The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Read online

  Staring at me from my bulletin board was a self-portrait Jake had penciled on the back of an envelope when he was ten. It was an accurate portrayal of him then. The wide, clear forehead. His trusting gaze and crooked, close-lipped smile. No matter how much turmoil he’d put himself through lately, by resisting school, work, me, he was still fundamentally the same kid. Under his rebellion, the soul of him was trust. He and his generation deserved far better than what my father’s generation had bequeathed mine.

  Make that his children would deserve better. On the geologists’ maps of the aquifer, our county, Sherman, was still mostly orange, for reductions of 15 to 30 percent. It hadn’t taken me long to do the math, figuring how much water we had left on our farm if we continued pumping at current rates. About eighty-five years’ worth, I estimated. I would be dead. As difficult as it was to contemplate, so would Jake. We would have “gotten ours,” as my father liked to say he had.

  What I’d written moments before now seemed overblown. It had the same self-righteous tone I’d taken with my father when I was younger. But after inheriting part of the land I had always accused him of abusing, I had quit my teaching job. Thanks to the Ogallala, I was now able to write full time. I had no right to point my finger anymore.

  I went back and crossed out all the “he”s and put in “we”s.”

  • • •

  I WOULD STIR-FRY SOME BROCCOLI AND MUSHROOMS with hamburger. Jake liked that. At the front gate, I looked down the street, hoping to see his beater pickup approaching. Not yet. I opened the mailbox and was surprised to find not only the usual assortment of pizza flyers and bills but also a hand-addressed white envelope.

  Seeing the postmark, I smiled. So soon? Ward must have written and mailed it the day after we met. I hurried up to my bedroom, closing the door and locking it lest Jake return and interrupt me.

  Black fountain-pen script flowed confidently onto fire-orange paper. You may not have given a second thought to our chance encounter. I, on the other hand, have revisited it often. At the bottom of the page, he’d rendered a cowboy riding a sorrel in watercolors that strayed beyond the lines. The horse was about to gallop over a prickly pear cactus, in purple bloom.

  As I read, I felt as if I were the one being painted—back into vivid existence, coming alive to a type of excitement I hadn’t felt in years.

  Tap-eta, tap-eta, tap! Jake’s customary knock, his fingernails on my door. I leaped up.

  “Mom? Can I come in?”

  I shoved the letter under my bed and slid the lock open as quietly as possible. His hat was tilted back as if he were a real cowboy, tired from a day riding the range. “Why are you sittin’ in here with the door locked?”

  Caught. Sometimes I felt like the kid. “Old habit, I guess. Your Mohawk is showing.”

  Jake looked at me suspiciously. “You’re looking pretty punk yourself, Mom. Did you know your hair has a paper clip in it?”

  3

  I PULLED MY BAG ONTO THE ESCALATOR AND TRIED TO FIX THE PERFECT SMILE, NOT TOO EAGER, YET WARM, RECEPTIVE. We were supposed to meet by the fountain, but I wanted to be ready in case he was waiting where passengers first spilled into the terminal. Denver was about halfway between our homes, and I was stopping here on my way back from Omaha, where I’d presented my essay on the Ogallala at a literary conference. We would have a day and a half together, then I would fly the rest of the way home to Laramie. Not seeing him, I continued over to the “Mountain Mirage.”

  Clear, perpetual glacier melt, funneled down from mountain reservoirs, then forced through hidden pipes, spouted up from hundreds of holes in the marble floor. The water put oxygen into the air and soothed travel-weary nerves with the sound of itself. Elegant compared with the cow pond we met beside in August. We’d exchanged two long letters, then switched to cybercorrespondence. That’s when my disciplined morning writing routine had come unraveled. Ding! Better check. It might be a word from Ward.

  I allowed myself one slow scan of the crowd. Not seeing him, I began to wonder if I’d scared him off somehow. But he’d called me the night before I left for the conference and had sounded fine then. “I thought I’d better speak to you at least once before our date. Otherwise I’d get tongue-tied.” It was the first time we’d talked since we met. I had been worrying about the same thing. Take that word “date.” I was relieved to hear him say it out loud, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for two people entering their fifth decade to go out on one.

