The Hailstorm

The Honest Season

Chapter 14: The Hailstorm

The storm came on July 14. It came from the northwest, like all the bad storms, the storms that carried hail and moved across the landscape like combines, cutting whatever stood in their path and sparing whatever stood outside it.

Ruth saw the storm at 4:00 in the afternoon. She was on the porch. The heat had broken the day before — the high-pressure dome had cracked and the cold air had pushed through and the temperature had dropped from one hundred and two to eighty-four and the dropping was relief, was the body's recognition that the oven had been turned off, that the air was breathable again, that the July siege was over.

But the cold air that broke the heat brought the storms. The cold air sliding under the warm air, the warm air rising, the rising producing the clouds, the clouds producing the rain, and sometimes the rain was just rain, was the good rain, the replenishing rain, the rain that the soil needed and the wheat needed and the farmer prayed for. And sometimes the rain was not just rain. Sometimes the rain was hail.

She watched the storm build. She watched the clouds grow from flat to tall, the vertical rise that meant energy, instability, the making of hail. Ice, lifted and dropped and lifted again inside the cloud until it was heavy enough to fall.

Hail. The word itself was hard. The word was a single syllable, percussive, the sound of the thing it described, the sound of ice hitting wheat, hitting leaves, hitting stems, hitting heads, the sound that Ruth had heard four times in thirty-eight years and that she did not want to hear again and that she could not prevent from hearing because she could not prevent the storm and she could not prevent the hail and she could not do anything except watch and wait and hope that the storm's path did not cross her fields.

The storm moved southeast. Ruth tracked it from the porch by the cloud base, nearly black, and by the lightning that lit the storm from inside.

The storm crossed the Hoffman place to the north. She could see the rain curtain, the gray wall sweeping across the ground. She could see the green tint in the cloud base, the green that farmers watched for with the particular attention of a person watching for the thing that can destroy them.

The green was there. The storm had hail.

The storm moved southeast. Ruth calculated its path and mapped it onto her land. It would cross Section 8, the section east of Section 12, the section that held three months of work and the particular investment of hope that every section carried.

She stood on the porch and she watched the storm move toward Section 8 and she could not stop it and she could not divert it and she could not do anything except watch, the watching that was the farmer's lot when the weather turned violent, the watching that was not passive but was agonized, the agony of a person who sees the thing coming and cannot step out of the way.

The storm hit Section 8 at 4:32.

She heard it. She heard the hail hit the wheat. The sound was a roar — not the roar of wind but the roar of impact, the percussive roar of millions of ice stones hitting millions of wheat plants simultaneously, the sound that was like the sound of a freight train but was not a train, was the sound of destruction, the sound of the atmosphere discharging its violence on the ground.

The storm crossed Section 8 in eleven minutes. Eleven minutes. Ruth timed it because timing the storm was a form of control, the one thing she could measure about the thing she could not stop.

The storm passed. The clouds moved southeast, toward the Missouri breaks, toward the country beyond. The sky behind the storm was clear — the blue that followed storms, the washed blue, the blue that was cleaner and sharper than the blue before the storm, the blue of an atmosphere that had discharged its energy and was now calm, was now empty, was now the peaceful sky that followed the violent sky, the peace that was not apology but was fact, was the fact of a system that had completed its cycle and that was resting before the next cycle.

Ruth drove to Section 8. She drove the pickup. She drove fast, the way you drive when you know what you are going to find and you do not want to see it and you drive fast because driving slow would extend the time between not knowing and knowing and the extension of that time would be torture and the torture would be worse than the knowing.

She reached Section 8. She stopped the truck at the field edge. She got out.

The northeast quarter was destroyed.

The wheat was flat. The wheat that had been thirty inches tall, that had been standing, that had been filling its kernels with starch, that had been three weeks from harvest — the wheat was flat. The hail had beaten it to the ground. The stems were broken, snapped, shattered by the impact of the ice. The heads were torn, the spikelets stripped, the kernels scattered in the mud and the ice that was melting on the ground, the ice that was dissolving into the soil, the hail returning to water, the water that the wheat no longer needed because the wheat was dead.

Not all of it. Not every plant. Some plants were bent but not broken, leaning at angles, the stems kinked but not snapped, the heads damaged but not destroyed. Some plants would recover. Some plants would straighten, would continue filling, would produce a partial yield, the yield of damaged wheat, the yield that would be half or a third of what the yield would have been if the hail had not come.

But the majority was destroyed. Ruth walked into the field. She walked through the devastation. She walked through the flattened wheat and the broken stems and the scattered grain and the melting ice and the mud and she did not cry.

She did not cry because crying was not what you did when hail destroyed a quarter-section. Crying was what you did when a person died. Crying was what you did when the loss was personal, was intimate, was the loss of a thing that had been part of you and that was now gone. The wheat was not part of her. The wheat was a crop. The wheat was the product of seed and soil and work and weather and the product had been destroyed and the destruction was a financial event, a ledger entry, a debit in the accounting of the season.

What you did when hail destroyed a quarter-section was assess.

Ruth assessed. She walked the damaged area. The northeast quarter was gone. Part of the southeast was hurt. The rest of Section 8 stood untouched, still filling, unaware that the wheat two hundred yards away had been beaten to the ground.

She calculated. The full loss, the partial loss, the price at the elevator, the insurance coverage. Nearly fifty thousand dollars gone in eleven minutes.

She did not round in her head. Precision was the farmer's answer to the storm's indifference: I cannot control what happened, but I can count what it cost.

She pulled out her phone. She called the insurance adjuster.

