Breaking Clean Read online

  The more delicate irony is found in the other stories, like the fate of the antelope, the hundreds that walked over the Missouri and lived to drop their fawns in new country. The river is a mile wide where the antelope crossed, on the tail of Fort Peck Lake, and the breakup of ice left them stranded. For years, the sight of a pronghorn was a rare privilege on our side of the river. The other side was crawling with them. But only for a few months. Antelope with the wit to outrun the storm died in a hail of fire that fall when Fish and Game gave in to pressure from landowners and staged a special hunting season to get rid of the surplus.

  And there are the double-whammy stories, the farmer-rancher kind of storm that kills the cattle all winter, then washes gullies through the fields when it melts. April staged the spring thaw like a magic show, whipping the white cover to one side with a flourish. Water roared through dikes, washed out culverts and channeled across roads. Water stood in the meadows with nowhere to go as the alfalfa grew pale and greasy beneath it. Cactus bloomed red and yellow around the bloated remains of birds and antelope, fence corners sagged under the weight of dead cattle, corrals and sheds swam in a stew of decay and manure. The fields lay saturated, too wet to hold a plow. By June, only shallow puddles dotted the hard-pan, all of them squirming with mosquito larvae. Until frost returned the next fall, the air hummed with a misery of flies and bloodsucking insects. Cattle submerged themselves in reservoirs or gathered on the hilltops where the wind could sweep their backs, twisting the useless pink stubs where their tails had been.

  The stories are tempered by time, now, the drifts of dead cattle too deep to forget, the loss of faith too profound to call up in words. They talk about luck now, how lucky we were the storm hit when it did, no one caught out on the road, no kids stranded at school. Lucky the electricity stayed on, the phone lines up. Still salvaging what they can three decades later. But there is wonder, still, in the facts, in circumstances somehow unreasonable, beyond the logic we lived by. How could it be that a man did everything he knew to do and it wasn't enough, wasn't even close? What happens when good intentions fail, and the work that makes the man becomes worthless—not just wrong, but simply meaningless, without effect? The old-timers would squint through Bull Durham smoke and shrug, "Well, hell, every so often it's nature's turn." And so it was.

  Like every other rancher in the path of the storm, my father kept badly frozen cows alive through the winter, trying to salvage the calves in their bellies. His decision was practical rather than humane, for the animals suffered for weeks as the flesh below their hocks swelled and turned black and their hooves dropped off. On the surface, it seemed a sensible business decision. If they could get a calf, if they could save the cow for hamburger, at least they'd have something. But he knew them, these cows that lay in their own waste and panted with pain, and I believe that part of him simply refused to give in, refused to turn loose. Saving them was the only way left of beating the storm.

  "I guess if you had another lifetime to live, you would have learned something, anyway," my father tells me now. "One thing I learned, and that's for godsake don't ever ..." He pauses, searching for words, his eyes grim or sad, then starts over. "If you have a froze-up critter, shoot 'em or haul them off or something. Get rid of them. It's cruel." He speaks the last word carefully, then lifts his head, steady, resigned to the fact of it. "They got a cruel deal to go through and they're not going to make it anyway."

  The range -cows gave birth that spring in the stench of decay, their tails gone, ear tips dried crisp, ready to fall. A few stood to wash their calves, murmuring and anxious, with milk pouring from them, milk streaming down their hocks, pooling around their feet, draining from holes in their udders where the teats had been. The calves were put on nurse cows, and the price of a good milk cow skyrocketed. Their mothers went to market, the milk still leaking, replenishing, no way to dry them up. The price of canner cows plummeted. Others were less fortunate still. All winter, in the gloom of outbuildings, those with no feet rose to their knees and fell back when men came to tend them, unable to stand on their raw clubs, unable to halt the poison that dripped from dead flesh to the straw, that crept upward through the blood. Penicillin kept the fever down, the rot slow.

  The men tended them gently, expectantly, patient as drones around a gravid queen. We had four or five, bigger places twenty or thirty head plumping in rows in sheds, hours of hauling buckets in and manure out, betting on the get. Every morning they were turned, rolled out of their own muck onto clean straw, pans of grain and water, the best alfalfa hay shoved under their peeling noses. As spring drew near, one by one these cows lay back in the soured straw and strained, their bodies bent on self-preservation, and cast away fetuses that never drew breath. Downwind of the sheds, you could smell their progress, the ones who spent the winter dying.

  For years, reminders of the storm lingered at the edge of our vision like the glint of new wire splicing the old along the east fence. Scraps of stiff hide, darkened with age, turned up in manure as we dressed the garden, maybe an ear, maybe one of the buckskin boots Mom sewed to fit that crippled yearling, the one that kept trying to stand on his missing feet. At roundup and branding, we rode in the dust of survivors, cows with healed stumps for ears and tails, cows that grew old grazing lush grass over the mass grave of their sisters. The most lasting reminders were felt in the absence of things we had come to expect, the silence of summers without hearing the rusty-hinge crow of a cock pheasant, years without the harmony of pronghorns, the way they swerve and dodge over the cured grass like a school offish.

