The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (9 page)

“Was this where Dull Knife came through?” I asked.

“No, they think it was west of here. I’ll take you there sometime, but this afternoon I have other plans for us.”

Mmm. Other plans.

•   •   •

W
ARD’S PLACE—A NARROW, TWO-STORY HOUSE WITH A
garage tacked on to it and a bunch of outbuildings beside a wooden windmill—looked like a ranch to me, not
a damned ol’ farm
, as he’d lamented in his letter. The place had an old-timey feel and, positioned on a bluff overlooking the Smoky, was far more romantic than a farm. To see the valley, we had to walk behind the house, which his uncle had built facing the road instead of the river, and through a maze of weathered wood corrals, where several horses searched the ground for strands of the morning’s hay. From the edge of the bluff, we looked out on the mile-wide bottomland.

It was the kind of low-key vista that could thrill only a native Kansan whose eye had not been jaded by mountains or the sensational. “Thrill” is probably the wrong word. “Satisfy” might be better, or “fulfill.” Not even in my childhood had I seen so much uninterrupted prairie. This is what the Indians saw, I thought. There were no buffalo, of course. All of those had been wiped out by hide hunters—with the encouragement of the generals overseeing the Indian wars, who knew full well that the natives couldn’t survive long without their food supply. “You kill the buffalo, you kill the Indian’s commissary,” General Philip Sheridan had cynically recommended. But the grass was the same grass that had supported the immense herds, and the trees and yucca were the same trees and yucca.

Where the cedar shelterbelt didn’t break our view, the aspect in the other directions alternated between square expanses of young, green winter wheat and lusterless stubble on the fallow ground, interrupted by remnants of frost-cured buffalo grass along the serpentine gullies. Even if surrounded by farmland on three sides, the place had a “poky” feel to it. That word, one of Ward’s favorites, described a certain lazy, western quiet that emanated from where cowboys lived. Here the pokiness was evident in the iron dinner bell beside the door, the solid round corral made of cottonwood limbs, the cattle-loading shoot, the brand some welder had worked into the filigree above the front gate, and the hitching post beside the garage, which Ward had converted into a tack room. I especially liked the quiet. The concepts of peace and quiet go together for good reason. I breathed the quiet in, letting the peace run through my veins.

All of the outbuildings were white stucco with green trim like the house. I appreciated the congruity. The place was a home, not a grain factory like our present-day farm. I was never able to explain to my father the ineffable qualities of old farmsteads that hadn’t been demeaned by corrugated-tin sheds. “Farmerized,” Ward called it.

I saw that the branches of nearby trees had scraped shingles from the house’s roof. The rain gutter was beginning to come off. The green
trim was peeling. He was a bachelor, I reminded myself. What had I expected?

Reading my expression, Ward said, “I’ve got a list. The house has never been very near the top.”

He followed me as I took in the downstairs, recently cleaned. “It’s nice,” I said, half lying. Both the dining room and living room walls were hung, as I’d predicted, with reproductions of famous western paintings. I did like the yellow Formica-and-chrome table and chairs in the kitchen, but the olive-green linoleum and walnut-stained cabinets with the copper handles gave me the creeps.

I began mentally remodeling, tearing up the turquoise carpet in the living room, sanding and varnishing the wood floor that was probably suffocating beneath it, widening the front entrance that Ward said he never used.

“And now for my lair,” Ward said. After a steep climb up a narrow stairwell, we stepped into an L-shaped sitting room that held a big recliner, a rolltop desk, and a large TV—I’d feared that his TV would be large. Coved ceilings and the overstuffed chair gave the room a cozy, nestlike feeling. The walls were real knotty pine, unlike the paneling I’d talked my parents into for my room in the Goodland house. Shelves lined one wall. The Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, every book in Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series. Things Ward must have read in childhood.

There were several adult books too. All of Hemingway, it looked like, most of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nothing by Faulkner, a serious oversight for someone of the masculine-classics bent. Dickens. Some Michener. A few recent bestsellers.
Angela’s Ashes. Cold Mountain. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
What conflict had led a former girlfriend to suggest that one?

Women authors were poorly represented except for a complete set of Ayn Rand. Oh boy. Social Darwinism. Capitalism as the natural winnowing by which superior men triumphed over their inferiors. Rand’s high-spirited Dominique Francon finding her alpha male in
Howard Roark. I looked down the hall. At the far end, a door stood open—his bedroom, I assumed. The edge of a green porcelain sink gleamed inside the nearer doorway. When my parents had remodeled the farmhouse, they installed green bathroom fixtures. Suddenly, it all seemed too shabbily intimate.

