THOSE FIFTY ACRES

THOSE FIFTY ACRES

He ducked, and the rock flew overhead, landing harmlessly in the grass.  It was an impotent gesture, but it was mean nonetheless, something he more or less expected from that man.

“What was that all about?” his wife Rachel said as she came from the house to help him with the bales. 

“Who can figure that guy?” Jesse replied, taking his cap off and wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

“He goes out there a lot,” she noted.

“I guess,” he replied, meaning he knew as much as she did about it.  “The kids’re with mom, still?” he queried.

“She’ll be back soon,” she said.

He was tall and lean and she was also, though she had a bad back made worse from carrying their second child.  She bent over awkwardly and grabbed one side of a bale as he grabbed the other.  They had known each other since their teen years when she would come to Lake County to spend summers on the farm with her grandparents.  Her family finally returned to South Dakota from New York, where her mother, an immigrant from Germany, preferred to live and work.  However, when ties to family and land proved too strong to keep her husband away, she acquiesced. 

“You don’t have to do that,” he said concerned after setting the bale on top of the others on the pallet.

She shrugged.  There were still a dozen or so bales that needed to be stacked, and she stooped to reach for another, grunting as they lifted it. 

It was late enough in summer for the heat to be slacking, and it wouldn’t be long before she would be absorbed by the preserving and storing of their garden produce.  She put up green beans, tomatoes, beets, cucumbers, and apples from the two trees behind the house, which she made into applesauce before preserving.  Much of what she labored over was given to friends, especially those who needed it, who came to the Lutheran church Sunday mornings where she set out boxes of the jars.  The only thing she asked in return was that people give her the jars back.

“Aren’t you worried?  He scares me.  Why does he do it?” she said, grunting again from the weight of her side of yet another bale.  The effort turned her pale face red, and he paused to give her a rest, knowing she wouldn’t listen to him if he told her not to bend and lift. 

“I suppose we’ll find out one day,” he said.  “He’s a mean one that man is.”

“You knew him once?  I heard Emmy Bryce say that to Ruth Miller in town this mornin’.  Everybody’s talkin’ about him.  People see him drivin’ off the road alongside the pasture, and they’re concerned.”

“I knew him in school in Madison.”

     That was all he would say about it, and she didn’t need to push him for more.  Jesse lived with his parents and his brother on a working farm near Madison, until he reached junior high school, when his father committed suicide.  That was in the eighties, during the five-year drought, when farmers went bust all over the state, and the Reagan administration sent spokesmen out to the region to explain why the Department of Agriculture would not be helping.  That’s when Jesse got his ambition to return to the farm one day. 

“Do you think he means us harm, Jesse?” she asked.  He could tell by the way she stood that her back hurt and wished she would go back to the house.  Although she was almost as tall as him, she was not well muscled.  She was, in fact, rather delicate, but her delicacy of physique was made up for by stubbornness of character and strength of will. 

“If he lets his meanness take hold of him, he might.”

Meanness.  The dispute was over the fifty acres.  Jesse’s little farm was a wedge shaped sixteen-acre remnant of two sections that had been broken up and sold to neighbor farmers more than thirty years ago.  The old farmhouse, a stall barn, a pole barn, corn bins, a useless silo—all came with the sixteen acres, and Jesse had spent his last five years renovating the house and barns and acquiring the thirty-seven cattle he now fed on the place. 

     Those fifty acres were a fenced-in pasture one side of which ran alongside his stall barn.  He needed that pasture for his cattle and couldn’t keep what he already had without it, no less expand to the fifty head he set as his goal.  He worked at the soybean plant for his and his family’s main income, though he was now making out well marketing the meat from his slaughter, which he did twice a year, having a good deal with the two Catlin brothers who ran the locker.  Jesse had built up a customer base large enough so that in just a few more years he had expected to buy those fifty acres without having to go to the bank.

     He was now three years into a ten-year lease which he had arranged to pay for with an option to buy.  What had happened, though, was that the owner, Guy Presler, who had promised Jesse he would sell him the pasture outright if he retired from the farm before the lease ran out, sold the farm instead to his nephew and moved into town, leaving the lease intact, but not, at the insistence of his nephew, including the option.  That left Jesse with no place to turn and with no future.  Old Presler’s sale of his farm closed out Jesse’s options. 

     Now the problem was that those fifty acres didn’t mean much in the scale of the Presler farm.  When the old man was young, he took over the farm from his father.  It was a thousand acres then.  The fifty acres in dispute were part of a section Presler bought thirty years before and were once part of the farm Jesse was now trying to build back up.  Presler continued to add to his acreage and now had some thirty-five-hundred, the second largest farm in the county. 

     Those fifty acres actually squared off Jesse’s sixteen, making for a straight corn row a thousand acres deep.  In fact, Presler never put corn in them, keeping them for pasture, which he usually rented out anyway, not keeping cattle himself.  He liked the idea of the young Jesse having those acres and keeping the memory alive of Paul and Brigid Hanson who farmed there long before he did and from whom he bought those acres when they became too old and frail to farm anymore.  It was plain meanness on the nephew’s part not to honor his uncle’s promise.

     When news spread of the old man’s retirement and the sale to his nephew, Jesse went to see Guy Presler.  Harold Gambihier, the nephew, was there at the time, and he told Jesse then that he, Jesse, should be glad he was honoring the lease, for he had no legal obligation to do so, there being no contract involved, only a handshake with his uncle.  “Take what you can get and be glad for it,” he said flippantly.  “That pasture’s mine now.”  Jesse said, “We’ll see about that!” and marched out of Guy Presler’s little house in town to the only lawyer he knew. 

     “It’s not the handshake that makes the agreement binding,” the lawyer told him, “not by itself.  It’s the fact that your agreement with Guy Presler is no secret, everybody knows about it, and that makes it binding.”

     So Jesse borrowed what he could from his mother and together with what he had in savings got the rest from a second mortgage on the house, returned to the lawyer and said, “I’m callin’ in that option,” and put the check on the lawyer’s desk.

     It didn’t take long.  Harold Gambihier did what he could, but the judge told him that that option had to be exercised before the farm could be sold and only Jesse’s turning it down could leave him in possession of those fifty acres. 

     Those acres may not have meant a thing to Harold Gambihier.  But losing them did.  And losing them the way he did made matters worse for him.  It was as though he had been slapped in the face by that Jesse Wier, and slapped in public, too.  He didn’t know what he would do, but he would do something. 

     Jesse ducked, and the rock flew overhead and hit the grass harmlessly, bouncing into the side of the barn.  Where the rock hit the red paint, generations old, had weathered away and the wood that showed was grey as steel and just as hard.  Jesse heard the stone knock against the wood.  Harold Gambihier had driven his pick up alongside the back fence of the pasture where a strip of unploughed ground made a lane out to the road.  He saw Jesse across the narrow side of the pasture stacking bales to be hoisted up to the loft of the barn.  Jesse had seen him drive in and get out of the truck and wondered what he was up to.  Not friendliness, he knew. 

