The Last Farmer

FOR JAY

It was the sheriff again, this time in person. Spencer was rolling in his John Deere when a black-and-white Chevy Blazer with a ski rack of lights crawled into his rear video monitor. Jakey—Sheriff Hanson now—easing up the section line road in Spencer’s blind spot, making no sound, leaving no dust.

Sneaky. Typical Hanson maneuver. Spencer and Hanson had gone to high school together twenty-five years ago when there was no love lost (Hanson was a towel snapper, a hallway arm twister, a late hitter in football) and certainly none now. Here in “the Valley” of northwestern Minnesota, everything was about land.

Running his tractor by a GPS receiver, Spencer sat back to watch the Blazer’s progress. The ungraveled line road was greasy and soft—the frost had gone out four days ago—and with any luck Hanson would slide into the judicial ditch and get stuck, in which case he could damn well call a tow truck from town. Kindly farmers on their tractors did not stop to pull vehicles from ditches; those days were gone.

The Blazer kept coming, slewing, but gradually drew even with Spencer’s John Deere; then kept pace. Spencer did not slow until red lights flashed atop the Chevy. He swore without heat; taking his sweet time, he eased back on the RPMs, touched “neutral” on the finger pad, and let the thirty-six-foot seeder, like a sea anchor, drag the John Deere to a stop. He did not switch off the engine, nor was he getting down from the cab to walk the five hundred feet to the road, not in this cold, black gumbo.

“What, Jakey? Am I driving over the speed limit?” Spencer called over by cell phone.

“Very funny, Spence. Didn’t think you saw me.” Hanson held his mobile to his face but did not get out of his Blazer. “Big new tractor, tinted cab, cruise control, video screens. I figured maybe you were watching a movie in there.”

“What’s on your mind, Jakey? Spring has sprung. Fish to fry.”

“The old Erickson house, that’s what. You said last fall you were going to take care of it.”

“True,” Spencer said, glancing down the line road to the old farmstead—a few gray, empty buildings before a windbreak, the only bump on the horizon for a mile—then back to Hanson, “though I didn’t say when.”

“Don’t be cute, Spencer. You might own all the farms around here now, but you’re still responsible for the buildings.”

Spence cracked his RPMs and sent Jakey a puff of black diesel smoke. “It’s on my list, Jakey, not high, but on my list.”

“Well move it up. Those empty old farm houses attract bad elements.”

“Bad elements? You mean, like us back in high school, Jakey? Remember when we’d drive around looking for an old house or an empty barn to throw a kegger? Hey, remember that time when you fell—”

“Beer and a little weed is one thing,” Hanson said. “We’re talking meth, now, Spence. Meth heads are everywhere. They’re like rats, always looking for a place to crawl into.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Spencer said.

“Not kidding, Spence. An abandoned house like Iver’s is a public health hazard—which makes you liable. You don’t want some meth head to fall down Iver’s stairs, break his neck, and sue the shit out of you. Then he’d own all your land and you’d have to get a job like the rest of us.”

Spence glanced at his watch. “I’ll try to take care of it this summer.”

“See that you do, Spency.”

“Over and out, Jakey-boy.” Spencer clacked shut his cell phone, slipped it into his shirt pocket. After a quick glance at his dashboard LCDs to make sure he was still autotracking, he brought up the RPMs to 1800; in a flower of dark smoke the John Deere leaned into its seeder and headed downfield. Once rolling, Spencer poured a cup of lukewarm coffee, then swiveled his seat to watch Hanson, who, sure enough, drove into the Erickson place, which is what it would always be called even though Spencer had owned it for years.

In the bare, empty yard Hanson got out. Stretched. Walked slowly to the narrow, steep-roofed farmhouse. Tapped on the boarded, first-floor windows with the butt of his long flashlight (what was it with cops and those long-barreled flashlights?). Mounted the concrete steps, inspected the front door. “It’s open,” Spence said to no one.

Hanson disappeared into the house. Stayed inside for a long time.

