The Neighbors

The Honest Season

Chapter 4: The Neighbors

The Petersons were three miles east on the county road, the road that ran straight through the wheat ground like a sentence that refused to end, the road that connected the Enger place to the Peterson place and the Peterson place to the Hoffman place and the Hoffman place to the Ericson place and the connecting was not metaphorical but physical, was the gravel and the hardpan and the tire tracks of four families who had been driving this road for three and four generations and whose tire tracks had become the road, the road that existed because the driving existed, the way the community existed because the farming existed, the farming that held the people to the land and the land to the people and the people to each other.

Dale and Karen Peterson farmed 3,200 acres. Wheat and cattle, the diversification that some farms chose and that others did not, the hedging of the bet, the spreading of the risk across two commodities so that when the wheat price fell the cattle price might hold and when the cattle price fell the wheat price might hold and the holding of one while the other fell was the safety that diversification provided, the safety that Ruth did not have because Ruth had sold the cattle in 2011 and because the selling had simplified the operation and the simplification was what two people on 2,400 acres required, the reduction to one thing, the focus that survival demanded.

Dale was sixty-one. He had farmed since he was eighteen, since his father handed him the keys to the Ford 8600 and said: "It's yours now," which meant not the tractor but the work, not the machine but the life, the transfer of obligation that occurred in farm families when the son was old enough and the father was tired enough and the ground would not wait for the timing to be perfect because the ground's timing was the only timing that mattered.

Karen kept the books. Karen had kept the books since 1987, the year she married Dale, the year she moved from Wolf Point to the Peterson place and learned that marriage to a farmer was not a partnership but an incorporation, the joining of two people into a single economic unit whose product was wheat and whose expenses were everything and whose profit was the remainder, the remainder that was sometimes generous and sometimes cruel and that Karen tracked in the ledger that she maintained in the office off the kitchen, the office that was a desk and a filing cabinet and a calculator and the knowledge of forty years of farm accounting, the knowledge that said this year is a 7 and this year is a 4 and this year is a 2 and the average is the story and the story is that farming is possible but not easy and the possible is enough.

Ruth saw Karen at the co-op in Sidney on a Thursday in April. The co-op was where they all went — the CHS Country Store on Central Avenue, the building that sold seed and chemical and fertilizer and animal health products and the hardware and the fencing and the gloves and the boots and the thousand items that a farm consumed in the course of a year, the store that was the material infrastructure of agriculture, the place where the physical inputs of farming were acquired before they were applied to the ground.

Ruth was buying Cruiser Maxx, the seed treatment, the fungicide and insecticide that she applied to the seed before planting. Karen was buying fence staples, a box of 500, the staples that held the barbed wire to the posts, the posts that held the cattle in the pastures, the pastures that held the grass that the cattle ate, the chain of containment that was the cattle side of the Peterson operation.

"Ruth," Karen said.

"Karen," Ruth said.

They stood in the aisle between the seed treatment shelf and the fencing supplies shelf, the aisle that separated their operations in the same way the county road separated their farms, the separation that was not division but adjacency, the standing-next-to that was the architecture of rural community, the proximity without intrusion that neighbors maintained.

"Soil warming up?" Karen said.

"Forty-one on Section 12 yesterday," Ruth said. "Getting there."

"Dale's at forty-three on the east sections. He's thinking next week."

"We're thinking the week after. Section 12 runs cold."

Karen nodded. The nodding was understanding. The nodding was the acknowledgment of a fact that both women knew — that soil temperature varied by field, by exposure, by slope, by the particular microclimate that each piece of ground created through its orientation to the sun and its depth of snow cover and its drainage and its color, the color that determined how much sunlight the soil absorbed, dark soils warming faster than light soils, the physics of absorption that every farmer understood not as physics but as knowledge, as the thing they knew about their own ground.

"How are the kids?" Ruth said.

"Tyler's still in Bismarck. Emily's talking about coming back."

Emily Peterson was twenty-eight. She had gone to Montana State for agribusiness. She had worked in Bismarck for a crop insurance company. She was talking about coming back. The talking was the thing — the verb, the present participle, the ongoing consideration that a young person performs when the land is pulling and the city is holding and the pull and the hold are in equilibrium and the equilibrium might tip either way, might tip toward the farm or might tip toward the career, the tipping that would determine whether the Peterson place had a fifth generation or whether the Peterson place became what the Hendrickson place became in 1962 and the Olson place became in 1978 and what the Enger place might become if Ruth said yes to $4.2 million.

