More About The Ages
The Ages is really about a question I’ve considered at length and, as a reporter, take seriously: What would it be like for a reporter’s life or career to “flash before his eyes?” I’m talking about integrity and the reckoning of same, a tables-have-turned story. In my years as a journalist and photojournalist, I like to think I’ve done a fair job presenting people and their circumstances to readers. However, in terms of reporting, Truth is a very malleable thing and can be shaped to inflame a situation even by accident. It scares me sometimes when I think about moments I may have done this, despite my better intentions. In journalism, your error is someone else’s consequence. But such is life, too. And unless one is very careful, living can be a job of building ghosts.
Also By Benjam Waverly
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I
I remember the days when every typewritten line ended with a ding. I remember them well. I was a reporter at the Kadoa Register, typing my way on an old Royal Number 10 through the daily news of a town whose population exhausted at 800. I’ll tell you what I remember most about that time. There was no backspace key on my typewriter, as if the word “correction” didn’t exist until electric powered our words and took the weight of what we said out of our fingers. As I type this now, an old man at the end of his life and on the plastic keys beneath my fingers, I admit I couldn’t handle that pressure anymore—the pressure of a life without error (a scary notion to a man my age, who sometimes forgets where he keeps the toothpaste in the mornings). Errors today only require holding down the back-arrow until every wrong word disappears. As if it never existed. Yes, we have it easy in these modern times.
I write this because tomorrow I turn 110. I’m the oldest man in Willhowk County, and the Willhowk Weekly News wants to do a story on my life. How they will contain it to one article I have no idea but what scares me is they will. The thought that my life might be reduced to 30 column inches puts a shake in me. Can it be told so easy? Can anyone’s? From experience, I know that it can.
MAN PLEADS GUILTY TO MURDER
JAWBONE OF MISSING WOMAN FOUND IN WOODS
Stories I told that began and ended in the space of a headline. The details don’t matter, but there’s an entire life to be read in one bold line.
Now here I am, about to see my life flash before my eyes in black and white. Feels like karma.
About ten years ago, a member of the Kadoa Historical Society discovered a bank of my articles in an attic, a “jeweled find” she told me, since there were articles that predated the fire that burned down the original Register newsroom in 1963, incinerating its stacks and “erasing a valuable piece of the town’s history.” The historical society declared my writing a county treasure and hired me an assistant, cute college girl, to catalog all my writing.
Today, the Charles Speek collection is in the basement of Kadoa City Hall, sealed in sheets of plastic and stored in airtight lockers, away from light and air, so the pages won’t turn to dust. “Preservation” was the word they used.
When an editor at the Kadoa Register heard about my articles, he called, asking if I’d be interested in doing an interview about the matter of the “Attic Articles,” as it was deemed then. To his dismay I declined but agreed to a meet and greet with current Register staffers and some journalism students from the high school and community college. My years of experience, the editor told me, would be most beneficial to the ongoing education of his reporters and our youth.
“Your mind must be a trove of local media, affairs, and history,” he said. “There’s a lot to learn from you, I’m sure.”
I told him at my age my mind was history. We shared a laugh together, mine contrived, his nervous, and the deal was made.
There, I told the staff that a reporter’s job is never done. They all nodded their heads, the whole lot of them too young to know that a reporter’s job is done every time they finish an article and the ding fades from his ears.
Pardon my thoughts for bouncing around some, going from one topic to the next without segue or transition, but such is life, no? So often we find ourselves in predicaments with no understanding of how we got there. Like a page torn out of our life’s story. One moment Character X is pouring himself a glass of orange juice and the very next he’s running for his life. We don’t know what the reason is and soon realize there’s no point in trying to bridge the gap of how we came to find our main character hanging by a thread. We can only turn the page and see what happens next. Sometimes the story ends well and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s that simple. Of course, I think, no matter how bad things get, we all want to believe our stories will end well. That we’ll breathe our last on that final ride into the sunset. I’m talking about hope. But it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes hope never comes. Hope for me is a Scandinavian woman who does odd chores around my house three days a week and prepares me meals for seven and that’s about all I expect of hope at 110 years old: that it keeps my home in order and me fed. Ask anything else of it, and I think I’d push my luck.
It’s 7:45 a.m. Hope is expected in 15 minutes, and in 27 hours, a car will arrive to take me to the Kadoa City Hall 12 miles west, where it’s been arranged for me to meet Dennis Blarky, the young man from the Register. He wants to take a photo of me with my back pressed up against the lockers the Attic Articles are stored in. At least that’s how I see it in my mind: myself stiff against the cold black casing, a dial poking me in the ribs, and my hands semi-raised, expressing, “Please, don’t shoot me like this.”
The only story that won’t be behind me but will always be behind me is the story of Metchel Rice. But I’ll get to him in a minute.
I would have much rather preferred Dennis to take my photo here, in my home, away from all that history. But how can I turn my back on my own words? If I can’t stand up to them now, as old as I am and knocking ever more loudly on death’s door, when do I expect I can? In another ten years at 120? No, I don’t suspect my luck will take me that far, if one considers living to my age lucky. I don’t.
Preservation. The word haunts me.
