Sprout

done was move across the country, like half the kids I knew who’d lost one or the other parent after their families split up. The difference was, all those other parents showed up again, sometimes for a visit, sometimes to take you back—sometimes when you didn’t even want them to.
    But my mom was never coming back.
    For whatever reason, living in town didn’t suit him. Actually, the reason was pretty clear: too many people. For all his talk about friends and neighbors, good country folk and the salt of the earth, what my dad really wanted was to be alone. And so we ventured into the countryside, careened down two-lane highways or bumped and juddered over dirt roads, the trip made that much louder by a couple of boxes of dishes I’d tossed into the backseat right before we left Long Island. Their rattling had a dense, almost solid sound, as if the plates and cups and bowls had broken into tiny pieces and settled in a single mass on the bottom of the boxes, but I was too afraid to unfold the lids and check. I kept my eyes trained on the unpaved roads instead. They fascinated me. In Long Island, all the roads were, first of all, streets , and they were also, you know, paved . Dirt roads belonged to movies set in other countries, other centuries. Yet here they were, their washboard ridges shaking our suburban car to pieces, as if to punish us for disturbing a quiet pastoral afternoon.
    The Arkansas River ran through the southern part of the county (that’s pronounced R -Kansas by the way, as in: Sen. Sam Brownback, RKansas). We’d crossed other rivers that’d given their names to states, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri. By contrast, the Ark was small and shallow, rent with sandbars and fringed with stunted, scared-looking trees. The land around the river was almost entirely carved up into wheat farms. It was late June, remember. Harvest was almost over, and the stubbled fields were golden in the sun—them good ol’ amber waves of grain—but still, I preferred the real waves we’d left behind. You know. Water .
    The wheat didn’t appeal to my dad either. He turned the car around, aimed for the northwestern corner of the county, where the land was drier, hillier. The unplowed pastures were mostly empty, or dotted with Herefords destined for grocery stores and chain steakhouses, although one of them, surreally, was filled with ostriches.
    “Good meat ostriches,” my dad said as we drove past the flock, or herd, or whatever you call a group of ostriches. The big gray birds regarded our car with level, malevolent gazes, but before I could ask him when he’d ever tasted ostrich I saw the sign: GOOD MEAT
OSTRICHES
    Only later would we learn that the dryness of this part of the county was an illusion—that the water table skulked a few feet below the surface, and bubbled up each swampy spring. But summers come fast to Kansas. By the time we got here the land was hard and brown, and pearly spikes of prickly pear cacti glinted amid tangles of withered grass. Where there was water, streams as thin as untied shoelaces, a line of ubiquitous cottonwoods huddled over the shallow trickle like pigeons converging on a dropped pretzel.
    Of course, I didn’t know they were called cottonwoods then. But when we drove over a tiny shaded bridge I could see their leaves, heart-shaped, shiny as plastic, and their bark, rough and jagged as granite (rough and jagged: I know, Mrs. Miller, I know). Only later did I learn that if you separated the thick gray bark from the trunk that its underside turned out to be reddish brown and smooth as the inside of a walnut shell. That September we met a woman at the State Fair who sold paintings made on sheets of cottonwood bark. Nature scenes mostly. Little bitty trees painted on little bits of trees. I thought that was a little sad—I’ll take the real thing over a painting of it any day—but my dad bought three. Hung them in the living room next to the front door, in the place where my mom’s picture had been in our house on Long Island.
    It was with money from the sale of our old house that he bought eleven and a half acres about eight miles north of Hutch. Our property wasn’t as barren as some of the other plots in that part of the county. In fact it was covered in trees. Covered ’s a bit misleading. It implies woods, forests, wilderness, whereas our catalpas grew in orderly if slightly tattered rows. They’d been planted orchard-style in the 1920s; according to Mrs.