by Sarah Smarsh
Those who managed to profit or at least subsist on their land soon saw the population tide turn. After the Homestead Act, it was only a matter of decades until the American industrial revolution made cities into hotbeds of economic potential. Factory smokestacks beckoned from city skylines, and agriculture became an option rather than a requirement for the underclasses. For some of them, a new system of state universities and land-grant colleges held the promise of higher education and work in office chairs rather than on their feet.
So where once immigrants were told to go west as “pioneers”—complicit, in the process, in the government-sanctioned genocide of indigenous peoples—now their bodies were needed for urbanization’s boom. Thus, 44 of Kansas’s 105 counties had reached their peak population by 1910.
Flowing from that history of westward expansion, subsequent rural flight to cities, and the vast land that enabled it all, the United States still has a uniquely mobile population.
But once my family got to Kansas, they stayed. They worked the land too hard and too fast for the soil to keep up, and the prairie wind buried their houses in dirt. Many people fled the Great Plains then, amid the Great Depression and black, hellish, roiling clouds of dust in the 1930s. Still, my family stayed. Maybe they wanted to leave but didn’t or couldn’t. I don’t know. But not even the Dust Bowl drove them out.
By the time Teresa gave birth to my dad in the 1950s, advancements in farming equipment finally allowed for the economic dream of something beyond mere subsistence. Farmers were working huge swaths of land, putting away a large surplus of grain that would be distributed around the world by way of new transportation infrastructure—ports, highways, and railroads the country had invested in. Dad grew up driving Depression-era tractors, since Chic was too tight to invest in new equipment, but workers like them had successfully turned the center of the country into a massive wheat operation.
Then came trouble with banks.
Land prices rose in the 1970s, and banks started granting farm mortgages using a farm’s productivity as collateral, regardless of a family’s ability to repay. When land prices fell during my 1980s childhood, collateral value did, too; interest rates spiked, and farms were foreclosed on in droves.
They called it “the farm crisis.” Family operations went under in record numbers, and federal farm bills didn’t stop the corporate and global forces that were devastating small farmers like us. During the first ten years of my life, from 1980 to 1990, rural Kansas lost about 40,000 residents, while Kansas metro areas gained about 150,000.
That was the climate I came up in. All around us things were closing: the small-town department store, the hardware store with its tiny drawers stretching to the ceiling, the local restaurant. Lawyers took down their small-town shingles and doctors moved to cities. But we held on. So when I think of you, I think of a place. You would have been born, as I was, in a place people said was dying.
In that place, even planned pregnancies were expected to happen very young. I remember once shocking my friends I grew up with by telling them I didn’t want to have a baby until I was twenty-six, a scandalously old age for a first child in some corners of rural America. I don’t know why I settled on that number. I remember when I passed it, though. I didn’t live in the country anymore then, and many of my friends who stayed already had more than one kid.
With those sorts of pressures shaping me, I would come to see my grandma Teresa—a farm girl who spent a few years hustling for her own education and job training in Wichita and then ended up a farmer’s wife with six children—as a woman whose life was defined foremost by its ruralness. By the time I knew her, she was an old woman who was so cranky that even people who loved her laughed and called her a mean ol’ bitch.
Teresa was thirty-one years older than my other grandma, Betty. She couldn’t imagine where young Betty got her energy, she said. She wore polyester shorts, nurse shoes, and support hose for her varicose veins. She drove her and Grandpa Chic’s long Chevrolet Impala to Cheney, where her children had gone to high school, to get her graying black hair “set” in a short, tight permanent or to the nearby farm where we gathered warm eggs out of the coop and left change in a coffee can.
Her mind was starting to go by the time I was a kid, and I didn’t know how fiery she’d been throughout her life until I grew up and heard stories. I only knew that she loved me in a particular way that no one else did—like I was almost the only thing she loved. She had legions of other grandchildren, as Catholic women did back then, and many of them were terrified of her.
