Leaving Before the Rains Come (19 page)

But in spite of all the social attainments and the cushioning consequence of affluence, it was as if tragedy, having settled on the Rosses, found comfort there and stayed one generation into the next. Julia and Walter’s eldest son, Walter Jr., was all set to become every bit as successful as his father. He married well and had two sons; he showed himself to have inherited astute business acumen. Then, on the night of November 29, 1931, as he and his wife were driving across Campbell’s Bridge near Philadelphia, the steel girders buckled, left their concrete moorings, and the vehicle plunged into Neshaminy Creek thirty-five feet below. Walter Jr. died instantly. His wife survived, my Charlie’s indomitable grandmother, Margaretta Sharpless Ross. She was left with two very young sons: my father-in-law and his older brother.

A few years later, perhaps to recover from her heartbreak, or perhaps to provide her sons with an unequivocally masculine influence, Margaretta Ross took her young boys out west to Wyoming, to spend the summer at the famous Bar B C dude ranch in the shadow of the Teton Mountains. There she fell in love with the co-owner of the ranch, Irving Corse, and eventually married him. When Irving shot himself in 1953 after years of enduring excruciating arthritis, Margaretta took over management of the ranch until her own health declined in the mid-1980s. When I met Charlie in 1991, his grandmother had been dead only three years. “She wasn’t easy,” he said. “I think she was afraid of people taking advantage of her.”

Years later, I boarded my horse on a ranch owned by an elderly woman who had known Margaretta as a younger woman. The elderly woman told me Margaretta was the most difficult person she had ever known, which was really saying something, because the elderly woman was quite difficult herself; hard-drinking, chain-smoking, cantankerous. “When I heard the story about that bridge collapsing, I figured it was about right,” she told me. “If you had met her, you’d know it would take more than a collapsing bridge to kill that tough old cow. God, she was difficult.”

Upon Margaretta’s death in 1988, a life estate negotiated in 1929 by her late husband, Irving Corse, terminated and the Bar B C became part of Grand Teton National Park. From a ranch auction, Charlie acquired a couple of rickety pine beds, a few rough chairs, a dining room table that had been raked by the claws of a marauding black bear, and a cowhide sofa dried to the point of such fragility that one of our guests eventually fell right through it. Charlie also kept his step-grandfather’s cowboy saddle, on the back of which was still the name, written in clear, if fading, white letters:
CORSE
. It seemed a bad-luck saddle to me, given Irving’s tragic end. The suicide wasn’t much spoken about, of course, but it seemed all the louder to me because of it—the dreadful, conclusive loneliness of that final self-inflicted shot.

The case of little missing Charley Ross dragged on well into living memory. In 1939, a sixty-nine-year-old retired carpenter named Gustave Blair sued Walter Ross, now aged seventy, in an Arizona civil court. He claimed to be the little Charley Ross and wanted a share of his father’s estate, although Walter vehemently denied the existence of any trust. Gustave’s story was as convoluted as it was tragic, but having heard evidence of his fantastical and harrowing tale—the child was allegedly hidden in a cave in Pennsylvania to begin with, and thereafter led a restless, threatened life—the Phoenix judge ruled that the retired carpenter was the “only and original” Charley Ross. But Walter, wary of imposters, worn out by a lifetime of false claims and dashed hopes, ignored the ruling.

Gustave then requested a jury verdict, and on May 8, 1939, after only eight minutes of deliberation, a jury of twelve men issued on their verdict in the civil action
Blair v. Ross
. Gustave Blair was, they declared, the lost boy, legally entitled to change his name to Charles Brewster Ross. But Walter continued to refuse to accept the court’s decision. “Blair is evidently just another one of those cranks who have been bothering us for the last sixty-five years,” he told the Associated Press. “The idea that my brother is still alive is not only absurd but the man’s story seems unconvincing.” When Gustave made plans to see Walter in Philadelphia, Walter bolted to his summer cabin on Saranac Lake.

Undeterred by his supposed brother’s reluctance to acknowledge him, Gustave legally changed his name to Charles Brewster Ross. A few months later, he traveled to Pennsylvania with his second wife, Cora, in an attempt to remarry under his freshly retrieved identity in the church that now sat on the site of his old family home. However, given the Ross family’s refusal to recognize the man as their lost brother, the pastor refused the couple’s request. “If my older brother lives for five years, he’ll seek me out and admit kinship,” the latter Charley Brewster Ross declared.

