The man leered at my kindly barber and muttered something. I suppose he wanted to know how long he would have to wait for a shave. Maybe he had been waiting all day for a barbershop shave. A fine, brave, hung over sort of waiting, all the while entombed in that Santa Claus suit. I screamed. I like to think I was screaming against chaos, in defense of my mother and notions of a proper Christmas, and maybe because our Santa Claus who was not a Santa, with his corded, unshaven neck, even looked remotely like a turkey as this story turns edgy and nightmarish.
My father’s turkeys had been slaughtered the week before Thanksgiving in a couple of box-cars pulled onto a siding in Tule Lake, and shipped to markets in the East. Everyone was at liberty and making ready to ride out winter on whatever he had managed to accumulate. So the party my parents threw on the night before Christmas had ancient ceremonial resonances. The harvest was done, the turkeys were slaughtered, and the dead season of cold winds was at hand. It was a time of release into meditation and winter, to await rebirth.
But it was not a children’s party. It is difficult to imagine my father at a children’s party. As I recall from this distance it was a party for the turkey herders, those men who had helped my father conspire his way through that humiliating summer with those terrible creatures. At least the faces I see in my dream of that yellow kitchen are the faces of those men. Never again, my mother said, and my father agreed; better times were coming and everybody got drunk.
I had been put down to sleep on the big bed in my parents’ bedroom, which was quite a privilege in itself, and it was only late in the night that I woke to a sense of something gone wrong. The sacred place where I lived with my mother had been invaded by loud laughter and hoedown harmonica music and people dancing and stomping. As I stood in the doorway looking into the kitchen in my pajamas, nobody saw me for a long moment—until I began my hysterical momma’s-boy shrieking.
The harmonica playing stopped, and my mother looked shamefaced toward me from the middle of the room, where she had been dancing with my father while everyone watched. All those faces of people who are now mostly dead turned to me, and it was as if I had gotten up and come out of the bedroom into the actuality of a leering nightmare, vivid light and whiskey bottles on the table and those faces glazed with grotesque intentions.
Someone saved it, one of the men, maybe even my father, by picking me up and ignoring my wailing as the harmonica music started again, and then I was in my mother’s arms as she danced, whirling around the kitchen table and the center of all attention in a world where everything was possible and good, while the turkey herders watched and smiled and thought their private thoughts, and it was Christmas at last in my mother’s arms, as I have understood it ever since.
For years the faces of the turkey herders in their otherness, in that bright kitchen, were part of a dream I dreaded as I tried to go to sleep. In struggling against the otherness of the turkey herders I made a start toward indifference to the disenfranchised. I was learning to inhabit distance, from myself and people I should have cared for.
A couple of years later my family moved the hundred miles east to the MC Ranch. My grandfather got the place when he was sixty-two years old, pledging everything he had worked for all his life, unable to resist owning such a kingdom. The move represented an enormous change in our fortunes.
Warner Valley is that place which is sacred to me as the main staging ground for my imagination. I see it as an inhabited landscape where the names of people remind me of places, and the places remind me of what happened there—a thicket of stories to catch the mind if it might be falling.
It was during the Second World War that wildlife biologists from up at the college in Corvallis told my father the sandhill cranes migrating through Warner were rare and vanishing creatures, to be cherished with the same intensity as the ring-necked Manchurian pheasants, which had been imported from the hinterlands of China. The nests of sandhill cranes, with their large off-white speckled eggs, were to be regarded as absolutely precious. “No matter what,” I heard my father say, “you don’t break those eggs.”
My father was talking to a tall, gray-faced man named Clyde Bolton, who was stuck with a day of riding a drag made of heavy timbers across Thompson Field, breaking up cow shit in the early spring before the irrigating started, so the chips wouldn’t plug up the John Deere mowing machines come summer and haying. Clyde was married to Ada Bolton, the indispensable woman who cooked and kept house for us, and he had a damaged heart which kept him from heavy work. He milked the three or four cows my father kept, and tended the chickens and the house garden, and took naps in the afternoon. He hadn’t hired out for field work, and he was unhappy.
