Spencerville

was alive, she’d find the means and the courage to see him, to speak to him, to see how much of him was her fantasy and how much of him was real.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he drone of some sort of machinery began to register in Keith Landry’s mind, and he opened his eyes. A breeze billowed the white lace curtains, and sunlight seeped into the gray dawn.
    He could smell the rain-washed soil, the country air, a field of alfalfa somewhere. He lay awhile, his eyes darting around the room, his mind focusing. He’d had this recurring dream of waking up in his old room so often that actually waking up in his old room was eerie.
    He sat up, stretched, and yawned. “Day four, life two, morning. Roll ’em.” He jumped out of bed and made his way toward the bathroom down the hall.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Showered and dressed in khaki slacks and T-shirt, he examined the contents of the refrigerator. Whole milk, white bread, butter, bacon, and eggs. He hadn’t eaten any of those things in years, but said, “Why not?” He made himself a big, artery-clogging breakfast. It tasted terrific. It tasted like home.
    He walked out the back door and stood in the gravel drive. The air was cool and damp, and a ground mist lay over the fields. He walked around the farmyard. The barn was in bad repair, he saw, and, as he explored what had once been a substantial farm, he noticed the debris of a past way of life: a rusted ax buried in a chopping block, the collapsed corncrib, the tilting silo, the ruined springhouse and chicken coop, the broken fences of the paddock and pigpen, the equipment shed filled with old hand tools—these all remained, unrecycled, uncollected, unwanted, contributing to the rural blight.
    The kitchen garden and grape arbor, he noticed, were overgrown with vines and weeds, and he saw now that the house itself needed painting.
    The nostalgia he’d been experiencing on the way here was at odds with the reality before him. The family farms of his boyhood were not so picturesque now, and the families who once worked them were, he knew from past visits, becoming fewer.
    The young people went to the cities to find work, as his brother and sister had done, and the older people increasingly went south to escape the harsh winters, as his parents had done. Much of the surrounding land had been sold or contracted to big agribusinesses, and the remaining family holdings were as hard-pressed today as they had been when he was growing up. The difference now was not in the economics; it was in the will of the farmer to hang in there despite the bad odds. On the ride here, he’d thought about trying to farm, but now that he was here, he had second thoughts.
    He found himself in the front of the farmhouse, and he focused on the front porch, remembering summer nights, rocking chairs and porch swings, lemonade, radios, family, and friends. He had a sudden urge to call his parents and his brother and sister and tell them he was home and suggest a reunion on the farm. But he thought he ought to wait until he got himself mentally settled, until he understood his mood and his motivations more clearly.
    Keith got into his car and drove out onto the dusty farm road.
    The four hundred acres of the Landry farm had been contracted out to the Muller family down the road, and his parents received a check every spring. Most of the Landry acres were in corn, according to his father, but the Muller family had put a hundred acres into soybean production to supply a nearby processing plant built by a Japanese company. The plant employed a good number of people, Keith knew, and bought a lot of soybeans. Nevertheless, xenophobia ran high and hot in Spencer County, and Keith was certain that the Japanese were as unwelcome as the Mexican migrants who showed up every summer. It was odd, Keith thought, perhaps portentous, that this rural county, deep in the heartland, had been discovered by Japanese, Mexicans, and more recently by people from India and Pakistan, many of whom were physicians at the county hospital.
    The locals weren’t happy about any of this, but the locals had no one to blame but themselves, Keith thought. The county’s population was falling, the best and the brightest left, and many of the kids he’d seen on his visits, the ones who had stayed, looked aimless and unmotivated, unwilling to do farm work and unfit to do skilled labor.
    Keith drove through the countryside. The roads were good but not great, and nearly all of them were laid