FICTION

Requiem

By Taylor Brorby     VOLUME 59 No. 2

Vertical Divider

The mine never came east. For years, Wilbert Bast watched the dragline plod west, eat away the crumbly Clark County soil. He waited, thought that with a bit more time someone from the mine would knock on his door, would sit down at his kitchen table, pull out a contract, and discuss the Bast mineral rights.



When the mine was built in Clark County in the sixties, Wilbert’s world changed. The Teepee Butte Creek he fished as a child was dammed; its water held back by jagged rocks. Grant Marsh Lake was built for the power plant that would brick the reservoir’s banks, the water used to cool the plant’s coal-fired turbine engines. The lake never froze; ropes of steam swirled in bright January air. People sat in Grant Marsh Lake like hot springs; they pulled wool caps over their heads.

Coal powered the plant, warmed the lake, lined pocketbooks. When coal was discovered in Clark County in the sixties, Wilbert came back to the farmhouse and told Delphia and the children that their ship had come in. Wilbert had heard that coal had been discovered on Jerome Haggert’s land west of Lewis, but that the mine executives were debating about whether the mine should move east or west.

“Comes east, we sell the mineral rights. Could give up farming and watch the money come in. We’d be set,” he said and smiled at Delphia.

She smiled too—to appease her husband. But in her quiet moments, she wondered why Wilbert wanted to give up the farm where they had made a home, where they had lost a child, where his parents and grandparents had struggled to settle in the shortgrass prairie of western North Dakota. They had done well—or well enough—raising their children, balancing the weights and measures of life, the ups and downs of the hailstorms and wily winter weather. It wasn’t perfect—farm life never was—but there was a richness to their textured family story.

For Wilbert, the American Dream was right under their feet: under their garden of carrots and onions and potatoes, under their acres of wheat and barley and oats. The land had always provided, and it would now provide again—if only the higher-ups from the mine came to his farm.



But the mine never came east. No—the mine would head west, like everything in the American Dream, and Wilbert would stay put like his ancestors had wanted, the people roaming for their own Big Rock Candy Mountain—people who left Germany when Catherine the Great promised them the world near Odessa.

Wilbert would go out beyond the lilacs lining the drive back to the farmhouse when the power plant was first being built and watch the cranes swing as steel shined on bright days.

People came to Clark County from the north—Scandinavians from Sibley County, near Canada—to work in the coal mine and power plant.

His silent anger brewed each season as he picked rocks from his fields. The grackles in the shelterbelts seemed to cackle at him while he churned the soil.

Under those rocks, he knew, was his fortune, and with each passing year, his shoulders sank with the weight of knowing he’d never be able to cash in.

He started to take a double shot of Lord Calvert before going to mass on Sunday mornings, sometimes a third or fourth. During prayers, he’d chew the inside of his cheek, try not to look over at the Haggerts, at the Holzers, at the men he grew up with who were now becoming wealthy because the mine bought their mineral rights. He’d look ahead at the new priest, Father Braaten, a nervous, Ichabod-Crane-type man, as he transfigured the bread and the wine into the body of Christ.

Christ had suffered for Wilbert’s sins, but to Wilbert, there was no greater sin than being a bad farmer. Now envious, he believed the greatest sin was getting rich quick.

Wilbert began to snub his weekly pinochle games at the coffee klatch in the Slow Stop, stopped swinging by Byron’s Bar for an afternoon snifter with Carl Moffert and Lyle Ziegler ever since they started talking about the winter cruises they were going to take.

He holed up and stewed on the farm and wondered how his ship didn’t come in.



Clark County grew in the sixties—there was a hardware store at the end of Lewis’s main street, a beauty parlor, a grocery store, multiple bars, a county health clinic.

Year by year, Wilbert’s children graduated high school, married off, moved away—to coal booms in Wyoming, for construction jobs in the Pacific Northwest. His oldest, Anne, married a dairy farmer down in Don Schmidt country near Arbuckle—but they wouldn’t take over Wilbert’s grain farming. Curt, Wilbert’s son-in-law had already taken over his own family’s operation.

The bad years of farming Wilbert had in the sixties would go on into the seventies and eighties; it winnowed his pocketbook. He had overextended on new machinery. He was behind on loan payments.



Now, in his mid-fifties, Wilbert and Delphia hit hard times. They had voted for Reagan, believed in his “city on the hill,” and thanked God that Carter was out and a Republican was in. Rural America could now climb the ladder.

Except there was no ladder, Wilbert found out, for farmers.

In 1981, the rains didn’t come, and Wilbert had to pay for irrigated water from the Missouri River—but the air was too dry, the ground too hot; the horizon danced after morning coffee. Wilbert would stand in his fields and wipe his brow.

The wheat curled like charred paper.

The next year, the Basts’ youngest son, Mark, took a year off from the school in Wahpeton to help his father farm.

“Shouldn’t put off your education to help me,” he said early one evening over beer.

“You need the help, Dad, and school’s boring anyway.”

“It’ll keep you from getting into shit like this,” Wilbert said as he looked up from his beer bottle at his son.

Mark tried to smile.





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TAYLOR BRORBY is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, Crude: Poems, and Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, and is widely anthologized. Taylor has been supported with fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, and the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. He serves on the editorial boards of Hub City Press and Terrain.org and is a contributing editor at North American Review.


VOLUME 59 No. 2