I asked, “Can he make a living at it?”
“He could if the prices were right. The livestock’ll get that barley. He can’t afford to sell it for what it’s going.”
“You ought to be able to make a living with land like this. Crops like these.”
She shrugged, walking ahead of me now. Not holding my hand—leading the way.
“Mr. Gillis does all right with his sideline,” she said.
“You mean taking in house guests.”
She nodded.
“You ever stay here before?” I asked her.
She nodded again. “A few times.”
We were at the edge of the barley field, now. Some stones were scattered about, some of them nearly boulders, big cold seeds not worth planting. She pointed.
“That grass is Mr. Gillis’ hay. He’s got about six acres in grass. For the cows and horses.”
We walked along, skirting a patch given to more stones and nettles. “Always a patch or two a farmer can’t tame,” she explained. “There’s the corn.”
I walked behind her, like an Indian, down green rows of corn only a few feet high. Silo corn, she said; planted late to keep it green. It would go eight feet. Up ahead, she said, was some corn Gillis had planted around the end of May.
I followed her down these rows, too, but they were damn near as tall as I was. The air here smelled sweet; up ahead Louise was breathing it in, smiling. At home.
We passed a field of yellow sweet clover, on our way to a field of (she said) alfalfa. She picked off a few tiny purple flowers, saying, “Relish for the cows.” Gillis only had a couple acres of alfalfa, not enough by her way of thinking. We walked past another field (oats, she said) cut and shocked, which she dismissed as pig feed.
“Because of the price?” I asked.
“The price,” she nodded. “My daddy got two dollars for an eighty-pound tin of milk, few years back. Now it’s less than a dollar.”
“That’s rough.”
“It’s the banks. That’s why I don’t think it’s so bad, what Candy and the others do.”
“Rob banks, you mean.”
She glanced at me, brown eyes wide. “Sure. All the banks ever do is foreclose on farmers.”
We were to a big white-flowered field, riffling in the slight morning breeze. Buckwheat, she said.
“Just an acre,” she went on. “Used for chicken and hog feed. You know what he could get selling it? Penny a pound.” She shook her head. “Farmer’s life.”
“But you miss it, don’t you?”
She was looking at the ground, watching her feet as she walked. “Maybe. A little.”
I followed her down into a hollow and we sat under some trees. Another bird was singing. I asked her what kind it was.
“Robin,” she said. “He doesn’t know from the Depression.”
“Why don’t you go back home, Louise?”
“Home?”
“The farm.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
She was sitting with her knees bunched up, clutching her legs with clasped arms; she had nice legs, by the way. White. Smooth.
“I was married. Still am, really.”
“I see.”
“He was bad to me. Worse than my daddy, even. He was a lot like my daddy, really. Maybe that’s why I took up with him.”
That seemed a pretty fair insight for a girl who was part farm girl, part moll. Louise was somebody who had the promise of being her own person, if she could just break away from the sordid world Candy Walker had introduced her to.
“Couldn’t you go back to your daddy?” I asked.
“Would he take me back?”
A rhetorical question, but I thought about answering it, anyway.
Before I could, she answered it herself: “He wouldn’t want me back. I’m a sinner. A fallen woman. And as for Seth, he’d probably shoot me. He said as much.”