At 90 years old you’re on borrowed time, but at 100, you wonder if you’ve outlived the Reaper himself, divinely selected to pay witness to the world until the years finally become too many, claim all lands, and return everything to dust. Will God call me home then or will I endure like the Red Wind that shapes the dunes of eternity?
Forgive me, sometimes I feel so old that I think of Sisyphus and his boulder, and the years get the better of me.
Years are a funny notion. They are separators on life’s timeline, laid out like railroad ties narrowing to a single point: your beginning. And no matter how many years I lay down between me and my ghosts, it’s never enough; for they’re always right behind me. That’s the thing about ghosts. The older and slower you get the quicker they close the gap, and with my approaching interview, mine are at my heels, smiling and eager and hungry. I can hear all their voices locked in that vault, murmuring my name. A cacophony of stories that I wrote, and soon mine will join their places in print. And one day, Mr. Blarky (what a name!) will hear my voice calling out to him, and he’ll wonder if he did me right. Perhaps I should warn him that this is his fate. Or perhaps he’ll come to discover, as I have, that you can’t walk away from the stories you’ve told with a clean conscience, no matter how good your intentions.
We all play devil’s advocate from time to time, beating around a story until we find what we want. I did it for a living. And now it’s time for a reckoning. And that reckoning will come by way of the news.
I retired from newspapers 42 years ago, away from
that time of my life now almost as long as I was in it. I twiddled my thumbs for a year after my retirement before my hands, restless, found the keyboard again. Only then I endeavored the long haul and for the next 13 years wrote 16 novels. Two of them, a series about the strange life of a farmer named Zeph McTurney, were made into movies, starring the good-looking fellow with the blond hair…I forget his name, but you know whom I mean. I was 82 when my years as an author closed, and I figured I best pack my bags and wait. It might surprise you to know that when death did not come by the time I was 85, I tried to kill myself. Life is a system of compartments, if you stick to the straight and narrow of it at least and don’t venture too far off the beaten path. People get lost that way, some never to return. I know. So, you see, at 85, I had run out of compartments save my coffin. Or so I thought.
The tidy life I lived for so long upended on me the moment I woke after taking the pills to find myself still alive and not in the Hereafter. I should have been dead and credit my survival on the stupid luck of the incredibly old or incredibly young to beat odds. Never the romantic, I avoided searching for meaning and carried on as if my suicide were another attempt in a long list of them that did not succeed. But I knew better than that. I knew my resilience was because of Metchel Rice.
II
I grew up out in Iowa’s farm country, surrounded by mile after green mile of corn and beans. My father (and other farmers like him) found dependability in this kind of monotony. My father always said that “money might not grow on trees, but it does grow from the ground.” And he was right. In those days, if you owned 160 acres of rich Iowa soil free and clear, you had life made.
Of course, this is not true anymore. A hundred-and-sixty acres is no longer large enough to provide for a family, not with farming corporations out there like Goodmill, owners of 79 square miles of premium farmland in western Illinois. But 160 acres back then was just fine. It was good and sweet and honest. And no one recognized that more than Metchel Rice.
Metchel Rice’s problem was that he saw the 3,000-mile salad coming, and with it, the death of the family farm.
“You mark my words. One day big companies from Austin and Oklahoma are going to come in with their automatic combines and turbo tillers and run the green, the honest green, right out of our land. There won’t be a barn or silo or worse yet a porch light around for hundreds of miles. You’ll see,” he’d prophesize to a disinterested audience at Griggy’s each Friday night. The only sign his words were heard at all came when someone would knock him on the shoulder, and say, “Automatic combines? Turbo tillers? Jeeze, Met. I think you’re reading too much Jules Verne.”
This was back in the days when most farmers still used steam power to work their fields. Technology, as it’s understood today, wasn’t understood back then. Except by Metchel Rice, who thought the everlasting march toward the future was to be trod carefully. For this he was, by and large, considered paranoid, and folks had plenty of reason to be wary of him.
He fussed over his crops more than anyone, walking his fields every morning, talking to the corn, and worse, listening to it. And in the evening, he pet and cooed his beans before nightfall. And for all his efforts there just wasn’t something right about the way he kept his farm. It was a little off and a little off-putting. His cornrows were slightly crooked, his fields and barn mildly unkempt. Farming is a business of order, unitary, monotony, and hopefully predictability. Metchel Rice’s was none of these. It was frayed, as if you gave an imbecile a tractor and told him to plow and sow.
Met might not have been an imbecile. He owned a successful farm, after all, provided for his family best as any of the men in the county, but he was like white on a crow, and it was not a good time to be possessed by differences. This is all I’m saying.
On my father’s good authority, I was to become a farmer. I figured there were better uses for my hands, but until I discovered what those were, I walked idly toward the future bestowed me. Most days with a smile. I enjoyed the prospects of that life. Like my father and his friends, I found security in the sameness of life as a farmer. All those fields of green. It was work understood, which meant, as a kid, I took it for granted. I could walk right into my adult life, hands in my pockets, and my livelihood would be there waiting like a present. Then I would marry, bear my own children, and eventually take over the farm, continuing to grow my family’s name and tradition without strife and without an obligation to worry about means. I was the exact opposite of Metchel Rice, and frankly, his undying fight against the changes of the greater world around him scared me. The futility, the constant defeat threatened my view of the way things were supposed to go, and I wanted Metchel Rice to change or go away, both of which my father said would never happen.
