The Note the Bank Called After the Drought

“I can’t say I do.”

“He had a hundred and sixty acres in Iowa. Eighty-six. The bank sold it out from under him at an auction and a neighbor bought it for pennies. I was six. I stood in the yard next to him and watched them carry out his mother’s table.” He looked at the window. “Land gets sold, Mr. Becker. Somebody buys it. It might as well be somebody who’ll keep it going.”

“It might as well be somebody who paid for it fair.”

“It’s the market.”

“It’s not the market. If it were the market, you’d have taken Kessler’s money.”

That did something. His eyes came back. He took up a pen and turned it over.

“I think you should go,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

I left. I stood in the parking lot in the cold and hoped he would pick up the phone before I got to my truck and fix it. Don Mercer would have. A man with his own father’s farm in his past should have understood better than anyone.

He did not call. On Friday evening there was no change in the account. I phoned Shane after supper to tell him, and he told me he already had the churches working.

Six pickups

Shane was the one who made it a crowd. I want that on the record.

I had told the neighbors we would go see the regional president, Susan Pratt, at her office, in person, and quietly. I figured two trucks. Shane had been on the phone until two in the morning. He called Gina Hendricks, whose farm had been the first to go, and Gina called Cal Dunlap, who had sold his 120 acres and had not been to church since. Barbara called Fay Beal at the credit union. By Sunday supper the people who would come had settled on themselves.

When I pulled into the co-op lot on Monday at 6:30, there were six pickups waiting. Mud-splashed and cold, engines idling in the dark.

I counted the heads. Eleven people.

Not one of them held a sign. There was not a single speech. Barbara Zeller had brought a thermos and a sleeve of paper cups. Her daughter Jolie had brought a folder of certified deed copies with the prices highlighted in yellow, and she stood holding it against her chest like a hymnal.

Arlen rode with me in the good coat, his cap on his knee and the black diary under his arm. Beulah had packed ham sandwiches in wax paper for the whole line. We went in a convoy, six trucks with our lights on in the gray, and for sixty-eight miles nobody honked and nobody hurried.

“I haven’t been in a parade since Eisenhower,” Arlen said.

“This isn’t a parade.”

“No.” He looked out at the beanfields, flat and bare. “But it’s the same people.”