Steal the North: A Novel (23 page)

Reuben was beside me with a water bottle. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, rubbing my back. “You’re making yourself sick. We’ll find a different way.”

There was no other way. I needed Jamie’s help if I wanted to stay.

Obviously my dad was ready to face his sin and make amends. He’d already told his wife—that was clear in the way she hadn’t screamed or been rendered speechless on the phone when I said I was Jamie’s daughter—but what about his sons? Would they forgive him? If I were to interrupt their lives, they might not forgive
me
.

“Oh, shit,” Reuben said. “Here he comes.”

I looked up the driveway. A man was walking from the house. My dad.
My dad
. Yes, he had the stride of a man for whom life had worked out. I couldn’t let him see me all sweaty and with barf in my hair. Why was he coming out here? Couldn’t he wait? I almost threw up a third time, but there was no food left.

“Get in the truck,” Reuben said. “This is fucking bullshit.” He started the engine. My dad walked faster. “Emmy, do you still want to do this? If you do, I’ll pull into the driveway. I’ll hold your hand the whole time.”

I shook my head. I didn’t need Jamie. I never had. And I’d make damn sure I never did. I could fight my own battles. Reuben drove me away. I didn’t need a dad to love me when I had Uncle Matt and Spencer.

Then why did I look back?

I shouldn’t have looked back. My dad ran to the end of his driveway. Then the cocky boy from camp, who had chosen this land—this wondrous land—over my mom and me, went down on his knees. I forgave the man instantly for all the loneliness and longing he’d caused me, but not for what he’d done to Mom. That would have to come later, if ever. I didn’t ask Reuben to turn his truck around. I curled up on the seat, rested my head on Reuben’s leg like a pillow, and kept my eyes closed tight until we were out of the Palouse, away from my father’s hills—and the land my brothers called home.

Jamie

I saw her, Katie, our daughter.

I’ve been told over the years by uncles, brothers-in-law, and neighbors that a daughter can bring a man to his knees. Now I know this is true. My sons have kept me awake at night with their fevers, fears, even broken bones. But they are sturdy again come morning. Our daughter—
my
daughter threw up at the edge of my driveway, so nervous was she to meet me, her own dad. My child. My baby girl I never held. That I never once assured things would be okay. I can’t stop thinking about her. About the three of us. All I should’ve done but didn’t. What type of man does what I did? Not a respectable sort. That’s for sure. What type of man tucks his stout boys into their beds, night after night, making sure their bellies are full and their worries calmed, while his baby girl may be hungry somewhere, anywhere?

I thought I heard an echo of your courage, Katie, in our daughter’s voice. Your courage used to astound me. I was cocky and sure. But I faltered in the face of the first challenge that presented itself to me. That says a lot about a man. A boy. I pray my sons grow up to be better men. I thought when Emmy called, how brave she must be. I understand now she’s not as brave as all that. She’s fragile, and I made her that way. Emmy is as fragile as this land, which I am trying to be a good steward of. I try harder than my father ever has anyway. He might be a better businessman than I am, but I try harder.

An Indian boy brought Emmy here in his truck. At first I thought that meant our daughter was troubled, to be hanging with an Indian. But I don’t think so. After all, he, not I, was rubbing her back as she threw up. And I’ve promised myself not to do to my kids what my parents did to me, no matter. Let them love whom they love. That is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give to a child.

And speaking of gifts, I realize now that you didn’t hold back any part of yourself, Katie. You gave it all to me: your mind, body, heart, soul, spirit. And what spirit you had. I was too young and stupid to see how rare it is for one person to give herself so completely to another.

