The Road Home Read online

  A northern front came through and it was blustery but with not all that much snow. J.M. was worried and didn’t want her parents driving home for three hours in such weather but her father, like nearly all farmers, couldn’t be dissuaded from his plans. I’m always reminded in such situations of Thoreau’s notion that the farm owns the farmer rather than vice versa.

  The next day was quite cold, well below freezing, but clear and sunny and after seeing off his mother and her boyfriend Nelse and I took a long hike. We invited Dalva and J.M. along but they had the atlas and several other maps spread out and Dalva was showing J.M. places that she must visit. This seemed to make Nelse nervous and he waited for me out in the barnyard. On impulse he showed me his father’s secret place up in the haymow and it unnerved me with its vague spiritual impact, the ungulate skull hanging from the rope twisting of its own energy, and the view through the cracks of the barn slats having a striking longitudinal effect on the landscape and the bright sunlight through the cracks casting stripes down our bundled-up bodies. Who really was Duane, anyway, I thought, with so much obvious unrest in his spirit that he had made my own religion seem abstract. He had reminded me of a boy I had found repulsively attractive (this is indeed possible!) when I was but twelve and my dad had hired a group of traveling, farm-working Lakota to help us get in the potato crop. Our family was a bit dour and the Lakotas’ somewhat wild humor embarrassed us. Out my bedroom window I could see these Native men rolling their cigarettes in the evening. The whole group were bunking in the barn and of course were not allowed to smoke there. On the afternoon the harvest was finished my mother, in a rare good humor, made a venison stew out of an illegal doe my bully brother had shot. There was a fine bonfire in the barnyard so everyone kept warm while they ate. Though as I say I was only twelve at the time, one of the young Lakota with an especially hooked nose did a mock dance of a buck mule deer in rut, prancing vigorously around to the amusement of the others. He kept looking at me, recognizing in me the young woman I wasn’t at the time very enthused about becoming. I must say I felt an odd tingle in my stomach. He jumped even higher than J.M. did the other day. Several of the older Lakota women looked at me and laughed. Oh how I wished my family could laugh like these poor, ragged people did, but it never would happen.

  With Nelse and I exchanging leads we made a two-hour circle within the property with my thoughts only momentarily going in the unpleasant direction of the past week. We stopped to look at his cattle fences and the whole project struck me as a tad daffy. So much about the cattle business repulsed me that I didn’t want to listen to his ideas about seven-part rotational grazing, though my ears perked when he said his cattle would never see a feedlot. Feedlots inevitably reminded me of the photos of prisoner-of-war camps. I said something about how in the old days the place had raised prime beef for the carriage trade and he was momentarily wistful about his amateur standing. I fretted aloud about how his plan might not work out and he drew me up short by saying I shouldn’t devote the remainder of my life to worrying about my family. I said I’d try not to and laughed when I said that if you’ve raised enough chickens the idea of being a mother hen is not very attractive. It seemed a ghastly chore when I began feeding the chickens as a child and still does. Only Lundquist seems to enjoy raising chickens. He names them all.

  The sun wasn’t warm enough to melt the inch or two of snow and when we passed through a dense shelterbelt into a hundred or so acres of open prairie the effect was quite overwhelming. It was a portion of the property that had never been tilled and the indigenous grasses emerging from the thin snow cover were splendid indeed. I teased Nelse that he could build a fine sod house against the west shelterbelt border for protection against the prevailing winds and was startled when he said he had thought about it. There were fine bunches of prairie dropseed, switchgrass, buffalo grass and redtop which was especially striking against the snow. I didn’t come here often because for birding reasons I prefer thickets. I recalled with painful clarity when I had walked out here with Paul after a nasty argument I had had with my husband over some stunt flying he had done at the county fair. Dalva had just recently been born and Paul was freshly home from Brazil. That’s why we captiously named her Dalva, after a samba record Paul brought home called “Estrella Dalva.” I believe I was crying on the porch and Frieda was holding baby Dalva when Paul suggested a walk and when we arrived in this field I was amazed at how he could identify all the different indigenous forbs and grasses and wildflowers many of which had become quite rare except in areas that hadn’t been tilled or overgrazed.