     Harold’s visits had always an air of mystery to them.  He’d come up that lane between the fence and the corn in his pick up, get out, and stare across the pasture at him.  Jesse’d stop what he was doing and stare right back, but in his own head he was unnerved.  Harold was a mystery, right from the start.  His wanting to take those fifty acres from Jesse was just irrationally mean.  People around here didn’t deliberately do things to ruin others, just the opposite, they helped each other out.  If those fifty acres meant anything at all to the Presler farm, he wouldn’t have pushed the issue.   

But Harold’s carrying on about them the way he did was even meaner and more mysterious.  Out of the corner of his eye Jesse glimpsed Harold kicking something out of the soil and bending down to pick it up.  Then he saw him throw and saw the rock coming over the pasture.  Harold took a last look at him, got into the pick up, and backed down the lane.  Once on the road again, he gunned the gas, and his wheels spun up dirt and gravel into a cloud as he sped away.

“Lets his meanness take hold of him?  His throwin’ that rock says he’s done that already.”

“He’s done it before.  He goes out there and gets out of his pick up and stares at me.  That’s twice now he’s tossed a rock over the pasture.  I stare back at him, though.  I’m not gonna let him spook me.  Though he does, I’ll tell ya.  Spooks the hell out of me.”    

When they had got all the bales stacked, Rachel returned unsteadily to the house, the heel of her right hand pressing into her back.  Jesse, turning from watching her, walked into the barn, and, squinting in the dim light, ducked under the rafters of the loft floor, climbed into the loft, and winched up the hay.  While he was up there, he saw his mother coming off the road, bringing the kids back.  Rachel needed the time alone to rest in order to take the pressure off her back, so his mother came on her days off to take the kids to her place for the afternoon.  Jesse would never have asked Rachel to help with the hay, but he respected her too much to demand she go back to the house and lie down.  Now she was in pain, he could see, and the kids would stress her even more.  He shook his head. 

He worked the night shift at the soybean plant and had a couple hours yet before his shift started, time enough to clean up and take a meal.  He walked to the other side of the loft and pushed the shutter on the opening there to look out over the Presler acres on the other side of the pasture.  He could see in the distance the shelter belt that surrounded the farmstead there and hid the house and outbuildings.  He did see the settling trail of dust left by Harold as he raced toward the house.  Jesse looked over his cattle, all calm and natural, the calves, nearly double their birth size now, nevertheless still clinging to their mothers’ sides.  Rachel would be setting the table for his meal, so he closed up the shutters on both sides of the barn, climbed down the ladder, and drove his pick up back to the pole barn and stowed it for the night.  He took the Cavalier to work to economize on gas. 

His supervisor at the plant told him that he would be moving into management soon, and that meant daytime hours, no more weekends, and a decent raise.  Things were looking up for him and Rachel, which is why he felt such an itch over Harold Gambihier.  That man was the dark cloud on his horizon, and Jesse feared what he might do.  He loved the little farm his blood and sweat were beginning to make prosper.  His fondest memories were of the farm in Lake County, even though tragedy ended his family’s life there.  That was what made him dread Harold Gambihier.

Though both Harold and Jesse were outsiders in Brookings County, both had family connections there.  Jesse’s great grandfather on his mother’s side, Eli Cook, brought his family west from Massachusetts in the early 1900s, settling first in Wisconsin, where things didn’t work out for them, then moving to Minnesota, and finally taking root in Brookings County. 

     His mother’s father, Joshua, the younger of three brothers, bought small acreage near the town of Madison in Lake County after the second war and prospered for a time.  But the need for more acreage pressed on him, and in his middle years he went into debt purchasing another quarter section adjacent to his own.  Having only the one child, a daughter, when he died the farm passed to her and her husband along with the heavy debt. 

     This was the farm that failed in the mid 1980s, when Jesse’s father took his own life.  Bankruptcy and the meager return from the auction left his mother having to work to support him and his younger brother.  But the Brookings County branch of the Cook family, surviving on the land through the great drought of the Thirties, prospered and grew.  Jesse’s taking the old Hanson farmstead with its sixteen remaining acres was looked upon favorably by his relatives, and he was welcomed in the community.

     Harold Gambihier on the other hand was Guy Presler’s sister’s grandson, the only descendent in the family with ambition to farm.  Guy Presler’s six daughters were scattered all over the U.S.  His son, who lived nearest in Minneapolis, became a surgeon, and his children were too urbanized to even imagine themselves farming for a livelihood. 

     She, Holly Presler, married into the Gambihiers of Lake County, farmers all still at that time.  Her son, Harold Gambihier senior, managed his father’s farm so poorly that when the drought of the 1980s weeded out the inefficient, Harold senior gave it up.  But this move made the fortune of this branch of the Gambihier family.  Harold senior took what resources he had in hand from the sale of the farm and speculated in land around the Sioux Falls area.  Within five years he had made his first million. 

     Harold junior, however, when it came time to go to college, studied agriculture at the state U instead of business, which is what his father had hoped for him.  Knowing that his great uncle’s children would never return to the farm, he spoke often of the necessity to keep the land in the family.  At first, he tried to arrange with his cousins an agreement whereby they would remain owners in name and he would work the farm for his own and his family’s livelihood, thereby keeping the farm in his cousins’ line of inheritance but with no operational obligations. 

     Harold believed that with efficient management, a farm the size of his Uncle’s could be made to yield many times more than a comfortable living and that in time he could buy his way off the Presler’s farm into one of his own.  But this proposal failed.  His cousins wanted the farm sold.  Harold senior, recognizing a good opportunity, bought the farm and put his son’s name on it as well as his own, to keep it from passing into his daughter-in-law’s family in case of his son’s death. 

As Jesse came into the house, his mother was just leaving.  She scolded him for working Rachel in the yard.

     “What good does my taking the children do,” she said angrily.  “Look at her.  She’s all twisted in pain.”  Then she pushed her way through the door.  “Next time,” she said over the top of her car, “I’m taking Rachel and leaving the kids with you!” 

     He bore her righteous anger stoically and watched her through the door drive up to the road.  On either side of his long drive were two corn fields, their tassled-brown tops glistening in the lowering sun.  The corn was eight feet high this time of year, seemingly resting in the fields waiting for harvest.  When she turned onto the road, Jesse closed the door and kicked off his boots.  The large country kitchen was nearly finished.  He had been remodeling it for the last six months and had only the trim around the windows, doors, and floor left to do.  Rachel had set the table and gotten Ruth and Christopher settled into their chairs.  Jesse went to the sink and washed his face and hands, then took his place at the table.  He winced as Rachel struggled over the kids, getting them served before sitting herself.  She was stubborn.  If he mentioned her lifting the bales, she would get angry.  After he was gone, she would have Ruth and Chris on her hands for several hours before their bedtime.  They could be trying at that time because neither of them liked to go to bed.  There was nothing he could do.

     They were in the middle of their meal when his cell phone toned its sing-song call.  He signaled to Rachel to stay seated and got up from the table to reach for the phone in the wicker bin on the counter where they kept their mail and other non-kitchen things.  When he sat down again, his color had changed, and he was silent.   Rachel looked at him and could sense the trouble. 