Four years later, in July 1943, Walter died. He was buried in St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church outside Philadelphia. “Above all, he had not allowed his father’s obsession to become his own,” wrote Thomas Everly. “In order to live, he let Charley Ross die.”
7
Six months later, the last man claiming to be Walter’s lost brother died of influenza in a Phoenix hospital. But the lingering memory, the nagging doubts about little Charley Ross, meant that he remained stitched into the family’s thinking and soul. He was silently but persistently everywhere.

As a child, my Charlie Ross—Charles Chandler Ross II, named in part for his family’s most enduring tragedy, as had been his great-uncle before him—was taunted by his older brothers. “You’ll get kidnapped,” they predicted. “No one will ever find you again.” But if such taunts terrified Charlie at the time, he not did not later cite them as the source of his hypervigilance against the world’s injustice, or his amorphous but persistent sense that he was not living the life to which he had been entitled. In any case, the taunts were nothing compared to the threats his brothers delivered to throw him from the third-story window of their house, and their subsequent denials of any such behavior.

“It was just what brothers do,” he said.

“Is that code for something?” I asked.

Charlie looked blank. “Code for what?”

And when in 1997 Charlie suggested naming our son Charles Ross, it didn’t apparently occur to him, and certainly not to me, until someone else pointed it out, that we were keeping alive the name of the missing child. So on and on the missing went, well after little Charley could possibly have still been alive, as if the itch of him yearned to be uncovered. “Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.”

There is no loneliness quite like the loneliness that comes from living without ancestors, without the constant, lively accompaniment of the dead. And it was true, the people I knew on the farms and ranches of my youth accepted their dead relatives into their houses and bodies, not in the way Christians might accept the Eucharist—a weekly ritual—but in vivid daydreams, in the conception, birth, and rearing of their children, in the ingestion of every meal. The dead, disentangled from the prison of their flesh, were expected to engage in a busy, even mischievous afterlife, affecting weather, health, and fertility. They did not disappear, and freeze or desiccate beneath a slab of stone, or in some vault. They did not leave wealth or reliable inheritances of property for their successors. Nor did they rest in peace.

W
hen we first arrived in the United States, I got a job five days a week as a river guide in Jackson, Wyoming. I wasn’t very good at it, but I earned twenty dollars a trip, and other than cracking my chin open on a rock, no one got hurt on my raft. Three evenings and one lunch shift a week, I waitressed at a high-end restaurant in town. I wasn’t very good at that either, but it was busy season, help was hard to find, and no one at my tables actually starved to death. On good nights, I could earn a couple of hundred dollars in tips. It seemed like a small fortune until Charlie told me it wasn’t enough. He explained that a house was very expensive. Childcare was very expensive. Health insurance was very expensive. Then I realized my unskilled labor wouldn’t be worth anything in the winter. In September, when the cold weather came, river operations would shut down and the restaurant would close for the off-season, and then where would I be?

I hadn’t thought it through, to be honest. It’s not that I wasn’t familiar with seasons. Growing up on farms in southern Africa, I was very aware that we had cooler dry seasons and hotter rainy seasons. We’d reaped and we’d sowed. But regardless of whether crops were going into the ground or coming out of it, we had always seemed more or less short of money. “We’re on the bones of our arses,” Dad would say. But he said it in a way that suggested being poor wasn’t a bad thing; if anything it was a jokey thing.

On the other hand, when Charlie showed me our budget and presented a list of numbers that would not zero out, it was not a jokey thing. I didn’t really understand the accounts, nor did I understand the words that were coming out of his mouth, but what he told me with his body, his quietly contagious anxiety, made me nearly dizzy with panic. I picked up an extra shift at the restaurant. Then summer ended, and I found part-time office work at just above minimum wage. Meantime, I woke up at four in the morning and worked on a novel about a lonely, unhappy Zimbabwean housewife whose husband ignores her and never laughs at her jokes until she runs off with an aid worker woman and opens a florist called the Placid Lily. Charlie looked for a job—but not just any job. He wanted to earn a
real
wage, he said. I said I thought all wages were real; what was surreal, I told him, was the cost of everything here.

Then Charlie came home one day and announced that he was going to be an estate agent in Jackson. To begin with, I didn’t understand what he was telling me. And then when I did, I reacted poorly. I burst into tears and said it would kill his soul to sell houses here and to develop land. This, after all, was the earth he loved above all else: this was where he had planted himself as a seventeen-year-old; these rivers had taught him to read water; these were the snow-peaked mountains he had dreamed of on hot nights in Zambia. Charlie got angry and asked me if I had any better ideas. I said I had dozens: we could move back to southern Africa and live in a hut; we could move into a teepee and wait for one of my books to get published; we could sell our bodies to science. I said there had to be something that Charlie could do that didn’t involve the murder of his spirit.

