It suddenly struck home to me that, with Arlette officially dead instead of missing, those acres were mine. So two days later I swallowed my pride and went to see Harlan Cotterie.
The man who answered my knock had fared better than I, but that year’s shocks had taken their toll, just the same. He had lost weight, he had lost hair, and his shirt was wrinkled—although not as wrinkled as his face, and the shirt, at least, would iron out. He looked sixty-five instead of forty-five.
“Don’t hit me,” I said when I saw him ball his fists. “Hear me out.”
“I wouldn’t hit a man with only one hand,” he said, “but I’ll thank you to keep it short. And we’ll have to talk out here on the stoop, because you are never going to set foot inside my house again.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I had lost weight myself—plenty—and I was shivering, but the cold air felt good on my stump, and on the invisible hand that still seemed to exist below it. “I want to sell you 100 acres of good land, Harl. The hundred Arlette was so determined to sell to the Farrington Company.”
He smiled at that, and his eyes sparkled in their new deep hollows. “Fallen on hard times, haven’t you? Half your house and half your barn caved in. Hermie Gordon says you’ve got a cow living in there with you.” Hermie Gordon was the rural route mailman, and a notorious gossip.
I named a price so low that Harl’s mouth fell open and his eyebrows shot up. It was then that I noticed a smell wafting out of the neat and well-appointed Cotterie farmhouse that seemed entirely alien to that place: burnt fried food. Sallie Cotterie was apparently not doing the cooking. Once I might have been interested in such a thing, but that time had passed. All I cared about right then was getting shed of the 100 acres. It only seemed right to sell them cheap, since they had cost me so dear.
“That’s pennies on the dollar,” he said. Then, with evident satisfaction: “Arlette would roll in her grave.”
She’s done more than just roll in it, I thought.
“What are you smiling about, Wilf?”
“Nothing. Except for one thing, I don’t care about that land anymore. The one thing I do care about is keeping that god damned Farrington slaughter-mill off it.”
“Even if you lose your own place?” He nodded as if I’d asked a question. “I know about the mortgage you took out. No secrets in a small town.”
“Even if I do,” I agreed. “Take the offer, Harl. You’d be crazy not to. That stream they’ll be filling up with blood and hair and hog intestines—that’s your stream, too.”
“No,” he said.
I stared at him, too surprised to say anything. But again he nodded as if I’d asked a question.
“You think you know what you’ve done to me, but you don’t know all of it. Sallie’s left me. She’s gone to stay with her folks down McCook. She says she may be back, says she’ll think things over, but I don’t think she will be. So that puts you and me in the same old broke wagon, doesn’t it? We’re two men who started the year with wives and are ending it without them. We’re two men who started the year with living children and are ending it with dead ones. The only difference I can see is that I didn’t lose half my house and most of my barn in a storm.” He thought about it. “And I’ve still got both hands. There’s that, I suppose. When it comes to pulling my peter—should I ever feel the urge to—I’d have a choice of which one to use.”
“What… why would she—”
“Oh, use your head. She blames me as well as you for Shannon’s death. She said that if I hadn’t gotten on my high horse and sent Shan away, she’d still be alive and living with Henry at your farm just down the road instead of lying frozen in a box underground. She says she’d have a grandchild. She called me a self-righteous fool, and she’s right.”
I reached for him with my remaining hand. He slapped it away.
“Don’t touch me, Wilf. A single warning on that is all you get.”
I put my hand back at my side.
“One thing I know for sure,” he said. “If I took you up on that offer, tasty as it is, I’d regret it. Because that land is cursed. We may not agree on everything, but I bet we would on that. If you want to sell it, sell it to the bank. You’ll get your mortgage paper back, and some cash besides.”
“They’d just turn around and sell it to Farrington!”
“Tough titty said the kitty” was his final word on it as he closed the door in my face.
On the last day of the year, I drove to Hemingford Home and saw Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank. I told him that I’d decided I could no longer live on the farm. I told him I would like to sell Arlette’s acreage to the bank and use the balance of the proceeds to retire the mortgage. Like Harlan Cotterie, he said no. For a moment or two I just sat in the chair facing his desk, not able to believe what I had heard.
“Why not? That’s good land!”
He told me that he worked for a bank, and a bank was not a real estate agency. He addressed me as Mr. James. My days of being Wilf in that office were over.
“That’s just…” Ridiculous was the word that came to mind, but I didn’t want to risk offending him if there was even a chance he might change his mind. Once I had made the decision to sell the land (and the cow, I would have to find a buyer for Achelois, too, possibly a stranger with a bag of magic beans to trade), the idea had taken hold of me with the force of an obsession. So I kept my voice low and spoke calmly.
“That’s not exactly true, Mr. Stoppenhauser. The bank bought the Rideout place last summer when it came up for auction. The Triple M, as well.”
“Those were different situations. We hold a mortgage on your original 80, and we’re content with that. What you do with that hundred acres of pasturage is of no interest to us.”
“Who’s been in to see you?” I asked, then realized I didn’t have to. “It was Lester, wasn’t it? Cole Farrington’s dogsbody.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Stoppenhauser said, but I saw the flicker in his eyes. “I think your grief and your… your injury… have temporarily damaged your ability to think clearly.”
“Oh no,” I said, and began to laugh. It was a dangerously unbalanced sound, even to my own ears. “I’ve never thought more clearly in my life, sir. He came to see you—him or another, I’m sure Cole Farrington can afford to retain all the shysters he wants—and you made a deal. You c-c-colluded!” I was laughing harder than ever.
“Mr. James, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“Maybe you had it all planned out beforehand,” I said. “Maybe that’s why you were so anxious to talk me into the god damned mortgage in the first place. Or maybe when Lester heard about my son, he saw a golden opportunity to take advantage of my misfortune and came running to you. Maybe he sat right in this chair and said, ‘This is going to work out for both of us, Stoppie—you get the farm, my client gets the land by the crick, and Wilf James can go to Hell.’ Isn’t that pretty much how it went?”
He had pushed a button on his desk, and now the door opened. It was just a little bank, too small to employ a security guard, but the teller who leaned in was a beefy lad. One of the Rohrbacher family, from the look of him; I’d gone to school with his father, and Henry would have gone with his younger sister, Mandy.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Stoppenhauser?” he asked.
“Not if Mr. James leaves now,” he said. “Won’t you see him out, Kevin?”
Kevin came in, and when I was slow to rise, he clamped a hand just above my left elbow. He was dressed like a banker, right down to the suspenders and the bow tie, but it was a farmer’s hand, hard and callused. My still-healing stump gave a warning throb.
“Come along, sir,” he said.
“Don’t pull me,” I said. “It hurts where my hand used to be.”
“Then come along.”
“I went to school with your father. He sat beside me and used to cheat off my paper during Spring Testing Week.”
He pulled me out of the chair where I had once been addressed as Wilf. Good old Wilf, who would be a fool not to take out a mortgage. The chair almost fell over.