The Farm They Thought I Rented

Who they thought I was

To understand what happened three days later, in the gravel of my own driveway, you have to understand who Diane Merritt thought I was, and you have to understand that she never once, in two years of Sunday dinners, asked me a single real question about my life.

Here is what she knew. She knew I did books, part time, for the Haddon County Farmers Co-op. She knew I drove a nine year old pickup with a dent in the tailgate. She knew I did not talk much at the table, that I brought a pie instead of a bottle of wine, that I wore the same gray coat two winters running. She knew my last name was Hartwell and that I had kept it, professionally, because the co-op checks and half the paperwork in the county already had that name on them and I saw no reason to reprint the world.

From those facts she built a whole person, and the person she built was a poor girl who had gotten lucky.

Here is what she did not know, because she never asked.

My grandfather was Walt Hartwell. In Haddon County that name used to mean something, though the people who remembered why were getting thin on the ground and Diane Merritt was not from here originally, she was from two counties over and had married up into the notion that the Merritts were gentry. Walt started with a quarter section his own father left him and he was, by every account including the hard ones, the most stubborn man ever to sit a tractor in this part of the state. He bought land the way other men bought coffee. When a neighbor went under in the bad years he did not swoop, he carried them, and then when they could not come back he bought fair and let them keep the house till they passed. By the time he was done he had put together six hundred and forty acres in one connected block along the Ash Creek bottom, the best dirt in the county, all of it paid for, not a dollar owed on a foot of it.

And in the fall of 1961, for reasons that were half business and half spite toward a banker who had once made him wait in a hallway, Walt Hartwell bought the big two story brick building on the corner of Main and Second in downtown Danby.