The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (29 page)

He took a gulp of coffee. “You’re not going to let me do this, are you?”

“Let you? It’s not up to me.”

“Don’t stand in my way!” he shouted. Somewhat inadvertently but also somewhat purposefully, he tipped over the chair he’d been sitting in, dumped the remainder of his coffee in a bougainvillea bush, and left.

That night I knocked on Bruce’s door.

Kris opened it a crack. Her protective instincts had kicked into full gear. Behind her, Bruce sat on the bed, hunched over his guitar. “Come in,” he said resignedly, that jagged edge to his voice. Kris opened the door.

“I cannot bear to look upon that which I have wrought,” he confessed.

“That which Harold wrought,” Kris corrected.

She was right. Dad had placed a guilt bomb in each of us and set it to explode shrapnel in our brains if we ever contemplated selling. Bruce had merely detonated the bomb.

I said, “Our kids aren’t equipped for it, Bruce.”

“Why not?” he almost shouted. “Maybe Josh will surprise you. Maybe Jake will.”

“That’s what they think, but we didn’t raise them in the life.”

“That’s exactly why they want it,” Bruce said. “Anyway, it’s out of my hands.” He got up and reached into the room’s refrigerator. “Want a Presidente? Bottled right here in the Caribbean.”

“No, thanks.”

He sat down with a groan, opened his beer, and picked up his guitar.

I returned to my room. Mom had her yellow hairnet on, which matched her yellow nylon nightgown. She looked fragile, but less so than when we’d first arrived. The trip was doing her good. Her back didn’t even seem to hunch as much. She had the beginnings of osteoporosis, but was trying to stave it off with the calcium tablets she chewed with every meal. “I think I’ll sit up and read a little,” she said, getting one of the
Newsweek
s she’d brought from her suitcase. She flicked on the lamp over the corner stuffed chair. “I’m not very tired tonight.” Unlike everyone else, she seemed undisturbed by Bruce’s news. Not much bothered her anymore. This calm was not solely the product of her habitual repression. She seemed to have entered that state of saintly acceptance achieved by the most gracious of the elderly.

Bruce’s Dylan-esque voice reverberated across the stone tile of the hallway.
From this valley they say you are going / We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
.

Mom leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “My,” she said, “isn’t Bruce getting good on his guitar?”

He’d probably been anguishing for months over this decision. Kris was right to be protective of him.

•   •   •

A
BBY WAS FEELING PROTECTIVE TOO.
T
HAT NIGHT
when I joined her at the bar, she said, “The farm was going to kill Dad, and now it’s going to kill Josh. I won’t stand for that!”

“Oh come on, Abby.”

“I mean it, Aunt Julie.”

“Your grandfather survived until he was eighty-two.”

“But my dad is not Harold. Thank God! And neither is Josh.”

“Nor is Jake,” I said. Although he’d apologized for his anger earlier, this was the first night he hadn’t come out to the bar.

Abby took a drag on her cigarette. “Nor Jake. It will kill them and we can’t let that happen!”

“Those are just clove, right?”

She leaned down to reach into her purse, her blouse so tight and
low cut that I wanted to suggest she go put on a comfortable T-shirt. “Be natural, be wholesome,” I wanted to say. But she was well into her twenties, the man-alluring years. And judging by the stares of the young island men sitting near us, she was succeeding. Their white shirts and loosened ties indicated they were clerks, free for the remainder of the night from their jobs in nearby hotels. She sat up, handing me a cigarette. I said, “I quit again a year ago. But this won’t do any harm, right?”

“No, you’ll be fine.” With a bar match, she lit the slender, delectable, brown cigarette for me. “I could go back there and do it,” she said. “I’m smart. I could manage it.”

It amazed me how strong the call of farm duty was in the kids. Except for a couple of years when she was little and Bruce was attempting to work for Dad, Abby had never lived on the farm. The complete animaled and peopled Carlson farmstead that Bruce and I had grown up on was ancient history by then. But Dad bought her a goat, Schwanlea, that she loved. Schwanlea and her grandfather’s passion had apparently been enough to ensnare her too.

