It started with a ping, barely audible, sounding like a single note lifted out of the string that occasionally burst forth warning him he’d forgotten to put on his seatbelt, as he sometimes did. It was a gray, cloudy day in early November, and he was on SR45, heading south into farmland, past mile long stretches of field corn now seven feet high and turning brown, past combed rows of drying soybeans in fields the size of inland seas, and the ever-pumping oil wells that since childhood had reminded him of giant praying mantises. He drove past the ghosts of old barns and abandoned farmhouses, their chipped paint and sagging roofs, past relics of rusting machinery, past brick ranch style houses with trimmed yards and giant metal sided sheds housing John Deere and Case-International tractors and implements that increasingly seemed like an invasion of gargantuan insects from some strange planet.
Mike slipped his left thumb under his seatbelt strap and tugged. “Nope,” he said under his breath. And he listened for the ping again, but his white, three-year old Ford F150 remained obstinately silent, save for the drone of the tires on the asphalt and hum of the engine underneath, which he could feel more than he could hear. He listened carefully for three more miles, but the truck refused to speak. He thought about turning on the radio, his right hand unconsciously reaching for the dial, but he caught himself and pulled it back. None of the music made sense anymore—hadn’t for years—and the news would only put him in a sour mood.
Mike turned right onto 1300N and began to feel a little more at ease. The rumble in his stomach began to settle. The ragged asphalt of the county road felt softer, warmer, like old jeans. He lifted his left leg and passed gas. There was little traffic on these roads—grain trucks, the occasional tractor, some farmwife in a rust-colored Caprice driving over to the filling station in Fairfield. The county roads didn’t have lines painted down the center, didn’t need them. Out here, everyone knew to stay on their own side.
He arrived home a couple of minutes later. The white frame house, built half a century ago, sat on a rise, the highest spot in a low-lying area, overlooking what had been the family farm, until a couple of years ago when he retired and began renting the land to his neighbors, the Urfers, a local farming family dynasty. He had just let down the truck gate and was lifting a red five-gallon gas can out from the bed when he heard the screen door slam. A few seconds later, his wife, Marilyn, came charging around the side of the garage carrying something small and black in her left hand.
“Where you been?”
“I told you I was going to get some gas for the tiller,” he said.
“You get it?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“How’d you pay for it?” she asked, with a sad kind of smile. Marilyn had been a pretty woman when he married her fifty years ago, and she was still pretty, though her prettiness had largely shifted to the inside, from where it radiated through decades of farm work, through countless gardens, and through the physical hardships of bearing four—no, five—children. He was always forgetting poor little Edward, born with a hole in his heart and alive just three very sad and difficult days. At this moment, however, it wasn’t prettiness that Marilyn was radiating so much as it was a frustrated bewilderment. He could see it in the tightness of her smile.
He thought about her question for a moment. He couldn’t honestly remember. “My card, I guess,” he said, glancing toward the calm gray sky behind her.
“How’d you do that?” she asked. “When you didn’t take your wallet.”
He felt his back pockets—empty—and then shoved his hands into the big side pockets on his jacket, but all he could come up with was an old box cutter and a tangled piece of twine he had been using earlier to tie up the canes of a rose bush that had caught his jacket as he walked around the west side of the garage that morning.
+ +
The truck didn’t speak to him again for several days. The next time it did, he was turning out of the driveway on his way to the IGA in Fairfield to pick up some bread and Pepsi. There were a few other things on the handwritten list that Marilyn had given him, along with his wallet, before he left. This time the ping was followed by three other bursts of tone, each one as clear and bright as a birdsong. Toh…. Peeeeh…. pooonk….
Ping… toh, peeeh, pooonk, he thought. Ping… toh, peeeh, pooonk. He made a little song out of it. Ping… toh, peeeh, pooonk! Ping… toh, peeeh, pooonk! It played over and over in his head as he drove south on the county road into a bright, blue early November sky. Ping, toh, peeeh, pooonk! Ping, toh, peeeh, pooonk! Beats the hell out of that damned radio.
