Sweet Land Read online

  I dried my hands and soon enough tracked that faint sawing sound to the den. There the TV was flashing in an empty room. On the screen was a man cutting plywood; another dark-haired fellow held the sheet steady. Big men, with noses and bellies. They wore leather tool belts, jeans and plaid shirts, and scuffed boots that had seen some dust. Two big men working together. Sawhorses, sheets of plywood. A silvery circular saw, its blade eating up the thin red line, the yellow sawdust feathering up behind in a golden drift. I turned up the sound. I sat down. For some reason the scene got to me. Choked me up. There was something about it—the tools, the boots, the wood, the two men working. It was all so real. It was something anyone could believe in. After that, Thursday nights it was Bob, Norm, and me.

  T-minus twenty-five minutes.

  Bob Vila himself picks each house to be remodeled. He drives around looking for older homes for his next project, and these houses could be anywhere in the United States. Anywhere. Sure, most of the jobs are out East. That’s because Norm and Bob are from out East originally. But they have remodeled houses in Connecticut, Tennessee, California, Colorado, Wisconsin, and more. I know because I keep track.

  In our den I have a United States wall map and each red pushpin is a This Old House project. It took some work, I’ll tell you, getting all the sites pinpointed. I had to order the tapes I’d missed, then go through them one by one. But I’m glad I did. Looking at the pins it’s clear to me now that Bob Vila could show up in anyone’s neighborhood.

  Once I was driving west in Minot when I saw a shiny blue crew cab Ford pickup, the driver with sunglasses, coming at me from the other way. For a second I froze at the wheel—then I closed my eyes and spun a louie across traffic. Cars honked at me, which was serious because people in North Dakota never use their horns. I made it across the traffic but there were too many cars and I lost him. Afterward I had to pull over. My heart was pounding. I had to catch my breath.

  I bowl, and that night at the lanes I told the girls in my league who I just might have seen.

  They laughed. Phyllis said, “You sure it wasn’t Elvis?”

  Anyway, once Bob picks a house—say it was your house—all the remodeling is free. I have thought and thought about this matter and I believe it to be true. Reason number one, Bob is a wealthy man. He has his television show. He has his videos. He has his books on remodeling. Reason number two, even if Bob wasn’t rich, he is not the kind of guy who would take money from homeowners who are struggling to make life better for themselves and their kids, even if they offered him the money.

  I don’t tell people my ideas on the free remodeling. If you know in your heart that something is the truth, there’s no need to broadcast. Besides, it would only hurt Bob and Norm. Imagine how people would try to get close to them, to be their friends. Imagine the women, the things they would do.

  T-minus fifteen minutes. I’m knitting with one eye on the clock when Jim pokes his head into the room. The round top of his head shines.

  “Yes?” I say immediately and loudly.

  “Have I got something for you,” Jim says. He is a middle-sized man with a round head and one of those soccer-ball bellies that truckers get from the constant jiggling, the continual pounding over seams in the freeway concrete, which over the years weakens the stomach muscles. Jim holds up his new Playboy.

  “There’s nothing in that magazine for me,” I say. I check my watch against VCR time, keep my needles moving.

  “Not even an interview with Bob Vila?” My yarn snags.

  Jim grins and holds out the magazine.

  I make a point of unhooking the snag before I set down my wool, my needles. Then I clutch the magazine. It’s heavier than I expect.

  I look for the right page, making sure to glance away when the pictures flash up pink. And suddenly there it is, “Twenty Questions with Bob Vila.” A picture, too. Bob is standing beside a low red car that I read is a Ferrari. A Ferrari his wife has given him for his birthday.

  “I could sure go for one of them Ferraris on my birthday,” Jim says from behind me. He puts his hands on my shoulders, begins to rub them. I can feel his belly, round and firm, against the back of my head.

  “Well we’re not rich, you’re not Bob Vila, and it’s not your birthday,” I say, and hand him the magazine. I check the time on the VCR, then pick up my knitting. I have to focus on my yarn, concentrate, remember the pattern. I crochet newborn caps for the local hospital. Newborn caps are my bowling money.

