The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (5 page)

As much as I’d tried to hold back tears, my eyes weren’t cooperating. Ward leaned forward. “I know you don’t want to be held, but will you please scoot a little closer?”

I wriggled my chair toward the bed but not close enough for him to touch me.

He dropped his hands onto his lap. “Okay. Jesus. I really hurt you, didn’t I?”

I nodded, unable to speak.

“I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m so sorry. But I thought you wanted it to go fast.”

I looked at him in disbelief.

“You know, last night, when you said it was good to rush? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

I felt my anger begin to fade. Could it be he’d really taken that literally? “I didn’t mean wham bam. I meant why not go for it? When you’re feeling passionate, why wait?”

“You see, Julene, I totally misunderstood that. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to sidestep this, but you could have said something. You could have slowed things down or stopped them altogether.”

But I had tried! At least I thought I had, with my body language. Apparently, my signals had been too subtle for Ward. What did a man like him need? I expected nuance in lovemaking. It was supposed to be mutual, intuitive, a communion. Yet why hadn’t I asserted myself more? Insisted even? Maybe
that’s
what threatened me—my own failure to stand up for myself.

“Will you come here, please? Lie down with me, let me hold you?”

I looked into his contrite eyes. “I don’t want any kisses.”

“That’s not what I want right now either.”

I lay down with my back to him, but there was no way to hide the emotion coursing through me. It was pouring out of my eyes. He put his arm around me. “Will you ever run out of tears?”

“I don’t know where they’re coming from. I hate that I’m acting like this.” Clearly, my heart believed that the lonely years were behind us, that finally we could open again, but it was too soon and too dangerous to act this way.

“Without your tears, I’d be on my way home by now. I never would have known how you felt. And this is the only place I want to be.”

“Me too,” I admitted, amazed at the truth of it. I thought, I am lying here with a man who isn’t shaped right, for me. He doesn’t think right, as far as I believe. He lives in a place I can’t return to. And yet I don’t want him to leave.

I sighed. “There’s too much against us. We live too far apart. I’m
not going to work on sex with you. And I’m not going back to Kansas. I left all that ten thousand years ago.”

“This may be a corny thing to say, but I don’t really think we have a choice. This is bigger than us.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, as if unconvinced. But what else could explain my inability to get up from the bed?

“Besides,” Ward added. “My place might be different from what you think.”

“I already know what your house looks like. I bet it’s full of knotty pine and pictures of cowboys on horses and that you use horseshoes for coat hooks.”

“Okay. I guess you do know.”

“I’m a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club.”

“So?”

“I have friends who are gay.”

For a second, he didn’t move or breathe. “Am I supposed to be shocked at that?”

We laughed together. He said, “Before you list any more of your faults, would you let me hold you for a while longer?”

“My faults?”

“Or mine. Which have you.”

I rolled over and laid my head on his shoulder. “I think that door that slammed shut this morning is opening.”

His chin moved up and down against my forehead. “And for once in my life, I have the sense to go through it.”

“What would you have done in the past?”

“I would have run.”

I nodded in self-recognition. Wasn’t that what I’d spent the morning doing? At the first indication of a problem, I had turned tail. But a strange miracle had taken place on this bed. It had been like Alice’s precipitous fall down the rabbit hole. On landing, we’d both found ourselves in an alternate universe, and now it was as if we’d inhaled some secondary smoke from the caterpillar’s hookah. I’d lain down of one heart and now I was of another, willing to work on anything.

When Ward took my hand and led me down the stairs, it was as if every cell in my body aligned itself in his direction. It had been so long since a man had taken my hand with confidence and led me anywhere, so long since, if one had tried, I would have been willing to follow.

The sun was setting and he had five hours to drive, cows to check on and horses to feed. Jake might come home any minute. We said our good-byes on the porch, and I watched the taillights of his Continental until he turned onto the bridge that would lead him to I-80, the old Oregon Trail. He would travel east into Nebraska, then drop down the Ladder of Rivers, to his home on the Smoky.

5

O
N
T
HANKSGIVING MORNING,
J
AKE SLEPT AS HE ALWAYS DID ON OUR TRIPS TO
K
ANSAS, A PILLOW WEDGED BETWEEN HIS HEAD AND THE WINDOW GLASS AND THE QUILT THAT HIS GRANDMOTHER HAD STITCHED FOR HIM WHEN HE WAS IN KINDERGARTEN WRAPPED AROUND HIM.
It barely covered his upper half anymore. His dirty ball cap had fallen off, revealing his patchy Mohawk.

As I drove, I snatched glimpses of the dawn-gilded Never Summer range. The mountains had all the luster I’d wished for that grim afternoon the month before when, unloved and unsaved, I’d returned to Laramie and my imperfect life after rushing out of the Denver hotel. But Ward had followed me, then left me caressed and transformed. Ever since, I’d taken a new lover’s delight in beauty. The gray-green rabbit brush against a gentle pink sky and the ponderosa pines and boulders dusted in snow made me downright nirvanic. I could hardly resist waking Jake. “Behold!” I wanted to say.