A mile down the road, he saw a cloud of dust in the distance, no doubt one of the Urfer boys picking corn. Less than a minute later, the giant John Deere Combine Harvester came into view and stopped beside a grain truck, offloading. He still thought of them as the “Urfer boys,” despite the fact that they were all now well into their fifties and some into their sixties, and they all had kids of their own, and their kids had kids of their own, too. He had grown up six or seven years ahead of Chip Urfer, the oldest, and that had put him in a position to see, to really see, how old man Clarence had marshaled his good luck of having seven sons in a row into what became one of the biggest farming empires in the tri-state region. Those boys grew up working the farm. School was an afterthought. Attendance depended on the weather. And in just a little over a generation, they had transformed the place from a three-hundred-acre family farm to a seven-thousand-acre agribusiness. Of course, not all the boys were still farming. Jerry had moved to Chicago and gone into banking, Gene ran the local feed mill in town and was only marginally involved in the farm, and poor Steve had died during Reagan’s first term, when he slipped and fell into the corn auger which cut off his right arm and, being alone, bled to death before he could get help. That was a bitter harvest.
The four remaining Urfers owned the land surrounding the southern and western sides of the main section of Mike’s farm, the four hundred and thirty-five acres surrounding his house. They had been renting his acreage since he retired, and they had come to him repeatedly with offers to buy. Good offers, offers above current market value. Offers he continued to refuse for his own reasons.
He made a mental note to stop on the way home and chat with Leon Urfer, who he figured was driving the combine, provided he could catch him at the end of a row. It didn’t work out that way, however. After he left the IGA, the truck spoke again. He heard it as he was pulling out of town, past the Chevy dealership, with its head row of shiny new pickup trucks adorned with balloons and brightly colored pendants. The message was an indecipherable mix of pings and pongs and tangs and one clear doonk.
Why is the truck talking to me? he wondered. He checked his seatbelt and looked at all the gauges. Everything seemed fine. He went through a mental checklist in his head: oil pressure, temperature, vacuum hoses, alternator, tire pressure. None of these would send a ping, pong, tang, doonk signal, he thought. But then the truck ping, pong, tang, doonked again, and he got a little nervous, so he pulled into the access road for a large bean field that no one was working at the moment. He stopped the truck, got out, walked around, kicked at each of the tires, looked at the muffler, and raised the hood. He couldn’t see any problems. The hoses were all connected, the belts all tight. He checked the oil, water, battery connections, every part of the engine that provided access and that might, possibly, make some strange noise. Satisfied that he wasn’t doing any lasting damage, he got back in the truck and nearly backed out in front of a yellow Mustang that was flying down the road way too fast. He heard the honk and hit the brakes just in time to turn around and see some kid swerve to miss him.
He got home a little shaken and carried the bread and Pepsi into the kitchen where Marilyn was standing at the counter chopping onions for that night’s dinner. She looked at him puzzled as he put the two IGA bags on the kitchen table. “Is that all you got?” she asked.
“Where’s the rest of the list?”
+ +
Marilyn tried to tell herself she was overreacting, focusing on a few isolated incidents rather than looking at the big picture, but her sense of worry about Mike had increased since he’d retired. It was ironic that she had been the one who pushed for him to do it, and now she was the one who regretted it most. She had to keep reminding herself that retiring had been the right thing to do, but she hated that it didn’t just naturally feel that way.
She stood at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes with the automatic absent mindedness of someone who’d performed this simple operation for over half a century. Looking out the window at the gray November sky settling in for winter, she watched Mike pour gas into the rusty red tank of the old garden tiller and recalled her embarrassment at having to call McKenzie’s station last week to apologize for his driving off. Loretta understood the mistake, of course, and told her they could come in and pay any time, not to worry, but Marilyn knew that Mike wouldn’t want to go to bed with that hanging over his head, so they got back in the truck and drove into town again. By the time they got home that afternoon, it had started to rain.
It took until today for the garden to dry enough to till, so Mike was out trying to finish that job. She watched him replace the cap on the tiller gas tank and carry the half-empty can back to the garage—the fingers of her left hand deftly reaching for another potato, and her right hand scraping the peeler across the rough surface, her gaze steadily out the window. She had always thought of farming as a wrestling match between a man and everything around him—land, animals, buildings, machinery. Everything wanted what it wanted—land wanted weeds, animals wanted to eat and to roam, buildings wanted to fall apart, and machinery wanted to breakdown or rust—and the farmer’s job was to keep all those things from happening, to wrestle everything back into place, back into shape—to keep it working.
She watched him walk back to the tiller, move a couple of levers, and pull on the starting rope. She could hear the motor spin through the closed autumn kitchen window: pfflooop… pah. He pulled again: pfflooop… paah. He stopped, looked at it a moment, and then pulled a third time: pfflooop… pfflooop... paah.
