Chapter One

“You can always tell a ______, but you can’t tell him much”.  That phrase went through X’s head as he drank his last drop of water.  He was lost in the woods.  Not lost exactly, but at the end of a trail that didn’t seem to continue.  He should turn around.  He knew he should.  But it just gnawed at him to cover ground he’d already covered.  He turned anyway.  After a short, half-hearted walk back up the trail, he turned again, and soon was back where he had started.  He sat down on a horizontal rock and as he considered his (limited) options, his mind began to drift.  Where was that trail?  Where was that trail….where was that Tr…

Where was that tractor?  He had just gone into the trees to do his business, and now he couldn’t find it anywhere?  How could that even be?  Jeremiah looked back the direction he’d come, looked forward to where it would be if it had somehow jumped into gear.  Nothing.  He sat down to think.  To retrace his steps in his mind.  He’d just walked over, done his business, and walked back to here.  There had to be an explanation.  These things didn’t move very fast.  Especially when they hadn’t had a chance to build up a head of steam.  He decided to walk to the dead center of the field, to the top of a slight rise, so that he could look all around.  He slowly followed his footprints, hard to see in the hard ground he hadn’t yet plowed.  And just as he came to the top of the little rise, there it was.  He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself.  Wouldn’t have thought such a small hill could hide something so big.  But he hadn’t been able to find it, and there it was.  Hmph- who’d a thought?

            Jeremiah Book was 45 years old, but to look at him that day, you would’ve sworn he was over 60.  A lifetime in the sun was what had done it.  Working on his father’s farm, now working on his own.  Seemed like he’d been throwing hay up onto wagons since the day he was born.  Maybe he had.  He certainly hadn’t spent his time playing like others his age that he’d heard of.  When he was a younger child, he’d been put out to pasture, to watch the sheep or the cows.  Make sure they didn’t wander into trouble or get attacked by a wolf or bear.  There hadn’t been coyotes around the area back then, although they were starting to make inroads now.  Jeremiah had heard their obscene howls at night while he sat on the porch.  He’d seen a few deer that they felled.  Not like wolves, not like bears.  With their pesky little bites out of everywhere.  And they never finished an animal like a wolf.  That was what Jeremiah hated about them the most.  The waste.  When he shot a deer, he was sure to use as much of it as he could.  He didn’t claim to be a native.  Now those people could really use up every last bit.  But he tanned the hide, and smoked the meat.  There wasn’t a whole lot left at the end, and that he fed most of to the animals.  It showed some sort of moral failing in an animal when it wasted.

            He got back onto the tractor and went through the rather complicated motions that got it started moving again.  The tractor had been a major investment for him, and one he prayed would pay off for his farm and his family.  Chuck was already gone off to the Navy, but Mary-Anne was about to graduate high school, and Jeremiah wanted her to go to one of those new Junior College for Women, if she could pass the tests to get in.  Well, Olive wanted her to.  Jeremiah was too busy working the fields to be able to think about such things.  Though, when he got right down to it, he couldn’t really figure out why, since he sat behind the wheel of first a team of horses and then the tractor all day long.  But that was just the way they did things.  And Olive wanted Mary-Anne to get an education.

            It was a new idea.  And frankly, Jeremiah Book wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.  It wasn’t that he didn’t love Mary-Anne.  Oh, no.  He loved her with every fiber of his being.  But was that what women should be learning? 

Thoughts?  Is that the kind of life the world would give them?  A life of thinking important things?  Maybe one or two women, like Louisa May Alcott or that woman poet from Massachusetts.  Hell, maybe they all thought big thoughts in Massachusetts.  But what about Pennsylvania?  What about Mary-Anne?  The life she likely looked forward to was a life of endless repetition, of cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with cleaning in between, and raising children all through.  Oh, Mary-Anne said she wanted two children now, but what would marriage say?  What would a husband say about having a family so small?  And she’d likely be marrying a farmer just like him.  She and Olive both knew what would most likely be in store for her.  And yet, they persisted in this Jr. College for Women plan!  Ah, well.  What harm was there in dreaming, eh?  He wiped his forehead and shifted the tractor into gear, now that it had a full head of steam ready.  He glanced to his right to follow the line of unplowed grass and dirt, and remembered why he didn’t have time to think thoughts all day- he had to focus.

And his had been a life of focus on work.  Not schoolwork; work work!  Meaning, work done with his hands.  Like an animal, he thought with a touch of bitterness.  Work meant not doing that school stuff that amounted to nothing, but getting something done.  Moving that hay from one end of the barn to the other.  Moving those cows from the field into the barn, and then getting the milk out of them.  Taking a room full of pigs, and turning them into pounds of bacon, pork, and ham.  Salted and smoked so they’d keep through the winter.  That was work.  That was what he had known. 

Still, there was a part of Jeremiah that wanted to rise above drudgery.  There was a part of him that spoke to his mind after supper, when he would sit on the porch and look off into the distance while it was growing dark.  These days it sometimes spoke to him when he read Chuck’s letters from the Navy.  This was why he had taken the chance and bought the tractor.  He was following some distant, whispering hope that there was something more to life than work.  Maybe the tractor would save him and hour every day that he could use to write Chuck a letter back.  Or read a book like Olive always encouraged him to do.  Maybe.  But first he had to learn how to use the dang thing, and for now, that was taking up more of his time than the horses ever had.

As he plowed along, he thought of his father’s farm.  Now that had been a place of work.  No wonder he’d asked Jeremiah to drop out of school.  When Jeremiah thought back to that place with his mature eyes, it was a wonder to him that Pa had let young Jeremiah attend school at all, let alone until the 6^th grade!  He unwittingly let out a small sigh thinking of it.  He was unaware that he echoed almost exactly the one produced by the steam of the tractor.