  Over time the artifacts went back to earth and the wildlife returned, nurtured and guarded by landowners who came to see the prairie as empty without them. Only stories survive, and a restlessness when wind rises on winter evenings. Every generation relearns the rules its fathers have forgotten. One rule is awareness, the need to see past the power of human hands on the land, to the power beneath it. Those who forget have the wind to jog their memory, wind slipping evenly through the sage, dusting across the fields. Watch your back, it's whispering. This land owes you nothing.

  Church and State

  In the days before laws mandated kindergarten, school started with first grade. I climbed the narrow wooden step and entered South First Creek School as a student at age five, proud of the new dress sewn for this day, mercifully unconcerned about the high-water bangs sheared into the front of my Dutch-boy haircut. I carried pencils, a gum eraser, a box of twenty-four crayons, a tub of paste with a brush built into the lid, a tiny bottle of Jergens hand lotion and a small packet of tissues—but my most prized possessions were a handkerchief with red and blue flowers and a Gunsmoke lunch box with a little thermos bottle that fit inside.

  I started school every autumn for eight years with much the same collection of objects, but I would remember that day as the first time such possessions belonged to me alone—I did not have to share them with a sibling. Grace Nesbit, one of our near neighbors, taught my first year, and though she was familiar to me from dinners and neighborhood gatherings, at school she assumed the mantle of Teacher. She even looked different in school, her posture perfect, her hands folded—the only ranch wife I knew who kept her nails filed and polished. I sat amid the chatter of kids I'd known all my life, ten students from four families, my cousin Lois and a neighbor boy named Larry joining me in first grade.

  South First Creek squatted on the prairie within driving distance of three rural communities, a stucco-covered shotgun shack with a steep pitched roof. It looked large to me only because there was nothing around it to compare—no trees, no boulders, no other buildings in sight except the outhouses. A barbed wire fence separated the grounds from the cow pasture surrounding it, enclosing the school buildings and some rudimentary playground equipment—a welded-pipe swing set with four swings and a slide. The school was a mouse-infested bungalow entered through a bare stud-and-siding porch, and though the schoolroom was wired for electricity, the site had no well, and therefore no pl
umbing. Twin outhouses sat in opposite corners along the western fence, boys' to the right, girls' to the left. Parents took turns hauling water to fill the Red Wing drinking crock that occupied the low bench on the left wall of the entry, while hooks for our coats formed a row along the right wall. A basin and towel shared the bench, and over it a scattering of hooks and bent nails held our collection of mismatched cups, one for each of us brought from home every autumn and returned, black with grime, in May. We pushed a spigot at the base of the crock to get water, and when we finished with our wash or our drink, we tossed the dregs out the front door.

  At the far end of the building, a tiny unheated room acted as living quarters for the teacher. Mrs. Nesbit commuted from her ranch home, but even when vacant the teacherage was kept closed off. A peek through the window from outside revealed a bare cotton-tick mattress on an old iron bed, a battered dresser and a small table with a hot plate. The only time students were allowed in the teacherage was during the Christmas play, when it served as "backstage" for the performers.

  The main schoolroom held it all—students, teacher and eight grades' worth of books, materials and supplies. Bookcases and shelves lined the walls below the windows and rose to the ceiling in places, every inch of space crammed with books, paper, flash cards and art materials. A large blackboard dressed the north wall, and strung along above it was a permanent display of the Palmer Penmanship alphabet, the uppercase letters made grand with a fat swirl at the start, a bit of flourish at the end. We used the flattop heating stove as a storage table until it had to be lit in October. Standard-issue portraits of George Washington and Abe Lincoln glowered down upon us, and before Health Inspection every morning, we stood beside our desks and pledged allegiance to a flag propped in the corner behind Teacher's desk.

  Decades after the fact, I tell my children about Inspection, and they are aghast at what they consider a huge violation of privacy, if not basic civil rights. We had no such frame of reference, of course, and first thing in the morning every student, from big, sulky eighth-grade boys to barely housebroken first graders, pulled out a clean hanky and unfolded it on the desktop for Inspection. Spreading our hands flat on the hankies to display our fingers, we sat up straight, feet flat on the floor, and waited our turns in silence. Teacher began at one side and walked slowly up and down the aisles between rows, pausing at each desk to check the posture, the cleanliness of the hands and fingernails, the neatness of the hair, and to hear the student say, "I brushed my teeth." Occasionally one of the big boys sported black crescents under his nails or someone owned up and said she hadn't brushed her teeth, in which case that student did not get a gold star on the Health chart. From our performance during Inspection came our Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory mark in Health on our report cards.

  Inspection probably originated as a means of reinforcing cleanliness and civilized hygiene habits in rural communities before the advent of plumbing and electricity, a way of keeping disease contagion and body odors to a minimum in the congested schoolroom. The ritual continued in my era, despite the fact that every family in our community had some variation of running water and at least four or five changes of school clothes. By then, however, we were far less conscious of the basic hygiene lessons than we were of the institution of Inspection itself. We intoned "I brushed my teeth" like we did the Pledge of Allegiance, words with slender connection to that morning's ablutions. Older girls competed to have the nicest handkerchiefs, and although we were each required to have a handkerchief on hand at all times, we never, never used them to blow our noses. We rubbed away sniffles on our shirt cuffs or were directed to the box of tissues on Teacher's desk when she got tired of hearing us snort. Handkerchiefs were for Inspection.