For the last several years, especially since my father died, I had dreaded holidays in Kansas. They never delivered all I wanted for Jake, all I thought he needed. But for the last two weeks, I’d been giddy about
this approaching trip home because I would finally get to see Ward again. It had been difficult not to share my excitement with Jake over the past month. So far I’d told him little. He knew only that I’d met Ward when I went home alone in August and that he was coming to dinner.

Jake finally unfolded from his cocoon as we dropped into Fort Collins, the town north of Denver. “Morning, sleepyhead,” I said.

“Morning.” His tone was still laced with grumpiness from having to get up so early.

“Your grandfather went to ag school here when it was a little college town. Now look at it, all condos and McMansions.”

“I like our house better,” Jake said.

“Man, me too.”

“Can I drive?”

“After Denver. Let’s wait until—”

“Whatever,” he said, before I could remind him of the tricky interchange coming up. He turned toward the window and a new sleeping position. He was wearing one of the white undershirts he’d stenciled with the day of the week. This one said Sunday, even though it was Thursday. It had brown stains and a tear where he’d ripped out the label. Only by pleading had I gotten him to wear plain jeans, not the pair he’d drawn psychedelic designs on and refused to let me wash.

What would Ward think? I hoped that he had enough wisdom to see past Jake’s clothes. I hoped that he could read his eyes. Jake had the kindest, brownest brown eyes. He hadn’t been very kind to me lately, but that was to be expected at this age, wasn’t it? It comforted me that his teachers still praised his compassion, saying it was surprising in a boy.

After we’d rolled onto the plains, I dutifully exited at Deer Trail, a tiny town east of Denver. Jake took the wheel, and I tried not to seem too observant as he pulled onto the interstate.

He thought he was invincible. Closing my eyes, I imagined him standing on an on-ramp like this one, army-surplus pack on his back and his thumb out, going in search of his father. While I would do
anything I could to prevent that, he didn’t believe in the dangers I warned him about. And his desire for a father had been relentless ever since he was a toddler. Only when he hit his teens had the yearning become less evident, but I knew it was there. He still had a child’s trusting heart, open despite the pain that had been inflicted on it.

Jake’s father had sent him only a couple of letters over the years and had phoned only a few times. Then he deigned to visit him once, when Jake was twelve. He’d planned to come through Laramie anyway, with some motorcycle buddies. He was several hours late. It had pulverized my emotions to watch Jake wait for his dad’s arrival. Then, when Stefan decided not to stay for the weekend as he’d promised, I’d had to watch Jake’s joy turn to disappointment. Stefan was having engine trouble. Worried that he would break down, he continued on with the others.

Jake flicked on the radio and tuned it to his favorite Denver station.

“Not too loud,” I said, although my newly opened heart was receptive to virtually any music. I grooved on the head-banging rhythm and raw emotion in the angry male voices. Their vocal cords might have been ground glass. Let it out, I thought. Feel it.

When the low-wattage station faded, it was my turn to choose. We sang along with “Eleanor Rigby,” Jake’s voice hitting the high note in “
where do they all come from?”
with ease. I missed the note every time, but neither of us cared. We were getting into the holiday breakaway spirit, thank providence. We could count on a car trip as recess from the mother-son wars.

Halfway between Denver and the Kansas border, I could still see the snowy cap of Pike’s Peak hovering ghostlike in my side mirror. Otherwise, nothing but smooth grasslands defined the circular horizon. The land lifted and fell gently, meandering along dry streambeds. Two pearlescent cloud wings stretched toward us from our destination, where morning rimmed the earth in turquoise. The dry air evaporated haze, giving the sky its clarity and inspiring a feeling in the chest that the early Plains explorer Richard I. Dodge described best:
the magnificence of being
.

“I love this point in the trip,” I said.

“I know,” Jake said. “You always tell me that.”

All flesh is grass
, it said somewhere in the Bible. Grass makes flesh, and a century and a half ago we would have seen herds of antelope wheeling over the land like flocks of birds, as we often saw them do in Wyoming, veering suddenly to pour down a valley or around a long, low hill. But the only grass-turned-flesh we’d seen that day had been cattle.

And as we approached the Kansas border, all I could tune in on the radio was a moralizing talk-show hostess. “What did you think would happen when you married an alcoholic? Alcoholism is a disease, Emily, a disease. Do you remember your vows? In sickness and in—.” I cut her power off midsentence.

“Amen,” Jake said. Noise from the Subaru’s leaking windows filled the silence.

The land was flatter now, and the grass had vanished. The earth had been human stitched into a patchwork of monotones—squares and circles of bare dirt, corn stubble, and winter wheat. Many of the fields had irrigation sprinklers. Some of the sprinklers were running, unusual this late in the year. The High Plains were in the midst of a drought, but having the Ogallala Aquifer to tap into was like having a goose that laid golden eggs. Except, of course, we were doing what people always did, killing the goose.

Ward was a rancher, not a farmer. An important distinction. Much of his land would be in grass. In a letter, he’d described his place
as honestly as I know how
, saying it looked, at first glance,
like any damned ol’ farm
.