Olive watched him out the kitchen window as she cooked up roast and fried the potatoes.  She had seen his confused moment, but would never tell him that.  It would only make him mad for her to have seen him so vulnerable.  She too spent a moment thinking about the tractor, and what a risk it had been for them.  But unlike Jeremiah, she saw it as a stepping stone.  To a better future.  Whereas her husband saw it saving time and getting the necessary work done faster, Olive Book pictured it increasing their harvest.  And when there was more in the corn-crib, there was more in the wallet, as her father had always said.  Chuck was already out at sea both literally and figuratively.  He had gone off to the Navy and he was on his own.  He didn’t need them.  But Mary-Anne was another story, and a woman’s story that Olive could relate to better.

She was a smart girl.  Olive could see that.  And she knew Jeremiah could see it too.  A girl who deserved better than the life of a farm wife.  Better than constant cooking and cleaning.  Child-raising was non-negotiable.  She couldn’t get away from that.  But a girl with an education could at least escape into her mind.  Or so Olive imagined.  She herself had only made it to the fifth grade.  Enough to learn reading and writing.  She’d read a few nice stories, learned to do multiplication.   It got by on the farm.  But she wanted more for her daughter.

For the early part of Mary-Anne’s life, Olive hadn’t known what to think about the girl.  From the point of view of her mind, anyway.  Women simply didn’t go to school after high school.  It just wasn’t done.  But in the last few years, these new Junior Colleges had been popping up around the state.  Colleges for women, they called them.  A girl could go there and learn how to take care of the farm better, learn some science to understand how seeds grow and how cows mate.  She could learn about what good foods were, too.  And maybe she could also read some of those stories Olive’s friends sometimes talked about- those stories by women from Massachusetts who actually made a living for themselves.  Without a husband!  She couldn’t ever remember the names, but was taken by the notion.  Also, perhaps that way, Mary-Anne wouldn’t be trapped at home quite as much.  A college-educated girl would be likely to be invited to many sewing circles around the county to talk about what she’d learned.

But how could she get Jeremiah to agree to it?  She was well aware of how tight money was.  Well aware of how much they really needed the girl right here on the farm, needed the extra pair of hands.  But was it Mary-Anne’s hands they really needed?  She couldn’t lift heavy things.  She certainly didn’t know how to run the new tractor and from what Jeremiah had told her, Olive didn’t want her daughter going anywhere near the thing.  What they needed was another man around the place.  Someone to help Jeremiah so that he could concentrate on plowing and planting and harvesting.

Well, who was she kidding?  They needed Chuck is who they needed.  There had been a gaping hole left when he went to the Service.  The Jeremiahe as when the coal miners over on the other side of the county used Nobel’s dynamite to blow the side of a hill off.  She knew he’d made the right choice.  Deep inside she knew.  But why did he want to go so far away?  The Navy?  To go on a ship?  To the other side of the world?  Every part of the thought process was foreign to her.  Olive had never been further outside of Pennsylvania than Ohio and didn’t see any reason at all to go even that far.  But maybe that’s what happened when children got further into school.  Chuck had graduated from high school and gone without hesitation into the Navy.  Had the plan in his mind the whole time.  But if that was true, how was he her son?  Her with no desire to go anywhere, and Chuck chomping at the bit to get as far away from home as the biggest warships could take him?  Was she making a mistake encouraging her daughter to get an education?

It was then that she saw him coming.  Saw Jeremiah running across the field faster than he was in the habit of running.  And yet, he turned sideways every twenty feet or so, as if to shield his hand.  Oh, Great God in Heaven- his hand!, she thought as she saw the blood beginning to seep through the fingers of his other hand.

He came flying through the door, flinging it open with his uninjured yet bloodsoaked hand, leaving behind so much blood on the screen door that despite all the scrubbing Olive applied to it over the years to come, she would never see it totally free of the stain.

“My finger!  That damned tractor took off my damned finger!” Jeremiah screamed, eyes wild.  “Get the wagon ready!”  Olive screamed for Mary-Anne and as Jeremiah washed off the initial blood, she saw there was no point in sending the girl to look for a severed digit.  It was there- sort of.  Crushed beyond recognition, exactly.  But enough… matter was there, that she could see there was nothing left in the field that could be reattached.  “You get the horses, I’ll get the straps ready!  Jeremiah, we’ll be waiting right outside the door.  We have to hurry, Honey!”

They quickly prepared the wagon, and by the time any of them knew what was happening, they were off at a quick gallop.  She didn’t want the horses to wear out before they got to the county hospital, but wanted to make haste at the Jeremiahe time.  Jeremiah laid in the back.  He was losing a bit of blood.  Enough that he would be weak for some time.  Certainly enough so that he was no help getting to the hospital that day.  No, Olive and Mary-Anne had to take care of it.  And so they did.

The doctors took their time about it, but they did what Olive had suspected from the moment at the kitchen sink next to the blood splashed roast and potatoes (which, needless to say, never did get eaten.  Not by the family, anyway.  The dogs loved it)- they simply cut the finger off cleanly and stitched up the end.  There was nothing else to be done.  The bones had been crushed and the skin couldn’t grow without a foundation on which to build.  It was the ring finger on  Jeremiah’s left hand.  His wedding ring had disappeared into the machine, never to be seen again.

In truth, the giant belt of the tractor that had done the damage had flung the ring far away into the plowed dirt of the field.  Many, many years later, it would be found by a hobbyist with a metal detector who didn’t suspect its history in the least, or even care.  It would be melted down for the gold it was made of.