Road to Bountiful (11 page)

The countryside zips by, more fields of wheat and corn, more prairie potholes shimmering in the hot morning sun. We see some rough country, up and down, red rimrock country, where no crops will grow. We pass through the little towns with their sturdy, agricultural-sounding names—Burlington, Berthold, Stanley, Ross, and Wheelock. We see the high-and-low, duck-like bob of oil well pumps dotting the landscape. We drop down toward the big, lazy Missouri River and then drive up a rise toward Williston, flat and spread out, oozy green trees marking the edges of town. We find a restaurant in Williston, a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, where the people who work there all speak Spanish and fix us an awesome lunch of Mexican food.

And then we climb back into the car and push our way into Montana.

“Not far to go now. We should be at Glenn’s in a little more than an hour,” I say cheerily, filled with good food, the cool air blowing on my face, driving fast. “We’re making good time. Really good time.”

Uncle Loyal shifts his weight and doesn’t say much in response. He is quiet again. It was probably the combination of heavy food and hot weather and a long day of driving.

“Glenn. You need to know something about him. I hope you’re not disappointed in Glenn,” he says.

“Can’t be. He’s a friend of yours, ergo a friend of mine. Nothing more to it than that. And think of what we have to look forward to after our visit there. Ergo, the mountains of Montana, fishing, hiking, climbing, cool temperatures, awesome views. Ergo, we’ll be on top of the world, Uncle Loyal. I like the word
ergo
by the way, even though I don’t know what it means. Ergo, bergo, slergo.”

We drive on, farther into Montana. Uncle Loyal fidgets a bit. He looks out the window, beyond the grain fields, past the round-topped hills. He shuffles his feet and stretches. Although it’s midday, a quarter moon hangs overhead in the summer sky.

We pass through an Indian reservation, then on to Glasgow, a small town with a wide main street, just north of a giant dam and reservoir. We push ahead. We near the place where Uncle Loyal said that Glenn was.

“Not far now. Can’t be. Next stop: Glennville. Glenn, baby, here we come.”

“Only a few miles,” Uncle Loyal says slowly. “There’s a small town just ahead. That’s where we’ll find him.”

“Good. Let me know where I need to turn.”

We drive in silence for twenty minutes. Then Uncle Loyal shifts in his seat, drums his fingers on the dash, and turns his head to look out the window. We pass a sign that gave the name of a small town—actually, less than a town, just a few homes, a grocery store, a grain elevator, a closed gas station, a building that advertised, “Antiques and Collectibles, No Junk,” a bar, a large stone house that said, “Bed and Breakfast, Open, Call Ahead,” but gave no phone number, and a large garage with a dozen old cars and trucks parked outside, a man dressed in greasy coveralls standing on the side of the highway.

Uncle Loyal says, “Here it is. Here is where Glenn is.”

“Where is he?”

“Up there. On the little hill to the left. The green place.” He flings his hand in a general direction to the south, toward a small green patch of grass surrounded by tall trees.

I look in the direction he pointed and squint. Something isn’t right. I can’t see any houses.

Then the bottom drops out of my stomach. The green place. Yes, of course.
Now I know.
It all comes to me, all of what Uncle Loyal said suddenly made sense. Of course he’d be at home. Glenn couldn’t be anywhere else.

“It’s a cemetery,” I say.

He glances toward me sheepishly. “Yes.”

“Uncle Loyal. That’s where Glenn is, right?”

Uncle Loyal turns away. He now looks troubled, and I can just about guess the unspoken questions that are on his mind. “Does it matter, Levi? Do you understand? Will we still catch fish? Are you angry with me?”

His face is drawn. He fidgets uncharacteristically. He looks straight ahead.

“Yes. I’m sorry, Levi. I didn’t tell you. I should have. I tried a couple of times, but I didn’t think you would go all this way if you knew my friend Glenn wasn’t alive. I should have said something more, been more adamant and forthcoming.”

I slow down as we near the intersection. I’m trying to sort this out. It made no sense, and it made a lot of sense at the same time. I flip on my turn signal and wheel the red car to the left onto a dusty gravel road that led up the hill.

“I’m sorry,” Uncle Loyal says. “I am truly sorry. But . . .” and he doesn’t finish his sentence.

