The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (17 page)

My father still farmed more than a thousand acres of dryland winter wheat. After making as clean and well packed a seedbed as Farm Program conservation rules allowed, he planted in September, placing the seeds deep enough to rest in damp soil but shallow enough so the sprouts could reach the surface. If he was lucky, snow would come and keep the crop moist. “Drip, drip, drip!”
he would say, playing the air like a piano with his thick fingers, his eyes shining with delight over nature’s built-in irrigation system. If there was no snow on the ground when January winds began to rage, he was quick on the draw with an implement called a chisel, which tore gashes in the ground perpendicular to the wind. The ridges this left prevented the fields from blowing.

When Dad had done all he could to ensure success, he prayed. No matter how irreligious he claimed to be, that’s what he’d been doing in my childhood when he stood on the balcony of our old farmhouse summer nights, scrutinizing the sky. Seeing a thunderhead approach over the western windbreak, his face would swell with hope the way the ground seemed to swell in advance of a rain. To me, he had looked kinglike, standing on the ramparts of the house my grandfather had built. But like every farmer who invested his family’s future in the interplay of soil, seed, and weather, he was no king. He was merely a supplicant, completely subject to the sky’s whims.

Now that I was back, I couldn’t get enough of watching my burly, arthritic father kneeling behind his wheat drill, flicking dirt out of a furrow with his pliers handle to make sure he was planting at the right depth. He had this uncanny knack for uncovering the kernels. “Ooh, ooh, there she is,” he would say
.
“Now you try.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t find a single one. But I liked crouching beside him and being given the chance to learn. Even with our big equipment, everything came down to kneeling in the dirt. The action went back ten thousand years to when wheat was first domesticated in the deserts of Mesopotamia. At least in this particular instance, nature’s
and my father’s dictates were one. You must plant in moist soil. You confirm your success by uncovering the seed and checking.

•   •   •

“
L
OOK AT THAT,
J
ULIE,”
D
AD SAID IN
August, proud of the corn I’d planted in April. Fully tasseled, it stood six feet tall, a solid green wall, every plant a uniform height and color. But to me, the corn seemed hypergreen. It looked unnatural. What corn and sorghum we’d raised when I was a kid had survived on our scant rainfall. Without irrigation, seeds had to be planted farther apart so that they could compete for moisture. Looking at a cornfield then, I’d seen as much gray dirt between the stalks as I had emerald green.

Our old, dryland, prechemical approach had more in common with the way I’d seen Hopi Indians farm than it did with our present methods. Although the Hopi generally distrusted outsiders, I had a San Francisco friend who assisted the elders of Hotevilla, the most traditional village on the reservation, with their causes. This was in my desert exploration period. My friend didn’t own a car, and when he told me he’d received an urgent call from James, the village spokesperson, I had offered to drive him to Arizona in my Cruiser.

The Hopi, who traced their lineage in the desert southwest to AD 600, were still farming the way they always had. James took us to his field, where I watched him drop to his knees, that universal posture of farmers. He pressed holes into the mounded earth with his planting stick, then dropped corn kernels into them one by one.

He and his family stored their harvested corn inside their house. At night, stacks of the burgundy and indigo ears gleamed in the lantern light as we crowded around the family’s small, painted wooden table. We ate posole, piki bread, and pinto beans. After supper, James and my friend worked together composing a newsletter. James hoped the newsletter would garner support from
Bahana
, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing
the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out—an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer.

Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.

“It’s an attack on the values that have been teached to us by the elders for thousands of years,” said James, who spoke English with a gentle accent. Hearing him speak Hopi with his wife and children, I realized for the first, mind-bending time in my life that I was a foreigner on this continent. In their low-lying, flat-roofed house made of adobe and rock fragments, James and his family lived seamlessly with the wild desert around them. According to Hopi legend, humanity failed to appreciate and therefore destroyed three previous worlds. The Hopi had been given the desert this fourth time around and were grateful for the privations of the arid climate. It reminded them to stay within their limits and avoid making the same fatal mistakes.

Not to say that the Hopi were less provincial than any other tribe, including ours. When my friend introduced me to a group of the village elders, I was as naively reverent of them as any white, twenty-eight-year-old Carlos Castañeda aficionado would have been. A man in his nineties who was revered by everyone motioned me to his side. Had the old man seen something in me that promised I would be especially receptive to his wisdom? No. Apparently he’d misinterpreted my interest in him as flirtation. He grabbed my hand and pulled it toward him with surprising force, like an old crab creakily dragging carrion toward its mouth, except his destination turned out to be the fly of his khaki pants. So much for my dream of becoming the first woman ever allowed into a kiva. As he pressed my palm into his crotch, I jerked free. The old guy must have thought he “could have had” me right there.

Some things, I guessed, were the same everywhere. But other things were so different it was hard to believe that the Hopi and we
were members of the same species. James’s village was formed in 1906, the same year that my Carlson grandparents traded the Texas land they’d homesteaded for Kansas land—as my mother liked to say, “sight unseen.” A chart graphing Hotevilla’s and our progress would have diverged rapidly from that year forward regardless of what you measured. Standard of living, as defined by our culture, up, up, up for us. Horizontal for them. Crop yields up, up, up for us. Horizontal for them. Groundwater reserves down, down, down for us. Horizontal for them. Biological diversity of the plants and animals we shared our land with down, down, down for us. Horizontal for them.

That was the main difference between the Hopi and us. They were okay with horizontal. We were not.

7

I
T TOOK ME A YEAR AND A HALF, BUT
I
FINALLY GOT MY OPPORTUNITY TO RESTORE NIGHT TO OUR FARM.
An electrician came out to raise the wire between the shop and old sheep barn so that Dad’s new seed drill could pass beneath it when folded up for transport. Surreptitiously, I had him install a switch on the light pole. He said no one had ever asked him to do that before.

