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By Root 1064 0

a thousand acres by himself. Rose and I could both drive the combine in a pinch, and I had driven a few loaded grain trucks to the elevator almost every year, but the fact was, we always got pressed into service at the height of the harvest; there was no way that we could fill in for Pete and Daddy. There was Jess, of course, who had driven one of the tractors when we hired six high school kids to ride the bean-bar to spot-spray weeds and volunteer corn in the bean rows. He’d worn coveralls, boots, and a face mask in 93-degree weather, and let Ty handle all the chemicals, which Ty found excessively squeamish. Every time Ty worried aloud about what we were going to do, he avoided mentioning Jess, leading me to know that he didn’t want to work with Jess again, whatever Jess’s talents and skills were. I didn’t ask if these suspicions were simply based on differing ideas about farming. I would have been the first to admit that they were well founded, whatever the source. He asked around town, put ads on various bulletin boards and in the Pike paper. His tenant agreed to work for five days in exchange for two days’ work at his place. There were no answers to the ads. There seemed to be some reluctance around town to having anything to do with us. Ty widened his campaign, advertising for help in Zebulon Center, Henry Grove, Columbus, and even Mason City. He said we would put people up and pay good wages. It was a problem that did not solve itself. The fact was, the kind of men who were around when my grandfather was farming, men who worked but did not own, were gone from the country by 1979. He began calling around to see if he could get some custom combining done.

When he engaged me in conversation about this problem, I tried to sound concerned and helpful, but all the time I was imagining them naked somewhere, relieved to be alone, giddy and giggling and utterly sufficient to themselves. If they thought about me, it would be to plan some little kindness that they thought I needed, that would remind me yet again of who was who and what was what. If even the most clandestine love affair yearns for an audience, then of course I was theirs.

I saw Rose every day. We made pickles and canned tomatoes and I drove the girls places for her. I noticed her fleeting little smiles. We talked, in a way. She alluded to Jess only tactfully, and gave me little hugs from time to time, or compliments. I don’t remember any of what she said. It was as if she were just moving her lips.

Ty decided to sell the last hundred piglets as feeder pigs, instead of finishing them. At the last minute, after we’d loaded the pigs, but before he’d taken down the loading chute, he said, “I’m going to load some of the sows, too. Prices are up enough. I could get something for them.”

I snapped to. I was covered with muck from loading a hundred fifty-pound hogs and ready to get into the shower, but what I was hearing amazed me. I said, “Ty, prices aren’t up at all. You’ll be lucky to get three-fourths of what those sows are worth. They’re prime breeding stock. You can’t just cart them off to market on impulse!”

“That’s exactly what I can do. That’s the only way I can make myself do it, as a matter of fact.”

“Even if the new buildings don’t get built, we can keep on with what we were doing.”

“My heart’s not in it.” He spat in the dirt. “Anyway, I gotta think about the payment on that loan. It’s not going to take care of itself.”

“What about the rent for your place? I thought we earmarked that for the payment.”

“That’s going to get eaten up if he works for me at harvest as much as I’m going to need him. Selling off these sows will tide us over till after harvest. That’s what we’ve got to think of now.”

A farm abounds with poisons, though not many of them are fast-acting. Every farmer knows a chemical dealer’s representative who has taken a demonstration drink of some insecticide—safe as mother’s milk, etc. Once, when Verna Clark was still alive and everyone was still using chlordane for corn rootworm, Harold dropped his instructions into the tank and reached