The Ogallala Road A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair

Author:Julene Bair [Bair, Julene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

7

IT TOOK ME A YEAR AND A HALF, BUT I FINALLY GOT MY OPPORTUNITY TO RESTORE NIGHT TO OUR FARM. An electrician came out to raise the wire between the shop and old sheep barn so that Dad’s new seed drill could pass beneath it when folded up for transport. Surreptitiously, I had him install a switch on the light pole. He said no one had ever asked him to do that before.

Because it had rained recently, the pump engines weren’t running the night I turned off the mercury-vapor light. The darkness, therefore, was doubly sweet. Starlight glazed the road somewhat, but I couldn’t gauge the distance between my eyes and the ground. Each step I took felt like an act of faith. Remembering how juniper, yucca, and cactus had billowed out at me like ghosts during my nighttime walks in the Mojave, I tried on my wilderness mind-set. Imagining the blackness around me as unfarmed prairie filled me with a sense of limitless possibility.

“The strangest thing,” said the new hired man’s wife the following morning. They lived across the drive in a new double-wide that Dad had entrusted me to order for them. “Did you notice that the yard light went out last night?”

I told her that I’d turned it off and that I hoped to keep it off from now on. “Won’t it be nice to step outside at night whenever you want to and look at the stars?”

She stared at me as if I’d lapsed into a foreign language. “I wish you wouldn’t turn it off,” she finally said. “That light’s for see-cure-i-ty.” She drew the word out in the explanatory way you might use with a small child.

This was the same hired man’s wife who had invited me to a Tupperware party. I’d sat with my legs folded demurely in the circle of women who were as careful not to say anything they couldn’t live down as the women in my mother’s ladies’ club had always been. In most rural communities, you keep your private business private and you don’t express any views that might upset or alienate your neighbors. It hadn’t been like that in the Mojave. Once I’d gotten together with Stefan and began circulating more, I discovered that people there argued about politics and gossiped openly. You had to be pretty free-spirited, I guessed, to live in the Mojave.

But in Kansas, women carefully tiptoed around one another. All we talked about at that party were our gardens, the weather, and our parents’ health. I took a slip of paper from the bowl handed around, to see if it had my birthday month written on it, in which case I would get to take home a free lemon-squeezing contraption. I competed to see how many words I could make from “Tupperware.”

“Weep” came first to mind. Probably a reason for that. Did the other women bluff their way through those gatherings, pretending to be entertained by the small talk, while boiling inside with ideas and

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