  “My birthday ain’t that far off,” Jim says softly. He is still standing behind my chair. He takes my head into his hands and begins to run his thumbs slowly over the rims and down the sides of my ears.

  I keep knitting, which my girlfriends say I could do through a tornado.

  “What if I was Bob Vila and came driving up and knocked on the door?” Jim says. His voice has dropped a note, turned husky. He keeps stroking my ears. He knows what that does to me. And I know that his new magazine has got his batteries charged up.

  “Piff to that,” I say. It’s a nervous saying I have.

  “Piff?” Jim says. “That’s all?” He laughs once.

  “Piff,” I say.

  Tomorrow morning Jim is leaving for Duluth, Georgia, with a load of durum. When he’s gone I stay pretty much in the house; in winter you shouldn’t leave a house alone, even for the afternoon. Especially this house. When the temperature drops to twenty below and the wind comes in from Montana and ice knocks down a power line somewhere, it’s trouble. Frost grows from the plug-ins, from around the window sills, from the keyhole. It grows like toadstools. I’ve sat there and watched it move. On those days I wear my parka and one of the newborn caps.

  “What if?” Jim whispers. He’s leaning down now. His breath is sweet and woody from his Copenhagen, which I’d rather smell than cigarettes.

  Summers I stay in, too. I can’t take the heat outside so I stick to the den where we have a window air conditioner. I keep knitting. Sometimes if the shades are drawn and the air conditioner is blowing cold I’ll forget that it’s summer and I’ll put on a jacket and one of those wool caps. The caps feel good any time of year really. I can see why black people wear them. And one size fits all.

  Jim leans down, whispers in my ear. For a moment my fingers stop; the needles go silent. I look across the living room, see my reflection in the TV. I am low and round and gray. “I used to be prettier,” I say.

  “You’re pretty enough,” he says. He keeps stroking my ears.

  “I never weighed this much in my life,” I whisper.

  “It’s all the same by me,” Jim says.

  I can’t say anything.

  “Really,” he says, his voice softer now.

  I set down my hooks, my wool, shut my eyes and lean my head back into his belly. Its firmness, heavy as a ripe pumpkin, always surprises me. There are worse things about a man than a belly. When I open my eyes Jim is smiling at me, hopefully, upside down.

  “Say I was Bob Vila and it was my birthday besides.”

  T-minus three minutes.

  In our bedroom Jim is breathing hard. I have my arms around him. “Come on, honey,” I say. My eyes are on the clock.

  The headboard is thumping, thumping, thumping against the wall. It’s only half-inch sheetrock. I try to concentrate. “Okay honey!” I call out to him. His eyes are closed; I don’t know if he hears me.

  I think of the sheetrock. Sheetrock is really billions of tiny dead fossils ground into powder, then rolled out in wet slurry. Pressed flat. Baked. Papered both sides. Then painted white. I saw the whole process once. Bob and Norm visited the quarry and the factory, which were somewhere along a coast in Canada. From the loading dock there were trucks one after another hauling away the finished product, the 4-by-8-foot sheets that we make rooms with, white rooms, rooms so white we have to hang things on the walls. No one can live with bare sheetrock.

  Across from the bed there’s a calendar with a nature picture. A stream with trees and sunlight. There’s no water or trees like that around here; it had to have been taken somewhere else, another state. Below the color picture there is a line of twelve little squares. The months. I can’t read their names, let alone pick out the days.

  Thump and thump and thump.

  Across the bedroom the digital clock blinks the time. It’s T-minus one. I call out to Jim. He hears me this time and picks up speed. I start to feel something, but it’s too late for me. So much is late for me that I close my eyes and keep them shut. I concentrate on that thudding sound. Jim goes on and on. After awhile it’s like there’s someone pounding, pounding, pounding on the front door.