Like anyone who’d had a happy childhood, I was a little nostalgic, but a sense of desolation overcame me when I considered what it would be like to live in the same county where I’d grown up, in a house that my uncle had built. How could Ward stand it? What was I doing here? Why would I want to reenter my dead past?

“Brr,” I said.

“Cold?”

“Just a little.” My clothes were damp from the drizzle.

“We’ll have to take care of that.” Ward must have seen my eyes stray to the shelf. “I know I’m out of date.”

“I went through an Ayn Rand phase,” I said.

“I got excited about her in college, but I’m still an eager learner.” He pulled me to him. “It’s just I haven’t had a teacher.” He said this into the hair over my ear, turning my spine into an electrified rope.

There was more to a man than the books on his shelf. Besides, Ward didn’t buy many books. He’d told me he read mainly out of his little town’s library. That’s where he’d run across my book. Unfairly, I’d led him to apologize. I backed out of the hug. “I’m such a snob, and you’re so open-minded.”

“Oh yeah. That’d be me all right.” He walked down the hall, stopped beside the bedroom door, and turned to wait for me. He wasn’t smiling.

My tongue thickened, and I could feel my heart beating as I brushed past him into the room. The oak-slatted headboard, chest of drawers, and dresser were so dark from age that I first thought they’d been stained black. The dresser had an oval mirror like the ones in old Westerns. Navy-blue curtains framed the room’s one skinny window. The venetian blinds were turned open, permanently, I suspected,
because what did it matter? The closest neighbors lived more than a mile away. Through the dirty glass, I could see the valley.

Say things worked out between us and I moved here. First, I would remove the blinds. Wash the window. How impressed Ward would be to see me on an extension ladder outside his house. Perhaps someday we’d enlarge the window opening and hang French doors onto a little balcony. . . .

He was standing beside me. “Julene,
Julene
,’’ he said, pulling me close and searching for a scent on my neck. Perfume wasn’t my thing, so to distract him, I turned my face up for a kiss. He gave me one, deep and all consuming, but when my body began to conform to his, the way water does to rock, he put his hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the mirror. “Later, sweetheart. I want to spend the night making up for last time. Look at how beautiful you are.”

Now that I understood his game, I didn’t mind being redirected. I would anticipate and savor him all the more. The mirror, hazy with its own age, blurred and flattered us. “We look good together,” I said. In the low light, our hair was exactly the same color, blond without a hint of silver.

“Now here’s my plan.”

Following Ward’s instructions, I went into the bathroom, started the water in the green tub, peeled off my damp clothes and put them outside the door. How good the hot water felt! I hadn’t realized how chilled I was, but he obviously had. While I languished in the bath, letting the warmth seep into my bones, he put my clothes in the dryer, then deposited them outside the door.

“Better?” he said when I came downstairs.

“Much. Thank you.” In warm, dry jeans and my soft velour sweater, I felt nothing less than well loved.

“Okay then. Let’s see some sights.”

9

P
LUM
S
PRINGS TURNED OUT TO BE AN IDYLLIC PRAIRIE TOWN WITH A MUCH-MALIGNED AMENITY.
A hill. Ward said that the locals complained because they had to walk up it every so often—when they were children and climbed it on their way to school or, later, when their pickups broke down. I loved the place for that hill, and for the view from it of untrammeled, rugged prairie.

He pointed out his parents’ white frame house on the end of Main, where the street began to curve down into the Smoky Valley. We’d been invited to a dinner of Thanksgiving leftovers, but Ward had told his mom he wanted me all to himself today. “I promised we’d come tomorrow, though. Everyone’s eager to meet you.”

We ate our “dinner,” which was lunch in Kansas, at a little drive-in restaurant. The only choice was between a hamburger or a “fishwich.” The fish, I knew, would be a square-shaped, deep-fried, codlike substance. I chose the hamburger and made the mistake of ordering it with mayonnaise. The bun was so soaked with Miracle Whip that it fell apart. I hate Miracle Whip. I wiped my lips with my napkin and resorted to eating the burger with my fork. Ward watched me, apparently amused.

“What a slob I am, huh?” I couldn’t say what I thought about the meal without offending him, and I was determined not to make the same mistake I had earlier, passing judgment on his books. Did he know how good he looked? He had changed out of his own rain-dampened clothes and now had on a button-up Pendleton shirt. The yellow plaid complemented his hair and mustache, and the chocolate-brown neckerchief he’d put on lent his black cowboy hat all the more dash. He wore cowboy clothes with flair, but I’d been happy when he told me that he considered snap-up shirts ridiculous. He wasn’t into country music either. Like me, he preferred the soulful, minor-key songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.

