Chapter 7 - The Autumn Plowing
The ground was heavy with three days of soaking rain, but the silt-loam along the creek bottom had a clean, friable crumble when the moldboard of the John Deere plow cut through the sod. The tractor—a nineteen-sixty-eight model 4020 that my father had bought with timber proceeds when I was two years old—ran with a deep, rhythmic, two-stroke bark that echoed off the basalt bluffs across the river.
I sat in the steel seat with both hands on the wheel, my eyes fixed on the furrow line ahead.
The smell of turned earth rose around the tractor like incense: dark, rich, damp with rotting alder leaves and the deep, iron-rich fertility of river silt that had been settling in this valley since the Missoula floods. With every pass of the three sixteen-inch bottoms, the weeds, the dead thistle stalks, and the gray residue of summer pasture were turned under, buried ten inches deep beneath ribbons of glistening, black soil that shone like wet coal in the afternoon light.
A flock of sixty sea gulls, blown fifty miles inland by the coastal gale, followed fifty yards behind the plow, wheeling and diving into the fresh furrows to snatch angleworms from the exposed earth.
At the headland near the old cherry orchard, I throttled back, clutched the transmission into neutral, and set the handbrake.
The engine settled into a low, chattering idle, its exhaust pipe puffing thin rings of blue diesel smoke into the crisp air.
I climbed down from the iron step, pulled off my leather work gloves, and walked to the fence line where Arthur Pendelton was standing with both elbows resting on the top cedar rail.
He was wearing a heavy Pendleton wool mackinaw in red-and-black plaid, a gray felt fedora pulled low against the river wind, and a pair of rubber barn boots that had seen forty years of mud. He had a battered thermos under his arm.
"You're cutting it a little deep on the creek side, Brandon," Arthur said, not looking at me, his eyes following the straightness of the furrow across the flat. "Your dad never went past eight inches on that south turn. You hit the gravel layer if you go nine."
"The soil is deeper here since the state cleared the brush for the culverts, Arthur," I said, leaning against the rail beside him. "The silt backed up two feet behind the willow roots during the spring high water."
Arthur nodded slowly, unscrewed the plastic cup from his thermos, and poured two inches of steaming black coffee. He handed it to me.
It was bitter, strong enough to float a lead nail, and tasted faintly of the cork stopper that had sealed the bottle since nineteen-seventy. It went down my throat like liquid firewood, spreading warmth into my chest and out to the tips of my cold fingers.
"The state auditor called me this morning," Arthur remarked, pulling a small silver tin of horehound drops from his mackinaw pocket.
"About the bypass?"
"About your former wife’s real estate partner. Mr. Slocum."
I took another sip of the coffee. "What about him?"
"The real estate licensing board in Salem suspended his broker's credentials at ten o'clock," Arthur said, popping a brown candy into his mouth. "It turns out Mr. Slocum had four other 'commercial options' executed with elderly landowners along the right-of-way between here and Damascus. Every single one of them had a family member in a memory-care unit or an out-of-state heir who hadn't checked the property tax rolls in five years."
"Did they arrest him?"
"The state police pulled him out of his office on Kruse Way at noon," Arthur replied, his voice completely level. "They took two desktop towers and six filing cabinets out to an unmarked van. The district attorney in Clackamas is coordinating with the Department of Justice on a racketeering indictment."
I looked across the plowed field toward the house.
The yellow curtains in the kitchen window were pulled back. Through the glass, I could see my mother moving between the stove and the table, carrying a blue stoneware bowl, her small frame illuminated by the warm, amber glow of the kerosene lamp she kept on the sideboard.
"And Gwen?" I asked.
"She wasn't at the boutique," Arthur said. "Her sister drove down from Spokane with a rented horse trailer on Wednesday night. They cleared her personal clothing and her two dogs out of the Tigard house before the marshal arrived with the writ of possession. The sister’s husband told Tom Garrison down at the feed store that Gwen is living in an apartment above a dry cleaner in Spokane Valley. She’s working the register at a garden center."
A garden center.
The woman who had refused to allow a jar of home-canned peaches to sit on her quartz countertop because they didn't match the "aesthetic" of her kitchen was now spending eight hours a day carrying fifty-pound bags of steer manure and plastic flats of winter pansies for twelve dollars an hour.
I didn't feel triumph. I didn't feel vengeance.
I felt only that clean, cold indifference that an engineer feels when a bad calculation is finally erased from the margin of a blueprint.
"She called the office yesterday, Brandon," Arthur added quietly.
I looked at him over the rim of the plastic cup. "What did she want?"
"She wanted to know if your mother would consider releasing five thousand dollars from the trust to cover her health insurance premium for the winter."
"What did you tell her, Arthur?"
The old lawyer took his fedora off, smoothed back his thin white hair, and set the hat back on his head with a sharp, decisive tug.
"I read her the transcription of her own voice from Tuesday morning," Arthur said. "The part where she told you that an eighty-two-year-old woman was not her problem. And then I hung up the phone."
He took the empty cup from my hand, screwed it back onto the thermos, and patted the top cedar rail twice with his heavy leather glove.
"Finish the plowing before the dark catches you, son," he said. "The frost is coming off the mountain tonight. You don't want the clods freezing hard before you disc them."
May you like
He turned and walked down the gravel road toward his Buick, his boots leaving clean, round prints in the damp gravel.
I climbed back onto the iron seat of the 4020, dropped the hydraulic lever until the three steel plows sank back into the rich black earth, let out the clutch, and watched the ribbons of silt roll over behind me into the gathering dusk.
