“This place just plumb beat me. I thought I could set it right, just one more year, get a little rain. Prices go up some, maybe. Didn’t happen neither way. Had ten inches of rain last year, I don’t think we’re goin to see that much this year. Wife can’t take it no more. She says if she has to watch that dust blow another year, she’s goin to take my shotgun and blow her durned head off. Hell, she might want to take me with her. I shore do hope you folks have better luck here, ’cause if it warn’t for bad luck, we wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

When it came time to close the deal, Emaline had almost as much to invest as Jake did. She put in four hundred dollars, which she had saved, a nickel tip at a time except when Jake was her customer, from her job at the Arrowhead Diner. He put in six hundred. They borrowed three thousand from the First State Bank, which was eager to loan money to folks who could put up twenty-five percent cash. When the papers were all drawn up, they shook hands with the banker.

They moved into the basement house to give Jake time to make repairs on the main house before winter hit. From the first day on the farm, they rose with the sun and worked till sundown. Jake managed to make some improvements on the house, but he was no carpenter. He tried to do everything by main force. When nothing else worked, he would reach for a sledgehammer. He might have knocked the entire house down, but a bindle stiff who called himself Colonel Amen came knocking at the door, wanting to work for food. He was handy with a hammer and saw and willing to work hard for three square meals a day. He quoted scripture at the top of his lungs while he worked, but he could drive a nail straight, cut a two-by-four so it fit perfectly the first time, shingle a roof without falling through it. After he had worked for two weeks, the house no longer looked as though it might collapse with the next strong wind. Emaline grew weary of hearing the Revelation of St. John all day long and asked Colonel Amen if he didn’t know a few of the Psalms. He recited one or two and went back to Revelation, but it was worth it to see an almost new house emerge from the wreckage of the old. Colonel Amen slept in the barn and refused even to take his meals in the house. Jake said he was a tramp of the old school, a man for whom the road was a calling. As soon as he finished the job, Colonel Amen would be off again, back to riding the rails.