Shearing
In the photo I am leaning in stiffly, artificially, with an exaggerated smile. The man at my side is not leaning back. Although the couch is crowded with people, there is a visible gap between my grandfather and me—narrow, maybe, but deep.
When I first pulled the picture out of the envelope, the only thing I could see was the gap, rising floor to head between us like a slice in the print. Flushing crimson, I dug deep into a thickly stuffed drawer and buried it, but the image would not leave my head.
There is a difference, I suppose, between gaps that are made and gaps, like this one, that are simply discovered. You can plant a new tree where one has been uprooted, or replace a boulder that has been moved, but you cannot change the grain of the wood or the conglomeration of the stone. The gap that divides me from this man is hereditary; my mother has much the same tidy, stoic relationship with him that I do. Except he knows her name.
Although his health is better than most people half his age, I have become anxious this year that my grandfather might die before I have a chance to get a good hold on him. Maybe this sudden rush of wanting to understand him comes from a ripening desire to understand myself. Or maybe I am interested on an entirely ancestral level. Or maybe I just feel guilty for having never really tried before. I can’t tell.
So I have increased my pilgrimages north. Admittedly, I am too late. Last-minute intimacy is a poor excuse for sincerity, and all of us can sense it. Instead of a venture into familiarity, my visits become penance for years of absence.
It is late August. Outside the broad wall of windows, summer is relaxing into autumn. Inside it is stiff as winter. We have all assumed our usual positions: my mom and sister and I on the couch, fidgeting on the slick leather, grandma on a kitchen chair, angled in, and my kids in various stages of agitated boredom. Back to the window, my grandfather sits rigidly upright in his recliner.
We all sit. My mom and her stepmother rattle through pleasantries while the kids make a break for the spare bedroom, and the rest of us concentrate on looking anywhere but at each other. Aside from the new TV on the cart wedged next to the couch, the room looks the same as it did last month, last year, and the year before that. Fading Christmas cards line the china hutch that stretches the length of the room, houndstooth curtains edge the windows behind my grandfather. The burned-asphalt carpet, the pastoral landscape above the couch, the lamp on a chain over the table—nothing has changed.
During a visit when I was a teenager, a dozen years ago, I mentioned to my grandfather that I was interested in learning to play the saxophone. Mutely, he rose and disappeared through the basement door, reemerging after a minute with his own battered instrument. I had no idea he played. My mom said something about a college band, but he offered no details. Neither did she. He just handed me the case and we took it home. Apart from this minuscule bit of history, I know nothing of his youth. I know where he has lived and ranched, and I know each of his nine children and my fifty-six cousins intimately. But my sketch of the interior man is blank.
Barely perched on the edge of the couch, I lean forward. “How are you feeling, Grandpa?”
“Fine.”
“Have you been with the sheep lately?”
“No.”
My eighteen-month-old grabs his starched khakis and he reaches down awkwardly. “Oh, you don’t have to pick her up,” I say. My hand shoots out to pull her back as I overstretch a smile. “Can you say hi to Grandpa, Catherine?”
I am the only one smiling in the picture; even the baby is arching away from the pose. It was taken last summer during the annual family gathering on the Fourth of July.
Ever since I can remember we have come to this small Utah town for the Fourth, but the tradition is in the middle stages of terminal illness. Sprinklers have replaced irrigation ditches that used to flood the entire yard into an aquatic wonderland. Climbing on the mausoleums in the cemetery across the street is now taboo. Even the rodeo we used to religiously attend has been moved two weeks ahead, two weeks before any of us arrive. Most of the cousins don’t bother to come for the Fourth at all.
What used to pass as a parade still snakes down Main Street right in front of my grandparents’ house, but every year there are fewer floats and marching bands, more livestock semitrucks and pickups with For Sale signs. Nothing is the same.
I have never visited my grandfather alone. My mom is riding with me today, my oldest sister follows in another car. The kids have been whining since we pulled onto the freeway.
“Are you really taking that baby out there?” my mom asks, again.
