you were supposed to do to people in any difficult circumstance. Clobber them with food. She guessed this was a good thing, a helpful thing, but Martha hardly ate anything these days.The food would be consumed by Martha’s daughter, Pat, and Pat’s kids and anybody else who took a turn staying at the old farmhouse.
Norm had died last winter, a heart attack that the doctor said had probably meant about two seconds difference between being alive and dead. He’d gone out to the barn to break the ice on the cows’ water trough—Norm, being a Peerson, saw no reason to spend good money on electric immersion heaters—and that’s where the neighbor found him, collapsed in the sawdust and manure of the barn aisle, the rubber mallet he’d been using on the ice wedged beneath him, the untroubled cows stamping and shuffling around him.
Now Martha lived out the frail end of her life in the big bare farmhouse with the sloping floors and the bathrooms that smelled of Lysol and drains. For years she’d had breathing problems, balance problems, attacks of dizziness. Then she’d developed cancer in her female parts, had all the surgeries and treatments. So much inside her had already been burnt, cut, or poisoned, none of which had prevented the cancer from coming back, attaching itself to whatever was left. The doctors were vague about what came next, but no one expected anything good. A row of pill bottles was set out on her bedroom dresser like the row of spice bottles in the kitchen cabinet. Martha, who hadn’t even liked taking aspirin for a headache.
If you had to die, and after all you did, Anita decided it would be better to go fast, like Norm. Then you wouldn’t have to think about it. She didn’t like thinking about Martha; it was horrible, really, how she suffered, how her body found new, complicated, queasy-making ways to fail her. Nor did Anita especially want to go see Martha, keep a cheery face on when everybody, including Martha, knew the only reason you were there was because things were really, really bad. That was a crummy, selfish way to feel and you weren’t exactly proud of yourself. She couldn’t help it. Some things bothered her more than they did other people.
Almost to Grenada. It was a gray day with a hurrying wind that reminded you winter wasn’t that far away. She passed grain trucks and combines trundling along the road, and here and there corn had spilledlike candy onto the shoulder. Their house in Ames was in a development on the edge of town, and sometimes ribbons of corn husks blew in across the yards. Everything around here was about farming: the weather forecasts, the TV commercials for hybrids and soybean cyst nematodes, or whatever it was that killed soybean cyst nematodes. She was just glad that she wasn’t a farm kid, glad that she hadn’t grown up ten miles out of town and spent her summers showing heifers at the county fair. She’d always felt sorry for the country girls. Even in a place as small as Grenada, there had been those distinctions. She hadn’t missed it by much. Her mother had lived on a farm when she was a little girl, and the farm had been lost in the Depression. They’d moved into town and started over from nothing. It was all kind of lucky, in a way, a complicated sort of luck that had mostly benefited herself.
There weren’t supposed to be Depressions anymore because they’d fixed all that. Still, everybody agreed that the economy was terrible right now. Not that she had any time to listen to the news! She just heard Jeff going on and on about the Arabs, Arabs causing all the trouble. Well what did he expect? That was what they always did.
Jeff’s bank made a lot of farm loans, and now farmers had to pay more to dry grain and run equipment and everything else. The crop prices were too low and the farm debt was too high and Jeff spent a lot of time stewing and chewing about it. He referred to the president as “the peanut farmer,” as if growing peanuts was
Norm had died last winter, a heart attack that the doctor said had probably meant about two seconds difference between being alive and dead. He’d gone out to the barn to break the ice on the cows’ water trough—Norm, being a Peerson, saw no reason to spend good money on electric immersion heaters—and that’s where the neighbor found him, collapsed in the sawdust and manure of the barn aisle, the rubber mallet he’d been using on the ice wedged beneath him, the untroubled cows stamping and shuffling around him.
Now Martha lived out the frail end of her life in the big bare farmhouse with the sloping floors and the bathrooms that smelled of Lysol and drains. For years she’d had breathing problems, balance problems, attacks of dizziness. Then she’d developed cancer in her female parts, had all the surgeries and treatments. So much inside her had already been burnt, cut, or poisoned, none of which had prevented the cancer from coming back, attaching itself to whatever was left. The doctors were vague about what came next, but no one expected anything good. A row of pill bottles was set out on her bedroom dresser like the row of spice bottles in the kitchen cabinet. Martha, who hadn’t even liked taking aspirin for a headache.
If you had to die, and after all you did, Anita decided it would be better to go fast, like Norm. Then you wouldn’t have to think about it. She didn’t like thinking about Martha; it was horrible, really, how she suffered, how her body found new, complicated, queasy-making ways to fail her. Nor did Anita especially want to go see Martha, keep a cheery face on when everybody, including Martha, knew the only reason you were there was because things were really, really bad. That was a crummy, selfish way to feel and you weren’t exactly proud of yourself. She couldn’t help it. Some things bothered her more than they did other people.
Almost to Grenada. It was a gray day with a hurrying wind that reminded you winter wasn’t that far away. She passed grain trucks and combines trundling along the road, and here and there corn had spilledlike candy onto the shoulder. Their house in Ames was in a development on the edge of town, and sometimes ribbons of corn husks blew in across the yards. Everything around here was about farming: the weather forecasts, the TV commercials for hybrids and soybean cyst nematodes, or whatever it was that killed soybean cyst nematodes. She was just glad that she wasn’t a farm kid, glad that she hadn’t grown up ten miles out of town and spent her summers showing heifers at the county fair. She’d always felt sorry for the country girls. Even in a place as small as Grenada, there had been those distinctions. She hadn’t missed it by much. Her mother had lived on a farm when she was a little girl, and the farm had been lost in the Depression. They’d moved into town and started over from nothing. It was all kind of lucky, in a way, a complicated sort of luck that had mostly benefited herself.
There weren’t supposed to be Depressions anymore because they’d fixed all that. Still, everybody agreed that the economy was terrible right now. Not that she had any time to listen to the news! She just heard Jeff going on and on about the Arabs, Arabs causing all the trouble. Well what did he expect? That was what they always did.
Jeff’s bank made a lot of farm loans, and now farmers had to pay more to dry grain and run equipment and everything else. The crop prices were too low and the farm debt was too high and Jeff spent a lot of time stewing and chewing about it. He referred to the president as “the peanut farmer,” as if growing peanuts was
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