Jeannie and Teresa had a lot of friction between them but also a mutual respect as the type of good women who get called “bitch.” Mom was vaguely proud that her cranky mother-in-law had found a soft spot for me.
The only makeup Teresa wore was a dusting of perfumed powder that was loose like flour. Her cheeks were soft, creased, and falling. My eyes were shaped like Teresa’s, Mom used to say when I was very young. I didn’t see it then, but now that I’m grown I can. Other than my lighter hair, I grew up to look just about exactly like someone had taken Teresa’s eyes and put them on Mom’s face. Mom was always right about that sort of thing.
Grandma Teresa would send me to get her rural-route mail delivery from the metal mailbox banged up by hail and her small-town newspaper from the plastic box next to it. It was a long walk up the driveway, a stretch of gravel with wheat on either side. I carried the mail past the cottonwood, maple, and peach trees that Grandma Teresa taught me to name, past the gazebo that Grandpa Chic built. Chic would be working in the shed at the other edge of the field, but Grandma Teresa was always there asking if I wanted an after-school snack: some canned cherry pie filling in a bowl, crackers, maybe ice cream from the Schwan’s man who drove a refrigerated truck down bumpy dirt roads.
Teresa rarely left the three-bedroom house my dad had helped build when he was a teenager. The five older kids had married off, and Chic and Teresa had given the farmhouse they’d spent almost forty years in to one of their sons and his growing brood.
So there in her new house, all of a mile from her old one, she spent days pulling a heavy canister vacuum across the marble-brown deep-pile carpet I often pushed toys through, or cooking for Grandpa Chic. She cursed him from the stove while he sat in his recliner after a day working outside.
“Just sit in there, goddamnit, and watch your goddamn Wheel of Fortune,” she’d mumble, or sometimes yell, through the wall between kitchen and living room. Grandpa Chic was silent, smoking in his denim overalls and looking at a television screen set in a wooden console with golden speakers and a big knob that switched the channels.
Dad later said that Grandma Teresa and my mom had a lot in common, which seemed plausible since they’d disliked each other tremendously. They’d both been young, smart mothers unsung in houses their husbands built.
“She was a hard mother,” Dad told me about Teresa when I was grown. “She had woman problems that didn’t get treated. But when she got older, she mellowed out, and you two hit it off.”
I’m unaware of any diagnosis, but the “woman problems” might have been depression, creative energy stifled and imploding in an isolated wife and mother who went unseen and unheard. I often played with her scarves and jewelry left over from when she was middle-aged in the 1960s, the last decade when she was inclined to buy such things. Who was going to see her anyway? You can go a very long time in the country without being seen, which can be both a blessing and a problem.
When I drew pictures for her, she would tell me I should design greeting cards for Hallmark. The global greeting-card company had started north of us in Kansas City in 1915, a year after Teresa was born, and was still based there. In moving from Wichita back to the countryside in the 1930s, she had moved against the economic flow of a nation. But often she subtly hinted that her granddaughter should leave for Kansas City—a true urban center that for her had once represented jazz music
, jobs for a woman who had gone to secretary school, an Art Deco skyline.
In every place, something is gained and something is lost. Out in the country, at the end of Teresa’s life and the beginning of mine, I felt both the treasures of isolation for a strange girl and all the things an independent, thinking woman stood to lose.
In the quiet of her house, so quiet you could hear distant birds through the walls, I found Teresa’s high school yearbooks in the bottom drawer of an old bureau. I asked whether I could look through them, and she stared at me without answering. I set them at the wobbly kitchen table with a plastic covering over it and paged through them for hours. They were full of handwritten notes from girlfriends in strange 1930s penmanship and slang, which I read over and over again. Still without saying a word, Grandma Teresa watched me paging through them with an unsettled look on her face, as though a little girl fascinated by her life was the most surprising thing that had happened in fifty years.
