The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

No, sir. He couldn’t say that it had.

  They had several decisions to make. Ryan should understand that these were serious matters. Killing the president, threatening to kill the president. They had to decide if the police should be involved, if other investigative agencies should be involved. This was not something to be easily dismissed, given the recent events. Even if Ms. O’Brien had only been trying to . . . what did he think she was trying to do, anyway?

  Ryan told them he couldn’t say. He wondered where Megan was, and if they’d already talked to her. She must have turned in her obscene joke of a paper directly to the professor. That was enough to tell him that the paper was only meant to sound as if she were crazy. What she was really trying to do was wreck him.

  He thought he could convince them that he had not spoken approvingly of political assassination or urged his students to practice it. It was everything else that stung. We are all a part of political science whether we want to be or not. Everything can be explained by it. How easily he had been made to sound like an idiot.

  They kept him there for more than an hour. The matter of her visits to his apartment. He didn’t deny that they had happened, did he? Extremely poor judgment on his part. As for what he had said in class. Of course they knew he had been misunderstood. (It was beginning to feel to Ryan as if he himself was accused of trying to kill the president.) Of course he had the absolute right and freedom to express his own views. The university supported and protected that right. But there was the possiblity that the student’s parents might make difficulties. He should be prepared to answer questions, give some sort of statement if necessary. For the time being, that is, for the rest of the term, it would be best if his teaching duties were assigned to someone else. They were not passing judgment. It was for everyone’s protection, including his own.

  Ryan said, “If I’d had sex with her, and given her an A in exchange, like she wanted, none of this would be happening.”

  Further embarrassment on their part. They had been hoping to avoid anything unpleasant. Hoped that he would be mortified enough to go along with everything and allow them to be the chickenshits they had decided to be. He was only a graduate student. His insignificant rights and freedoms more easily dispensed with. Megan’s parents must have made some first-rate threats. Sue the university for indoctrinating students in violent anarchy? Sue him for either molesting their daughter or failing to do so? Ryan said, “You know, we were talking about this the other day in class. The difference between stated ideals and actualities. Lip service, it’s called.”

  Their faces hardened. Ryan stood. “Would you excuse me?” And then, because he needed something else to propel him out the door, he said, “Personal experience and personal grievance inevitably expand outward into the public sphere. Boy, do they ever.”

  He left the professor’s office and climbed the two flights of stairs to the office he shared with four other graduate students. No one else was in and he closed the door behind him and sat at the desk.

  The self he had created was dissolving along with the life that had sustained it. In our system of government we can never change who we are born as. Now he would be neither teacher nor student. He would begin again, in perfect ignorance.

  Iowa

  APRIL 1983

  Before you got married, before you had any idea of who it would be, or how it would all come about, there was curiosity but also a kind of dread, in case you might not be able to pull it off. That happened to people sometimes; they held out too long, or got their hopes set on someone who disappointed them, or maybe they lost their nerve. Anita had known that when it came to marrying, something remarkable was expected of her. It was a small town, and girls like her were burdened with everyone’s admiration and spite. And so it was a relief to choose, to be chosen. It calmed something in her, but as time went on, she began to wonder why it had all seemed so important.

  Mornings were her mother’s favorite time to call, no matter how often, or in how many ways, Anita let her know it was inconvenient. Either Anita had just arrived home after taking Matthew to kindergarten, and the baby had fallen asleep in the car, and it was her one chance to go back to sleep herself. Or else, since Matthew only went to school three mornings a week, she had both of them home and needing one thing or another, a snack or a diaper change, or Matthew attempting to bury his sister in stuffed animals, as he was doing now.

  “Stop that,” Anita told him, removing a plush frog from the screaming child’s face. “What are you trying to do, smother her?”

  “We’re playing.”

  “Well she doesn’t want to play like that. Go watch Ninjas.”

  “They’re over.” Matthew, sulky now. He never had any fun.

