The Magic of Ordinary Days (6 page)

On the way back, Ray drove. I tried enjoying the silence. Before me, the domed sky was even larger than the sage lands below it. As we passed under the shade of high clouds, I turned to face Ray across the seat. “Do you know much about the history of this land we're driving through?”

He shrugged and kept his eyes focused on the empty road ahead. “Can't say that I do.”

“I found it in this book.” I spread my fingers over the wrinkled leather cover. “It was once part of a huge land grant belonging to Mexican citizens.”

He shook his head. “Didn't know that.”

“The grant covered four million acres, but U.S. courts threw out Mexican claims for lack of written proof, and the lands were opened up for homesteading, for example, to your family.” I only wanted to share a conversation, but as the words came out of my mouth, I realized they sounded like a school report.

“That so?” Ray said. He glanced over his shoulder at the things he'd piled in the truck bed. Clearly he wasn't interested in what I was saying.

“What about your family, Ray? How did they come here and why?”

He crunched himself deeper into the driver's seat. “Well. They came out here and started farming.”

“In what year? Where did they live?”

Again, he focused straight ahead. “Don't rightly know the details. Better ask Martha,” he said. “Our grandma used to tell us all about that stuff, but I'm sorry to say I've gone and forgot it.”

Now I looked straight ahead, too. Shimmering distances on the horizon never came closer. After we passed a train going in the opposite direction, I waited until the high whine of the steam whistle left the still air, then I pointed to the tracks. “In some places the ruts are so deep you can still see the old Santa Fe Trail. Right there, between the tracks and this road.”

“Sure enough?” he said, but that was all.

Afterward, I tried reading my book but had to stop because it was making me motion sick. And the only other thing Ray told me was the name of the high point along the road, Jack's Point, a grazing spot for mules. When we stopped for groceries in La Junta, I couldn't think of anything to talk to him about as we walked the few aisles picking out canned goods and produce together.

Before we left town I bought a copy of the other La Junta newspaper, the
Democrat,
and looked over copies of both the
Rocky Mountain News
and the
Denver Post,
all of which I found out were available for mail delivery. I decided to subscribe to the
Denver Post.
Reading about events a day late was better than not reading about them at all.

The following morning, I got up out of a sound sleep to make Ray breakfast. He shoveled it down and headed out the door, then I returned to my room and napped until a more reasonable time for awakening. The next two days, however, Ray started staying around later in the mornings. I heard him up before dawn, just as before, but then he'd be shuffling around the house instead of leaving it. When I got up, there he was, waiting around in the kitchen for breakfast and drinking down coffee.

One morning I told him, “You don't have to stay in because of me.”

He had continued sipping out of his mug and didn't look up. “I just been more tired, is all.”

I opened my mouth, just about to do it, to correct his English. Most of the time Ray spoke correctly, but every so often he slipped up. He reminded me of fellow students I'd known who had grown up without proper English having been spoken in their households. They knew the correct ways from schooling, but sometimes what they heard at home accidentally sneaked out of them, and how those errors embarrassed them, especially around students such as me, who rarely even slumped to slang. So I closed my mouth before I could say a word to Ray.

The next morning, after I'd made pancakes and fried eggs for breakfast, Ray drank coffee and lingered until the sun was well up into the eastern sky. I asked him about the harvest, and he answered by naming machinery and listing a nondescript course of events I had difficulty following. He told me about various fields, reminding me that he had shown them to me during our drive. But I couldn't remember one field from another, although I pretended I could.

After he went out to the truck and drove away, I sat until my coffee turned cold. I finished cleaning the kitchen and watched the breeze coming in through the window screen, how it lifted the curtain into an arc, dropped it, then lifted it again.

How could something as big as this farm feel so confining? I'd only been here a week, but it felt more like a month. And I'd never spent so much time alone before. Already I'd discovered the weird things I was capable of doing, the thoughts I was capable of entertaining, during too much free time. I'd already examined my hair up close in the mirror and categorized all the different strands of color I found there. I'd studied my toes, counted clouds in the sky, and tried to discern the different facial expressions that could be made by a cow. I'd wondered how many people would die overseas in the time it took me to make up my bed.

