The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (6 page)

“I was going the speed limit,” protested my son.

6

J
AKE CARRIED ALL OUR BAGS IN AT ONCE AND DROPPED THEM IN THE ENTRYWAY.
We exchanged whispery hugs with my mother and heartier ones with my more substantial, unreserved sister-in-law, Kris, and niece, Abby.

Bruce was sitting on the couch, his twelve-string guitar leaning beside him. “Hi, Uncle Bruce,” Jake said.

“Hello.” He wore his usual scruffy attire. Loose-fitting jeans, old work shoes. The laces didn’t match. What was left of his hair hung below his collar, and he still had his hippie beard, although he kept it trimmed better than he used to.

“Is that a new guitar?” Jake asked.

“No, just the same ol’ noisemaker,” Bruce said, holding it out for Jake, who took it and started strumming the few chords he knew.

“Show Bruce that song you wrote,” I said to Jake.

“Oh,” Bruce groaned. “Sure, show me what you’ve got.”

I kicked myself for submitting Jake to his uncle’s seeming disdain. He put the guitar down. “Nah. Maybe later. Where’s Josh?”

Josh was Bruce’s twenty-two-year-old son. He was at the motel, Bruce said, with his girlfriend and their toddler daughter, who loved the motel pool. “Don’t worry. They’ll get here in time for gobbler.”

Kris and Mom had returned to the kitchen, which seemed like a safer place. I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched Kris convey herself between the counters with her customary flat footfall, serious intention, and efficiency. Mom was mincing broccoli with a food processor. She wore one of the outfits she’d sewn in the sixties. Bright-orange polyester pants with a vest in the same color over a flowery pink, voluminously sleeved blouse. All of her old clothes still fit her. On my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, I’d persuaded her to put on the tiny lavender party dress she’d gotten married in. To save money, they’d eloped. It had been the final year of the Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties. They were poor then.
We got ours by going without!
Dad.

Now, more than sixty years later, Mom still looked great. Her hair wasn’t really gray, but silvery blond, the same color mine had begun to turn in my late thirties. It was from her that I’d gotten my Scandinavian features. We had high cheekbones, fine noses. But her skin still shone like porcelain, while mine had begun to show sun damage.

Her needlepoint pictures competed for wall space everywhere in the house. Here, above the picture rail, she’d hung the cute ones. Snoopy slept on his doghouse roof, big-eyed cows munched flowers, kittens played with balls of yarn. “Shall we set the table, Mom?”

“Oh sure, I guess it’s time.”

I rescued Jake and took him with me into the dining room. First we pulled the gold tablecloth from the blond, built-in hutch, then we draped it, making sure the edges were even. This was our job. We’d
done it dozens of times before. Getting out the good china plates with the autumn leaf pattern, we did the tally—Bruce and Kris; my niece, Abby; nephew, Josh; and his little family. Mom, Jake, me. There would be nine of us.

No plate for Dad. I looked over at his college graduation picture on the buffet. His dark eyes, under heavy brows and set in a young, smooth face, stared fixedly into a future now spent. “Just look at that handsome rascal,” my mother liked to say, as she gazed at the picture. “Is there any wonder why I married him?”

But without the cap and tassel, Dad wouldn’t have looked so rakish, even back then. Mat burns he’d suffered in a high school wrestling match had caused the hair on top of his head to fall out, and it never grew back. We’d razzed him about his baldness. He always played along. Like the gold teeth that accented his smile, a vein of humor glinted in him despite his serious approach to work and what one of my aunts called his hard-assed opinions.

He could not abide what he considered sloth in others. I remembered him pacing the sidewalk outside our farmhouse when my brothers and the hired men tarried over dinner, the noon meal. With his thudding gait and hulking shoulders, his bulb-toed work boots, and the crooked brimmed work hat he jammed low over his ears, he was a caricature of frustrated ambition. “Go in there and tell them to get their lazy butts in gear,” he would command me. In I would go, repeating his orders, eliciting laughter and a shuffle of boots and chairs. Empowered by my father, I’d felt like a toy poodle herding bulls.

No plate for my brother Clark either. If he’d lived, would we be setting a place for Noelle, the woman who drove to meet him after his 1988 bicycle trip down the California coast? When he didn’t show up, she made the calls to all the local hospitals, then performed the dreaded task, identifying his body in the morgue.

Clark, the eldest. He had been my protector when we were kids. According to family legend, he had even saved me from getting killed when we were traveling in Arizona and I’d toddled onto the highway in front of an oncoming truck. Then all those years later he slipped on
a gravel shoulder and was himself hit, by a lumber truck. In the stoic way of farm families, we had absorbed the shock of his death into our interiors and moved on. But the loss was an untended wound.

Jake opened the velvet-lined, wooden box of silver. Watching him work his way around the table, I recalled the Thanksgiving when Clark had apologized to me for not helping in the kitchen. “I want to,” he said, “but if I did, Dad would think I was a homo.” Screw that! had been my attitude. Ever since Jake was little, I had made it a point to insist on his helping with every meal at Grandma’s house.

“Don’t be late.” I heard Kris command. She was speaking to Josh on the kitchen phone. “Julie’s new boyfriend’s coming to dinner.”

Jake looked at me and pressed his lips together in a flat smile.

Clark and Noelle hadn’t married, although Noelle told us that they’d been on a marriage track. “Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?” Mom had said many times. Was my family feeling hopeful on my behalf now? Did they envision Jake and me made more complete by the balance Ward would bring to our lives? A fork on the left to accompany our knife and spoon on the right? I envisioned that myself, but at no time more than now, here.