Spencer thought of calling Jakey on his cell and asking if he was spanking the old monkey in there, but didn’t. Hanson was high school, always would be. Back then, Spencer was a scrawny, 145-pound, second-string running back with a rust-bucket Ford truck and only one clear thought in his head: to get the hell out of Dodge the day after high school graduation. Which he did. However, after a couple of wild years out west, plus fitful starts at college, Spencer came back into town on the Greyhound, and walked the final five miles home. There was something about that walk—the close-up look at the ditches, the fields, the horizon of spring wheat—that spun his brain with possibilities.

“I figured I’d see you again,” his father had said, and got Spencer started farming by renting him a line of older, smaller equipment and forty acres (with his father there was no free lunch). Spencer, on his own, gradually worked out a deal with Iver Erickson, a cranky old bachelor, to farm his place on shares: the first year forty acres, then eighty, then, eventually, the whole quarter.

Twenty years and two divorces later, Spence now owned Iver’s place and several more farms. Iver had stiffed his relatives, giving them each $500 but the bulk of his estate ($400,000 in savings) went to the U.S. government to help pay down the national debt. A patriot and then some. Spence owned his family’s farm plus six more sections (including one that used to belong to the Hanson family), which made his operation one of the biggest in the Valley. He didn’t hang out with anyone from high school days; they brought him down, made him indecisive, threw him off his game.

At field’s end, Spence overrode the autotracking GPS system, which was “hands-free steering” up to a point—he still had to make the turns—then settled back in his seat as the tractor locked onto its new, parallel coordinates. By the time he passed the Erickson place again, the Blazer was gone.

At 2:00 PM he met a co-op fuel truck in Iver’s yard and took on a tank of diesel. The driver was one of the Larson boys, Gary, the term “boy” being relative in farm country; Gary’s father, Henry, was at least eighty, and showed no signs of slowing down or stepping aside, and Gary, wearing his usual mirrored sunglasses, was already in his early fifties.

“That new 9520T working out for you?” Gary asked as he dragged the hose up the bright green ladder-steps to the fuel port.

“So far so good,” Spencer said cheerfully from ground level.

Fuel stiffened the hose; the meter on the truck spun like a runaway slot machine. Larson adjusted his sunglasses and leaned back on the little platform like he owned the tractor. “They say rubber tracks are harder to turn than with regular tires.”

“No difference, really,” Spencer said and stepped away. He tried to limit his time around diesel fumes and losers. He walked over by Iver’s granary where he leaned a palm against the weathered boards (long hours in the John Deere’s cab gave him sea legs) and took a good long piss. His urine was darker than he liked. Too much coffee. Afterward, he opened the granary door and poked his head inside. From a leak in the roof, the granary smelled like a fraternity house, like beer soaked into the wooden floor. Bins, built around a scoop shovel, one of which still hung on the wall, rose up straight and square with yellowed, twelve-inch, white pine boards; mice, however, had chewed through the corners of the bins, rounded out knotholes in the floorboards, gnawed crazy spirals in the scoop shovel’s smooth handle—they loved the salt in men’s hands—and from their work left a layer of black, thistle-seed droppings on the floor. High up in the granary’s peak a fist-sized barn owl swiveled his head to stare down at Spencer. “Hey mister,” he murmured; the little owl did not blink. Spencer withdrew.

Back at his tractor, the fuel port gurgled louder as the truck’s meter slowed: the dial stopped at 255 gallons.

“Ouch,” Spencer said.

Larson capped off the port, climbed down, racked up his hose, then produced a battered metal clipboard plus a pocket-sized calculator.

“Just let me sign, I don’t want to know the damage,” Spencer said. It was an offering, a conversational gift to Larson, who continued to write up the ticket in silence.

“Looks like 710 bucks today,” he said, handing over the clipboard and pen.

Spencer scrawled his name. “Easy come, easy go.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Larson replied. He tore off the receipt for Spencer.

Spencer paused. “How’s your Dad these days?”

Larson shrugged. “Same-o. Still farming.”

“Amazing. That guy’s going to live to be a hundred.”

Larson stared at Spencer long moments, then got in his truck, started the engine and backed out of the driveway.

***

The day was lightening, and Spencer took a brisk walk about the yard to stretch his legs. His daughter, Sara, who was twenty-six and lived out East, warned him about blood clots; about drinking enough water—about staying hydrated so he didn’t get kidney stones. Warned him when she called, that was, which was not often.

