Chapter 2 #4
"But that's not going to be you. Because you're reasonable. Right?"
"Right," Francis said dully. "Reasonable."
"Good." Pell made a final mark. He tore off a sheet, a carbon, an actual carbon copy, and he walked halfway across the yard, closer than Francis liked, and set it on the ground under a rock, and backed away.
"That's your registration. Your assessment date. Somebody'll come by, count your acreage proper, work out your number. And then we'll see you at harvest, friend. All real simple. All real civilized."
He turned back toward the truck. "Nice place you got. Real nice. Water and everything. He's going to like this one."
Francis's mouth was dry.
"Who," he said. "Who's going to like it."
Pell paused, one hand on the truck door, and looked back, and for the first time there was something almost like warning in his face. Something almost like pity.
"Mr. Macklemore," Pell said. "Stanley Macklemore. He runs the Combine. He likes to know about the good ones personal." He climbed up into the cab. "You'll meet him, come fall. Everybody with a place worth having meets him eventually."
He said it the way you'd tell a man he had a serious illness. Kindly. And final.
The engine turned over and caught, that obscene living growl, and the truck backed and turned in the wide part of the road and rolled back down the hill, slow and unbothered, in no hurry at all, because why would it hurry, it had all the fuel and all the time and all the guns in the world.
Francis stood in the yard and watched it go until the sound of it faded down past the dead highway and was gone.
Then he walked over and picked up the paper from under the rock.
It was a form. A real form, printed at the top in the old world on some office machine that had died months ago, the blanks filled in now by hand in Pell's neat pen. PROPERTY. ACREAGE. HEAD COUNT, and a number there already, a guess, low, three. HARVEST SHARE, and a blank there, waiting.
And at the bottom, a line. A signature line. And under it, printed: THE COMBINE. And under that, smaller: S. MACKLEMORE, PRINCIPAL.
Francis stared at that line a long time.
A signature line. On a form. At the end of the world.
The soft man had turned the whole plain into a warehouse, and every farm into an account, and every family into stock on a shelf, and there was a form for it, with a signature line.
Francis understood a man like that. God help him.
He understood him completely. He had been him, in a smaller way, in a better world.
A man who read the fine print. A man who found the patterns.
A man who ran the cold math of value and knew, always, exactly what a thing was worth and exactly how much he could take.
The difference was that Francis had processed claims for people who'd lost their homes.
Stanley Macklemore had figured out how to lose them himself, and profit.
Behind him, Ruth came around the corner of the house. Her people were coming out from behind the barn, slow, drawn by the silence, and Nathan was climbing down from the blind, and Maya stood in the porch door.
Ruth walked up beside Francis and looked at the paper in his hands, and her weathered face did not need to read it to know what it was.
"So now you've met the clipboard," she said quietly. "The friendly one. Pell, is it, still? Or a new one. They cycle."
"Pell," Francis said.
"Pell." Ruth nodded, and there was a whole grief in the nod. "He registered us too. Last spring. Friendly as a Sunday. Set the paper under a rock, same as that. Told us we'd come to be grateful."
Francis looked down the empty road.
"You said your place stopped being yours," he said slowly. "You never told me how. You held it back. At the fence, and after. You held the whole story back."
Ruth was quiet for a long moment. The wind moved her grey hair against the seed cap.
"I held it back," she said, "because you hadn't decided yet whether we were people or a problem, and a story like ours, told too soon, sounds like a beggar's story. Like I was working you."
She looked at him. "But you've met the clipboard now. So you'll believe it, and I'll tell you the rest of it, all of it, the part that put us on the road for eleven days with a coughing woman and one child."
She looked out at the dead fields. At the ground Francis meant to turn green.
"We said no," Ruth said. "That's the whole start of it. Last fall, at harvest, when they came to take the share. We'd had a hard year and a thin crop and there wasn't enough to give the share and still winter, and we had elders, and we had children, and we couldn't give it and live."
Her jaw worked. "So we said no. Just the once. The way Pell says nobody does."
"And then there was a visit," Francis said, very quiet. "That wasn't a clipboard."
Ruth looked at him, and her pale eyes were dry, and terrible, and full of the thing that never leaves.
"There was a visit," she said, "that wasn't a clipboard."
And she began, at last, standing in the yard of the farm Stanley Macklemore had just marked for his own, to tell Francis exactly what the Combine did to a place that said no.