  It’s hard, I’d written, not to anticipate the whole soaring, predictable plot based on one charmed meeting. The same way we hum a whole song after hearing a single bar. Disappointment is inevitable.

  Why had I considered it necessary to hedge my romantic bets? I wondered. I regretted having tossed that discordant thought into the mix. It had caused him to agree, and that was the last thing I wanted.

  When it comes to the disappointment factor, he’d responded, my experience has proven you right, but I’m kind of like Pea in Lonesome Dove: “‘Though loyal and able and brave, Pea had never displayed the slightest ability to learn from his experience, though his experience was considerable. Time and again he would walk up on the wrong side of a horse that was known to kick, and then look surprised when he got kicked.’”

  For the most part, we’d stuck to safe topics. He wrote a gripping account of riding a runaway horse when he was a kid. It’s always been a mystery to me how it managed to brush me off on the only tree between the Smoky Hill River and Oklahoma. I’ve had plenty of near-death experiences on horses since then, but that one is still the benchmark. We recommended books on Cheyenne Indian history to each other, and I shared drafts of my essay. He’d proven to be a perceptive critic.

  I scanned the terminal again, a full 360 this time, then looked into the airiness overhead—the hollow undersurface of white peaks that were supposed to resemble mountains. No matter how distinctive the architecture, the scale of it dwarfed a person.

  Waiting for him like this made me regret the one confiding e-mail I did send, telling him that because I’d grown up twenty miles out in the country, I hadn’t developed many social skills. High school had consequently been rough—part of the reason, probably, that I’d gotten married so young, at eighteen. After that first divorce, I’d been shocked to discover I didn’t know how to make friends. I’d since become much better at that, but as I’d written, By myself in the house at night, with Jake gone somewhere, the lonely ache still creeps up on me sometimes, as if a door has been left open onto subzero cold.

  Waiting. What had he revealed in turn? He’d said that all of his past relationships had been good, even if none had lasted. What made them good, then? He wrote that trying to describe my abiding interest in horses would be like boiling a religion down to a few words. And in case you were wondering, as for religion, I don’t follow any standard-issue faith but firmly believe death isn’t our final end. I was glad he felt that way, I responded, although I couldn’t claim as firm a belief.

  Ward had been somewhat revealing when, in the interests of honesty in advertising, he listed his faults. He said that he procrastinated too much, and this kept him from achieving the degree of success he wanted. The admission worried me a little. He also confessed that his friends considered him very independent. I’m not proud of that, but there it is.

  Why does he consider that a fault? I wondered. I did take pride in my independence. When I’d told him about going back to Kansas to have Jake after my second marriage ended, had I given him the mistaken impression that I was of a more dependent nature?

  But courtship is a fine institution, he added. Had he been trying to warn me?

  I must have written something disparaging about conservative politicians, because he also said, I can tell from your last letter that we see things differently in some regards. We’d since acknowledged our political differences. Could we talk these out without rancor or insults? We
weren’t sure, but we were already committed to trying.

  Actually, we didn’t really seem to care what our differences were. It’s way too soon to be thinking the way I’m thinking, Ward wrote in his last e-mail, before he’d called. This is INSANE. What is going to happen when we wake up?

  I guess it’s this, I thought, letting out a huff of cynical despair. This is what’s going to happen. I scanned the high walls for a clock. How long should I wait for him? Fifteen minutes? Thirty? Then what? See if I could catch an earlier flight back to Laramie? I was like Pea too. Always walking up on the wrong side of romance. When had it ever not kicked me flat?

  Just as I spotted the clock and discovered it was ten minutes past the time we were supposed to meet, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  He stood grinning beside me, wearing a black cowboy hat. We hugged briefly. “I waited on the mezzanine,” he said. “Thought I could see better from up there. Then I missed you altogether.” His exotic eyes had a mischievous glint in them.