My mom and Grandma Betty were large characters who had done a lot of wild things and had a lot of adventures. Grandma Teresa was the only female caretaker in my life who seemed, on the surface, like a traditional “homemaker.” Yet, of all of them, she was the only one who seemed concerned that I be known for my talent. She praised my report cards from school and asked what I was going to be when I grew up. She was also the only one who raised hell if someone forgot to feed me or pick me up at school, the only one who tore my dad up and down if no one was paying attention and I walked alone two miles up the road to the trailer full of kids and a man she didn’t trust.
Unlike Betty and Jeannie, Teresa was a reserved woman who stayed married to the same man for fifty years and never “worked outside the home.” But I have a feeling that she is the one who would have most deeply understood my connection to you—at once a maternal sense so profound that I refused to have you in a poor rural place and a selfish mission to never be trapped.
It wasn’t all bad, that poor rural place. Though money was scarce, you would have had your basic needs met because we knew how to grow and build things.
Dad left farming behind when he moved to Wichita, but Betty and Arnie’s farm was a constant operation in food production: an enormous vegetable and fruit garden that stretched from the dirt road to the house, the animals we killed and butchered ourselves, hens giving eggs, the peach and walnut trees, thickets of boysenberries, the fields of alfalfa, soybeans, and wheat. I sometimes missed meals in Wichita while my parents worked and I babysat Matt, or when I changed schools and was too embarrassed to tell an adult that my free-lunch paperwork hadn’t transferred and I had nothing to eat. But at the farm we had more than we could eat ourselves. Grandma and I would spend an entire summer day putting up thirty quarts of tomatoes for making chili in the winter. Then we’d give a jar to every old farmer who stopped by for a beer.
The popular image of Kansas is a monotonous, level expanse. If you drive through without getting off the interstate highway, that might be all you see for hundreds of miles, but some corners of Kansas are made of modest hills, woods, red-rock formations, slight cliffs. Still, my family fit the stereotype as both a people and a place: farmers on flat earth.
Some of us saw a beauty in that earth that people heading west toward the Rocky Mountains seemed to miss. But the earth was more of a tactile experience than a view. We had it on us. Cars got stuck in muddy ditches after thunderstorms. My feet got stuck in the marshy edges of ponds full of cattails. Gravel got stuck in my knees when my bike tires slid on roads made of sand.
We pulled radishes out of the garden, rubbed them on our jeans, and ate them right there if we pleased because a little dirt was good for you. After a shower, it was still under our fingernails and in the grooves between our toes. Grandpa Arnie said you could grow potatoes in my ears on account of how dirty they were.
We rarely bothered to wash our cars and pickups because they went up and down muddy roads every day and what was the point. If someone came through in a sparkling vehicle, got out in clean clothes, and asked us how to get somewhere, when he drove off Grandpa Arnie would say he was a real dandy but then it takes all kinds.
What came out of the dirt went into the kitchen. Grandma Betty hadn’t grown up that way, coming from Wichita, but it turned out she loved it. Her cigarette burned in an ashtray on the windowsill while she showed me how to chop vegetables, peel potatoes, pull guts out of chickens, and beat the eggs they laid. Her Supremes or Conway Twitty albums turned on the outdated record player, or soap operas played on the little black-and-white TV that sat on the kitchen counter. Grandma breaded pork chops Grandpa had butchered and put them in a hot skillet while I stood on a kitchen chair in my underwear running a hand mixer through a bowl of boiled potatoes and milk.
The place had a comfortable rhythm and stability that Betty, my mom, and I had known nowhere else. Betty and Arnie had been together for a decade, her longest relationship by far. Cheap things had hung in the same place long enough to leave behind clean rectangles on walls that sunlight and cigarette smoke discolored over the years. It felt like home. When I came inside with cockleburs and tacklike stickers in my bare feet, Grandma helped me dig them out and kissed the bleeding holes they left in my skin.
On the weekends, the house brimmed with drunks and hard characters. When the sun went down, Grandpa Arnie was likely to hitch a long hayrack to his pickup and pull a mob of singing, beer-sloshing adults and dirty children through the humming night. The coyotes, bobcats, and chickens heard us sing, laugh, and scream. Grandpa’s favorite trick was to pull the flat rack of wood and steel down the muddy waterway that funneled rain to the crops. He yanked us up and down the sides of the jagged canal. Someone invariably fell while the rest of us clung to corners and one another, legs dangling from the hayrack’s rusted metal edge.