Soon I folded up my apron, changed from loafers to sneakers, and headed for the outbuildings I'd been staring down ever since my arrival. I found the barn guarded at the open doors by a milk cow that was so big up close I hate to admit it scared me. From behind the cow, a long-eared hound plodded out the barn doors. I had seen him from afar several times before, but he'd kept his distance from the house. Now as I stood outside the barn, he chugged up to me like a streetcar going uphill. He padded circles about me, sniffing my scent that had fallen down into the dust. I reached down and rubbed the bony top of his head and stroked down his backbone—a string of marbles set out under a rug.

“Hey, boy,” I whispered to him.

Now he sniffed around my neck and huffed out dog breath that made me smile and remember. When I was a child, we'd never been allowed a pet. But Abby, Bea, and I had often visited a neighbor who kept a yard full of schnauzers and miniature poodles, so we grew up with some knowledge of pets and no fear of dogs. When one of the poodles gave birth to a litter, we each chose a favorite before those pups had a chance to open their eyes. Although we couldn't take them home, Abby and Bea chose fat white ones, and I picked a wriggling black that reminded me of a caterpillar. I still remember the name I gave him: Shadow.

That old hound padded along with me as I moved on. We passed by rows of crops lined out to the horizon. This was a place of leaves, stalks, and stems in every shade of green, ordered and watered by man but grown by the blue, dry sky. The land was breathing deeply. Human exchange of air seemed meager compared to all the synthesis going on at ground level, and the houses and buildings seemed simply like small boxes of right angles and deadwood planks surrounded by all these big, buzzing fields.

A clay-colored tumbleweed wedged between rows of green leaves caught my eye. Thorny, trapped, and out of place, it let me know the insignificance of any one, distinctive thing caught in a place so mapped with sameness. Aunt Eloise and Aunt Pearl had once accused me of hiding out in school. Instead Father had sent me into hiding here, where the openness of land and sky made hiding out about as unlikely as finding clover among the sage.

I went past a windmill that pumped water out of the well, a wind charger that Ray had told me provided our electricity, and a gasoline storage tank. Behind the barn and next to the livestock pond, I found the last of the outbuildings. Stacked with crates and old tools, the inside of the shed smelled like the attic where my mother had once kept boxes of our old dolls and dresses. On a shelf, I found the hand tools Ray's mother must have used for flower gardening. I picked up a small trowel, brushed off the dirt, and passed it slowly from one hand to the other. It was already too late to start summer annuals, but in the fall, I could still plant bulbs.

I searched over and under the other shelves in the shed and found things I hadn't expected to find. In the house, there seemed to be room for only the most practical of items. But here, I found pieces of the past—an old wooden butter churn, a small pie safe, buttonhooks, and a flat pan with a long handle that was once used to heat bedding. Pioneers would heat the pan over the fire, then run it in between the sheets to warm them before slipping in for the night.

The butter churn and the pie safe needed to be sanded and refinished, but the buttonhooks and pan simply needed polishing. Everything I found could be worked on and restored. I could even learn to do the restoration myself. Soon I found an empty burlap bag, shook it open, and began stacking it inside with the things I wanted.

That evening, Ray came in early. I was just about to tell him about the shed when he asked, “What do you say we go and visit my sister tonight?” Then he headed for the bathroom.

Maybe he sensed I needed a change, or maybe he needed one himself. “For dinner?” I called after him.

“You bet,” he said as he closed the door.

I looked about for the telephone before remembering we didn't have one. “Don't we need to let her know we're coming?” I called back.

“No need,” he answered from behind the door.

