That was before they even saw the news around the corner—before they even saw how one of the sugarhouse roofs had caved in under the snow load. Just caved right in. To be frank, it was hard to believe, even looking right at it. To be frank, even looking right at the roof dipped down, even looking right at how it’d busted apart in the middle, where the seam was, it was hard to believe. ’Cause that sugarhouse had withstood some fifty winters easy. And now here it was. The sides not snapped and splintery but buckled like the whole thing had turned out not to be made out of wood and metal at all, but cardboard. A cardboard house. ’Course, Rex really ought to have gone up there and knocked the snow off back when the storm came, now. Even if he’d seen the roof hold snow that deep before, he should have done it. ’Cause you can’t always tell what the snow is by looking at it. Some snow’s heavy, and some snow’s light. He knew that. And that roof being a shed roof, the pitch of it wasn’t steep enough for the snow to slide off on its own, now, see. Who knew what the pitch of the thing was, but to be frank, in these parts, you should not put up a roof like that at all. To be frank, in these parts, you should put up a gable roof with a nine-over-twelve pitch at least. And knowing those old sugarhouses had those damned shed roofs, well, Rex ought to have got up there with a shovel, the way he always had. He let the sleet fall on him and flat said so himself. He ought to have. But he was too dead tired to do it, he said. Too dead tired. And where that was the first time anyone had ever heard him even use the word “tired” with regard to himself, Everett did expect Ginny to start crying right then and there. He did. He expected it. But she did not. Instead she just listened, calm as a doorstop. The sleet was building up like icing on their shoulders and heads, but Rex and Ginny and him just stood there anyway, as if it was this fine spring day, while Rex explained how he wasn’t really tired. How it was just his heart making him feel as though he was tired. He wasn’t really tired.
“Because you’re not getting enough oxygen,” Ginny said.
And Rex said that was right, now. His doctor had said the same thing. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
“We better be getting back,” he said finally. “That sky is out to get us and the Good Lord seems to have taken a powder.”
So they tromped back up the hill, their hands in their pockets, thinking.
Ginny and Everett shoveled out the barn floor. That floor was so caked with cow shit, it looked like it been refloored shit brown. But what the heck. They cleaned it all out. They shoveled out some paths through the snow, too, so as to make it easier to haul water up to the hogs. And come the end of the day, they took Rex out for a prime rib down at the inn. Talked over the equipment. The tractor. The mower. Ordered up some strawberry shortcake for dessert. Rex complained about the new folks in town. They want to bake bread for a living, then complain when they have to drive all over tarnation delivering it, he said. Ginny and Everett laughed. They laughed when Rex complained about the commune next door, too. How they complained about him. Complained about his chemicals. Complained about how runoff from his fields was trickling down to theirs.
“So I told them, When you figure out how to fix gravity, let me know,” he said. “So I told them, Go fuck your sheep.”
Ginny and Everett laughed some more.
“Because that’s what they do, them hippies, you know, when they’re not fucking each other,” said Rex, scratching his jaw. “The sheep or the cows, depending on their equipment.”
Ginny and Everett laughed again. They did not point out that some of their classmates from high school were living on that commune now. They didn’t think it was needed. They were just glad to hear Rex sounding like himself.
“A bunch of rich kids, that’s what they are,” he said. “Think any of them got drafted? Those kids got off, every one of them got off. Their daddies got them off.”
That was one of his favorite topics of conversation, along with the government.
“Think they care about the family farms down there in Washington?” he said. “Or do you think they’re too busy with their girlfriends to care? Giving it to them every which way.”
They ordered up some more shortcake. To be frank, it wasn’t as good as what they had in the city. To be frank, this time of year the strawberries were mushy on account of they were frozen instead of fresh. Pulpy. They were pulpy. Ginny and Everett ate it up anyway. And as soon as they got in the car to go home, Ginny said, So what if we went back to help? And way before they got to the apartment, their minds was made up. Jarvis wasn’t going back. Bob wasn’t going back, neither. But they were. ’Cause that farm had been in the family for a hundred years, easy. Ginny’s ma was buried there. Ginny’s grandma and grandpa, and her great-grandma and great-grandpa, too. It was bigger than anything in the city, a lot bigger. Come to think on it, in fact, it was everything. And here they’d left Rex to run it on his own for years. What was that all about? As if movie houses and cafés were more important than the farm! As if they were more important than Ginny’s pa! Everett called up work first thing the next morning. And, well, now, it didn’t pain him too much to say he wasn’t going to be framing up that four-car garage with the automatic door opener, did it. Ginny borrowed them a van for the furniture. And that was it. They didn’t have to weigh and consider, see. They didn’t have to decide. They were just going.
