“Cub, honey, what’s wrong. You dead?”
“About.”
“I’ve seen you further gone than that, and resurrected at the sight of a cold beer.”
He sat up straight. “You got one?”
“From your mother’s kitchen?”
He flopped back against the hay, taking off his Deere cap and settling it over his face. She sat down opposite him on the lowest row of bales, which were stacked like a wide staircase leading up to the rafters. Not many farms still maintained the equipment to make square bales, instead favoring the huge rolls that were handier to move with a tractor and fork. But these made nice furniture. She dragged one close for a footstool, swung up her short legs and leaned back against a prickly wall of hay, waiting for further signs of life from her husband. Lying on his back, he resembled a mountain: highest in the midsection, tapering out on both ends. He pulled his cap farther down over his face.
“You’re just worn out,” she offered.
“No, it’s more than that.”
“What, are you sick?”
“Sick and tired.”
“Of what?”
“Farming.”
“I hear you.” She was conscious of her unfinished cigarette, aware that only a fool or city person would smoke in a hayloft. It could catch fire in a flash. But that would be in some year other than this one, in which the very snapping turtles had dragged themselves from silted ponds and roamed the soggy land looking for higher ground. A little tobacco smoke might help dry out this hay. Cub evidently didn’t disagree, for he lay silent awhile. Then spoke from under his cap.
“Dad’s fixing to sign a contract with some loggers.”
“You mean to cut timber? Where?”
“That hollow up behind our house. All the way to the top, he said.”
“What possessed him to do that now? That timber’s been standing awhile.”
“The taxes went up, and he’s got a balloon on his equipment loan. You and I are behind on our house payments. Money’s coming in even lower this year than last. He’s thinking we’ll have to buy hay out of Missouri this winter, after we lost so much of ours.”
She looked at the backs of her hands. “Just one month behind, you and me.”
She’d been hoping Bear and Hester didn’t know about the missed payment, but every nickel gained or lost on that farm went on the same ledger. Bear and Hester knew every detail of their lives, as did their neighbors and eventually the community as a whole, thanks to the news team down at Hair Affair.
“I talked to the man at the bank about our payment, Cub. It’s Ed Cameron, you know who that is. He said it was no big deal, as long as we’re caught up by year’s end.”
“Well, foreclosure on Dad’s equipment loan is a big deal.”
She felt something in herself drop. “That’s not an issue, is it?”
“The word was mentioned.”
She wanted to throw something, though not necessarily at Cub. She hated how his parents left them in the dark, even on something so important. Bear earned as much or more on machine repair and metalwork in his shop than from anything that happened in this barn. For years he’d gotten steady contracts making replacement parts for factories and something for the DOT, a bracket for guardrails, was her understanding. Dellarobia kept out of it. Bear seemed to think of these contracts as more valid than regular farm work, maybe because he’d learned welding in the military. He’d borrowed a huge sum to expand his machine shop, a few months before transportation departments everywhere suddenly came up strapped, and people decided they hated government spending. The equipment loan was backed up by a lien on the land.
“So what happens to us, if this farm gets folded in half overnight?”
Cub remained mute and supine on his bed of hay. Cub’s only off-farm income was what he made driving a truck that delivered gravel, intermittently, as that company was not seeing a lot of action these days either. Ever since the economy tanked, people had been settling for what they had. Renewing their vows with their bad gravel driveways.
His inert response to this crisis was predictable. In case of fire, take a nap. She tried an easier question. “How’d you happen to come by this information?”
“Listening. He talks more to Peanut Norwood in a day than he does to me in a year.”
“Lord, if he’s telling the neighbors of his downfall, we must be pretty near the end of the rope. You know your dad.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“No bad news comes looking for Bear Turnbow that he can’t send running.”
“I know, I was thinking that. It’s worse for the Norwoods, I guess. Peanut wants to log out his side too. They said it works best if they clear-cut the whole deal at once.”
“A clear cut. Cub, honey, could you at least sit up and discuss this like a human? You mean where they take out everything down to the slash?”
Cub sat up and gave her a sorry look. He had fleece clinging to his trousers and hay in his hair, a sight to see. “That’s where they’ll give you the most money. According to Dad, it’s easier when they don’t have to pick and choose the trees.”
She stared at Cub, trying to find holy matrimony in there, pushing her way back through the weeds as she always did. To what she’d seen in him when she was still looking: the narrow face and long chin that gave an impression of leanness, despite his burgeoning middle. The thick lashes and dark, ruler-straight eyebrows like an interrupted pencil line across his forehead, behind the pale forelock that hung in his eyes. The cause of their marriage had been conspicuous at the wedding, but she’d gone a little foggy on the earlier motives. She recalled the nice truck, other plans canceled, an ounce of pity maybe. A boy named Damon who’d kissed her half to death and then left her for dead, on the rebound. And there stood Cub, with his rock-steady faith that she knew more than he did, in any situation outside of automotive repair. His bewildered sexual gratitude, as near a thing to religious awe as a girl of her station could likely inspire. These boyish things had made him lovable. But you could run out of gas on boyish, that was the thing. A message that should be engraved in every woman’s wedding band.
“So this is a done deal,” she said finally. “Has he talked to the logging people?”
“Whatever’s too little to cut up for lumber, he said they can grind into paper.”