  I came out of my reverie when I saw Nelse crawling around in the snow and cutting small thatches and bouquets of the wild grasses with a penknife and then tying them up with binder twine from his pocket. He said he intended to hang them from the rafters of his bunkhouse for decoration. He gazed at these bouquets as if they were great art and they probably were. At such rare moments men seem glorious creatures, as if magical personages in those ancient tales in the Book House, rather than the oafs and louts that have made the world such a problematical place.

  One warm evening in August when we were sitting on the porch swing actually holding hands Paul said, “My family never quite joined the world.” I didn’t say so at the time because I was waiting for what he might add but in my opinion his family never joined the world except strictly on their terms. I also could have said that included Paul himself, sitting there next to me with his mind seeing only his own ideas as if they were colored landscapes. My husband, John Wesley, volunteered for Korea in order to fly more technically adventuresome planes. To flout death on such a whim when you had two daughters seemed unforgivable at the time and still does.

  When we got back to her house Dalva and J.M. were still looking at maps though there was now an empty wine bottle on the table and J.M. was telling a story about a trip she made at fourteen to a big 4-H convention in Washington, D.C. Their local leader had managed to get himself arrested for consorting with a prostitute but had been widely forgiven back home because that was simply the kind of thing that could happen in Washington. However, jokes of all sorts would continue to follow this man, mostly out of his earshot except the subtler ones from his peers, so that he finally moved to Kansas.

  I went into the kitchen where Lundquist was fixing a clogged-up sink trap. His little dog growled and I gave him my customary piece of cheese, which caused him, as always, to twirl his slight body in pleasure. Lundquist, nearly invisible under the sink, recognized my shoes and began speaking his odd thoughts. For reasons best known to him but possibly not, the subject was my absent daughter, Ruth, whom he saw as “born” a music person the same way a young cousin of his over in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, had taken up the concertina when he was seven and never put it down. This cousin eventually became rich and famous playing for the large Polish communities in Milwaukee and Chicago, so much so that he was able to buy a new Plymouth every four years.

  I reflected on this a moment and readily agreed that Ruth was a music person remembering that when Lundquist had had free time and the weather was a little less than horrible he would sit on the porch and listen to her practice, even if it was only the metronomic torture of scales. It was his contention that in heaven we will only speak in music because of the hundreds of unmanageable languages on earth. Lundquist had long since wandered beyond faith into the arena of permanent certainty which was somewhat enviable to me.

  J.M. came into the kitchen and began deftly making tortillas, a talent she had learned from her Mexican-born mother. I smelled the pot of pork and green chile stew she had begun in the morning and it definitely cleared the sinuses. In fact while we ate dinner everyone sweated until their hair was quite damp except for J.M. She was embarrassed that she may have made the dish too hot but everyone loved it. Lundquist ate a small bowl before he left and did a spry little dance around the table. Nelse told a few engaging but I imagine bowdlerized stories of his adventures in the Southwest and Mexico including helping
an old couple butcher a steer so spavined that there was scarcely any meat on its bones.