  “Well go watch something.” The phone rang. The baby’s face purpled with new, redoubled fury. Anita found the pacifier and tried to get the baby to close her mouth around it. “Go!” she said to Matthew, who was hanging in the doorway to see if he could get into further interesting trouble.

  On the third try she got the baby to take the pacifier and dove for the phone just before it went to the answering machine. Her mother didn’t like the answering machine and refused to leave messages. She would either keep calling back or, if Anita really wasn’t there, she might start calling the neighbors, as she’d done on a couple of occasions.

  “Hi Mom.”

  “Now how did you know it was me? Someday you’re going to answer the phone that way, and it’s going to be somebody else, somebody important, and you’ll be sorry.”

  “Nobody important ever calls here.” The baby was quiet, chomping down on the pacifier. Anita walked into the TV room to check on Matthew. At least she could do things while she talked, try to put the house back together.

  “Are you all right, honey? You sound upset.”

  Her mother always said something solicitous. If Anita ever tried to sound normal, neutral, happy, her mother asked her if she was mad about something. “No, it’s nothing. Marcie was pitching a fit, but she stopped.”

  “Mar-cie!” her mother sang through the phone. “Marcie monkey!”

  Anita and the baby looked at each other. Anita thought it was a sad, wised-up look. “She must have heard you, Mom. She’s smiling.”

  Her mother sighed. “You have to bring them up here. It’s been so long.”

  “I will, Mom. Some weekend when we can see Dad too.” It was always easier with her father there. He helped keep the lid on things.

  “We could—,” her mother began, but somewhere in the background a racket started up, a voice without words, high, harsh, changing pitch like a siren, breaking into a sustained sobbing. “I have to go, honey. It’s one of her bad days. Love you.”

  “Love you,” Anita said back, but her mother had already hung up.

  Anita put Marcie in her crib and wound up the teddy-bear mobile. Tinkly music played as the bears went round and round. She told Matthew that if he got out of his pajamas and put his clothes on, he could have more juice, and that he should take the clothes out of his dresser, not the dirty ones on the closet floor. Then she sat down at the kitchen table with that morning’s Des Moines Register spread out in front of her. Her mother had not yet read the paper, or else she would surely have called with something to say about it. Anita lived half an hour away from the town where she’d grown up, and usually this was far enough, but not always.

  FT. DODGE MAN KILLS FAMILY, BANKER, SELF

  The man in Ft. Dodge had farmed wheat and corn and kept a small herd of pastured cattle. He had taken a pistol and shot his wife, his eight-year-old son, his three-year-old daughter, and the dog. He had used a rifle to kill the cattle. He had driven his truck into town and gone into the bank that was about to foreclose on him, walked up to where the loan officer was sitting at his desk, and shot him through the head. He was on his way to the Farmers Home Administration office when two sheriff’s cars caught up with him. He’d stopped the truck in the middle of the street and put the pistol in his own mouth.
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  It wasn’t the first such story, but it was the first time they’d shot the banker too.

  Jeff got home late that night. Anita had fed the kids and run the dishwasher. She’d put Jeff’s dinner in the oven and watched from the front windows as it got dark. She turned off the oven and tried to call the bank, but of course everyone there was long gone. Matthew asked where Daddy was and she said she didn’t know. He started whining and she told him to go to his room. Muffled thuds came from behind his closed door. He was throwing different toys against the walls.

  It was almost eight by the time Jeff’s car pulled into the garage. Anita hadn’t wanted the first words out of her mouth to be Where have you been? but of course that was what she ended up saying.

  Jeff said he’d had to work late and yes he should have called but he hadn’t expected things to go so late and not to start in on him. He had the peevish expression that meant he knew he was at fault. If he ever had an affair, she figured she’d know just from watching him be furious.

  She didn’t start in. She waited until he’d seen the kids and got his first drink working and was sitting at the kitchen table eating his dinner of dry chicken and lima beans and rice and she said, “I was worried that somebody might have shot you.”

