Open Spaces

OPEN SPACES/CM Husted IGOT DISORIENTED on the prairie. Most of the roads were gravel, and only a few had signs. Nobody up there needed them. Tourists usuaUy stuck to the interstate on their way up to GrangeviUe or down to the Lewiston Valley. Who knew where they headed after that. It was a big part of the country, lots of space under the sky, and it seemed like people were always headed somewhere else. Td been like that when I was younger—a few months m Vegas, then Seattle, up to Alaska and then back down to California. Td traveled the West like an old pioneer, and that was the place Td stopped—the Camas Prairie, m Idaho. The rolling hüls looked the same m every direction, or at least, they did to me. "Go back to the suburbs," my father-in-law would say. "There's plenty of stucco houses down there for you to navigate by. Up here we use a couple newfangled things like, oh, I don't know . . . north, south, east and west! You ever heard of those Catifornia?" Most people called me CaI, but my father-in-law, he caUed me Catifornia, and sometimes I had to answer for the sins of an entire state. During that time, though, he was gentle, almost fatherly, and would just sigh and squeeze my shoulder without saying anything. We knew that words were flimsy. He'd talked a lot more after his wife passed, but that was just to fill in the spaces she left behind. It had been almost two years since, and none of us had expected another funeral so soon. Henry and I drove out to one ofhis plots near Big Canyon. He thought the bluegrass might be ready to cut and stopped by to see if I wanted to drive out there and check. He'd been a champ through the whole ordeal. I told him that the best thing I could do was to keep busy and let JiI work through her own grief. She wouldn't talk about it anyway, just sat around and stared at old pictures of the three of us. The day before, Td come home from work and she'd picked off the tips of her fingernatis and lined them Ui two neat rows on the coffee table. "Jesus, honey!" I said. "Are you okay?" She looked up with disgust as her eyes came into focus. "Of course Tm not okay. Just go ... go do something. I want to be alone," she said and went back to staring at her fingernaUs. Henry was my brother-in-law, and during this time he stopped in almost every day and took me on some farm errand or another. He was 46 · The Missouri Review one of the only people I could tolerate being around, and that was because he didn't try to say too much. We talked about farming and sports, but he never asked if I was okay or if there was anything he could do, and that's the way I wanted it. The sympathy of that town was crushing me; people bringing food, helping out with chores, not bringing their children with them when they came to the house—it was too much. We got out to the field after driving miles on a skinny dirt road that curved like a spine over hills covered with wheat, bluegrass and bright yeUow canola fields. Behind the hundred-acre parcel ofbluegrass, which wasn't blue at aU, but a deep, dull green, was Big Canyon—a place where everything feU in on itself and carved through the landscape for miles before opening up at the Clearwater River. We parked, and Henry jumped out immediately and wandered Ulto the bluegrass field. Then he puUed one of the heads off, broke some seeds loose and cradled them m the palm of his hand. I walked over slowly, taking Ui the view, and by the time I got there he was chewing on the seeds; I could teU he was deep in thought. Hank took farming real serious. He studied new techniques, played the market with his surplus gram...