The Year We Left Home (21 page)

“Probably not. Omaha’s so far away and it’s so big, they’d really have to go out of their way. Not like around here, where everybody knows everybody who . . .” Her words were gaining ballast, sinking.

Harve reached across the table and took both her hands in his. She’d painted her nails silver just that afternoon. They caught the light like fish scales. “You’re worried about Jeff, aren’t you? All those nuts making speeches.”

She nodded, her attention fixed on Harve’s magnificent nose. So large and red and inflamed, such an intricate geography of pores and capillaries.

“Well don’t you be. There’s always a few dirty dogs out there, that’s the way of the world. But most people understand that business is about risk, and sometimes risks just turn out bad.”

“But . . .” She wanted to take her hands back but didn’t think she should. “So many people, the farmers I mean, that’s all they know. Farming, living on the farm. Where are they supposed to go, and who’s going to grow crops if there’s nobody left?” She knew she had to stop talking. Right then.

“Ah.” Harve released her hands so that he could get to his drink. Anita sat back in her seat and let the hands retreat into her lap. “Here’s where it helps to understand a few things about markets. The big picture. See, for everything that’s bought and sold, there’s a market. A buyer and a seller.”

He paused to let this sink in. “Like before there were cars? There was a big market for horses. And horse feed, and horseshoers, and horse-drawn carriages, and so on. You needed to buy a horse, you went to somebody who sold horses. Then cars come along and put all those sellers out of business. But new businesses start up. Car manufacturers and repair shops and gas stations. That’s progress. You couldn’t stop it if you wanted to. That’s easy enough to understand, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Anita said. She attempted to look like a serious listener, someone who could take Harve seriously. Next to her, Jeff seemed ready to throw her coat over her head and rush her out the door if he had to. Linda allowed herself to look bored. She must have heard about horses and cars a time or two before.

“So here’s your farmer, operating pretty much the same as he ever was, ever since somebody shoved a stick in the dirt, dropped in a seed, and covered it over. Oh, he’s got machines, combines, better fertilizer, better crop storage. But he’s got the same markets. No need to grow more if there’s no place to sell it, right? Then one day that changes. He can ship his corn and wheat all the way to the great Union of Soviet Sorehead Republics, because those boys can build all the missiles in the world, but they can’t feed their own people. Now wouldn’t you want to buy yourself some more land, and maybe build a bigger barn, and everything else you’d need to take advantage of it?”

She wished Harve would quit asking questions she wasn’t really meant to answer. But by this time he didn’t seem to be talking to her
as much as to some invisible audience of clearheaded visionaries, men who knew a thing or two about a thing or two. “Looking at the big picture. That’s the bank’s job. Because what goes up must come down. The bank makes its best guess as to how and when that’s going to happen and the farmer makes his, and they do business. And some of these guys got a little greedy. Little wishful thinking. There’s always winners and losers and in this particular situation, they wound up with the short end of the stick.”

“The what end?” Linda asked. “I’ve heard this story told different.”

Jeff said, “That’s about the size of it, Harve. Lots of people figured they’d ride that gravy train all the way to Russia and back. They didn’t count on the peanut farmer pulling the rug out from under them.”

“Or on overproduction.”

“Or land values dropping sixty percent.”

“But we did,” Harve said. “We didn’t jump in with both feet, like some of these boys. We had the expertise. The smarts. Survival of the fittest. It’s a natural law. Like these bigger outfits coming in now. They got the capital to buy up that acreage and they’ll do a more efficient job of working those farms.”

Anita cleared her throat. “So farmers are like, what, horses?”

“Don’t be silly, honey.” Jeff, anxious not to look like he couldn’t keep his woman in line. “You’re wasting your time, Harve. She’s just determined to misunderstand. It’s like George Burns and Gracie Allen around our house.”

“No, she’s right to worry, aren’t you, Sunshine? All the poor farmers, they just get put out to pasture? Sent off to the glue factory? Maybe I made it sound like they didn’t much matter. But that’s not so and I apologize if it came out that way. You can feel sorry for each and every one of ’em and I do. Well, maybe not the real hardheaded ones who argue up and down that black is white and white is black. On an individual basis, feel as sorry as you want. But individuals are not the same thing as economics, or history, or farm policy, or the man in the moon.”