  Why on the mezzanine instead of where we’d agreed? He’d wanted to play me a little, apparently, and it had worked. The minutes of anxiety he’d put me through seemed deliciously excruciating now that they were over.

  • • •

  AFTER DRESSING FOR DINNER IN OUR SEPARATE rooms, we met in the hotel lobby. Ward was wearing a brown suit, a pale-green shirt and a regulation brown tie with a yellow stripe. He said, “I know you probably expected something western, but what I think you want here is a date, not a cardboard cutout.”

  In the pasture, he had reminded me a bit of a blond John Wayne, but dressed this way, the high ovals of baldness on his forehead exposed, he reminded me more of my farmer father ready for a night at the Elks Club. Or for Easter Sunday, when he would indulge my mother by going to church. I was sure that Ward’s callused hands had seldom felt the brush of a suit cuff. Like my father, he was an outdoor working man who’d endured and been shaped by weather.

  Ward hadn’t gotten his tan in a leisurely way, recreating. He’d gotten it the honest way, working. Each day he breathed the dust I’d breathed growing up. He felt the heat and cold I’d felt. Smelled the same smells. His eyes looked restless in the restaurant surroundings of plush carpets and rich brocades, and I knew that his vision had been honed, as mine had, on distances and pastels.

  The male university professors I knew in Laramie seemed effete by comparison. For exercise, they rode bicycles and, like me, were willing to drive sixty miles to Colorado to shop at Whole Foods. Ward would probably melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if I suggested he ride a bike or visit Whole Foods. If the Parmesan and walnut-encrusted tofu I wanted him to try didn’t do him in, the sun-dried tomato tapenade on a gluten-free, whole-grain wafer would. Indeed, his waistline suggested that he was still nourished on beef and potatoes.

  I would have to deal with some things, I thought. I wouldn’t be surprised if, among men, he told the same kinds of sexist jokes that my father had. But then again, he loved my book and the grasslands. He cared enough about the past in our mutual home to be excited when I’d suggested we go to the Denver library the next morning to look at old maps of the region. He wrote well. He stood open to me, like a door onto another self. The Kansas farm girl who, with all her worldly experience, had never quite left home.

  If romance has a color, it is burgundy. I don’t remember what either of us ate, but I do recall the sensuous, round-bellied goblet in my hand and the chime it made when we clinked. While we waited for the contents of our glasses to loosen our tongues, we fleshed out some details from our pasts. I knew from his letters that he had studied history in college. But now he told me how important it had been to him to pay his own way through, working for a large-animal veterinary practice. A close family friend who had graduated from high school before him had almost busted his parents’ bank account going to school, then had flunked out. “I was bound and determined not to be like him,” Ward said.

  My father had paid his way through college too, I told him. “I admire people who do that.”

  “If I was going to flunk out,” Ward explained, “I wanted to do it on my own dime. I was more interested in my job than colonial politics, but I stuck it out and made a pretty good showing.” After getting a teaching degree, he’d been hired by a small Colorado high school.

  He still faulted himself for lacking patience, not wanting to “hold those kids’ hands.”

  “Why should you have?”

  He reached over and squeezed my hand, which I’d placed strategically, on the table between us. “Thank you, darlin’, but we all deserve, well, need some hand holding from time to time, especially when we’re young. I just wasn’t the one to do it. I’ve never been so unhappy in my life, before or since.”

  I watched the frown leave his face as he returned to the present. He confessed that when he’d told his friends how excited he was about our date, they’d advised him to put on the brakes. “They think I don’t really know you, but they don’t understand how many words we’ve written to each other. They’re not like me. Most of my buddies would rather walk a mile barefoot through a sticker patch than write a letter.”

  After Ward quit teaching, he moved to Denver and sold real estate, but that job hadn’t lasted long either. He now earned the greater share of his income selling ranching products—pipe corrals, water tanks, loading chutes, while grazing some cattle himself. “Cows and sales might make my living, but horses give me a life.” He’d moved back to Kansas because his family’s land would afford him the privilege of spending the rest of his life around the animals. “I never met a horse who didn’t have a decent heart. Some of them have been frightened by bad treatment, but you can win back their trust.”