  He looked at her with his cheeks puffed out, full of food. She said, “Like they shot the banker in Ft. Dodge. A farmer shot him because the bank foreclosed on him.”

  Jeff chewed and swallowed. “What did you do to this rice? It tastes funny.”

  “You heard me.”

  “That was Ft. Dodge. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “You foreclose on people too.”

  “I don’t, the bank does.” Jeff finished off the chicken and left the rest of the food on the plate.

  The baby started fussing in her crib and Anita had to get up to tend to her, and then to tell Matthew to brush his teeth. She got everyone settled and went into the TV room, where Jeff was sorting through papers from his briefcase and keeping an eye on the television. They’d got cable, and now he could watch sports of one kind or another anytime he wanted.

  Anita sat on the couch, the end closest to the television so it would be easiest for him to look at her. “Could you help me understand something? What’s the matter with the farmers, why are they all having so much trouble?”

  “Not all of them. Just the ones who can’t pay their loans.”

  “All right, why can’t they pay their loans? Come on. I really want to know about this.”

  He did look at her then, trying to measure her intent. She said, “After all, they’re the same farms they’ve always been. Same crops, right? What happened?”

  “They took out more loans because money was cheaper a few years back. And crop prices were higher. Land values were higher. Now that’s all changed.”

  “Money was cheaper?” she ventured.

  “Interest rates were lower. That’s what banks do, you know that, charge interest.”

  She did know that. But she’d never really had to know much more. She got up from the couch and started for the kitchen. Jeff reached out and caught her around the hip with one hand. “Sorry I was late tonight.”

  “All right.”

  His hand reached down, patted once, twice. “Don’t worry about all that. I need you to focus on the kids, worry about them.”

  “All right.”

  She wasn’t stupid. She hadn’t been one of the brainy kids at school, but she hadn’t wanted to be. There hadn’t been any real reward in it that she could see, and besides, she knew plenty of day-to-day things that were more interesting and useful to her. Sometimes she thought that having children made you dumber, at least while they were small, just because you could get by on mental autopilot, coaxing, threatening, laboring. You were only as smart as you had to be. But she wasn’t so stupid that she couldn’t follow explanations, if people bothered to make them.

  Jeff’s bank was in the news a great deal even without anyone’s getting shot. His was just a branch bank of the main bank, Citizens Reserve and Trust headquartered in Omaha. Citizens Reserve had made farm loans over four different states, and enough of them had gone bad that if you drove very far in any direction, you were sure to see the bank’s green-and-white sign posted on acreage. They owned land everywhere, like a Monopoly game.

  Twice a year Jeff traveled to Omaha for business, and on other occasions the Omaha people came into town themselves. Those were evenings when they got a babysitter and Anita had her hair done and put on whatever was best in her closet and accompanied Jeff out to the steak house the Omaha people preferred. Although it was understood that for all its etched-glass partitions and red-jacketed waiters and drinks served in fishbowl-size portions, it was and would always be inferior to the restaurants in Omaha, which served the best steaks in the world, hands down.

  Anita and whichever of the wives were there made a show of being happy to see each other, and of paying each other compliments. There was unspoken competition among them and, unlike with the steaks, she wasn’t going to concede. She knew she was one of Jeff’s assets, the kind of wife people could imagine in Omaha, if such an opportunity were to come his way. She didn’t want him to forget her worth. Even after two babies she could still put her figure to good use, squeeze herself into whatever shape was required. It hadn’t been so long ago that she’d been the prettiest girl in the room, and that was still the case in many rooms.

  On this evening Jeff was picking up the babysitter and then he and Anita would drive together to their dinner. Between the mayhem the kids put everyone through on such occasions, and getting herself ready, there wasn’t any chance for the two of them to talk until they were in the car. “Slow down,” Anita told him. He was taking the corners fast and she was sliding from one end of the seat to the other. “Jeff, come on! If they get there before us, they’ll just go to the bar. It’s not like they don’t know the way.”

