can see from the front porch. Recently my wife and children and I ate our supper sitting on the living room floor before a log fire; and then, sprawled out on the wide pine planks, I drew a diagram for the fifteen-foot wall closet I will build some day in the large bedroom. My past is so littered with flaws in conception as well as execution that now, whenever I do anything, I go about it as carefully as I can.

Larry, the son born in Iowa, has practiced the piano ever since he was five, but he is not interested in music as a profession. His hands are just as agile as Dick's, and I wonder at times if he might not make a good surgeon. The thought pleases me.

Sometimes I have a dream. In this dream the morning is full of mist, the endless field covered with snow. I look into the opened grave, which is deep as a well, to see the dark gravedigger caressing an object that resembles a luminescent baseball. “Gravedigger,” I call—and I can speak to him so preemptorily for he has but a bit part in an old play—“what are you handling?” “Alas,” he says, “it is the skull of poor Jesus Christ.” “It is too tiny and too perfectly round to be a skull, gravedigger,” I say sternly. “Tiny and round it may be,” he replies, “but do you know what this skull contains?” “What, gravedigger?” “In this little ball,” he says, his every syllable twanging like a guitar string, “in this little ball lies all of Heaven and all of Hell.
Or so he thought
.”

It is one of those queer winter dreams that fill one both with foreboding and joy. Oh sweet Jesus! I say, waking, with my eyes in tears. You truly believed you could make and mend and hold! Carry on, you brave little baseball skull! And I love my wife and my children and my horses and my dogs and cats, and in my loneliness wish them all in bed with me. This is what it feels like, to be placed.

Following a tour in the U.S. Air Force, William Kittredge managed the family ranch in Oregon for almost ten years. He studied writing at the University of Iowa, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is now Regents Professor of English at the University of Montana
.

He has written two collections of stories
: The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories
(1978), and
We Are Not in This Together
(1984)
. Owning It All—
evocative narrative essays—appeared in 1987. His 1992 memoir
, Hole in the Sky,
takes place in the cattle country of southeastern Oregon. His crafted, thoughtful essays appeared in
Best American Essays
in both 1988 and 1989. He has won the Montana Governor's Award in both arts and humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities gave him its 1994 Frankel Award for service to the humanities
.

 

Who Owns the West?

A
fter a half mile in soft rain on the slick hay-field stubble, I would crouch behind the levee and listen to the gentle clatter of the water birds, and surprise them into flight—maybe a half-dozen mallard hens and three green-headed drakes lifting in silhouetted loveliness against the November twilight, hanging only yards from the end of my shotgun. This was called jump shooting or meat hunting, and it almost always worked. But I wish someone had told me reasons you should not necessarily kill the birds every time. I wish I'd been told to kill ducks maybe only once or twice a winter, for a fine meal with children and friends, and that nine times out of ten I was going to be happier if I let the goddamned birds fly away.

In 1959, on the MC Ranch, in the high desert country of southeastern Oregon, an agricultural property my family owned, I was twenty-seven, prideful with a young man's ambition, and happy as such a creature can be, centered in the world of my upbringing, king of my mountain, and certain I was deep into the management of
perfection. It was my responsibility to run a ranch-hand cookhouse and supervise the labors of from ten to twenty-five workingmen. Or, to put it most crudely, as was often done, “hire and fire and work the winos.”

Think of it as a skill, learnable as any other. In any profession there are rules, the most basic being enlightened self-interest. Take care of your men and they will take care of you.

And understand their frailties, because you are the one responsible for taking care. Will they fall sick to death in the bunkhouse, and is there someone you can call to administer mercy if they do? What attention will you give them as they die?

Some thirty-six miles west of our valley, over the Warner Mountains in the small lumbering and ranching town of Lakeview, a workingman's hotel functioned as a sort of hiring hall. There was a rule of thumb about the men you would find there. The best of them wore a good pair of boots laced up tight over wool socks; this meant they were looking for a laboring job. The most hapless would be wearing low-cut city shoes, no socks, no laces. They were looking for a place to hide, and never to be hired. It was a rule that worked.