For Sara’s sake he briskly walked the two-acre square. He had not gotten it mowed last summer, and the dead grass, long and tangled, thickened at the edge of Iver’s windbreak, which stood at perfect right angles to the farmyard: three tall rows of poplars on the outside; two rows of box elders closer in; a row of weeping willows; two rows of lilacs; and, finally, a bushy, prickly wall of caragana. Every tree and shrub was planted offset to the previous row in order to form the densest possible wall against the northwest wind. The poplars were fifty feet tall; at least half had died and fallen (the earth here was too rich and dense for some types of trees), and chilly Canadian air flowed through the gaps and bare branches.

Along the edge of the windbreak, overgrown by brush and bull thistles, were remnants of Iver’s machinery. A rusty, orange Case tractor with engine and seat missing—a rattling, muffler-less tractor Spencer had driven many an hour when, as a boy, he worked for Iver. A dump rake with its iron seat also gone. A harrow with sharp, rusty tines (once Spencer had turned the Case too sharply and the harrow rode onto the rear tire and almost onto him, but he had braked in time, and never told Iver). Piles of scrap iron. Mounds of broken concrete blocks. Iver’s crazy self-propelled mower made from scratch in his shop: four Model T rubber wheels attached to a welded-pipe carriage, a Wisconsin engine (frozen up, or it would be gone by now), a seven-foot sickle scavenged from an old hay mower, an iron steering wheel that pulled cables on pulleys. Spencer remembered Iver puttering around his yard on the contraption, laying down perfect swaths of hay that he later gathered with the dump rake and fed to his cows. With Iver, nothing was wasted.

Spencer kicked a tire on the old mower. Cracked, brittle rubber fell away from the rusty rim, which was missing its hubcap. He pushed aside weeds with his boot and looked closer; Spencer was sure those hubcaps—heavy, antique aluminum disks—were there last fall, but everything nowadays was collectible.

He walked alongside the broken-backed barn, its red-painted sides faded to blushed smoke, and stepped through the gaping front doors. Pigeons rattled upward—he flinched—through a bright raw star of daylight in the roof. Below, the same light fell dimly on concrete gutters filled with rotted straw, and skeletal stanchions made from ¾-inch water pipe (no town-bought stanchions for Iver), their drinking cups drooping slack-jawed and rusty. He had milked Iver’s cows for a couple of weeks one summer when Iver got pneumonia; the cows did not like him and the feeling was mutual.

There used to be a pile of planks in the corner and a thick haymow rope overhead. Maybe if he closed the barn door people wouldn’t feel free to scavenge. He leaned into the wide panel of boards that made up the big door, its rollers squeaking sharply along the metal track, and would have latched the thing but its iron hook and clasp were gone.

The exterior of the house showed no additional theft or vandalism; the front door still worked. Inside the dim kitchen he wrinkled his nose at dankness and, faintly, the oily-wool smell of old man. Wallboards around the kitchen were kicked in. People still believed Iver had hidden money in the house, but Spencer knew better. Iver was a scrooge but not a fool: it was banks, not walls or mattresses, that paid interest on savings and certificates of deposit.

In the living room by the old green couch was a fresh scatter of Bud Light cans. He went upstairs, careful on the narrow risers. The handrail was glass smooth from fifty years of use; on the wall where the stairs turned hung the dark, caked, constellation print of Iver’s left hand. Not the cleanest guy in the world.

The upstairs bedroom was close with the smell of beer and damp cotton. A stained, exploding mattress lay askew on a rusty coil spring. One sock-foot of black nylon peeked out from underneath the bed; Spencer fished it out with his boot, a torn pair of panty hose, slightly stained and ripped off in a hurry. He remembered that desperate feeling of driving around with a girl, looking for someplace to be alone in a small town where everybody, including the motel owner, knew him and his parents. He straightened, careful not to bump his head on the steeply pitched ceiling. Evidence of screwing, yes, but drug use, no. He kicked at a pile of trash, stooped to pick up a rusty harmonica. Iver played harmonica? He tapped dust from its little square holes, a C harmonica, then went to the west-facing, narrow window and yanked up the sash; he lay the harmonica on the sill, then drew the window down on top. A crack of fresh air, not so large as to let the pigeons in, would do this room good. He kicked once more through the trash, took a last look around. The only thing he had saved from Iver’s house were his farm logbooks, a stack of brown, narrow accounting journals into which Iver had logged every dollar of expenses and income since 1939. Neither Iver’s family nor thieves had wanted them and it seemed a shame to let the mice get them, so Spencer had taken them home. In general, he was superstitious about keeping a dead man’s things, but the logs were fun to look through on occasion—along about 1975 Spencer’s own name showed up in the books—plus they were a good record of prices not to say one man’s life. In June of 1947, Iver had stopped smoking; near Christmas he paid fourteen dollars for a radio.