They drove up without telling Rex. Surprised him, and well, he was surprised sure enough. In fact, his sand-colored eyes teared up before he could put a stop to it. And now, that wasn’t something you saw every day. Ginny teared up, too, just to see it. Everett got to work. There wasn’t room for all the furniture they’d made, but they did put some of it to use. Piled the rest on a pallet in the basement, then spruced up a mite. Not to set things straight, now. To set things straight they’d have had to open up the walls and insulate. They’d have had to replace the windows with double-pane. Replace the furnace. Have a look at the pipes and the wiring. The wiring was probably some kind of cobweb, if you looked. Creative—it was probably what his pa used to call creative. They didn’t touch it, though, didn’t touch the real stuff. They were just making the place livable. Putting down carpet. Putting up wallpaper. Hanging some curtains. They washed the windows and reduced the heaps. ’Course, the heaps were an enterprise, right there. Rex was no worse than other humans when it came to clutter, but if he needed a chair, everything went on the table. If he needed the table, everything went on the counter. And if he needed the counter, it all went back on the chair. Ginny found all kinds of things as she worked. Prescriptions. The phone number of some woman Rex said was after him. Unpaid bills. Certified-mail slips. She held one up.
“You ever pick this up?”
Rex made a face. “Don’t believe I did.”
“What about this?”
Clean-shaven as he was these days, he looked more like a schoolboy than you’d have thought possible. Stricken, even. He looked stricken. Except when he was really in trouble, see. Then he’d wink.
“Help me out, now,” he’d say. “Womankind’s got it out for me.”
And before things got worse, him and Everett would put on their hats and head out to the field. ’Course, they had plenty of problems out there, now, too. Out there, they had problems galore. But out there, they were at least battling sick animals and broken equipment. Time. Nature. Enemies worth calling enemies. Whatever went wrong, no one was going to shake a finger at them.
They fixed the sugarhouse in time for the sugaring season, kept the lines clear and had a good year. Spring breeding went fine, too. Pretty soon a new herd of wobbly-legged calves were escaping out the fence just like their forebears. Escape artists. The lambs were bleating away, and the pullets were laying their first little long eggs, and those eggs were delicious indeed. Tender. Ginny and Everett were glad to be on the farm, and Rex was taking it easy the way he was supposed to. Slowing down if he felt anything at all. Ginny and Everett took CPR out at the high school while Rex got himself accustomed to the idea of surgery. A bypass. He was having him a bypass. ’Course, everyone had them these days. Medicaid would pay for it. It wasn’t going to be bad.
Those were happy times, in a way. They were happy.
But Ginny had her an account book, and a box for the bank statements, and every night she stayed up later, like she was in some farm movie.
“Depends on what beef goes for this year,” she’d say. “If it’s better than last year, we’ll be all right. If it’s worse, we’ll be in trouble.”
’Course, the real problem wasn’t the price of beef at all. The real problem was Rex’s real estate ’cause he’d always made some extra introducing this one and that. Getting them to shake hands.
“But now people don’t call—have you noticed?” said Ginny. “Because they know that he’s sick. He doesn’t look like someone who could get the best price. He doesn’t look like he has the energy.”
“Well, and he doesn’t, now, does he?” Everett said.
Ginny was sore at him for that. Said people should stand by her pa when he was sick, instead of going out and finding someone else to replace him. Saying they wanted ads, when that wasn’t the issue at all. Brochures. She said he should think so, too. And Everett could see her point in a way.
Still, he said, “Well, and what if I don’t?”
’Cause, to be frank, he was getting as sick of her scolding as Rex. Sick of her lecturing. In the city, him and Ginny’d try to work things out. Talk things over. Go down to the café. Have them some coffee. But here he mostly headed out to the field and let her cool down. Here they had kind of a different style.