After lunch, we drove north, across the interstate that I’d traveled in the morning, onto a narrow highway, then onto gravel. We took more turns than I would ever be able to retrace on my own, finally stopping
beside an unmarked bridge. This creek was the Sappa, Ward informed me, the site of the Cheyenne Hole Massacre, which some people called the last battle of the Red River War.

“Want to take a look?” It was still misting outside and cold. He wore suede work gloves, and through them his grasp was the large-handed, firm one I’d yearned to feel again. It was a manly grasp, full of his own ego and volition, his own ideas of what we would do next.

We climbed a steep, yucca-strewn slope. Deep in the ravine, obscured by tree limbs, glimmered a circle of dark water, as placid and inscrutable as the eye of a horse. Here again the Ogallala was making one of her magical, life-giving appearances, this time in a death-dealing place.

“The soldiers rode in through there,” Ward said, pointing to a gully that dissected the hill opposite us. His eyes grew distant as he considered the ravine again. “Anyone camping down there would have been a sitting duck.”

I’d read about the Cheyenne Hole Massacre in a book Ward had sent me. The Indians had lost the Red River War, which they referred to as the War to Save the Buffalo. It had been fought south of the Oklahoma-Kansas border, and those Indians who’d camped here had been Southern Cheyenne refugees attempting to reach the Black Hills, where some bands of Northern Cheyenne still lived freely. As one historian put it, they had felt secure here, because this was the land their clans had hunted before being exiled to Oklahoma. They were the people, in other words, who had hunted the pasture hills where I grew up.

The book had included a list of the dead. They had names like Little Bull, Dirty Water, and White Bear. They had consciously taken their identity from the land, as I had done unconsciously in my childhood, from the very texture of the sand in the Little Beaver and from our craggy little canyon.

As the book was fresher in my memory than in Ward’s, I told him a few of the details that I recalled. The ambush had taken place in April, when the creek was near flood stage. The soldiers’ horses struggled in the crossing, alerting the Cheyenne. Half of the band
climbed out of the ravine and escaped. The half that didn’t were likely women encumbered by small children and the men who stayed behind to defend them. The lieutenant who led the charge claimed that nineteen warriors were killed and eight “squaws” and children. Cheyenne accounts claimed the reverse—twenty women and children and just seven braves. Of the lieutenant’s forty-four men, two lost their lives.

Ward said, “You can’t imagine how exciting this is to me, Julene. To be standing here. Talking like this.” Yes I could. Learning the history, we were filling in the blanks in ourselves. This had been a major event in a place where we’d grown up thinking that nothing significant had ever happened. Yet no one seemed interested in memorializing it. I’d seen no historical marker, not even the creek’s name posted on the bridge. A kid living on a nearby farm would have been as ignorant of the Indian past as I’d been.

My only awareness of Indians had come when my brothers or I found an arrowhead or when my father told his fantastical bedtime stories about a deep, mysterious hole in our canyon pasture. We couldn’t see it by day, but Dad said it opened at night.
These ol’ redskins live down there, and when the moon is full, they come out to hunt.

Today it intrigued me that my father had placed his Indians underground, as in the deep recesses of the mind. Where else could they have gone? They’d been thoroughly vanquished on the land they’d lost to us. When I’d read about manifest destiny in high school and my history teacher made it clear, with her patriotic ramblings, that she still bought into the dated concept, I had no classmates whose resentful dark eyes in dark faces might have caused me to question her. As the North Dakota author Clay Jenkinson pointed out, you could sense
a compelling edginess
in Nebraska and the Dakotas, where there were large reservations. Not in Kansas, though.
A plains state without Indians is a dull blade
, he wrote.

Yet the Indians hadn’t been vanquished from my father’s psyche or from mine. Looking down into the silent accusing eye of Sappa Creek, I felt a little more centered in fact and less in the void of denial. By the
simple act of beginning to learn the history, I was making slight amends. Not to the Indians—that would have been impossible—but to the violated principles of truth in my own heart.

Ward said, “Some of the history buffs I talk to think that when Dull Knife’s Northern Cheyenne came through this area three years later and killed all those settlers, it was revenge for what happened here. Others think it was just savagery. They say that even if the braves had known about Cheyenne Hole, they wouldn’t have cared about it. The Northern and Southern Cheyenne were two separate tribes.”

“That’s such bullshit,” I said. The braves had killed forty settlers. But they hadn’t raided anywhere else in their six-hundred-mile flight from the southern reservation. The attacks had most likely been waged here because the Cheyenne had in fact always viewed themselves as one tribe. They’d been split, north from south, only when the migration of whites began along the Platte River, on the Oregon Trail.