Because it had rained recently, the pump engines weren’t running the night I turned off the mercury-vapor light. The darkness, therefore, was doubly sweet. Starlight glazed the road somewhat, but I couldn’t gauge the distance between my eyes and the ground. Each step I took felt like an act of faith. Remembering how juniper, yucca, and cactus had billowed out at me like ghosts during my nighttime walks in the Mojave, I tried on my wilderness mind-set. Imagining the blackness around me as unfarmed prairie filled me with a sense of limitless possibility.

“The strangest thing,” said the new hired man’s wife the following morning. They lived across the drive in a new double-wide that Dad
had entrusted me to order for them. “Did you notice that the yard light went out last night?”

I told her that I’d turned it off and that I hoped to keep it off from now on. “Won’t it be nice to step outside at night whenever you want to and look at the stars?”

She stared at me as if I’d lapsed into a foreign language. “I wish you wouldn’t turn it off,” she finally said. “That light’s for see-cure-i-ty.” She drew the word out in the explanatory way you might use with a small child.

This was the same hired man’s wife who had invited me to a Tupperware party. I’d sat with my legs folded demurely in the circle of women who were as careful not to say anything they couldn’t live down as the women in my mother’s ladies’ club had always been. In most rural communities, you keep your private business private and you don’t express any views that might upset or alienate your neighbors. It hadn’t been like that in the Mojave. Once I’d gotten together with Stefan and began circulating more, I discovered that people there argued about politics and gossiped openly. You had to be pretty free-spirited, I guessed, to live in the Mojave.

But in Kansas, women carefully tiptoed around one another. All we talked about at that party were our gardens, the weather, and our parents’ health. I took a slip of paper from the bowl handed around, to see if it had my birthday month written on it, in which case I would get to take home a free lemon-squeezing contraption. I competed to see how many words I could make from “Tupperware.”

“Weep” came first to mind. Probably a reason for that. Did the other women bluff their way through those gatherings, pretending to be entertained by the small talk, while boiling inside with ideas and unspoken needs for true connection roiled within them? How did they keep from exploding?

For the double-wide, I’d ordered a fireplace, a pretty built-in hutch, and oak trim—niceties that Dad had balked at. “Because you’re cheap,” I’d said. “Jesus, Dad, give them something to make it homey.” He forked over the cash because this new man was young and smart and
experienced—promising management material. Dad’s heart was not getting any stronger. He would not be able to run the farm forever. So I left the yard light on after the hired man’s wife asked me to. Dad needed a manager more than I needed darkness, especially now that I had been having traitorous thoughts again.

•   •   •

“
A
H-AH-AH.”
E
ACH SUMMER NIGHT, THE BABY SOUNDS
Jake made as he lay in his crib playing with his toes kept rhythm with the “
grr-rr-rr
” of the pulsating pump engines. I would sing the lullaby I’d written for him.

Jake’s a little cowboy, yes he is.

Someday he’ll ride a horse named Biz.

Biz’ll be a red horse, big and strong.

He’ll be Jake’s best friend all day long.

Maybe at harvest time I would go out to the field and choose an ear of corn to lay beside him, as James had told me the Hopi did, so that the Corn Mother might protect the little one. There would be no need to search for a perfect ear. They were all perfect. Would that fact render my gesture meaningless? Or worse, bestow a curse instead of a blessing? I knew what gave those ears their look of perfection. Sometimes a menacing chemical odor wafted in through my windows, as if carried on the engines’ growl. I would scurry through the house, slamming the windows shut, then stand over Jake’s crib, as helpless as if bombs were dropping.

I wished I could give Jake a childhood like mine. I wanted him to know how to grow vegetables; understand where meat came from; hold snakes as they wrapped around his arms; be tickled by the toenails of lizards, salamanders, and box turtles; hand raise birds, mice, ground squirrels, and cottontails; slop hogs; pluck chickens. My brother Bruce liked to point out that I’d never milked a cow, which was true. In fact, all I’d done on a regular basis was ride the big wooden barn gate, spooking the cow, causing her to kick over the pail and step on Bruce’s toes. But Clark had shown me how to milk a few times and I knew the
warm, scaly feel of Rosebud’s teats in my fist and how to pull them alternately, causing the milk to flow.

I wanted Jake to have that sensory grounding, to be of a place in a real way, integrated with the other creatures that lived there. But not even the ditches were safe for wildlife anymore. If Dad didn’t mow them or scatter poisoned bait in them to kill grasshoppers, the county sprayed them to kill weeds. The sheep were long gone. Jake would never be asked to climb into the barn rafters above the giant gunny sacks Dad hung at shearing time and jump into them to compress the wool. He wouldn’t emerge with lanoline coating his skin or be, for reasons such as that, entwined with other-than-human life on a cellular level. He would never know the sound of a thousand ewes and twelve hundred lambs milling in the corrals, their
baas
as divergent as human voices—some high, some low, some scratchy, some clear—a chorus of comfort when he might otherwise feel alone. And I certainly wasn’t going to marry a farmer and give him any siblings to play with.

Light cast by the mercury-vapor bulb seeped in around the drawn curtains—sickly blue, as if contaminated by the chemicals that hovered in the air. In desert darkness, I had experienced danger of the enlivening kind, not this danger of the deadening kind. What would happen to my heart, to my mind, to Jake’s and my bodies, if I chose to stay on?

From my journal:
Sinclair Lewis uses the verb “enfeeble” to describe what loneliness does. What a perfect word for the almost physical diminishment loneliness causes
.