What the Soddie Knew

We met in a place that had no business being a restaurant — a converted grain elevator on the Nebraska side of the Platte, where someone had put in a pizza oven and a chalkboard menu and left the rest of it alone. The corrugated walls still smelled like milo. The windows were set high, the way they are in grain elevators, so you got a band of sky and nothing else. Annie Proulx had chosen it, which made sense once you were inside it. The building was a thing that had been one thing and was now another thing and was trying not to apologize for either.

She was already seated when I arrived, at a table made from what I’m fairly sure was an old feed bunk, drinking black coffee from a ceramic mug that said COZAD VETERINARY SUPPLY on it. She looked at me when I sat down and said, “The table’s uneven.”

I said I’d noticed.

“Good. That’s the first test. If you don’t notice the table, you won’t notice anything else.”

Larry McMurtry arrived ten minutes late in a way that suggested he’d been on time and had chosen to wait in the parking lot. He came in wearing a button-down shirt and jeans that had been ironed, which is a specific kind of Texas formality that communicates effort without concession. He ordered iced tea and a basket of fried cheese curds, which he ate steadily throughout the conversation, one at a time, without ever offering the basket to anyone else.

“Nebraska,” he said, looking around. “I’ve always thought Nebraska was what happens when Kansas decides to be ambitious.”

“Nebraska is what happens when the glacier stops,” Proulx said. “The till moraine. The loess. The Sandhills are wind-sorted Pleistocene sand sitting on the Ogallala. People settled here thinking they were settling on dirt. They were settling on a sandcastle that hadn’t fallen down yet.”

“People settled here because it was free,” McMurtry said. “Or because their other choice was worse. Nobody came to Nebraska because they looked at it and thought, this is the place. They came because the Homestead Act said a hundred and sixty acres and the fine print said you had to survive five years on it, and they thought five years was something they could do.”

“Most of them couldn’t,” Proulx said.

“No. Most of them couldn’t.”

I said I wanted to talk about that — the gap between the promise and the cost. We were supposed to be thinking about a story. A frontier-pioneer story set in the sod-house era, something that grappled with what it meant to try to make a domestic life on land that was actively hostile to domesticity. The combination we were working from had elements of retrospective narration, the prairie itself as a character, and the particular brutality of frontier self-reliance — the kind that gets romanticized by people who’ve never had to make soap from rendered fat.

Proulx cut me off. “Don’t say ‘hostile to domesticity.’ The land isn’t hostile. The land isn’t anything. The wind isn’t hostile. The cold isn’t hostile. A blizzard that kills your cattle and buries your soddie to the chimney is not hostile. It’s weather. The hostility is entirely in the assumption that you belong there.”

“Annie, they did belong there,” McMurtry said, and I could hear the weariness in it, the sound of a man who had fought this particular battle before. “Not because they had a right to be there — they were on Pawnee land, Lakota land, everybody knows that. But belonging isn’t a right. It’s an act. They belonged there because they stayed. Because they buried children there. You bury a child and you belong to the place where the grave is.”

“You belong to the grave. That’s different from belonging to the land.”

“Is it?”

Proulx didn’t answer. She wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at the band of sky through the high windows. A hawk passed through it, or something that could have been a hawk. It was there and gone.

I said I’d been thinking about Cather. About the way My Ántonia uses a narrator looking back at someone else’s life — Jim Burden watching Ántonia from a distance, constructing her through memory, never quite possessing the story he’s telling. I wondered if our story could do something similar. A retrospective narrator. Someone looking back at a woman — a pioneer woman — from the vantage of decades.

“The retrospective narrator is a trap,” Proulx said. “You get the warmth of nostalgia and the authority of hindsight, and both of them are lies. Jim Burden doesn’t understand Ántonia. He understands what Ántonia meant to him. Those are not the same woman.”

“That’s what makes it work,” McMurtry said. “The gap between the woman and what she meant. That gap is where the whole novel lives. If Jim understood Ántonia, there’d be no book. She’d just be a person.”

“She is just a person.”

“She’s a person who became a symbol. That’s the fate of pioneer women in literature. They become symbols of endurance, and then the symbol eats the person. I’ve done it myself. I know what it looks like. Clara Allen is a symbol of endurance, and I love her, and I also know that somewhere inside the symbol there’s a woman who would be furious about what I’ve done to her.”

I asked if that was what we should fight against — the symbol eating the person.

