Maryann

The Honest Season

Chapter 11: Maryann

The facility was in Sidney, twenty-six miles west on Route 16, the road that Ruth drove to town for groceries and hardware and the particular errands that a farm generated -- the parts run to the NAPA, the seed treatment pickup at the co-op, the trips that accumulated across a week and that Ruth consolidated into a single Tuesday or Thursday drive because consolidation was efficiency and efficiency was time and time was the thing the farm consumed and the farmer preserved, the hoarding of hours that was the farmer's instinct, the instinct that said: do not make two trips when one trip will serve.

The facility was called Prairie View. It was called Prairie View because it sat on the east edge of Sidney and its windows faced east and the east was prairie, was the grassland and the wheat ground and the badlands that stretched from Sidney to the North Dakota line and beyond, the vista that the facility's name promised and that the facility's windows delivered, the view that the residents could see if the residents could see, if the residents' eyes were capable of receiving the light and the residents' minds were capable of processing the light into landscape, the processing that some residents could perform and some could not, the distinction between the residents who looked out the window and saw the prairie and the residents who looked out the window and saw the glass.

Maryann Enger was in Room 14. She had been in Room 14 since 2021, since the fall that broke her hip and that broke, with the hip, the arrangement that had allowed her to live alone in the house in Culbertson, the house that she and Carl moved to in 1993 when Tom and Ruth took over the farm, the house on Elm Street, the in-town house that was the retirement house, the house where Carl died in 2008 and where Maryann lived alone for thirteen years, the thirteen years of widowhood that she managed with the competence of a woman who had managed a farm household for forty years, the competence that was not diminished by Carl's death but was redirected, the energy that had been applied to the farm now applied to the house and the garden and the church and the weekly bridge game at Karen Hoffman's kitchen table.

The fall happened in October. The fall happened the way falls happen to eighty-four-year-old women -- without warning, without drama, the left foot catching the edge of the rug in the hallway, the rug that had been in the hallway for twenty-three years and that had never caught anyone's foot and that caught Maryann's foot on an October evening at 6:15 when she was walking from the kitchen to the living room with a cup of tea, the cup of tea that she dropped when she fell, the tea splashing on the hardwood, the cup breaking, the hip breaking, the two breakings simultaneous, the ceramic and the bone, the cup and the woman, the objects that were whole and then were not.

Ruth drove to Sidney on a Tuesday in June. She drove the F-150 on Route 16, the road that she had driven a thousand times, the road that ran west through the wheat ground and through the small communities that were not towns but were places -- Brockton, the railroad siding, the few buildings that constituted the acknowledgment of a location; Bainville, the grain elevator and the bar and the church; Fairview, the bridge town, the town on the Montana-North Dakota line where the Yellowstone met the Missouri and where the geography changed and where the bridge carried the highway from one state to the other, the crossing that Ruth did not make because Sidney was in Montana, was on the Montana side, was twenty-six miles of Montana road.

She parked in the facility lot. The lot held fifteen cars. The lot always held approximately fifteen cars because the facility had thirty-two residents and approximately half the residents had families who visited and the families who visited came on varying schedules -- some daily, some weekly, some monthly, some never, the frequency of visitation being the measure of something that was not love, was not devotion, was not the simple accounting of affection, but was distance and schedule and the particular capacity for witnessing decline that some people possessed and some people did not, the capacity that Ruth possessed because Ruth witnessed decline every year in the fields, the decline of the crop in August, the browning of the stems, the drying of the heads, the turning of the living into the dead that was harvest, the decline that was not failure but was completion, was the plant finishing its work, and Ruth understood decline as completion and the understanding allowed her to visit Maryann without the horror that some visitors carried into Room 14, the horror of seeing the before become the after.

She signed in at the desk. The desk was staffed by a woman named Terri, the receptionist, the woman who knew every visitor and every resident and who tracked the comings and goings of the facility the way Darrell Kincaid tracked the comings and goings of the elevator -- with clipboard and pen and the particular attentiveness of a person whose job was the monitoring of passage, the recording of who entered and who left and when.

"Hi, Ruth," Terri said.

"Hi, Terri," Ruth said.

"She's having a good day," Terri said.

A good day. The phrase that the staff used to describe the days when Maryann was present, when the fog lifted, when the mind that had been Carl's partner and the farm's accountant and the church's organist surfaced from the place where it now spent most of its time, the underwater place, the deep place where the memories sank and the thoughts dissolved and the person who was Maryann Enger became a body in a wheelchair that looked out the window and saw the glass or saw the prairie, depending on the day, depending on whether the day was a good day or not.

Ruth walked down the hallway. The hallway smelled like the facility smelled -- disinfectant and coffee and the underlying scent that no disinfectant could fully suppress, the scent of age, the scent of bodies that were finishing their work, the biological scent of decline that Ruth recognized the way she recognized the scent of ripe wheat, as the smell of a living thing approaching its conclusion, the olfactory evidence of the final stage.

