Rough Ground, Full Price

Chapter 3 The Rain Came Anyway

The rain came Wednesday night, just like the forecast said, and it came sideways. I sat on my porch and watched it hit the roof of my shop and listened to the gutters overflow and thought about Clara Boyd's north forty and the way water would sheet off that hardpan like it was concrete. Nine inches in five days is a biblical amount for this part of the state. Fields that had been ripped would take the water down. Fields that hadn't would send it to the road.

By Friday the county road at the bottom of the Boyd property was underwater, and the culvert under it had plugged with rye straw, and the water was backing up into Clara's field from the wrong direction, which meant that even if she'd ripped it she'd have had a mess. I drove past on Friday afternoon out of plain curiosity and saw her standing in the rain in that clean barn coat, talking to a man from the county drainage board. She looked smaller than she had in the sunshine. I didn't stop.

The calls started on Saturday. Merle Hanson, whose field I hadn't ripped on account of he'd fired me. Wanda Price, whose text had been so short. A dairy operation out on County 14 that I'd never worked for but whose owner knew my name. Every one of them had the same story. Their fields were drowning, their operators were booked or flooded out or stuck in mud, and they'd heard I might have time.

I did have time. I had nothing but time. But every one of those calls came with a sentence I couldn't get past, and the sentence was always some version of the same thing. "I know we haven't been on the best terms." "I know things got complicated." "I heard what happened with the Boyds."

I said the same thing to all of them. I said, "Call me back when the list gets fixed." Most of them didn't know what I was talking about. The ones who did went quiet. Merle Hanson understood, because Merle had been the one who'd warned me about the co-op two years ago and then signed the newsletter anyway.

Sunday night my phone rang at eleven. It was not Clara. It was Carter Boyd, her son, thirty-four years old, who'd been living in the inland city for a decade and had come home two years ago to run a farm-to-table restaurant that had lasted eleven months. I'd never met him. He introduced himself like I should know the name, which I did, because everybody in the county knew the Boyds.

"You're the guy who won't help my mom," he said.

"I'm the guy your mom tried to charge three hundred dollars," I said. "Different guy."

"She's not sleeping. She's got sixty thousand dollars of seed in a shed and no ground to put it in and the field's a lake."

"That's a bad situation."

"You could fix it."

"Your mom could fix it. She could pick up the phone and call Larry at the co-op and say four words. Put him back."

"You want her to humiliate herself publicly."

"I want her to correct a lie publicly. There's a difference, and you know there's a difference, and the fact that you're calling me instead of her tells me you know exactly which one it is."

Carter was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again his voice had changed. Less restaurant, more farm.

"What if I put him back?" he said. "I'm on the newsletter committee. I'm not on the board, but I've got a vote on the committee and I can get you a paragraph in next week's update. Same recommendation. No asterisk. I'll do it Monday morning."

"And your mom?"

"Calls Larry herself and says the agreement with the operator was resolved and the co-op shouldn't be involved in private disputes. That's it. She doesn't have to say she was wrong. She just has to say it's private."

I thought about it. I thought about the list, and the sixty grand in seed, and the nine inches of rain, and my Steiger sitting in the shop with a full tank of two-dollar diesel.

"Monday morning," I said. "Paragraph in the update by Tuesday. Then I'll come look at the field."

"She'll agree to that."

"She'd better."

I hung up and went to bed. I did not feel like a hero. I felt like a man who had found the one lever in the county that mattered and had learned how to pull it. Which is what they teach you in business school, I guess, except I never went.

Larry at the co-op called me Monday at eight. His voice was the voice of a man doing something he didn't like under orders he couldn't refuse. He said the recommendation list would be updated in the Thursday newsletter and he hoped I understood there were no hard feelings. I said I understood perfectly. Then I hooked up the Steiger and drove to Clara Boyd's north forty.

The field was a lake. There was standing water in the low spots and a channel cut through the middle where the runoff had gone to the road. I walked the fence line in my boots and looked at what was left, and I did the only honest thing I know how to do, which is tell somebody the truth when they're paying me.

"If I rip this now I'll make it worse," I told Clara. She was standing next to her son, hands in her pockets, no level, no lawyer, no husband. "The ground's saturated. You'll get ruts and compaction and you'll be fixing it for three years. You need to wait two weeks and let it drain and then I'll come back and we'll do it right."

"Two weeks is too late for the seed."

"Two weeks is too late for this seed," I said. "It's not too late for your ground. Those are different problems, and you're about to trade one for the other."

She looked at Carter. Carter looked at her. Then she looked at me and said the first fully honest thing she'd said since I met her.

"I don't know how to tell the difference," she said. "I don't know anything about this. I inherited it and I've been pretending."

I stood there in her flooded field and felt something shift, the way ground shifts when you finally get below the hardpan. I didn't forgive her. I'm not built that way, and she hadn't asked. But I understood her a little, and understanding somebody is the doorway to every kind of trouble there is.

"Two weeks," I said. "I'll put you on the calendar. And Clara, from now on, you pay me on completion and you don't touch my depth."

She nodded. I drove home.