It took Charlie more than a year to sell his first property. In the course of those long, worrying months, he was tired all the time and felt nonspecifically unwell. Eventually he was diagnosed with having profound environmental allergies: sagebrush, aspen, grasses, dust. Charlie’s body had turned his treasured, chosen world against him. I took books out of the library and read everything I could find on allergies and autoimmune disorders. “You’re fighting against yourself,” I told Charlie. “You need to find work that fulfills you.” But bills piled up faster than I could imagine our way back to a simpler life; a life in which our means exceeded our wants; a life in which we could explore what it was that we were born to do, rather than what we needed to do.

Feeling complicit in Charlie’s fatigue and ill health, I made myself busier than ever. I was still working three days a week, taking care of Sarah on my days off, cooking, cleaning, and waking up early every morning to write. I had moved on to a new novel, the first one unsurprisingly having been rejected by publishing houses everywhere. Then my second novel got unsurprisingly rejected too. It seemed to me, our safe, sane American lives weren’t any easier than our crazy, diseased African ones. Charlie talked about the way things used to be when he lived here in the seventies and eighties. I invited his friends over and tried to recast his nostalgia in the present tense. But it wasn’t ever going to be enough; I couldn’t rewind the clock back to those happier, simpler times. I suffered from bouts of depression and I missed Zambia.

But I was losing much of what had made me southern African; our toughness, our humor, our hardiness—these didn’t translate easily in a culture that had made comfort the primary goal, and challenging that comfort something we did on weekends, for fun in the mountains, on the ends of ropes, or on bikes and horses. Also, identity is easily corruptible. As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren’t culturally distinct anymore. Then we’re part of someone else’s corporate plan, we’re a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we’re a black dot on a bottom line. Retaining culture takes effort and persistence and discipline. It’s a commitment, not a flag. You can’t just pull it out and wave it about when it’s convenient.

At last Charlie had some real estate deals—the sound of nail guns echoed in frenetic new subdivisions in the forests all around us—and suddenly there was some extra cash around. I felt guiltily relieved. I no longer had to add up each item in my grocery cart to make sure I wouldn’t go over our modest budget. We sold our house in Idaho and moved to Jackson. But Charlie didn’t seem happier—if anything I was even more aware of the multiple ways I was failing to be the person he expected me to be.

“What do you want from me?” I’d ask.

“What do you want from
me
?” he would echo.

Then sometimes on a summer day Charlie would announce time off from work and he would take Sarah and me down the scenic section of the Snake River, or we would hike up in the mountains, or kayak into a remote campground in Yellowstone. In those sunstruck hours, Charlie would recall how he had been riotously happy near here fifteen years or a decade ago, how he had thrown famously raucous parties in those days, how he had been soul-connected to this land back then. But he said it as if that experience was now an unreachable fantasy, as if the past were a foreign land and the present was a regrettable chore. I understood then that no matter what we did, we could never recapture those hallowed times. The best we could aim for were weeks or months of grinding slog, with these brief intervals of relief as compensation. Unbridled joy was not a realistic—or necessarily worthwhile and commendable—goal.

I got pregnant again, and in early March 1997, Mum flew over for the delivery, arriving in the same spring blizzard that pressure-dropped the baby into my pelvis. Labor came like a train shunting back and forth over the same piece of railway track. Charlie sat by the television nursing a swollen foot brought on by an attack of gout, while I screamed and screamed. Nothing would budge. Mum pronounced herself impressed and shocked all in the same sentence. “It’s all very nice and shiny in this hospital,” she said. “Lovely views of the mountains, and they do seem to like their appliances and beeping things, but where are all the nurses and helpful people? There are no helpful people here.”

Nine hours of screaming and still the baby was no closer to being born, and I was becoming overwrought with pain and with the terror of the next contraction. “For God’s sake,” Mum said at last. She hauled me out of the bed and marched me down the empty corridors. “A walk will do you good,” she said as I continued howling in protests of awful agony. “Oh, this is inhuman,” Mum muttered. “We’ll all go deaf.” She elbowed her way into an empty bathroom and filled the tub. “See if you can get in there,” she said. “Honestly, how hard can it be to have some Epsom salts on hand?”

Much later, Mum found a nurse and insisted the doctor be summoned. “You can’t just leave us like this,” she pointed out. “It’s been going on all day. Knock her out at least.” Then she took the nurse outside and I don’t know what else she said, but there was suddenly a small cluster of nurses around my bed, and Charlie hobbled down to the nurses’ station to wait for the doctor, and then the baby started to come, although his head was far too large for the space allowed, and by the time he arrived he was all limp with exhaustion and needed to be taken from me into the bright gadgetry of an incubator in another room. “He’ll be all right,” Mum said. “Babies are as tough as cockroaches, really.” Then she peered unhopefully under the sheets. “Although you won’t be getting back in the saddle anytime soon.”