  Dispersal

  To get to the Matson sale I had to drive through town. On the edge of town I passed the red brick high school where my wife, Ellen, teaches English in the upper grades. Through the school windows I could see students moving about in front of colored posters. I knew that if Ellen weren’t teaching I could not be thinking about buying that New Holland hay mower listed on Matson’s sale bill. My forty Holsteins are a fine bunch of cows, but if it weren’t for Ellen’s town job, things on the farm would be tough.

  Which made me think of Matson and his family. I didn’t really know them—they were strangers to me—but I could tell from their sale bill what had gone wrong. Too much machinery, not enough wheat. Too many bankers, not enough rain. Tough luck all around.

  But bad luck draws a crowd like blood pulls flies. Several pickups followed mine as I turned at the red auction flags. Soon up ahead I could see the shiny aluminum tops of Matson’s grain bins. Below stood his newer white house and, beside it, li
nes of pickups stretched from his yard down his driveway and along the shoulders of the highway.

  I parked, leaving myself room to turn around, and began to walk quickly toward the crowd. Sales do that to you. Anything can happen at a sale. In Matson’s yard cars and trucks had parked on his lawn. Their tires rutted the soggy April grass and water welled up in the zigzag tread marks. Closer to his house, a pickup had backed over a small trimmed spruce tree. The tree remained bent over in a green horseshoe beneath the tire. I slowed my walk. For a moment I thought of turning back, of going home. If everybody left, there could be no sale. But even as I thought, several farmers passed me. I kept walking.

  Ahead, the crowd surrounded the auctioneer, who stood atop a hayrack. He wore a wide black cowboy hat, and his tanned, wrinkled throat bobbed like a rooster’s craw as he cried the small stuff. Cans of nails. Some rusty barbed wire. Three fence posts. Some half-cans of herbicide. A broken shovel. Beyond the auctioneer, in even lines, was the machinery, mostly John Deere green and Massey Ferguson red. Beyond everything were Matson’s long, unplowed fields.

  I registered for a bidder’s number, then stood in the sunlight with a cup of coffee and looked over the crowd. You shouldn’t get in a hurry at a sale. You ought to get the feel of things. The crowd was mostly farmers with a few bankers and real estate men thrown in. The younger bankers wore flannel shirts and seed-corn caps, but I could pick them out right away. Like the real estate guys, their faces were white and smooth and they squinted a lot, as if they were moles who just today had crawled out of the ground into the sunlight. Moles or skunks.

  Off to the side I noticed an older farmer picking through a box of odds and ends. He fished out a rat-tail file from the box and drew it across his thumbnail. He glanced briefly around, then laid the file alongside the box and continued digging.

  “Gonna spend some of the wife’s money?” somebody said to me. I turned. It was Jim Hartley, who milked cows just down the road from my farm. I knew he already had a good mower.

  “Not if she can help it,” I said.

  He grinned. But then his forehead wrinkled and his blue eyes turned serious. “Hell of a deal, a bank sale like this. Imagine if you had to sell out. Had all these people come onto your farm and start picking through your stuff like crows on road kill.”

  I looked back at the old man with the file. But both he and it were gone.

  “Be tough,” I said. That old bastard.

  Hartley looked around at the crowd. “Haven’t seen Matson anywhere. And I can’t blame him for that. Good day to get drunk.”

  “I don’t really know the man,” I said. “He’s a stranger to me.”

  “He’s got some pretty fair equipment,” Hartley said. “The combine looks good. And that New Holland mower—it’s damn near brand new.” He narrowed his eyes. “You could use a good mower.”

  “Maybe I’ll take a look,” I said. I raised my coffee cup, took a sip.

  Soon enough Hartley went off toward the combine, and I found the mower. From a distance it looked good. The yellow and red colors were still bright, which meant it had always been shedded. Up close I checked the cutting sickle. All the knives were in place and still showed serration, which was like buying good used tires still showing the little rubber teats on the face of their tread. Next I turned the hay pickup reel to watch the sickle move. The knives slid easily between their guards with a sound that reminded me of Ellen’s good pinking shears. Then I saw the toolbox and the mower’s maintenance manual. The thin book was tattered and spotted with grease and with Matson’s fingerprints, tiny whirlwinds painted in oil. Its pages fell open to the lubrication section. There Matson had circled and numbered every one of the grease fittings. I was sold.