On his way out of the house, Spencer peeked down the basement stairs, which were rotted off where they hung in two feet of black, fetid water. He covered his nose and got the hell out of there, back to daylight and fresh air. Iver had never married. Spencer’s mother said more than once, “I don’t want you kids in his house—ever!” They obeyed, and Spencer was not sentimental about Iver, who, to be honest, was a smelly old goat; however a house was a house, even this one.

Spencer was glad to climb back into the comfortable, new-smelling cockpit of his John Deere. He fired the engine and cranked up the stereo. A little Springsteen—“Divorce Music,” he called The Boss’s songs—but at least Spencer didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

At 3:00 AM he finished Iver’s quarter, then headed home. Spencer’s parents had retired to Fargo, his two brothers and two sisters lived out of state, and Spencer lived with his daughter’s cat in the homeplace where he’d grown up. In the mercury-vapor yard lamp, his metal grain bins lined the driveway in an ascending row of size and brightness. Beginning, nearest the house, with a squat, gray, 1,000-bushel Butler cylinder (the first departure, in the 1940s, from wooden granaries like Iver’s), continuing through the 10,000-bushel size of the 1980s; his recently added 25,000-bushel bin dwarfed them all. Billy Craddock’s pickup was parked by the Quonset machine shed. Spence was dragging, but he walked across the chilly yard and stepped inside the hangar-sized building. Billy, a high school kid and wizard with a welder, put in hours for Spence whenever he could; centered on the wide concrete floor, his blue jeans and boots poked out from underneath the field cultivator, his welding rod splashing a fountain of sparks. Spencer averted his eyes though not quickly enough.

“Billy, dude, everything goin’?” Spence asked when the sparks died.

“Under control, Spence,” Billy said, voice muffled. He sat up and tipped up his hood partway. Molten suns floated inside Spencer’s eyeballs; he couldn’t really see Billy at all.

“What’s your schedule this week? I need to dig that west eighty.”

“Not good,” Billy said. “I can give you twenty hours maybe.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers. Plus I was thinking. You know the old Erickson yard?”

Billy nodded.

“I got to do something with those buildings. Maybe get the house fixed up and rent it out, or sell it to some young married couple. You know anybody?”

Billy sat up straighter and laughed for real this time, his teeth white and wet beneath the lip of his mask. “One problem Spence—there aren’t any young married couples. No young people period. I mean, hey, your own daughter—she’s gone and she ain’t coming back here.”

Spencer shrugged. “That’s because the only guys left are redneck welders driving beater pickups.”

Billy chuckled and shrugged down his mask.

Spence tapped Billy’s boot with his own. “There should be a couple of cold ones in the office fridge.”

“No thanks, got my Dew,” Billy replied.

“Kids nowadays,” Spence said, turning to the door. “Jesus.”

Billy’s laugh was muffled as the welder hummed louder. Sparks sizzled.

In the house, which was pretty well empty after his brothers and sisters had divided up the stuff—Spence had a kitchen table, two chairs, a couch, a television, and a bed upstairs—he took out a Schwan’s roast beef dinner and nuked it in the microwave. Fred, Sara’s old cat, whined at the door. Spencer let him in. He was orange and white, half wild, a great mouser, and not hungry tonight. He let Spencer pet him briefly, then headed upstairs, bump, bump, bump. Spencer showered, came back to eat his crinkled aluminum plate of roast beef, then headed to bed himself. He was a dead man; never made it out of his bathrobe.

Much later he thought he felt Fred rustling around on the bed in the dark, then smelled old people.

“Hey, baby,” he mumbled, “aren’t you working tonight?”

