Spencerville

paid Mary for the beer as Bob Arles made small talk, then Arles followed him out.
    Arles asked, “You lookin’ for work?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Real tight here. You still got the farm?”
    “Yes, but the land’s contracted.”
    “Good. Take the money and run. Farmin’s the kind of job you got to save up for.”
    “That bad?”
    “What do you got? Four hundred acres? That’s breakeven. The guys with four thousand acres, mixed crops, and livestock is doin’ okay. Seen one guy drivin’ a Lincoln. He’s tight with the Japs and the grain dealers in Maumee. Where you stayin’?”
    “The farmhouse.”
    “Yeah? The missus from around here?”
    Keith replied, “I’m here alone.”
    Arles, realizing his friendly chatter was on the verge of being nosy, said, “Well, I wish you luck.”
    “Thanks.” Keith threw the beer in the passenger seat and got into the car.
    Arles said, “Hey, welcome home.”
    “Thanks.” Keith pulled back onto the two-lane road. He could see the south end of Spencerville, a row of warehouses and light industry where the old Wabash and Erie tracks came through, bordered by cornfields; the place where town utilities and taxes ended and rural life began.
    Keith circled the town, not wanting to go into it yet, though he didn’t know why. Maybe it was the idea of cruising up Main Street in the weird car, and maybe seeing people he knew and them seeing him, and he wasn’t prepared for that.
    He headed out toward St. James Church.
    As he drove, Keith sort of blocked out the mobile homes, the aluminum sheds, and the abandoned vehicles. The countryside was still spectacular, with broad vistas of crops and fallow fields that ran to the horizons where ancient tree lines still divided the old surveys. Creeks and streams, sparkling clean, meandered among weeping willows and coursed beneath small trestle bridges.
    The land had once lain beneath a prehistoric sea that had receded, and when Keith’s ancestors arrived, most of what became northwestern Ohio had been swamp and forest. In a relatively short period of time, working with only hand tools and oxen, the swamp had been drained, the trees felled, houses built, the land contoured for farming, then planted with grains and vegetables. The results had been spectacular: An incredible bounty had sprung from the earth as if the soil had been waiting for ten million years to sprout rye and barley, wheat and oats, carrots and cabbages, and nearly anything that the first pioneers stuck in the ground.
    After the Civil War, whatever money was to be made in farming was made in wheat, then came corn, easier, heartier, and now Keith saw more and more soy, the miracle bean, protein-rich for an exploding world population.
    Spencer County, like it or not, was connected to the world now, and its future was in the balance. Keith could see two pictures in his mind: one, a rebirth of rural life brought about by city and suburban people looking for a safer and gentler existence; the other picture was of a county that was little more than a mega-plantation, owned and operated by absentee investors for the purpose of planting the money crop of the moment. Keith could see fields and farms where trees and hedgerows had been pulled up to make room for the gargantuan harvesters. As he reflected on all this, it struck him that perhaps the whole nation was out of balance, that if you got on the wrong train, none of the stops down the line could be the one you wanted.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Keith pulled onto the gravel shoulder of the road and got out.
    The cemetery lay on a hill of about an acre, shaded by old elms and surrounded by fields of corn. About fifty yards away sat St. James, the white clapboard church that he’d attended as a boy, and to the right of the church sat the small parsonage where Pastor and Mrs. Wilkes had lived, or perhaps still lived.
    Keith went into the cemetery and walked among the short tombstones, many of them worn away by weather and covered with lichen.
    He found his maternal and paternal grandparents, and their parents, and their sons and daughters, and so on, buried in an interesting chronological order that you had to know about, the oldest graves on the highest part of the rise, then the next oldest graves descending in concentric circles until you reached the edges of the cornfield; the oldest Landry grave went back to 1849, and the oldest Hoffmann grave, his German ancestors, went back to 1841. There were no large groupings of dates