The Road Home Read online

  My feeling of being baptized maintained itself when I got back to our campsite at the edge of the fairground, though there had been a momentary urge to track Smith to downtown Lincoln. I had overheard some farm boys talking about a saloon on the far side of the city where girls danced without their clothing, a fascinating prospect, but possibly not serious enough for someone who had just had his sacred calling reaffirmed. If only that Frenchwoman had been there to guide me, I thought.

  I had been at the campsite only a little while when my parents appeared, well out of my own mood of ethereal scornfulness for those in the other rows of tents who were obviously unaware of a higher sort of being in their midst. My father was as happy as I had ever seen him. The Hereford bulls we had rented out to other farmers and ranchers had proved spectacular, and their progeny had won many prizes at the cattle show. He fairly danced around the little fire where my mother was brewing coffee. I hadn’t the heart to play out my newfound artistic mood of high purpose because I could not recall seeing him this happy. There was also the thought that the bull I had shot in late spring might have been even more valuable than previously supposed as he was out of the same sire as the others. We had a nip of whiskey in our coffee, my first with him, and then my mother noted my large sketch pad which I had been careless enough not to conceal. In a rush I told them all of my ambitions, including going off to Chicago, and they became quiet and ruminative, with my mother staring off to the west as if discovering a new meaning there.

  It took a while, right up through dinner, in fact, for us to strike a bargain. I would be allowed to go to art school in a year and a half when I became sixteen, if I promised to try Cornell College, my father’s alma mater, the following year. To pass their entrance exams I would have to bear down miserably hard on my studies and abandon my wild and irascible habits. I nodded in agreement to everything that would facilitate my going off to art school at sixteen. After fixing us a simple dinner my mother had leafed through each empty page of the sketch book as if imagining what belonged on it. She said, “Get kahnah” which meant birds in Lakota and I was obliged to draw her a meadowlark from memory at which point she did an imitation of the song of the meadowlark which startled those lounging in front of the tent nearest us. Well off in the distance, in the late summer twilight, we could hear the calliope music which seemed as beautiful to me then as Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony does now.

  I think of it as the best evening of our lives together. It was a specific moment of relief and leisure—for my parents from the extended Lakota “Götterdämmerung,” and for me, the subsiding of anxiety over telling them I wished to be an artist, certainly an uncommon ambition for one from my background. There was none of the strident middle-class reaction against the fey and wayward son one reads about, but then, despite his avowed sin of greed and her homely preoccupations, they were scarcely bourgeois. They were their own peculiar class.

  Later that evening we joined a group of Swedes and a growing crowd at a dance down at the end of the rows of tents. There were fiddles and concertinas and some young men had made a grand fire out of pilfered railroad ties. There were all manner of immigrant farmer groups including Bohemian, German, a full Scandinavian mix, and plain white, stolid Nebraska farmers and ranchers, though not the most prosperous sort who favored the downtown hotels during State Fair. My father had been always treated with some suspicion for being on the wrong side of the “Indian Question” though there was the usual respect given to the prosperous, and he rarely if ever got to mix in with ordinary folk as he did that evening. Everyone drank from barrels of beer and danced to the polka music until they were dense with sweat and exhaustion. I heard the last of the music at dawn from our tent. I didn’t know how to dance but had done so with every one from the old and fat to the young and fetching. The mood of the gathering seems so distant from our present day when ranchers and farmers make parodies of their virtues for the public sentiment. There was still a raw and unforgiving exuberance then in a place that had only been a state for thirty-three years.

  I was disturbed from my maunderings by Lundquist’s knock. He had been making sure that the barn plumbing was well wrapped in anticipation of a predicted freeze that was to be especially bitter for October. He brought in a kettle of his “stew” from the pick-up, a mixture of dried salt cod, potatoes and onions, and I regretted telling him that Frieda had called to say that she would be another full day down in Lincoln, the Holy Ghost himself having visited their church gathering which was requiring an extra day to discuss the incident.

  “That Frieda takes her religion to the nethermost,” he said, slumping at my bidding into a chair. Though he had been working for me and we had been friends since soon after Armistice in 1919 he would not dream of sitting down in the house without being asked to. I poured him a stiff whiskey and he went to the kitchen for his requisite water so as not to insult what he called his “stomach juices.” I called out to have him bring Shirley, his little dog, inside out of the cold which he did gladly. Shirley got along well with the Airedales who rolled her around with their noses, the kind of peculiar game dogs make up on their own.

  While Lundquist was washing up I put his stew on to heat, adding some garlic and hot pepper. He knew I did this but chose to ignore it, announcing invariably that his “momma’s” recipe always tasted better at my house. He would also never accept a glass of red wine without a brief comment on the idea that the beverage was “papist,” usually followed by grumbling that the atomic bomb had changed the weather for the worse, and that all politicians bore the Mark of the Beast, the latter contention not difficult to agree with. On all things agricultural, however, he was absolutely knowledgeable and current, his life’s biggest announced disappointment being that I had lost interest in both the subject and its practice, having essentially put our place to rest after John Wesley’s death.