I slow more as we get to the entrance of the small country cemetery. The markers, all a light gray, stand in perfect lines.

I steal a glance at Uncle Loyal. I think,
He has no one, he has nothing, nothing but his wisdom and his stories and his experience living on the plains. His wife is gone, his friends are gone. He has two daughters, one he hardly hears from and the other who has given me a plastic card and six hundred bucks to get him to Utah so that she can feel better about the way she’s treating him.
I feel a surge of sympathy or understanding or empathy or ethos or pathos or one of those words I should have learned in English 101 but never took the time.

But I feel
something
, and that’s what counts, I suppose. I don’t want him to be sad or unhappy or feeling that he let me down. I know what I
could
do, what I
should
do, what I
would
say. I take a gulp and feel I am on the edge of doing something that would be considered maybe as an act of kindness, and at the same time I hope it won’t be clumsy. I have to admit that I have a bit of a record when it comes to being clumsy. I need more practice at being kind. It seems like the ideal time to start. Loyal’s needs had become more important than mine.

“It’s okay, Uncle Loyal,” I say. Then I tell a lie. “I knew a hundred and fifty miles ago, even before we crossed the state line into Montana that Glenn wasn’t alive. You dropped enough hints. It’s okay. Really. I would’ve come anyway. I did come. Proves it, right?”

He doesn’t say a thing but looks at me and gives me a slight nod. I know then things will be okay, and I also know he is embarrassed. I also know that these few minutes at that country cemetery in the middle of nowhere mean a lot to him. I stop the car. He gets out, slump-shouldered, and walks toward a marker on the far corner of the cemetery, near two tall cottonwood trees. I think it best to just watch him for a few minutes from afar.

I slide out of the car. I hear him say, “Hello, Glenn. It’s been such a long time. I haven’t been very good to you these last few years. My apologies, old friend. Have you heard I’m on my way to Utah?”

Then he turns toward me and beckons me to follow.

“Glenn, I want you to meet someone. He is important. He is special. Without him, I would not be here.”

I take a few slow steps toward the grave, and when I get there, I look at Loyal, then look at the marker and say, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Glenn. You have a good friend here in Loyal Wing.”

And the funny thing is that I meant it.

From the Depths of the Valley We Travel toward the Tops of Peaks

I made a serious mistake. I did not take my great-nephew into my total confidence. I was not honest with him. I did not treat him as I should have. I did not tell him that Glenn, the closest friend I had, other than my Daisy, passed away seven years ago when a large stack of hay bales toppled over and crushed him. Yes, I tried, I made an attempt, but I stopped short of the mark.

My fear was this: Levi, young and in a hurry and obviously sent to North Dakota to pick me up and drive me to Utah for a sum of money, would not understand my deep friendship with Glenn Leuthold, would not understand how much it meant to me to visit his grave site in the cemetery for what may well be the last time in my life.

When will I be able to come back to this stark Montana Hi-Line country?
The answer, I knew, was likely never.

So I engaged in this subterfuge. I never really told Levi that Glenn was dead, but I also never really told him he was alive. I chose my words carefully. I put it out of my mind how I would deal with Levi once the truth was known. Certainly, I would apologize. After visiting the cemetery, we could travel with haste toward Utah, we could drive straight through. It would not matter. I would owe at least that much to Levi for taking me so far out of his way.

But something happened on our way to Montana. Levi changed. He was a different young man than the one who picked me up less than two days ago. No longer in quite the hurry, no longer with mere dollar signs in his eyes and viewing me as a commodity, an object to be transported, but rather, as a human being deserving of attention and respect. This journey we are sharing, we are both growing from it, the result that most journeys inevitably cause.

He said to me, “I knew before we got to Montana that Glenn wasn’t alive.”

I asked how he knew.

He said, “You said something. You said, ‘That’s where we’ll find him,’ when I asked you where he lived. You didn’t say, ‘That’s where he lives. His house is green and he lives on a farm and I hope we don’t catch him when he’s calling in the cows or feeding the chickens or cutting alfalfa.’ You just said that’s where we’ll find him. You like to describe things. You notice colors and sounds and how things work. And then you said zero, zip, nada about Glenn’s life, other than what happened a long time ago. That’s a big clue, Uncle Loyal. You’re not good at making up things or hiding things.”