I quit my menial office job to take care of the children. I cooked and cleaned and I still woke up at four in the morning to write. My third novel was rejected, as was a fourth and a fifth. But Charlie was selling more land and more houses. We commissioned an architect to design a mountain home for us, with hardwood floors and cherry cabinets. We bought nicer furniture, newer cars, a Labrador puppy. To pay for it all, Charlie went into the office earlier and returned home later; he brought back piles of paperwork and sat late into the night worrying numbers into columns.

There didn’t seem to be any way for me to repay Charlie for all the work he was doing to make our material lives possible. I wrote, and raised the children, and kept house, and almost every evening I welcomed Charlie home with painstakingly prepared meals, wine, and overeager chatter that too often became a list of demands. I needed Charlie to bring back with him from the world beyond our children and the housework news and ideas and conversation. He didn’t have to slay dragons, but a few shiny scales from the fight would have been diverting. “Oh, just make something up if it was a boring day,” I implored. But Charlie complained of ever-increasing exhaustion. He grew more silent and withdrawn. Sometimes I got drunk and railed, “You seem so unhappy. What are we doing this all for?” Charlie would look embarrassed on my behalf and in the mornings I would wake up dry-mouthed and repentant.

Growing up, I could measure my father’s stress by the length of the cigarette ash on the veranda in the morning where I found him at dawn after those uneasy nights, hands hovering over a game of solitaire, a cigarette shelved into a groove on his lower lip, a cup of tea at his elbow. “Top of the morning, Chookies,” he’d say. “Sleep okay?” And then I knew the yields weren’t matching up to expectations, or the price of fuel and fertilizer had just surged, or the government had suddenly decided to raise the minimum wage by fifty percent. “Well, I tried worrying about it all night,” he said, slapping cards down on the coffee table. “And it didn’t change a bloody thing. You’d think I’d have learned by now, wouldn’t you?”

Years later, I stumbled in an accidental way on some of the works of the desert mothers and fathers, the ascetic, hermitic holy people who lived in the deserts of Egypt starting around the third century
AD
. I liked their names to begin with: Sarah of the Desert, Paul the Simple, John the Eunuch. And then I liked their teachings: know who you are; know where you are; know what is happening. Surrender anyway. One of the instructions of peace given by the desert father Moses seemed to me to trump all else: “The monk must die to everything before leaving the body, in order not to harm anyone.”
8

But I think really to live with even a small degree of that deliberately careless wisdom requires the precondition of fearlessness, trust in oneself, and belief in one’s own personal culture. My father had taught me one kind of fearlessness and trust. He had taught me how to get from one end of a bit of land to the other; he had taught me endurance; he had shown me what an unrestrained life looked like. But a more cautious life—one without geographical markers, a life of bills and bank statements—was foreign to me, and I could not catch up to it. Work, in some unexplained, inexplicable way, seemed to be the key to such a cautious life. Work, work, work, as if it were the modern equivalent of decades in the desert.

I took another menial part-time office job, and continued to get up at four in the morning to write. My sixth, seventh, and eighth novels were rejected. I submitted a ninth novel. My agent didn’t even bother to shop it around; instead she wrote back to me saying that she felt it was a waste of my time to continue writing, and a waste of her time to represent me. “You may have some talent,” she offered cautiously. “But you don’t have a story.”

So with nothing left to lose, I wrote the truth. I wrote about growing up in Rhodesia during the war, about the deaths of three of my siblings, about my crazy-wonderful parents. Into those pages went all my loneliness of my new life, all my love for the land that had raised me, all the pain of having left it. The pages seemed different from what I had written before—nonfiction instead of fiction, obviously—but also
of
me, eccentric, mordant, irreverent. I found a new agent and she sold it within a few days to publishers in New York and Europe. Suddenly I had a public voice and another full, distinct life from the one I had shared with Charlie. For the first time since falling in love with him, I could imagine myself as a separate being from him. And because of that, our arguments became more damaging; there would be tears, rages, threats, and afterward neither of us would sleep.

In the next couple of years, I traveled back to southern Africa and wrote a troubling book about soldiers from the war I had grown up in. Charlie grew tired of the way I seemed to need to peel back the scabs on old wounds and explore the painful bloody parts of my vicious history. I told him I was compelled to dig into the world in this way. He said it was unnatural and unhealthy and made of me a terrifying wife. I said he would do well to explore his own demons and sadness and that I could stand for him to get a little more terrifying.