•   •   •

W
E SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, WAITING
for the oven timer to go off. Here Mom hung her more serious needlepoint efforts. A replica of John Millet’s
The Gleaners
, in which peasant women collected stalks of wheat left behind by a rich farmer’s harvest wagons. A large-antlered bull elk. And a romantic rendering of our old farmhouse, the one her father had built and that we’d both grown up in. “If I’d known they would burn it down, I never would have left it,” she often said.

I hoped the conversation wouldn’t stray into politics while Ward was here. I’d tried to warn him that he’d be entering a den of liberals. He’d said not to worry, it wouldn’t be his first rodeo. But I didn’t think we were ready for any rodeos yet.

Secretly I believed I could sway Ward over to our side. After all, I’d openly stated my views in my book, and he’d been a fan of that
before we met. He didn’t seem to see the contradictions in himself that I did. A poetic soul, I reasoned, trapped in a prosaic, repressive region.

I didn’t need my atypical family exacerbating our differences. Maybe I could defuse the bomb before Ward arrived. Bracing myself, I asked, “So what do you think of our man in the White House now, Bruce?”

He stopped strumming. “Oh,” he groaned in his usual fashion. He went back to practicing a short riff. I waited. He’d spent most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter. His cynicism suited the profession, but not the small-town papers he’d worked for. “I went to a city council meeting and wrote what I heard,” he’d said when I asked him what had caused his last dismissal. Now he managed the farm Dad had left us. He could do that even though he lived more than a hundred miles east of Goodland because the excellent farming couple Dad had hired years before his death still did all the real work.

Finally, he put his guitar down and sighed. One side of his mouth lifted wryly, revealing a crooked canine. “I can’t say what I think about our president. I could get arrested.”

I said, “It might get better. We might win next year in the midterms.”

“I’m not kidding!” Bruce yelled. “I could!”

“That, that . . . ,” Mom said. She paused to search for sufficiently disparaging words. “Idiot! He calls himself a Christian. I can’t even stand to look at him.”

Mom and Dad had voted for Eisenhower and Nixon. They’d disliked Kennedy, whom Dad scorned as a “choirboy” Catholic, and were charmed by Reagan. “Such a likable fella,” Dad used to say. But being religious, Mom admired Jimmy Carter, and during George Bush Sr.’s tenure she started saying, “That stinking Rush Limbaugh is driving me over to the Democrats. I’m sick of his stupid bullshit.” She caused consternation in many who didn’t expect such a nice-looking grandma to cuss.

Abby laughed. “You had to ask.” She leaned down to pick up a section of newspaper.

Jake said, “Can I see your tattoo, Ab?”

She turned in her chair and lifted her short black hair with the raspberry-red stripe in it. Last year her hair had been auburn and long. On the back of her neck, hieroglyphs encircled a sun emblem. Jake touched it. “Is it new?”

“Oh no. I’ve been hiding it for something like ten years.” She was twenty-six, well into official adulthood and ready to take on the world.

Mom and Kris shook their heads at each other in maternal defeat.

The cuckoo clock clicked to twelve, but the little bird didn’t pop out. That mechanism hadn’t worked in fifteen years. Clark had sent my mother the clock when he lived in Germany, where he taught chemistry to U.S. Army kids for a while. So it still hung on the wall, the shuttered cuckoo reminding us of the absence we seldom spoke about.

“Ward should be here any minute,” I said.

“Where’s he from?” Kris asked.

“Plum Springs.”

“My aunt Julie is dating a man from Plum Springs?” Abby said, incredulous.

They hadn’t been gossiping about us at all, I was disappointed to realize. No one even knew that Ward was local. But it flattered me that Abby had me pegged as cosmopolitan and beyond any such backsliding. “From near there,” I said.

“So how’d you meet him?” Abby asked.

“In a cow pasture along the Little Beaver. I was looking for springs.”

“Why?” Bruce asked. He seemed genuinely, if guardedly, curious.

I spit it out without hedging. “I thought it was high time I educated myself about what we’re doing to the Ogallala Aquifer.”

Bruce’s eyes gleamed with orneriness that hadn’t abated since he was twelve, when I’d followed him around the farmstead as he ignited stink bombs he’d made from powdered sulfur. “What are we doing to the Ogallala?” he asked with a hint of the same mimicking tone he’d gored me with then.

“Bleeding it dry.”

“Oh that.” He wasn’t surprised at my zealotry. I’d always been the family idealist, and I’d been complaining about wasteful irrigation practices for years.

“I’ve got a gripe about the way people use water,” Mom began.

Bruce beamed at me conspiratorially, as if to say, “Here she goes.”

“I just hate the way my neighbors let it run down the street!” she exclaimed. “They water their lawns all day and let it run and run. My parents taught me that water is precious. We had a tin cup hanging on the windmill and if we filled it up, we had to drink it all!”

“That lawn water’s nothin’ compared with what we waste on the farm, Mom,” I said.

“You saved water because you didn’t have an electric pump on the windmill,” said Bruce, who had a penchant for cutting through other people’s delusions. “You had to conserve it because the wind didn’t always blow.” Then to me, “Better be careful. If you singlehandedly put an end to irrigation, you’ll cut your own income by two thirds. Not to mention mine. Don’t touch mine.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “No one’s going to listen to me.”

The doorbell chimed. “There he is!” Abby said.

Jake smiled reassuringly at me as Abby leaned sideways in her chair to look into the entryway. Through the three offset panes of the front door, my niece’s first glimpse of “Julie’s new boyfriend” was half of his mustached face, a full square of his red-and-white pinstriped shirt, his blue-jeaned hip, and half of the calf roper who cinched his middle.