Chapter 11 Two Women and a Bank

The bank in Fetterling had been in the same building since 1931 and had made the identical decision in 1998 and in 2026, which was to be kind about a person and unhelpful about a number. Loretta went in on the twelfth of June at ten in the morning and came out at eleven forty, and she told Corrine the substance of it at the kitchen table on the Saturday after, in a voice with the temperature of a dishwater, which in that house meant something had gone badly. "They'll lend me forty on the house," she said. "Forty thousand, twenty years, and the payment is a number I could say out loud. I said it out loud in there and the young man didn't blink, which is how I know it's too much for me." "What do they want for it?" "A second on the house and a first on the crop ground, which I don't have and cannot get, because the crop ground is half mine and half Corrine's." Loretta turned her cup. "So I said no. And then he said the thing they say. He said if there's going to be an offer on the low field, the bank would like to be told about it before it happens rather than after." "That was the whole reason for the meeting." Loretta said it the way she said most things, which was once. "He had already heard. Somebody in this county told him that somebody in that courthouse had a conditional-use application in front of it and a parcel appraised non-prime in the same township, and that is not a secret in a place with one grain elevator." "He had a name?" "He had a parcel number and he would not say the name and I did not ask, because it was not his to give and because I did not want to be the woman in the bank." Loretta turned her cup. "He also had a second thing, which he did not say out loud either. He had the millage. You cannot keep a secret in a township that has one school district, and the value of this place on the roll is nine thousand two hundred and forty dollars for a hundred and sixty acres, and there is a tax on this township that has gone up four years running for a road that is not paved past the Roegner place. He knows that number because that is his number, and I know it because I pay it, and he knows that I know it, and that is the whole conversation underneath the conversation." Corrine sat down across from her, and for a moment they were both still, the way the two of them got still together, which was the only family resemblance they had ever needed. "Mom. I want to ask you something and I want you to not enjoy it." "Go on." "If the money were not a problem," Corrine said, "would you sell it." Loretta Ambrose looked at the window for a long time. Out it, the sow was at the fence with her head through the rails, and the truck was gone from the yard, and the light on the lane was doing what it does at that hour, which is to come in under the trees from the west and lie in the tire ruts. "No," Loretta said. "Then why is there a deadline." "Because a will is a thing you write for the person who comes after and I have not got anybody who comes after, and a refusal is a thing you hold in your mouth and the mouth gets tired." She turned the cup. "Your grandmother had a reason she could say out loud and she said it out loud in a field, and my father had a reason he could say out loud and he never said it, and I have had thirty years to go looking for mine and what I have found is that I do not want them to have it. That is all of it. I do not want a company with a truck to have it. That is not a principle. It is a preference, and I have held it this long by having four children' worth of reasons and no money." "You have two." "I have had two," said Loretta. "I had two and a man, and the man is dead, and I do not intend to say his name in a room with a planner in it." Corrine was quiet for a while. Then she said, "I should tell you what I found. Because if I find it, it's going to change what the field is worth, and I don't know yet in which direction, and I'm telling you now so that you hear it from me and not from a letter." Loretta put both hands flat on the table, which she did about four times a year. "Say it." "There's a culvert under the north lane at the turn," Corrine said. "It was put in by a district crew in August of 1974 and the tile record says it was cleared and that freeboard was restored and the outfall was verified. My father knew it was cleared. He knew in 1974. He knew it and he never said and he never put a single line of it in a report, and I have found the exact sentence in my father's own words which was, so somebody wrote it down that way." "He never told me." "He told Ida Roegner. And Ida kept the paper. And your husband knew it because he was in the country that summer and he dug the lane." Corrine looked up. "And if the culvert is under the lane and the lane is still there, then either it is still clear, which changes what the Hollow can do, or somebody filled the lane over it and paved over it, and that is a different and much more interesting thing." Loretta sat back. "Sell the farm to a gravel man for dirt money," she said, "because of a ditch, and let a man who has never met any of us have the place where my son and my daughter were born, and let him knock the lane out with a dozer in a year." "If you want to stop it, help me look." "How." "You know every inch of it," Corrine said. "You know where the lane turns and you know where your mother sat with a thermos and you know where the fill went. You've known all of it your whole life and you have been carrying it in a sewing tin under a bed for thirty years because there was never a reason to dig." Loretta looked at the ceiling for a moment, and then she got up and went out of the room, and Corrine heard her go up the stairs and stand on the landing, and heard the creak of the third step going down to the basement, and heard nothing at all for about two minutes. She came back with a biscuit tin that had held zwieback at some point in the previous decade. "Then you can have the rest of it," Loretta said, and set the tin on the table without opening it, "because you have earned the rest of it, and because you are going to go to a hearing in nineteen days and sit in the fourth row with your hands on your knees and let a man read a number off a page, and I am not having that either, and I have had enough of holding things in this house." She put her hand flat on the lid. "There is the lane turn, which you have. There is the box at the creek, which your brother has. There is a piece of ground on the west side of that box that nobody has anything to do with, because it is a quarter of an acre and it is a bank, and your grandfather used to throw every dead sow and every post off the place into that bank, and I have a picture in a shoebox of it in about 1958 with him standing in it up to the knee." She lifted her cup and put it down without drinking from it. "And there is a thing at the north fence of the crop ground that I have never told either of you about, and which I have thought about every day since the March that you said his name out loud in this kitchen." "What's at the north fence." "A hole." Loretta said it and sat back as if she had set something heavy down. "About as big as a washtub. Dug by hand. Forty feet from a tile main that runs straight underneath it. Your grandfather dug it in the summer of 1974, on the Thursday after the district came out of the creek, on his own time, and he had the topsoil piled on one side and the subsoil on the other and he put the topsoil back in the wrong order, so nothing has ever grown over it and there is a bare circle in that field you can see from the road in a dry August." "How deep." "He never told me." Loretta's hands were flat on the tin. "I asked him about it twice. The first time he said he would thank me not to worry about my own two hands. The second time he said he would tell me when he was ready to, and I was thirty-one with two babies and a dead husband and I could not stand any more men in that house who had things they were getting ready to tell me." She stood up and carried the pot to the sink. "So I have never known," she said, over the noise of the tap, "whether that hole is the thing I have been protecting for fifty-two years or whether it is a hole a man dug because a fifteen-year-old boy held a board in 1974 and heard a number, and whether those are the same thing, and whether there is any sense in the world in which they are." Corrine Ambrose stood at the kitchen table and found that she had no idea what to say, which had happened to her in that house perhaps five times in her life. "Mom. You could have told me in the spring." "I know exactly what I could have told you in the spring," said Loretta Ambrose, with her back to her, "and I have gone over it every day since the March and I have not arrived anywhere, and I am telling you now because it is January and there are going to be men in that room in nineteen days who will have spent four months deciding whether I knew, and there is not going to be another room after that. A hole is a hole. It is four feet or it is forty. Either way somebody puts a lid on it before the water comes up, because I am not having my low ground under water in April because a woman of my age could not get to the telephone." ---