  It is difficult indeed for us to accept others and ourselves at the level of our intentions without noting the disparity between them and the way we actually live. Lundquist seemed an exception; his innermost and outermost thoughts were the same, full of a quirky originality of perception. He would begin a sentence railing against war profiteering and finish it by naming a half a dozen different birds’ nests he had located for Naomi. Though his formal schooling was as brief as mine, he was especially pleased that Linnaeus had been a Swede. In a somewhat unkind trick I had once loaned him Strindberg’s memoirs which troubled him. “That fellow had himself confused with God,” Lundquist had muttered, not an inaccurate assessment of tormented Strindberg. His only vaguely immodest gesture was his ability to run up the side of the barn using a rope hanging from the mow door, an improbable feat for a man past fifty, and one he’d only perform when Dalva and Ruth teased him into it. He early startled me by saying of both my Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis paintings, “He’s got it just right,” while he found nothing of particular interest in Thomas Hart Benton or Charley Russell. We quarreled over Benton and it turned out that Lundquist felt he was overly familiar with much of Benton’s material and preferred paintings that “rattle my gourd.” Despite his Christian faith he saw nudes as “the glory of God,” a matter over which he and Frieda disagreed.

  What I mean to say was that Lundquist was always what he intended to be, but unlike so many matter-of-fact people, he had intense empathy for the more troubled in mind. I had overheard through the porch window his explanation to Dalva about whether animals went to heaven, a matter which had been bothering her. He told her simply that he had dreamt of seeing cows, horses, snakes, chickens, coyotes, lions and tigers, all up in heaven drinking sweet fresh milk from the same huge golden bowl. That was proof enough for him and he hoped it would be for her.

  Looking at him across the dinner table while he rocked and cooed at his mutt Shirley, I was struck again by the evils of primogeniture, the manner in which farm property in the old days was transferred to the oldest son to keep the results of the hard work intact, leaving the other sons to wander through
life as hired hands or shop clerks. It was partly the source of the Populist unrest, this large population of the disaffected. Lundquist was a brilliant farmer destined to never own a farm, just as the most capable “top hands,” cowboys, ranch managers will never themselves own a ranch. It was my own father’s almost errant providence that “blessed” me as the religionists say, so that even in the worst days of the Great Depression I could readily buy land, or travel to the Kentucky Derby, the Dublin Horse Show, or lay in the best Bordeaux. My older son, Paul, who is somewhat estranged from me, accepted his mother’s money which turned out to be considerable, and John Wesley was to receive this farm and my own other holdings. I left off my spending ways when John Wesley enlisted in World War II. I kept the farm going for the war effort though it was more Lundquist but I lost heart so great was my fear for my namesake’s safety, only to have him die in Korea. Thousands of times I’ve cursed the day I took him for a ride in a barnstormer’s plane in the late twenties. I lost my beloved son to machines, but then we are in deepest error when we think our children are truly our own. We may have problems forgiving others, or ourselves, because life herself has never forgiven anyone a single minute’s time. I think of my blood brother—yes, we performed that childish rite—standing there in the cold potato field.

  I am chastened to discover that my forays into wisdom are less interesting than Lundquist’s new batch of home-smoked bacon. He stopped by this morning with a slab, disturbed to find me out in the bunk-house without a fire, sitting at the desk and thinking about this, my first studio, and the pathetic sign that once hung on the door. ART STUDIO NO ENTRANCE.

  We tested the bacon with a critical palate as others do at wine tastings. Lundquist had also brought over a jar of his fresh-grated horseradish root he mixed with a bit of vinegar and heavy Jersey cream. We also had eggs and his eyes were red with tears from the dollop of horseradish. We decided a beer was appropriate though it was only midmorning. He was pleased when I announced the bacon to be one of the best batches ever. He had added extra applewood to the hickory to give it a fruity zing, totally unlike the bacon available to the public trough.

  This was a breakfast fit for an active farmer so we saddled up two peaceful mares for a chilly ride to avoid falling asleep in our chairs. We headed across our southwest pasture, known as Smith’s pasture because that’s where he badly fractured his nose in a rough game we played as children. You sprint up to a heifer, grab her tail and give a jerk, seeing how long you can hold on as you’re dragged hither and yon at a gallop. You grab the tail as far back as possible to avoid the flailing hoofs. A wise cow had refused to run, and backed up with a kick, making a mess of Smith’s nose which gave it the appearance of the Indian on the nickel. My father set the bone, first giving Smith a dose of opium that he rather liked.

  The late autumn fields reminded me of Millet, a banal painter but that’s what the fields helplessly looked like. We joggled along, half asleep in the saddle. Lundquist had Shirley nestled just behind the pommel where she liked to ride, barking occasionally at the Airedales coursing out in front of us. They had been chasing after the same female coyote for years and I had supposed they meant to kill her, but then out the kitchen window in September I had seen Sonia hunting mice with this coyote in the newly mown alfalfa.