Not that he didn’t get Ginny’s worry. He did. He did get it. He knew Rex was out taking walks at the north end of the property, and he knew what that was about. Knew Rex had a number of acres in mind and knew it made him sick to contemplate. Sick. It was years ago that the bank came and took Rex’s pigs, now. Years. But he still talked about it—how they came and took his pigs while he just stood there. Ginny talked about it, too—how her pa didn’t say a word for a month. And now this. Land. This was worse. Ginny was afraid it was going to kill him. Or the walks. She was afraid the walks were going to kill him, especially as north was the side that bordered the commune. North was the side that bordered the hippies.
The hippies and their sheep.
’Course, those hippies had been living there for ten years at least. They were not new. But somehow in all those years, Rex never had got used to them. He didn’t like their ganged-up ways, see. He didn’t like the way they’d put together a hundred acres for themselves just like that. Ganging up. None of them was half the farmer he was. It was hobby farming, that’s what it was. Play farming. A lot of the money came from their daddies. But where the hippies had all that land they seemed to think pretty damned well of themselves, he said. They did. They thought pretty damned well of themselves.
“How do you know?” Ginny asked him sometimes. “How do you know what they think? Have you ever talked to them?”
“Pa, we’ve been visiting over there,” she even said once. Felt she had to tell him.
Rex did not like to hear it. But lacking other company, and seeing as how Belle Tollman was living there now, Ginny and Everett had gone to visit a couple of times. Toting pies along with them, and staying for longer than they should have. Laughing in the sunroom part of the great room, over by the big red woodstove, though, to be frank, Belle had changed. Ginny and Everett were shocked when they saw how disheveled she’d got. How she wore torn-up clothes, and walked around with a parrot on her shoulder, and didn’t ever wear socks, just put her feet in her sheepskin boots barefoot. And her thinking had changed, too. The word “organic” was holy to her now. Organic. Organic. Ginny and Everett looked at each other. But at the same time, Belle was the Belle Tollman they knew. She was still wearing the necklace she’d worn in high school, a silver necklace with an ice skate on it. She still had Belle’s quick way of talking. And she still thought Belle-like thoughts. Asking why chicken soup was soup made with chicken, for instance. Why wasn’t it soup made for chickens? Wasn’t chicken feed, feed for chickens? In high school, Ginny had thought that type of question weird, but now she thought it funny. Familiar. A dear, she called her. “Don’t you think Belle is a dear?” she said. She did think Belle’s husband, Paxton, weird. “Are those what they call dreadlocks?” she said. “I think he’s the one pa told to, you know.” But Belle herself was a dear. And Ginny liked a lot of the other commune folks, too. She liked the way they dressed—more regular than Belle, but original, still. She liked the way they ate. Said she was going to get some tofu, when she got the chance. And she liked hearing news. When Belle said Randy Little was away getting a divorce, for instance, but that he was coming back with Sue Ann Horn, Ginny liked hearing about it. Talking about it.
“I guess they ran into each other one day and realized they’d never loved anyone the way they loved each other,” Ginny said. “Belle said they talk a lot about us. How there’s something special about those high school attachments.”
“Think so?” said Everett.
“She said they feel like true love in a way other attachments never do.”
“Got you before you knew any better, I guess.”
She smiled and said how she thought high school friendships were different, too. “I don’t know that we made any real friends in the city, did we?” she said.
“We did not,” he said.
“We have roots here,” she said. “We go back. It makes a difference.”
“Think Belle and Paxton’ll want to come have supper on our Queen Anne chairs?” he said.
Ginny gave him the eye. “In due time,” she said, “I don’t know that they won’t.”
“What a nice talk they’ll have with your pa over dessert. About the runoff.”
“I don’t have a crystal ball,” she said.
’Course, they sure could have used a crystal ball right about then. ’Cause Rex thought they were going to have to sell ten acres. He could barely get the words out. Ten acres. And that wasn’t even going to guarantee they could keep going forever. That would only keep them going for a while. And what if the hippies bought the land? Rex was worried the hippies would buy the land. Everett thought Rex was jumping the gun. He thought he should try moonlighting first, the way Rex used to. He could do just about anything, he said. Jack-of-all-trades that he was. He could. Or how about Ginny? Ginny could try for a job at the inn, he said. There was some competition for those jobs, and you had to defend your hours with a shotgun. Still, Ginny could try.