“I would go and do it if only to save Josh,” she said. “But who would I ever find to love me there?”

“I can tell you from experience. No one.” Ward had been a grass man, not a dirt man, I reminded myself. He had not been the answer to this dilemma. There was no answer except complete personality changes and sacrifices none of us would be willing to make.

“Maybe you could do it, Abby,” I said.” But you’d have to really want to. You’d be throwing away all hope of a social life, and forget about your real career plans. And you would hate the chemicals and the irrigation as much as I do.”

She reared back on her barstool. “Oh the folly!” she shouted at the palm fronds above us. The island men laughed, and I resisted putting my hand on her arm.

“The sheer unadulterated folly! Folly, Aunt Julie—I know you know this—is totally nonclassist and doesn’t care which old patriarchal noggin it invades. Whether it’s King Lear’s or Harold Bair’s.”

“Let’s move over to the pool chairs,” I suggested.

Once we were resituated, Abby picked up her theme. “Okay, Jane Smiley keyed in on it too, but it doesn’t take a genius to see, if you’ve read Shakespeare and you ever knew any old farming geezers like Grandpa, that they’re all on a power trip.”

I felt dizzy, as if I’d downed a barbiturate laced with speed. I looked at the brown wand in my hand. Was there tobacco in it? I’d thought they had only clove in them. Through a gap in the curtains, I could see Jake’s profile as he sat watching the TV. I didn’t want him to catch me smoking. I remembered the night we’d gone to the
Fellowship of the Ring
with Ward and I’d bought him a pack of Marlboros. Ward had reprimanded me, not for buying them but for complaining about buying them. “Cut it out,” he’d said, as if he’d earned the right to interfere. Only later, postbreakup, did Jake’s unannounced return to his grandmother’s the following morning make sense. How had it made him feel to see the only authority figure he could count on curtly silenced by the cowboy dude she’d gone all ape over? Which was the worse addiction, his to cigarettes or the one we shared to the myths attendant on dads? Which drug had I been pushing to the most ill effect?

I put the cigarette out in the same bougainvillea bush he’d dumped his coffee in. That poor bush.

Like Lear, Abby continued, Harold had been self-deluded about the incomparable value of his domain. “His estate,” she said, “meaning everything he had to offer, not just his land. His place in the universe. His mightiness.”

“Wow, you’re so smart, Abby. How’d you get so smart?” A tobacco high and my second beer induced a sisterly solidarity, along with a euphoric sense of tragedy.

“And of course, you know who played the role of Cordelia.”

“Me? That would be the obvious choice since I was the only girl in the family.”

“No. Dad did. Bruce. Your brother!”

“Oh right. The falsely judged, least rapacious one of our lot.”

“
More sinned against than sinning
. He tried to farm with Grandpa
because that’s what he loved doing more than anything else, growing things. Look at his gardens. He has ripe tomatoes in June! Not even Grandma has ripe tomatoes in June. But Grandpa treated him like a slave, so he resorted to newspaper work. I’m sorry, Aunt Julie, but you got help from Grandpa. Dad didn’t.”

It’s demoralizing to learn a sibling’s opinion of you from his child. How widespread and solidified had this version of ‘Julie’ become? “Oh Abby. Your father doesn’t know how much I hated having to go back home.”

“All broke and pregnant?”

I downed my beer. “Exactly how I like to put it.”

“And you didn’t have a wife to support you,” Abby said, conciliatorily. Bruce had lived off Kris’s wages for a while after he quit small-town journalism.

I felt around in the bougainvillea pot.

“I’d give you another, but I’m all out,” Abby said. As she went to reposition herself on the lounger, her foot shot out and kicked over her beer, breaking the bottle.

“God, Abby, you’re drunk. Don’t cut yourself.”

“I won’t. I guess you weren’t exactly Regan or Goneril either. And I don’t think Clark was, certainly. He didn’t take anything, just disappeared honorably, as Cordelia did. Actually, you were all Cordelia. All any of you ever wanted was to make him proud.”