“Yeah, but I’m on break and was horny.”

It was Sandy, his sort-of girlfriend. She was head night nurse at the local rest home, and since their schedules never matched, it was catch-as-catch-can. She was also married.

“You must have been dreaming about somebody special,” she murmured, her hand inside his robe.

“You, honey,” Spence said.

“Yeah, right,” she said. In one of those sweet moves that only women can do—crossing her elbows and lifting her arms—she shrugged off her smock. Twenty minutes later Sandy was gone and Spence spent; he fell back asleep immediately, and then his alarm rang. 5:00 AM. Time to roll.

Three weeks later, planting his last forty acres of soybeans, Spencer believed that the far windbreak was not a windbreak but a gray line of welding that held earth to sky, and if that weld broke there would be hell to pay: the field would come unstuck from the horizon, tilt backward, and Spence and his new tractor would slide off the edge of the earth. Good-bye cruel world, Spence thought—when his phone rang. Area code 617.

“Hey, honey!” he said immediately. He tried not to sound eager.

“Hi Daddy.”

“Where are you, baby?” He powered down, killed the engine.

“Boston. Like usual.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure. No trouble. Just thought I’d see if you were done planting.”

Spence swung open his cab door and climbed down. “You still got good radar, honey,” he said, dropping to the earth, grabbing the rail to steady himself. “I’m on my last few rounds.”

He could feel her smile, though she didn’t laugh. She was not the laughing type; there had been too much trouble, too much pain in the divorce, all of which was Spencer’s fault. “You coming home?”

Sara was silent. Spencer winced. It just slipped out.

“Where’s home, Daddy?”

“I know, I know, honey. I mean home as a figure of speech. Are you coming back? For a visit? That’s what I meant.”

“Not sure,” she said. “I have business this summer in Minneapolis. Maybe we could meet there for dinner.”

“Tell me when, I’ll drive down,” Spencer said. “Right now, I’d get in my truck. You know I would, honey.” His voice broke.

“Oh Daddy, it’s all right. I know how you get in spring and fall.”

Spencer honked his nose.

“How much sleep have you been getting?” she asked.

“Four or five hours.”

“Be honest.”

“Three. Maybe.”

Sara clucked her tongue. “Well, when planting’s done I want you to get rested up, all right?”

“I promise, honey, I will.” Spencer could not stop weeping; this was a disaster.

“I’ll call you about Minneapolis, all right? It’ll probably be July. Maybe August.”

“I’d love that,” Spencer said. “You know I would.”

“Okay, Daddy. Sleep, rest, all right?”

“I love you, honey,” Spencer said.

There was silence. “Bye, Daddy.”

Spencer stumbled back up into his tractor. In the cab he had himself a good long cry—he was in way worse shape than he realized—then finished the field and went home to bed.

It took him two weeks to recover from planting. Long binges of sleep. Days of naps, of a groggy, nobody-home, wading-through-slurry kind of feeling. He could barely muster himself to call the Schwan’s man, who came and went while Spence dozed on the couch. He found an invoice on the kitchen table and a handwritten note. “I couldn’t wake you, so took a guess.”

Spencer looked in the freezer compartment. Chock-full of entrées, mainly roast beef, but a couple of chicken potpies that looked decent.

“Lucky I don’t lock the house,” Spencer said to Fred.

Like there’s anything to steal, said Fred’s blank-eyed stare.

“True,” Spencer allowed, and headed back to the couch. He dreamed he was drowning in a bin of flax seed, which was finer and more slippery than quicksand—flax seed was every farmer’s nightmare—and awoke to find Fred sleeping heavy on his chest, his fluffy tail twitching in Spencer’s face.

By June first the scales sloughed off his eyes, the shutters lifted from his brain; the sky inside his head lightened by degrees, and the backaches from too much couch time receded. His energy returned. There were fish to fry.

Small ones, at least, to start. He called the bulldozer guy to knock down the buildings on two farms he owned west of town. It would be enough to keep Jakey off his back.

“No problemo,” the young Cat-skinner said over the phone. “You want them piled to burn or you want me to bury it?”

“Bury it,” Spence said. “Otherwise, Hanson will nag me about a burning permit.”

