JAKE SAID IT WAS LIKE TRYING TO HOLD ON TO A greasy rope with a bull on the other end. No matter how hard they fought, the farm just kept slipping away. After they missed mortgage payments in February and March 1938, Calvin Cox called from the bank and asked if they could come in to talk things over. Emaline had gone to high school for a year with Calvin. She knew that he was a decent man who hated having to foreclose on his customers, but he had no choice. He had carried them as far as he could go. If they were able to sell some machinery or some livestock to catch up with the mortgage payments, they could go on and hope for a bumper crop and better prices in the next harvest. If not, he’d have to foreclose. Emaline had to do the talking, because Jake got too angry when he was dealing with bankers, even bankers as nice as Calvin.

“If we sell the machinery, we won’t be able to get a crop in.”

“Maybe your neighbors would help. Or Jim Lindquist, with his team.”

“Even Jim has a tractor now. He’d help all he could, but they’re in the fields just about every day through the spring as it is. Same with everybody else.”

The banker shrugged. He was sympathetic, but it was not his problem. They tried to find a buyer. They spoke to the neighbors and asked Jim Lindquist and Cecil Narrows if they knew anyone who might be interested in buying the farm before they went into foreclosure. Emaline tried to prepare herself for the inevitable. It had happened to tens of thousands of farm families all over America. Why should they be different?

Jake wanted to pull up stakes and go to Oregon, join the great migration to the coast with all the thousands of miserable Okies who had been in search of any work they could find since the beginning of the depression. Every year they got a Christmas card from Clay Tatro and his wife Alice, who lived in a mill town outside Portland. Tatro had been Jake’s sergeant in the army. Despite the difference in rank, Jake and the sergeant had formed a strong friendship, probably because Jake had been the only man to put the bull-necked Tatro on his back when the men tried a little bare-knuckle boxing. The last two years, Tatro had included a note with the Christmas card, saying that he could really use a man like Jake at the sawmill, where he was the shop steward for the union. Emaline thought Tatro wanted Jake to be hired muscle.

“Beats workin for a living,” he said.

“Not if you get your head broken in a strike.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You don’t know that. It sounds dangerous.”