“True.”

“Me too, Aunt Julie,” she pleaded.

“Oh Abby.” I reached and she leaned into my hug. A sob escaped her. With one hand, I pushed her long dark-auburn hair behind her ear, dropping its weight onto her back. I rested my hand on the corsetlike blouse she wore. The flesh over her shoulder blades felt cool—soft and foreign. I wished I’d held her more often when she was a child, wished we had all lived closer. I knew how she must have suffered, as we all did, glimpsing displeasure in Dad’s glances. She had a brilliant mind but wore a few extra pounds. Dad judged women primarily by their physical characteristics.

Perhaps that’s why I’d dreamed of him dressed as Pablo Neruda. I’d always longed for some refinement in him—the understanding of each of our souls that would have come with that.

That night, Abby and I figured everything out for everybody. We would sell the farm. I would invest the proceeds, continuing my role as the family’s money manager. The boys, if they wanted to be family heroes, could learn a trade, then we could set them up in business together. We could buy them a house to renovate in the central Kansas town where Bruce lived. He could supervise the first project, and then they’d be on their own.

It all sounded so sane to me then, after two beers and one clove cigarette.

2

A
BBY’S AND MY PLANS FOR
J
AKE AND
J
OSH NEVER MATERIALIZED.
Jake said he wanted to try farming, so I encouraged him to demonstrate his eagerness by moving to Goodland. He could show up on the farm every morning and make himself useful. I would clear the way for him—arrange it with Ron, help him find a house to rent, and then help him move. Understandably, he didn’t take me up on that offer. It would have required uncommon determination and self-confidence to go down there and foist himself, a green beginner, on Ron, who could not have hidden his disdain. Those raised in the life don’t respect those who weren’t.

Josh and Lace broke up, and the cable company he worked for promoted him and transferred him to Corpus Christi, where he could go scuba diving every weekend if he wanted to. He met a woman, married her, and his daughter, Jess, now had a baby brother. Josh’s new wife was a showy dresser from the Dominican Republic. She lived in a sea of family who’d immigrated to Corpus Christi. Imagining her in the old farmhouse or in the double-wide, surrounded by fields of corn
and wheat, was as absurd as picturing a toucan roosting among the pigeons in our old sheep barn.

The summer after our trip to the Turks and Caicos, I found my own new love. My attraction to Jim, an engineer who lived and worked a two-hour drive south of Laramie, in Colorado, was rooted in my wilderness passions. We swam in mountain lakes, paddled rivers, camped and skied together. Jim also shared my politics, and when we danced, our bodies moved in natural rhythm, like two ocean waves.

On our second date, for a swim in Lake Hattie, I happened to ask Jim if he knew my cousin’s ex-husband, who, like Jim, had once worked for Hewlett Packard. I didn’t think it likely, as Jim said there had been more than fourteen hundred employees at the Colorado division when he worked there. It turned out that my cousin’s husband had once taken Jim pheasant hunting on his mother-in-law’s—my aunt Bernice’s—land in western Kansas. During the trip they visited a farmstead that had a couple of Quonsets, a barn-shaped house, and a double-wide trailer on it. Jim distinctly remembered meeting an old man on that farm. They’d talked for quite a while. For an atheist who once compared what happens when we die to the fate of a jack rabbit hit by a car—
Bang! When you’re dead, you’re dead!
—my father sure had an uncanny way of making his presence felt after his own death.

After dating Jim for a little over a year, I sold my beautiful old house and moved to Colorado to live with him. Almost immediately I made new friends, many of them writers whose work inspired my own.

My professional horizons had widened and I was in a committed relationship. So when Bruce e-mailed to say he’d “had about enough”—of farming, that is—and that a real estate agent he’d been flirting with said he had a “hard offer,” I believed I was ready to let the farm go as easily as I had Laramie and the beautiful old house.

