Heartland

by Sarah Smarsh

  There are many complicated reasons why so few people cross a socioeconomic divide in any lasting way, but one of the reasons is simple: It is a painful crossing. Those were the hardest years of my life.

  When I called home, I heard the familiar stories: My thirty-year-old cousin Candy didn’t know how she’d pay her hospital bills, but she’d survived colon cancer. At a party Grandma threw at the farm, Arnie’s daughter-in-law rifled through unlocked parked cars to steal cash—to buy drugs, my mom speculated—and in the process took Candy’s last $20. Well, Candy had had it, so she beat the shit out of her while my mom cheered her on and Arnie’s son Tom tried to pull them apart.

  After the party, Mom figured out that her wedding band, which she’d stopped wearing but kept in her purse, was missing. A few days later, she drove an hour from Wichita to her stepsister-in-law’s house in rural Kansas and pounded on the door. Mom sat on the porch for hours and hours until she finally came to the door and handed over the ring, miraculously not yet sold for drug money. Meanwhile, Dad was on a new job site. Chris was having more health problems, in and out of the hospital with a stomach burned through by painkillers. Bills bills bills.

  Then I hung up and went to class.

  Few people knew how much I was struggling both emotionally and financially, because I didn’t talk to anyone about it or even understand how bad off I was. Knowing I’d never ask for it, my high school cheerleading coach mailed me $300. I put it in a thank-you card and mailed it back. Like the conservative laborer who spurns the idea of “handouts,” my pride was bigger than my need.

  I didn’t know the term “first-generation student” and didn’t grasp yet that I had in fact “grown up poor” and was still very much “living in poverty.” The best I could come up with for describing my situation was that I was a “financially independent student” and tell people that “I grew up on a farm.”

  I once took a roommate, a funny, sharp girl raised in lower-middle-class Wichita, to the farm and was stunned to see it through her eyes. Everything was worth exclaiming about—the cows, the pigs, the chickens, the butchering shed, the cow tongue pickling in a jar in the refrigerator, the way every single adult was drinking alcohol.

  Tom and his wife were living at the farm since they had no money and Grandma would take needy people in whether she liked them or not. This was before the ring theft, I guess.

  My friend’s mouth fell open when Tom boomed through the front door, carrying a plate of flayed raccoon meat to put on the stove.

  Eating raccoon was remarkable even for us. The occasional turtle or rabbit ended up in the kitchen as novelty, maybe, but raccoon seemed plumb trashy. I was embarrassed when my friend told the story again and again back on campus—a situation I found I could control by telling the stories myself.

  “Cows are more pleasant than goats,” I’d say to explain why we had one and not the other, and my college friends would crack up like it was an amazing joke. Grandpa Arnie had bought a few goats when I was little, and they had turned out to be a menace.

  “Why did he buy the goats?” they would ask, as though the answer were complicated and perhaps had something to do with personal fulfillment.

  “Because they are cheap and eat weeds,” I’d say, and they’d bend over laughing. By then I’d be laughing, too, because I was amazed it was so funny to anyone.

  In those moments I saw that mine wasn’t as much a sad story as it was a rare one, that better-off people’s fascination was not just derision but, sometimes, honest awe. The distance between my world and my country’s understanding of it had been growing because so few people from my place ever ended up on a college campus and beyond to tell its stories. It was a distance I wanted to make smaller.

  During the fall of my sophomore year in college, Grandpa Arnie was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He briefly received hospital treatment, but the cancer had progressed too far for anything to save him. Grandma Betty took care of him at home. He died in six weeks.

  I’d been to a lot of funerals by then. Arnie’s brother, who had colossal hands. Ray’s mother, whose face was shaped like mine. The sixteen-year-old girl I’d roomed with at cheerleading camp who lost control of her truck and was buried in a blue sweatshirt that read CHEERLEADER. My high school’s middle-aged athletic director, who was so tall he must have needed a special casket. Grandpa Chic, who looked old, the way a dead body ought to look. Wrinkled Judge Watson, in whose chambers I’d played while he and Betty smoked between hearings. My great-grandma Dorothy, who was buried in a satin nightgown that Pud had bought.

