Rough Ground, Full Price

Chapter 4 The Newsletter

The Thursday update came out on paper and by email, and by noon I had six calls from operators and farmers asking me where I'd been. I read it standing in the shop with grease on my thumb. A radio on the workbench was talking about rain that would not come until Sunday. The cat from the door had followed me in and sat on a crate like she paid rent. The paragraph Carter wrote was three sentences long and said exactly what it needed to say. Zeke Marshall is a certified operator in good standing with the tri-county agricultural board and is recommended for ripping, discing, and custom hauling. That was it. No asterisk. No explanation. In a county of eleven thousand people, three sentences is a thunderclap.

I folded the paper and put it in the book next to the line that said remainder refused. I did not throw the old list away. I wanted to remember what it had looked like without my name.

By the following Monday I had more work than I could do. Merle Hanson called and apologized, which I accepted without ceremony. Wanda Price came out to the shop herself and stood there in her work boots and her church coat and said she was sorry and I said I knew and we moved on. I booked out three weeks. I put fuel on my old Co-op account and the kid at the counter looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us said anything, which was the right amount.

But the work didn't feel the way it used to. I noticed things. I noticed that when I drove past the Boyd property I looked at it. I noticed that Clara called me once a week to ask questions she was embarrassed to ask, and I answered them, and the answers were getting longer. I noticed that her husband Dennis had gone back inland on the train and hadn't come back. I noticed that Carter Boyd showed up at my shop one afternoon with a cooler of iced tea and a request that wasn't about farming.

"Teach me," he said. "I want to learn the ground. I don't want to be the guy who owns a farm and doesn't know what it is."

I looked at him standing there in his city jeans and his nice boots and I thought about all the reasons I had to say no. He was a Boyd. He'd been part of the problem. He was probably going to leave again. But I've been asked for help in worse ways by better men, and there's a version of this county where a Boyd knows how to read a furrow and doesn't need a newsletter to tell him who's good at his job. That version is better than this one.

"Six a.m.," I said. "Bring gloves. Don't bring the cooler again. Coolers are for customers."

He grinned like a kid. I went back to work. That night I laid out a second pair of gloves on the bench and then put them back in the drawer, because I was not going to start treating a Boyd like an apprentice until he showed up twice.

The trouble with teaching a Boyd was that it put me on the Boyd property, which meant it put me next to Clara, which meant it put me inside the thing I'd been holding at arm's length for weeks. In early June I was out there at dawn with Carter and Clara came out with coffee and stood at the edge of the field watching us work, and when I came in for a water break she was standing where the furrows started, looking at them like she was reading a book she couldn't quite translate.

"Show me the depth," she said.

I got down on my knees in the wet clay and showed her the seam where the ripper had lifted the hardpan and let the water in. I put her hand on it. She didn't pull back. Her palm was cold and her face was close and I stood up faster than I needed to.

"I was wrong about you," she said. "Not just about the field. About all of it."

"You didn't know me."

"I still don't."

"No," I said. "You don't."

She held my gaze a beat longer than the moment allowed, and then Carter came around the fence line with the clipboard and the moment folded itself up and went away. But it didn't go far.