Read Online The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair - Free Book Online Page B

incivility? We didn’t say a prayer, just started handing the platters around. If Mom had called the shots when we were growing up, she would have set a different, more reverent tone in her household. Dad hadn’t gone in for all that “holy, holy, holy.” Yet he’d had more social grace than all of us put together. “Grace” was not a word that leaped to mind for a man of such blunt and coarse opinions. He did, in fact, worry that Clark was gay. He did call undermotivated hired men lazy so and so’s. But if he were still with us, we wouldn’t have been handing platters around the table in silence. He would have sparked a conversation with a tidbit of gossip or an odd fact he’d read in
National Geographic
. He would have plied us with questions about our lives, asking Jake how school was treating him and offering sage advice it pleased me to hear.
Don’t let those grades start slippin’. Pretty soon they’ll be down so far you’ll need a bucket and a rope to get them back up.
    “Now Jasmin,” Ward said, “did you grow these pickles yourself?”
    Mom perked up at this attention from the new man at her table. “Oh no, I didn’t. But I used to grow all my pickles. Even after we movedto town. You should have seen that downstairs closet in the furnace room. It used to be plumb full of vegetables I’d canned.”
    “I miss that food, don’t you?” Ward said.
    “I saw some pretty good clouds down your way last week,” Bruce said, before she could answer. “You guys squeeze any moisture out of them?”
    “Not a drop,” Ward said.
    Bruce sighed. “Dry sponges. Oh well. Who needs rain when we’ve got the government?” He explained that the drought-relief package Congress had passed coincided with his taking out government crop insurance. “Like doubling down in blackjack,” he said. Gleefully he threw up his hands. “And winning!” He revealed both crooked canines this time. “That never worked for me in Vegas, but in Washington, the odds are stacked our way.”
    A landslide of cash had poured in, so much, he explained to Ward, that he was planning to buy a new tractor before year end, to reap the investment tax credit. “The government gives it to us. We give it back. They give it to us.”
    “That’s the merry-go-round all right,” Ward said.
    “I had a dream about your father,” Mom said. “He told me we didn’t need that new tractor.” She’d described the dream to me before. She’d been sitting in the tub, naked, I assume. Was there any other way to sit in a tub full of water? He’d been washing her back. That this must have been a common ritual between them amazed me. Growing up, I rarely saw my parents display affection. There were no spoken endearments, no touches other than her patting his bald head on occasion or him slapping her bottom as she washed the dishes. “Oh Harold!” I could still hear her grumble, as if truly angry.
    Discovering that my parents had been that intimate in their private lives touched me. But it couldn’t have been easy for my father to make such a vivid appearance in Mom’s dreams, especially for a man who hadn’t believed in an afterlife. He must have felt a mighty need to convey his advice. I was accustomed to thinking my father correct in all things farm related. Was Bruce frittering away Dad’s money on fancyequipment we didn’t need? Were we destined for financial ruin? It really did scare me.
    Bruce ignored Mom and her oft-repeated dream. Ward’s starched shirt and dark-blue jeans were a dead giveaway. My brother knew he had a Republican sitting between the sights of his piercing brown eyes, and he’d clearly been waiting to move in for the kill. “I’ve got an idea. The government can get out of the lives of everyone who voted for Newt Gingrich and his buds in Congress. The rest of us’ll take our Farm Program checks.”
    “Okay, Bruce,” Ward said. “Let me know if you can spare a couple bucks.”
    Bruce leaned back in his chair and