  I wasn’t prepared for Grandpa Arnie’s wake, though, which for me fell during a busy week of college exams and deadlines. I took a test, got in my car, and sped south. As trees gave way to grassland and the sky got bigger, I spent the three-hour drive thinking about Arnie. How I would get off the bus and see him high off the ground, resting easily atop his white Case tractor, rolling out of the big metal shed pulling a disc plow. I would feel relieved that he was still doing chores and not already sitting at the kitchen table with a big glass of tea, because I hated how he greeted me.

  “Juh learn anything?” he would say.

  Not wanting to bother explaining the complicated lessons I had mastered in the classroom—algebraic formulas, three-point essays—to a grandfather who hadn’t gone beyond sixth grade, I always replied sullenly, “No.”

  We both knew I was leaving soon, not just from the farm but from the only way of life Grandpa had ever known. It was a separation born of class, that a child might lose a sense of belonging within her own family for going to college.

  When I got home to find Grandpa driving machinery, he did not ask about my studies. There were more important things to do.

  “Girl!” He would holler down at me over the huge engine. “Close the gate behind me!”

  The deep voice, full of power and phlegm, was lost to the churning equipment, but I had learned to read his lips—thus avoiding misunderstanding his directions and the red-faced explosion that followed. I would nod, and he would wheel slowly across the gravel that was our front yard as dogs, cats, chickens, and the odd piglet scattered from the painful roar.

  Once he turned toward the field, Grandpa Arnie would look back at me. Through dust, he would raise one index finger, which is how farmers wave to say hello, goodbye, and thank you. Then he would surge forward, pulling the green plow out to the quarter where Jerry the farmhand was already turning the earth.

  I arrived in Kingman underdressed and late for the wake. Having raced out the door back at my apartment, I still was wearing jeans and a Nike windbreaker as I ran across the street to the mortuary near my old high school.

  Dad and Chris, always late, got to the door the same time I did. Dad put his hand on my shoulder as I hurried him inside. He was walking like he was old, although he was just forty-four. He was wearing his snakeskin boots with a suit that was too big.

  “I’m going to need you to help me get through this,” Dad said, his voice low.

  His hairline was nearly halfway back on his head now, and his light brown beard was going gray. He had known Arnie even before he’d known my mom. But, having lived with him for much of my life, I’d surely been closer to Arnie, and it didn’t feel right to be summoned as Dad’s shoulder to lean on. I turned from Dad to go alone toward the chapel.

  The people inside were already halfway through the Rosary. No seats remained in the main area, so I knelt in the last pews of a side room set off by a tall partition. I couldn’t see past the makeshift wall to the casket and the pulpit and my family. I could hear but not see Father John, the priest who had married my parents and grandparents and presided over all my sacraments. The people near me were Arnie’s distant friends, long-lost cousins, and members of the farming community reaching halfway across Kansas. Some turned and recognized me as immediate kin who belonged in a closer seat. I wondered whether Grandma Betty was c
rying.

  I squeezed my hands together and tried to concentrate on counting the Hail Marys but could think only about how Arnie’s big, leathery hands that swatted wasps and tied fence were lying somewhere in the other room, and why didn’t I bring a Rosary, how did the people who weren’t Catholic know what to do, where was Grandma Betty, couldn’t I have changed clothes at an intersection coming through Wichita, what kind of person takes a college exam after her grandpa dies, and how was Grandpa Arnie dead?

  I looked at the funeral program the mortuary had printed and for the first time registered Grandpa’s middle name, August. He had been born that month in a farmhouse a few miles away in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression. I didn’t think of you right at that moment, but the name stuck in my brain for several years until I realized it was your name, too.