  I stashed the manual and walked away. I didn’t want to linger near the mower and attract other bidders. I bought another cup of coffee and then stood off to the side where I could watch the mower and see who stopped by it. Two men paused by the mower, but they wore wheat seed-caps and smoked, which said they were grain men. Soon they moved to the combine. One stocky farmer slowed by the mower, but he wore high rubber boots and a Purina “Pig-Power” jacket. I was feeling lucky until a man and his son walked toward the mower like it was a magnet and they were nails. Their cuffs were spotted with manure splash. They wore loose bib overalls for easy bending. And they wore caps cocked to one side, a habit dairymen have from leaning their foreheads against the flanks of their cows.

  The son turned the pickup reel while the old man held his ear to the main bearing case. After the old man nodded, the two of them crawled underneath the mower and didn’t come out for a long time. What the hell did they see under there? Finally they came out and stood off to the side. They stared at the mower and nodded and whispered. I wondered how many cows they milked.

  By now the auctioneer was in the back of his pickup and was barking his way along the hay wagons and rakes, headed this way. I went over my figures again. I knew in town that mower would sell for $5,500, give or take a couple of hundred. I had set my limit at $5,000. As long as I stuck to that figure I couldn’t go wrong.

  “Now here’s a mighty clean mower—” the auctioneer called. The hook and pull of his arms drew the crowd forward. “Boys, if this mower were a car, we’d call her ‘cherry.’ You know what this mower would sell for in town, boys, so somebody give me six thousand to start!”

  The crowd was silent.

  “Five thousand, then!”

  Still there was silence.

  “Boys, boys—four thousand to start!”

  In the silence somewhere a dog barked. The auctioneer’s eyes flickered to the clerk and then to the banker. The banker, ever so slightly, shrugged. He was worried about the big tractors and combines, about the house and the land.

  “Boys, this ain’t a rummage sale, but somebody give a thousand dollars.”

  I saw the younger dairyman nod, and the bidding was on. At $1,600, it was between the dairyman and me. The young fellow began to look at his father before each bid. At $1,750 I saw the old man fold his arms and squint. At $1,850 he pursed his lips and shook his head. His son mouthed a silent curse and looked down.

  “Eighteen hundred three times—gone!” the auctioneer said and pointed to me. I held up my bidder’s number for the clerk to record as the crowd dissolved away to the next implement.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. Eighteen hundred was a steal, no two ways about that. My ears burned. I felt shaky. I sat down on the mower’s long drawbar. I ran my hand along its cold steel. I wondered for a moment if the mower had felt any change, if it knew I was up there. Soon enough that shaky feeling gave way to a stronger idea—that I had to get that mower out of here and home as soon as possible.

  I found the clerk’s booth and wrote out my check. Then I brought around my truck and got ready to hook on to the mower. Trouble was, Matson had parked the mower in field-cutting position, which meant its mouth was too wide for highway travel. I knew that the drawbar released to swing to a narrower stance. But for the life of me I could not see how. I knew I still wasn’t completely over that shaky feeling because if I had been home on my own farm and just sat there a few minutes, I could have figured things out. Not here, though.

  I asked another farmer if he knew, but the man was in a hurry to join the crowd around the combine. So there was only one thing to do—find someone who knew for sure. And that was Matson.

  I walked up to his house. The drapes were all drawn. I rapped on the door and waited. Inside, I could hear a baby crying. Along the sidewalk was a flower bed. Somebody last fall had done a lot of work planting tulip bulbs, but now their first green spears were drowned in quack grass.

  A woman answered the door. She was about Ellen’s age, late thirties. She had a bone-white face that said she seldom went outside.

  “Is Mr. Matson home?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She just stood there, looking beyond me to the auction. From deeper in the house I could smell cigarette smoke.

  “I bought . . . an implement,” I said.

  Her pale eyes returned to mine. “Tom—” she called back to the dusk of the hallway.