“We didn’t see our mom yesterday,” Claire said, running up ahead and then facing Sandy and walking backwards.
“That’s too bad,” Sandy said.
I had made a point of calling a realtor in a distant city. Our potboiler was localized and had not, as far as I knew, been heralded more than once on the news at the beginning. There was a fair chance Sandy knew nothing of our misfortunes. She would jump to her own conclusions. She might think that I was the ex-husband who had kidnaped his children. She might take a more kindly view, might assume that my wife had died in a crash, that we had gone to a seance to try to make contact.
Sandy Brickman and I talked zoning. We talked arable land. We talked mound systems and septic systems and sewer. We talked county planning and town ordinances. Another one of my mother’s famous sayings that has stuck is this one: “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” I had the terrific urge to take Sandy by the shoulders and yell in her face.
“I’ll be honest with you,” I said quietly. “My twin sister is dying of leukemia. None of us have insurance. We’ve been trying to raise funds for bone marrow treatment by having dances and collection cups in the supermarkets. I’m sure you can imagine what kind of money we’re talking.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Sandy said.
“Selling this place is a shot in the dark, I realize, but it’s all I have left now for cash.”
I had wanted to spend my life caring for land, being a steward, and raising food. When we moved in, and I walked down to the barn for the first time, I couldn’t imagine needing anything more. I had my own barn, a wife, a child. The barn had stanchions, a haymow, a milkhouse. It had stalls down below for sheep, a horse if we wanted. Alice once said that most men must secretly want a barn, even city-dwelling men. She saw how I was about the barn, how at night I’d make excuses to go out one more time.
“I need the cash,” I said again. I wasn’t sure there was anything in me that went deeper than my stinging skin. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt much more than an animal sensation, a veering toward ruin. Everywhere I looked I kept seeing that sign, I Need Food.
“I can tell already that it’s a real special piece of property,” Sandy said as we walked along the edge of the soybean field. It was a respectable stand and the only green thing close to the ground. She was probably seeing the place divided up into five-acre lots with dream houses, sprawling brick affairs with hardwood floors and decks, windows and views, stone fireplaces, master bedrooms with walk-in closets and Jacuzzis, family rooms, great rooms, mud rooms, closets, closets, closets. “It’s going to take that special buyer. Now, you say that this property, parts of it anyway, cannot be zoned residential, is that right? Is it locked into some kind of conservation easement?” She was huffing and puffing as we climbed the slope to the plateau. “I just gotta get back into aerobics,” she muttered. She kicked the ground and the earth rose in a puff of smoke. “Is it dry or what?” When she’d had a chance to catch her breath and scan the horizon, she pursed her lips, as if to whistle. She blew out a silent stream of air as she shook her head.
It is a good place. With your back to the east you hardly notice the greyhound racetrack in the distance. You can see the fields laid out in squares, the pond sparkling in the sunlight, and the old orchard beyond. You can see the cows standing still around the few shade trees in their worn pasture. You can see how far the woods stretch. You can see the marsh with its cattails, and the cranes lifting off into the air, making their guttural trill.
“There’s a marsh, a bog, and a fen on this property,” I said, which
was stretching the definitions of those wet places slightly. We definitely had a marsh, and pretty much had a bog. The fen was questionable.
“No kidding,” she said. “I didn’t know there were so many things like that.” The bog is what had sold me on the place originally. A farm with a barn and a bog. “This is a real special piece of property you’ve got here,” she said for about the third time. “I’ll tell you what.” She was going to deliver a secret, a Sandy Brickman kind of secret. She put the stem of her sunglasses into her mouth. They hung from her lips like some gruesome piece of orthodontia.
“Yes?” I said, waiting for the revelation.
“We’ll have to have the house appraised, do a survey, work up the papers, take care of the business. I’m going to zip back to the office and make a few phone calls.” She managed to say that with her mouth full.
“I’d really like to get this going,” I said.
She put her glasses back on. “I think I’m having an inspiration, Guy.” She called me Guy, as if it was my name and only I hadn’t known it. “What you have to do is sit tight. That’s all you have to do.”
