• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1030 0

eighty acres in the southwest corner, then, some months later, but also in 1938, the two hundred and twenty acres east of that. My father always said that frugality was the key—his father had managed to save money on machinery, and when the acreage came on the market, they could afford to pay a dollar more per acre for it. Some time later, I found that this was only true of the first piece. The story of the second parcel was more complicated, less clearly imparting one of those simple lessons. The farmer was Mel Scott, who was a cousin by marriage to the Stanleys. He wasn’t known to be much of a farmer, but he had good land, and a reasonable acreage for those times. The trouble was, he refused to go to his cousins for help or advice, because he didn’t want them to know how badly he was doing. He forbade his wife to divulge anything to her family, which eventually meant not seeing them, as her clothing and the children’s clothing fell to rags. No going to church, no invitations made or accepted. Scott, meanwhile, sought advice of my grandfather, and money of my father, his neighbors, which was shameful enough but nothing compared to the humiliation of standing before Newt Stanley or his wife’s other wealthy, powerful, and outspoken cousins, who had not resisted the marriage, but had mocked it a little. He didn’t borrow much money from my father; there wasn’t much to borrow.

Then it came time to pay the taxes, and Mel Scott came over late one November night and knocked on the beveled glass front door of the big Sears Chelsea. I imagine it as one of those winter nights on the plains, clear and black, when space itself seems to touch the ground with a universal chill, and a farmer who has walked a half mile over the fields, despairing but fearful, too, and full of doubts, arrives at the dark house of his neighbor. He knocks lightly on the door, almost, at first, wishing not to be heard, then again, with more pride (it’s no sin to be struggling—everyone is struggling). No one answers, there are no lights, only the rattle of feed pans from the hogs and cattle in the barn. So he turns, and walks to the edge of the porch, and maybe thinks about just going home. But it is so cold, getting colder, and the half mile expands to a marvelous distance. Surely he will die before he covers it again on foot. So he knocks again, more loudly, and shouts, and my father, who sleeps in one of the front bedrooms, awakens from his hardworking slumbers and comes down. My grandfather gets up. A light is turned on, an agreement is made. My grandfather will pay the taxes if Mel Scott will sign over his land. He can then farm it on shares and buy it back when commodities prices go up. The taxes aren’t much. Twenty years before, a man could have paid them without thinking about it. Those times are sure to return again.

They shake hands all around, and, a little warmed by the last coals in the kitchen range, Mel sets out for home. He is saved, hopeful—he has gotten what he wants. But getting what he wants removes the veil of panic that has kept him stumbling forward a single step at a time for these last years, and reveals to him that he no longer wants what he wanted before, what he thought he always wanted. Time, Mel thinks, to sell up, to move to the Twin Cities and get a job. How could they make it through the winter, anyway? When he gets home, he is ecstatic with the cold, the crystalline air, the high pressure that hums over the whole defenseless breast of the continent, and ecstatic, too, with a hope that turns failure into success, plans for a trip, a new life, city time. The next day he signed the farm over to my father and grandfather, and he borrowed a little more money to cover the expenses of moving. My father and grandfather took over the land and the few crops still standing in the fields. They knocked down the buildings when I was a teenager, and after that there were only traces, the shadowy depression of the pond in the fields and the circle of the old well, filled in, to show that lives had been lived there.

The Stanley brothers were