But help was scarce during those years when so many of the able bodied were gone to the war, and there he was, take it or leave it. And anyway, riding that drag wouldn’t hurt even a man with a damaged heart. Clyde was a little spoiled—that’s what we used to say. Go easy on the hired help long enough, and they will sour on you. A man, we would say, needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.
This was a Saturday morning in April after the frost had gone out, and I was a boy learning the methodologies of field work. The cranes’ nests my father was talking about were hidden down along unmowed margins—in the yellow remnants of knee-high meadow grass from the summer before, along the willow-lined sloughs through the home fields. “The ones the coons don’t get,” my father said.
I can see my father’s gray-eyed good humor and his stockman’s fedora pushed back on his head as he studied Clyde, and hear the ironic rasp in his voice. At that time my father was more than ten years younger than I am now, a man recently come to the center of his world. And I can see Clyde Bolton hitching his suspenders and snorting over the idea of keeping an eye out for the nest of some sandhill crane. I can see his disdain.
This going out with Clyde was as close to any formal initiation as I ever got on the ranch. There really wasn’t much of anything for me to do, but it was important I get used to the idea of working on days when I was not in school. It wouldn’t hurt a damned bit. A boy should learn to help out where he can, and I knew it, so I was struggling to harness the old team of matched bay geldings, Dick and Dan, and my father and Clyde were not offering to help because a boy would never make a man if you helped him all the time.
“You see what you think out there,” my father said, and he spoke to Clyde seriously, man to man, ignoring me. They were deeply serious all at once and absorbed into what I understood as the secret lives of men. It was important to watch them for clues.
My father acted like he was just beginning to detail Clyde’s real assignment. You might have thought we faced a mindless day spent riding that drag behind a farting old team. But no, it seemed Clyde’s real mission involved a survey of conditions, and experienced judgment.
“Them swales been coming to swamp grass,” my father said. “We been drowning them out.” He went on to talk about the low manure dams which spread irrigation water across the swales. Clyde would have the day to study those dams, and figure where they should be relocated.
Once we believed work done well would see us through. But it was not true. Once it seemed the rewards of labor would be naturally rationed out with at least a rough kind of justice. But we were unlettered and uninstructed in the true nature of our ultimate values. Our deep willingness to trust in our native goodness was not enough.
But we tried. This is what I am writing of here, that trying and also about learning to practice hardening of the heart. Even back then I might have suspected my father wasn’t much worried about swamp grass in the swales, and that Clyde Bolton knew he wasn’t, and that it wasn’t the point of their negotiations. My father was concerned about dignity, however fragile, as an ultimate value.
“Your father was the damnedest son of a bitch,” one of the ranch hands once told me. “He’d get you started on one thing, and make you think you were doing another thing which was more important, and then he w
ould go off and you wouldn’t see him for days, and pretty soon it was like you were working on your own place.”
It was not until I was a man in the job my father perfected that I learned the sandhill cranes were not endangered at all. It didn’t matter. Those birds were exotic and lovely as they danced their mating dances in our meadows, each circling the other with gawky tall-bird elegance, balanced by their extended fluttering wings as they seized the impulse and looped across the meadows with their long necks extended to the sky and their beaks open to whatever ecstasy birds can know. I think my father was simply trying to teach me and everyone else on the property that certain vulnerabilities should be cherished and protected at whatever inconvenience.
I have to wish there had been more such instruction, and that it had been closer to explicit in a philosophical sense. Most of all I wish my father had passed along some detailed notion of how to be boss. It was a thing he seemed to do naturally. I wish he had made clear to me the dangers of posturing in front of people who are in some degree dependent on your whims, posturing until you have got yourself deep into the fraud of maintaining distance and mystery in place of authenticity.
