Then Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve, decided to break inflation.
He broke it the way you break something that has gotten too large and too fast: by tightening the thing that was feeding it. Interest rates climbed past 12% in 1979, past 15% in 1980, past 18%. By 1981, the prime rate touched 21 and a half percent, which is a number that sounds abstract until you carry it against a land note or an operating loan and do the arithmetic at your kitchen table and feel the arithmetic do something to the air in the room.
Commodity prices fell the same years the rates climbed. Cotton dropped. Grain dropped. The export boom that had made the 1970s feel like a permanent condition turned out to have been a condition with an end date, the way most booms do. The Soviet grain embargo of 1980 didn't help. Markets that had been open tightened. Prices that had been high found their natural floor, and the floor was lower than most men had planned for when they were signing the notes.
And this is the part that matters: the men who had borrowed against rising land values to buy more land were now holding land that was falling in value while paying interest rates that had no ceiling anyone could see. The leverage that had felt like a tool in the 1970s revealed itself in the 1980s as what it had always actually been: a claim, a prior claim, senior to yours, held by someone else on everything you thought you owned.
Earl Pruitt watched it happen from the outside. That is not a comfortable place to watch from. I want you to understand that. There is nothing pleasant about watching your neighbors go under. These were men he had known his whole life, men he sat near at the co-op, men whose children went to school with his children, men who had farmed this same flat country under the same flat sky for the same reason he had, which was because it was what they knew and who they were.
He watched Donnie Calvert, who farmed 420 acres east of Slaton and had taken on a grain elevator partnership in 1978, lose the partnership in 1982 and come out of it with 200 acres, a 10-year-old tractor, and a forehead that had aged beyond his years. Donnie didn't complain about it publicly. He just quietly got smaller, the way a man gets smaller when something large has been taken from him and he is trying to determine what size he actually is without it.
He watched three families on the north end of the county sell equipment at distressed prices to meet operating loan payments—selling at the worst possible time, into a market flooded with other men selling for the same reason, which meant the prices were as low as they were ever going to be, and the men selling knew it and sold anyway because the alternative was worse.
And he watched Gene Forbes.
Gene Forbes, who had farmed 2,200 acres north of Lubbock in 1976 and had borrowed heavily through the late '70s to push that number toward 3,000, began selling in 1983. Not voluntarily, exactly, but in the way that becomes voluntary when the bank has made the alternative clear. He sold 280 acres on the south end of his operation at 40% below the price he had paid for it four years earlier. He sold a grain storage setup he had built in 1979. He sold the white Ford dually and bought a used one. He kept farming. He was not ruined, not entirely, but he was smaller, and he knew it, and the county knew it. And there is a particular kind of knowing that settles into a man's face when the story he had been telling about himself turns out to have had a different ending than the one he planned.
Earl Pruitt had no debt to service. He had no notes to meet, no operating loan to roll over at 20%, no land value to watch fall on paper while the bank watched it with him. He farmed his 80 acres and he paid his bills in the same month he received them, and he kept his savings ledger in the kitchen drawer.
He had opened a second savings account at the Slaton branch of First National in 1979 when he had first felt the shift in the air, the way you feel a change in weather before the instruments confirm it. He had labeled it in his ledger the way he labeled everything: plainly, without drama, in his small neat hand: Next.
That was the whole label, one word. He didn't specify what Next meant because he didn't need to. Next meant what it always meant: the next thing that was right, purchased at the right time, owned outright, free and clear. He added to that account every month from 1979 through 1985, six years of steady saving while the world around him was contracting and the men who had borrowed were selling off the pieces of themselves.
In the spring of 1985, a land auction was announced outside Post, Texas, 30 miles south of Lubbock. 160 acres of prime dry land cotton ground being liquidated by an estate in financial distress. Good soil, productive history, no improvements to speak of, no irrigation equipment to factor in—just land, flat, clean, honest West Texas farmland going to whoever showed up with the money in a market where almost nobody had money and almost everyone was afraid.
The auction was on a Thursday morning in April, cool still, the way April mornings are out there before the heat arrives for the season. A smaller crowd than the Haskell Brothers yard in '76, maybe 40 men. Some of them farm management company representatives in newer trucks, a few independent farmers, a banker or two standing at the back with their hands in their pockets and their faces arranged in the careful neutral expression of men who are there to observe, not participate.
Earl Pruitt sat in the back row, same work jacket, nine years older, the color of it now past old paper and approaching the color of the land itself. He had a cashier's check in his breast pocket drawn on the First National Bank of Slaton.
Two farm management companies opened the bidding. They were methodical about it, incremental, professional, the way organizations bid when the decision has been made by committee and the ceiling has been set by a spreadsheet. They moved the price up in careful steps. Earl Pruitt moved it up with them.
At a certain point, one company stopped. Their ceiling had been reached or their instructions had run out or whoever was on the other end of the calculation had decided the number no longer made sense. They lowered their paddle and became observers.
The second company stayed a little longer. They pushed it three more increments, the way you push something when you still believe you can outlast the other side. Earl Pruitt raised his paddle the last time. The second company was done.
The auctioneer called it. 160 acres of prime dry land cotton ground sold to the man in the back row in the sun-bleached work jacket for a crisis-floor price that would look, in 10 years, like the best transaction anyone made in Lubbock County in a decade.