     “What is it?” she asked, fearing to hear because of the way he looked.

     “It was Eric,” he said.

     Eric was one of the Catlin brothers who owned the meat locker where Jesse took his cattle for slaughter.  He had known the brothers since he and Rachel took the farm.  He named them among his friends.  With their help he built his customer base.  They gave those of his customers in the local area who needed locker storage for the meat they purchased from him a discount to help build his business, and they did all the packaging and shipping for him of meat that had to be sent out of the area.

     “What?” she said, holding her breath.  “Jesse, tell me.”

     “Eric said Harold’s father came to them with an offer to buy the business.  He wanted to let me know.  He said neither he nor Ethan wanted to sell, but the man was offering too much money, making it hard for them to say no.  He wanted to let me know because both he and his brother are sure this is aimed at me.  Well, what do you make of that?”

     “There are other meat lockers, Jesse.  Doesn’t buyin’ out the Catlins seem foolish to you?  Seems like a waste to me,” she said hopefully.

     “Yea,” he replied, depressed.  “I can find another locker to do the slaughter and the packagin’.  But it’ll cost, cost a lot more.  There’ll be a lot of things we won’t be able to do anymore.  If Eric and Ethan sell, it’ll set us back, Rachel.  We’ll be where we were five years ago.”

     “Why, Jesse?  We’ll only have to travel further, maybe to Dell Rapids.  Why would it cost so much more?”

     “I take the cattle up to Eric and Ethan now by myself, one at a time, in our trailer.  It’s only a half mile from here.  Dell Rapids’s the next nearest place.  That’s maybe seventy miles.  Can’t make five trips, Rachel.  They’d all have to go at once.  I’d need to hire it out, and I’d need help.  That means wages, not to mention the stress on the animals.  That means more feedin’.  For every five animals we hauled to Dell Rapids, two would go to pay for them.  We couldn’t afford it, plain and simple.”

     He hadn’t returned to his supper.  Neither had she.  They sat glumly in silence for a while as Ruth and Christopher ate. 

     “Well, they want to make it hard for us,” Jesse said finally, starting in on his meal again.  “And that’s just what they’re doin’.”

     “Do you think Eric and Ethan will sell?  Would they give it up?  They make a good livin’, don’t they?” Rachel wondered out loud.

     “They do,” Jesse said.  “But money’s money.  I guess it depends on how much old man Gambihier’s offerin’.  Eric said it was a lot.  I guess he’s more than tempted.  If he called to tell us about it, he’s probably thinkin’ he and Ethan can’t say no.”

     “What’ll they do after they sell?”

     “I don’t know,” he said, getting up from the table.  He had only eaten a few more bites of what she had laboriously prepared.  He took two slices of her homemade bread and slapped a chunk of beef between them.

     “I need to go,” he said, “I’ll finish this on the way.”

     “Be careful drivin’ with that sandwich in your lap, Jesse,” she said sternly.

     He smiled.  He slid his feet into his boots at the door and left the house.  Where he worked in the plant the machinery droned and whined so loudly that he had to wear earplugs.  Amid the throbbing, these created an eerie zone of silence around him.  Jesse always spent the evening and the early morning hours in this zone, and that’s what he wanted now.

     He didn’t worry for himself if Eric and Ethan sold, he worried for Rachel, knowing the stress the changes would bring on her.  Because he worked all night at the plant and after his always inadequate sleep worked all afternoon on the farm, she insisted on pulling her weight to take at least some of the burden off him.  At least, he thought, his moving into management at the plant would help take some of the pressure off.  Working days and having weekends off meant not only a more normal life but also more time with Rachel and the kids.  Not only that, it would make his work on the farm less stressful because he would have a couple hours rest before bedtime and then he and Rachel could go to bed together.  There was no telling how much anxiety that would reduce.

Harold Gambihier senior took possession of the Catlin meat locker late that September.  He didn’t change its name, though the Catlin brothers no longer had any connection with it.  They, the brothers, made out well enough, and for a while, all the talk in town concerned what they would do next.  But being responsible men with families, they lost no time using their windfall to set themselves up.  With help from the bank, they founded a trucking company, Catlin Bros. Moving and Hauling, which included livestock, and they prospered from the very start.  

     Harold Gambihier senior, on the other hand, hired out the management of the locker along with its labor, and as such two-party arrangements often turn out, especially given the circumstances, it was a losing proposition from the start.  It was this failure that led to the tragedies of the coming year. 

     Eric and Ethan Catlin came from one of the oldest families in Brookings County.  When they founded the locker, the whole community celebrated, and the whole community contributed to their success by giving the locker what meat packing business they could.  Everyone knew the reason Harold Gambihier senior took possession.  They didn’t like it.  A community’s disapproval can be deadly to such a business.  When it finally became clear to the man Harold senior hired to run the place that the community cold shouldered the business, he quit.  That was in mid-June of the year following.

After auguring the holes for the pen and the chute, Jesse set up the posts, one at a time, mixing the concrete right in the hole.  It was sweaty, backbreaking work.  But he stayed at it all day, and now, as evening came on, he looked over the posts outlining what would be his and Rachel’s solution to their biggest problem.  That would be all for the day.  It was the Saturday before Memorial Day, and he would have to finish the work on Sunday after church. 

     His raise at the plant was enough to enable him to make a monthly payment on an old six-cattle stall trailer, which he bought with Rachel’s approval to haul his cattle to Dell Rapids.  He never spoke with the man who ran the Catlin meat locker, who might very well have agreed to generous terms just for the sake of having the business, and it being Jesse’s business would have made it all the more valuable to him.  No, it never even occurred to Jesse to talk with the man.  That was a measure of how deeply Harold Gambihier junior tainted the atmosphere of Brookings County.

     On Sunday morning Rachel and Jesse drove off with Ruth and Chris and Jesse’s mother Alva to the Lutheran Church in the little town of Volga.  They arrived early for the Christening of their cousin Terry Cook’s newborn boy.  Terry and Gina Cook were younger than Jesse and Rachel, but the four had become close in the last five years.  When Terry and Gina were asked to be godparents to Christopher, their friendship was cemented.  Now it was Jesse’s and Rachel’s turn to stand as godparents.  People brought food and beverages to the church for the gathering before the service.  All the numerous Cooks were present, as well as the Hansons and the Nielsons, the Mortensons and the Robinsons—all families that had pulled together to survive the Thirties and who traditionally celebrated each others’ milestones.    

     When at the end of the service the proud parents were called to the apse with the infant, Rachel and Jesse, tall and slender, took their places alongside the parents.  Photos afterwards had to be posed for, and when all was finally done, the church’s reception rooms had to be cleared and cleaned.  Two and half hours after leaving for the church, Rachel and Jesse returned home.

     They all had a quick bite.  Then Rachel and Jesse changed clothes to finish the work on the pen and chute while Jesse’s mother cared for the kids inside.  She wasn’t at all happy with these arrangements.

     Concerned for her daughter-in-law, Alva tried to persuade her not to help with the heavy work.