  After the prayers, people filed into the chapel to view the body. I felt hands on my back ushering me ahead in the line. I came around the partition and saw the dark brown coffin with engravings of wheat stalks. It was a perfect coffin, if a coffin can be perfect. Arnie’s first wife and her husband were bent over the body. I always forgot about the first wife.

  I saw Grandma Betty standing on the other side of the casket with a few members of our family. She had been crying. She looked at me with a sad smile, and Shelly walked over to take me past the body.

  “Hey. You okay?” she said.

  “Yeah. I was late,” I said, looking down at my jeans.

  We stepped up to the open casket. I felt like I was going to fall down for a moment. I tried to think about how it wasn’t really him lying there. His jaundiced skin had been poorly concealed by thick, tan makeup. He was wearing his brown polyester suit, with his wide maroon tie, and the coffin was brown, and Arnie was a little bit brown, and everything was brown like the earth. A stalk of wheat lay across his chest. He wore his Tony Lama boots that I used to run and get from his closet so he wouldn’t have to climb the stairs with his bad knees. I looked at his face, sinking into the folds of skin pushing up from the collar around his remarkable neck. Betty never could find collars that fit him. I thought his whole body was sinking. I noticed a bit of hair coming out of his right ear.

  “Hey,” Grandma Betty said, rubbing my back with her hand, which held a wadded tissue.

  “Hey,” I said.

  We hugged right there with a line of people behind us waiting to look at the body. Then Betty leaned into the coffin and stuck her pinkie in his right ear. It didn’t seem right to me to go burrowing into the crevices of a corpse. But she dug around inside the ear and pulled out a clump of wax, which she rubbed into her tissue. Shelly and I looked at each other.

  “Hey, Betty, what’s on his tie?” Shelly whispered close to Betty’s ear.

  “What?” Betty said.

  I had noticed, but not really noticed, a small metal pin in the middle of his necktie. We leaned closer to examine it. It read FORGIVEN.

  “I think his ex-wife put it there,” Shelly said.

  “I thought that bitch was up to something,” Betty said. Her voice sounded like it might break soon.

  As she undid the pin, she started to cry, just barely, and moved away from the casket. I said a prayer and sent a message into space for Grandpa Arnie or his soul or whatever might be around, and stepped past.

  On the way out, I saw Jerry, who was approaching middle age and had been Arnie’s farmhand since he was a teenager, wearing the look of a son who had lost his father. Tall and skinny, he seemed suddenly like a scarecrow. He looked me in the eye while a crowd of people scooted around us.

  “Hello, Sarah,” he said, and somehow we were giving each other a long hug, though he was always so shy, and we never talked much through all the years of him hammering in the shed or drinking iced tea at the kitchen table with Grandpa. He cried a little bit, too. “He was real proud of you,” he said.

  Leaving the mortuary, I was anxious to see the farm for the first time in months. I drove past the wheat fields that looked cold and dead but were alive underneath. Green sprouts would appear soon. I turned onto the long gravel driveway and saw the square white house that I’d left behind for college the year prior.

  When I opened my car door, the farm didn’t seem to be there. The cows and pigs made no sounds in the darkness, and I couldn’t smell them, because the November air was frozen. There already was talk of a farm sale. There was no one left to keep the farm alive. Jerry had his own family and acreage now. Arnie’s grown children lived in other places. Betty was depressed and still sick with chronic fatigue. I was in college. Matt was a teenager and had grown up mostly in the city anyhow.

  I grabbed my backpack, full of heavy textbooks, and crunched across the earth, past the cars that had beaten me home. I opened the metal gate, then the metal screen door, then the wooden front door that opened into the kitchen with its wooden chair where Arnie drank iced tea after his chores, when I got home from school.

  “Juh learn anything?”