"That would be good," Ruth said. She meant it. She meant it because a young person coming back to a farm was a rare thing, was the reversal of the current, the upstream swimming that almost no one did anymore because the current was strong and the current ran toward the cities, toward the jobs, toward the lives that did not require the body to be outside in January or the mind to be calculating soil moisture in July or the spirit to absorb the loss of a quarter-section to hail in eleven minutes.

"She's got a boyfriend in Bismarck," Karen said. "That's the hold."

"The hold is always a person," Ruth said.

Karen looked at her. The look was quick, was the glance of a woman who heard something in what Ruth said that was not about Emily and was not about boyfriends but was about the thing that held a person to a place, the person-hold, the grip of a human being on another human being that was stronger than the grip of land, stronger than the grip of heritage, stronger than any force except death, which was not a force but an absence, the absence of the person who held you, the absence that released you into a freedom you did not want.

They did not discuss the offer. Karen knew about the offer. Everyone knew about the offer. The information had moved through the community the way it always moved — through the elevator, through the co-op, through the bar, through the Sunday morning conversations at the Lutheran church, through the network of knowing that a small community maintains without effort, the network that is not gossip but is awareness, the communal awareness of what is happening to each member because what happens to each member happens to the community, the individual event becoming the collective concern.

Ruth paid for the Cruiser Maxx. Karen paid for the fence staples. They walked out together. The parking lot was gravel, like everything in Sidney was gravel or pavement or dirt, the surfaces of a town built on the Great Plains where the ground was the dominant material and every surface was the ground modified — paved or graveled or scraped or graded, the ground dressed up for human use but still the ground, still the thing beneath everything.

"Tell Dale I said hello," Ruth said.

"Tell Hector I said the same," Karen said.

Ruth drove home. She drove the twenty-six miles on Route 16, the miles that she drove twice a week for supplies and errands and the particular necessity of being in a town, of seeing people, of performing the social acts that a human being requires even when the human being is a farmer who prefers solitude, even when the solitude is the preferred condition, even when the company of wheat is more comfortable than the company of people. Even then. Even a farmer needs to stand in an aisle at the co-op and talk to another farmer's wife about soil temperature and children and the things that hold people to places.

Old Gus Lindgren drove past the Enger place every morning. He drove past at 7:15, the same time every morning, in the same truck, the 1994 Dodge Ram, maroon, 200,000 miles, the truck that Gus had driven since the year he retired and that he would drive until the truck died or he died, whichever came first, and the whichever was not morbid but was practical, was the calculation of an eighty-eight-year-old man who understood that both he and the truck were operating on borrowed time and that the borrowing was not infinite.

Gus had farmed the place south of the Enger place, the 1,600 acres along the Missouri breaks, the ground that was rougher than Ruth's ground, the coulees and the draws and the thin soil on the ridges and the deep soil in the bottoms, the mixed ground that produced mixed yields and mixed income and the mixed life of a farmer who worked difficult land for sixty years and who retired in 2012 and who sold the land to the Hoffman boy, who consolidated it into the Hoffman operation, the consolidation that was the pattern, the merging of smaller farms into larger farms that was the economic imperative of modern agriculture, the math that said a family could not live on 1,600 acres of marginal ground and that the 1,600 acres must join a larger operation or must cease to be farmed.

Gus did not cease. Gus retired, which is not the same as ceasing. Gus moved to the house in Culbertson, the house on Second Street, the house he bought with the proceeds of the land sale, the house that was small and warm and that had a paved driveway and a garage and neighbors and the particular comfort of a house in town, the comfort of proximity to the grocery store and the post office and the bar and the church, the comfort that Gus appreciated without admitting it because admitting it would have been admitting that the farm was hard and that the leaving of the farm was relief and that the relief was not betrayal but was honest.

But Gus drove past his fields every morning. He drove the county road from Culbertson east, past the Enger place, past the Peterson place, to the section line where his old driveway used to be and where the driveway still was because the Hoffman boy kept it maintained, and he stopped the truck and he sat and he looked at the fields, his fields, the fields that were not his fields anymore but that were still, in the geography of his heart, the place he farmed, the place he worked, the place where his body learned the shape of labor and his hands learned the feel of soil and his mind learned the pattern of seasons.

Ruth saw him every morning. She saw the maroon Dodge at 7:15, moving east on the county road, the truck traveling at exactly thirty-five miles per hour because Gus drove at thirty-five regardless of the speed limit, thirty-five being the speed that Gus trusted, the speed that allowed his eighty-eight-year-old reflexes to respond to the deer and the pheasants and the occasional farm implement on the road, the speed of caution that was also the speed of ceremony, the slow drive of a man visiting the place that made him.