     “But mom,” Rachel said, “tomorrow is Memorial Day.  Jesse has the day off.  We have to get the cattle to the locker tomorrow or Jesse’ll lose a day’s pay doin’ it.”

     “He can do that work himself.  Why put that stress on your back?”

     “I’ve been feelin’ better,” Rachel lied.  “Besides, I’ll just be the extra pair of hands he’ll need.  He’ll do the liftin’, I’ll just do the holdin’ in place.”

     All the posts were up.  Jesse just needed to put up the rails.  This would be tedious and time consuming, and she knew he would appreciate her company and her help.  Between the two of them, they should have it done before dark.  Tomorrow morning, they would merely need to pen the cattle, drive them up the ramp of the trailer which would be enclosed by the chute, and all Jesse would have to do then was drive them the seventy miles to Dell Rapids.

The first of the five steers warily climbed the ramp and stopped at the threshold of the trailer.  Standing there frozen, it couldn’t be prodded to go in by either Rachel or Jesse on the ground.  One of them would have to climb up and push it into one of the lead stalls.  Rachel said she would do it and climbed over the chute rails and lowered herself onto the ramp. 

     She then began shouting and waving her arms, and the steer inched forward until Rachel came up behind it and slapped it on the flank.  It then moved into the left lead stall.  The next animal up passed by Rachel and uncomplainingly moved into the stall beside its companion.  Rachel swung the gates closed behind them and moved back to let the next two animals in. 

     The first of these took its place behind the steer on the left, but as the second reached the top of the ramp, it refused to go any further.  Rachel slid along the side of the trailer, keeping her back pressed to it so as to not scare the animal back down the ramp.  She reached to pat the steer on the side of its neck to calm it and urge it in, but the animal refused to budge. 

     Jesse, seeing the difficulty, climbed the ramp behind the animal and gave it a mighty slap on the rump.  The intensity of the slap frightened the animal, and it leaped forward, but as it did so, it wedged Rachel against the side of the trailer, and as she pushed to move it away from her, the animal lifted its left hind leg and stomped down on Rachel’s foot.  Rachel screamed and shoved at the same time, but the steer only dug its hoof deeper into the top of Rachel’s foot. 

     Seeing what the steer was doing, Jesse charged in and lowered his shoulders to the animal’s rear.  Shouting as loud as he could, he shoved and pushed with all his might.  The steer moved off, and Rachel fell to her knees.  But all the screaming and shoving stirred up the first two animals, and they began to bellow and kick, raising a din inside the trailer, and this started the two behind them to bellowing.  Not yet secured into their stalls by the gates, they turned, still bellowing, and tried to force their way to the ramp. 

     When he realized they were too frightened for him to block them, Jesse pulled Rachel to her feet and turned his right side outward to shield her from the charge of the steer that had stomped her.  This animal viciously heaved against him with the side of its body as it passed, knocking him and Rachel against the side of the trailer.  Jesse lost hold of Rachel and she fell again to her knees.  At that moment, the second free animal charged them.  Rachel was knocked again against the side of the trailer and fell face downward to the floor.  As it passed her on its way to the ramp, the steer, maddened by fright, stomped on her back.   

     Jesse rose, bruised but unbroken, and tried to pull Rachel to her feet, but she screamed in pain, so he left her lie, realizing how dangerous it was to try to move her.  The two animals in the lead stalls were still bellowing and heaving, while the three in the pen below had gathered at the far end and were also bellowing in the fright they had themselves started.  Jesse leaped over the chute and took off for the house, screaming to himself, “Rachel! Rachel!”  He had no mind left for the work he was doing.  His whole existence contracted into the scream, “Rachel!”

“Can you move your legs?” he asked as he gently rubbed her back.  “C’mon, try to move them.”

     But she couldn’t.  As they waited for the ambulance, she laid her head on her forearm and closed her eyes.  The cattle up front had settled down, and in the quiet she could hear her heart beat.  The shock was starting to wear off, and what had happened was beginning to dawn on her.  As he knelt beside her, soothing her, and saying everything was going to be all right, she knew it wasn’t. 

     And she was right.  Their lives had changed.  After the MRI he sat with her in the hospital room.  The doctor had shown him the crushed vertebra and discussed the damage to the nerves.  Jesse knew that the future he worked so hard to realize had now to be forsaken, though he said nothing to Rachel as he sat beside her.  He would have to find a place in town, he thought, at least temporarily, so he and the children could be near her.  His cousin Terry offered to haul the cattle to Dell Rapids, which relieved him of that burden.  He would need the income to cover the costs of moving to town.  Their future would now consist in the hope that after the surgery and the therapy, Rachel would walk again.  Her doctor’s confidence kept him from losing heart. 

     When news of Rachel’s injury and her condition reached the ears of friends and relatives, it came to Harold Gambihier junior’s as well.  All during the day people came to the hospital to visit Rachel and to offer help to Jesse.     “If you plan to hang on, count on me,” his friend and cousin Terry Cook said.  Gina Cook stayed at Rachel’s bedside, holding her hand and saying cheering things.

     But Jesse knew that Rachel couldn’t go back to the farm.  Whether in a wheelchair or on her feet, that farmhouse, where so much of her life was taken up by things she would no longer be able to do, would wither her emotionally.  So he let out to friends and relatives on that Memorial Day his decision to leave the farm.  That’s what brought Harold Gambihier to the hospital. 

     He came in the morning during Rachel’s second day, when she was being prepped for surgery.  Terry and Gina were there.  When they saw Harold peek through the door, their eyes widened, and Terry poked Jesse, whose back was to the door, and motioned for him to look.  Jesse turned and saw Harold looking in at him.  Rachel noticed also.

     Jesse rose and turned, expecting Harold to come into the room, but Harold stayed in the hall, though not concealing himself. 

     “What is it, Harold?” Jesse said, trying to keep his voice from sounding unfriendly.  If Harold meant well, Jesse was willing to bury the ax.  He felt more than a little guilty for not stopping virtually everyone who came to wish them well from condemning Harold as the cause of Rachel’s misfortune.  Jesse knew it was unfair, though he understood their feeling it.  Since Harold didn’t come into the room, Jesse went out into the hall.

     He extended his hand in a gesture of friendliness, but Harold didn’t take it.  Instead, he shoved his face close to Jesse’s and poking him in the chest with his finger growled, “I hear you’re sellin’.  I want those fifty acres.  Soon as you can get to the realtor.  Don’t even think of sellin’ them to anyone else.  Y’hear?  Don’t even think it.  They’re mine.” 

     Then he pivoted on his heel and stomped up the hall to the elevator he had come up on.  Jesse stood looking after him as though he had been struck dumb.  After Harold left, Terry, who could see them through the door, came into the hall and said, “What the hell was that about?”  When Jesse told him, he shook his head and said, “I’ll be!  Now there’s a guy with social graces.” 

     “What do you plan to do, Jesse?” Gina asked after he explained what Harold came to tell him.

     “Jesse’s not sellin’ anything,” Rachel said defiantly.  “I’m goin’ home, one way or another.  Jesse?” she said questioningly, “you don’t want to sell, do you?  I don’t want you to.  Not on my account.”