Sandy Brickman, as it turned out, was the answer to the prayers somebody must have been making. Theresa was the only person I knew who prayed every day. It was more than likely that she was praying not only for her damned soul but also for Alice, and for me. I hold Theresa personally accountable for conjuring up Sandy Brickman. In the weeks that followed, the appraiser and the surveyor did their work. Even before Sandy wrestled with the details of our farm, the image of Mrs. Arnold L. Reesman must have risen up in her mind. Sandy had spent much of her professional life cultivating Mrs. Reesman. She must have somehow appealed to the lady not as an obsequious money-grubbing real estate agent, but as a friend, an advocate, perhaps a lover of nature.
It was mid-August when Sandy showed up. Alice had been in Racine for nearly two months. I remember Emma, around that time, wanting to go to the summer library story hour on Tuesday afternoon. She’d seen the banner across the windows, advertising the event. I wouldn’t let her. She went to her room and slammed the door like a teenager. Without Theresa we were back to eating cornflakes for every meal. I had dreams that the
old man and I were standing out on the road, both of us with our signs held high. I didn’t let myself sit still to think. I didn’t breathe a word of my plan out loud, even when I was alone in the presence of the barn walls. During the day the girls put on their dress-up sun bonnets and together we hauled stones. They didn’t like it much, but they didn’t have a choice. They’d get tired and play under the wagon. I cleared about forty acres of stones last summer. One day, in Alice’s stead, I made sauce from the early apples. I had to cut around the bad spots in every single wormy apple. There wasn’t any sugar in the house and when the girls tried a spoonful of the hot sauce they acted as if I’d poisoned them.
Right after the sign went up Mrs. Reesman came to look at the farm. Sandy, Mrs. Reesman, and Arnold Reesman III arrived in a silver Volvo on a Wednesday morning. The sight of that car almost brought me to my knees. I have never really had a hankering for cars, but that silver automobile, so sturdily made, accident-proof, with the soft black leather seats, was a thing of incomparable beauty. Sandy got out first. She had not learned during the first round that high heels are unnecessary and also perilous when showing country property. Mrs. Reesman followed. She was a small woman, fine boned, with short white hair and a lip that I guess was naturally swollen. It was an enormous upper lip. She was the same vintage as my mother. But she was rich and as a result she seemed less concerned with appearance. She was wearing an embroidered shirt that had come from a poor Latin American country and ordinary white Keds, yellowed with age. She had the deportment of a queen.
I learned that her late husband, Arnold L. Reesman II, had been the Scout master for thirty-five years of Troop Nineteen. She was looking for a plot of land to donate to the Boy Scouts of America—the Arnold L. Reesman II Scout Camp. Reesman, the boys would call it. We stood by the barn, getting our bearings. I handed the county topographical maps to Arnold III and I held out the aerial view photograph for Mrs. Reesman. As I watched mother and son pore over the documents, I felt that I was beginning to see the world through Alice’s eyes. She prided herself on her snap judgments. She had always seemed to think that sizing up people was a special talent. It didn’t seem difficult to know strangers that morning. It didn’t seem like much of a skill, judging character. Mrs. Reesman was old enough to know that rain would fall again. She was talking to her
son, asking him to picture with her the place in spring, when the grass is blindingly green. She could imagine the tulips, the first chitter of robins, the leaves unfolding. The spring-fed pond violently appealed to her imagination. When we took the short walk down the lane and stood before the water she grinned, that upper lip enlarging to grotesque proportions as it spread across her face. She could see the naked Scouts running the length of the wooden pier and jumping, arms outstretched, into the clear water. “It is a shame,” she said with her patrician, sharp diction, “that inner-city youth have to grow up surrounded by cement and broken glass. They don’t know that they, themselves, are of the earth.” The boys would study birds as well as microscopic organisms. They’d want to recycle and save the rain forests. The old farmhouse would be torn down, of course, and the barn could be turned into a lodge. They became slightly animated, thinking of the potential. Arnold nodded. Mrs. Reesman raised her eyebrows. He suggested they rent some of the fields to the neighboring farmers. There won’t be any for long, I might have said. Mrs. Reesman put her hand to her heart at the idea of the Scouts earning merit badges for detasseling corn.
