- “You weren’t protecting me, miss,” Grandpa said. “Not by then. Maybe at first. Maybe when you asked for my ID. But not by the end.”
- He looked at her.
- “By the end,” he said, “you were embarrassed of me.”
- Ashlyn was sobbing.
- Tom handed her a box of tissues.
- “Ashlyn,” Tom said. “I think we need to talk about whether this job is—”
- “No,” Grandpa said.
- Tom looked at him.
- “No, Tommy,” Grandpa said. “Don’t fire her.”
- “Earl, she called security on you. She humiliated you in front of the whole lobby.”
- “I know what she did,” Grandpa said.
- He looked at Ashlyn.
- “Miss,” he said. “Where’d you grow up?”
- “Naperville,” she said. Through the tissues. “Outside Chicago.”
- “Your folks?”
- “My dad’s an orthodontist. My mom does real estate.”
- “You ever been on a farm?”
- She shook her head.
- “Before this job,” she said, “I’d never been west of Rockford.”
- Grandpa nodded.
- “Why’d you come here?” he asked. “To Corwith?”
- Ashlyn wiped her eyes.
- “My boyfriend,” she said. “He got a job at the ethanol plant in Algona. I followed him. I applied at every bank in the county. This was the only one that called me back.”
- She looked at the floor.
- “He broke up with me in August,” she said. “I’m still here because I signed a lease.”
- Grandpa looked at her for a long time.
- “Miss,” he said. “Do you know what’s on my boots?”
- Ashlyn looked up.
- “Mud,” she said.
- “Where from?”
- “I don’t know.”
- “The north field,” Grandpa said. “Section nineteen. Doyle Township. My great-grandfather broke that sod with a team of mules in 1882.”
- He looked down at his boots.
- “That mud,” he said, “grew two hundred and four bushels of corn an acre this year. That corn’s going to the elevator in Corwith. And then to the ethanol plant in Algona. Where your boyfriend works.”
- He looked at her.
- “And then it’s going in somebody’s gas tank,” he said. “Maybe in Naperville.”
- “I wear these boots into this bank,” Grandpa said, “because this bank was built on that mud.”
- He tapped his boot on Tom’s carpet.
- “Every loan this bank ever made,” he said. “Every mortgage. Every car loan. Every dollar in that vault. It came out of the ground. Out of fields like mine. Out of farmers in muddy boots.”
- He looked at Ashlyn.
- “You see mud on your new carpet,” he said. “And you think it’s dirt.”
- He shook his head.
- “Miss,” he said. “That’s not dirt.”
- “That’s the bank.”
- Nobody said anything for a long time.
- Then Ashlyn stood up.
- She walked out of the office.
- I thought she was leaving. Quitting. Going back to Naperville.
- She came back two minutes later.
- With a bucket. And a brush. And a spray bottle.
- From the janitor’s closet.
- She got down on her knees.
- On the gray carpet. In the lobby.
- In her white blouse and her perfect pink nails.
- She started scrubbing.
- The mud prints. From the front door to window three.
- Tom stood up.
- “Ashlyn,” he said through the glass. “You don’t have to do that. We have a cleaning service.”
- Grandpa put his hand on Tom’s arm.
- “Let her,” he said quietly.
- We watched through the glass wall.
- She scrubbed every print. All fourteen of them.
- It took her twenty minutes.
- Her nails broke. Three of them. I saw her look at them. Then she kept scrubbing.
- When she was done, she came back into the office.
- She stood in the doorway. Holding the bucket. Her knees wet. Her blouse stained.
- “Mr. Doyle,” she said. “I’m sorry I called it dirt.”
- Grandpa looked at her.
- “You didn’t call it dirt,” he said. “You thought it.”
- “I’m sorry I thought it,” Ashlyn said.
- Grandpa stood up.
- He put his cap on.
- He picked up the envelope with the two thousand dollars.
- He put it in the bib pocket of his overalls.
- He walked to the door.
- He stopped in front of Ashlyn.