Linda said, “I think we’re back to the big picture. That train never left the station.”

“Now you just possess your soul in patience, Linda Lou,” Harve said, trying not to sound as irritated as he was. “The lady has a good heart. She has some serious questions and I’m trying to give her serious answers. Why don’t you get them to bring you one of those what is it, Grand Marniers you like so much. Let me finish making my damn point.” Harve paused for long enough to get his smile working again. “Any one person, there’s only so much they can do when the tide starts to turn against them. Buy themselves a little more time, maybe. But the truth is, a lot of these small operators who just got by, their time is gone. They won’t be farmers anymore because we don’t need as many farmers. They’ll find something else to do here or they’ll pack up and leave. The name for it is economic dislocation, and it’s a bear to live through, but it all shakes out in the end. Like all those Okies who went west in the Dust Bowl, and now they’re sitting pretty out in California, hey?” Harve had managed to get himself all jollied up by now. “We should all have that kind of bad luck.”

Linda said, “I guess it’s our bad luck that the world always seems to need plenty of bankers.”

Anita murmured that she understood a lot better now, thank you. Under the table she formed her right hand into a pistol and shot Harve, POW, in the middle of his roomy stomach. She shot Jeff, POW, straight through the heart. She aimed at Linda but then, liking her better than she had before, reconsidered and shot Jeff again.

Except for the babysitter, it was nothing she planned out ahead of time. You could never be sure if Mrs. Taub was going to be available, but she was. So Mrs. Taub tried to soothe Matthew with vanilla wafers while Matthew cried that he wanted to go too and Anita told him no, it was just for grown-ups and Matthew said
it
wasn’t fair.

Then she drove around for a while. She wasn’t clear in her mind what to do next. Here was Jeff’s bank, and here was his big Lincoln, sitting in its reserved spot. At least she didn’t have to wonder where he might be instead. Anita entered the drive-through lane, filled out a
withdrawal slip, and sent it through the noisy sucking tube. She chatted with Stephanie, the teller, over the intercom, hinting that some secret or surprise was in the works, in case Stephanie might be inclined to question or comment. It was a joint account, she was entitled to draw from it, but still, it was a lot of money. Anita waved and drove away and stopped at the branch facility next to the Pic N Save. Here she went inside and withdrew an equal amount, waited on by a young and heavyset teller who either did not recognize her or pretended not to, and so she had $5,000 in cash in her purse when she left town and headed north on the highway.

She felt like a bank robber. Technically, it was her own money. But all the money was really Jeff’s.

First week of May. A bright, cool day with the wind from the west and the edges of the farm fields greening up. Anita thought,
I can just go there. I don’t have to stay. I don’t even have to talk to anybody.

It took her a while to find the Goodells’ place. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been there, or even driven past it. But here it was, the old yellow farmhouse set back from the road and, in front of it, the mobile home they’d put up for Bradley and his family. The lane and farmyard were packed with cars and trucks, and a flatbed trailer was pulled up in front of the barn for the auctioneer’s use.

The wind was a lot stronger and colder out here in the open. She had to park some distance down the lane and then pick her way along the ruts and the mud from the last rain. Although she’d worn a hooded navy sweatshirt and jeans, outdoor clothes, she hadn’t given much thought to shoes, and her flats slipped and twisted on the uneven ground. Once she got closer, she didn’t see anyone she recognized, but she had a feeling that plenty of people there knew who she was.

Citizens Reserve must have sent a man out from Omaha to represent them as mortgagee. Anita’s fear all along was that Jeff would be there, would have to be there. But someone, maybe Jeff, must have thought better of that. She didn’t know this Omaha man but it wasn’t hard to spot him. He’d dressed down in a windbreaker and khakis, but
he was still the only man there not wearing a hat. He was drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup and talking to a sheriff’s deputy.