     “I don’t know, Rachel.  I’ve been thinkin’.  Maybe it’s for the best.  I think it is.”

     “Not on my account,” she said again, and the flood gates opened.  Rachel’s sobbing depressed them all.  Then the nurse came in.

Terry and Gina Cook stayed with Jesse and with Alva and the kids until the surgery was over.  It took four hours.  When the doctor came out, they all sucked in their breaths as he approached.  The surgery, he said, went well, but it might take several days, maybe weeks before they would know if it was successful. 

     Once home, Terry told his father about Harold’s visit to the hospital.  Angered, the old man reached for the phone and began to call other members of the Cook clan.  In a few hours, everybody knew what Harold said to Jesse at that moment when Rachel was getting ready for her surgery, but it wasn’t to lack of social graces they attributed his behavior.  They put the worst possible construction on it.  Harold Gambihier, they all agreed, was the type of man who would openly seek personal gain from another’s misfortune.  In farm country people reserve a special place in hell for men like Harold Gambihier.  The Cooks’ contempt for him reached such an intensity that they agreed, whatever the cost to themselves, he will never own those fifty acres.

     When Harold left the hospital he went to see his father.  Whenever he came to his father’s place he felt intensely how low and shabby his own concerns were—living for the time being in his uncle’s ancient run-down farm house, wrestling with an uncooperative co-op to sell his corn, locking horns with that Jesse Wier over those fifty acres, not to mention the failure of the meat locker, and on and on.  His father would say, “You made your choices, son,” and laugh.  As he turned off the road onto the long drive leading to his parents’ house, he felt humbled.

     Located on the rise, the house was baronial in scale and aristocratically overlooked the lesser estates dotting the surrounding landscape.  These were all built on three-to-five acre lots by his father in the late nineties and early two thousands.  A dozen years earlier he had speculated on land just over the border in Lincoln county.  As Sioux Falls’ southern expansion spilled out of Minnehaha into northern Lincoln county, his land skyrocketed from the five hundred dollars per acre he paid for it as farmland to the fifteen thousand dollars per acre he sold it for as building lots. This was the beginning of his father’s rise to fortune. 

     He slowed the car as he pulled off the asphalt onto the gravel of the courtyard in front of the house.  His father was waiting for him, and he knew he would be irritated by this visit.  But he had no choice.  He needed his father’s influence now more than ever.  He glanced at the time on the dashboard as he got out of the car.  It took him an hour and a half to get here from Brookings.  That would add to his father’s irritation.  But he drove slowly to give himself time to think how to approach his father about Jesse Wier.  He let himself in. 

     The house faced east, and the morning sun shone through the large windows above the door, igniting the spacious atrium off of which the various sections of the home radiated.  He heard his father call to him from somewhere in the house, and he stood trying to get his bearings.  Then he saw him gesturing from the hall that led to the back of the house where the kitchen and the informal rooms were that his mother and father occupied when they were alone.  When he joined them, his father asked if he wanted to sit outside on the patio and have coffee out there.  He agreed, hoping, because of what he wanted to ask, that his mother wouldn’t join them. 

     “So, tell me Harold,” his father said, settling into a cushioned wrought iron chair at the glass-topped umbrellaed table, “what’s so important that it couldn’t wait till the weekend?”

     “Have you heard what happened to Rachel Wier on Monday?”  He had decided that being direct was the best way to begin.

     “Rachel Wier?” he asked, sounding puzzled. 

     “You know, the wife of that guy who owns the old Hanson place.”

     “Ah, him!” he sighed, his displeasure pronounced.  He frowned on his son’s obsession with that man.  “What happened?”

     “She had an accident loadin’ cattle, seems she might be crippled.”

     “So, what’s this got to do with you?”

     “Well, her husband’s let out that he wants to get off the place, seein’ she’s in such a bad way.”

     “And you think this is your chance to get that pasture?”

     “Long and short of it.  It’s not worth much.”

     “No, it’s not.  And that should be the end of it.  Why the hell do you care, Harold?  It’s not like you to be doin’ favors for anybody.  What the hell’r you gonna do with that place?  You need it like you need a hole in your head.”

     His irritation had gotten the better of him, so Harold sat back to let his father calm down.  He sipped the coffee he had carried out and put on the table.  His mother following them out had put a plate of cookies and a bowl filled with grapes on the table.  He plucked a grape and tossed it into his mouth.  His father reached for a cookie.  They sat in silence, munching.

     “Uncle Guy let those fifty acres go, dad,” he said, trying to explain what he didn’t understand himself.  “It’s like there’s this hole in my side, which I don’t need.  A hole which isn’t gonna heal unless I get them back.”  He thought about that and nodded his head, continuing.  “I need them to make the place whole again.  You know what I mean?  Whole?” he said, gesturing with his hands to make a circle.

     “No.  I don’t know what you mean.  Whole?  Christ, son, you’re farming thirty-five hundred acres.  Concentrate on that, make that work for you.  That’s what’s whole.”

     “Listen, dad, that Jesse Wier’s not gonna sell to me because he probably blames me for what happened to Rachel.  There’s grudge shit goin’ on.”

     “You mean because of our buying the Catlins’ locker?”

     “Sure.”

     “Well, that was spite work, Harold.  You know it.  I did what you wanted about that, but I never approved.  Well, so she’s paid for it.  Take my advice, Harold, leave well enough alone and forget about the Wiers.”

     “Just a call from you to Uncle Guy should do it, dad. He listens to you, and he knows everybody.  He can make it happen.  All he’s gotta do is put out the word.”

     “I’ve got things to do, now, people to see,” he said, getting up.  “I’ll think about it.  Meantime, go tend to your own affairs and leave the Wiers alone.” 

     Harold got up, too.  “Get back to me, dad.  Tonight.  Maybe by tomorrow or the next day, we can put all this behind us.”

     “Us?” his father retorted.  “It’s got nothing to do with me, Harold.  If it did, it’d be behind us already.”

     He reached for his son’s shoulder, gave it a shake, and went back inside.  Harold stood there feeling ambiguous, a sense of hopefulness beneath which a pall of darkness seemed to flow.  By now, all the Cooks knew about his visit to the hospital. 

Everything went from bad to worse for Harold Gambihier.  It wasn’t enough that he had gone to the hospital to say what he said, but when he returned after his visit to his father, instead of taking his father’s advice and tending to his own affairs, he threatened the general peace of Brookings County by telling everyone he saw in the next few days that he would get what was rightfully his, and watch out to anybody who got in his way.  The Cooks were outraged.  Nothing in their generations of living on the land provoked their sense of injustice as this behavior of Harold Gambihier.  Even Harold’s uncle was offended.

     On the Saturday following the surgery, Jesse sat beside Rachel, holding her hand as the nurse gently folded the sheet off her.  The doctor began to probe her feet with a long pin.  He began at the toes and pricked the skin of the top of her foot till he reached the ankle.  Rachel lay glumly, staring at the ceiling, as the doctor asked her to.  When he probed above the ankle, Rachel shouted! 