  The first day of school, someone's father stayed awhile to work the special wrench required to adjust the desk's height, fine-tuning the fit as we sat straight in our seats with our forearms level on the tops. Once it was customized, the desk became private property. To open another student's desk without permission was unheard of, except for Teacher, who had access to all. Each row began with the smallest desks directly in front of Teacher's desk and ended with the eighth graders' desks at the rear of the room. Each fall desks were swapped around with other rural schools to accommodate the year's crop of growing students, so certain coveted desks circulated through our school only once every couple of years. Desks we had never seen before popped up occasionally, and we studied them for familiar names or signs that spoke their origin, deciphering them like archaeological sites. We interpreted initials or cattle brands, more rarely a first name, carefully, always searching for a sign of an ancestor or a now-grown neighbor. Small drawings etched into the oak with the sharp end of a compass might take the bulk of a year to complete, and almost always were done by older students—the ones at the back of the room, the ones required to have compasses for their arithmetic, the ones able to work furtively and persistently and not be caught. Finished, the etching was rubbed full of fountain pen ink, which soaked into the wood and lent a tattoo-like appearance; we copied it by laying a sheet of tablet paper over it and rubbing with a pencil until the design came through in relief.

  We had no say in which desk we got, for the decision was based on size and availability, and the teacher had the final say. A really bad desk, one worthy of a winter's sulking, might feature a slick Formica top—no carving, no graffiti—with a tarnished metal rim that turned white cuffs black, an inner cavity lumpy with dried-glue puddles, and sprung hinges that no longer held the desktop up when you raised it. With these desks, a student propped the lid on her forehead to rummage for items and risked it slamming shut on her fingers if it slipped. The best desks were varnished oak with slots along the top to hold pencils and enough carving to both add historical interest and mask additional etchings.

  It's true what they say about the rural school experience— the ranch kids who attended one-room country schools saw both the best of education and the worst it could offer. At best, we received one-on-one attention, with every assignment marked and returned to us to be corrected; spelling bees, learning games and elaborate Christmas programs; and of course we had the advantage of all grades in one room—this last lending the effect of having lessons presented subliminally for a year or two before being called upon to master them yourself. At worst, we had chaos. A school taught by only one teacher is bound to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of that teacher, and indeed, if the weaknesses were of the sort that encouraged rebellion and disorder, then students were in for a long year.

  For decades, our county relied on a dozen or more regular schoolmarms, women with local ties who had taught for years in one or another of our rural schools. Most schools made it a rule to switch teachers every year or two to promote diversity, but by the time my education commenced in 1960, practicality made this impossible. Many of the regulars were nearing retirement age, and the local school board had difficulty finding new teachers willing to live in one side of a shack and teach in the other for less than ten thousand dollars a year. When they found a good one, they kept her as long as they could. My favorite teacher, Mae Bibeau, taught two of my eight years, her wry sense of humor and enthusiasm for writing lending me courage long after she left. Another great educator, Grace Nesbit, taught me two more grades after the first. In between the good years were a couple of teachers with lessons that extended beyond the covers of a book. My second grade at South First Creek School, for example, was one fall-to-spring lesson in anarchy taught by the Peigneux boys and sponsored by the distraught and ineffectual Mrs. Hughes. The chaos of the classroom and the bullying permitted during recess prompted an exodus during Christmas break, as parents who could manage it pulled their students out and sent them to other, more distant schools. Those who left never came back. After second grade, I would not have another person in my grade again until I started high school. A few years later, with the old school near collapse, the board wrangled the funds to erect a small prefab two-room building on a new site bet
ween Second and Third Creeks. It was in the inaugural year of this new school, my sixth-grade year, that I was introduced to God and Cary Grant by the venerable Mr. Saxton.

  Nine kids attended Second Creek School that first year, four of them boys in the seventh and eighth grades, and for the first time the board cast the net wide to find a male teacher, who would offer discipline and keep order. They caught Daniel Saxton, a retired high school teacher from Minnesota. When I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow that fall, I patterned my mental picture of Ichabod Crane after Mr. Saxton: tall, lanky and stoop-shouldered, with a shock of yellowish-gray hair, thick spectacles perched on a thin, beaky nose, a neck with wattles, and huge flat ears that flushed when he lost his temper. I believe he had taught at a Catholic or private high school, but whatever his experience, there was no direct transferal from that to our rural school and the six elementary grades we filled that year. He lost the older boys, the very students he'd been hand-selected to teach, in the first hour of the first day. Blinking and baring his tarnished teeth, he made us all stand and introduce ourselves. Then, waving a baton of chalk, he led us with great gusto through a song that was to become a hated morning ritual:

  Good morning to you!