- “Miss,” he said. “You doing anything Saturday?”
- She stared at him.
- “Saturday?”
- “We’ll have the belt by then,” Grandpa said. “We’ll be back in the north field. Running till dark.”
- He looked at her.
- “You ever ride in a combine?”
- Ashlyn shook her head.
- “Seven a.m.,” Grandpa said. “Doyle place. North of town on County Road R-35. White farmhouse. Red barn. Can’t miss it.”
- He looked at her shoes. Black heels.
- “Wear boots,” he said.
- We drove to Algona.
- Twenty miles. In the rust-colored Ford with the 2019 calendar on the dash.
- Neither of us said anything for the first ten miles.
- Then I said, “Grandpa.”
- “Mm.”
- “Why didn’t you ever tell me? About the bank? About mortgaging the farm? About Valentine’s Day 1986?”
- He drove for a while.
- He looked at the fields going by. Brown and gold. Half harvested. Combines in the distance. Dust clouds.
- “Because it wasn’t about me,” he said.
- “It was,” I said. “It was all about you. You saved the bank. You saved the town.”
- He shook his head.
- “Mrs. Brekke saved the town,” he said. “With four hundred and twelve dollars in quarters. Arne Thorsen saved the town. He had two hundred dollars to his name and he put in a hundred. The Lutheran church took up a collection. Twelve hundred dollars. The Methodist church matched it.”
- He looked at me.
- “I just went first,” he said.
- “Your grandma made me do it,” he said.
- I looked at him.
- “I didn’t want to,” he said. “Mortgage the farm. I was scared to death. A hundred years. Never a dollar of debt. My daddy would’ve rolled over in his grave.”
- He drove for a while.
- “Your grandma sat me down at the kitchen table,” he said. “February eleventh. The night before. She’d been to the bank that day. She’d seen the line.”
- He swallowed.
- “She said, Earl, what’s the farm for?”
- “I said, It’s for us. For Mike. For the grandkids someday.”
- “She said, If the bank closes, Mike won’t have a town to farm in. There won’t be a co-op. There won’t be a school. There won’t be a church. Everybody’ll sell out and move to Des Moines. What good’s six hundred and forty acres in a ghost town?”
- He shook his head.
- “She said, The farm isn’t the land, Earl. It’s the people around it.”
- He was quiet for a long time.
- “We drove to Omaha the next morning,” he said.
- We got the belt on Thursday.
- Kenny Lindqvist had it overnighted from Moline. He met us at the dealership at seven a.m. He took the two thousand dollars in hundreds and counted it twice.
- “Heard you had a little trouble at the bank, Earl,” Kenny said.
- Grandpa looked at him.
- “Who told you?”
- “Linda Feeney,” Kenny said. “The lady who walked out. She told her sister. Her sister told my wife. It’s all over the county.”
- He handed Grandpa the belt.
- “Linda feels pretty bad,” Kenny said. “Says she didn’t know who you were.”
- Grandpa took the belt.
- “Didn’t matter who I was,” he said.
- We put the belt on Thursday afternoon. It took four hours. Grandpa lay on his back under the feeder house in the dirt. Eighty-four years old. Handing me wrenches.
- The combine started on the first try.
- Ashlyn came on Saturday.
- Seven a.m. Exactly.
- In a little white Honda Civic with Illinois plates. She parked by the barn.
- She got out.
- She was wearing jeans. A flannel shirt. Brand new. The tags still on the sleeve.
- And boots.
- Brand-new Red Wings. Brown leather. The same kind as Grandpa’s. She’d bought them at the Farm & Fleet in Algona on Friday night. They cost two hundred and thirty dollars. She told me later.
- Grandpa was standing by the combine.
- He looked at her boots.
- “Those’ll need breaking in,” he said.
- “I know,” Ashlyn said. “They already hurt.”
- “They’ll hurt for about a month,” Grandpa said. “Then they’ll be the most comfortable thing you ever wore.”
- He climbed up into the cab.
- He looked down at her.
- “Well?” he said. “You coming?”
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