I thought I understood things so much better now. How lucky I was that I hadn’t moved back to Kansas to be with Ward. I recalled the dream I’d had after Clark died. At first I had tried to put a pleasant spin on it, thinking wasn’t that nice? Clark was protecting Jake from falling off that seed drill, the same way he used to protect me. But the
dream’s vibe had been grim, not reassuring. And I knew it had been about all of us, not only Clark and Jake. To be born in Dad’s lineage was to be conscripted into subliminal servitude to his passions. When Ward broke up with me, I reasoned, he saved me from a fate worse than my own death—accompanying my father into his. I still believe this. But today I know that you can’t cast out your demons with one decisive or, as it would be in Bruce’s and my case, indecisive act.

That supposedly hard offer didn’t come through, but Ron’s emphysema had gotten so bad that he now needed oxygen in order to sleep at night. The “end game,” as Bruce called it, was on. We both thought we should sign before what was obviously a national real estate bubble collapsed, but neither of us was ready.

Despite his apparent certainty in the Turks and Caicos, Bruce now wrote in an e-mail that he was
having a lot of problems dealing with the sale of the farm as it has given us all nice lives
. For a man in my family to say he was having a lot of problems with anything was like my saying it was tearing my guts out, which it was.

When we finally signed, the real estate agent succinctly boiled the work of our parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes down to thirteen words:

SHERMAN County

21 Quarters irrig., dry land, grass,

CRP. Nice improvements. 5 wells.

The farm stayed on the market for a year before we had an offer, for a third less than we were asking. “I am not going to give it away,” Bruce said.

Another year went by. Then Congress passed a new energy bill upping the percentage of biofuel required in gasoline. The main source of that, given the cropping patterns already established, was ethanol from corn. Ethanol distilleries sprang up in the Midwest and on the Great Plains, and corn prices began to creep higher. It had also begun to rain again.

At night, across the land, along with toad song in the prairie
potholes, droned the snores of once sleepless farmers, their dreams overflowing with burgeoning grain bins. The people who’d made the first offer came back with a higher one. Still too low for Bruce, and our accountant warned it would be risky to carry the note for the buyers, who had never farmed on this scale.

Even though I could see it would be a gamble, I argued for accepting their offer. If we were going to commit identity suicide, I wanted to pull the trigger and get it over with. But I needn’t have worried, or perhaps I should have, because the revolver’s chamber clicked forward and within a week came a third offer, fully loaded. The amount we were asking, in annual installments. It came from three brothers. They were megafarmers headquartered in a little town not far over the Colorado border, where they had a big feedlot. Altogether they owned one hundred sections—one hundred square miles. I didn’t like the idea of the farm’s being absorbed by such a huge operation and suggested that our other prospect should be granted an opportunity to counter. But the accountant and bank officer who oversaw Dad’s trust took comfort from the megafarmers’ solid financial statement, assuring us that an operation that size would never renege on the loan. The consensus was that we shouldn’t let them slip away.

•   •   •

B
EFORE WE COULD REGISTER THE SOUND OF
the hammer cocking, Bruce and I found ourselves in Goodland for the final negotiations. We met at Mom’s house, although she didn’t live there anymore. On one of my visits, she and I had toured Wheat Ridge Acres, the appropriately named local assisted-living place. In the dining room, she ran into some farm neighbors she and Dad used to play pitch with on winter Saturday nights. That comforted her, and in her usual reasonable manner, she had agreed to move. She’d remained reasonable throughout our discussions of the farm sale too, compassionately reiterating that “Harold foresaw this. He said it would be all right.”

In advance of this day, I had e-mailed Bruce, suggesting we have lunch together in order to come up with a negotiating strategy. “I’ll go,”
he said now, “but there’s no way to wriggle out of this. We signed a good-faith contract with the agent, remember? And he got our asking price for us.”

“I didn’t say anything about wriggling out of it.”

We must have planned to pick up Mom after lunch. That must have been why we took her car. I chose one of Goodland’s only bows to the yuppie aesthetic, a restaurant in an old brick building overshadowed by grain elevators on the north end of Main. It had big swaths of plateglass I’d never noticed before, probably because the windows had been heavily draped back when it was home to the Moose lodge.

