Chapter 1 A Number on a Field

Corrine Ambrose had spent seventeen years turning ground into numbers, and she had come to trust the idea that a number, once arrived at honestly, was a form of mercy. Her brother wanted one from her by the fifteenth of the month, which was the single condition under which she had never trusted numbers. The request arrived folded in three, on the counter of the district office at the county annex in Dunnage Center, under the mail slot at eight in the morning. It was a single page, county form, the kind that exists in every township office in the state and in no office anywhere else: a request for an agricultural impact statement, one original, two copies, wanted in the name of the owner. The parcel line was written out in full, section, township, range, acres, forty to a decimal. Beside the acreage someone had penciled a word: thirty-one point four. On the back, in block capitals pressed hard enough to emboss the paper, was Boone's hand. Sis. Weerick wants the low field by the 15th. Need a straight number, not a county number. M. will not sign anything. Corrine read it twice. Then she put it in her coat pocket, took her field bag off the hook, and drove the eleven miles to Fetterling with the thaw going on around her. March had come in that year the way March comes in a county whose ground is mostly bottom ground: overnight, without ceremony, all at once. The gravel road off the highway had gone to soup two miles back. The mailbox at the bend stood in a puddle that came up over the bottom of the box. The elm by the schoolhouse had begun, in the manner of elms, to drip on a day when nobody had yet touched an umbrella, and Corrine drove with the defroster on high and the radio off, listening to the road instead, which had stopped sounding like a road and had begun sounding like water finding its level. Fetterling is four buildings and a grain elevator that no longer holds grain. The elevator was sold in 2011 to a company that puts seed in it and takes it out again in April, and the siding that used to run in under the scales is a gravel lane now, and the switch stands rusted to the ballast. Corrine came into town at the four-way, passed the shuttered feed store with the geese on the awning, and turned north on the county road with a white frame house with a widow's walk visible on the ridge to the east, and then the road bent down into the creek bottom and there was the Ambrose place. She saw the truck first. Boone's truck sat in the yard with the tailgate down and the bed half full of stacked sod, hauled up out of the dig where they had been pulling ditches since the second week of February. From the road it looked like a man had been making a small deliberate pile of the winter. The shop building was closed, its roll door up two feet, and through the gap came the sound of a compressor and the smell of diesel and wet concrete dust, the two smells that had been the inside of that building for all of Corrine's adult life. Boone came out of the gap wiping his hands on a rag and did not stop, which was his way of saying hello and also his way of saying that the conversation was going to happen in the yard, in the cold, standing up. "You're the April fifteenth," he said. "I'm the person whose signature has to be on line four." "Line four is you if it's an impact statement. Line five is the tenant of record. Line five is a corporation in a suburb." He threw the rag over the rail. "They want the parcel appraised as what it would bring as ag versus what it would bring as dirt. If the dirt number is a good one and the ag number is a bad one, the whole thing is upside down from what Mom thinks it is." Corrine set her field bag on the tailgate and unzipped it, mostly to have something for her hands. "And you want me to write the bad one faster." "I want you to write the true one." He wiped a streak of grease across the front of his jacket. "It's worth about fifty-eight on the north end of the market comparison. That's what they've offered. Fifty-eight an acre for thirty-one acres and they're paying cash in thirty days. Sis, I've got sixty-one thousand on me right now, and it's not a bank, it's people." The pig barn was behind them and out of the wind. From it came the low noise of Mudlark, the brindle sow, working at her feed, and the sound went on the way it had gone every morning of Corrine's childhood, so that she had crossed a hundred miles of interstate that week and still come home to the same two noises: a compressor and a sow. Loretta came out with the coffee can and three mugs in a towel and did not interrupt, which was her method. She was sixty-eight and had the same shoulders as the Ambrose women before her, which were wide and low and built for a generation that lifted things heavier than anyone had told them they were strong enough to lift. She looked at the two of them standing at the truck bed and handed over the mugs and said, to Corrine, "Your father didn't pour concrete in mud." "Dad poured concrete in January," Corrine said. "Once." "That was before he had a bad hip," said Loretta, and went back inside. Boone watched her go. "She's got the deed and she's got the folder with the old papers, and she'll sit on both until the sun comes up. You want to talk to her about that, talk to her. I'm not the one holding it." "I know." "You're the one who's going to have to sign something." Corrine did not answer that. She walked around the back of the house instead, out along the lane past the empty nestbox posts of the chicken coop, and then down the mowed grass slope toward the place where the land gave up. She had not been down there since the summer her father died. That was five years, and she had told herself it was because there was nothing at the bottom of the slope to see, which was true in the sense that a person does not have to go to a place in order for it to keep on happening without her. The tile main came out at the north edge of the Hollow on a clear day, a six-inch cast iron line laid in a trough with a concrete collar at each end, and it had been there when she was a girl and it would be there now unless the money ran out first. She could see the collar from the top of the slope, a pale rectangle in the weeds. The rest of it she could not see from up there. She could see the standing water, the brown sheets of it lying in the furrows in a way that looked like the field had been painted and the paint had not dried. Thirty-one acres of it, silver where the sky came down and brown where it did not. Two feet under it, she knew, was the ground her grandfather had spent four winters on, and under that the ground before him, which had been wet since before the county had a name for it. Corrine stood at the top of the slope with the mug going cold in her hand and understood, with the clarity that comes at the top of a slope you have just walked down in your life, that she was going to have to go down into it. Not today. Today was the mug and the truck and the county form in her coat pocket. But the number on that form, the thirty-one point four, had been taken from somewhere, and every number in her trade was taken from somewhere, and this one had been taken by her. ---