I pressured you a bit the first time we had sex to meet me at a motel and make it “official” between us. Up until then we’d been meeting every Saturday, or every other, mostly by the Snake River. We’d spend three or four hours together at a park or, once it started getting cold, in the cab of my truck: talking, touching, and listening to songs on the radio. One afternoon together could sustain you for weeks, you said, because you’d relive every moment, every touch, word, and song. You had so little, then, that it was enough for you. But I needed more. You were naturally nervous when we met at the Appaloosa Inn. You’d never been in a motel room. You looked in all the drawers, peeked in the shower, held the little soaps, rearranged the chairs—as if it were a fancy hotel in Spokane or a quaint B and B instead of a cheap motel paid for with a farm boy’s allowance. You made us coffee and turned on the fuzzy TV. I was dumbfounded again that your family didn’t own one. You had no idea who Farah Fawcett was. Nor had you seen a single image of the hostages in Iran or heard the newly elected Reagan speak. My body had been aching to be inside yours for months. When the ache became palpable in the motel room, you stood, shut off the TV, and started to unbutton your dress. I held my breath. One bare shoulder, another, and then the dress slipped off you. To this day I’ve still never seen anything more provocative. You reached behind and unhooked your bra and then took off your underwear. I was speechless, and I couldn’t move from the chair. I couldn’t even reach for you when you stepped directly in front of me—as if I were the inexperienced one. You took my hands and placed them on your body. “I’m yours, Jamie.” For a moment I just rested my forehead on your beautiful belly, the soft weight and lure of your breasts hovering above me.

“Do whatever you want with me,” you said. “But be gentle.”

Your offer scared and deeply aroused me. I cupped your ass. When you bent forward to kiss me, your hair enshrouded us both.

You didn’t cry afterward, like other church girls. You didn’t feel dirty or the least guilty. I made sure as I held you between the sheets. You seemed more alive than ever. Full of joy. Your body lit somehow from within.

“My faith is in you, Jamie,” you said with enough conviction that I should’ve felt invincible. After we slept awhile, you again offered yourself to me. I’d brought only one condom. I thought I could pull out in time, but our bodies had such cadence.

Only after putting your dress back on
did you become sad. I shouldn’t have let you leave. And you almost couldn’t because your piece-of-crap car wouldn’t start. I had to clean the points and retime the ignition. I should’ve pretended I couldn’t fix the problem. I should’ve stranded us there together until I got the guts to ask you to marry me.

I’ve put up one hell of a front all these years. I finished high school after caving to my dad and turning my back on you. I drank a lot. My freshman year of college is a blur of alcohol and girls whose names I didn’t need to know. My only moments of clarity were when I allowed myself to think of you as I walked the Pullman campus in the chilly and then frigid early-morning hours. I was an eighteen-year-old college student with a baby I didn’t acknowledge. I heard you were working at the truck stop café at the intersection of I-90 and state highway 17. My cousin claimed to have seen you climbing out of a trucker’s cab. He recognized your hair. But I told him he was mistaken. I told myself you’d find some other way—
any
other way—to survive.

I drank so heavily my third semester that my dad threatened to quit paying my tuition. He strongly suggested the army to help get my head out of my ass. And what, back up his? When I got into one too many scrapes, the university suspended me for a semester. I returned to the farm. When I got back to college, I threw myself into my agricultural classes. My study emphasis was soil erosion, which I thought was the reason my dad had sent me to school. But he didn’t want to hear how the land he farmed, and supposedly loved, was formed. He especially didn’t want to know how agriculture has altered it—no more than he wanted to know how I was changed by what I’d done to you, Katie. My dad didn’t find it fascinating that the Palouse hills contain little or no bedrock. The light, fertile soil goes all the way down to the hard lava surface. The soil is so rich, I learned, because of enormous floods from Montana that ripped through eastern Washington. The floods actually missed the Palouse region, leaving it far less scathed than the scablands surrounding it. But years of westerly winds blew rich flood sediment back eastward, along with volcanic ash from the Cascades, to form dunes. Upon these dunes, wheat grows at a higher yield per acre than anywhere else in the United States: the only fact of interest to my dad.

He certainly didn’t want to know that the lightness of the soil is what makes it so susceptible to continued erosion. Some movement is natural, but intensive agriculture in the Palouse is washing away the land and clogging the rivers. Annually the Palouse loses an average of fourteen tons of topsoil per acre. Storms can double the loss. My old man already knew these statistics, he claimed, but he didn’t find them staggering.

Did it ever stagger him that he had a grandchild out there somewhere who might be hungry or lonely? Did all the blood ever rush to his head at the thought? Walking proudly through his fields, did he ever have to stop short for a moment as I did occasionally on campus? The time I saw a young dad carrying textbooks in his arms and a baby in a pack on his back, I followed him clear to the Children’s Center. I thought my head was going to explode. Then I went and got drunk. It was the last time I ever did.