I didn’t give him credit enough for intuition. But I still don’t know if he really knew.

After we got out of the car, I called him over to the grave site. I know what he said. But . . . I watched carefully for clues. Was he angry with me? Was he impatient? Did he feel deceived? Did he feel used? I saw none of those signs. He quietly walked to the headstone. After a few minutes, I tell him more about Glenn.

I say to him, “Glenn was a true friend. That is a rare and precious thing. Even in the Church, we have many acquaintances for whom we feel love, but few friends we actually do love.”

I say, “Glenn was a man of wisdom and experience.”

I say, “Glenn was constant, like the Northern Star.”

I say, “You would have liked Glenn.”

Levi says, “I’m sure I would have.”

We spend about a half hour there. I pull a few nearby weeds. Levi takes them from me, walks to the little custodian’s building at the cemetery, really nothing more than a utility shed, and drops them into a plastic trash can. After that, he walks back to the car and stands quietly, allowing me to gather my thoughts and say a few quiet words to Glenn before heading back to the car. I know when it is time. I come back to the car and get in. Levi quietly drives away from the cemetery, and we head west again on Highway 2.

Finally, I say, “To Utah. As quickly as you choose to travel.”

He says, “Yes, to Utah.”

I am disappointed. For all that I had put him through, I harbored the faint hope and an opaque vision of hiking toward a snow-capped mountain, fishing pole in hand, laughing with one another in the brittle, piney mountain air.

Levi grips the steering wheel tighter and presses on the accelerator. We drive several miles in disquieting silence, past the tawny fields, the jade of cottonwood and box elder trees.

Then he says, “Do you think she’s over me?”

Startled, I ask, “Who?”

The corners of his mouth pinch upward. “How soon you forget, Uncle Loyal. I am disappointed and disillusioned. I expected more from you. You know. Her.”

“Her?”

“Yes, her.”

The light dawns. “Ah. The motel clerk, the lovely one, Evelyn. She of the amazing hair.”

“Of course. Yes.
She. Her.
It.
My princess today, my future queen of tomorrow.”

“Levi, I doubt she will ever forget you. You are one of a kind. You are unique.”

He reaches over and playfully slaps the side of my knee and says, “That’s what I wanted to hear. I miss Mr. Rogers telling me that there is no one else just like me.” He sits back in the driver’s seat and says, “Let’s get out that map. We need to find us a mountain to climb.”

“I believe I have located some to the south of here. It will mean turning away from Highway 2 and driving through the central part of the state. We likely will not get to the mountains until tomorrow.”

“Just tell me where to turn. I’ll do the rest. To the mountains.”

“Yes, to the mountains.”

If luck should smile upon me and if my traveling companion remained true, I might just yet end up with foggy blue breath and snow on my shoes before this trip was over.

In Our Roaming, We Cause Aunt Barbara Wonder and Surprise

Uncle Loyal is getting into the navigator’s role big time. He unfolds the map about every half hour and studies it. He tells me he’s looking for roads that will lead us to mountains. He tells me that he thinks the best roads are those that get squiggly and bunched because that must mean there are a lot of switchbacks and changes in elevation. He tells me he’s looking for little dots of light blue, signifying lakes, and thin ribbons of slightly darker blue, which show where the streams and rivers are. And he also looked on the map for the little triangles with the name of a mountain and the number beside it signifying its elevation. He tells me with a laugh and more than a little excitement that there must be a thousand mountains in Montana higher than ten thousand feet.

He tells me to turn left when we reach the junction of Highway 191. He tells me that there are some mountains about twenty miles away, and while they don’t appear to be tall or impressive, we might want to take a look at them. Scout them out, he says. Reconnoiter. Choose our path.

I make the turn, and we drive through hill country. A blue, hazy patch of pine green rises to the west. Mountains, for sure, but they aren’t the kind we’re after. We drive closer, and Uncle Loyal says, “The map says there’s a little town at the foot of the mountains. It’s going to be dark soon, and I don’t see any other towns nearby. Maybe we can drive by and see if there’s a place to eat, a place to sleep. We’ve put in a long day.”