THEIR LAND, WHEN SHE RETURNED, LOOKED AS though it had been blasted by a terrible scourge. Tumbleweeds clung to the barbed-wire fence along the county road, the oat field had withered, scattered clumps of sugar beets grew between cracked patches of bone-dry earth. Corn that should have been knee-high by the Fourth of July was ankle-high now, in mid-August, and so sparse it might have grown there by accident. The fence between the beet field and the cow pasture had sagged so that the cattle stepped over it and stood, dumb as clods, mouthing the tender beet leaves. The cattle guard was clogged with weeds and the dust had silted it over and almost buried the two old wagon wheels that marked the entrance. The culvert under the lane that led up to the house was blocked with more tumbleweeds and stagnant irrigation water had flooded part of the road.

Emaline had spent the night in town with Calla before Charlie Naudain drove her out to the farm. He offered to stay and help, but Emaline said this was her mess to clean up and she would do it on her own. She watched his old Nash until it turned onto the county road, waited until he was out of sight to sit down on the stoop and bawl. The prolonged spasm of collapse that was the Great Depression meant nothing here. This was her personal ruin, two months of neglect that had transformed a working farm into a grotesque wreck.

It was barely eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, but the Ford Runabout was nowhere to be seen. Jake was out, the cattle were bawling. He was still the same Jake McCloskey, tomcatting around the county, living exactly as he pleased, counting on someone else to clean up the mess.

She cut across the alfalfa field to close a gate that had been left open. The short spikes of fresh-cut stubble hurt her feet through the thin soles of her good shoes. She accepted the discomfort as her penance for having neglected the farm and walked a wide circle, taking stock. The worst of it was her garden, now acres of weeds and withered plants. If Jake had watered it even a single time, it didn’t show. He plainly had not pulled a solitary weed. Here and there her crops peeked through, but another few days without water and there would be nothing left that she could salvage. She marched into the house, dug her bib overalls and brogans out of her valise, went to work. She milked the cows, fed the chickens and the ravenous hogs, forked hay to the cattle and horses. Molly the collie was wildly happy to see her. The pups, grown so large they would be hard to sell, jumped all over her.