“That man’s legs grow from the ground.”
I was working the south field one morning, inspecting the crops for infestation, thinking about this very thing, when I looked over and saw my father at the farthest edge of the field talking with Russell Merk, the nearest farmer to us. Russell’s Model T was parked alongside the road on a diagonal, like he’d gotten out in hurry. My father’s tractor still puffed away its black, sooty smoke, and the two men, my father and Russell, passed a sheet of paper between them. My father rubbed his brow with the back of his gloved hand, leaving a black streak across his forehead, which chilled me despite the hot June sun beating down on my neck. My father leaned against Russell’s Model T, jolted foreword, shocked by the heat, then sat down on the wood running board, careful not to lean back against the hot black metal behind him. Russell stood over my father, his shadow mingling with the edge of the corn field. I propped my forearm on the handle of my shovel and watched them for a moment, worrying about what that paper said. In all my years, I’d never seen my father sit down on anything while working but the seat of his tractor. I began to divine the possibilities from my imagination. A foreclosure, which I discounted right away. Our farm was fine, more than fine. And were foreclosure the case, it would have been Thom Sinder our mailman or Garret Ferreira the banker delivering the bad news, Thom in his beaten uniform (Gosh, Mr. Speek, I’m real sorry) or Garret in his three-piece suit (George, I tried to give you every opportunity, I did). Perhaps my father had committed a crime and that was a WANTED poster with his picture on it. I stopped the nonsense right there and resolved to go see what the matter was like a man, thinking my father would welcome my interest. What I was not thinking as I walked over to Russell and my father was that the sheet of paper had anything to do with Metchel Rice, for how could a paranoid eccentric bring my father to the ground? But that’s exactly what happened.
“But don’t you see? With George Hooney in, it might make other farmers think. His consideration alone breeds more consideration, mass consideration. The bastard doesn’t understand he’s starting what he fears most.”
This was what I heard Russell saying to my father once in earshot. My father looked at me, noticing my approach, and I thought for a second he would shoo me away. One more step, and I sensed I was about to step into an adult matter that I wasn’t sure I was ready for, but my father let me come. All these years later, I still wish he had turned me away. But he let me come, and I felt like a man, his confidant. His equal.
I looked then to the paper in my father’s hands. The sun beat down on it, making visible its bold letters in reverse on the backside. I couldn’t read the small print backwards but the large said enough:
Farmers’ Commonwealth
Preserve Our Agrarian Tradition
United We Stand Divided We Fall
Our homes will rot. Our barns will collapse.
Our future will turn to dust.
JOIN ME!
No sons of his own, Russell always took a special liking to me, and I to him. My father occasionally borrowed me out to help around Russell’s farm, and Russell was always eager to teach me everything he knew. Respecting my father, though, he’d start each lesson with, “Your dad probably already showed you this, but it never hurt
s to learn it again.”
“Charles,” Russell said to me, paying me only a sidelong hello. Like my father, he was possessed by the paper’s implications and distracted from his usual booming greetings: a slap on the back, a shake of the shoulders, a rough tousling of my hair. “How’s Charles today?”
“Mr. Merk,” I said back to him. He nodded and returned his bleak attention to my father.
“You have to speak with him. I mean today, George. You’re the only one who’s ever been able to break through those voices in his head,” Russell said.
My father did not hand me the sheet, and I didn’t ask for it, although I now knew whom they were speaking about and worried because I had never seen my father concerned over Met Rice. Later I learned that my father wasn’t worried about Met Rice at all, but Hooney.
Isaac Hooney was the most successful landowner in the county, owning almost 1,500 acres free and clear. Stock options he held in a seed company and farm implement manufacturer meant he had little overhead but the expenditure of his employees (he was the only farmer in the county who had fulltime help) made almost all his sales profit. Hooney possessed a wealth none of us thought possible in our part of the world, and he was both revered and feared for it. In my father’s lifetime, he had seen three families crumble to Hooney’s enterprise, which was creeping across the county like a spreading organism, eating up everything it latched onto. You could say thinking about this gave me the idea for how to put a stop to Metchel Rice.
Luckily for our family, Hooney’s empire was located all the way across the county, on the western edge, with thousands of acres of farmland between us, keeping us at a safe distance from the Hooney Spread. Even bacteria can burn out if it consumes too much. I viewed Hooney like a foreign war: It’ll never come to us. But my rationale never stopped my father from thinking about Isaac Hooney. I often wondered if he thought about Hooney sometimes when we sat down for dinner (just me, my mom, and my dad) and saw him looking at our homegrown food like it might disappear one day. Of course, I understood nothing back then, my thoughts pulled from one direction to another like a feather in the wind, and dismissed the furrows in my father’s brow as adult apprehension or stress. Frankly, I admired him for his worry lines. I wanted them, too.
The Ages Page 1
