The ground was hard and cloddy. It took a few minutes for him to cross the field but not once did Tanner turn his way or even seem to move. Nor did he when Ansel called out to him.
Ansel pinched the barbed wire and stooped through. He drew close enough that he could lay an arm on the cart wheel and talk in a low tone, like it was the two of them on the steps of the Methodist church. “Hello, Horace,” he said.
Tanner didn’t turn, but something in his eyes moved.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” Ansel said.
Tanner seemed to be shaking his head, but it was hard to tell. It might have been a tremble in fact.
“Are you not feeling well?”
Still Tanner didn’t answer. The buzz of insects was in the air and, from the other side of the field, the steady chunk chunk chunk of Clare’s mattock. A steady worker. It couldn’t be said that he wasn’t.
“Can I do something?” Ansel asked.
Again a long silence. And then Tanner said, “Take the mules.”
Ansel stepped onto the running board and reached forward but Tanner didn’t loosen his grip on the reins. “I mean keep them,” he said in a whispery voice.
What this meant, Ansel wasn’t sure. “Keep them? Until when?”
“Keep ’em and use ’em,” Tanner said. “I’ve got no use for ’em now.”
Losing his place. He’d heard Tanner might be losing his place. Which itself didn’t carry much surprise. Dirt from his unplanted fields blew onto their own meager plants and would bury them if he and Clare didn’t strip-list in anticipation of every wind, digging deep parallel furrows to catch the fine silt blowing low along the ground.
“I can’t, Horace,” Ansel said. “I can’t use them and I can’t feed them. I’m sorry, but I can’t feed what I’ve got.”
Another silence developed, except for the buzz of insects and the distant chunk chunk chunk.
Tanner was so still he might have been asleep. Finally, though, he turned. He looked full at Ansel. His face seemed ancient and absolutely empty. You could cast him as the dead man’s ghost. He said, “They’re good animals. They’ve got lots of work left in ’em.”
When Ansel got back to Clare, the boy barely looked up. “Whad he want?” he asked, but even when he spoke he kept working. Ansel stared at Tanner’s wagon going slowly back the way it had come.
“He’s up against it,” Ansel said. “Tanner’s up against it.”
He spat on his hands before taking up his mattock.
21
Charlotte had a photograph album full of pictures she’d taken with the Zeiss Ikon box camera her grandfather Opa had given her mother, but her mother wasn’t much interested in it and when she overexposed a roll of the 120, she handed it to Charlotte and said, “Do with it what you will.” What Charlotte did was join the Photography Club at Abilene High and take photos galore, which she learned to develop in the darkroom that the science teacher, Mrs. Clough, had set up in the school basement, but now Charlotte had no darkroom at her disposal and they couldn’t afford the chemicals if she did, so the camera had been tucked away in her hope chest, but the photograph album with its green leather cover stayed out on the radio where others in the family, Neva especially, would sometimes take it up and finger through it, marveling at the younger versions of themselves.
Charlotte also had a journal, which was handier since it required nothing more than a pen and privacy. She used to keep a girlie diary of her high school days in Abilene: Went to picture show with Harley and Opal, then had soda and gum. Washed and curled my head. A litany of valentines, dances, and matinees that made her sad to read now. What she missed was the fullness of things. It wasn’t the boys and romance. She’d had two boys in high school but only let one of them kiss her. She didn’t like it but she let him and when he tried to touch her beneath her shirt, she didn’t feel at all excited by the maneuvering. She felt clammy and rigid and pushed him away once and for all. After graduation, she just came back home to poor corn and wheat, failing cattle, and dead hogs. No matinees, no jitney lunches, no meetings of the Journalism Club, or the Photography Club, or the Mythology Club (where the girls voted to call her dog Artemis). For that matter, no desire to record on what day she washed and curled her head. Who was there to see it? Not Opal, founder of the Appropriate Dress Club. Not Harley, who’d married Opal one week after graduation and was probably keeping her in Appropriate Dresses with his insurance salary. For company now Charlotte had the voice of KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best!) while she fed clothes through the mangle and stirred lumps out of gravy. She listened to the Wonder Bakers while she spooned bread-and-butter pickles into the bread-and-butter pickle dish. She listened to Roxy and His Gang while she pieced scraps for a quilt that seemed boring now, so long had she been making it. What possessed her to do one called Wedding Ring? There was no money for new fabric, so she couldn’t sew dresses, the only thing that had ever been fun at home.
One day the newsman talked about an editor in Texas who was forming what he called the Last Man’s Club. It was for farmers determined not to sell out and leave their farms, so they could vie with one another, she guessed, to be the last man left. It was funny in a not-laughing way. Charlotte already had a friend whose mother was making muffins out of hog shorts. Now her own family had no hogs to feed hog shorts to, and the cows had almost no feed.
In her notebook that night, Charlotte had written: Reasons not to join the Last Man’s Club, and underlined it twice. Reasons number one and two were, Hog shorts make horrible muffins, and Artemis will starve.
It wasn’t long until she had reason number three: A farmer in Clark County fell off his tractor while driving it all night. All night! He was ground to pieces, said the man telling the story at the Co-op. I told Dad about it when I came home because he does the same thing, trying to add acres to make up for last year’s loss, but he says he lashes himself to the seat with a rope.
Reasons number four and five were dust and hoppers. She had seen with her own eyes a pitchfork her father kept in the barn, an artifact from the invasion of 1919. Otherwise she wouldn’t have believed a bug could eat wood like that.
In the back of the notebook, she practiced journalism à la her junior year at Abilene, using Who What When Where Why and How.