“Christ, Jim, where the hell is the bottom, eh?” growled Harland as he entered the tight confines of the office.
“Well, hello to you, too, Mr. Sven,” chimed the portly coop manager, wheezing a bit through lungs corrupted by decades of cigarette smoking.
“I work a whole goddamn year for these prices? Damn! I’d be better off dumping the beans in the Minnesota River.”
“You do that, Harland. Lookee here, farmer, the market’s in the toilet. So the price is the price. You want me to dry your beans and put ‘em in the silo or don’t you?”
“I ain’t got no other choice. Write that teeny weenie check. But I don’t like it one damn bit.”
“Harland, you never like it. Best price, piss price, you say the same thing every year. Your daddy said the same old thing right up to the day he died.”
“It ain’t like it used to be. How many people come banging on your door now, Jim, eh? Use to be the whole county was farmers. How many now? Fifty?”
“I can’t argue with that, Harland. Tell it to those suits at the Chicago Exchange, will ya.”
“Small guys get forced out at these prices.” Harland hissed. “Pretty soon this town has one farmer and everybody else is selling Mary Kay wrinkle cream.”
The general manager of the Sweetly Growers Coop grain elevator complex, a middling grain storage facility of six concrete silo towers built in the ‘50s, spit a swig of coffee across the room and blew out a fitful laugh just as far.
“Ha, Harland, I could use some of that Mary Kay. I don’t look so good, and my wife, hell, she ain’t the blushing bride I married thirty-seven years ago.”
Harland glared out the window of the dust-filled Coop office, down the rail tracks toward the signal crossing on Main. “Think I’ll go down to Ester’s and get some breakfast. We’ll bring the last of the loads by late this afternoon.”
“You do that, Harland. Have a coffee in my honor, will ya, now that I sprayed mine all over this place.”
As the farmer turned for the door, it swept open to admit another. Harland scrutinized the new arrival, a fellow sporting more hair than he had a right to and wearing a white broad-brimmed field hat hand-fashioned by Amish hatters.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” crowed the newcomer.
Jim Bottomly peered over his glasses and waved a hand. “Well, Mr. Whittemore, fancy hat you got there. What brings you so far down off the bluffs on this fair morning?”
The farmer eyed the younger man, scowling beneath his bleached eyebrows and his ConAgra ball cap. Before Abel could respond, Harland interrupted.
“I understand, son, you posted your land along the lake.”
Abel turned to the farmer and nodded. “Yes, we did that.”
“What for?” Harland’s delivery was curt. “People ‘round here have been shootin’ pheasant and waterfowl out there for 100 years.”
“Yes, sir, I know that. But we’re not picking up one more beer can or chasing one more four-wheeler off the property. After ten years of it, we’ve had our fill.”
“Nobody I know goes up your way to trash your land, young man.”
“Oh,” the man beneath the Amish hat uttered. “Does the name Andrew Regas ring a bell?”
The name made Harland flinch. The farmer and his wife had taken Andy Regas on as a pre-teen foster child and saw him through his teenage years, teaching him the myriad skills necessary to tend a modern farming enterprise. The minute the boy reached his eighteenth birthday, though, he left the place without so much as a wave goodbye.
The coop manger leaned forward in his chair, sensing some discomfort bubbling up in the room.
“What about Andy?” snapped Harland.
“You know,” Abel said slowly for effect, “I can put up with a lot. That’s my personal nature. But every man has limits. I reached mine. You should know Regas.”
“I do. Why?”
With his emotions on a short leash, Abel offered, “Next time you see him, let him know, if you would, that if he rams that four-wheeled thing over the property again, or if we have to clean up after one more of his jacked deer, he’s going to have to baby-crawl one long way to get home.”
Jim let out a laugh to take the edge off the exchange. “Ha! Most nights he’s so pickled he can’t stay on his feet anyway.”
Harland wasn’t laughing. The farmer shot Bottomly a stern glance, then stepped out the coop door and into the fall chill.
The needle-sharp light of the September morning sun caught Harland as he stormed to his Ford F-150 parked beneath the grain bunkers towering above the cottonwood. The fourth generation farmer, with a fifty-seventh birthday just two weeks away, slammed the truck door, flipped the key and ran the lane onto Main. As he made the turn, the signal lights at the crossing pulsed to life, flashing and clanging. Harland peered down the steel rails to the west. He calculated he might beat the train to the crossing, but thought better of it.
A quad-header was laboring on the flat, coming fast. The lead locomotive’s headlight, 10,000 candlepower bright, cut through the morning shine. The Burlington Northern was a big train, just shy of a mile long, but nothing unusual along the line through Sweetly. The farmer knew well it was a fat grain snake, all covered hopper cars loaded to the gunwales with corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, millet and rye.
The four GP-30s roared through the crossing at sixty miles an hour, blowing diesel smoke, enough to dwarf an empire of semi-tractor trailers. The inside of the F-150 filled with the sonic rumble of heavy steel on steel. The freight was bound for the railyards in Minneapolis and the mammoth storage silos and industrial baking mills that lined the tracks in the Twin Cities.
Ester’s had been pouring weak coffee for Big Stone Lake region farmers since Sweetly’s main street was first paved. The farmer parked the F-150 out front next to half a dozen other farm pickups.
“Hello, farmer,” called a face under a Skoal chewing tobacco cap as Harland entered. Harland sat on a stool at the long lunch counter and greeted men like himself who had been harvesting soybeans and corn and who, most days of the year, came down to Ester’s for at least one cup of coffee.
“Pour me some of that swamp water, will you, hon?” Harland called to a waitress in her sixties. “Ain’t you gettin’ your Social Security yet, Karen?”
“No,” shot back the matron, “but I won $100 on the scratch tickets, Harland.”
“Well, then,” called out a face under a Dow Chemical fertilizer cap, “Harland will be wantin’ you to take him to supper, Dutch treat, there, Karen.”
“That’s right,” pitched in Skoal chewing tobacco cap. “What with the price he’s gettin’ for his beans, somebody’s going to have to feed him.”
Light laughter bobbed about the room. The farmer poured milk in his java and looked down the row of farmers hunched over the counter. “You know who showed up at the coop this morning, eh? That fellow from the freak farm.”
“You mean up on Prospect?” asked the waitress.
“Yeah, on the bluffs.”
Dow Chemical cap burped, “That’d be Whittemore. Old New England money.”
The woman behind the counter chirped, “No, he got his money from writing books. He’s the closest thing we got around here to a celebrity.”
“We don’t need his kind around here,” Harland scowled. “Liberal horde is what they are up there.”
“Oh, take a breather, Harland,” puffed the waitress. “You need a stiff drink rather than my coffee.”
“I hear you, Harland,” the man under the Skoal cap said. “We work our ass off for a dollar, and he sits around and waits for big royalty checks to arrive in the mailbox.”