Early Warning

When Pastor Campbell appeared, he didn’t say a word about Marsh Whitehead for half an hour — his text was “What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.” He then went on to talk about everyone’s favorite subject, which was the failure of just about every farm in the neighborhood to make a profit, which meant, of course (and Joe knew he was being cynical), not much money for the church. However, Pastor Campbell focused not on gold but on goodness — the goodness of the toil itself, the tilling of the soil, the richness of the ears of corn, the miracle of soybeans, which “the Israelites would have loved if they had had the chance to grow them.” Were we not lucky, in spite of passing weather, nuclear winter followed by scorching summer, still to be here, among friends and relatives, sitting quietly, and contemplating the Lord, in whom there is peace? Why has God laid his burden on the human race? God has laid this burden on us as a reminder, and some days the burden is heavy, but only by feeling the burden at its heaviest can we sense when it lightens. There will come a time when the burden floats away from us of its own accord, and unless we feel our toil, we cannot gain this understanding — nay, pleasure. Pastor Campbell, when he got wound up, did use the word “nay.” “You will have heard, my friends in Jesus, of a certain event. I almost said ‘sad’ event, but I stopped myself. I put before you that I myself do not know if this is a sad event or not a sad event. How we think of this event depends on how we think of the Lord, on whether we truly believe in his mercy and his love. On whether we allow ourselves to ask prideful questions, or whether we simply bow our heads and say, ‘So be it.’ Our hearts do, indeed, go out to our friend and sister, Sarah Whitehead, and to her children. We are like Sarah in that we must step back and say, ‘Father, thy will be done,’ but we are not like Sarah in that we do not have to wrestle as immediately as she does with the burden of this event. Sarah is not present this morning. She wished to be, but she was advised to let a day or two pass, so that she might compose her thoughts and look to Jesus for solace. I know, my friends in Jesus, that you will help our sister in all the best ways you know. I have great faith in you.”

Joe thought that was a little ham-handed, but he saw that Lois was moved. Her fists were clenched in her lap. After the pastor stepped back, Ethel Roach started playing the organ, and they all stood up — first the usual “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” then one they hadn’t sung since last year, which did, in fact, bring tears to his eyes:

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Of course, as soon as the service broke up, all anyone talked about was Marsh — how the heat had affected his crops, what prosperous farmers the Whiteheads had always been, to come to this; well, the bank was going after them. Joe walked away. That was all he needed to know, that and the scared looks on the faces of the other farmers, who were probably not in much better shape than Marsh had been. Joe knew that he was the man with the ideal setup, maybe the only one in the county — Minnie had a well-paid job, Lois’s shop benefited from being just far enough from Usherton to seem like it was in the country, and Denby had turned out to be picturesque. Not only that, Lois had made herself a network of dealers: if she somehow came up with a picture or a piece of furniture that actually had craft value or rarity, she knew how to estimate its value and get it to a decent market. This year, he and Jesse were living mostly off that bounty, even though they had gotten fifty-four thousand bushels of corn and eighteen thousand bushels of beans. The price of corn was $2.40, and the price of beans was $5.45 (and lucky to get that out of a record harvest). Joe and Jesse had therefore made $228,000 off of the nine hundred acres they planted, but after paying for seed, fuel, tractor repair, herbicide, fertilizer, and the 19 percent interest on their loan to buy the seed and fertilizer, they had cleared only $18,000, which they put away for next year’s crop.

Two hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars! Walter would have been speechless, Joe thought. Hadn’t there been a year or so when Joe was about ten when their corn yield was thirty-five bushels and they were happy to get it? But the one thing Walter had never stopped saying, so that Joe had had to put his hands over his ears, was: Bigger yields, lower profits. You’ve got to sell it to someone.