“He would do that,” the Cat-skinner said. “Windbreaks too?”

Spencer paused. The trees on both farms were craggly and crappy, well past their prime. Like Iver’s place, lots of dead trees. “Okay.”

“And as long as I’m rolling, do you want me to do the old Erickson place too?”

Spencer was silent.

“I mention it because Hanson said he was after you about it.”

“He did, did he?”

The Cat-skinner paused. “I mean, it’s no big deal . . .”

“No rush on the Erickson place,” Spencer said. “Maybe later this summer.”

“Sure,” the man said quickly. “I’ll do the other yards first. When I get done you’ll be able to farm right over them. Like they were never there.”

As the spraying season approached, Spencer stayed inside the house. Took care of paperwork. Made phone calls. He contracted out all his herbicide applications, pre- and post-emerge, because he couldn’t own a sprayer or a crop duster for what it cost to hire it out but also because the chemicals made him sick. Made his face puffy, his eyes baggy. Not sick sick. Not something he could name—no rashes or dizziness or vomiting—but when everybody was spraying he just didn’t feel good. Even inside the house, with the windows closed and the air conditioner running, he got thick-brained, stiff, groggy. This year he had vowed to get ahead of the curve—not feel shitty for three weeks—and when Jeff Broker and his spray rig rolled up the long driveway Spencer met him in his pickup, suitcase packed.

The spray rig with its tall, skinny tires and folded, fifty-foot boom wings and pull-behind chemical tank looked like a giant praying mantis on life support; at night, far out on the fields with running lights on, rigs like his were downright scary.

“All set?” He spoke with Broker by cell phone.

“All good,” Broker replied. “Got your new satellite maps downloaded and I’m ready to roll.” He was fiddling with his laptop even as he held the cell to his ear.

“Okay, I’m outta here for a few days,” Spencer said.

“What, you don’t like how I smell?” Broker grinned behind sunglasses and his narrow, tinted-glass cockpit.

“Nothing personal,” Spencer said. “And hey, feed my cat if he looks hungry, will you? House is open.”

Broker gave a thumbs-up, and Spencer headed to the highway.

At the blacktop, he paused. Winnipeg and the Fort Garry Hotel were an hour and a half to the north. Winnipeg had good restaurants where he could get borscht and pasties, and Canadian girls were pretty, but there was the border, which always made him nervous, plus all that flat prairie land—the north end of the Valley—in between. He turned south, toward the lake and pine country of Bemidji, which was about the same distance away.

On the way through town, he swiveled his head to stare. He could swear it was smaller these days. A car dealership now had only a bare, cracked, asphalt parking lot. A downtown restaurant’s windows were papered over. On the south edge of town, the old grain elevator, tall, square, rusty, galvanized tin—the kind that photographers loved—had been torn down and bulldozed into a pile. Dump trucks were hauling it away even as he passed. He knew the old elevator was a dead duck. All the small-town grain elevators under 100,000 bushel were doomed because ADM was building a “super-regional” grain storage center near Argyle, one with a circle of railroad tracks big enough to hold a double-unit train, 220 carloads, of wheat. Knocking down this old elevator felt a little like shooting the last buffalo.

He turned up Springsteen and rolled southeast, passing gradually over the Agassiz Ridge, the slight rise (most drivers never noticed it) that ran north and south, the old oxcart trail of last century’s settlers and voyageurs heading to Canada. On the back, east side of the ridge was the transitional zone where long-ago glaciers had left fields full of boulders—some as large as his truck—that cattle farmers had pushed into piles like Stonehenge. Black Angus grazed around the big rocks. No crop farming here. In the Valley a mile or two made all the difference, and the smartest farmers on the ridge had switched from cattle to large gravel pit operations where trucks rumbled night and day.

In another half hour he passed sloughs and potholes as he entered lake and pine country. He took back roads through Gully and Gonvick, stopping for a burger at a café where the girl was plump, young, and friendly but barely able to look away from Days of Our Lives on the television over the bar.

