2
MOST OF WHAT I’m going to tell you, I know. The rest of it, I believe.
I know, for example, that they started in Iowa, like the papers said.
I believe, on the other hand, that he must have seen flyers talking about it. Maybe he saw notices in the Iowa papers and government brochures too, all talking about it, saying there were still some acres of it left out here and if he proved on some of it, stayed on it, it was his to homestead.
He was twenty-five. He had married late. Ada had married later — for a woman, I’m talking about, since this was eighty-two years ago and she was already twenty-three. But things like age and time would have bothered him in a different way than they did her, because the pictures I have seen of her show that she was a small thin woman with eyes that seemed too big for her head — one of those women with blue veins showing at both temples. A woman like that — tight strung, nervous, too fine altogether for what was wanted of her — never should have married somebody like him, and she paid for it. He was a hard stick. He was all stringy arms and legs, with an Adam’s apple like a hickory nut that jugged up and down when he chewed or said something, and I don’t suppose he was much more than just getting used to having a woman in his bed before he was already thinking something like: Here I been married a half year already, but I’m still at home. I’m still shoveling corn to another man’s hogs, still spooning soup at somebody else’s dinner table. Jesus God.
He was a mean sort of private man, I know from personal experience with him, and more muleheaded even than he was private. He hated like the very goddamn to be dependent on anyone for anything. So I believe there had to be something like those flyers, and I believe he had to have seen them.
On those cold wet Iowa nights then in that first winter of their marriage, with his brothers and sisters sleeping in the bedrooms next door and his folks snoring from another room down the hall, I picture him standing beside a kerosene lamp. I picture him reading those flyers and notices and government brochures till he had them by heart, while in the room with him Ada would have been lying thin and straight in their bed under some thick homemade quilts, lying there waiting for him with her hair already combed out and braided, trying to stay awake for him because she no doubt believed a new wife would do that or should at least try to. And still — because I know that’s the way he was — he must have gone on night after night the same. Gone on standing there beside that damn foul-smoking lamp, reading and planning and shivering in his long sag-butt underwear, with his red feet itching from the cold and his stringy arms and legs gone all to goose bumps and pig’s bristle by the time he finally blew out the lamp and crawled into bed beside Ada — not to sleep yet, you understand, or even to raise Ada’s flannel nightgown so he could rub his calloused hands over her thin hips and little breasts — but just to wake her again, wake her so he could tell her one more time how, by God, he had it all figured.
Well, he had it all figured — he always did — but I don’t suppose that cold-feet, goose-bump, being-wakened-in-the-night sort of thing could have gone on for too long, because even Ada would not have put up with it forever. She would have gone back home to her mother in Johnson County, claiming whatever they called incompatibility in those days, and then Roy would have fumed and claimed foul and begun to rage something about a wife’s duty. And maybe that would have been the best thing for both of them; at least it would have been the best thing for Ada, because then she might never have had to leave Iowa. But, like I say, that goose-bump business must not have gone on for too long, not to the point where Ada left him, anyway, because come the next spring, the spring of 1896, I know they both left Iowa in a loaded wagon and moved to the High Plains of Colorado.
They drove across western Iowa and ferried across the Missouri River, then they crossed all of Nebraska. They couldn’t have made more than twenty miles a day, and they probably came alone, since there hadn’t been any real wagon trains for thirty years, and maybe by the middle of the second week Ada had stopped looking out the back of the wagon. Anyway, they got here, and when they got out here to northeastern Colorado, what did they find? That happens to be one of the things I know; I know what they found, but what I don’t know is what they expected to find. It depends on what kind of lies those flyers and government brochures told. But if they expected to find some more of Cedar County, Iowa, some kind of extension of that country they had left three or four weeks earlier, then they never should have thrown any bag of seed or any plow or foot-pedal sewing machine into any wagon; they should have stayed put, because this country wasn’t like that. It wasn’t any of that deep-black-topsoil country with forty inches of annual rainfall and good drainage and plenty of hardwood close by — burr oak and black wall — for lumber and fuel. What this country was was sandy, and it was dry, and for the most part it was just flat, with only some low sand hills running off in a northeasterly direction towards the Nebraska Panhandle. There were almost no trees.
Even now there are not many trees here, although people in towns like Holt have full-grown trees that were planted by early residents sixty and seventy years ago in backyards and along the streets — elm and evergreen and cottonwood and ash, and every once in a while a stunted maple that somebody stuck in the ground with more hope for it than real experience of this area would ever have allowed. In the country we have a few trees now, too, of course, standing up around our houses, and you can tell where somebody lives, or used to live, because of those trees, but we are more interested in windbreaks. The 1930s taught us windbreaks, and the government wants to encourage it.
Every spring now the soil-conservation office tries to sell us red cedar, blue spruce, ponderosa pine, Russian olive, Nanking cherry, cottonwood, lilac, sumac, plum, and honeysuckle — thin saplings at nine dollars for a bundle of thirty or fifteen dollars for a bundle of fifty. For another twenty cents per tree the government will send out somebody to plant them for us. Last spring it was an old man on a tractor plowing a furrow so that a young woman riding a tree planter behind the tractor, with a bundle of saplings in a box beside her and her feet raised onto stirrups to be out of the way, could poke the saplings down between her thighs into the plowed furrow almost like she thought she was giving birth. This particular young woman enjoyed getting as much sun as she could all over her body, and the folks down at the soil-conservation office are still trying to figure out how much to charge us for watching her do that.
But then I was talking about what it was like in this country in 1896 when Roy and Ada rode here in a wagon from Iowa to homestead, and I said there were almost no trees here then, and that’s true. The only trees in this country at that time stood along the rivers and the creeks, and there were only two each of those. To the north was the South Fork of the Platte River and about one hundred and fifty miles to the south was the Arkansas River; in between were the two creeks, the Republican and the Arikaree.
What they found when they got here then — and I don’t believe Ada ever got over the shock of it — was a flat, treeless, dry place that had once belonged to Indians.
It was a hell of a big piece of sandy country, with a horizon that in every direction must have seemed then— to someone who didn’t know how to look at this country and before Henry Ford and paved highways diminished it just a little — to reach forever away under a sky in summer that didn’t give much of a good goddamn whether or not the bags of corn seed Roy was going to plant in some of that sand ever amounted to a piddling thing, and a sky in winter that, even if it was as blue as picture books said it should be and as high and bright as anybody could hope for, still didn’t care whether or not the frame house Roy was going to build ever managed to keep the snow from blowing in on Ada’s sewing machine. There just wasn’t a thing in the world concerned enough to care whether Roy’s corn did anything more than shrivel, and there wasn’t a thing tall enough or wide enough anywhere between Canada and Mexico to stop the snow from blowing.