I run a dozer for the Kansas Department of Transportation. I’ve done it for twenty-two years, mostly on highway jobs, building road shoulders and cutting ditches and cleaning up after washouts like the one that had just torn through my father’s field. I know dirt the way some people know horses. I know how it moves and how it settles and how water finds every weakness in it, and standing beside Dad that Friday, I knew one thing for certain. That gully could be fixed.
Chapter Three: At the Fence
My sister’s husband, Quentin Ames, farms the ground next door. He’s forty-eight, a big, friendly man with a sunburned neck and a laugh you can hear across a sale barn, and he’s farmed in Chase County his whole life. He married Joanie when they were both twenty-two, and for most of those years he and Dad got along fine. Quentin helped Dad work cattle every spring, and Dad lent Quentin his stock trailer whenever he needed it, which was often.
But Quentin has been running hard the last few years. He rents more land every year, three thousand acres now between his own and what he leases, and he’s bought bigger machinery to cover it. There’s a combine payment, a planter payment, and a new tractor with a cab like an airplane cockpit. Joanie doesn’t talk about money much, but she told me last Christmas, after a glass of wine, that the payments on his equipment came to more than they used to spend on everything in a year.
He came over on Monday morning, three days after the flood. I was at Dad’s place because I’d taken the day off to help him check fence where the water had torn it out along the creek, and we were standing in the yard by the stock tank when Quentin’s pickup came up the lane. He got out and walked over to the yard fence and leaned his forearms on the top wire, the way men do out here when they have something to say and don’t want to come all the way in.
“Leroy,” he said. “Stacy.” He nodded to us both and looked off toward the south hay for a minute, though you couldn’t see it from the yard. “That field’s done, Leroy. I drove by it yesterday. That gully’s going to cost you more to fix than the ground is worth, and it’ll just wash out again the next big rain.”
Dad didn’t say anything. He was standing with both hands on the top of his cane.
“I’ll take the forty off your hands,” Quentin said. “Twelve hundred an acre. Cash. I can have the bank write it up this week, and you won’t have to worry about it anymore.” He smiled, kind of sheepish. “Keep it in the family, you know. Joanie’d like that.”
Twelve hundred an acre is forty-eight thousand dollars. I knew, because I’d looked it up the week before for no reason except curiosity, that good hay ground in Chase County was selling for better than three thousand an acre that spring, and the south hay wasn’t just good ground. Even with a gully in it, it was worth twice what he was offering, maybe more. And I knew why he wanted it. That forty joined his rented ground on the north and the west, and with it, he could farm straight through.
I understood the payments. I understood that he was running scared. I’ve seen what a bad year does to a farmer who’s borrowed heavy. But it didn’t make it right to shop an old man’s field while the mud was still wet.
“I’ll think on it,” Dad said.
Quentin nodded like that was more than he’d hoped for. He tapped the fence wire twice with his knuckles, said he’d call later in the week, and drove off down the lane. Dad watched his truck go, and then he turned and walked slowly back to the house without saying anything to me, and I stood in the yard by the stock tank and felt something cold settle in my stomach.
He’d think on it. That scared me more than the gully did. In fifty years I had never once heard my father say he would think about selling a single acre of that place.
That evening I sat at Dad’s kitchen table while he heated up a can of chili, and I tried to find a way to say it. I could tell him Quentin was lowballing him. I could call Joanie and tell her what her husband had done. I could drive over to Quentin’s shop and have it out with him. But every one of those roads ended with Dad in the middle, watching his children fight over him and his land, feeling like a burden and an old man. Arguing with my sister’s husband would only make Dad feel like the problem. Dirt could answer faster than words.
Chapter Four: The Old Cat
I own an old Caterpillar D6 dozer. I bought it eight years ago at a Butler County sale for twenty-one thousand dollars, a 1979 model with a rebuilt engine and a blade that had moved half the dirt in southern Kansas. I keep it on a lot behind my house in Cottonwood Falls and use it for side work on weekends, cleaning out ponds and pushing up brush piles and building the occasional terrace for farmers who can’t get a contractor to come out for a small job. It’s yellow under all the rust, and it smokes when it starts, and I love it more than any vehicle I’ve ever owned.
Tuesday morning I called my foreman at KDOT and put in for a week of vacation. He asked me if everything was all right, and I told him my dad’s hayfield washed out, and he didn’t ask anything else. He grew up on a farm in Marion County. He said take two weeks if I needed them.
Then I called Bud Kasselman. Bud is sixty-eight and runs a little trucking outfit out of Strong City, hauling grain and cattle and the occasional piece of equipment on an old Peterbilt with a lowboy trailer. He’s known Dad since they were boys at Chase County High School, and he’s hauled my dozer for me a dozen times. I told him what I needed and asked what it would cost.
“Your daddy’s south hay?” Bud said. “The one with the gully?” Word gets around fast in a county with twenty-six hundred people. “I’ll be at your place at sunup.”
He was there at five-forty Tuesday morning with the lowboy hitched and the headlights on. We chained the D6 down in the half-dark, and he hauled it the eleven miles out to Dad’s place with me following in my pickup. When we unloaded it at the edge of the south hay, I asked Bud what I owed him for his diesel. He looked at me like I’d insulted his mother.
“Your daddy pulled my truck out of the creek with his tractor in 1986,” he said. “In a thunderstorm. In the middle of the night. He never took a dime.” He climbed back up in his cab. “I’ll come back for it when you’re done.”
Dad came out of the house about the time Bud’s truck disappeared down the lane. He stood in the yard in his overalls and looked at the dozer sitting at the edge of his field, and then he looked at me.
“Stacy,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing your hayfield,” I said.
He looked at the dozer a long time. “Quentin says it’s not worth fixing.”
“Quentin’s wrong,” I said.
Chapter Five: Alma
Before I started the dozer, I drove into town and picked up Alma Rutledge.
Alma is eighty-eight years old and still lives by herself in a little stone house on Broadway in Cottonwood Falls, three blocks from me. Her husband, Ted, was the county man for the Soil Conservation Service from 1955 until he retired in 1988, back when the government first started paying farmers to build terraces and grass waterways to stop the land from washing down the rivers. Ted Rutledge built half the conservation work in Chase County with his own hands and a transit, and Alma rode along with him on most of it. She knows more about how water moves across these hills than any engineer in Topeka.
I’d called her Monday night and asked if she’d look at the field with me. She said she’d be ready at six-thirty, and she was, sitting on her porch in a canvas jacket and a sun hat with her purse in her lap. I helped her into my pickup and we drove out together, and she didn’t say much on the way except to point out every pond and terrace along the road and tell me who built it and what year.