“Then the many paid for it,” I added. One hundred fifty of the Cheyenne who’d fled with Dull Knife were apprehended and imprisoned at Fort Robinson, in Nebraska. They refused to return to Oklahoma, so the commander ordered that they be deprived of heat, food, and water. They had no choice but to break out, and when they did, soldiers shot more than half of them, whether guilty or not of raiding, whether male or female, whether adult or child.

Ward bent down to examine something on the ground. I said, “I’d like to think that we’d be a little more discerning today, as to which people we punish for which crimes, but just look at how we responded to the World Trade Center attack.” Ward didn’t say anything. “I mean, some people can’t distinguish one Arab from another. Like our president, Ward. I know he’s your guy, but if he gets his way, pretty soon we’ll be fighting wars all over the Middle East.”

Ward stood and dropped a triangular stone into my hand.

“Wow,” I said, although I couldn’t see any sign that it had been chipped into that shape.

“He’s gonna go after any nation that harbors terrorists,” Ward said, squeezing my hand closed over the rock and bending down to look for
others. “What do you think we should do?” he asked over his shoulder. “Get together with Bin Laden and have a big powwow, talk it through?

It was all I could do not to throw his stupid rock at his butt. “You really don’t get it do you?”

He stood up. His mustache poked out over the upper corner of his wry smile. “It’s a dangerous world, Julene. We need to go after ’em wherever they’re hiding.”

“Don’t you see, Ward? A lot of innocent people will die. How is that different from what happened here?”

He put both hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “I hope that doesn’t happen, but there’s one thing I do know.”

“What’s that?” I asked, prepared for him to say he couldn’t go on seeing such a lily-livered liberal.

He winked at me. “I wouldn’t be worth your trouble if I didn’t have any reactionary opinions for you to correct.”

His ability to defuse a conflict would come in handy over the years—if there were to be years. “I guess I don’t have to convert you this afternoon, huh?”

“No, I guarantee you’ll have plenty of time for that.”

The drizzle had stopped, and puffs of gray cloud were lifting to reveal a clear strip of cellophane blue on the horizon. “Let’s look up there,” I said. Skirting sharp yucca spires, I climbed a wet cow trail up the hill. It was dotted in cedar trees. I’d read somewhere that these were isolated survivors from the last glacial period, when the world had been much colder. With Ward behind me, I pretended to search for arrowheads. What I really wanted was to cool off. Go lighter next time, I thought. He’d nailed it. It would take a while to loosen the hold his “reactionary” friends had on him. I poked along what looked like a promising embankment.

When I turned around, I caught Ward looking me up and down. Those eyes. They were lit up like green fire and contained a coyote’s wily lust. Had our disagreement aroused him? It couldn’t have been the shape of my behind that had done it. My voluminous raincoat made thoughts of it purely imaginary.

By the time we got back to the ranch, arms of mauve stretched
across either side of the sun, small and white in the west. The cellophane blue that had begun to show as we left Cheyenne Hole was an amphitheater now for the appearance of the brighter, bigger moon.

Ward cut the twine on two bales of hay and I went down the line with him, tossing the square flakes and being introduced to the geldings. “This is Sam, a yearling and a half. He’ll make someone a good roping horse.” Next in line was a blue roan. “Thankless, I call him. He’ll be on the truck next spring.”

“The truck?”

“To the sale barn. Terrible disposition. You can’t trust him not to bite or kick you if you turn your back on him. Of course in the sales book, I put their registered names.” These would no doubt include references to the famous stud in their bloodlines. Ward favored the descendants of Doc Bar.

Over a supper of rotisserie chicken we’d picked up, I learned that he ate off Styrofoam plates with plastic cutlery so he wouldn’t have to wash dishes. To avoid emptying the trash often, he kept a full-sized garbage can in his kitchen and lined it with a heavy-duty plastic bag. When I asked how he disposed of the bag, he said he burned everything in his own trash pit. I envisioned fumes from curdling plastic and Styrofoam widening the hole in the ozone layer.

“You use sunscreen?” I asked.

“Never have.”

“You might want to start.”

“Don’t have to. I wear a hat. Don’t take my clothes off except at night.”

I glanced meaningfully at the dark window, then looked right into the green fire.

“C’mere,” he said.

We dropped our shirts in the kitchen, my bra on the stairs, our boots in the den, and peeled off our jeans in the bedroom. When he didn’t make a move to turn on a dim light of some kind, I was afraid this was going to be another, wham-bam “get this over with cause it’s only for me and women aren’t really interested in sex” encounter.