Why our ancestors thought it necessary to plow up most of the prairie, I’ll never understand. I’m just thankful that I do own some grass. You can still ride a horse here and imagine it the way it used to be and was meant to be. I can’t wait to show it to you, Julene
. That longed-for moment was upon us. I would see his place the next day. Finally. His hand would envelope mine again.

“So are you going to marry this guy?” Jake asked.

Had he been silent all this time because he was mulling over the radio diatribe? Had he connected that poor Emily’s husband to his dad, whose drinking had led to our divorce, then to “this guy,” who, as far as he knew, could be a drinker too? “Gee, Jake,” I said, “we’re nowhere near that point. For now, I just hope you’ll like him.”

“You think I will?”

I paused. “I want you to, but I can’t promise.”

He greeted this with no words, only silence that I could read too well. I reached across and squeezed his shoulder. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, sweetie.”

“Thanks, Mom. I know. I don’t have to like him. I just want you to be happy.” He blessed me with a smile.

•   •   •

S
HORTLY AFTER CROSSING THE
K
ANSAS BORDER, WE
exited the interstate. With a population of five thousand, Goodland was the largest town since Denver. We shot past the new Walmart Supercenter, which had put all three grocery stores and half the other stores on Main Street out of business.

After the Farmer’s Co-op, where my dad used to fuel his pickup before heading out to the farm, we zoomed over the railroad tracks past peeling white grain elevators, then threaded the grid of square corners and straight streets. Paint had weathered off the older clapboard houses. Many had for-sale signs in their front yards.

The town was as predictable as tic-tac-toe. On the west side came Sherman Street, then Custer. Naturally, I thought. Two generals in the war against the Plains Indians. The settlers had named the county after Sherman too. I’d never made the connection as a child, but this seemed entirely appropriate to me now. The army’s chief commander had taken the flat, arable land from the Cheyenne and delivered it to us on a silver platter.

We rumbled down brick-paved Main Street. When I was Jake’s age, Goodland had been a bustling town. Back then mannequins with aquiline features and long, expressive hands posed in the many
clothing-store windows. The only downtown store that sold clothes now was a Penney’s. I pointed to the fried-chicken take-out place. “You won’t believe this, Jake, but when that building was a shoe store, they had an X-ray machine you could stand on and look at the bones in your feet. I must have done it a hundred times.”

“No kidding? It’s amazing you didn’t get toe cancer or something.”

“We used to eat there,” I said, pointing to the once elegant, now seedy, Waters Hotel. We would go on the rare Sundays Dad had joined the rest of us for church. I remembered linen tablecloths, heavy silverware, and other diners stopping by to tease my father.
Did she have to bribe you with dinner to get you off the farm, Harold?

“If I could eat like this every Sunday, I’d become a holy roller.”

The store where we’d bought our first TV, when I was six, had been taken over by a Mexican vendor of candies and other “
cosas de México
.” Mexicans had come with irrigation, to hoe weeds from between row crops. They’d stayed and prospered, in relative terms.

The previous summer, when I’d dared mention my concerns for the Ogallala to one of our old farm neighbors, he’d warned that I shouldn’t knock irrigation. It had been “good for Goodland.”

I’d nodded politely. I didn’t want to alienate this old family friend, who took time out of his busy schedule, running a large farm, to pay regular visits to my mother.

“If they’d put through that zero depletion,” he said, “you could shoot a bullet down Main Street and not hit anyone.” Zero depletion had been a water-control policy proposed in the early nineties that would have reduced the amount farmers could pump until the withdrawal rate reached a sustainable level, meaning no more would be taken out of the aquifer than rain and snowmelt returned to it each year. The plan hadn’t gone over well among irrigators, but having completed our tour of Main Street, I could see that a bullet’s hiting anyone was less likely than ever before.

Goodland was dying despite irrigation, and to some extent, because of it. As irrigators drained the aquifer, irrigation drained the countryside of farmers. In order to pay for sprinkler systems—and compete in the
depressed grain markets caused by overproduction, due partly to irrigation—they had to “get big or get out,” as Ezra Taft Benson, President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, had famously advised farmers to do. My aunts and uncles who’d sold their land and left in my early teens were among the many lacking the will or the means to get big. So they got out. The stores had gone the way of the farmers.

I glanced at the clock. Eleven a.m. We were close. A few more blocks to the house, then one hour before Ward was due to arrive. My heart swelled with my unbelievable good fortune. Who would have thought I could love a rural Kansan?

As usual, Jake failed to slow down for the dips that served as the newer east side’s drainage system. We almost bottomed out on one of them, and the tires squealed as he rounded the turn at the First Christian Church, with its swooping roof. Our journey ended as it always did, at Mom’s house. “Where’s that smoke coming from?” I asked. I opened my door, peered under the car. “Oh my God! The tires are on fire.” My brother Bruce had arrived before us, I saw. His “road hog,” as he called his twenty-year-old Pontiac, was parked at the curb.