A love of money is the root of all evil. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Your gold and your silver have rusted, and their rust will be a witness against you. Loretta has heard these words all her life, and she has always wondered: How could you not love money? Is it even possible?
He’s not even trying to talk her into it now. He wants to wait for the money, too.
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
The taverns. Oh, the taverns. The Muddy Bumper in Reno. The Silver Pony in Baker. The Mint in every Podunk Montana town. The little-town bars. The dusty afternoon light, thrust through the bar dark in thick planks. The freak-show glow of the egg jar, pickling in amber, and the sharp bite of a seventh cigarette. The Rockin R in Bozeman. John’s Alley in Moscow. The Dry Dock in Moses Lake. The little-town taverns, unannounced. Walk in, await an audience, watch the night grow. Buy rounds, unscrew the top of the cane, drain the Wild Turkey. Wink at the best-looking gal first chance you get. The Sports Page in Pocatello. The Bawdy Dog in Orem. The Baby Bar in Spokane. The Stockmen’s in Elko. People pressed around us so tight we felt their heat, their life, pouring into us. We walk in, and wait for the eyes to turn, for the looks to begin, for the approach and the surprise — their thrill when we sit with them, share ourselves, their glorying in us — and the delivery of the best kind of love, the only kind of love: wild, momentary, complete.
September 1, 1975 GOODING, IDAHO
Jason’s dad sits in the high cab of the tractor, pulling the baler as it spins the cut hay into its mouth and spits out a trail of tightly twined rectangles. Jason and Boyd swap between bucking bales onto the flatbed and driving the truck. They should finish by nightfall. Finish for the day, finish for the season, finish forever. That’s what Jason is thinking, that this will be his last day of this, ever, and that now that school is starting, his senior year, everything will be the last of its kind, the final one. Next year, he’ll be eighteen, a high school graduate, and gone. The thought gets him through it alclass="underline" the throb in his temples, his pasty mouth, the ache in his shoulders.
The day is spangled, wincingly bright — white-gold fields, a haze of dust. They have been haying behind Grandpa’s place, by the falling-down gray shack and the old tractor grown through with weeds. They stop for lunch. Jason and Boyd eat in the truck cab, drenched in sweat and daubed with hay dust, while Dad clears weeds from the teeth of the baler.
They eat quietly until, across the field, they see Dean emerge from the back door of the house and lope to the shed. Everyone else left not long after the funeral, but Dean and his family stayed, without explanation. Now a pickup truck and a horse trailer packed with boxes are parked in the drive.
“Are they moving here?” Boyd asks.
“I don’t know.”
“They look like they’re in some pioneer movie.”
Jason feels an odd impulse to defend them. The ugly tether of family.
“What are they, like, square dancers?” Boyd asks.
“Probably.”
“Do they spin wool into thread? Can they churn butter?”
“I’m sure they can churn amazing butter.”
Jason’s parents have been deeply uninformative about the situation. His father has been particularly terse and dismissive, pretending he’s surprised anyone might be interested in what Dean is doing. Across the field, Dean emerges from the shed and strides to the horse trailer. Ruth comes out from the back door, and begins pulling down what seems like one hundred pairs of overalls from the clothesline, two kids romping at her feet like puppies.
“Spectacular butter,” Jason says. “You’d want to rub yourself all over with this butter.”
It is so hot it no longer feels hot. Jason’s mouth is furred, no matter how much warm water he chugs from the thermos. He sinks drowsily into the soft, springy seats, closes his eyes, wonders how quickly they will make it through the final windrows. Four more hours? Five?
Done forever.
Boyd spits out the window. “I don’t get why you don’t know if they’re moving here,” he says. “What’s the big secret?”
Boyd can’t understand Jason’s family, Jason knows, because they almost never tell one another anything, while he and his mother tell each other every embarrassing thing. Jason doesn’t know what to say about Dean. He can feel already how having them here is going to reflect on him, on his family — how it will create a new zone of caution between him and others.
“They’re just old-fashioned,” he says. “They live down there on the Utah-Arizona line. It’s like they’re half Amish.”
“Down there with the polygamists?”
“I’m not sure.”
Dad comes to the truck, boots crunching the shorn hay stalks. He takes off his hat and squints at them, sweat sheened, the tips of his nose and ears a deep red.
“All right, boys, let’s get back to it,” he says.
“Hey, Mr. Harder,” Boyd says. “Is your brother moving here or what?”
Dad pulls on his gloves, gets them snug.
“We’re still figuring that out,” he says.
• • •
Grandpa has been dead for two weeks now, the funeral come and gone, and everything still feels tilted on its side. For as long as Jason can remember, this has been the order of things: him, his parents, and Grandpa down the road. His grandmother died when Jason was four, and he doesn’t remember her at all. The current arrangement — the family, as he understood it to exist — had taken on a feeling of permanence.
And then there is the pressing strangeness of Dean and Ruth and their kids. Dean calls Ruth “Mother” in a stern voice, they dress like pioneers, and an air of self-imposed privation hangs around them. None of them says much, always waiting for Dean to talk. They don’t watch television or go to movies or dances, and they eat weird food. For one of the family dinners before everyone left, Ruth made meat-free hamburgers out of bulgur. Everyone picked at them unhappily while Ruth talked about the benefits of eating less meat and sugar. It was the quietest meal of the week, as people nibbled the crumbly patties and held their tongues.
Afterward, Roy had driven Jason into town for cheeseburgers, tater tots, and suicides at the Oh-So, where they laughed themselves to tears over Ruth’s food.
“Ho-ly shit. Those poor kids,” Roy had said, sinking a tot into a tub of pink fry sauce. “Someone ought to set them free. Nobody should be forced to eat like that.”
“Why do they?”
“Why do they do anything? Don’t ask me.” He seemed happily unconcerned. “I used to tell my friends that Dean had crooked calf disease. You know what that is? When their feet are turned under and twisted all around? Nothing you can do for ’em. It’s just unfixable. Dean’s like that — just deformed. From the ground up. His feet are all fucked up.”
Jason is tempted to say he hates them, but why would he hate them? He feels a stinging blade of hatred in the side, like a stitch in the abdomen from running — a resentment that they magnify everything he dislikes about his family and church and town, the limited horizons, the boring reverence, the feeling that the people who were considered wise were in fact stupid. And the truth of it, the real thing: the fear that they are him. That he is them. These freaks.
In the days before the funeral, Dad, Dean, and Roy spent a lot of time huddled together, speaking in low voices, pointing, and shaking their heads. Sometimes Bonnie and Jenna would join in. They were sorting through the inheritance — Grandpa had left each of the five siblings a share of the land. Dad already had 250 acres and the dairy, which he’d bought years earlier. The brothers were going to buy out the sisters, but some unknown tension remained unresolved.