Where the Bluestem Returns

Prologue

The hill behind the Smucker farmhouse had held the family’s dead for nearly a hundred years, and the stones stood in their row above the farm the way they had always stood, facing south, looking out over the house and the barn and the county road, which was the way the family had always chosen to look: toward the work.

Raymond Townsend was the oldest of them. He had come from Ohio with nothing and built the farm on a piece of Kansas that was mostly sky and grass and possibility, and he died in 1891 driving his horses ahead of a prairie fire, which was the kind of death that belonged to the kind of man he was. Sarah held the place after him, a widow of thirty-two with five children and a scorched pasture, and when a quiet horseman named Jacob Miller rode up the road to buy yearlings and stayed to mend a fence, she let the prairie give something back. She married him under the big cottonwood beside the house, and the good years came, and the two of them lay side by side now at the top of the rise, which was where they had chosen to be.

Annie was their daughter who stayed. She buried her first husband in the influenza year, Bruce Smucker, who gave her a daughter and a name, and she married the quiet farrier who came up the road afterward with an orphaned boy on the wagon seat beside him. Sam Rosenburg gave the place the rest of his years, and the boy, Eli, gave it nearly all of his. Annie bent under everything the prairie sent her and did not break, because bending, as this family understood better than most, was not the same as breaking. It was another way of holding on.

Birdie was Annie’s daughter. Barbara on the stone, Birdie every day of her life. Widowed at twenty-five with two small girls and a bank note coming due, she drove home in the worst spring of 1934 with forty dollars and fourteen hens, took back her family’s name, and built an egg cooperative out of nothing that fed half the county through the Depression. She stood. That was the word the family used for her, had always used, would go on using. Birdie stood.

Ruby was Birdie’s daughter, the one made of numbers and silence, and the man she married had come to the farm the first time in the summer of 1943 as a prisoner of war, a German farmer’s son who planted a handful of cornflower seed by a fence post as if to say that home is a thing a man carries with him, and who came back up that same road eleven years later a free man to stay. Ruby and Franz Weber united two farms, the home place and the Mercer land to the south, and raised two daughters, and buried Eli, and kept the books in a hand so exact that a stranger could have run the operation from the ledgers alone.

Franz’s stone was the newest on the hill. 1983. Ruby had stood at the graveside in her plain coat and had gone home the same afternoon and finished the seed order, because the seed order was what there was to finish, and for two years after that she ran both places herself, with a hired crew and Danny Pruitt on the Mercer ground and her own exactness, and the county said, the way it had said of her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother before her, that the woman did not know how to quit. The county was right. The cornflowers came up that spring the way they came up every spring, one hundred and forty feet of deep blue along the south fence that nobody planted and nobody tended and nobody needed to.

The farm below the hill was the farm it had always been. What had changed was everything around it.

The money had changed. In the years after Franz died, the price of land went down the way water goes down a drain, slow at the rim and fast at the center, and the interest on borrowed money went up past anything the old books had a column for. The improvements Franz had signed for in 1979, the irrigation and the tile drainage, the things that were right for the ground and would be right for it for fifty years, had become a number on a note held by a bank in Salina, and the number grew in the dark the way numbers do. All across the county, farms that had held through the dust and the wars and every dry year since statehood were coming up in the legal notices, two column inches at a time. The sale bills went up at the co-op and the implement dealer and the post office, where sixty years before the county had posted the names of its war dead, and folks read them the same way they had read those, and then looked away the same way.

In the spring of 1985 Ruby Weber was fifty-eight years old. On a Tuesday morning in April she came in from the barn, set the coffee on, sat down at the kitchen table with the work calendar in front of her the way she had sat down at that table on five thousand other mornings, and went down onto the floor between the table and the stove, and did not get up.

Her elder daughter was two hundred miles east in Wichita, in the agricultural loan department of a bank, reading the papers of other people’s dying farms.

This is what happened next.