  I reflected that from this same saddle had hung a soft leather bag kept spread by alder stays that carried my first sketch book on my rides. My father gave it to me for that purpose when we had come home from the State Fair. He said it had been made from elk skin that a Lakota woman had traded for with a Cheyenne during one of their peaceful intervals when they were collectively angry with the Crows and Blackfoot after Little Bighorn. My father had kept botanical specimens in this bag and I was astounded when he showed me his notebook drawings of plants right down to their root hairs, as fragile as spider webs. I asked him if he had ever drawn a human, and he said no, but that he wished he had drawn his first wife, Aase, whom he’d been married to only briefly before she died of tuberculosis, then he could still look upon her face on occasion. I said nothing of my similar wishes for Willow, but I remembered that at the time he became less a towering and remote adult than a fellow creature. We scarcely think much that our fathers loved as much as we.

  If only Willow would send me a letter, I thought at the time, but then I’d never seen her read or write and doubted she was up to a letter. Of course I had vowed never to love again if it were to be the source of so much pain, unmindful that a scant ten years ahead a love would come along that made my sorrow over Willow look idyllic. On a cold spring day one ached for summer, and on a hot summer afternoon, one ached again for the first chill norther of autumn. I had begun to think it was central to my character and number of years to ache. I hoped it would be useful for my art, but had grave doubts about how one would get this ache into a sketch or painting, the latter being beyond my possible dreams at the time.

  I only gradually became conscious that Lundquist was talking and my horse was drinking water at the spring. I said that the watercress was dead for the year, hoping it an adequate response as Lundquist took umbrage when not listened to carefully.

  “Don’t be in such a hurry to be off in the clouds. You’ll get there soon enough.” He was immediately fond of this witticism and repeated it. It was less amusing for me what with the recent tremors of my heart. He then gave me the gist of what he was talking about which was a paragraph in a recent Nebraska Farmer by a research veterinarian to the effect that if all the dogs on earth were left in free concourse, soon enough all dogs would be medium-sized and brown.

  I looked at Shirley and the Airedales and too readily agreed for Lundquist’s taste because I saw this contention leading us into the type of sump that I found tiresome. Any cattle- or horseman has elaborate notions of breeding programs that would drive a layman daffy with boredom. I had bred all too many fast and pretty horses that would kick their way out of a trailer, bite barn cats, become frantic in the full moon and jump sky high at a bird shadow. Gene programs required good sense rather than romantic greed. Man o’ War was a conditioned plan that also managed to breed a thousand unlike himself and relatively worthless.

  There was a recent fire ring up the creek bank that caught my eye and Lundquist followed my glance. It wasn’t trespassers he said but that Dalva got a rare A on a test and Naomi had asked him to bring her out here to roast frankfurters over a fire, her desired reward. Lundquist then said her behavior frightened him and he prayed she’d become a more ordinary girl. This irritated me and I said we had quite enough of those, whatever they are. I could fairly see his mind clicking off her somewhat troubled genealogy, including myself, my father, her father all wild-eyed for the machineries of war.

  I studied relentlessly hard all that winter with cold mornings devoted to the books, chores and sketching off horseback in the afternoons, and more studies in the evening. Often, rather than my prescribed work, I’d ready my Scribner’s or the little art books on Rodin, William Morris, or Millet my father had ordered by mail. Nearly everything was disappointing and incomprehensible to me, especially John Ruskin and Henry James. With my meager background all of the attenuations of emotion in Henry James meant no more than a pond at the back of our property that Smith and I had viewed as bottomless. I had the gravest of doubts about whether I was up to snuff and turned for solace to his relative William James, and a piece he wrote called “The Consciousness of Self.” I liked the part about the “Empirical Me” and how the self may preserve its integrity. That was close enough to home to be understandable. Any nascent artist must pump up their ego so they can function in an area that no one feels comfortable in until later years. You have selected yourself to be someone extraordinary and you must manufacture enough mental fuel to carry you along, which for one so young and unlettered and unpracticed as myself could be a grim chore. My confusion was further added to by the article on art in the 1895 Britannica where many quotes were in Latin, and an idea of Shakespeare had been noted to
the effect that “art was nature, too.” How the hell was I supposed to make nature, something that I actually knew about in all of its grand permutations in that my father taught me about every weed, flower, type of grass, tree, shrub and all of the habits of the creature world in our area?

  I simply had no gift for abstract thought at the time and what saved me were the countless afternoons of sketching which was a visceral act, along with guiding the horse through snowbanks or through slush puddles, or finding a sunny canyon out of the chill wind to sit down and study the appearances of things.

  I had received a brief but jubilant note from Davis on the glories and temptations of the Art Institute and Chicago that ended with “Where are the sketches?” referring to my promise to send my work for criticism. Oddly, I suppose, this was the first piece of truly personal mail I had received in my life. I fearfully sent him a batch, adding with a scarcely felt braggadocio that I was sure I was ready to start painting. It was a full three weeks before the reply came, by which time I was a moping chunk of raw meat. He pronounced my drawings as mostly average with a few that showed promise, adding, “You must sketch years before you begin to paint. The eye and brain know the appearances of things whilst the hand doesn’t. The hand must be trained to follow our most fantastical notions of all the varieties of what we see in the world.” He also said that he was living with a beautiful woman of twenty-five years which meant I couldn’t share the letter with my parents though I certainly read them the part about my showing promise.