  “Unlike humans?” I asked.

  “I haven’t had as much luck with them,” he confessed. I reminded him what he’d written—that he’d never been in a bad relationship.

  “They weren’t ‘bad,’ they just didn’t work out.”

  “Did you leave or did they leave?” I asked.

  He picked up his glass, took a sip—to buy time? “Usually I did,” he said.

  My smile must have flattened, as he grasped my hand harder this time. “Because, Julene, they weren’t you. This is different.”

  We held hands all the way back to the hotel, and when the elevator came to my floor, he stepped off with me. I’d wondered if he would and wasn’t sure whether I wanted him to. Nine tenths of poise is pretense, I reminded myself as we stopped at my door.

  “Well,” he said, holding out his arms for a goodnight hug.

  He wore aftershave. No man I’d dated since leaving Kansas had worn aftershave. I took a deep whiff. “Mmm.”

  He accepted that invitation with a devouring kiss. Stunned, I returned it. My body was rising to him like a vine lacing itself around a post. How is this happening? I thought. He’s from there. I’m kissing a man from there.

  I swiped my key and held the door open for him.

  “Not tonight, sweetheart. I don’t want to rush this.”

  “Rushing’s good when you’re in a hurry,” I said.

  “Let’s have breakfast at nine, then go over to the library, look at those maps.”

  “Are you forgetting I have a son? I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you next.”

  He grinned. “Tomorrow is also a whole new day. Let’s see what it brings.”

  The room was freezing, and I couldn’t find a thermostat. After vainly searching the closets and drawers for an extra blanket, I lay awake and alone on the giant bed, less certain than I’d been since we met.

  It had happened twice now. He’d offered then withheld himself, promising to meet by the fountain and waiting instead on the mezzanine, now tantalizing me with the greatest kiss of my life, then leaving. I had feared I wouldn’t want him. I now knew that I did. But how much did he want me? What had he said about courtship? I
t was a “fine institution.” If this was a game to him, he’d won the first round.

  4

  IN THE LIBRARY’S RARE-MAP ROOM, WE OPENED THE LONG, FLAT DRAWERS AND LIFTED OUT THE TREASURES ONE BY ONE. Most of the old maps showed nothing at all in our remote region—no roads or rivers or topographical marks. “I kind of like living in a part of this sad old world so empty they use it to print the legend,” Ward said.

  “Those are the best places,” I agreed. Finally, we seemed to be getting back in sync. In the mirror that morning, after a sleepless night in my freezing room, my face had looked drawn, and my eyes had dark circles under them. I’d never done well on little or no sleep. Talking over breakfast, I’d felt like I was tiptoeing through broken glass. Each word I uttered seemed to shatter on impact with his. We hadn’t connected well, but now the bad spell his refusal had cast over us seemed to be lifting. Perhaps he’s just old-fashioned when it comes to sex, I thought.

  “Look how big we once were,” Ward said, pointing at a map of Kansas Territory. Until 1861, Kansas had reached from the Missouri River all the way to the Rockies. Our eyes were drawn to the Smoky Hill River, where Ward lived, and to the Middle and Little Beavers, whose dry beds had both wound through the countryside where I grew up. The Smoky appeared much more often on the maps because it had always had reliable water in it. In the late 1850s, when gold was discovered in Colorado, the Smoky Hill Trail had been the most direct route to Denver. It had also been the most dangerous. The Cheyenne, who camped and hunted on the plains, were understandably threatened by the incursion. They were prone to burning stage stations and torturing and killing the passengers.

  Despite these dangers, instead of crossing Nebraska on the Oregon Trail, some travelers headed for the far West came through Kansas, then turned north onto the Overland Trail, which ran along the eastern face of the Rockies.

  I traced my finger from Laramie south along the Overland to Denver. “Our paths join.”