David Calls

The Honest Season

Chapter 7: David Calls

The phone rang at 7:14 on a Sunday evening. Ruth was on the porch. The porch faced south, and in May the south-facing porch held the last of the light until nearly nine, the light coming sideways across the fields, the light that turned the new wheat — two inches high now, the pale green of emergence, the first visible evidence of the seed's success — into a surface of yellow-green that moved when the wind moved it and was still when the wind stopped and that was, in either condition, the most beautiful thing Ruth knew how to look at, though she would not have used the word beautiful, she would have used the word good, because good was the word that farmers used for healthy wheat, the word that contained assessment and approval and the particular relief of a crop that had emerged evenly and strongly and that stood in the ground the way a good crop stands, which is vertically, which is without hesitation, which is with the confidence of a plant that has found its soil and its moisture and its light and that intends to grow.

She went inside to answer the phone. The phone was on the counter, the landline, the handset in the cradle, the same phone she had used for twenty-two years, the AT&T two-line that Tom bought when they installed the second line for the dial-up internet that they no longer used but that still had its own number, the second line silent, the ghost line, the line that connected to nothing but that Ruth kept because disconnecting it would require calling the phone company and the phone company was in Great Falls and the calling would take thirty minutes and thirty minutes was time she did not have for a task she did not need to complete.

She picked up the handset. She knew it was David before she answered because David called on Sunday evenings. He had called on Sunday evenings since he left for college in 2010, the sixteen-year pattern of a son who understood that his mother did not call him, that his mother waited for calls, that the initiative for communication belonged to the person who had left, not the person who had stayed, because staying was itself a form of communication, was the daily broadcast of a woman who was here, who was always here, who could be reached at this number, on this phone, in this kitchen, at any time, and who did not need to reach out because she had never left.

"Hi, Mom," David said.

"Hi, David," she said.

She sat at the table. She sat in her chair, on the east side. The kitchen light was on, the single bulb in the ceiling fixture, the fixture that was original to the house, the porcelain socket and the glass shade that Elsa chose in 1939 and that had survived eighty-seven years of farmhouse life — the vibrations of heavy trucks, the slamming of doors, the movements of four generations of people beneath it.

"How's the wheat?" he said.

He always asked about the wheat. He had grown up in wheat. He had ridden in the tractor cab as a child, sitting on Tom's lap, the lap that held him while the fields opened and the drill planted and the world of the farm expanded from the house to the sections, from the yard to the horizon. He had driven the grain truck at fifteen, the legal age in Montana for a farm permit, driving the truck to the elevator, learning the route, learning the scale, learning the moisture test, learning the language of harvest. He had left for college knowing the language, and the leaving did not erase the language, the leaving preserved it, the way a language is preserved when the speaker leaves the country and carries the language into a new place where no one else speaks it and the speaking becomes private, becomes intimate, becomes the secret communication of a person with their past.

"Wheat's up," Ruth said. "Good stand."

"Temperature been okay?"

"No frost since planting. Lows in the mid-thirties. Soil's staying warm."

"Good," he said.

The conversation paused. The pauses were part of the conversation. Ruth and David communicated in statements separated by silence, the silence not empty but full, full of the things they did not say because the things they did not say were understood, were the substrate of the relationship, the way the subsoil is the substrate of the topsoil — unseen, unspoken, but holding everything up.

"Mom," he said.

She knew. She knew from the way he said it, the single syllable carrying the weight of the thing he was going to say, the way a single post carries the weight of the wire and the wire carries the weight of the boundary. She knew because she had been expecting this call, this particular version of this Sunday call, the version in which David stopped asking about the wheat and started asking about the offer.

"I talked to Sarah," he said.

"I know," she said. She did not know. But she knew because Sarah and David talked, because siblings talk, because the children of a widowed mother talk to each other about the widowed mother the way employees talk about a boss — with concern that is also assessment, with love that is also strategy, with the particular attention of people whose lives are affected by decisions they cannot make.