The speedometer lurches, then levels out. “Mom, she’ll be fine—she loves the desert. The weather is supposed to be mild next weekend. There will be shade in the car, and we’ll be taking plenty of food and water—and anyway, she loves to just sit and play in the sand.” The car groans as we start the climb up Sardine Canyon.
“Maybe you should leave her with me.”
When I was young, I used to dream I lived in this canyon, sometimes on the dry, barren side, sometimes on the pine-slathered side.
“She really likes to come. We like going all together. She loves to bang on the rocks with the boys.”
My mom prefers the green southern slope.
“I think you and the baby should just spend the weekend at home with me. There’s nothing out there.”
I have four sisters, no brothers. That’s how I introduce my childhood to most people. They usually respond with condolences for my dad. “It’s okay,” I say. “He had me.”
When my oldest sister married, a longtime neighbor walked up to my dad, slapped him on the back, and said, “Well George, now you’ve finally got a son. Other than Allyson, that is.” Just past twenty, and saucy as sixteen, I feigned insult—after all, I had a boyfriend and looked decent in a skirt—but he had a point. Growing up I didn’t play much with dolls and I never liked pink; I smelled of horses, spent hours sharpening my pocket knife, and took yard work over vacuuming every time. And whenever allowed, I spent Saturdays in the desert with my dad.
My parents made a deal when they married. My dad could take the boys hunting and camping and out to the desert. The girls would go to the symphony and take ballet. The deal held pretty well for girl-one and girl-two—but somewhere between girls three-through-five, it collapsed.
My dad started taking me to the desert before I was ten. I didn’t like it, not at first, but I went to be with my dad.
The desert was hot and dry and empty. I didn’t get out of the car the first few times; I just watched out the window while my dad scrambled up the hill, checked a mine shaft to see that it had been blasted shut, and scrambled back. Then we drove home. Being in the desert, for me, was only something to be endured.
When I was about twelve, my dad bought a few hundred acres south of Tooele in Dry Canyon, former home of a long-dead town called Jacob’s City. Open mine shafts were a liability for his property ventures, so my dad checked new acreage to see if he needed to have any sealed. Envisioning a skeletal version of the set for Gunsmoke, with its boardwalks and flat-faced shops, I rode along with bloated expectations.
Jacob’s City had once consisted of a hotel-saloon and several dozen cabins—all rough-hewn and cramped. Only one cabin remains today, but when I was twelve the hotel was still standing, although at a torturous angle. The clapboard sagged, contracting under its own weight and the midday heat. The interior had been picked bare except for the remnant of a front desk topped with glass shards. Three cabins lined the canyon—one each on the north- and south-facing slopes, and one in the canyon crook a few yards from the hotel.
After exploring the buildings, I slumped on the ground in front of the hotel to wait for my dad, who was still navigating talus piles halfway up the mountain. I peeled off my shoes and plunged my feet into the sand. They burned sharply on the surface, then cooled as they hit the pleasantly damp sand beneath. I lay back on the crusty sage, closed my eyes, and inhaled. The thick air rushing into my body was like tonic, and I lay on my back and drank it in until my chest muscles ached.
I have only ever breathed like that in the desert.
“The desert is hot and dry and empty,” my mom always says, but she never gets out of the car. Trying to explain the lure of the desert to her is like trying to explain a sunset to someone who sees in black and white. “You don’t have to keep going out there just to humor your dad,” she says.
Sometimes I want her to understand badly enough to risk annoyance. I talk about the sand dunes and the silence and the thousand shades of brown, about how strong freshly cut pinyon smells, about open sky. I ramble on about antelope and hawks and cedar posts and caves.
“It’s so exhilarating to dig into a place you expect to be empty,” I say, “and find it full of life and history.”
She says much the same thing when I complain that I can see little of the substance beneath my grandfather’s surface.
I am running out of subjects. Kids, weather, ranch takeovers, not even the changing face of Main Street manages to spark any subcutaneous interest.