  After dinner we sat before the fireplace in the den and listened to Glenn Gould who was Ruth’s hero. The music didn’t quite seem possible, whatever he played. Ruth had a photo of him in her bedroom playing with his gloves on. J.M. and Nelse had looks of blank affection on their faces and repaired to the bunkhouse early. Dalva and I talked desultorily about Nelse’s nomadic existence and whether or not he’d be able to settle down but our hearts were not in an attempt to predict his future. I felt an unworded quiver of doubt over whether my own hopes and prayers should be offered up to try to influence or control someone else’s destiny. I dismissed this theological question as being too onerous for my sleepy, after-dinner brain. Dalva’s eyes were drooping and I thought of her own nomadic life and though it lacked the concentrated amplitude of Nelse’s it had been pretty steady. I remembered some of our phone quarrels about her predilection for ramshackle cars when she could readily afford reliable ones. Of course I worried to no effect. Even now she was wearing a chamois shirt and old boots from her teens. It occurred to me yet again that our trajectories begin in childhood and are somewhat less movable than we wish to think. When tracing her life I’ve often thought that her grandfather had more influence on her than I did. There wasn’t a single normally male prerogative she hadn’t taken when the will had moved her. But then I cautioned this thought with my own plans for some wandering after the coming June when I retired. J.M. hoped to spend the summer here and had offered to take care of the garden whenever I was absent.

  Dalva wouldn’t wake up on the sofa so I found an old army blanket she cherished and covered her. I drove home in a white, glistening moonlight and saw Athell Dodson’s old shaggy male dog trotting down the road as if he had a purpose. I sat on the edge of my bed for a short while studying the moonlight without a single thought but of the crisp shadows the moon was casting. I said good night to my long-absent husband and he bid me good night with the soft voice of one nearly asleep.

  PAUL

  Christmas Eve 1986

  It is quite late and Naomi has gone to bed with no sense of an invitation for me to join her. How Christian in an odd sense. I had an errant feeling I might propose late this evening but then she made so much of her intentions of becoming a solitary traveler the impulse drifted away. I’ve always cared for birds but the interest never became an obsession to the point that I favored them over other species, including the botanical and human.

  I could easily blame myself as I made a list this summer of a dozen or so places she might enjoy and when I came back for a prolonged holiday stay I noted that her shelf of travel books had expanded. Dalva looked at me strangely for a short moment when I so willingly gave up my boyhood room to J.M. who seems much taken by it. J.M. teased me about the many misidentifications in a large stone collection but then I told her I was only seven when I began gathering it. I tried to give her my arrowhead collection but she refused, saying that it was much too valuable. This was a nervous moment but then she said that Nelse was surprised by how simply I lived down on the border. She was looking at my boyhood bookcase, most of the titles quite absurd, including Horatio Alger (Sink or Swim, Tom the Bootblack Boy), the Hardy Boys, the Tom Swift Series (Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle) and the unpleasantly influential Richard Halliburton who never stopped wandering the world until he disappeared (Seven League Boots).

  J.M. is what we used to call “fetching” rather than the more banal “pretty.” Along with Dalva she strikes me as the least defenseless woman I’ve met and she’s only twenty-two. I’d guess it’s her mother’s influence rather than her father’s in that he resembles millions of morose farmers who have begun to sense that the yeoman mythology is fleeing the earth. Of course J.M. also had to have had his unqualified support just as Dalva had Naomi’s and my father’s. In so many respects he was a monster but a splendid one in helping to raise her, unlike myself and J.W. who received so much of his anger and confusion. It’s as if with J.W.’s death he was beaten into the ground and emerged as a quite different human. It is proper to suspect conversions in general but this one became utterly convincing over the years. It made me ponder what our succession of wars had done to so many parents who sent off boys who were still half children in the parents’ own mind. I know J.W. packed his teddy bear for World War II despite being his father’s strident, male image in a way I could never be. A teddy bear and a photo of Claudette Colbert in a bathing suit. I once hid the photo as a joke and he was so bereft I immediately replaced it on his dresser after he bellowed at Frieda in accusation.

  My single, overwhelming regret about J.W. was a fistfight we had when I was twenty and he nineteen and he had taken me for a ride in his biplane and had done a series of stunts that had covered my shirt with a big breakfast. We began fighting the moment we landed for fuel in Grand Island and it took a number of bystanders and a huge mechanic to break it up. I was embarrassed to overhear an old man say, “Those Northridge boys are just like their daddy,” the absolute last thing I wished to be. I was already a junior at Brown (my mother’s choice) and wished to be a geologist and a gentleman, in that order.