 

On bright afternoons when my people were scrambling to survive in the Great Depression, my mother was young and fresh as she led me on walks along the crumbling small-town streets of Malin, Oregon, in the Klamath Basin just north of the California border. This was before we moved to the MC Ranch; I was three years old and understood the world as concentric circles of diminishing glory centered on the sun of her smile. Outside our tight circle was my father, an energetic stranger who came home at night and before he touched anything, even me or my mother, rolled up his sleeves over his white forearms and scrubbed his hands in the kitchen sink with coarse lava soap. Out beyond him were the turkey herders, and beyond them lay the vast agricultural world, on the fringes of the Tule Lake Reclamation District, where they worked.

What the herders did in the turkey business, as it was run by my father, was haul crates full of turkeys around on old flatbed trucks. When they got to the backside of some farm property where nobody was likely to notice, they parked and opened the doors on those
crates and turned the turkeys out to roam and feed on grasshoppers. Sometimes they had permission, sometimes my father had paid a fee; and some of the time it was theft, grazing the turkeys for free. Sometimes they got caught, and my father paid the fee then. And once in a while they had to reload the turkeys into their crates and move on while some farmer watched with a shotgun.

The barnyard turkey, you have to understand, is a captive, bitter creature. (Some part of our alienation, when we are most isolated, is ecological. We are lonely and long to share in what we regard as the dignity of wild animals—this is the phantom so many of us pursue as we hunt, complicating the actual killing into a double-bind sort of triumph.) My upbringing taught me to consider the domesticated turkey a rapacious creature, eyes dull with the opaque gleam of pure selfishness, without soul. I had never heard of a wild one. The most recent time I had occasion to confront turkeys up close was in the fall of 1987, driving red scoria roads in the North Dakota badlands. I came across farmstead turkeys, and true or not, I took that as a sign we were where agriculture meant subsistence. No doubt my horror of turkeys had much to do with my fear of the men who herded them.

From the windows of our single-bedroom apartment on the second floor of the only brick building in Malin, where I slept on a little bed in the living room, we could look south across the rich irrigated potato-and barley-raising country of the Tule Lake basin and see to California and the lava-field badlands where the Modoc Indians had hidden out from the U.S. Army in the long-ago days of their rebellion. I wonder if my mother told me stories of those natives in their caves, and doubt it, but not because she didn't believe in the arts of make-believe. It's just that my mother would have told me other stories. She grew up loving opera. My grandfather, as I will always understand him, even though we were not connected by blood earned the money for her music lessons as a blacksmith for the California/Oregon Power Company in Klamath Falls—sharpening steel as he put it. So it is unlikely my mother was fond of stories about desperate natives and hold-out killings and the eventual hanging of Captain Jack, the Modoc war chief, at Fort Klamath. That was just the sort of nastiness she was interested in escaping; and besides, we were holding to defensive actions of our own.

After all, my father was raising turkeys for a living in a most haphazard fashion. So my mother told me stories about Christmas as perfection realized: candied apples glowing in the light of an intricately decorated tree, and little toy railroads which tooted and circled the room as if the room were the world.

But we live in a place more complex than paradise, some would say richer, and I want to tell a story about my terror on Christmas Eve, and the way we were happy anyhow. The trouble began on a sunny afternoon with a little snow on the ground, when my mother took me for my first barbershop haircut, a step into manhood as she defined it. I was enjoying the notion of such ceremony, and even the snipping of the barber's gentle shears as I sat elevated to manly height by the board across the arms of his chair—until Santa Claus came in, jerked off his cap and the fringe of snowy hair and his equally snowy beard, and stood revealed as an unshaven man in a Santa Claus suit who looked like he could stand a drink from the way his hands were shaking.

The man leered at my kindly barber and muttered something. I suppose he wanted to know how long he would have to wait for a shave. Maybe he had been waiting all day for a barbershop shave. A fine, brave, hung over sort of waiting, all the while entombed in that Santa Claus suit. I screamed. I like to think I was screaming against chaos, in defense of my mother and notions of a proper Christmas, and maybe because our Santa Claus who was not a Santa, with his corded, unshaven neck, even looked remotely like a turkey as this story turns edgy and nightmarish.

My father's turkeys had been slaughtered the week before Thanksgiving in a couple of box-cars pulled onto a siding in Tule Lake, and shipped to markets in the East. Everyone was at liberty and making ready to ride out winter on whatever he had managed to accumulate. So the party my parents threw on the night before Christmas had ancient ceremonial resonances. The harvest was done, the turkeys were slaughtered, and the dead season of cold winds was at hand. It was a time of release into meditation and winter, to await rebirth.

