The Jonas boy would agree to come to work full time for a while, he figured. There just was not that much to do on his father’s place, and the boy usually needed money. But Hook would have to warn him about smoking in the buildings; that could not be tolerated. He would tell Arnie to watch him. As for the farm itself, the Strickler piece was planted to wheat. He would seed clover on top of it in February and plow it down after the wheat was combined in the summer. Then it would be ready for corn again, at least three years of it. But that meant he would have to buy corn next fall to fatten his steers. The price was low now, after harvest, but he did not like to deal in futures; he did not like to spend money he had not yet made except when it was absolutely necessary, and that was often enough so that he would resist the temptation now, when it was a matter of choice. If the price of corn was too high by fall, he would simply sell the steers as feeders and let someone else do his gambling for him. There were no other pressing problems he could think of. There was plenty of silage and hay and feed; the mill was working properly; Arnie had finished tuning the big John Deere, and the honey wagons had been reconditioned, so he did not see any problems for the men in keeping up with the feedlot manure, unless the weather stayed mild and the ground soft. That also could mean some footrot among the feeders, but Arnie knew enough to watch for it. The most important thing, of course, was simply to check the herd out in the field every day, watch for the slightest sign of injury or disease, especially pneumonia in weather as wet as they had been having. All it took was the loss of a few head to drive operating costs out of sight; and of course anything serious, like a spate of blackleg, and a man could be out of business within a very short time.

Hook had gotten into farming more by accident than design. After his discharge from the Navy he had studied at the University of Illinois, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English and comparative literature in the spring of 1952, just four months after he had met Kate Larson there, in the corridor of the humanities building between classes. Carrying a handful of books, he had been struggling to get into his great drooping stormcoat when suddenly, miraculously, there was this hand holding his coat up for him so he could slip his arm into the sleeve. Turning, he found that the hand belonged to a girl who looked as if she had just stepped out of a fjord somewhere, a lovely smiling nordic Venus, with clothes. They were married that June and spent the summer in Greenwich Village exploring each other more than Manhattan, yet still managed to be insolvent by fall, and Hook took a job teaching junior English at a suburban Milwaukee high school. The three years he spent there were also the first years of his marriage, a time of candlelit love and laughter and happiness so perfect it was not even aware of its own existence, and a time of dazzling accomplishment too, for these were the years his sons were born, so it took him all that time to realize that he loathed the job of teaching. He liked the students as individuals and he enjoyed modern literature, but the two things, the students and the literature, made no vital connection in his mind. It was simply not important to him how the kids felt about books. So he was at best an indifferent teacher. Worse, he was an unhappy one, feeling anachronistic and unreal in the puerile school atmosphere, like a grownup who had accidentally stumbled into the center of a child’s game. He felt diminished by it. And so he quit.