In Bemidji he checked in at an AmericInn and fell asleep in his clothes. Much later—almost 11:00 PM—he roused himself and went out to find food. He drove around to find the bar that had the most cars, in this case Dewey’s, a log-sided steak house at the edge of town. Inside it was loud—very loud—and crowded; he was lucky to find a stool at the bar, where he ordered a burger basket and a Labatt’s. Everybody here seemed to know each other. He watched the people as they laughed and talked and bought drinks and danced. The jukebox was impossibly loud and the laughing voices of a table of women pricked like fish hooks inside his ear drums (too many years around high-RPM equipment). He discreetly made a couple of napkin spitballs to buffer the noise, which made the bar Cheers on mute. One of the women at the table caught his eye and smiled briefly; he nodded, and eventually she came over, unsteady on her feet (no wedding ring), but the music was too loud for good conversation, and, in bad timing, his food arrived; when Spencer turned back to the woman, she was moving down the bar.

Spencer stayed in Bemidji for four days, sleeping a lot, once walking over to the college to look at the coeds. He followed a girl in shorts and a tank top into the campus bookstore, where he pretended to read while he watched her return some books. When she left, he couldn’t very well follow her, so he lingered with his book, The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Back home he read the New York Times online, and kept up on world events—particularly as they affected wheat prices—but he hadn’t read a real book in years. This one felt heavy in his hands, its sentences too long; he wondered if his brain was beyond the point of reading a full book again.

The following day he hired a local guide to take him walleye fishing on Lake Bemidji, but the lake was plate-flat and waveless. “We need that walleye chop,” the guide kept saying, and Spencer ended up with a bad headache from the sun’s glare on the water.

At the local Perkins the next morning, his waitress with smoker’s teeth brought him coffee with two creams. “The number five?” she asked. After breakfast, Spencer checked out of his hotel.

He had hardly started toward home when his cell phone rang. “Hey Spencer, it’s me.”

“So I see, Jakey.”

“Where are you?”

“I could be anywhere.”

“You’re not home; I was just there.”

“Everything all right?”

“Sure. Just checking on the Erickson place. Which, now, I hear, is haunted.”

“English, Jakey.”

“I heard some kids talking. They went out there to drink beer, I guess, but kept hearing noises, voices, something. They got all freaked out.”

“That’s a good thing, right? If they think the place is haunted, they’ll leave it alone.”

“Kids maybe, yeah, they’re afraid of ghosts. The meth heads are the ghosts, Spencer. They ain’t afraid of anything, which is why that house has to go.”

“Okay, okay, Jakey. Here’s my plan. I think I have some leftover ammonium nitrate. I thought I’d haul a couple of barrels of it over there, soak it with diesel fuel, and blow Iver’s house to Kingdom Come. What do you think?”

There was silence. Then Hanson said, “You blow up anything with ammonium nitrate you’re in deep do-do.”

“With who?”

“With me. With Homeland Security. With everybody in law enforcement. There was a little thing that happened down in Oklahoma City, if you recall.”

“Geez, Jakey, when did you get so serious? Can’t a guy have any fun anymore?”

“You got ammonium nitrate, you call it in and get rid of it. People want to steal that shit—then who knows what they’ll use it for.”

“You worry way too much, Jakey.”

“Not kidding, Spence. I can get a warrant.”

Spencer scuffed his phone across the seat, then held it at arm’s length. “You’re breaking . . . Jakey. I’ll . . . touch.” Then signed off.

He drove on in much better spirits.

On his way back into town, he slowed at the city limits, which felt closer in than when he had left. The old elevator was completely gone. Like it was never there. On the north side of town, wheat and soybean fields rolled up closer than he remembered. And what happened to the old drive-in theater and the bowling alley? The fairgrounds was gone, too—all that in four days. But he was looking through his rearview mirror and his sunglasses, which he peeled off; however, the brilliant June sunlight, made hazy by the humid breath of miles of wheat and soybean fields, made it difficult to see well, or even very far.

He turned his truck west, toward Iver’s place. On the line road, skinny, fresh car tracks wove ahead of him; the road was dry now except for a few black puddles, and the car tracks turned into Iver’s driveway. No vehicle to be seen. Probably Jakey come and gone on Homeland Security detail. Jakey or scavengers.

He parked and got out. Stretched his legs after the drive from Bemidji. He took a leak and was about to leave when he heard music. A swell of breeze and a weak ghostly chord of music—in C—came from the upstairs window. He laughed and walked toward the house—and into the path of a skinny, pale woman coming from the other side. She was carrying a small camp stove. Behind her two rail-thin guys were unloading stuff, including a propane cylinder, from a battered station wagon parked inside the barn.