But it was not a children's party. It is difficult to imagine my father at a children's party. As I recall from this distance it was a party for the turkey herders, those men who had helped my father conspire
his way through that humiliating summer with those terrible creatures. At least the faces I see in my dream of that yellow kitchen are the faces of those men. Never again, my mother said, and my father agreed; better times were coming and everybody got drunk.

I had been put down to sleep on the big bed in my parents' bedroom, which was quite a privilege in itself, and it was only late in the night that I woke to a sense of something gone wrong. The sacred place where I lived with my mother had been invaded by loud laughter and hoedown harmonica music and people dancing and stomping. As I stood in the doorway looking into the kitchen in my pajamas, nobody saw me for a long moment—until I began my hysterical momma's-boy shrieking.

The harmonica playing stopped, and my mother looked shamefaced toward me from the middle of the room, where she had been dancing with my father while everyone watched. All those faces of people who are now mostly dead turned to me, and it was as if I had gotten up and come out of the bedroom into the actuality of a leering nightmare, vivid light and whiskey bottles on the table and those faces glazed with grotesque intentions.

Someone saved it, one of the men, maybe even my father, by picking me up and ignoring my wailing as the harmonica music started again, and then I was in my mother's arms as she danced, whirling around the kitchen table and the center of all attention in a world where everything was possible and good, while the turkey herders watched and smiled and thought their private thoughts, and it was Christmas at last in my mother's arms, as I have understood it ever since.

For years the faces of the turkey herders in their otherness, in that bright kitchen, were part of a dream I dreaded as I tried to go to sleep. In struggling against the otherness of the turkey herders I made a start toward indifference to the disenfranchised. I was learning to inhabit distance, from myself and people I should have cared for.

 

A couple of years later my family moved the hundred miles east to the MC Ranch. My grandfather got the place when he was sixty-two years old, pledging everything he had worked for all his life, unable to resist owning such a kingdom. The move represented an enormous change in our fortunes.

Warner Valley is that place which is sacred to me as the main staging ground for my imagination. I see it as an inhabited landscape where the names of people remind me of places, and the places remind me of what happened there—a thicket of stories to catch the mind if it might be falling.

It was during the Second World War that wildlife biologists from up at the college in Corvallis told my father the sandhill cranes migrating through Warner were rare and vanishing creatures, to be cherished with the same intensity as the ring-necked Manchurian pheasants, which had been imported from the hinterlands of China. The nests of sandhill cranes, with their large off-white speckled eggs, were to be regarded as absolutely precious. “No matter what,” I heard my father say, “you don't break those eggs.”

My father was talking to a tall, gray-faced man named Clyde Bolton, who was stuck with a day of riding a drag made of heavy timbers across Thompson Field, breaking up cow shit in the early spring before the irrigating started, so the chips wouldn't plug up the John Deere mowing machines come summer and haying. Clyde was married to Ada Bolton, the indispensable woman who cooked and kept house for us, and he had a damaged heart which kept him from heavy work. He milked the three or four cows my father kept, and tended the chickens and the house garden, and took naps in the afternoon. He hadn't hired out for field work, and he was unhappy.

But help was scarce during those years when so many of the able bodied were gone to the war, and there he was, take it or leave it. And anyway, riding that drag wouldn't hurt even a man with a damaged heart. Clyde was a little spoiled—that's what we used to say. Go easy on the hired help long enough, and they will sour on you. A man, we would say, needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.

This was a Saturday morning in April after the frost had gone out, and I was a boy learning the methodologies of field work. The cranes' nests my father was talking about were hidden down along unmowed margins—in the yellow remnants of knee-high meadow grass from the summer before, along the willow-lined sloughs through the home fields. “The ones the coons don't get,” my father said.

I can see my father's gray-eyed good humor and his stockman's fedora pushed back on his head as he studied Clyde, and hear the
ironic rasp in his voice. At that time my father was more than ten years younger than I am now, a man recently come to the center of his world. And I can see Clyde Bolton hitching his suspenders and snorting over the idea of keeping an eye out for the nest of some sandhill crane. I can see his disdain.

This going out with Clyde was as close to any formal initiation as I ever got on the ranch. There really wasn't much of anything for me to do, but it was important I get used to the idea of working on days when I was not in school. It wouldn't hurt a damned bit. A boy should learn to help out where he can, and I knew it, so I was struggling to harness the old team of matched bay geldings, Dick and Dan, and my father and Clyde were not offering to help because a boy would never make a man if you helped him all the time.