     “Do it again,” she said, her mouth wrinkled into a tight-lipped smile, a tear forming in her left eye and running into the hair at her temple. 

     The doctor pricked again in the same spot, and Rachel shouted once more.  Then he repeated the procedure on her other foot, and the feeling was returning there as well.

     “This is excellent news.  We’re not out of the woods yet, but I’m hopeful,” he told them.  “We wouldn’t expect to see this progress so soon.  That vertebra has to heal before we can begin doing any real testing, and of course no therapy until then.  But the fact that she has any sensation at all is excellent.” 

     After the doctor left, Rachel was covered and tucked in again by the nurse, who told Jesse she needed to sleep.  He left the hospital feeling for the first time that week that life was good, that things might just work out.  All their work and all their plans and all their dreams did not mean nothing.  When he thought how that tear dripped from Rachel’s eye when she felt the pin, his own tears started to flow.  He got in the Cavalier and drove to the farm, where his mother was tending the kids.  He couldn’t wait to tell them the news.

     He turned off Route 14 onto the gravel road that crossed the railroad tracks before intersecting the dirt lane that ran to his house.  He drove slowly because of the washboarding on the lane, which made the little Cavalier tremble so badly he was afraid it would fall apart.  He didn’t worry in his pickup, but the Cavalier wasn’t built to take that shaking.  He patiently urged the little car at five miles an hour up the lane.  Before he reached the compound, however, he noticed Harold’s pickup on the gravel road.  “What the hell is he doing up there?” Jesse thought, scanning the fences along the newly planted fields on either side of the road but not seeing Harold anywhere. 

     He parked beside the house, but instead of going in, he went round the house towards the barn.  He wanted to look in on the cattle, but he also wanted to see if Harold had gone up along the back fence of the pasture.  The cattle were peaceful.  He had seventeen calves this spring, which meant he was nearing his goal.  He would be able to market ten as he did this year and keep seven heifers back to make forty-five in all.  Next spring he would reach his goal of fifty head, and he would then be able to market perhaps twenty animals.  Even after expenses, that would be good income.  Surveying the pasture and the fields around it, however, he saw no sign of Harold.  He returned to the house, feeling uneasy over whatever Harold was up to.

     Alva had come out looking for him, worried over the three phone calls she had gotten while Jesse was at the hospital.  People had been hearing Harold’s threats and calling to alert Jesse.  A mood hung over the area, a hush, as though people were holding their breaths in expectation of they did not know what.  As she turned the corner of the house, she saw him coming from the barn and stopped where she was, waiting for him.  Jesse had a smile on his face, and she was gladdened by it, lifted from the mood caused by the gossip.

     “Good news,” he said as he neared.

     “Lord, we all need some good news about now,” she responded.

     “Looks good for Rachel,” he said, coming up and, taking her arm, turning her around.  They walked side by side toward the door.

     “The doctor did some pokin’ at Rachel’s feet with a pin, you know how they do,” he said cheerfully.  “And Rachel screamed!”

     “Really? Oh, my God!”

     “Yes,” he said as they reached the door.  “She’s got feelin’ down to her ankles, both legs.  The doctor said he didn’t expect it so soon and that it was a good sign.”

     Before they went in, he turned to scan the pole barn and the field beside the house and the garden all seeded and planted, the soil still loose and black from the tilling. 

     “Maybe,” he said, looking then at his mother, “maybe I won’t move into town just yet.”

     “Maybe,” she responded, “you won’t have to move at all.”

     They heard and saw a car turning off the road onto the long drive up to the house, and recognizing Terry Cook’s black Grand Prix, they waited.  He pulled up beside Jesse’s Cavalier and got out.

     “You just get back from the hospital?” he asked Jesse as he came round the back of the car.

     “Yea, good news up there, Terry.  I’m just goin’ in to call around.”

     “Bad news here, Jesse,” he said, joining them.  “Let’s go on in and I’ll tell you about it.  What about Rachel?” he said as they kicked off their boots.  Jesse told him the good news.

     While Alva began putting a plate of sandwiches together and Jesse settled the kids into their places at the table, Terry settled the mystery of Harold’s pickup out on the road.

     “Uncle Jim and Aunt Eve were comin’ home from Brookings this morning and saw Harold pull off 14 headin’ here, Jesse.  That was enough for Uncle Jim, what with Harold poppin’ off these last few days about how nobody better get in his way buyin’ your place or else.  ‘Harold’s got to go,’ he said to Aunt Eve.  So when they got home, he called my father and Uncle Josh and told them about seein’ Harold headin’ to your place.  That was the last straw.”

     Alva brought the sandwiches to the table and fetched a couple of cans of pop from the fridge.  She cut up one sandwich for Ruth and Chris and poured them a half of a glass of milk each.  Jesse and Terry helped themselves, and Alva sat next to her son at the table.

     “What’d they do?” she asked.  “I’ve been here since Jesse went to the hospital this morning.  I sure didn’t hear or see anything.”

     “Well, they came up the road behind Harold’s pickup and saw him at the back fence of the pasture, lookin’ at the place.  So they all three went out there to ask him what he thought he was doin’.  My father was gonna tell him that if you ended up sellin’, Jesse, he was gonna buy the place and that he, Harold, could just get over it, because he was never gonna own those fifty acres.  But he never got the chance.  Harold saw them comin’, and I guess he could tell they had somethin’ on their minds he didn’t want to hear, so he ran across the fields towards his own place.”

     “Yuck,” Alva said.  “His boots must’ve weighed fifty pounds a piece by the time he crossed those fields.”

     Chuckling, Terry went on, “They didn’t go after him, as you can guess.  But they did drive round to his place and waited for him there.  But when he got near and saw them, he ran across to the shelterbelt and hid among the trees and brush in there and wouldn’t come out.  So dad and the uncles, they left a note on his door.”

     “What’d it say?” Jesse asked, amused by the story and feeling lighthearted because of Rachel’s getting feeling back in her legs.

     “Dad wrote it.  What he said was, ‘Harold, you dumb ass, you ain’t goin’ to get those fifty acres, even if Jesse sells, because if he sells, I’m buyin’.  Give it up or get out yourself.’  Then they all got in dad’s car and took off, honking the horn and waving their arms out the windows.”

     “That doesn’t sound like bad news to me,” Jesse said, laughing.  “Just the opposite.  Harold’s gettin’ a come uppance sounds like good news.”

     “That’s not the whole of it, and I’m here to warn you ‘bout what might just happen at the end of all this.”

Terry told what he knew.  Later in the morning, after Terry’s father returned home, Harold senior had called.  He told Eli Cook that however much he tried to check his son’s obsession, Harold just got worse and worse.  He had gotten a call from him a while ago.  Harold ranted on the phone about Jesse stealing a part of his farm and that now he was never going to get it back, no matter what he did.  All the Cooks were conspiring against him, he said.  He, Harold senior, had to resort to shouting over his son’s ranting to get a word in, but his son wouldn’t listen.  Harold’s gone off, he said, to do something everyone was going to regret, and he was calling to warn them.

     “Wheeew,” Jesse whistled.  “That guy’s nuts.  Do you think he’d come here?”