The woman called out to the men—who straightened. They all froze.

“Who are you?” the woman said. She had very bad teeth.

“I’m . . . a farmer,” Spencer said.

Nobody moved. The woman glanced backward, then again to Spencer. She grinned with her lips but not her eyes. “So, you want to party with us?”

“I don’t think so,” Spencer said.

“Come on baby, you look like you could use some fun.” She let her bony hand slip to her shirt buttons. Teased one open.

“Listen. I own this place and you shouldn’t be here,” Spencer said. He swallowed. “I’m gonna walk back to my truck and drive away, and you better do that, too. Like right now.” He didn’t wait for an answer; he moved with even steps back to his truck, ready to bolt if he heard anything—a clank of metal—behind him, but there was nothing. Purposefully not looking back, he turned his truck around and drove, slowly, back down the line road.

In his rearview mirror he soon saw the station wagon throwing dust behind him, then turn south on the blacktop and disappear. He let out a breath.

Arriving at his own driveway, he paused, by habit, to check the mail. A few bills, including one from the Cat-skinner, plus an invoice from Broker for spraying. Nothing serious. In the house, there was no Fred to be seen; he was probably out mousing. While a chicken potpie hummed in the microwave, he toyed with his cell phone—“who you gonna call”—then he punched up the bulldozer man.

“Turns out I could be there later this afternoon,” the man said.

The days were long now, and the lowboy and Caterpillar rumbled up in tawny, humid light at 8:30 PM. Spencer was waiting in his truck, windows up, air conditioning on. The least he could do was be there. Watch.

He got out and stood near as the man tipped down the ramps and loosened the required come-alongs and chains. “As if they’d keep this baby on the trailer,” the guy said, his head ducked low as he worked. The fellow was young and quick on his feet; he hopped upward into the cab, closed the door on his own air conditioning. As the Cat’s engine surged and its tracks clanked down the steel ramps, Spencer returned to his truck. Inside the cab he tuned in to public radio, which he didn’t often listen to. Tonight was chamber music by Dvorák, a Czech composer who had once come to Iowa and composed there, the announcer said; he listened and watched the Caterpillar dig a long trench about twenty feet wide and six feet deep. No gravel, no sand to be seen, only glistening black dirt, rolling up blacker than crows’ wings. After Dvorák came Copeland, a long piece by the American, during which the trench was completed. At sundown, the Caterpillar turned toward the buildings. Spencer cranked up the music; he preferred not to hear the crunching sounds. The Caterpillar pushed Iver’s house forward as if it were weightless—tipped it into the trench in an explosion of dust and broken boards—then drove over it and back several times. Afterward he turned to the granary; then the barn and sheds; then the old machinery; and lastly, the windbreak. Samuel Barber now, Adagio for Strings, as the dead trees tumbled soundlessly into the hole—it was like he was watching a movie—and by 11:00 PM, with headlights below and starlight above, the Caterpillar lurched back onto its lowboy. Its engine died.

In the gathering blue darkness Spence walked back to the rig. The air smelled strongly—a yeasty rankness—of fresh dirt and wet tree bark, and the night air swelled in freely from the now unbroken field.

In the darkness, Spencer wrote the man a check. “Buy you a beer in town?”

The man shrugged. “Gotta be honest, I can’t do that anymore. Plus it’s late, and the wife . . . you know.”

“Sure,” Spencer said. “No problem.”

After the rig rumbled away, he took a last look around. He could farm over this—it was remarkable how small a rise was left in the blackened yard (people not from here would never notice it). No more worrying about hooking his cultivator or his seeder on a tree, no more scavengers, no more meth heads. It really was simpler this way.

Hungry, he turned his truck toward town to see if anything was open; if anyone was around. He stayed with the symphonic music—it seemed right tonight—but must have gotten lost in it. Or made a wrong turn somewhere. For the more he drove, the fewer lights he saw on the land. He kept driving far beyond the time when he should have reached town, driving until he understood that there no longer was a town. It was all gone. As far as the eye could see, there was no one home.