I should’ve known my dad wouldn’t implement any of the conservation methods I was learning in my ag classes and in fieldwork at WSU research stations. My whole childhood, he and neighboring farmers were pissed off at the USDA for trying to tell them how to farm. “I’d like to tell Uncle Sam what I tell my boy,” I heard my dad say more than once when I was young. “Keep your doggone hand in your own pants.”

I finally realized my dad had sent me to college to learn chemicals and ag business in order to keep his yields high
despite
the erosion.

I had one “radical” professor at WSU who claimed land-grant universities, farmers, chemical and farm machinery manufacturers all had lobbyists working triple time to stymie even the mildest conservation legislation. According to this professor, the USDA had yet to grow a full set of balls. Government agents let farmers bitch slap them into turning regulations into recommendations and thus never actually withholding subsidies as punishment for lack of land stewardship. This professor wasn’t against farming. He thought it was the central relationship in any settled society. But he also wanted his students to realize agriculture hadn’t been around that long in “big history” and might even be transient. I had to rein in my fascination, which could’ve propelled me into graduate school and away from the farm and who I am at the core: I am a farmer, as I made painfully obvious to you, Katie.

I was in college to learn how to save the Palouse. But I was also trying to save myself.

I met my wife at the end of my junior year. She was a business major at the University of Idaho, only eight miles from WSU. She comes from a large potato farming family on the Snake River Plain in lower Idaho. Her extended family owns two tractor dealerships, and she’d hoped to manage one after college, before I proposed. Her dad had never wanted his only daughter’s help on the farm. My parents more than approved of our engagement, as did hers. Everything fell into place. We got married as soon as I was graduated. She never finished her program at UI. With financial investments from her parents and mine, we acquired our own wheat farm, a foreclosure from earlier in the decade, almost adjacent to my father’s. But
not
my father’s. Before long our son was born. Then we acquired more acreage as the overseas markets began to recover, another combine as the markets steadied, more debt to my father and the bank, another healthy son, another harvest, then a bumper year and another. Something was missing, but I tried never to let it show in my step. I thought I could redeem myself by being the best husband and dad. By working the land as faithfully as my father, grandfather, his father, but with smart soil-conserving methods. From the beginning, I’ve let USDA field agents and WSU researchers and extension workers give me all the help and advice they can to save this place for my boys. I don’t care if it means I have to labor longer hours turning over stubborn stubble, instead of burning it, or growing peas and beans so as not to leave any of my acres fallow and more susceptible to erosion. I don’t care if my dad thinks I’m nuts, a tree hugger, a Communist, an overeducated plowboy, a traitor for advocating conservation to local legislators, an embarrassment for always talking stewardship to fellow farmers at county ag meetings and picnic days.

For the first five years of my marriage, questions about Emmy consumed my thoughts on large family holidays, especially if both families were gathered: my parents, in-laws, cousins, uncles, nieces. I’d have to leave. “Let him go,” my mom would say. She knew. My dad knew too, but I’ll be damned if he still didn’t shake his head. I had long ago quit blaming him for my lack of character when it came to you. And as far as what I did with my portion of the Palouse—I told my dad, as well as my father-in-law, when they helped me secure my first acreage, that it was either my land to manage how I learned to in college or I was walking away from it all.

If only I’d had half the courage when it came to you, Katie.

At first my wife thought I split during holidays because I was rebellious and restless. She claimed to like a man with an edge. Probably because her brothers are bores and have their potato heads so far up their old man’s ass. She also didn’t harp that I never attended church with her and our boys. What right did I have to sit in a church?

Then, Katie, I ran into your brother-in-law, Matt, in a café right here in Colfax, the café where we ate together right before you found out you were pregnant. We sat close on the same side of the booth. You seemed so open at camp and in that motel room, so eager for life and hungry for knowledge about anything: farming, places I’d visited with my family, subjects I took at school, news stories. But in that café, when kids from my high school came in, you shrank behind my shoulder. It still breaks my heart. You were embarrassed by your old-fashioned dress. I was too. What was wrong with me? Especially after I’d seen what was underneath it. I followed Matt out to his truck that day. He told me you’d left the state with our baby before she was a year old and hadn’t been heard from since. You hadn’t even been in touch with your little sister, whom you loved and protected so fiercely that I used to be jealous. I am to blame for separating you from your sister. You wanted to give me everything, Katie, and goddamn if I didn’t take it from you, despite turning my back, and without realizing. It’s mind-boggling what a boy can take from a young girl.