A man once told me to smoke cigars. “They see you peel that cellophane,” he said, “and they know you don’t live like they do.”
My father set up the Grain Camp on a sagebrush hill slope, beneath a natural spring on the west side of Warner Valley. And it was an encampment, short on every amenity except running water in the early days—a double row of one-room shacks, eight in all, trucked in from a nearby logging camp abandoned in the late 1930s. There were also two shacks tacked across one another in a T shape to make a cookhouse, one cabin for the cooking and another for the long table where everyone ate.
The men, who lived two to a cabin in the busy seasons, sweltering on that unshaded hill slope in the summers, and waking in the night to the stink of drying work clothes as they fed split wood to their little stoves in the winter, were a mix of transients and what we called homesteaders, men who stayed with us for more than an occasional season, often years in the same cabin, which became known as theirs. Those men have my heart as I write this, men who were my friends and my mentors, some of whom died at the Grain Camp and have been inconspicuously dead for many years. Louie Hanson, Vance Beebe, Jake O’Rourke, Lee Mallard, so many others. I would like the saying of their names to be an act of pure celebration.
When I came home from the air force in the fall of 1957, I was twenty-five years old and back to beginnings after most of eight years away, a woeful figure from American mythology, the boss’s kid and heir to the property, soon to inherit, who didn’t know anything. Then in the spring of 1958, the myth came directly home to roost. I found myself boss at the Grain Camp.
There was no choice but to plead ignorance and insinuate myself into the sympathies of the old hands. Ceremony demanded that I show up twice a day to sit at the head of the long table for meals, breakfast and noon, and in the course of those appearances negotiate my way through the intricacies of managing 8,000 acres of irrigated land. For a long time I was bluffing, playing a hand I didn’t understand, risking disgrace and reaping it plenty enough. The man who saved my bacon mostly was an old alcoholic Swede in filthy coveralls named Louie Hanson, who sat at my right hand at the table.
About five-thirty on a routine morning, after a hot shower and instant coffee, I would drive the three or so miles from the house to the Grain Camp. The best cabin, walls filled with sawdust for insulation, belonged to Louie. He had worked for my father since our beginnings in Warner, hiring out in 1937 to build dikes with a secondhand Caterpillar RD-6, the first tracklayer my father bought, and made his way up to Cat mechanic, and into privileges, one of which was occasional drinking. Theoretically, we didn’t allow any drinking. Period. Again, there were rules. You need to drink, go to town. Maybe your job will be waiting when you get back. Unless you were one of the old hands. Then your job was secure. But nobody was secure if he got to drinking on the job, or around camp.
Except for Louie. Every morning in winter he would go down to the Cat shop to build his fire before breakfast, and dig a couple of beers from one of the bolt-rack cubbyholes, pop the tops, and set the bottles on the stove to heat. When they were steaming he would take them off, drink the beer in a few long draughts, and be set to seize the day.
So it would not be an entirely sober man I greeted when I came early to get him for breakfast and knocked on the door to his cabin. Louie would be resting back on the greasy tarp that covered his bed, squinting through the smoke from another Camel, sipping coffee from a filthy cup and looking up to grin. “Hell, you own the place,” he would say, “you’re in.”
Louie would blink his eyes. “Chee-rist. You got enough water in Dodson Lake?” He was talking about one of the huge grain fields we flooded every spring. And I wouldn’t know. Did I have enough water in Dodson Lake? Louie would look at me directly. “Get a south wind and you are going to lose some dikes.” I knew what that meant: eroded levee banks, washouts, catastrophe, 450 acres of flooded alfalfa.
Up at the breakfast table, while Louie reached for the pounded round steak, I would detail a couple of men to start drawing down the water in Dodson Lake, a process involving the opening of huge valves, pulling headgate boards, running the eighteen-inch pump. All of which would have been unnecessary if I had known what I was doing in the first place. Which everybody knew and nobody mentioned. All in all a cheap mistake, easily covered—wages for the men and electricity to run the pump, wasted time and a little money, maybe a couple hundred bucks. Without Louie’s intercession, maybe twenty thousand.