"Mom, the offer. $4.2 million."

"I know the number, David."

"I know you know the number. I'm asking if you've thought about it."

She had thought about it. She had thought about it the way she thought about the weather — constantly, peripherally, the way a person thinks about a thing that is always present, that affects everything, that cannot be ignored but cannot be acted on, not yet, not until the conditions are right, not until the season has taught her what the season has to teach.

"I've thought about it," she said.

"And?"

"And I'm planting."

He was quiet. She could hear him breathing. She could hear, behind his breathing, the sounds of his apartment in Denver — the television, or music, or the particular hum of a city apartment in the evening, the hum of other lives through the walls, the density of urban living that David had chosen and that Ruth had not chosen and that neither of them judged the other for choosing or not choosing because the choice of where to live is the most personal choice a person makes and the most unjudgeable.

"Mom, you're planting because you plant every year. But this year is different."

"Every year is different."

"Not like this. This year someone is offering you $4.2 million for the land. That's different."

"The wheat doesn't know about the offer."

He exhaled. She heard the exhale and she recognized it, the particular exhalation of a son who loves his mother and who is frustrated by his mother and who understands that the frustration is not his mother's fault but is the fault of the gap between them, the gap that is not geographic but epistemological, the gap between a man who understands the world through numbers and a woman who understands the world through soil.

David was a structural engineer. He worked for a firm in Denver called Morrison-Maierle, designing bridges and buildings and the concrete structures that hold the weight of human habitation. He understood load and stress and the mathematics of collapse. He understood that every structure has a capacity and that exceeding the capacity produces failure. He understood these things the way Ruth understood soil temperature and seeding rates and the particular sound the wheat makes when the wind moves through a mature canopy. He understood his world the way she understood hers, and the worlds were not the same, and the difference between the worlds was the thing that the phone call could not bridge.

"Mom, $4.2 million is more than the land will ever earn in your lifetime. You know that."

She knew that. She had calculated it. She calculated it the way she calculated everything — on the back of an envelope, in pencil, the arithmetic of a woman who had been doing farm math for thirty-eight years. Twenty-four hundred acres. Average yield: 36 bushels per acre. Average price: $6.00 per bushel. Gross revenue: $518,400 per year. Subtract inputs — seed, fertilizer, chemical, fuel, equipment payments, insurance, property taxes, Hector's salary — and the net was $140,000 in a good year. In a bad year the net was $40,000. In a terrible year the net was negative, was loss, was the subtraction that farming sometimes performed, the subtraction that took money from the farmer instead of giving it.

$4.2 million divided by $140,000 was thirty years. Thirty years of good years, of years without hail, without drought, without price collapse, without the mechanical failures and the weather disasters and the market fluctuations that made farming the most volatile profession in the most stable industry in the country. Thirty years of everything going right. Ruth was fifty-eight. Thirty years was eighty-eight. She would not farm until she was eighty-eight. She would not farm until she was seventy-eight. She might not farm until she was sixty-eight. The body that farmed was a body that absorbed the cumulative stress of driving and lifting and bending and the vibration of the tractor cab and the dust of the harvest and the cold of the winter and the body would fail, not suddenly like Tom's but gradually, the slow erosion that age performs on the body the way water performs it on the soil, the wearing away, the reduction, the diminishment that is not disease but is time.

"I know the math, David," she said.

"Then why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you planting? Why are you doing another season? You could accept the offer, close the sale, and be done by July."

Done. She heard the word. She turned it over in her mind the way she turned over a clod of soil, looking at it from different angles, examining it, testing its structure. Done. What did done mean? Done with the planting. Done with the harvest. Done with the 4:30 AM coffee and the walk to the field and the soil thermometer and the tractor cab and the drill and the combine and the grain truck and the elevator. Done with the work. Done with the thing that organized her days and her years and her life.

Done with Tom's barn. Done with Tom's tools. Done with the pegboard and the workbench and the motor that sat on the workbench in the state he left it. Done with the wrench on the hook. Done with the concrete floor.

