Chapter 6 The Winter They Dug

It had begun with the winter of 1948, when the drainage was not drainage yet but a field that had a name for what it did, which was the Hollow, and the Hollow had been in four generations of the family and in nobody's will, because nobody who could write left it to anybody in particular. Loretta told it on the Sunday in April with the coffee going cold again, and she told it the way she told everything, which was in the order of the work rather than the order of the feeling. "They'd been losing it since before the war," she said. "My mother said her father lost a crop in 'thirty-one and another in 'thirty-six and one in 'thirty-nine, three crops out of nine years off the same thirty acres. And her father said a man who plants on ground that takes his crop off him every third year is not a farmer, he's a man who bets. So he sold. He sold the Hollow to Wendt and kept the high ground, and the Hollow went to a tenant named Tarbell, and I was not born yet." "Levon Tarbell." "Levon was my mother's cousin, and he was thirty-one and he had four brothers and no money, and Wendt took him on share." Loretta turned her cup. "Ona Lee went down there in June of forty-nine with a thermos and a folding chair and a surveyor's stake she got from her father, and she marked the high water mark, and she marked it again in September, and when the two marks agreed she knew where the crown had to go." "She built a levee." "She told Levon where to build it. He and his brothers built it. Two winters, mostly. In the second winter of it the money ran out and she went to the schoolhouse and got a note for two hundred and ten dollars from the home economics fund, which is a thing that used to exist, and Levon never liked that part of it and she never let him hear about it." "What was the money for?" "Tile. Six-inch tile, hand-loaded onto a wagon from the plant at the crossroads, hauled out along the lane that isn't there anymore because the ditch that carried it went in under the levee and that's where it is." Loretta looked out the window. "They laid better than six thousand feet in two winters. Not a machine in it. Levon and Oran Yoder and two men whose names I never learned, because when I was growing up, the ones who were still alive did not want to be asked, and I did not ask." "Boone says a hundred and sixty acres of it." "Clovis Wendt seeded the ground on both sides of the lane the first year and went along with it, and there was a suit about it in the spring of fifty, because seeding the ground a man else was paying for is a thing you can be made to answer for, and Ona Lee went to the courthouse and told them to their faces that the seeding was the whole point and Clovis Wendt had better remember it." Loretta's mouth moved. "They made him pay the drainage assessments for thirty-one acres out of his own share. Eleven hundred dollars. He never got over it, and he never planted a thing on that quarter again, and when he died in 1963 he left it to his daughter with a note that said the ground was better than he deserved." Loretta said that last part in the flat voice she used for things she had decided a long time ago not to soften, and Corrine understood that she was not being told a story about her grandmother so much as being handed a paper she had never been given. "He wrote it in the will?" "He wrote it on a separate sheet and asked his lawyer to attach it to the will as an exhibit, and the lawyer did, because it was the only time in that man's life he had said out loud that he wanted something said." Loretta turned her cup a quarter turn. "It said: Cordie, the land is better than I deserved and better than I paid for. I have had thirty years of it and I sowed it once and it did not fail me, and I have been angry the whole time. Do not let anybody tell you it was a fair arrangement." "Did it fail them?" "It failed them in June of fifty-three," Loretta said, "which is not the same as failing. There was water in that Hollow that year that went over the crown twice and took the north corner of the field with it, and the whole quarter stood in water until September, and Cordie came out with a rowboat she had never launched, because there had never been anywhere to launch a rowboat on that ground. She said the alders came down on the farmstead side that year, and she made a nursery out of the stumps and set a hundred and sixty of them along the lane, and half of them are the trees you have all been told not to cut down your entire life." "She planted them." "Your great-grandmother planted a hundred and sixty trees in the worst year of the century," said Loretta, "and nobody ever asked her about it, and every one of you has had shade out of it since." "So she stayed." "She stayed eleven more years and died in 1962 in a house over at Kellerville, where she had moved to be near a telephone. She never farmed it. Not a season of it. She had the best ground in three townships handed to her for the price of a fence and eleven hundred dollars she did not owe, and she put in trees and kept hens and drove to the Methodist church at Fetterling until it closed, and I was thirty-one when she died, and she handed me the keys and told me the low ground would come back to whoever worked it." "She knew about the tile." "She knew where it was. She did not know what was wrong with it any more than anybody else did. Nobody did." Loretta set the cup down with a small sound against the saucer. "That is the part you have to hold on to, Corrine. Nobody in this family has been sitting on a secret about the Hollow. There has been one sheet of onionskin in a tin under a bed for thirty years and not one person in this family has ever read the back of it." "She had a reason she couldn't say out loud too." "She said a reason out loud exactly one time, to me, at this table, in 1962." Loretta's hands were flat on the wood. "She said: don't you let anybody take it off you on paper. And I have had sixty-four years to think about whether that was a reason or an excuse, and I have arrived at neither. I think it was a warning from a woman who had watched two men do it to her cousin in the courthouse in 1958, and who was fifty-nine years old, and who had not had a telephone in a house for eleven weeks that spring." "She left it to us." "She tried to. In 1963 Cordie Wendt Leamy signed the quarter over to me, and I was thirty-one, and my husband had been dead two years, and there were two babies and a man who could not come home from his work on Thursday afternoons, which was the arrangement, and which I am not complaining about, because he built it and I signed for it." Corrine had heard all of this before, in pieces, over thirty years. She had never heard the note about the eleven hundred dollars. She sat with it for a minute and let it be a minute. "Mom," she said. "Why are you telling me this." "Because in eleven days a man is going to stand up in Dunnage Center and read page eleven of your report out loud, and he is going to say the land has no value, and you are going to sit in the fourth row with your hands on your knees and let him say it, because it is what the paper says." Loretta's voice had not risen. It never rose. "And when he is done I want to be able to stand up too. So I have got to know what I am standing on. And I find that I have never known what I am standing on. Ona Lee knew. She had it in her hands. I got the house." "So get the rest of it." "Get the rest of what." "Get the rest of what she knew," Corrine said. "The culvert under the north lane. There's a man in that field who will pay two-eighty flat across the whole quarter because a twenty-nine-year-old signed a piece of paper, and I signed it, and I have been carrying it round like a stone in my boot since the March I found out. If there is one culvert under a lane on this place there will be others, and I am going to find every one of them, and then I will have to decide what a county soil scientist is actually for." Loretta Ambrose looked at her daughter across a kitchen table that had been in that house since 1958 and had four generations of names cut into the underside of the top, and she said, "Then go and get your boots. They have been by the door since Thursday." ---