  It was a question impossible to answer, and his tone struck me as skeptical. But there was a vulnerability in his question. Whatever the gift of school was, he didn’t possess it, and he knew that. He made the inquiry less because he cared about the answer than because he cared about me—Sarah Lou, the baby he’d held, the child he’d taken along on countless happy chore excursions across his land, the teenager for whom on dark winter mornings before school he had scraped ice from the windshield of a beat-up car parked next to his farmhouse’s chain-link fence. He’d seen himself in the way I smelled the air for rain, and he quietly admired the way I checked on newborn animals every day, without fail. We both had 20/10 vision. We exchanged glances when Grandma Betty got drunk during weekend farm parties and climbed onto the kitchen counter to dance.

  During his fast decline, I visited him in a Wichita hospital. We knew he was going to die and that I might not see him again. I held his big hand as I stood next to the bed, where he was smaller than normal under a white sheet. We hadn’t talked as much since I’d become a teenager and made big plans to leave and go places he would never see.

  “Grandpa, I—” I had a lump in my throat too big to talk.

  He patted my hand. His hand was enormous and brown against my small pale one. His fingers were thickened by work.

  “We know how we feel about each other,” he said.

  Soon there would be an auction. Grandma Betty would keep the house, outbuildings, and some acreage. She got money from the government for letting some of the land sit still and regenerate. Other acres she shared with Arnie’s old friends, who would tend crops and give her a piece of the profit. But the farm as we knew it was dead. There was a lot of equipment to be sold.

  On a frigid weekend, we covered a couple hayracks in antique gadgets dug from the recesses of our barns. Farmers from around the county stood spitting and kicking the dirt and waiting for the auctioneer to get to the big stuff, like the tractors and combines. The big sky was white and gray.

  To keep the cold off my skin, I had on the 1970s insulated coveralls I used to wear for chores. It felt good. An auctioneer faced the house from atop a hayrack that Grandpa used to pull us through fields on starry nights for fun. Men and women in coveralls, stocking caps, and work boots held thermoses of coffee. Their kids huddled next to them.

  “Arnie was a good man,” the auctioneer said, his breath a white puff in the air. “Let’s give’m a good sale.”

  Then he said numbers quickly, and the people in the crowd raised their hands to bid. They bid on things they didn’t need, because they knew the man they had belonged to and they knew his family who stood next to them now. In the greatest gesture of respect, they bid high.

  “SOLD!” the auctioneer said before his young helper lifted up the next item. They moved through the small things first and then auctioned off the combines, tractors, plows, and other big machinery.

  The country peop
le pulled cash out of their billfolds with cold fingers. In a rare act, they had driven a price up, rather than down, and intentionally paid more than market value. They knew Arnie had done the same at other farm sales. They nodded at us as they helped one another load the pieces of our farm into their pickup beds. They knew what a person’s life was worth.

  About a year after Grandpa Arnie died, during the autumn of my junior year in college, I was editing a story in the campus paper’s newsroom on the night of the 2000 presidential election. The whole staff was on duty, watching election returns on a boxy television mounted to a wall above a Rosie the Riveter poster and a fax machine that press releases came across. Earlier in the day I had cast my first-ever ballot in a national election, for George W. Bush. A friend and fellow editor with reddish-brown dreadlocks, a head scarf, and plugs in her earlobes sat down next to me at my computer, looked into my eyes, and asked, “How could you vote for him?”

  Something had changed my people politically in the twenty years since my mom had voted for Jimmy Carter when I was an infant, the year Reagan won. There I was to prove it—a liberally minded young person from the rural working class who had somehow voted Republican.

  Whatever caused the change, it crystallized with the popularity of a new conservative cable TV network. We didn’t have cable at the farm, but in Wichita Mom had started listening to conservative talk radio. She’d nod along in the car as a host spewed venomous attacks on liberalism. Something in his apparent outrage about “government handouts” appealed to her. She was open-minded and progressive on most social issues but raised a defiant middle finger to the idea of so-called assistance, so I did, too. I voted for Kansas native Bob Dole in my rural high school’s 1996 mock presidential election. Mom and I cheered when the GOP retained a majority in both houses that year. During my senior year, I wore a sticker on which I’d written IMPEACH CLINTON in all my student-organization group pictures on yearbook photo day.