She waved. She always waved. She waved from the porch or from the yard or from the barn door, the wave that was not greeting but acknowledgment, the acknowledgment of one farmer to another, the recognition that Gus and Ruth were members of the same profession even though Gus no longer practiced it, the way a retired doctor is still a doctor, the way a retired teacher is still a teacher, the identity persisting after the practice ceases because the identity was not the practice but was the thing the practice built, the thing that the years of work constructed inside the person, the internal architecture of a life spent doing one thing.

Gus waved back. He lifted his hand from the steering wheel, the hand that was spotted and thin and that trembled slightly with the tremor that old age provides as its signature, the tremor that was not weakness but was the body's honest accounting of eighty-eight years of use. He lifted his hand and he dropped his hand and the truck continued east and Ruth watched it go and the watching was a ritual, the daily ritual of two farmers acknowledging each other across the boundary of retirement and practice, the boundary that separated Gus's past from Ruth's present.

She wondered if Gus missed it. She wondered if the daily drive was longing or was habit, if the stopping at the old driveway was grief or was maintenance, the maintenance of a connection to a place that the selling had not severed because some connections cannot be severed by a sale, some connections persist in the way that a root persists after the plant is cut, the root surviving underground, invisible, drawing nothing, producing nothing, but present, still present, still anchored in the ground.

She would ask him someday. She would not ask him today. Today she had seed treatment to apply and a drill to check and a season to prepare for and the preparation did not include conversations about what it means to leave a farm, what it means to sell, what it means to drive past the place you worked every morning for the rest of your mornings.

The community was the Petersons and Gus and the Hoffmans and the Ericsons and the Thoresons and the Garcias and the dozen other families who farmed the tableland north of the Missouri in Roosevelt County. The community was not organized. The community did not have meetings or bylaws or a president. The community was the aggregate of the individual operations, the sum of the farms, the collection of families who did the same work on adjacent ground and who therefore understood each other in the way that only people who share a condition can understand each other, the understanding that is not sympathy but is recognition, the recognition of one gambler by another, one believer by another, one person who puts seed in the ground and waits for the sky to decide by another person who puts seed in the ground and waits for the sky to decide.

The annual gamble. This was the thing. The annual gamble was the thing that held the community together, the shared risk, the communal wager that the season would be kind enough, that the rain would come enough, that the heat would moderate enough, that the hail would miss enough, that the price would hold enough, that the enough would be enough. The gamble was individual — each farmer betting on his own ground, his own seed, his own section of sky — but the gamble was also communal, because the weather did not respect property lines, because the rain that fell on the Peterson place fell on the Enger place, because the hail that hit Section 8 could have hit the Hoffman wheat a mile north, because the shared weather created a shared fate, the fate of a community whose fortunes rose and fell with the sky.

When the rain came, everyone's wheat grew. When the hail came, the community held its breath and counted the damage and the counting was communal — who was hit, how bad, how many acres, the communal arithmetic of loss that the coffee conversations at the elevator performed, the conversations that were not gossip but were solidarity, the standing-beside that a farming community performed when one of its members was struck.

Ruth had been the recipient. When Tom died, the community came. Dale Peterson came with his truck and helped Hector finish the winter chores. Karen brought casseroles, three of them, the casseroles that women bring when a man dies, the food that says: you do not have to cook, you do not have to think about cooking, you have to grieve and the grieving does not include cooking and we will cook for you until you can cook for yourself. Betty Hoffman brought bread, the homemade bread that Betty made every week and that was famous in the county for its density and its warmth and the particular way it held butter. Gus Lindgren came. He sat in the kitchen. He drank coffee. He did not say he was sorry because saying sorry was not what Gus did. Gus sat and drank coffee and his sitting and his drinking were his condolence, his presence the only statement he could make, the statement that said: I am here, I have been where you are, I know what this is, and the knowing is the thing I bring.

They did not come because they were obligated. They came because the community was a system and the system required that its members support each other when the support was needed, the way the roots of adjacent wheat plants support each other through the soil's mycorrhizal network, the underground fungal connections that link the roots and that allow the plants to share nutrients and water and the chemical signals that say: I am stressed, I need help, send what you can. The community was the human version of the mycorrhizal network, the above-ground connections that linked the families and that allowed the sharing of food and labor and the particular resource that is presence, the being-there that cannot be shipped or stored or purchased but that must be provided in person, by a body in a kitchen, by a hand holding a casserole dish, by an old man sitting at a table drinking coffee.

