Read Online The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair - Free Book Online
Authors: Julene Bair
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behalf now? Did they envision Jake and me made more complete by the balance Ward would bring to our lives? A fork on the left to accompany our knife and spoon on the right? I envisioned that myself, but at no time more than now, here.
• • •
W E SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, WAITING for the oven timer to go off. Here Mom hung her more serious needlepoint efforts. A replica of John Millet’s
The Gleaners
, in which peasant women collected stalks of wheat left behind by a rich farmer’s harvest wagons. A large-antlered bull elk. And a romantic rendering of our old farmhouse, the one her father had built and that we’d both grown up in. “If I’d known they would burn it down, I never would have left it,” she often said.
I hoped the conversation wouldn’t stray into politics while Ward was here. I’d tried to warn him that he’d be entering a den of liberals. He’d said not to worry, it wouldn’t be his first rodeo. But I didn’t think we were ready for any rodeos yet.
Secretly I believed I could sway Ward over to our side. After all, I’d openly stated my views in my book, and he’d been a fan of thatbefore we met. He didn’t seem to see the contradictions in himself that I did. A poetic soul, I reasoned, trapped in a prosaic, repressive region.
I didn’t need my atypical family exacerbating our differences. Maybe I could defuse the bomb before Ward arrived. Bracing myself, I asked, “So what do you think of our man in the White House now, Bruce?”
He stopped strumming. “Oh,” he groaned in his usual fashion. He went back to practicing a short riff. I waited. He’d spent most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter. His cynicism suited the profession, but not the small-town papers he’d worked for. “I went to a city council meeting and wrote what I heard,” he’d said when I asked him what had caused his last dismissal. Now he managed the farm Dad had left us. He could do that even though he lived more than a hundred miles east of Goodland because the excellent farming couple Dad had hired years before his death still did all the real work.
Finally, he put his guitar down and sighed. One side of his mouth lifted wryly, revealing a crooked canine. “I can’t say what I think about our president. I could get arrested.”
I said, “It might get better. We might win next year in the midterms.”
“I’m not kidding!” Bruce yelled. “I could!”
“That, that . . . ,” Mom said. She paused to search for sufficiently disparaging words. “Idiot! He calls himself a Christian. I can’t even stand to look at him.”
Mom and Dad had voted for Eisenhower and Nixon. They’d disliked Kennedy, whom Dad scorned as a “choirboy” Catholic, and were charmed by Reagan. “Such a likable fella,” Dad used to say. But being religious, Mom admired Jimmy Carter, and during George Bush Sr.’s tenure she started saying, “That stinking Rush Limbaugh is driving me over to the Democrats. I’m sick of his stupid bullshit.” She caused consternation in many who didn’t expect such a nice-looking grandma to cuss.
Abby laughed. “You had to ask.” She leaned down to pick up a section of newspaper.
Jake said, “Can I see your tattoo, Ab?”
She turned in her chair and lifted her short black hair with the raspberry-red stripe in it. Last year her hair had been auburn and long. On the back of her neck, hieroglyphs encircled a sun emblem. Jake touched it. “Is it new?”
“Oh no. I’ve been hiding it for something like ten years.” She was twenty-six, well into official adulthood and ready to take on the world.
Mom and Kris shook their heads at each other in maternal defeat.
The cuckoo clock clicked to twelve, but the little bird didn’t pop out. That mechanism hadn’t worked in fifteen years. Clark had sent my mother the clock when he lived in Germany, where he taught chemistry to U.S. Army kids for a while. So it still hung on the wall, the shuttered cuckoo reminding us of
• • •
W E SAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, WAITING for the oven timer to go off. Here Mom hung her more serious needlepoint efforts. A replica of John Millet’s
The Gleaners
, in which peasant women collected stalks of wheat left behind by a rich farmer’s harvest wagons. A large-antlered bull elk. And a romantic rendering of our old farmhouse, the one her father had built and that we’d both grown up in. “If I’d known they would burn it down, I never would have left it,” she often said.
I hoped the conversation wouldn’t stray into politics while Ward was here. I’d tried to warn him that he’d be entering a den of liberals. He’d said not to worry, it wouldn’t be his first rodeo. But I didn’t think we were ready for any rodeos yet.
Secretly I believed I could sway Ward over to our side. After all, I’d openly stated my views in my book, and he’d been a fan of thatbefore we met. He didn’t seem to see the contradictions in himself that I did. A poetic soul, I reasoned, trapped in a prosaic, repressive region.
I didn’t need my atypical family exacerbating our differences. Maybe I could defuse the bomb before Ward arrived. Bracing myself, I asked, “So what do you think of our man in the White House now, Bruce?”
He stopped strumming. “Oh,” he groaned in his usual fashion. He went back to practicing a short riff. I waited. He’d spent most of his adult life as a newspaper reporter. His cynicism suited the profession, but not the small-town papers he’d worked for. “I went to a city council meeting and wrote what I heard,” he’d said when I asked him what had caused his last dismissal. Now he managed the farm Dad had left us. He could do that even though he lived more than a hundred miles east of Goodland because the excellent farming couple Dad had hired years before his death still did all the real work.
Finally, he put his guitar down and sighed. One side of his mouth lifted wryly, revealing a crooked canine. “I can’t say what I think about our president. I could get arrested.”
I said, “It might get better. We might win next year in the midterms.”
“I’m not kidding!” Bruce yelled. “I could!”
“That, that . . . ,” Mom said. She paused to search for sufficiently disparaging words. “Idiot! He calls himself a Christian. I can’t even stand to look at him.”
Mom and Dad had voted for Eisenhower and Nixon. They’d disliked Kennedy, whom Dad scorned as a “choirboy” Catholic, and were charmed by Reagan. “Such a likable fella,” Dad used to say. But being religious, Mom admired Jimmy Carter, and during George Bush Sr.’s tenure she started saying, “That stinking Rush Limbaugh is driving me over to the Democrats. I’m sick of his stupid bullshit.” She caused consternation in many who didn’t expect such a nice-looking grandma to cuss.
Abby laughed. “You had to ask.” She leaned down to pick up a section of newspaper.
Jake said, “Can I see your tattoo, Ab?”
She turned in her chair and lifted her short black hair with the raspberry-red stripe in it. Last year her hair had been auburn and long. On the back of her neck, hieroglyphs encircled a sun emblem. Jake touched it. “Is it new?”
“Oh no. I’ve been hiding it for something like ten years.” She was twenty-six, well into official adulthood and ready to take on the world.
Mom and Kris shook their heads at each other in maternal defeat.
The cuckoo clock clicked to twelve, but the little bird didn’t pop out. That mechanism hadn’t worked in fifteen years. Clark had sent my mother the clock when he lived in Germany, where he taught chemistry to U.S. Army kids for a while. So it still hung on the wall, the shuttered cuckoo reminding us of
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