“You can’t fight it,” McMurtry said. “You can acknowledge it. You can let the narrator acknowledge it. He’s looking back and he knows he’s turning this woman into something she wasn’t, and he does it anyway, because that’s what memory does. Memory is not storage. Memory is composition.”

“Memory is erosion,” Proulx said. “You don’t compose a memory. You erode reality until what’s left is the shape of your need.”

I wrote that down. I actually wrote it on a napkin, which I’m aware is a cliché, but the napkin was there and the sentence was too good to trust to recall. Proulx saw me writing and said nothing, which felt like permission.

I brought up Laura Ingalls Wilder. The domestic architecture of the Little House books — the way survival is rendered through the specific tasks of making a home. Twisting hay for fuel. Sewing a button-lamp from a rag and a saucer of grease. The relentless dailiness of staying alive. I said I thought our story needed that granularity. Not just the landscape but the labor. The physical facts of keeping a family fed and warm in a house made of dirt.

“The soddie is the key,” Proulx said, and she leaned forward, and for the first time she looked like she was enjoying this. “A sod house is the land folded over onto itself. You’re living inside the ground. The walls sweat. Snakes come through the ceiling. In a good rain, the roof drips mud for three days. In a bad rain, the roof comes down. You’re not on the prairie. You’re in it. You’ve been swallowed.”

“That’s Gothic,” McMurtry said.

“It is Gothic. It should be. The pioneer experience was Gothic — people living in graves they’d dug for themselves, surrounded by a landscape that had its own intentions. But nobody writes it that way because the myth says it was heroic. Clean and heroic and full of pluck.”

“Laura Ingalls Wilder sold that myth. She sold it beautifully.”

“She sold it because it was the only story anyone would buy. A woman alone on the prairie, terrified, watching her children eat dirt because there was no food — that’s not a story the culture wanted. The culture wanted Pa playing the fiddle. The culture wanted the fiddle so badly it forgot about the dirt.”

I said I didn’t want to forget about the dirt. I said I wanted our story to hold both — the fiddle and the dirt. The moments of genuine warmth inside a life that was genuinely terrible.

“That’s Wilder’s actual achievement,” McMurtry said, quietly, and I could tell he’d thought about this more than he usually admitted. “Not the myth. The texture. The way she describes making headcheese — you can smell it. The way she describes the Christmas when they got a tin cup and a penny and a piece of candy and it was the best Christmas any child ever had. She’s not selling you the myth at that point. She’s giving you the sensory experience of a life where a penny in a tin cup is wealth beyond measure. And that’s real. That happened. Not to her specifically, maybe, but to someone. To thousands of someones.”

“It happened to everyone,” Proulx said. “And then they forgot it. And their children forgot it. And their grandchildren built ranch houses with central heating and forgot that their great-grandmother lived in a hole in the ground and boiled nettles for supper and called it good.”

There was a silence then that lasted long enough to become architectural. The pizza oven was ticking behind the counter. Outside, or what I imagined was outside — you couldn’t see much through those high windows — the light was shifting the way Nebraska light shifts in late afternoon, going from white to gold without announcing the transition.

I said I thought the narrator should be a man looking back at a woman. Not a husband. Maybe a son. Maybe a neighbor’s son. Someone close enough to see the domestic labor but not so close that he understood what it cost.

“A boy,” Proulx said. “A boy who watched a woman work and thought it was natural. Thought it was just what women did. And fifty years later, he’s an old man, and he still doesn’t understand what he saw, but he knows it was something enormous. He knows the way you know a mountain is enormous even when you can’t see the top of it.”

“He should be unreliable,” McMurtry said. “Not in the sense that he lies. In the sense that his admiration is a kind of blindness. He reveres this woman. He thinks he’s honoring her by telling her story. But the reverence keeps him from seeing the parts of her life that weren’t admirable — that were desperate, that were ugly, that were just a woman trying not to die and failing at it for thirty years until she succeeded.”

“Failing at not dying?”

“Succeeding at dying. Everybody succeeds eventually. The question is what they built in the interval.”

“What she built was a sod house that fell down,” Proulx said. “And a garden that went to seed. And children who left. That’s what she built. That’s all any of them built. The houses are gone. The gardens are gone. The children moved to Omaha and became insurance adjusters and forgot where they came from.”

“And that’s the story,” McMurtry said.

“That’s not a story. That’s an elegy.”

“An elegy is a story. It’s the only story the West has. Everything else is propaganda.”

I said I wasn’t sure I could write an elegy. I said I was worried about sentimentality — about the narrator’s backward gaze becoming a kind of golden-hour Instagram filter over a life that was actually mud and blood and monotony.

