Heartland
Page 26
Aunt Pud was the only one in our family who I recall refusing to budge from older affiliations between class and party. “The Democrats are for poor people, and the Republicans are for the rich,” she would declare and slam her beer on the table.
“No,” Mom would reply. “Democrats help people, and Republicans help people help themselves.”
People on welfare were presumed “lazy,” and for us there was no more hurtful word. Within that framework, financially comfortable liberals may rest assured that their fortunes result from personal merit while generously insisting they be taxed to help the “needy.” Impoverished people, then, must do one of two things: concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them. It’s a hell of a choice, and initially I made mine based on my mother’s ideas. My liberal peers were no different in that respect, for the most part having shown up on campus with their parents’ beliefs.
It was a sociology course the spring of my junior year that dismantled my political views about fiscal policy. Study after study that I found in my research for the class plainly said in hard numbers that, if you are poor, you are likely to stay poor, no matter how hard you work. As I examined the graphs over and over, my heart sped up with shock and anger. On the matter of my own country’s economic system, for all my family wisdom about what something ought to cost and who was peddling a con, I had been sold a bill of goods.
The people I’d grown up with were missing that information. But the liberal people I met in college often were missing another sort of information: What it feels like to pee in a cup to qualify for public benefits to feed your children. A teenager’s frustration when a dilapidated textbook is missing a page and there’s no computer in the house for finding the lesson online. The impossibility of paying a citation for expired auto insurance, itself impossible to pay despite fifty hours a week holding metal frying baskets at KFC.
It wasn’t that I’d been wrong to be suspicious of government programs, I realized, but that I’d been wrong to believe in the American Dream. They were two sides of the same trick coin—one promising a good life in exchange for your labor and the other keeping you just alive enough to go on laboring.
Meanwhile, as college experiences took me outside my home state, I realized that Kansas as a whole suffered from a similar disconnect with power. The broader country viewed states like mine as unimportant, liminal places. They yawned while driving through them, slept as they flew over them.
If you’re cast as a stereotype enough times—as a poor person, as a female, as the native of a place most people have never been—you might feel who you truly are fortify in opposition to it. Where the shame I sometimes felt as a child in poverty had once been, as a young woman in a new setting I felt a quiet pride about that place thought forgettable or populated by trash.
We were the “breadbasket”; I’d helped harvest the wheat that fed the world. Wichita was the “air capital”; my grandmothers had assembled warplanes there in the same factories where my aunts and uncles now worked. We were in “tornado alley”; we had ridden out storms in trailers and farmhouse basements and lived to describe the softball-size hail and the hay straw driven by the wind into a tree trunk. Whether or not I got a college degree, those experiences would always be my first education.
I ended up being admitted to a federally funded program that encouraged minority, first-generation, and low-income students toward graduate school. The small handful of white kids already in the program, I found, had given us a nickname: “White Trash Scholars.”
In the late ’70s, just after she divorced Dean, the guy with the squeaky voice who took her to Sears, Betty started thinking of Arnie again. She’d never forgotten that dance at the Cotillion. She drove past two or three country-western clubs where she knew Arnie hung out, hoping she might see his truck: The Wagon Wheel. Frankie’s Lounge. Then at a stoplight where West Street intersected Kellogg, which turned into Highway 54, Betty looked up in her Corvette, and Arnie was sitting there in his brown GMC.
She honked and waved. They pulled into Gerrard’s truck stop and talked over coffee. Thus, the highway women of my mother’s family spent the next quarter century moving in and out of Arnie’s farm.
Now that Arnie was dead, they all hit the road again. Within two years, Betty remarried and moved to Iowa to be with a rancher she met when he saw our hay-bale rows from the highway and stopped to ask about the price. Pud, Larry, and Candy moved to Florida to escape the Kansas winter. Shelly moved to Louisiana to be with a man she’d met on the internet. Mom divorced Bob and moved to Kansas City.
Even though she had moved north, Grandma had kept ownership of the farmhouse, outbuildings, and a few surrounding acres. The machinery and most of the land had been sold off, but the heart of the place still belonged to her.
The house sat unoccupied for seven years but still held furniture, televisions, clothes, photo albums. Nearby farmers stored their machinery in the Big Shed east of the house and their hay bales in the Little Shed near the cattle pen to the north. They kept their livestock in the pasture and rented acreage from Betty to grow wheat and milo.
The farmhouse itself began to fall apart with no proper keeper, though. Windows cracked, the basement flooded, the chimney that had crumbled over my childhood bedroom crumbled further.
Betty had been reluctant to sell the place, because it was hard telling how long her Iowa marriage would last, and she might want to move back. Plus, her family members might need a place to stay, as they often had. So she left the water service running and, in winter, kept the furnace on a low setting to prevent frozen pipes. It was an expensive solution for anyone, especially the woman who taught me how to haggle garage-sale prices from a dime to a nickel. Eventually, she stopped ordering propane and let the house go cold.
