Chapter 5 - Blood and Soil
Jeff pulled the truck into the gravel parking lot of the county bank, shifted into park, and let the engine idle. The air conditioner blew a weak stream of lukewarm air across our faces. He picked up the phone, his voice cold and steady in a way I had rarely heard in our fourteen years of marriage.
""Wayne, listen to me very carefully,"" Jeff said, speaking directly into the receiver. ""Last summer, Caleb and Hannah worked six days a week at the stand. They earned twenty-four hundred dollars. Ma took every cent out of their coffee tin and paid off Hartley Feed without telling them. When Sarah confronted her, Ma told her the kids were nothing more than field hands who owed her for room and board. Did she mention that part of the story between her sobs?""
A heavy silence hung on the other end of the line. Wayne was an arrogant man, quick to posture and bark, but he wasn't entirely stupid. He knew his mother’s ruthless streak just as well as we did—he had just spent his life profiting from it rather than suffering under it.
""She... she told me the kids helped out a little and expected a fortune,"" Wayne muttered, his bluster losing its sharp edge. ""She said you were jealous because her stand had the better highway location.""
""You know what our kids are like, Wayne,"" Jeff said, his voice tightening. ""Caleb broke his finger hauling melon crates for you two years ago and finished the workday before he told anyone it hurt. They aren't lazy, and they aren't liars. Ma stole from them. Plain and simple. We let it slide all winter for the sake of peace, but we grew our own crop this spring, and we sold it in town. If Ma’s feelings are hurt because folks found out what she did, that’s between her and her conscience. Don't you ever call my phone screaming about respect again until you teach your own mother what it means.""
Jeff hung up before Wayne could muster a response. He sat there for a long moment, staring at the bank's brick facade, his chest heaving slightly. It was the first time in his life he had ever hung up on his older brother. It was the first time he had openly rejected the family doctrine that Evelyn Dean was an untouchable saint whose whims superseded basic decency.
We walked into First National Bank together. The teller, a young woman named Brenda whose father bought corn from us earlier that morning, greeted the kids by name. She brought out two blue savings passbooks. Hannah and Caleb watched in utter awe as their names were printed in crisp black ink across the top of the pages, followed by their opening deposits: five hundred and twenty-five dollars each.
""Hold onto those,"" Brenda smiled, handing the little booklets across the marble counter. ""That’s your sweat and sunshine in those books.""
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As we walked out into the dazzling afternoon sun, the sense of victory was palpable, but beneath it lay the grim knowledge that a cornered snake is at its most dangerous. Evelyn Dean had been publicly humiliated in the town she had ruled socially for half a century. She was not the kind of woman who retreated to tend her garden in quiet shame. By the time we reached our dirt driveway, the first signs of her retaliation were already waiting for us.
A white county truck was parked near our garden shed. A man in a khaki uniform with a clipboard was standing near our rows of corn, carefully pacing out the distance between our crops and the property line.