Two more deputies were lounging around at the auctioneer’s stand, and she wondered about them. Nobody in the crowd looked ready to do anything illegal, or even anything very loud. They stood at the edges, as Anita was herself; a few of the men walked among the lots of machinery and tools set out for sale, and in and out of the barn. Anita couldn’t remember, if she’d ever known in the first place, if the Goodells kept any livestock. She hoped not. She’d never liked being around farm animals of any sort. They were so helplessly stupid, they made you feel as if eating them was some kind of a charitable act.

The Goodells and Peersons had been off to one side near the farmhouse’s front steps, and once Anita positioned herself to get out of the wind, she saw them: Ruth and Jim, who must have been about her parents’ age, and the younger kids who still lived at home, and Bradley and his wife and baby, and others of the Peersons.

It was a sad, bad feeling to stand there by herself. She’d always thought that family was family, and that had to count for something. Even as she’d lived her life apart from them, even though at times she had been embarrassed by them.

Her cousin Pat saw her then, and Anita watched her eyes narrow, then she said something to Ruth, who looked Anita’s way also, and then Pat began walking toward her. Anita thought she might as well get it over with.

Pat halted a little distance away. She was wearing a plaid wool jacket and denim pants and an old stocking cap. She’d never had one bit of vanity to her. “Hello, Anita.”

She didn’t sound either friendly or unfriendly, but then, she never did. “Hi, Pat. I guess I . . .” Anita stopped, shrugged. “How are Ruth and Jim?”

“You’re free to ask them yourself.”

“I wasn’t sure if I should.”

Pat let this remark settle. She turned away to gaze out over the crowd. The auctioneer was getting set up. He had a microphone
hooked up to an amplifier and speakers. The wire that plugged it all in coiled and trailed back to the barn. A loud electrified squeak made everyone look up. Pat said, “They’ll be glad to have it over with.”

“I tried talking to my husband.”

Pat turned back to her. She’d reached that point in aging where the markers of sex begin to fade. Her forehead and jaw could have belonged to an old man. “Always nice, when a married couple talks to each other.”

“You know what I mean.”

“That it didn’t do much good?” It wasn’t ever easy to read shades of mood or meaning into Pat, but she sounded tired, and mad on top of tired. “Nobody really thinks this is your fault, Nita. Plenty of them think it’s Jeff’s. I guess I’m one of them.”

“Everybody acts like I can get him to do things and I can’t.” Anita was struck by the truth of this. He’d never done anything she’d ever wanted, except grudgingly, and out of a vast reluctance.

Pat said, “I guess it’s not really about any one person. Anything one person can do when everything’s got so wrongheaded.”

Anita didn’t know whom she meant by this. Jeff? Pat herself? The Goodells? She’d never before thought of herself as helpless, if only because, growing up, she had always been able to get pretty much whatever she wanted. But she had confused that with having any real power in the world.

Pat said, “They were late one payment, and that gave the bank the right to call all their loans. They had four loans with the interest gone up to eighteen percent. Nobody could pay that off unless corn turned into gold.”

It wasn’t fair.
Maybe when you were a child, or for a little while longer, you thought that as soon as you pointed unfairness out, a swift and righteous justice would prevail.

The Goodells were grouped on their front stairs as if someone were about to take their picture for a Christmas card. Except that this was spring, not winter, and not a one of their faces showed anything open or pleasured. They looked flattened, incurious, as if all this were happening
to somebody else. Anita said, “I don’t see why they won’t let them stay in the houses, at least. A new owner could farm the place even with them here.”

“Not the way it works. Everything goes to the debt.” Pat nodded at a long table set out at one side of the barn. It held odds and ends of household goods: some Blue Willow china, a lamp with a rose-painted globe, an empty picture frame, a pile of what appeared to be ruffled kitchen curtains. “Pitiful, ain’t it. Pull somebody’s life up by the roots and set it out for everybody to paw over.”

Anita knew then why they were having a conversation in the first place. Pat was furious, and the fury had to come out of her as talk, and Anita was one person who hadn’t yet heard it from her. She felt inside her purse and touched the wads of money still in their bank envelopes. Five thousand dollars. Not nearly enough to buy a life back. Pat went on, “Besides, they wouldn’t want to stay. They’re at our place for now. Bradley and his, they might end up in Sioux City, there’s one of Jim’s cousins can get him on at ConAgra.”