“The mud is the defense against sentimentality,” Proulx said. “You keep the physical details precise. The exact consistency of sod when you cut it — it has to be damp enough to hold together, dry enough to stack. The weight of a single sod brick: about fifty pounds. A house takes three thousand bricks. That’s a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of earth, cut and carried and stacked by hand. If you write that, if you make the reader feel the weight of it, they can’t sentimentalize it. The body won’t let them.”

“Annie’s right about the labor. But the sentiment has to be there too,” McMurtry said. “Not sentimentality — sentiment. The difference between the two is that sentimentality is feeling without cost, and sentiment is feeling that has cost you something. The narrator loves this woman. He never says so. But the way he describes the way she wrung out a washcloth — the way she planted onions in a straight line when nothing else in her life was straight — the love is in the precision. You earn the feeling by refusing to name it.”

“That’s the best thing you’ve said today,” Proulx said, and I could tell it surprised her to say it, and it surprised McMurtry to hear it, and for a moment neither of them knew what to do with the agreement, so they sat with it.

I asked about the ending. Whether the narrator should visit the homestead site as an old man. Whether there should be a return.

“There’s always a return,” McMurtry said. “The return is the whole point of the retrospective narrator. He goes back and the soddie’s gone and the section has been absorbed into a corporate wheat operation and there’s nothing left but a slight depression in the ground where the house was. And he stands there and the wind blows and he remembers something specific — the sound of her humming, the way she shelled beans into a tin pail, something small, something irretrievably gone.”

“That’s too clean,” Proulx said.

“It’s not clean. It’s true.”

“It’s true and it’s clean. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. The problem is that you’ve described the ending of every elegiac Western ever written. Old man. Empty land. Memory. Wind. We’ve all read that story. We’ve all written that story. I’ve written it. You’ve written it six times.”

“Then what?”

“Then don’t end it there. End it at the table. End it before the memory. End it with the old man trying to remember something and not being able to. He goes to the place and he stands in the depression where the house was and he tries to remember her face and he can’t. He can remember the onions. He can remember the sound of the washcloth. He can remember the exact brown of the sod walls when they were wet. But her face is gone. And he knows — he knows this with the certainty of someone who has lost something they didn’t know they were carrying — that the work outlasted the woman. That what he loved was not her but what she did. And he doesn’t know if that’s a failure of his memory or of his love or if there’s a difference.”

McMurtry was quiet for a long time. He ate the last cheese curd. He looked at the band of sky, which had gone the color of a healing bruise.

“That’s colder than what I’d write,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It might be better.”

“It might be truer. Better’s your word, not mine.”

I sat between them with my napkin full of notes and my coffee gone cold and I thought about the old man standing in the depression. I thought about a woman’s face dissolving into a catalog of her labors. I thought about how the frontier was built by people whose names we’ve forgotten, whose faces we never knew, whose hands we remember only by what they made and what they carried and what they put down when they couldn’t carry it anymore.

McMurtry pushed the empty basket to the edge of the table. “One thing. The woman. She needs a moment where she’s not working. One scene where she’s doing nothing — sitting on the upturned bucket outside the soddie, watching the grass move. No purpose. No task. Just sitting. Because if all she does is labor, she becomes a machine, and machines don’t generate grief when they stop.”

“She’s watching the grass and she’s thinking about something we’ll never know,” I said.

“You’ll never know,” Proulx corrected. “The narrator will never know. The reader might guess, but the guess is the reader’s, not yours. Don’t fill in her silence. The silence is hers. It’s maybe the only thing in her life that belongs only to her — that minute on the bucket, watching grass, thinking whatever she’s thinking. You take that away from her by explaining it and you’ve done exactly what the frontier did. You’ve taken the last private thing she had and turned it into someone else’s property.”

We left the grain elevator separately. Proulx walked to her car without saying goodbye, which I had come to understand was her goodbye. McMurtry shook my hand and said, “Three thousand sod bricks. Don’t forget the weight.”

I drove back along the Platte in the dark. The river was there, or I knew it was there — you can’t see the Platte at night, it’s too shallow and too wide and too much the color of everything around it. But you can feel the humidity change. You cross an invisible line and the air is different and you know there’s water, even if the water is barely there, even if it’s six inches deep and a mile wide and moving so slowly it might as well be staying.

I thought about a woman on a bucket, watching grass. I thought about a man who remembered everything about her except her face. I couldn’t decide if that was a love story or its opposite, and I suspect that not deciding is exactly where the story needs to live.