“Did you know we lived in France?” I ask.
At his slightly piqued curiosity, I get excited and overindulge, chattering circuitously about our house and the village and a well-aged way of life—as if our six-month stay there entitled me to any more intimacy than I can claim with my grandfather.
“My husband used to take a picture of us in the west desert with him to the French schools. ‘There’s nothing in any direction for fifty miles’ he would say, ‘No houses, no people, just wide open space.’ The kids would stare at him like he was crazy. Can you imagine living that closed up?”
My grandfather nods, smiling. “When we were in Europe . . . ” he begins, his eyes quickening a pace. But he pauses to draw breath and my grandma finishes the sentence. He leans away, content to let her poach the subject, and relaxes back into obscurity. His eyes drift away from me and out the window to where the leaves are beginning to turn.
Desperate for connection, I bring up the shearing.
During summer break some of the grandkids would help the herders with the sheep up on the forest property, but only the boys were allowed. An irreparable tomboy, I ached to go. My grandfather, being a traditional man who also knew his herders well, had no intention of letting his granddaughters spend the summer at the sheep camp. But the prospect of wandering weeks on horseback gnawed at me, overrunning my thoughts, and pushing me almost to the point of begging. In the end, however, I did not have the guts to beg. I mentioned going once in an unsure, roundabout sort of way, and was immediately denied. So I settled for helping with the shearing one spring on the desert flats out by Wendover.
No rain had fallen for weeks, and the milling sheep threw up balls of choking dust. Unaware this was a two-day venture, I did not come well prepared. The one pair of clothes I brought were filthy and sweat-caked halfway through the first day. Only one herder had come, meaning only one horse and no joyriding. Instead, I was assigned to follow stragglers with a switch, prodding them back in line. My uncle would split a group off of the main herd and head them toward the traveling shearers in their converted semi-trailer. The large rectangle was split into three rooms—open on one long side to an oblong pen, and masked by black plastic on the other side that ran parallel with the ramp. We’d nudge the sheep up and onto the ramp, where they would stand slumped until two hands reached up from under the plastic and swept them away. A few sheep died in the process of being sheared, mostly ewes that had lambed too late. I had never seen a dead anything tossed away like that before, lobbed into a pile off to the side, and the first one stunned me motionless. The sheep on the ramp began to balk, causing a backup down the line. My grandfather hollered at me to pay attention, but he did not call me by name. I don’t ever remember him calling me by name.
Until that day, it had never occurred to me that my grandfather should know my name. Three of my four biological grandparents died when I was very young, and he was my only generational point of reference. Over the years, my grandfather’s children had multiplied extensively; even an overtly involved grandparent would have been hard put to maintain intimacy with fifty-some-odd grandchildren. Assuming he had once tried to keep us straight, I wonder if at some point my grandfather just let us blur into one big allegorical grandchild. Somewhat like I have done to him—letting him disperse into a vague sense of place.
Two hours have passed. The kids explode though the door and into the yard. I am repacking the scattered contents of the diaper bag.
“Thanks for letting us come, Grandpa. It was so nice to see you.”
He nods, his head turned away, the lowering light bronze on his already tanned face. I stop talking and follow his gaze out the window, over the cherry tree, around the empty irrigation ditches, into the high grass of the field. When someone talks of my grandfather, I don’t picture the man. I picture pea gravel in the window wells and cherry jam on the shelf and the view from the back of the pick-up, where I am wrestling a bum lamb into the folds of my oversized jacket. And I picture shearing in the desert.
Crossing the room to my grandfather, I bend to kiss his cheek. He smiles politely.
“I love you, Grandpa,” I say, startled by a surge that kicks up in my chest. He pats my hand, his eyes still on the streaking children. Straightening and turning, I drift slowly out the door. The warm air wraps around me and I breathe deeply once, twice, then step down and wander out across the evenly watered lawn and into the overgrown pasture, where my kids run squealing before me.
Allyson is prose editor of Segullah.