The deeply fearful are driven to righteousness, as we know, and they are the most fearsome fools we have. This is a story I have told as a tavern-table anecdote, in which I call our man the Murderer, since I have no memory of his real name. Call the story “The Day I Fired the Murderer.” It is designed, as told in taverns, to make me appear winsome and ironic, liberated, guilty no more. Which of course implies there was guilt. And there was, in a way that cornered me into thinking it was anger that drove me, and that my anger was mostly justifiable.
I had been boss at the Grain Camp for four or five years, and I had come to understand myself as a young man doing good work, employing the otherwise unemployable (which was kind of true), and also as someone whose efforts were continually confounded by the incompetence of the men who worked for me. We were farming twenty-four hours a day through early May while the Canada honkers hatched their downy young and the tulips pushed up through the crusted flower beds and the Lombardy poplar broke their buds and the forsythia bloomed lurid yellow against the cookhouse wall. But I don’t think of such glories when I remember those spring mornings. I remember the odor of dank peat turning up behind those disc Cats as we went on farming twenty-four hours a day, and how much I loved breaking ground.
Before sunrise on those mornings I would come awake and go piss, then stand in my undershorts on the screened-in veranda attached to the house where I lived with my wife and young children. I would shiver with chill and happiness as I smelled the world coming awake. Far out across our valley the lights on our D-7 disc Cats would flicker as lights do when seen through a screen, moving almost imperceptibly. I would take my binoculars and open the screen door and gaze out to those lights as if I might catch one of my night-shift Catskinners at some dog-fuckery, but really all I wanted to see was the machinery moving. Those Cats would clank along at two or three miles an hour all through the hours of darkness, turning a thirty-six-foot swath—a hundred acres every night and another hundred acres on the day shift. The upturned soil would mellow in the air for a day, and then we would harrow it and seal it with dust and drill it to barley. In ten days or so the seedlings would break earth, and those orderly drill-rows undulating over the tilled ground toward the sundown light were softly yellow-green and something alive I had seen to completion.
It came to a couple hundred acres of barley every day for fifteen days, t
hree-thousand-some-odd acres in all. By the end of harvest in late September, at roughly a ton per acre, that came to 3,000 tons of barley at $50 a ton, or $150,000, real money in the early 1960s in our end of the world.
We drained the wetlands and thought that made them ours. We believed the world was made to be useful; we ditched and named the intersections of our ditches: Four Corners, Big Pump, Center Bridge, Beatty Bridge. We thought such naming made the valley ours.
And we thought the people were ours.
The man I call the Murderer was one of those men who rode the disc Cats, circling toward the sunrise. My involvement with him that spring had started the previous fall, when someone from the Oregon Board of Parole called and asked if we would participate in what they called their Custody Release Program. They would send us a parolee if we would guarantee a job; in return we got an employee who was forbidden to drink or quit, on penalty of being sent back to prison. If there was “anything,” we could call and the State Police would come take him away. It seemed like a correct idea; it had been twenty some years since the Murderer killed his wife in an act of drunken bewilderment he couldn’t recall.
Frail and dark-eyed in a stiff new evergreen-colored workshirt, with the sleeves rolled to expose thin white arms, pensive and bruised and looking incapable of much beyond remorse, the Murderer spent the winter feeding bales to the drag at our feed mill, a cold, filthy job, and as monotonous an enterprise as it is possible to imagine this side of automation. So when it came time to go farming in the spring, I sat him up at the controls of a D-7, taught him to pull frictions and grease the rollers and called him a Catskinner, which is to say, gave him some power. The Murderer responded by starting to talk. Bright, misinformed chatter at the breakfast table.