policy proposed in the early nineties that would have reduced the amount farmers could pump until the withdrawal rate reached a sustainable level, meaning no more would be taken out of the aquifer than rain and snowmelt returned to it each year. The plan hadn’t gone over well among irrigators, but having completed our tour of Main Street, I could see that a bullet’s hiting anyone was less likely than ever before.
Goodland was dying despite irrigation, and to some extent, because of it. As irrigators drained the aquifer, irrigation drained the countryside of farmers. In order to pay for sprinkler systems—and compete in thedepressed grain markets caused by overproduction, due partly to irrigation—they had to “get big or get out,” as Ezra Taft Benson, President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, had famously advised farmers to do. My aunts and uncles who’d sold their land and left in my early teens were among the many lacking the will or the means to get big. So they got out. The stores had gone the way of the farmers.
I glanced at the clock. Eleven a.m. We were close. A few more blocks to the house, then one hour before Ward was due to arrive. My heart swelled with my unbelievable good fortune. Who would have thought I could love a rural Kansan?
As usual, Jake failed to slow down for the dips that served as the newer east side’s drainage system. We almost bottomed out on one of them, and the tires squealed as he rounded the turn at the First Christian Church, with its swooping roof. Our journey ended as it always did, at Mom’s house. “Where’s that smoke coming from?” I asked. I opened my door, peered under the car. “Oh my God! The tires are on fire.” My brother Bruce had arrived before us, I saw. His “road hog,” as he called his twenty-year-old Pontiac, was parked at the curb.
“I was going the speed limit,” protested my son.
6
J AKE CARRIED ALL OUR BAGS IN AT ONCE AND DROPPED THEM IN THE ENTRYWAY. We exchanged whispery hugs with my mother and heartier ones with my more substantial, unreserved sister-in-law, Kris, and niece, Abby.
Bruce was sitting on the couch, his twelve-string guitar leaning beside him. “Hi, Uncle Bruce,” Jake said.
“Hello.” He wore his usual scruffy attire. Loose-fitting jeans, old work shoes. The laces didn’t match. What was left of his hair hung below his collar, and he still had his hippie beard, although he kept it trimmed better than he used to.
“Is that a new guitar?” Jake asked.
“No, just the same ol’ noisemaker,” Bruce said, holding it out for Jake, who took it and started strumming the few chords he knew.
“Show Bruce that song you wrote,” I said to Jake.
“Oh,” Bruce groaned. “Sure, show me what you’ve got.”
I kicked myself for submitting Jake to his uncle’s seeming disdain. He put the guitar down. “Nah. Maybe later. Where’s Josh?”
Josh was Bruce’s twenty-two-year-old son. He was at the motel, Bruce said, with his girlfriend and their toddler daughter, who loved the motel pool. “Don’t worry. They’ll get here in time for gobbler.”
Kris and Mom had returned to the kitchen, which seemed like a safer place. I stood in the doorway for a moment and watched Kris convey herself between the counters with her customary flat footfall, serious intention, and efficiency. Mom was mincing broccoli with a food processor. She wore one of the outfits she’d sewn in the sixties. Bright-orange polyester pants with a vest in the same color over a flowery pink, voluminously sleeved blouse. All of her old clothes still fit her. On my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, I’d persuaded her to put on the tiny lavender party dress she’d gotten married in. To save money, they’d eloped. It had been the final year of the Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties. They were poor then.
We got ours by going without!
Dad.
Now, more than sixty years later, Mom still looked great. Her hair wasn’t really gray, but silvery
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