Room 14 was on the south side. The room had a window that faced south, which meant the room received sunlight in the winter when the sun was low and the light came in at an angle and warmed the room and illuminated the bed and the wheelchair and the woman in the wheelchair, the woman who sat in the light the way a plant sits in the light, receiving it, absorbing it, converting it into something, though what the light was converted into in Maryann's case was not growth but was warmth, was the simple thermal comfort of a body that was always cold, the body of an eighty-nine-year-old woman who weighed 112 pounds and who had lost the insulation that the body provides in youth and middle age, the subcutaneous fat and the muscle mass and the metabolic heat that a working body generates, the heat that Maryann's body no longer generated because Maryann's body no longer worked, no longer walked the fields, no longer bent over the garden, no longer carried the casserole from the kitchen to the car and from the car to the church basement, the carrying that was the exercise, the daily lifting that kept the muscles warm and the muscles keeping the body warm and the body keeping the woman warm.

Maryann was in the wheelchair. She was by the window. She was facing the glass and the glass was facing east and the east was the prairie that the facility's name promised, the grass and the wheat and the distance that Maryann had lived inside for sixty-seven years, since she came to Montana from Minnesota in 1959, since she married Carl and moved to the Enger place and began the life that the land required, the life that was not her plan but that became her life, the way the wheat's plan is not the wheat's plan but is the soil's plan, the soil determining what grows and the woman adapting to what the soil determined.

"Maryann," Ruth said.

Maryann turned. The turning was slow, was the careful rotation of the wheelchair that the nurse had taught her, the hands on the wheels, the push-and-pull that spun the chair, the mechanics of the wheelchair that Maryann had learned in the same way she had learned the mechanics of the farm -- by necessity, by repetition, by the understanding that the machine was the means of movement and the movement was the means of life and the machine must be operated because the alternative to operating the machine was stillness and stillness was the thing that Maryann resisted, had always resisted, would resist until the resistance was no longer possible.

"Ruth," Maryann said.

She said it clearly. She said Ruth's name the way she said Ruth's name in 1988, when Tom brought Ruth home for the first time, the Sunday dinner, the roast and the potatoes and the green beans from the garden and the scrutiny, the silent assessment that a farm mother makes of the woman her son has brought home, the assessment that is not about beauty or charm or education but is about capacity, about the ability to do the work, about the question that the farm mother asks with her eyes: can you do this, can you live this life, can you stand beside my son in the field and in the barn and in the bed and in the kitchen and do the work that this life requires, the work that I have done and that I am handing to you.

Ruth sat in the chair beside the wheelchair. The chair was vinyl, green, the institutional chair that every facility room contained, the chair for the visitor, the chair that was uncomfortable because comfort was not the chair's purpose, the chair's purpose was presence, was the holding of the visitor's body in proximity to the resident's body, the proximity that was the visit, the being-near that was the thing the visitor provided and the resident received.

"How are you feeling?" Ruth said.

"I'm all right," Maryann said. "How's the wheat?"

The question. The question that Maryann asked every visit, the question that the farm wife asks because the wheat is the pulse, is the vital sign, is the number that tells the farm wife whether the farm is alive or dead, healthy or sick, surviving or failing. The question that Maryann asked from the wheelchair in Room 14 was the same question that Maryann asked from the kitchen in the farmhouse in 1988, the same question in the same voice with the same expectation of a specific answer, a number, a condition, the honest report from the field.

"Tillering well," Ruth said. "Four to six per plant on Section 12."

"That's good," Maryann said. "Tom's father always said five was the number. Five tillers and you could relax."

Tom's father. Carl. The man who built the barn and poured the floor and farmed the Enger place from 1959 to 1993, the thirty-four years that Carl and Maryann ran the operation before handing it to Tom and Ruth, the handing that was the transfer, the generational passage that farms perform when the older body wears out and the younger body is ready, the passage that Maryann supervised because Maryann supervised everything, because Maryann was the organizer, the manager, the woman who kept the books and scheduled the maintenance and ordered the parts and tracked the seed inventory and managed the household and raised the son and maintained the church commitment and the community commitment and the marriage commitment, the multiple commitments that a farm wife balanced the way a juggler balances objects, each one in the air, each one requiring attention, the attention distributed across all of them simultaneously.

She was the one who taught Ruth to read a wheat field. This was the thing that Ruth carried with her every time she walked Section 12, the memory of Maryann in the field in June of 1989, the June after Ruth married Tom, the first June as an Enger, the June when Maryann took Ruth to Section 12 and walked her into the wheat and showed her.

"You look at the color," Maryann said. Ruth heard her say it. Ruth heard her in Room 14, in the wheelchair, in the facility in Sidney, but the hearing was the memory, was the voice from 1989, the voice of a fifty-nine-year-old woman standing in the wheat in June.

"The color tells you. Dark green is nitrogen. Pale green is stress. Yellow is drought. You don't need the soil test to know. The wheat tells you. You just have to learn its language."