  He let the car decelerate. He always started out these evenings in an anxious bad mood. He said, “One of these days we’re going to have to invite them to the house for dinner.”

  “And one of these days I’ll clean the house and have it stay that way longer than fifteen minutes. My mom called today. She said to make sure to tell you about the Goodells.”

  “Goodells.” He was trying to place them. “What about Goodells?”

  “They’re cousins of mine. You wouldn’t know it on the face of things. But Ruth is Norm and Martha’s youngest daughter.”

  Anita could see the names rolling around in his head, failing to catch hold. “And I need to know this why?”

  “Because of their loan. There’s some trouble with their loan and Mom said you probably didn’t know they’re family.”

  Jeff steered into the restaurant’s parking lot. “Trouble, what, they can’t get a loan? Nobody’s lending anymore. Crap, is that Daniels’s car? I knew we were late.”

  “No, the other kind of trouble.”

  “Huh.”

  “It’s a Citizens Reserve loan. Mom says to tell you they just need a little more time so they can get a crop in the ground and start making payments after harvest.”

  “Goodell,” Jeff said again. “Hamilton County.”

  “That’s right. They’re relatives.”

  “You’re related to half the state.” He eased the car into a space and shut the engine off. “Let’s get a move on.”

  “Jeff.”

  “Yeah, it’s been tough up in Hamilton.”

  “You aren’t listening. You can’t foreclose on my cousins, that’s . . .” She tried to think what it was. “Horrible.”

  “It’s one of those horrible facts of life.”

  He was impatient to get out of the car but she didn’t intend to let him yet. “You seriously cannot do this.”

  “Not me. The bank.”

  “Oh, pardon me if it’s hard for people to tell the difference.”

  “Most people,” he said tightly, “don’t know shit about s
hit.”

  “Funny how the guys with the guns seem to shoot the bankers, not the bank.” There had been another shooting, this one in Missouri. Another family, another loan officer, all dead. The farmers were always good shots.

  “That’s not one bit funny.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be.”

  “When’s the last time you even saw these famous cousins, anyway, huh? You spend a lot of time out at the farm lately?”

  Anita kept silent. Jeff opened the car door and the dome light went on, making them both blink. He said, “All right, try to understand this. None of these guys are going to be catching up on their payments. Even if they had a crop to sell, it wouldn’t be worth enough to cover what they owe for seed and fertilizer and fuel and implements and whatever else they borrowed for. That crop’s worth seventy-three cents less a bushel than it cost them to raise it. If your cousins or your second cousins or your third cousins once removed had their loan called, there’s nothing I can do about it, they’re no different than anybody else. Don’t you think everybody’s somebody’s family? Don’t you think I know that? We’ll be lucky if the bank doesn’t get sucked under from all the bad loans. Oh yes, that can happen. Then let’s see who’ll feel sorry for the likes of us. The Goodells’ paperwork went out through the Omaha office and it’s a done deal. They have thirty days for voluntary liquidation. Now can we please get going before Harve Daniels starts drinking his whole dinner.”

  What else could she do but follow him inside, through the heavy wood doors meant to suggest something or somewhere else—a castle? jolly olde England?—into the restaurant and its clubby bar, where Harve and his wife Linda were being served their second drinks. Harve was white-haired and big-bellied and supposedly a good businessman, not the fool it was so easy to mistake him for. Linda was fifteen years younger than Harve, decorated in an expensive way. She’d frosted her hair blond and got a new, tight perm and the shoulder pads of her dress stuck out like batwings and even as Anita exclaimed over how pretty Linda looked, she was thinking that after all Omaha wasn’t exactly Paris, and then she thought what a waste of time it was, the sugary talk and the sizing each other up as if either of them had ever spent five minutes thinking about the other and meanwhile here was Jeff. Shaking hands and laughing and finding whole new ways of saying nothing, all meant to demonstrate that he was at his ease, a man among men, and why should he care about somebody else’s grief or ruin, nothing to spoil your evening over, and she hated him. She hated him like poison.