     “I expect him to,” Terry said, gesturing toward the road with his head.  “He’s got reason.  He left his pickup on the road.”

     “Yea, I saw it when I pulled in.  I went out to the barn to look around.  Spooked me then, spooks me now.”

     Jesse got up and went to the closet in the little downstairs bedroom he and Rachel had turned into their office.  A clean desk with a laptop and printer, a rocker in the corner, a file cabinet against the one wall, a round rope rug on the floor, the room was neat and tidy, the way Rachel had left it before the accident.  Jesse hadn’t been in it since the Saturday before Memorial Day.  He pulled open the closet door and reached in to grab the handle of a gun case.  Pulling it out, he put it on the desk and unzipped it, taking out the old Marlin 30.30 that once belonged to his father and which he had fired only once at a fox that had gotten to Rachel’s chickens when they first came to the farm.  He had missed it, firing three shots as it bounded over the pasture.  His ears rang, and that’s what he remembered when he held it in both hands.  He fished on the shelf of the closet for the box of shells, grabbed it, and took the rifle and the shells into the kitchen.

     “Don’t be loading that, now,” Terry said.

     “Jesse!” his mother gasped.  “That’s overreacting!  Oh, oh,” she moaned, “this is going too far, going crazy too far.”

     “I’m just checkin’ it out,” Jesse tried to reassure them. 

     Little Ruth’s eyes grew round when she saw the rifle and heard the alarm in her grandmother’s voice, and she started to whimper, adding her voice to the dark mood settling on them.

     “I want to have it handy in case I need it, that’s all.”

     He checked the lever action of the rifle, clicked the hammer down gently with his thumb, and slid four shells into the magazine, leaving the chamber empty.  He checked the safety and placed the rifle in the closet at the entry of the house.

     “Out of the way,” he said, “but near at hand.  I don’t know what Harold’s up to.  Probably, even he doesn’t know.  But if he shows up in anything like the mood his father described, I want to be prepared.”

     He rejoined the others at the table, leaned over and pecked Ruth on the forehead to quiet her simpering, ruffled Chris’ hair as he stepped round the boy’s chair, and sat down next to his mother. 

     “You goin’ back to the hospital?” Terry asked.

     “After a while,” Jesse responded.  “They wanted Rachel to sleep when I left about an hour ago.  I’ll let her sleep another hour.”

     “Well, I expect I should hang around if you’re goin’ back.”

     “I don’t want to be left alone with Ruth and Chris,” Alva said.  “Terry, thanks.  I don’t know what I’d do if he came by.  I’d be so scared after all this talk.”

     She had reached across the table and patted the back of Terry’s hand.

     “I wouldn’t leave you alone, Aunt Alva,” he said smiling.  “Besides, Gina’s goin’ up to see Rachel this afternoon, too.  Don’t want too many of us at one time, it’s such a tiny room.

When Jesse walked into the room, Gina was already there sitting beside Rachel and holding her hand.  Rachel was in a good mood, laughing as she lay on her back wobbling her two feet from side to side.  Gina was beaming.  Jesse bent over and kissed her lightly on the lips.

     “Look!” Rachel said as she flopped her feet from side to side, her pale cheeks flushed with emotion.

     “I can see,” Jesse said, smiling with gladness. 

     He sat beside her on the chair in front of the little night table on which an ivory-colored phone sat and told her that Ruth and Chris were fine, and that Terry was with them and Alva at the house.

     “I’m gonna be ok, Jesse,” Rachel said, “and I’m going home when I leave this place.”

     That settled it in her mind.  They were not going to sell and leave the farm.  She looked into Jesse’s face, searching for a sign of that stubbornness she both admired and fretted about in him.  When he made up his mind to do a thing, she couldn’t change it, no matter how she reasoned.  But he smiled and nodded, leaving her feeling assured.

     He had not been there half an hour when his cell phone rang.  He fished it out of its holster on his belt and rose from the chair as he flicked it on.  He walked to the door of the room as he put it to his ear.  It was Harold.  He felt a sudden queasiness at the sound of the voice saying hello, at the sound of what he couldn’t identify in it, the tones both of anger and grief that made the back of his neck tingle with alarm.

     “I’m at your house.  I’m here, Jesse.  Ruth and Chris and your mother.  Here, talk to her.  She’ll tell you.”

     There was a moment of silence before he heard his mother’s voice.

     “Terry, Terry, he’s done something to Terry,” she sobbed hurriedly into the phone.

     He heard Harold’s voice imperatively shoot at her, “Tell him, tell him, or else!”

     “He’s locking us in the office.  Terry’s outside, lying in the dirt.  I heard a gunshot, oh, Jesse….”  He could hear the phone being yanked from her hand then and Ruth and Chris crying fearfully.

     “This is what you’re gonna do, Jesse.  Everything’ll be all right if you do it.  Go to that lawyer right now, get him to write up a transfer of deed and bill of sale for the pasture.  Then you come here.  We sign everything and it’s all over.  Do that and it’s all over.  Do that or else, Jesse Wier!”

     Harold had rasped his scheme into the phone, his voice constricted by the intensity of the emotions that drove him.  Jesse had said nothing.  He stood transfixed in the doorway with the phone to his ear.  When Harold rang off, he still stood with the phone to his ear, dazed. 

     “What is it?” he heard Rachel say, sounding alarmed.  He knew he was betraying what he didn’t want her to know.  He turned and said, “Got to tend to something,” and stepped into the hall, turning towards the elevators.  As he walked, he flipped up the cell phone and dialed 911.  He told the dispatcher what Harold had done, that he feared for Terry, and that he was heading to the farm.  She told him not to go there but to come to the police office in town.  He told her he had no choice, he had to go.  She said the police would get there as soon as they could.  When he hung up, he stepped into the elevator.  The police had to come from Brookings and would take time to get to the farm.  He, too, was coming from Brookings, but the hospital was closer, and he had the advantage of getting a quicker start.  He should have a good fifteen minutes on the police.  Fifteen minutes to deal with Harold. 

     He raced his little Cavalier over the washboarded dirt road, the car vibrating almost out of control, leaving a dust trail behind him a quarter of a mile long.  As he approached the house, he could see Terry lying on the ground in front of the door.  He saw then the door pulled open and Harold lean out.  He pulled to a stop just at the end of the long drive, about a hundred feet from the house. 

As he got out of the car, Harold shouted something he couldn’t make out.  The car faced the house so that its open door shielded most of Jesse’s body from Harold’s view, only his feet below and his shoulders and head above showing.  Harold, looking back into the house, turned again to him.

     “You didn’t go to the lawyer, don’t have the papers, do you?”

     His voice thick with rage, his face distorted, he pulled himself back into the house and slammed the door shut.  Jesse stepped around the car door and raced to Terry.  He was lying face down in the gravel.  Jesse knelt beside him and lifted his shoulder to look at his face.  He couldn’t tell if he was breathing, and there was blood under him.  Jesse looked for the wound, pulling him over onto his back.  There was a wound at the top of his chest just to the right of his chin.  The blood had stopped flowing. 