While he showered, I chose my khaki-colored dress with collar and shoulder pads that I had bought while shopping with my friend Dot shortly after Mother's death. Never before had I bought anything so military-inspired, as was the latest fashion, but after I had tried it on at May Company and with Dot's reassurances, I had decided it was a good fit and quite flattering. I donned the dress, polished my shoes, and then combed out my hair and put it up in pincurls so that just before we left, I could take it down and style it in a bob to graze my shoulders.

Ray came out dressed in his better slacks and a clean plaid shirt. He had washed his hair and combed it over the thinning area on top, but obviously hadn't checked the back of his head. Open to the air, his biggest bald spot shined like an Easter egg in the grasses.

Finally ready, Ray and I slid into the truck. As he started the engine, Ray looked my way. “Onions are ready. This'll be the last chance to get out for a long time coming.”

The trip took us nearly twenty minutes of travel down rutted dirt roads, over wooden bridges without railings, and past wind-mills that creaked around in silent currents of air. As we passed by some spare green plants I hadn't seen before, I asked Ray, “Are those tomatoes?”

“No. Those are potatoes.”

“Oh.”

“They get grown mostly down in the San Luis Valley.” He glanced over at me once, then continued. “But some farmers around here grow a few fields, then send the harvest straight off to the potato chip makers.”

“I see.”

We kept the windows down for needed cooling, letting the air whip in. I could feel the output of plants landing heavily on my skin. And as we arrived, I could tell my efforts to stay neat had done little good. Dust covered the sleeves and bodice of my dress, and I could feel tangles twisted in my hair.

Martha and Hank greeted us with smiles and handshakes, as if dropping by unexpected weren't unexpected at all. Their farm could have been a replica of ours. Inside the house, which had had a second story added for more bedrooms, they introduced me to their children. Sixteen-year-old Ruth wore a big shirt over denims, and her hair swung behind her in a long, rusty-colored pony-tail. Her eyes grew large as she looked me over. “Is that dress ready-made?” she asked.

It hadn't occurred to me until then, but of course store-bought clothes might still be considered quite extraordinary out here. During the Depression, farm wives and children were still wearing chicken-feed-sack dresses and flour-sack underwear. I nodded to Ruth and said, “It's my favorite,” but then I wondered if perhaps I should have worn something simpler.

“Oh, I can see why,” she replied, still looking me up and down.

Ruth's thirteen-year-old sister Wanda rose from reading a book to be introduced to me. She had copper-colored hair the same shade as her freckles and thick, straight hawk brows that must have spent a lot of time in thought. The two boys, Hank Jr. and Chester, looked more like twins than brothers. “They're only a year apart,” Martha explained. As I shook their hands, I noticed they had the same shade of brown eyes that ran in the blood of this family—lighter than mine—the color of brown eggshells.

After a polite exchange of how-do-you-do‘s, the boys headed back upstairs to finish a game of cards until dinner was served. Wanda took herself back between pages, but Ruth never left my side. Over dinner and dessert, she stared at me. She asked about the fabric of my dress, and later she asked to try on the opal ring I wore on my right hand, a gift from my mother.

In the kitchen, Martha started pulling out pots and pans, ladles and spoons, jars of spices. Ruth and I offered to help her, but she assigned us nothing but the table to set, and working together, we finished it in minutes. As we sat to fold the napkins, Martha kept moving about her kitchen with a certain ease of movement and steady purpose that let everyone around her know she had everything under control. Ray and Hank discussed farming business endlessly, and I overheard words and terms I'd never heard before, letting me know for certain just how out of my own element I was.

Beet pullers and feedlots. Fresnos and slips.

At last, Martha took a rest. She sat with me at the kitchen table while dinner baked in the oven. Ruth stayed with us, too, her chair scooted up flush with mine. When I told Martha I was not a cook, she offered to loan me recipe cards she kept in an old oak box, and she told me she knew a secret for perfect piecrust, if ever I wanted to know it. And she offered to pass on her “starter” for baking bread. I thanked her but didn't say I had no wish to spend my one evening out wasting it in talk of nothing but the kitchen.