Dirty Beans

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 2

Dirty Beans

When the storm door barked shut behind him, Alexander Murphy stepped down off the front porch into the March Sunday afternoon. He looked north toward town. That northwest wind, a real Iowa face-burner, brought tears to his eyes, but he didn’t turn away. Pull the cap down, and the hood up, and keep on. That’s the way it was. Hands in jacket pockets, he walked across the side yard under the three huge white pines Great-Granddad Seamus Murphy had carried here from northern Wisconsin as seedlings one hundred and twenty-four years ago. The soft needles whooshed and hissed like the breakers on the big lakes far, far to the north and east, home to tall trees, and most of their kin. How many winter nights had he fallen asleep to the mysterious whistling roar of three lonely white pines? How many times does the prairie wind blow in 43 winters?

His feet bounced beneath him as he walked on the needle mat near the massive trunks, and then jarred hard on the narrow lane as he crossed it. Alex squatted down by the field closest the house, and drew a deep breath through his nostrils. He smelled the faint smell of Muscatine topsoil barely thawed. Dry winter. Alex slitted his eyes against a thin ground blizzard of ice crystals and dust. He studied the earth at his feet where winter rye and red clover were already green. Green soldiers working hard to hold onto his land. He brushed aside a clump of desiccated bean hulls and stems to see what lay beneath. Dry soil, too grainy for the end of winter.

Alex Murphy was counting on this piece of ground this spring, one that ought to do better in corn than it had year before last. He was trying to get a handle on the margins, get his costs down, try something different. He held back on the herbicide last spring. He thought he’d hit the rotary hoe in a timely way. Yet, the volunteer corn and the pigweed had still come. He’d heard more than one whooping catcall in the night last summer screaming, “Dirrrr-teee beee-aaa-nnzz!” from a speeding pickup. He’d walked the rows the next morning hacking down tall offenders that spoiled the rowed symmetry of so few Iowa soybean rows.

“Dammit!” He pulled off a fuzzy yellow glove, and wiped a knuckle across an eyelid cut by blowing soil. “You’d think I was supposed to grow a twenty-row shag carpet.” Just give me more commercials, every winter, every spring. Show me umpteen new ways to grow Hollywood crops, and kill every damn weed and bug in sight. Yessireee!

Never mind the best part of my farm’s still going down the Cedar River, heading for the Mississippi. Never mind every gully washer carries my nitrogen clear to the Gulf. Never mind I’m going to lose this place to Harold Mundt in about three years time. Never mind it’ll kill my Dad. Hell, he’s got cancer now. Never mind, my kids want to live in town, anyway. Never mind Grandma Teresa would just die without ‘em here. Never mind the gravestones in the church yard yonder. “Damn! Dirty beans!"

An eight-year old shriek from the porch cut through the white pine needle noise. He looked up, looked north. “She’s here! She’s here, Daddy!” A spitfire girl, his Rose, ran from the house. She jumped on her father’s back as he struggled, stiff-kneed, to his feet. Even through his parka hood, Alex felt the side of his child’s head pressed tightly against his own.

A silver Honda Accord turned in at the lane. Alex Murphy stepped to the driver’s side where a wide face circled with curly dark hair leaned from the open window and smiled. “Hello, Rose Murphy. That’s a fine horse you’re riding today. What’s his name?”

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Next week... "Hold It or Drain It," Chapter 3

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 2 was written and edited by John P. Gabbert

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The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.