Not long before he died, Dad told me about the drive through Fulton Canyon. He said it was a pretty route and meant less time on the freeway. He always took it when he and Mom made a trip to The Dalles or Portland. Ever since he told me, whenever I go to Condon, I take Fulton Canyon too.
Mom is with me today. She had a doctor appointment in The Dalles, and I’m driving her back to Condon and staying for the weekend for Shannon’s baby shower. The women of Condon will celebrate as another of their hometown girls becomes a mother, as Leanne becomes a grandmother.
Fulton Canyon has plenty of curves going up a steep grade that tops out in wheat fields, fallow one year, planted the next. This year they’re planted. We pass two pretty farmhouses with leafed-out trees, and a bare-wood windowless church.
Mom’s eyes are on the puff-clouds against the blue sky. “I’ve always liked looking at the clouds,” she says. “Ever since I was a girl.”
“Me too,” I say.
She no longer lives on the ranch. Now she lives in an apartment in town. This is the first time in her life she’s lived alone. She says she likes it even though she misses Dad, especially at night when she wakes and thinks he’s there next to her.
It’s harvest time, but the field we’re passing hasn’t been cut yet. It’s a good crop, with thick stalks and full heads. A slight breeze moves the bearded wheat. Slow waves of dark gold shift to pale gold and back to dark gold.
I raise a finger off the steering wheel and point in the direction of the field. “Pretty.”
Mom looks. “I guess.” Her voice has a halting, not-agreeing sound.
“I’ve always loved it like this,” I say. “Right before harvest.”
She shakes her head. “I know it’s supposed to be pretty. But I get anxious every time I see a field of wheat waiting to be cut.” She keeps looking at the field and hunches her shoulders up and down. “Anything can happen. Fire. Hail.”
For sure she’s thinking of the hailstorm that came through Condon in ’75. It was her birthday. That storm caused a flood down Main Street, knocked holes in so many roofs that a roofing crew spent months in town repairing them. Our whole crop was wiped out. Insurance took care of the loss, but it was awful seeing all the wheat knocked down a month before harvest.
Exactly twenty years later, again on Mom’s birthday, another storm came through and caused almost as much damage. This time tennis ball sized hailstones came in sideways and knocked holes in the siding of houses.
“I feel way better when it’s all cut,” she says. “Even if I don’t have to worry about our crops now.” The land is leased out, it’s someone else’s concern, and Mom gets paid no matter what. But she spent fifty years as a rancher’s wife. The worry of it is an old familiar trail in her.
“There you go,” I say now, and raise my finger again as we pass a field of stubble. Cut-off stalks bent this way and that, no oceany waves or heads of bearded wheat. It looks broken and worn.
Mom turns to look as we pass. “Maybe people think that’s ugly.” The tracks of trucks and combine have laid bare the fine, dry soil. “But I like it.”
We get to the end of Fulton Canyon and go through Wasco and on to Highway 206. We’re quiet for a while. She rests her eyes.
“Hey,” I say, when she’s opened her eyes and resumed watching the landscape. “I’ve been wondering something.”
She’s gotten used to my wondering, and I’ve gotten over being surprised by the open way she responds now.
When I was writing about the rape, I’d asked her if I could interview her. She said yes immediately, no hesitation, even though we hadn’t spoken of the rape since it had happened more than twenty years earlier.
We’d sat together in the kitchen for that conversation. I asked her how it was for her all those years ago, when I called and told her I’d been raped.
She looked at me and her eyes got teary. She said, “I watched over you.” She said she hadn’t wanted to bring it up because it might hurt me to talk about it. She worried about my weight loss back then, and how much I exercised. Worried maybe the rapist had HIV and maybe I did too.
Then she pointed to the kitchen sink. “I started keeping the knives under the sink.” Because that was the one thing she knew about what happened to me, that he’d used a knife from my kitchen. She thought putting the knives away might help me not be reminded.
She’d been watching over me all these years. Her unspoken gestures of love.
My understanding of Mom shifted then. Like so many years before when we’d argued about the older man I was living with.
All I want is for you to be happy.
My shifting moved her too, like plates of land lifting and settling into a new landscape. Since that talk in the kitchen, we are more open, less guarded. Mom knows I want to talk about the personal things and she seems to want to join me. As much as she can bear. She’s a more private woman than I am. We meet each other here, between my wants and her limits.