Although suburban encroachment was fast upon us, to Sandy, and even to Mrs. Reesman, our farm was deep country. For them it was plenty wild enough and so close, only seventy minutes from Milwaukee. The girls staggered behind us as we walked the property. When Claire couldn’t cope, I carried her on my shoulders. I held onto one of her legs and with the other hand I dragged Emma along. She poked her fingernails into my palm, trying to hurt me.
Arnold was a thin, clean-shaven man in his early thirties. He had taken over the family business, which I gathered meant managing the money. When we came to the old orchard he took a deep breath and sat on a stump. He pulled each burr from his pant leg and flicked it away. Restored to his original state, he seemed at peace. Mrs. Reesman bent down and picked up a gnarled apple. “Isn’t this a Duchess?” she asked. Although I wasn’t sure, I said that it was. “We had these at Maud’s when I was little, Arnie,” she called to him. The Duchess apples were going to snag her in, just as the barn with the fresh white walls had caught me. Caucasian boys, Native American boys, Afro-American boys, would come together to harvest the apples of her youth.
Mrs. Reesman had an old-fashioned graciousness as well as a detachment that befit her wealth. She would or would not have the property, and either way her life would go on exactly as it had before. She seemed not to enjoy shopping, particularly, but she asked me questions about the farm. She did not have direct experience, but she was educated and knew what to ask. “How interesting,” she responded, without fail. Her great dignity, her code of behavior, neither required nor allowed her to ask me any personal questions.
Sandy walked me to the front door after the other two were in the car. “She really likes it,” she said, in hushed, conspiratorial tones. “She’s a lady with a vision, that’s for sure, and she’s very impressed. She’s the kind of person who feels a need to give back to her community. Her grandfather, I believe it was, founded one of the big Milwaukee breweries. Adele has always been so involved.” The only thing that kept me from trusting Adele implicitly, was the fact that she had Sandy in tow. “I’ve worked on a lot of different properties with her,” Sandy went on, “and I can tell when she’s affected positively.”
I’m in a terrible hurry, Sandy baby. I’m about to jump out of my skin. I know you didn’t believe that shtick about my sister so I leave it all to your imagination, if you have one. I want cash now, sweetheart, that’s the long and short of it
.
“People have been stopping at the sign,” I lied. “A couple drove in last night and wanted to look around.”
“Really.” It was a statement of disbelief.
“I told them to call you, of course.”
I’m sure that on the way back to Milwaukee Sandy, doing her utmost to represent me, explained to Mrs. Reesman that I was having personal problems and was looking forward to selling my property, that I had, in fact, an urgent need to make a major life change. And that considering my desperate need I might be willing to part with the land at a radically lower price. Not many people in their right minds, after all, would buy a place with a conservation easement.
I don’t know if Rafferty had some kind of sixth sense operating. The day after Sandy came to scout out the farm he called me, for a change. And he continued, calling me several times that week, as if he knew he needed to be alert. He phoned with good news once, about a witness he’d
discovered that was going to blow up the prosecution. He asked me how I was doing, how I was managing with the farm and the girls—questions he had not asked me at the start, when I could have used someone’s concern. I gave him no clues. “We’re going along,” I said. “Waiting. We’re waiting.”
On Friday Sandy called to say that Mrs. Reesman was planning to make an offer of three hundred thousand dollars, a substantial cut in the asking price. I had figured what I would need to pay Rafferty, to retrieve Alice, to wrap up my considerable bank debt on land and machinery and livestock. I had hoped also to pay back my mother’s loan. Mrs. Reesman’s offer fell short. “You can think about it,” Sandy said. “You let it simmer and then give me a jingle.”
I was standing at the window just the way I had when the girls were running through the sprinkler that morning near the start, in June. Although now they were listless, sitting in front of the television, I could visualize them out in the yard, prancing around in their suits. “No,” I said to Sandy, “it will do. I can live with it.” I hung up. I announced, “Forty-three thousand minutes. We might actually be able to have Mom home in forty-three thousand minutes, Emma.”