     “Terry,” he said, shaking him gently.  “Terry.”

     There was no response.  Jesse felt a rage coming over him he had never felt before.  On his knees beside the still body of his cousin, he began to tremble from it.  He was unable to move.  The door pulled open again, and he looked up at it.  His mother stood there, her face twisted in fear.  Then he saw her being pushed from behind till she was half out the door.  Harold had one hand on her shoulder, and with the other hand he held a gun to her head.

     “You’re goin’ back to town, Jesse, and get those papers like I said, or that’s gonna happen to your mother,” he said, gesturing towards Terry. 

     Just then Harold looked up over the newly-ploughed fields in front of the house.  His face changed to a snarl, and then to a look of confusion and fear.  Jesse turned involuntarily, but it was with a mixed feeling of relief and anxiety he saw what terrified Harold, a file of four police cars turning off the road towards the house.  Jesse, still on his knees beside Terry, turned back to Harold. 

     “It’s over, Harold, it’s over.  Let go of her.”

     Then they heard the sound of an ambulance trailing the police cars.

     “No, I’m not lettin’ this end,” Harold shouted above the siren.  “You go get those papers first, Wier, then it ends.”

     When he saw the police cars turning into the drive, Harold instinctively tried to hide the gun by putting it behind his back.  He reflexively gripped Alva’s shoulder harder, pulling her close to him.  She screamed from the pain and tried to twist away from him, forcing him to put the gun to her head again, which made her stand still.  As the ambulance turned into the drive, he pulled her back into the house and shut the door.   

     The police drove around the Cavalier and positioned their cars strategically at the front and sides of the house toward the rear, to have a view of the back.  They left space for the ambulance to drive up to Jesse kneeling beside his cousin.  The EMTs rushed to his side.  They did a quick assessment, lifted Terry onto a stretcher, rolled him to the back of the ambulance, slid him in, closed the doors, and raced away.  Jesse breathed in relief when he heard the one EMT say, “Alive.”

     Jesse rose as a policeman came to him. 

     “He’s got my mother and my two kids with him,” he said, unable to control his shaking, looking at the gravel where Terry’s blood had pooled.  At the hospital when he received Harold’s call, he felt no terror at Harold’s threat, not believing he really meant to, or even had it in him to harm his family.  That Harold would actually shoot his cousin seemed nightmarish.  When his mother sobbed that Terry was lying in the dirt, he assumed Harold had merely punched him, perhaps firing his gun to frighten everybody into believing he meant business.  Now, looking at Terry’s blood, his stomach churned in fear.

     The officer took off his sunglasses and scanned the house and yard on either side.  His face showed no alarm, no sense of urgency, no emotion, even, calming Jesse enough for him to go on. 

     “He’s got a gun.  He’s threatening to shoot my mother if I don’t do what he wants,” he said breathlessly.

     The policeman didn’t seem interested in what Harold wanted.  He looked at Jesse unemotionally, continuing to scan the front of the house, from the top of the roof to the sliding doors on the patio.  The policeman’s calm had its effect on Jesse. 

     “What’re we gonna do?” he said meekly.

     “You’re going to go back to your car and stay there,” the policeman said, pointing to the drive.

     Two officers now approached, and as Jesse backed away from the house, a third policeman joined him, putting a hand on his shoulder, less to guide him than to comfort him.  One of the two officers got into the nearest police car and pulled it close to the house, right over the spot where Terry had been lying.  Then the three assembled behind the car and one raised a megaphone and began to call on Harold to open the door.  Harold didn’t answer. 

     When Jesse neared his Cavalier, he reached on impulse for his phone, flipped it open and began cycling through its directory, not for anyone in particular but for someone he could talk to, to unburden himself.  When he saw Harold Gambihier senior’s number, almost instinctively he pressed call.  It took four rings.  Jesse spoke urgently, pleadingly, unhaltingly, so that Harold senior, at first gasping “No, no, the idiot!” became silent and listened to Jesse’s telling of finding Terry in front of the house, of Harold’s holding the gun to Alva’s head, of the children’s voices on the phone filled with fear, of the ambulance, of the policemen behind their car in front of the house.  Harold senior listened in silence to Jesse’s unburdening.  And when it was over, they listened to each other’s silence.  Then Jesse heard his phone go dead. 

     The policemen were patient behind their car.  They called out to Harold on the megaphone, assuring him they only wanted to talk, encouraging him not to do anything rash, saying that so far he has done nothing that couldn’t be undone, that it could all end with no harm to anybody.  But Harold wasn’t answering.  The police tried calling him on the house phone, but he wouldn’t answer that, either.  When they tried Harold’s cell phone number, they found it was busy.

     They had all gone silent behind the police car.  Jesse stood beside the Cavalier alone now.  The afternoon was waning, and the shadows of the trees at the side of the drive darkened Jesse and the little car.  Robins and grackles winged over the fences and settled into the shelter belt, a dove perched on the power line leading to the house.  The land seemed to hush in the slanting light and go still when the sound of a shot rang out from inside the house.

There were two people to visit in the hospital now.  Rachel began to get enough sensation in her feet that her doctor pronounced her essentially healed and said that she only needed time before she would be up and ready for therapy.  Terry was healing rapidly and would be out in another day. 

     He sat in a wheelchair beside Rachel’s bed wearing his own robe Gina had brought from home over his hospital gown.  Jesse had been explaining what was found at the inquest, and this caused them all to fall silent.  The question they pondered was why Harold killed himself instead of giving himself up.  Their discussion centered on the pasture and what it could have meant to Harold to drive him to such extremes.  The room was tiny, so that to make room for Terry’s wheelchair, Jesse and Gina had to sit on the one side of the bed.  Rachel’s feet were uncharacteristically still.

     “He had so much,” Rachel offered, “and so much ahead of him.  Why did he feel he needed what little bit we had, too?  I don’t understand, won’t ever understand that man.”

     “He thought he could force Jesse to sell, as though that could work,” Terry said.  “What I don’t understand is why he didn’t give it all up when he saw what he brought down on himself.”

     Jesse was silent and thoughtful.  Gina prodded him.

     “All the right is on your side, Jesse.  What’re you thinking?”

     “I’m thinking,” he said, lifting the glass of water off the tray over Rachel’s bed and taking a sip, “why he shot himself.”

     “What’ve you come up with,” Gina urged.

     “At the inquest, the police said that records show Harold used his cell phone twice that afternoon—once for a call he made, and once for a call he received.  The call he made was to me, here at the hospital.  The one he received was from his father.  The timing of that call was immediately before he shot himself.”

     “So, what’re you saying?” Rachel intruded.

     “I’m saying it was Harold senior that drove him to it in the end.”

     Jesse didn’t tell them about his call to Harold senior that afternoon.  According to the timing disclosed at the inquest, Harold senior called his son directly after talking with Jesse.

     “What the old man said to Harold we’ll never know.  But that was what ended it.  How he feels about it, well, we’ll never know that either.  He’ll take it with him, I guess, as we all do our consciences.”

     “Oh, Jesse!” Rachel said.