Marilyn dropped a freshly skinned potato into a bowl of cold water in the adjacent sink and grabbed another, never looking down. Mike had been a good farmer—as good as anyone around. He’d been strong and determined. He’d been smart. Of course, he had taken the occasional wallop of a drought or a flood, but he’d always been careful to put away enough in the good years to see them through the bad. But he was also alone. He didn’t have Clarence Urfer’s luck with sons. Three girls and two boys, one of whom died in infancy, and one, Will, not meant to be a farmer. At least not until recently, and not the kind Mike could use.
Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah…. Mike stood back and scratched his head. Then he stepped back to the tiller and adjusted a lever somewhere on the engine. Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah. Pfflooop… pfflooop... pa… pa… paaaah.
Feelings of guilt about pushing him to retire sprouted like weeds around the edge of Marilyn’s thoughts, ragged, furtive, slipping in here and there. If she wasn’t vigilant, she was afraid they would take root, and so she kept reminding herself of the two or three years before, how she had watched Mike struggle, how every day he lost a little strength, a little advantage. Even after he sold off the livestock, so he didn’t have to go out on cold, winter mornings to feed and chip layers of ice off the top of the water troughs, keeping the farm was too much for him on his own. Even when she put on her jeans, laced up her boots, and went out to help, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t have the strength she used to, either. That was the fact, she told herself, feeling yet again as if it were her lot in life to be the one who had to face the facts.
He was getting mad. She could see it through the window. Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah. Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah. His stance had become more rigid, his pulling jerkier. She looked down. She was wearing an old house dress and slippers because she had thought she’d be in for the afternoon. She didn’t want to ruin her slippers in the gravel and mud and oil splatters, but she didn’t feel she had the time to go to the bedroom and change, because then she’d want to put on a pair of pants as well. She remembered that Mike left his muck boots by the back door, and she thought she could pull those on over her slippers and grab one of his field jackets on the way out. She dropped a half-peeled potato and the peeler into the white porcelain sink and started for the back door, not seeing that she still had slivers of potato skin clinging to the back of her hands.
Face the facts, she thought. Why did she always have to be the one to face the facts? And why did it feel so often that she had to feed them to Mike like a spoonful of castor oil. By the time she got to the tiller, he was cursing under his breath.
“Gawl damned machine!” he said.
She could hear his frustration. “What’s wrong with it?” she asked, trying to use as reasonable a tone as she could muster. The air was cold, the wind felt sharp on the bare spot of her legs between the muck boots and the bottom of her house coat.
“Won’t start. Can’t you see?” he said, huffing. “Hell, I don’t know why.”
“Maybe it’s just old…. Maybe we need a new one.”
“A new one?” He scrunched up his face as if she had just described Martians landing in the cornfield.
“Look at it, it’s all rusty.”
“Hell’s fire! It’ll outlast us.” He reached down and pulled on the starting rope a couple of times. Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah. Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah.
Face the facts, she thought for no obvious reason.
Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah. Pfflooop… pfflooop... paah.
“You have the choke on, right?” she asked.
He stopped and looked her up and down. “You wearing my jacket? And my muck boots?”
“They were the closest things,” she said. “I was watching you out the window, while I was getting ready to cook dinner.”
He paused a moment to catch his breath. “You think I was gonna pop a gasket or something?” he asked, matter of fact, with no particular tenderness or tyranny in his voice.
Face the facts, she thought yet again, like an unwanted fragment of song that gets caught in a loop and stays in your head for hours, sometimes days. Face the facts. Face the facts. Face the… that’s when she happened to glance down and look at the kill switch on the handle of the tiller. It was in the down position, which she felt certain meant “Off.”
Face the facts, she thought, but then suddenly she thought of another fact, the fact that she loved him so completely, as thoroughly as a coat of dust settles into a long unused room, and she was afraid that this little switch would undo him, would unlock some door and spill out everything they’d had, everything they’d built, everything they’d known together. “Why don’t you come in for a while,” she said. “Take a break. Maybe it’ll start later.”
“Yeah,” he said, catching his breath. “Maybe it’s just flooded. Let it sit a while.”
“Good idea,” she said, feeling the flood of a different type rise up from her heart so quickly so that it nearly choked her. Her eyes moistened. Walking across the gravel drive in the cold breeze, his muck boots on her feet felt clumsy but oddly comfortable. His jacket was heavy and warm, so large and soft on the inside that it made her feel momentarily like a child. She pulled the sleeve up enough to free her hand, and then she took his hand in hers, and they walked in silence toward the small white frame house, neither of them noticing the slivers of potato skin that dropped off the back of her hands onto the gray, late autumn sidewalk.
© 2022, Mickey R. Hall
All Rights Reserved
Good start! Look forward to the coming chapters.