By then, a decade had passed since I’d left the farm. I’d finished college, worked at a newspaper in Kansas City, moved to New York and back, worked as a grant writer for nonprofits, taught writing at universities, and bought a small house in Lawrence. Along the way, I’d visited the farm whenever I could. Bumping down the dirt road off the two-lane blacktop, I would roll down my window to smell the earth and the air, as Dad and both my grandfathers had done when I rode along to help feed the cattle or count the kernels on heads of wheat.
Once up the gravel drive and out of my truck, I’d trace familiar outdoor tracks and sensory memories: At the chicken coop, holding a warm egg for the first time. At the tin-roofed Cat Barn, Grandma’s shrill keeeee keeeee as she walked from the house carrying metal pans of cat food, a dozen farm cats jumping from cobwebbed corners of old horse stalls. At the hay shed, now collapsing, dusty straw bales scratching my shins. At the tree row to the north, the evergreens where Shelly and I played, the sting of horsefly and mosquito bites, the discovery of deer ticks and ringworms burrowed into our skin. At the big metal shed, the smell of dust and oil—still present—and of Grandpa Arnie’s sweat through a thin snap-up shirt, long gone. At the swimming pool behind the farmhouse, now filled in with dirt and weeds, the smell of chlorine and the slick skin of a frog I tried to save.
In its current condition, the place warranted a low price, but Grandma balked at most offers and periodically unlisted the property to save the fee and rely instead on word of mouth. In early 2008, she finally sold the house and sheds by auction. After a bit of business wrangling, the farm had a new owner, and Betty needed to clean the place out by March.
“God, I dread it,” Betty told me. She was only sixty-two but had been diagnosed with emphysema and arthritis. She found the task of clearing out the farm both emotionally overwhelming and physically daunting.
The house was brimming with the bounty of her many Walmart sale raids and weekend garage-sale escapades, the acquisitions of a woman who grew up with next to nothing and thus relished the
act of accumulating the cheap somethings she could afford. These items overflowed from upstairs closets: bath salts made in China, faux-leather wallets, electronic language translators, fuzzy slippers, Life Savers candy. She wrapped them as gifts for grandchildren.
The kitchen, where Betty had fed so many family and friends, contained dinnerware, measuring cups, casseroles, heart-shaped cookie cutters, pancake makers, juicers, grease-splattered cookbooks, and no fewer than three garage-sale blenders.
Betty was the keeper of a few family heirlooms—her grandma Irene’s nineteenth-century mirror, her grandfather’s heavy iron tools, an orange highway cone my parents had stolen as a prank when they were in love thirty years earlier. These resided in the basement, which also contained shelves of decades-old canned jelly and garden vegetables, boxes and plastic tubs filled with crafting supplies and mouse droppings.
Back upstairs: the china cabinet full of my great-great-grandma Irene’s crystal and silver, inherited from women too far back for me to name; the built-in cabinets full of miscellaneous tools and games; shelves lined with knickknacks; four bedrooms full of furniture. They all provoked Betty’s anxiety.
The February night when Betty and I arrived to spend a weekend cleaning out the farmhouse, the place lacked running water and was freezing cold due to an empty propane tank. So we shared a cheap motel room ten miles down the highway in Kingman.
“God, I dread it,” she said again. “Part of me would just as soon light a match and burn the damn thing down.”
The next day, Betty’s younger sister Polly and her husband showed up to help us. They lived in Kingman then but for years had lived in an old two-story house Betty had bought as a rental a few miles south of the farm, close to Murdock.
The gray, late-winter morning had the wet, Midwestern cold that can freeze the inside of your nose if you step outside and breathe too quickly. Betty turned on and opened the electric oven to warm up the kitchen. She had called someone to partially fill the propane tank so that we might get the furnace going. We began our work in the old butchering garage. It was supposed to rain that afternoon, and we meant to get the outdoor sorting done before tackling the house.
Polly and her husband helped us hoist a broken garage door onto its crippled tracks. Brittle old glass from the garage door windows rained on our heads. I held the door up while they pushed out the dead Toyota pickup I’d driven for several years after Betty moved to Iowa.
They went about sorting fishing poles, wagons, and tools, and I climbed into the rafters to pull down Betty’s old warsh bins. She wanted to keep them in honor of her grandma, who first used them in the 1920s. They were thick with dust that coated my throat.
“If I were you,” I told her, “I would ask myself, ‘Will I use it? Does it have extreme sentimental value?’ If both answers are no, get rid of it. It will just weigh you down.” Grandma nodded but didn’t listen.
I spotted a bucket deep beneath a butchering table and yanked at the handle. Polly helped me pull it free, and we both covered our mouths from a horrible odor. The bucket contained a few small tools, which were stuck to the bottom by thick, dark goo—the decomposing juices of an animal no longer recognizable. I held my breath and hurried across the gravel yard with the bucket. I set it between the cattle pen and the Cat Barn and ran back to the garage. An eastern gust occasionally placed us downwind from the bucket, gagging us with the reek of death. We finished sorting the garage, sheds, and barns just as it started to rain.