Or on Halloween, under a big moon and a clear sky, we’d climb onto the hayrack for a chilly midnight ride past the potato patch and among tall, fragrant rolls of wet hay. We’d howl with surprise when three of my uncles leapt from behind the bales with masks and flashlights.
At the first snow, Arnie would tie the inner tube from a tractor tire to the back of his three-wheeler and drag rosy-cheeked drunkards across the yard. Or he’d rope old wooden sleds to the back of the tractor and forge down the snowy road with squealing children behind him pulling at their wet ski masks. For great stretches of the Midwest, people have to get creative to have some fun after a blizzard—lots of snow, no hills. In situations like that, where you had plenty of one thing and not enough of another—say, plenty of acres but not enough money—Grandpa Arnie’s ideas never quit.
Once, my cousin Shelly and I chased him across the snowy gravel toward the Big Shed, the large, easternmost outbuilding beyond the chicken coop and the Little Shed. The freezing air smelled of ash, which drifted in large chunks from the burn pile, anchored by an old cast-iron bathtub and a few crumbling barrels just past the pigpen. Somewhere between a broken antique band saw and an icebox covered in cobwebs, we found the four Radio Flyer sleds we dug out every winter. We dusted them off and lugged them toward the Big Shed with the rope Arnie had taken from his pickup bed.
“No, that ain’t gonna be enough,” Arnie said, looking at the sleds as he choked the Honda’s cold engine. He clicked his tongue against his teeth as he counted people on his stout fingers. He shook his head and crawled off the humming three-wheeler.
“You Katzenjammers can help me dig something else out,” he said, his boots stomping across the dusty shed floor to a corner that housed the defunct camper he and Betty had bought at a farm sale ten years earlier, in the late ’70s, for a family road trip through the Ozarks to the east in Missouri.
We helped him yank an old, torn-up canoe from the camper’s narrow metal door.
Arnie tested the bottom of the metal boat with his boot. The canoe had three seats, and the floor at one end had a hole in it. Arnie pulled two sandy floor mats from Old Brownie, th
e 1974 GMC pickup relegated to farm chores. He shook the mats and threw them over the torn canoe floor. He slid the boat forward a bit, and the bare frame between the mats and the ground was enough to keep everything in place.
It was almost five o’clock, and the slanting light under the roof of the open-air shed was stretching farther inside as the sun lowered. Shelly and I waited for Arnie to rope the canoe to Old Brownie’s hitch, and we climbed into the boat. Arnie started the diesel truck engine and dragged us past the Little Shed to the house.
“You gotta be shittin’ me,” people yelled from the porch. They boarded the canoe with whiskey in plastic cups and beer cans wedged in foam koozies. Shelly and I sat over the hole at the back of the boat since we were kids and our bony little butts would be fine, they said.
“If this goddamned thing tips over, I quit,” Aunt Pud said. We all remembered when she wrecked a three-wheeler into a snowdrift and laughed so hard she peed and sent steam into the air. Betty laughed as she squeezed in front of me, pulling my legs up around hers. Our thick coveralls made rustling noises when we moved.
Arnie revved the idling engine. We heard the truck switch into gear, and the canoe shifted forward.
“Oh, shit,” Betty said. We all laughed with nervous joy.
Arnie turned east at the road and picked up speed.
Riding a canoe down a dirt road was just fine, we discovered. The people at the front were singing Christmas carols, and we were wedged so tightly that the biting wind was easily avoided with a dip of the head behind a pair of shoulders. Arnie turned north at the tree row to pass our dozens of hay bales, half-buried in drifts, and I looked at the impressive expanse of white fields that stretched to the orange and pink horizon. The wheat and alfalfa, sprouting beneath the snow, were young enough that they would survive.