Maryann taught her the language. Maryann taught her to see the field the way Maryann saw it -- not as a crop but as a conversation, the ongoing exchange between the plant and the soil and the weather and the farmer, the four-way conversation that produced the season and that the season resolved. Maryann taught her to listen to what the wheat was saying by looking at how the wheat was growing, the visual grammar of agriculture, the syntax of tiller count and head size and kernel fill, the language that could not be learned from a textbook but could only be learned from a woman standing in a field saying: look, look at this plant, look at what it is telling you.

Ruth looked at Maryann in the wheelchair. She looked at the woman who taught her the language of wheat and who now sat in a room that was not a field, in a chair that was not a tractor seat, facing a window that showed the prairie but that could not deliver the prairie, could not provide the wind and the scent and the texture of the wheat against the arm, the physical contact with the crop that was the language's grammar, the contact that the glass prevented, the glass that was the boundary between Maryann and the life she had lived.

"The protein should be good this year," Ruth said. "We put on ninety pounds of nitrogen."

"Ninety is right," Maryann said. "Carl used eighty. Tom went to ninety. Ninety is right for the deep soil."

She was there. She was present. The fog had lifted and Maryann was in the room the way she was in the field in 1989, fully, completely, the mind engaged, the knowledge accessible, the woman who managed a farm for forty years available in the wheelchair in Room 14.

Ruth told her about the wheat. She told her about the tillering and the moisture and the price at the elevator. She told her about the drill maintenance and the tractor hours and Hector's work on the hydraulic system. She told her about Rust, the dog that Tom brought home as a puppy, the dog that was eleven now and gray on the muzzle. She told her the farm's news the way a correspondent reports from the field, the field dispatch, the communication from the front line to the rear, the information that traveled from the land to the room, from the wheat to the window, from the daughter-in-law to the mother-in-law, the chain of intelligence that kept Maryann connected to the place she had lived for sixty-two years, the place she could no longer live, the place that lived in her.

Maryann listened. She listened the way she listened in the field, with the attention that was total, the listening of a woman who understood that the information was not casual but was essential, was the farm's vital signs delivered to the person who had taken the farm's vital signs for four decades, the person whose entire adult life was organized around the question that she asked every visit: how's the wheat?

"And the offer," Maryann said.

Ruth looked at her.

"Tom told me about the offer," Maryann said.

Tom did not tell her about the offer. Tom was dead. Tom had been dead for three years and could not tell Maryann anything. But Maryann said Tom told her and Ruth did not correct her because the correcting was not kind and because the information was not wrong -- the offer existed, someone had told Maryann about the offer, whether it was David or Sarah or Karen Peterson or the network of farm community information that transmitted news from kitchen to kitchen without regard for the boundaries between the living and the dead, the network that Maryann had been part of for sixty years and that reached her even in Room 14, even through the fog, even in the facility in Sidney.

"Yes," Ruth said. "There's an offer."

"How much?"

"$4.2 million."

Maryann was quiet. The quiet was not the fog. The quiet was calculation, was the working of a mind that had kept the books for forty years, the mind that could calculate cost-per-acre and yield-per-dollar and the particular arithmetic of farm economics that was not taught in schools but was learned at the kitchen table with the ledger and the calculator and the receipts.

"That's $1,750 an acre," Maryann said.

"Yes."

"That's high."

"It's high."

Maryann looked at the window. She looked at the prairie through the glass, the wheat ground that was visible as a texture, as a color, the green of June wheat that was growing twenty-six miles from this window, the wheat that Maryann could see or could remember seeing, the two acts -- seeing and remembering -- merged in the mind of an eighty-nine-year-old woman who had seen sixty-seven Junes of Montana wheat and who carried every June in the tissue of her memory, the memories that the fog sometimes covered and sometimes did not, the memories that surfaced on good days the way the wheat surfaced from the soil, breaking through, emerging, green and alive and present.

"Carl would say keep it," Maryann said. "Carl always said keep it. Land doesn't grow. They stopped making it. You can make more wheat but you can't make more land."

Ruth heard it. She heard it the way she heard Tom in the field saying four is average, the voices of the dead speaking through the living, the voices that the living carried and repeated and that constituted the ongoing conversation between the generations, the conversation that farming sustained because farming was generational, was the long project, the project that no single life could complete and that every single life contributed to, the contribution measured not in years but in seasons, in the sixty-seven seasons that Maryann contributed and the thirty-eight seasons that Ruth contributed and the seasons that might come or might not come depending on the answer that Ruth gave to the offer, the answer that Carl's voice said through Maryann's mouth and that Ruth heard in Room 14 and carried back to the truck and carried back on Route 16 and carried back to the farm where the wheat was tillering, four to six per plant, on Section 12.

She drove home. She drove east on Route 16, back toward the farm, back toward the wheat, back toward the work that the afternoon held -- the sprayer to check, the rain gauge to read, the field to walk, the endless inventory of tasks that the growing season produced and that Ruth performed and that the performing was the life, was the living, was the answer to every question except the one that Grayson asked, the question that Maryann's voice and Carl's voice and Tom's voice answered but that Ruth's voice had not yet answered, the voice that was hers, the voice that the season was teaching her to hear.