"I'm not done, David," she said.

"Mom."

"I'm not done because the season is not done. I planted. The wheat is growing. Harvest is in August. I told Grayson I would have my answer by September first. That's the arrangement."

"The arrangement is that you're farming a crop on land you're going to sell."

"I don't know if I'm going to sell."

"Mom. $4.2 million. You're 58. You're running 2,400 acres alone."

"I'm not alone. I have Hector."

"You have one hired hand. One. Dad had you and Hector. Three people on 2,400 acres was already thin. Two people is — Mom, two people is dangerous. You're in a tractor cab twelve hours a day during planting. You're in a combine sixteen hours a day during harvest. You're 58 years old. You're doing the work of a person half your age."

She listened to her son describe her life. She listened to the accuracy of it — the hours, the physical demands, the danger that was real but that she had accommodated the way she accommodated the weather, as a condition, not a threat. She listened and she did not disagree because the facts were correct and the math was correct and the logic was sound, the logic of a structural engineer, the logic of load and capacity and the knowledge that every structure has a limit and exceeding the limit produces failure.

But the logic did not account for the thing that Ruth could not name, the thing that the season was teaching her, the thing that she felt when she walked the field and bent down and picked up the soil and smelled it and felt it in her hand. The logic did not account for the soil. The logic did not account for the honesty of the exchange — seed for wheat, work for yield, faith for fact. The logic did not account for the way the land held her, not physically but existentially, the way the land said: you are here, you are doing this, this is what you do, and the doing is the being.

"Mom, you could buy a house in Billings. Be near Sarah. Travel. You've never been anywhere."

"I've been here."

"That's what I mean."

"I know what you mean, David. You mean I've been in one place for fifty-eight years and the one place is small and the smallness is a limitation and the limitation should be corrected. You mean I should see the world."

"You should see something besides wheat fields."

"I see everything in wheat fields."

He was quiet again. The silence stretched. Ruth held the phone and looked at the kitchen and the kitchen looked back at her, the walls and the floor and the ceiling and the table and the stove and the counter and the coat on the hook, the room that was her world, the room that David wanted her to leave, the room that she did not want to leave and that she might have to leave and that she was not ready to decide about leaving.

"David," she said.

"Yeah, Mom."

"The land is not about what it earns."

She said it and she meant it and she did not know exactly what she meant. She knew that the statement was true the way she knew that the soil temperature was forty-one degrees — by measurement, by the testing of the thing against the instrument, by the reading of the indicator that said yes, this is the number, this is the fact. The land was not about what it earned. The land was about something else, something that the season was revealing to her, something that she could feel but not yet articulate, the way she could feel a change in the weather before the weather changed, the barometric pressure dropping, the humidity rising, the wind shifting from west to northwest, the signs that the experienced reader reads and that the inexperienced reader does not see.

"Then what is it about?" David said.

She could not answer. She could not answer because the answer was the thing the season was teaching her and the season had not finished teaching. She could not answer because the answer was in the wheat that was two inches high and that would be six inches high in June and twelve inches high in July and ripe in August, and the answer was in the growth and in the tending and in the harvest and in the number on the yield monitor and in the price at the elevator and in the check from the grain buyer and in the stubble left in the field after the combine passed and in the silence of September when the work was done and the fields were empty and the farmer stood on the porch and looked at the land and the land looked back.

"I don't know yet," she said. "That's what the season is for."

"Mom, you can't make a $4.2 million decision based on a season of wheat."

"I can't make it based on anything else."

He breathed. She breathed. They breathed together, mother and son, separated by six hundred miles and by the particular distance that exists between a person who lives on the land and a person who left the land, the distance that is not resentment but is reality, the gap between the life chosen and the life departed, the space that love crosses but logic cannot.

"I love you, Mom," he said.

"I love you, David."

"I'll call next Sunday."

"I know."