The house stunk of mice, alive and dead, but we were relieved to get warm. It had been the wettest winter in recent memory, and we were cold in a deep way. All day we had to squat outside the house to pee, since the water was turned off and we couldn’t flush the toilets.
At Betty’s suggestion, Polly and I took things for ourselves. I loaded my pickup bed with gardening items, kitchenware, and a few antique tools, the cracked and rusty sort of things that were in style in home decorating as “shabby chic” farm-life knockoffs at department stores but to us were practical possessions. For more sentimental reasons I took our old egg sign, a sharp, rusted square of corrugated tin onto which Betty had painted EGGS 1.00 DOZEN and placed at the corner of our dirt road and the blacktop. Polly took their mother’s purse, which no one had sorted through in the fifteen years since Dorothy’s death.
I was relieved to discover that our task was merely to glean from the house desired items, rather than to properly empty and clean the place—a job that would require weeks, not a weekend. Still, I was uneasy about leaving such a mess for the new owners and about having pieces of my childhood handled without reverence by strangers.
“That’s how auctions work,” Grandma said. “As is.”
I took the things I cared strongly for but left behind much with mixed feelings: the decorative ceramic cats my mom bought me when I was small, the marked-down teal dress I’d worn as homecoming queen candidate. I followed the sorting advice I had given my grandmother, but not without pause.
Jerry the farmhand stopped by to help. A high school friend of mine visited with her baby. Polly’s daughter and her young family came for the kitchen table. It was funny how the casual swirl of visitors so easily resumed at the farm.
Then it had been dark several hours, and the truck was full of things, and everyone but me and Grandma Betty was gone. It was our last moment on the farm. I needed to pee before we hit the road. In the black country night, Betty waited in her truck, smoking with the heater on and the windows up, heavy rain glistening past the headlights. I unbuttoned my jeans and squatted next to a walnut tree.
People have asked me many times, “How did you get out?”
It is a deeply flawed question. But if I indeed “got out” of something, what was it? It was many things, mostly red ones:
The tiny red shack on a prairie that my parents first brought me home to. The giant glass bottles emptied of blended whiskey and filled over the years with red pennies, the collection of which proved what we didn’t have. My red neck, blistered from selling Chinese fireworks out of a tent in a field. The red dirt under my fingernails. The red meat we dug knives into as we butchered the cattle whose muddy corral we could smell from our front door. The red blood on Jesus’s hand that promised my sacrifice would be rewarded. The red nail polish my mom wore when physical appeal was one of few available privileges. The ideological confines of “red state” politics that didn’t get the chance to be challenged.
Now I am in a different place. But have I really gotten out of those red places? I’ve seen something of the world, but I still live in my home state. I have a good leather bag, but I love it most for the fact that it cost $3 at the Goodwill. I have a cell phone, but I get voice mail messages from collection agencies looking for my immediate family members. I have a graduate degree but a heap of debt acquired in obtaining it.
If there was something to get out of, some place or class, in many ways I am still there and perhaps always will be. I am there by choice, to some extent, appreciating its riches that shaped me—the wildness of a childhood untended, freedom from expectation, a robust, learned understanding of my own capabilities.
To experience economic poverty in a country famous for its abundance is to live with constant reminders of what you don’t have, like running a hot marathon next to a cool reservoir from which you’re not allowed to drink. In the absence of certain securities, I had no choice but to go down, down, down, down, down to a taproot and then further down into places material wealth is less likely to force you. There I often heard a voice. It was yours, which is to say that it was mine.
I did not leave one world and enter another. Today I hold them simultaneously—class being a false construct, like any other boundary or category we impose. You don’t really climb up or down, get in or out. Mine isn’t a story about a destination that was reached but rather about sacrifices I don’t believe anyone, certainly no child, should ever have to make.
Economic destitution is just one of many possible poverties, of course. People of all backgrounds experience a sense of poorness—not enough of this or that thing that money can’t buy. But financial poverty is the one shamed by society, culture, unchecked capitalism, public policy, our very way of speaking. If you’re poor in a wealthy place, common vocabulary suggests that economic failure is failure of the soul.
The term “poor” is used to represent those without money, and it also is a descriptor meaning outright badness, as in “poor health” or “poor test results.” In a country where personal value is supposed to create wealth, it is easy for a poor person to feel himself a bad one. Many of the people who raised me believed themselves to be bad. I know because they often treated me like I was bad.
The greatest fortune of my life is that I knew they were wrong. What I truly got out of is a sense of lack—a feeling that knows no socioeconomic boundary. You were the one who helped me do it, your presence telling me you deserved happiness and therefore so did I.
It’s no surprise, then, that the moment I let you go was the moment America would say I made it.
The night we separated, I felt you go like a hand slipping out from mine after we’d held each other for lifetimes. I was around thirty years old but felt like I’d lived a lot longer. It had been that sort of life.
People sometimes say they feel something in their bones. There’s probably a chemical component to it, but we call it intuition. Often it’s about whether something is right or wrong, whether someone is lying. But sometimes it’s about an entity changing form. Before they got the call, they looked at a clock the moment a loved one died. Or they knew they were pregnant before they missed a period or took a test.