Mari loved him in the particular way a person loves someone whose presence makes the ordinary bearable. He died of a heart attack in his own alfalfa field in the summer of 1969 at 33 with the sun still high enough to burn the back of his neck where his hat had fallen off. He was found by his cousin at 4 in the afternoon.
Mari was called at 4:20. She drove to the field herself in the F-100 and sat with him in the grass for an hour before she let anyone else come near. By the fall of 1971, Mari Thorson had been farming 410 combined acres alone for two years. She had $19,400 in the bank. She had no debt.
She had the ledger. And she had on a Tuesday afternoon in October spent $60 at auction on a lot that no one else in the county considered worth the price of the paperwork.
The morning after the auction, she drove to the co-op in Viroqua to pick up a bag of chicken feed and a length of hydraulic hose for the manure spreader. She parked the F-100 in the gravel lot next to Elton Feed and Supply. The bell over the door still rang the way it had rung when her father had come in for 10 penny nails in 1953.
She pushed through and into the warm smell of grain dust and diesel and cracked corn. Six men were standing around the coffee pot at the back. Merl Blackwood was one of them. He had a paper cup in one hand and the other hand rested on the shoulder of a man Mari recognized as Dale Kentner who farmed 600 acres three miles east and had a reputation for laughing at other people's ideas before he had finished hearing them.
Merl saw her come in. He straightened without straightening. That small adjustment a certain kind of man makes when he has decided to perform for the room. He raised his voice by half a step.
He was in the middle of a story. He wanted her to catch the ending. The way he told it, some widow had bought 40 tons of cannery-reject carrots at the Holdridge sale for $60, and the punchline was that maybe she thought the carrots would straighten themselves out if she prayed hard enough. Dale Kentner laughed too loud.
Two other men laughed the way men laugh when they are not sure whether they should. The other three did not laugh at all. Mari walked to the counter. She asked Ronnie behind the register for her hose and her chicken feed.
She paid in cash. She counted the change. She turned toward the door. On the way past the coffee circle, she took the green notebook out of her coat pocket, opened it to the page where she had written Merl's name the night before and added a single line beneath it.
She did not look at Merl while she wrote. She did not look at Dale Ker. She wrote. She closed the notebook.
She walked out to the truck. The bell over the door rang behind her. The wind coming off the ridge had picked up since the auction. It was cold enough now that she pulled her collar to her chin as she loaded the feed sack into the truck bed.
What she had written in the notebook was three words. "Man is worried." She would not have said it that way out loud. She was not in the habit of narrating other people's fears back to them. But $60 was not the kind of number that got a purchasing manager out of a cannery office on his lunch hour to warn a widow about mineral profiles on a shoulder half a mile from the auction tent.
And it was not the kind of number that inspired stories at the co-op the next morning either. $60 was in the ordinary run of things exactly the amount of money the county was accustomed to Mari Thorson spending. It was what she paid for a good used chainsaw. It was what she paid to have Biscuit's teeth floated.
It was what the county expected of her and no more.
What the county did not know, and what Merl Blackwood was beginning to suspect for reasons he had not yet examined, was that Mari had spent the last three months walking every back road in Vernon County, looking at what was being written off, and that she had been running the arithmetic on those write-offs at the kitchen table every night after supper in the same green notebooks Raymond had bought three at a time, and that the $60 bid at the Holdridge sale had not been an impulse. It had been the last step of a calculation that had begun in a boarding stable outside La Crosse in the middle of August.
The stable was called Cedar Bluff and it sat on 80 acres of mixed pasture and hardwood 40 minutes northwest of Viroqua on a road that turned to gravel a mile before you got there. Mari had driven up on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of the month with a thermos of coffee and a sheet of questions written on the back of a feed invoice. Francis Oberlin was expecting her. Francis was 47 that summer.
She had been boarding horses for 20 years, had come to it after a first marriage that ended badly, and a second husband, who was still around, and had the good sense to stay out of the horse business. She wore a canvas coat similar to Mari's and had short gray hair. She cut herself with kitchen shears every 8 weeks. Francis had never met Mari before that afternoon.
She had heard about her from a farrier who worked both operations. They sat at Francis's kitchen table for the better part of three hours. Francis answered every question Mari had and volunteered a dozen more Mari had not thought to ask. She talked about what horses ate in winter, what it cost, and what they would eat that was not hay.
She said horses would take root vegetables through the cold months as a supplement to their dry ration. That carrots and beets and turnips broke the monotony of hay and helped a horse hold condition through January when the wind came out of the northwest for 11 days running. She said horses on root supplements came through winter in better shape than horses on hay alone. She said the only problem with feeding roots at any real scale was that produce suppliers charge retail prices for what was at bottom a field crop.
Mari asked what price would make sense. Francis told her. Francis told her, in fact, that she had been trying to source bulk carrots for six years and had never been able to find anyone willing to sell them at a number that pencled out. Mari drove home that evening with the invoice sheet in her lap and did the arithmetic in the green notebook at the kitchen table before she took her coat off.
The arithmetic was clean. The arithmetic was the kind that made her hands still on the page when she saw where it ended. She spent the next six weeks driving, not conspicuously, not in any way that would have drawn a comment from the neighbors. She drove the back roads on Sunday afternoons and after supper on the long late evenings, and she looked at fields the way her father had looked at cattle.
She saw a bean field near Westby that was going to yield well, but was already spoken for by a co-op contract. She saw a corn field outside a nearby valley that had been hailed to ribbons in July. She saw an onion crop near Chaseburg that was going to make the grower a good year. She saw the Holdridge back six from the county road on a Tuesday evening in late September.
She got out of the truck. She walked into the rows. She pulled up three carrots. The first one was crooked.