I’d always been curious about what went on in the town’s male hangouts—the pool halls, for instance, that I’d envied Bruce for frequenting as a teenager. Surely, he was having way more fun in them than I would ever be allowed to have in Goodland.

I marveled at the building’s splendor, for this town. An embossed-tin ceiling painted a sumptuous chocolate-brown. A new wood floor. Was it ash or birch? A copper countertop. “Where do you want to sit?” I asked.

“I don’t care. Anywhere.”

A corner table seemed appropriate, given that we had private business to discuss. All week long, ever since I’d heard, I’d been reviewing my reasons. I had no faith in our ability to replace Ron, as I remembered too well the many hired men who had become fired men in our childhoods. Renting would be no less of a gamble. What if the renter didn’t work out? Even if we were physically able to farm ourselves, which we weren’t, we wouldn’t have the equipment anymore to farm with. Equipment depreciated rapidly. You couldn’t just let it sit in case you might need it again someday. If we heeded what the climate scientists were saying, the drought might return soon and settle in for decades or longer. And I’d taken Bruce at his word in the Caribbean. He needed to quit, for his happiness and to lower his stress. If he continued, then got sick or died, what would I do then? Even if I had the know-how, I didn’t want to run the chemically intensive, water-guzzling farm our place had become.

Bruce flipped open his sandwich, sighed with disgust, and scraped off the feta cheese and dried cranberries. I said, “So I was thinking, we don’t have to roll over and take whatever terms they offer. If you have any doubts—”

“I invited Ron to the meeting,” Bruce said. “I know he doesn’t have a direct role in this financially. But we owe him that. I don’t care what you think.”

“Of course we owe him. I want him there too.” Bruce and Ron had become close over the last ten years of working together, and Bruce had always bent over backward to be fair to him. Ron probably had one of the only profit-sharing agreements in Sherman County. That treatment would have elicited anyone’s loyalty, but Ron would have given it to us anyway. He was made that way. Bruce had once told me that he and Ron were alike—a type of plainsmen who hardly existed anymore. Bruce was too original to say “dying breed,” but he might as well have. Me too, I had wanted to tell him. I’m one of us too.

He was eating his sandwich as if it were a chore. “The terms are fine,” he said, dismissing my whole reason for wanting to talk. Because really, maybe it wasn’t too late. All we’d have to do was put up a fuss over a detail. Demand an extra half point of interest perhaps. That’s if Bruce wasn’t 100 percent on board. There had been that one e-mail when he’d done an about-face in the middle of a discussion of real estate agents and land values and had put forth what must have struck him as a brilliant idea: He would continue managing the farm if I would grant him 51 percent ownership so that I couldn’t sell it out from under him when Mom died.

Although I’d been offended at the thought of his having all the say, the idea had appealed to me somewhat because it would have granted me a reprieve. I wasn’t sure who I was going to be when this was all over. But the thought of Bruce taking on the farm, given his age and previously stated concerns, didn’t inspire much confidence in me.

I said I would make it easy for him to buy my half if that’s really what he wanted. He replied that the proposal had been just a backup plan in case we couldn’t sell.

What I hadn’t understood was the inordinate power that uncertainty cedes to certainty, even if the certainty is just an act.

So here we were. Me with my unfailing appetite. Bruce dutifully chewing.

“We’re going to have to find places to put all the money,” he said.

“I’ve been working on it. My financial guy says we can make five percent even if we—”

“Five percent how?” Bruce asked.

“CDs, except—”

“Five isn’t that good,” he said. “The farm did better than that every year for the last—”

“I wish you wouldn’t interrupt me when I’m trying to explain something.”

Bruce abruptly shoved his plate aside, then got up. Without saying a word, he walked out the door. I watched through the remarkably large, remarkably clear glass beside me as he tossed the keys through the open window of Mom’s LeSabre.