Ruth went to the co-op in Sidney twice a week. She went on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days that she designated for errands, the days that she drove the twenty-six miles and bought what the farm needed and what the house needed and saw the people she needed to see, the seeing that was not social but was human, was the minimum social contact that a solitary woman required to remain a member of the species that she belonged to, the species that was social even when the individual was not, the species that needed to talk about soil temperature and children and the weather even when the individual preferred to talk to the ground.

The co-op was the gathering place. Not officially — the co-op was a store, was a commercial establishment, was the place where money was exchanged for goods. But the co-op was also the place where farmers met, where the conversations happened, where the information was exchanged, the information about markets and weather and the county's agricultural economy that the farmers needed and that the farmers shared in the aisles between the herbicide shelf and the seed shelf, the aisles that were the corridors of the community's intelligence network.

She saw Dale Peterson at the co-op. She saw Betty Hoffman. She saw the Thoreson boys, Karl and Eric, who farmed the place north of the Petersons, 4,000 acres, the largest operation in the area, the operation that had absorbed two smaller farms in the past decade and that was still absorbing, still expanding, the gravitational force of a large operation pulling the smaller operations into its orbit. She saw Hank Garcia, who farmed 800 acres east of Culbertson, the smallest operation remaining, the operation that survived because Hank's wife worked at the school and because Hank fixed equipment on the side and because the 800 acres produced just enough wheat to keep the farm in the category of possible, the category that was above failure and below prosperity and that was the category where most small farms lived, the category of enough.

She saw these people and the seeing was the community and the community was the context and the context was the thing that the offer asked her to leave, not just the land but the people on the land, not just the soil but the network, not just the wheat but the shared gamble, the annual wager that bound the farmers to each other the way the roots bound the plants to the soil, the binding that was not a chain but was a choice, the choice to stay and to farm and to stand beside the other people who stayed and who farmed and who made the same choice.

Ruth drove home. She unloaded the Cruiser Maxx. She put it in the chemical shed, the shed beside the barn where the pesticides and herbicides and seed treatments were stored, the shed that was locked because chemicals were dangerous and because locked doors were the farmer's response to danger, the simple response that said: this is here, it is controlled, it is behind a door that I hold the key to.

She stood in the yard. She looked east, toward the Peterson place. She could not see the Peterson place — the Peterson buildings were three miles away and the land was flat and three miles was beyond the visual range of a woman standing in her yard looking east. But she knew the Peterson place was there. She knew it the way she knew Section 12 was there even when she could not see it, the knowledge of proximity, the awareness that the ground she stood on was connected to the ground the Petersons stood on and the Hoffmans stood on and Gus Lindgren used to stand on, the continuity of ground that was the continuity of community, the shared surface that held them all.

The community was not the reason to keep the land. Ruth knew this. The community was not the reason the way David's logic was not the reason and Sarah's guilt was not the reason and Tom's memory was not the reason. The community was the context. The community was the water the fish swam in, the air the bird flew in, the medium that surrounded and sustained without being the thing itself.

But the medium mattered. The water mattered to the fish. The air mattered to the bird. The community mattered to the farmer the way the soil mattered to the wheat — not as the reason for growing but as the condition of growing, the medium without which the growing could not occur.

She went inside. She made tea. She sat at the table. She thought about the Petersons and Gus and Karen's daughter Emily who was talking about coming back. She thought about the talking, the present participle, the ongoing consideration. She thought about the word back. Back to what. Back to the farm. Back to the ground. Back to the community that held you when you were here and that released you when you left and that would receive you again if you returned, the community that did not judge the leaving and did not celebrate the returning but that simply adjusted, the way the ground adjusts to whatever is planted in it, the way the community adjusts to whoever is present.

She finished her tea. She washed the cup. She set it on the rack. She went to the barn. The drill was waiting. The seed treatment was in the shed. The season was approaching.

The community would plant when the soil was ready. The community would plant simultaneously, the individual operations beginning within days of each other, the tractors pulling the drills across the tableland in parallel, the parallel planting that was not coordinated but was synchronous, the synchrony of shared conditions, the same soil, the same temperature, the same decision made independently by a dozen farmers who looked at the same thermometer and read the same number and made the same call: fifty degrees, time to plant.

The community would plant. The community would grow. The community would harvest. And the community would be here in September when Ruth gave her answer, the community that would absorb the answer the way the community absorbed everything — the hail and the drought and the price collapse and the death and the departure and the return — the community that received without judgment and that held without grasping and that continued without insistence, the community of wheat farmers on the tableland north of the Missouri, the people who understood what Ruth faced because they faced it too.