Now, as we drive up the grade after the John Day River, I ask Mom, “How did you not get pregnant all those years between me and Cris?”
She’d had the first four of us in less than five years. Then eight went by before Cris came along. I thought of the tiny yellow pills that were my morning ritual for so many years. Did they even have them back then? Or maybe they did but they weren’t easy for a small-town woman to get a prescription for.
“For a long time, I used spermicide,” Mom says. “This was before the pill. I’d go to Espy. Remember him? The pharmacist?”
I do. I remember his son, too, sandy haired and dark-eyed. Cute. One of the nice boys who was just a friend.
“When I’d ask Espy for the spermicide, he’d say, ‘Do you want a spermicide boy, or a spermicide girl?’” She smiles a remembering smile. “I guess he didn’t think it worked too well. But it worked for me.” She raises her hands like she’s as surprised as Espy was.
She laughs. “He was always saying funny things. One time I was getting the spermicide and he said, “You and Jack are the kind of people who should have fifteen kids. Your kids are all so good.” She’s proud of what she and Dad made.
Women have babies for plenty of reasons. Because it’s the order of things, because they want to make life with the person they love, or because they aren’t careful. Maybe they want to be loved or want something to love. Maybe a woman believes a child will bring happiness. Or that she has something to give or teach or learn. Her body longs for that temporary allograft. She can’t imagine life without a child.
“Why did you want children?” I ask Mom.
We pass the mountain identifier, and I glance to see the Three Sisters, Three Fingered Jack off in the distance.
“It’s what we did. I didn’t think about it, really. It’s what women did then.”
She says, “I wanted a boy and a girl, so I had Pat and then Brad, and I kept trying after Brad. And I had Leanne.” She’s told me before that she loved being pregnant. That it was easy, the pregnancy, the labor.
She says she might’ve stopped after Leanne. “But I got a terrible case of hives, not long after she was born. It was awful. One day a spot on my leg would be red and swollen. It burned and itched and hurt. Another day it would be my neck or my arm or my back. A lot of times it was my mouth.” She touches her mouth when she says this part, her hand remembering the pain. Her mouth, like mine, thin lips, small even teeth. “I went almost a year hoping they would go away. Then I asked the doctor if he thought it would help if I got pregnant. I’d heard that somewhere.
“I’d have done anything,” she says. “Being pregnant was way easier than those hives.” She hovers her hand over her mouth and then her thigh, like the hot red pain is still there. “The doctor thought maybe it would help.” She smiles. Her voice has an uplift of surprise. “So I had you.” Her cheekbones my cheekbones, her thick hair my thick hair. “It worked. I never had them again.”
The townscape comes into view at the rise of the last hill. We’re about a mile from Condon. The trees and houses, the grain elevator with the Christmas star turned off this time of year.
These conversations are our way now. Mom gives me her stories, and I give her mine. If I’d had children they would have been our bridge. Without them, we found this other way.
“I’ve had some ups and downs,” I say. “With not having kids. It was really hard sometimes.”
She looks to the south. We both look to the south. The ranch there. The house empty now. Five kids and none of us taking over the ranching life. Our silence holds the missing for Dad, the years of our family on that place.
“Watching Leanne become a grandmother,” I say, “I guess not having grandkids is a whole other thing I’ll be having feelings about.”
She doesn’t say, I told you so.
We’re at the edge of town. The wide streets, tall trees, a boy running a lawn mower.
Her silence makes me bold. “I’ve worried that what you said might come true. That I’d end up being a bitter, lonely old woman.”
“Did I say that?” she asks. She sounds surprised.
Words that had been crashing around inside me all these years, she doesn’t remember.
“Yeah,” I say.
The knives others throw down, and we pick up and use as weapons on ourselves.
“That wasn’t very nice of me,” she says.
I could be angry that I took in her words, carried them in me. It was so long ago.
I pull up in front of her house, the gravel gives under the wheels.
What she said back then took me someplace I wouldn’t have gone, helped me keep watch on myself, made me determined to have another kind of life.
“You won’t be lonely,” she says. “Look at all the kids in your life. You wouldn’t have had the time for them if you’d had your own. And all the friends you have.”
The garden in the big house kitty-corner from Mom’s apartment is full of summer bloom, gold rudbeckia, some tall purple flowers. Asters maybe.
“And you aren’t bitter,” Mom says. “You’ve got Bill. You’re living a happy life.”