  I recall only looking at my father’s art books furtively, not wanting him to confuse my idle curiosity with actual interest. I doubt at the time that he much noted the degree to which I was at war with him. I remember the ghastly moments at Brown when I first read about the Oedipal complex, laying the book down carefully and fleeing the library. Oh my God, I thought, is behavior that predictable, are my feelings really that primitive? The boy wishes to kill the father and have the lovely mother, Neena, to himself. The father has pillaged her and there are occasional bruises on her arm, not because he struck her she says but because his hands are far too strong. When we were very young he’d bend nails with his fingers to amuse us, and flop a calf for branding as if it were a small bag of grain. After much begging John Wesley got a Newfoundland pup for his birthday which grew to an immense size within a year. The dog was an idiotic pest and one day the cowdogs ganged up and beat him severely. From the kitchen window I watched John Wesley howling with tears and my father sprinting toward the pick-up with this immense dog under one arm. I always felt there was something unnatural and evil about such physical strength and that during our worst times he became some mythological ogre from a children’s story. Of course he could be charming for long periods of time and he never struck me but once and that was when I was sixteen and improperly baited him about abandoning his art and becoming a monster. He knocked me flat to the ground which made John Wesley very angry, then disappeared for several weeks. It seemed unforgivable but I soon forgave him, though he appeared never to forgive himself.

  Before mother died when I was in my early twenties I was repelled when she told me he had been a wonderful lover. At first I attributed the statement to the amount of alcohol she drank and the breadth of medication she used to go to sleep or wake up. We were at her family’s place at Wickford, Rhode Island, and I felt called upon to disagree, saying that being a wonderful lover had to be more than a physical thing. She said she had stacks of letters, many of them written long after they parted. I’ve always believed that what made them finally unsuited for each other was her sister, Adelle, who, long dead, was the most powerful influence in their lives. It was unfair to both of them but then one becomes puzzled over the word “unfair” in this century of relentless butchery. At Wickford there were many old photos of Adelle and she resembled a sensual version of Emily Dickinson. Of course this is after the fact but she certainly didn’t look like a survivor. Her daffy cousin, a crusty Brahmin old maid, said that Adelle had nearly drowned as a child and had never fully come back to life except in a distorted sense. As a geologist I am primarily a scientist and I certainly didn’t know what to make of this idea so simply stated over a glass of cheapish sherry.

  * * *

  A few days after New Year’s on the day that I intended to leave, Naomi knocked at m
y door at five A.M., well before dawn. Within a millisecond my heart moved up into my throat. She said nothing beyond, “I’m lonely.” There was a hard, blustery wind against the north window and I wondered if it was the weather that brought her to me, but quickly didn’t care as her creature warmth enveloped me. Afterward I told her we had made love as if conserving energy and all she did was laugh, then quickly fall asleep. I awoke when I heard her car start and her tires spinning in the snowy driveway.

  On my way out I had promised to stop at the country school and talk to her students about geology. I had tried to make some notes over coffee but the structure of the house began to disturb me. I was here for a short visit, freshly back from Brazil, when it was being built. It was rather too much like the old place for my taste though I didn’t let it show. My jealousy was too poignant to hand around. The year before J.W. had taken me for a ride a hundred miles west of here near Gordon so I could meet his young love, Naomi. It was a small farm but neat as a pin showing that the family owned some storybook ideals. By that time I had just graduated from Brown and thought of myself as quite the man of the world. I was addicted to sophisticated young women from the East but thought it was appropriate that John Wesley had found himself a farm girl who was being trained to teach country school. Naomi was helping her mother in the garden when we arrived. When she stood up and walked toward us I was frankly dumbstruck. Why couldn’t I find a Naomi for myself? The answer is because there is just one of each of us, both the question and the answer repeated numberless times over the years.