What you need the least When you watch a man who owns 10,000 acres of farmland shopping in a thrift store for a toaster and a laundry basket, you know something’s out of whack. Today Ike Dyck buys the small kitchen appliances that he thinks he knows how to use: toaster, blender, electric frying pan, and a countertop deep fryer with a cracked and yellowed plastic lid. And today you think he must be wondering, as he clutches the shopping basket that the sympathetic clerk decides to sell him as a laundry basket for five dollars, when and how he’s going to do his own laundry. And today because everyone in this small town is wise to the drift of rumour, you know that everything he says and does will be noted by someone and then replayed in living rooms and restaurants and churches too. Really! Something has gone south. The pride has been squeezed right out of someone’s life. And maybe that’s all right, you think, watching that man from across the rack of men’s jackets, the musty smell of marginally-washed hand-medowns thick in the air, as he shakes for a smoke, and you think to yourself, should I walk over and offer him a cigarette? Say hello? No. You’d rather not. You’d rather watch from a distance with what you know to be a kind of false pity. Because you know that there but for the grace of god go you.
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You’re shaking for a smoke too, but you can’t do that in any store these days. You just have to deal with it. And right now you’d rather watch this man who owns 10,000 acres ask the Mennonite lady volunteering whether he can buy the shopping basket he’s carrying. I won’t do big loads of laundry, see, he says. You watch him struggle and shake, and you find yourself, in a new way, feeling sympathy for Ike Dyck. For your whole life you’ve actually despised him - the rich farmer that keeps buying the land from struggling families that are selling and moving to town - the man that makes the best of the end of a family farm. You’ve sat in the coffee shop on Monday mornings ordering your toast and eggs with the rest of your friends who still farm a section or so. Something less than 1000 acres. That used to be a farm of substance. You used to be able to live well off of that much land. Feed your family and then some. But over the last 10 years a lot of that’s changed. These days if you’re only farming a section and a quarter you’d better have a barn of pigs or chickens, and maybe some cattle. You’d better have something else. The bank tells you you better diversify so that you can make it through the dry years, or the wet years, or the years when you make more money from your hail insurance than your 400 acres of corn. But all that’s beside the point today because Ike Dyck is shivering. It’s been a week now since his wife and kids told him
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to leave the house. It’s all over town. In churches too. And he can’t hide the new burgundy crew cab GMC pickup he now parks in front of the three story green shutter apartments in the middle of town. Everyone notices. Not just the widows watching from their windows. You remember that. When ten years ago the grace of god left you too. When the drinking drove you out of the house. Back then it didn’t matter a damn to the wife that the farming got done and that there was lots enough to eat and always enough time and money over the winter to spend a couple weeks or so in the states, even Puerto Valliarta a few times. When your wife says she and the kids can’t go to church anymore with their husband and father at home sleeping the night before off, then either you gotta go to church on Sunday, or the bar on Saturday. Some decisions are harder than others. Finally she says she’d rather deal with rumours of divorce, than the pity of church-goers. She tells you that the church was what she grew up with. The church is what she knows. It’s me and the church, or nothing, she says. So you find yourself packing your bags – one or two for the first week, and then your whole closet along with the La-z-boy. You suspect that Ike Dyck’s last argument might have gone a bit like this too, but it would have been about women rather than the bottle. Even though Ike’s Viola was always reasonable when it came to drinking and smoking, she wouldn’t tolerate
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sharing her husband with another woman, not in that way. What woman would? Those are the rumours at least, and there’s been talk like that about Ike and Viola for a few years already. And you expect that a woman can’t stand going to church for too long in this town, while over-hearing folks tut-tut about her private affairs. They say Viola was too generous with Ike. That’s the rumour too. He just got used to it. Not her though, that’s for sure. So now, as you peruse the used books in the MCC Thrift Store, you watch Ike Dyck and find yourself pitying him and his 10,000 acres, rather than thinking about how you’ll struggle with your 800 acres this Spring. You turn away for a moment and settle on Agatha Christie’s “Sad Cypress”. 25 cents worth. You walk to the cashier as Ike Dyck pushes through the exit, his basket loaded with his collection of household items. You drop a quarter on the counter and follow him out, pushing through the first set of doors in time to help him get through the second. Thanks, he says. He looks at you and smiles, then looks down and turns to walk down the sidewalk, both hands clutching his load. His truck is parked just ahead, and you follow him down the sidewalk. Unlocked? you ask. He nods. You open the passenger door and unlatch the crew cab door too. Thanks, he says again as he lifts
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the stuff onto the seat, and then pushes the two doors shut, one after the other. He turns and smiles. Well, how’s it going, you say, smiling back. Shitty, he says and shrugs. Oh well. It’s a warm day, you say. But still a bit too wet to get on, eh? I’ve got a few beers back at my place, you say, smiling again. You know that he doesn’t want to be seen in the bar. Not yet. But there’s no better time for a cold one then late on a warm Friday when you can’t get on the fields anyway. You know Andy, he says, and looks you straight in the eye, that sounds good. You want a ride? Nah, you say, I’ll walk. You look a bit loaded right now anyway. Why don’t you get rid of that stuff and then walk over. I’ll be there by then, and I’ll throw a few burgers on the grill. Great, says Ike. Sounds great. I’ll be over in a bit. I think I can find the place. He walks around the front of the truck, gets in, and drives off. You watch and ask yourself what the hell you’re doing inviting the devil himself to your own house to drink your own beer and eat your own hamburger meat. But you’ve been the devil before and you know he needs company. You smile and begin walking toward the two bedroom bungalow you bought ten years ago, so your wife and kids could stay in the bigger house on the farmyard.
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You recall that first Spring after you left, back on the yard when you backed up the tractor to the drill, pulled it out of the quanset, filled it with seed, all the while watching the windows of your own house for any movement. You hoped the kids would see you and come running out to watch and beg for a ride. You’d have been annoyed by it the year before, but right then you wanted to be bothered by the kids. But they didn’t. They didn’t run out to say hi, or to pester you, and you drove the tractor and drill off of the yard alone. So it went for that whole year. As you walk now you imagine Ike too, feeling lost on his own farmyard, searching 15 minutes through his machine shed for a one-inch socket to tighten a nut on the seeder, because the whole time he’s searching he’s thinking about his house and what his wife and kids are doing inside the house that Saturday morning. Today though you know what you’ll find when you get home. Your own dirty dishes still nesting in the sink. That hint of socks and body odour. The toilet bowl that needs to be scrubbed. The beer in the fridge and the open potato chip bag on the counter. You could take the time to change it all. You could worry about what Ike’ll think when he walks in. But today you live easily with these things that you like the most, and need the least.
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Paul Krahn (1562 words)
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