"Dale, it's Ruth Enger," she said.

"Ruth," he said. "What happened?"

"Hail. Section 8, northeast quarter. Full loss. Southeast quarter partial."

"When?"

"Thirty minutes ago."

"I'll be out tomorrow morning."

"Thank you."

She hung up. She put the phone in her pocket. She stood in the destroyed field and she looked at the ground. The ground was covered with ice and broken wheat and the mixture was the rubble of the season, the debris of a storm that lasted eleven minutes and that destroyed three months of work and that left behind the particular silence of a field after hail, the silence that was the absence of the sound that standing wheat makes in the wind, the sound that bent and broken wheat cannot make, the sound that was gone.

She bent down. She picked up a head of wheat. The head was broken, the spikelets hanging. The kernels would have been ready in three weeks. Now they would not become wheat, would not become flour, would not become bread. They would return to the soil, if there was a next crop, if the land was not sold, if Ruth was still here to plant.

She dropped the head. She stood. She looked north, across the destroyed quarter, to the standing wheat beyond, the wheat that the storm missed, the wheat that was untouched, the wheat that was filling and growing and doing its work three hundred yards from the devastation, the distance between survival and destruction that the storm determined, the random distance, the arbitrary boundary between the path and the not-path.

She walked back to the truck. She drove home. She parked. She went inside. She stood in the kitchen. She stood at the window. She looked at the fields — the fields she could see from the window were not Section 8, were Section 12, were untouched, were standing, were green and tall and filling. Section 8 was to the east, out of sight, the destruction hidden by distance, the damage that she could not see from the kitchen but that she could feel, the way you feel a bruise that is under your clothing, the pain that is present but invisible.

She poured whiskey from the bottle on the shelf above the stove, the Evan Williams that Tom drank and that Ruth drank on the occasions that required not celebration but absorption, the taking-in of a loss that could not be unhappened.

She sat on the porch. She drank the whiskey. Rust sat beside her. The evening was cool — the storm had pulled the temperature down, had replaced the hundred-degree heat with eighty-degree calm, the calm that followed the violence, the peace that was not peace but was exhaustion, the atmosphere's exhaustion and the farmer's exhaustion and the land's exhaustion, all three spent, all three resting after the event.

She looked at the fields she could see. The standing wheat. The good wheat. The wheat that was untouched and unaware and filling and growing and three weeks from harvest. She looked at the good wheat and she did not think about the destroyed wheat because thinking about the destroyed wheat was not productive, was not useful, was the kind of thinking that led to bitterness and bitterness was a luxury she could not afford, a luxury that the season did not provide, a luxury that farming denied the farmer because the farmer who was bitter about the hailstorm could not tend the unhailed wheat, could not focus on the standing crop, could not do the work that the remaining acreage required.

The loss was in the ledger. The ledger was the record. The ledger contained every loss that farming had inflicted on the Enger place since Arvid broke the first ground in 1938 — every drought, every frost, every hailstorm, every price collapse, every mechanical failure, every death. The ledger was not a physical ledger. The ledger was the accumulated experience of four generations of farming, the experience that Ruth carried in her body and her mind, the experience that said: this has happened before and this will happen again and the happening is not a judgment and is not a punishment and is not a message from the sky. The happening is weather. The happening is the condition of farming. The happening is the cost of doing work that depends on forces larger than the worker.

Tom's death was in the ledger. Tom's death was the largest entry, the most devastating loss, the hailstorm that destroyed not a quarter-section but a life, not a crop but a partner. The ledger said: you have absorbed this, you have survived this, you will absorb this too.

She finished the whiskey. She did not pour another. One was enough, the one drink that took the edge off the loss and left the mind sharp enough to plan the morning.

She went inside. She washed the glass. She put it on the rack. She went to bed.

In the morning she would meet Dale Griswold at Section 8. She would walk the field with him. He would take photographs. He would write the report. The payment would come in six weeks.

The payment would not replace the wheat. The payment would replace the money. The money was important. The money was essential. But the money was not the wheat, and the wheat was not the money, and the difference between the two was the thing that David did not understand when he said $4.2 million, the thing that Sarah did not understand when she said she wanted Ruth to keep the land, the thing that Grayson did not understand when he said minimize disruption.

The wheat was not money. The wheat was work. The wheat was the physical product of a physical process performed by a physical woman on a physical piece of ground under a physical sky. The wheat was real in a way that money was not real, was tangible in a way that money was not tangible, was honest in a way that money was not honest.

The hail destroyed the wheat. The hail did not destroy the work. The work was done. The planting was done. The tending was done. The spraying was done. The work stood in the farmer's record even though the wheat did not stand in the field. The work was permanent even though the wheat was temporary. The work was Ruth's even though the wheat was the ground's. And the distinction between the work and the wheat was the thing that the hailstorm taught, the lesson that the season delivered on July 14 in eleven minutes of ice: the work is what matters. The work is what the farmer controls. The work is honest. The wheat is the result of the work and the weather, and the weather is not controlled, and the wheat is therefore not controlled, and the wheat is honest but the wheat is not guaranteed, and the absence of the guarantee is the condition of the work, the condition that the farmer accepts when the farmer plants, the condition that says: do the work and accept the result, do the work and let the season be honest, do the work and the work will be enough, even when the wheat is not.

Ruth closed her eyes. The destroyed wheat lay in the dark, in the field, in the silence that hail leaves behind. The standing wheat stood in the dark, in the other fields, in the continued sound of growth.

The season was honest. The season did not spare. The season did not apologize.

The season continued.