He hung up. She hung up. She put the phone in the cradle. She sat at the table. The kitchen was quiet. The kitchen was always quiet after David called, the quiet of a room that had held a conversation and that now held the aftermath of the conversation, the residue of words spoken and words withheld, the sediment of a mother and son talking about the thing they could not agree on and the thing they could not stop talking about.

She stood up. She went to the porch. Rust was lying on the boards, his chin on his paws, his eyes tracking her. She sat on the step. She looked at the fields. The wheat was invisible in the dark — the sun had set during the conversation, the light gone while she was inside, the transition from light to dark that she missed because she was on the phone, because she was talking to David, because the conversation required the inside of the house and the inside of the house did not have a view of the sunset and the missing of the sunset was the cost of the conversation.

She would have preferred the sunset. She did not say this to herself, not in these words, but she felt it, the preference for the visual over the verbal, the preference for the land's communication over her son's communication, the preference that was not a rejection of David but was a recognition that David's language was not her language, that David spoke in numbers and logic and the clean lines of structural engineering and that Ruth spoke in soil and wheat and the messy, unpredictable, honest language of the season.

The land is not about what it earns.

She had said this and she meant it and she needed to understand what she meant. She needed the season to tell her. She needed the wheat to grow and the heat to come and the hail to fall or not fall and the harvest to arrive and the combine to cut and the yield monitor to read the number and the number to be the answer.

The number was always the answer. The number was always honest. The number did not lie. The number said: this is what the ground gave, this is what the sky gave, this is what the work produced, this is the truth of the season, measured in bushels, measured in pounds, measured in the weight of grain that the combine extracted from the standing wheat and that the truck carried to the elevator and that the elevator weighed and tested and graded and bought.

But the number was not the answer to David's question. David's question was: what is the land about if it is not about what it earns? And the answer to David's question was not a number but a thing, a quality, a condition, a state of being that Ruth could feel but could not name, the way you can feel the temperature change before the thermometer registers it, the way you can feel the rain coming before the clouds arrive.

The season would name it. The season would give her the word. The season would teach her the thing she needed to learn, which was the thing she had always known but had never had to say because she had never been asked, because when Tom was alive and the farm was not for sale and the children were small and the work was the work and the life was the life, she had never been asked to explain why she was here, why she stayed, why the land was the thing she chose, because the choosing was the thing itself, was the evidence, was the proof that did not require explanation.

Now she was being asked. Now David was asking and Sarah would ask and Grayson was waiting and the offer was $4.2 million and the asking required an answer and the answer required a language she did not yet have.

She sat on the porch. The dark was complete. The stars were out — the Montana stars, the unpolluted sky, the stars that were visible by the thousands, the stars that Arvid saw in 1938 and that Carl saw in 1962 and that Tom saw every night of his life and that Ruth saw now, the same stars, the same light, the same ancient photons arriving from distances that the mind could not hold, arriving at this porch, at this woman, at this moment in the season.

She went inside. She locked the door. She turned off the lights. She went upstairs. She got into bed. Rust settled on the floor beside the bed, in his spot, the spot where he had slept since Tom died, the spot that was not Tom's side of the bed but was near Tom's side, the proximity that was the dog's tribute to the man who trained him.

Ruth lay in the dark. The house creaked. The house always creaked at night, the wood adjusting to the cooling air, the boards and beams contracting as the temperature dropped, the house breathing out, the house settling into the night the way Ruth settled into the bed, the body finding its position, the mind finding its rest.

David's question hung in the room.

Then what is it about?

She did not answer it. She closed her eyes. She slept. The wheat grew in the dark. The season continued. The question waited, the way the land waited, the way the offer waited, the way everything waited for Ruth to find the word, the word that would explain the thing that did not need explaining to anyone who had ever held a handful of soil and smelled it and felt it and known, without words, without numbers, without the structural calculations of a son in Denver, that the thing in her hand was honest, was real, was the only thing she had ever held that did not pretend to be something it was not.