Heartland Read online

  HEARTLAND

  Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The Guardian, The New York Times, NewYorker.com, Harpers.org, The Texas Observer, and many others. She recently was a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. A former professor of non-fiction writing, Smarsh is a frequent speaker on economic inequality and related media narratives. She lives in Kansas. Heartland is her first book.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Published by Scribe 2018

  Copyright © Sarah Smarsh 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Portions of the work herein have appeared in different form in the following publications: Flint Hills Review (‘The Firecracker Stand’, Issue 16, 2011), The Common (‘Death of the Farm Family’, Issue 8, 2014), and Longreads (‘The Case for More Female Cops’, 2016).

  9781925713633 (Australian edition)

  9781911617730 (UK edition)

  9781925693393 (e-book)

  CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  For Mom

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Dear August

  A penny in a purse

  The body of a poor girl

  A stretch of gravel with wheat on either side

  The shame a country could assign

  A house that needs shingles

  A working-class woman

  The place I was from

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I researched and wrote this book over the course of fifteen years. My initial task was to construct a family timeline of dates, addresses, and events, which I first undertook as a student at the University of Kansas with two small research grants in 2002. Throughout the drafting process that followed, I combed through public records, old newspapers, letters, photographs, and other archives to piece together a family history from the ill-documented chaos that poverty begets.

  For the family perspectives and anecdotes recounted here, especially those I was not alive or present to witness, over the years I conducted uncounted hours of interviews with many of the people involved. Much of the story was drawn from their memories and perceptions. Events I witnessed myself were written mostly from my own memory, sometimes with sought input from family members.

  Points on United States and world history, politics, public policy, and other matters beyond the private experience are based on news stories, studies, and books I deemed accurate and reliable in my capacity as a journalist. They are conveyed with my perspective.

  In a small number of instances, I have changed or omitted the names of living people.

  DEAR AUGUST

  I heard a voice unlike the ones in my house or on the news that told me my place in the world.

  It was your voice: a quiet and constant presence, felt more often than heard. You were like those stars that, for some reason, a person can see only by looking to the side of them. I was just a kid, but I knew the other voices were wrong and yours was right because my body felt like a calm hollow when you echoed in it.

  I didn’t try to figure out what you were. I just knew you. Often, what grown-ups say is mysterious, children readily understand. Eventually, in my mind, you took the form of a baby that I either would or wouldn’t have.

  You were far more than what a baby is. My connection to you was the deepest kind of knowing—hard to explain because it swooshed around in my mind and took different shapes and meanings over the years. But there was a moment, before I was even old enough to have kids, when I was fretting about the sort of decision that in another household might have gotten help from parents. Those moments usually sent me praying to some God outside myself. Instead, I thought, What would I tell my daughter to do?

  I’ve never been pregnant, but I became a mother very young—to myself, to my little brother, to my own young mother, even—and that required digging very deep. So deep down to the quick of being that I found not just my own power but your unborn spirit, which maybe are one and the same. I can’t tell you how that happened. But I can tell you why, for me, it had to.

  America didn’t talk about class when I was growing up. I had no idea why my life looked the way it did, why my parents’ young bodies ached, why some opportunities were closed off to me. I suppose we never completely do know, even with hindsight. But the hard economies of a family, a town, a region, a country, a world were shaping my relationship to creation—to my womb, yes, but also to what I would or wouldn’t have a chance to make of myself.

  I was on a mission toward a life unlike the one I was handed, and things worked out as I intended. I’m glad you never ended up as a physical reality in my life. But we talked for so many years that I don’t guess I’ll ever stop talking to you—not the you that would have been but the you that exists right now. There are two of you, as with all of us: the specific form and the energy that enlivens it. I only ever knew you as the latter, the formless power that I rode out of a hard place.

  Probabilities and statistics predicted a different outcome for me—a poor rural kid born the year her country began a sharp turn toward greater economic inequality. Chances were that I would stay in that hard life, and that you would be born into it, too.

  You have nothing to do with probabilities or statistics, of course, which are flimsy at best. But those were real, often devastating forces in my life and in the lives of so many children. I’d like to honor you by trying to articulate what no one articulated for me: what it means to be a poor child in a rich country founded on the promise of equality.

  How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so? It’s a relatively new way of thinking for me. I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes.

  Or, to put it in my first language:

  The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.

  1

  A PENNY IN A PURSE

  The farm was thirty miles west of Wichita on the silty loam of southern Kansas that never asked for more than prairie grass. The area had three nicknames: “the breadbasket of the world” for its government-subsidized grain production, “the air capital of the world” for its airplane-manufacturing industry, and “tornado alley” for its natural offerings. Warm, moist air from the Gulf to the south clashes with dry, cool air from the Rocky Mountains to the west. In the springtime, the thunderstorms are so big you can smell them before you see or hear them.

  Arnie, a man I would later call my grandpa, bought the farm-house during the 1950s to raise a young family. He spent days sowing, tending, and harvesting wheat. He eventually owned about 160 acres, which is a quarter of a square mile, and farmed another quarter he didn’t own. That might sound big-time in places where crops like grapes are prized in small bunches. But for a wheat farmer in the twentieth century, when the price
per bushel had been pushed down by the market even as yields had been pushed up by technology, it was just enough to earn a small living.

  When a wheat crop was lost to storm damage or volunteer rye, sometimes milo went in. Arnie raised alfalfa, too, to bale for his fifty head of cattle. He also kept pigs, chickens, the odd goat or horse. He had one hired hand, and his sons and daughters pitched in at harvest. For extra money during the winter, when the fields were frozen, he butchered for a meat locker down the highway toward Wichita and sold aluminum cans he collected in barrels near a trash pile west of his pole shed.

  When the old house turned quiet after his divorce, Arnie drank a lot of whiskey. On weekends, he liked to put on his good cowboy boots and go dancing in Wichita honky-tonks like the Cotillion, a small concert hall with a midcentury sign on Highway 54.

  There, one night in 1976, country music played while widows and divorcées danced in Wranglers and big collars under a mirror ball. Sitting at a table with a butcher named Charlie and a farmer they called Four Eyes, Arnie noticed a skinny woman with short blond hair at another table. She and her friend wore the paper rose corsages given to all the women at the door.

  “She’s not gonna dance with you,” Four Eyes told Arnie. “You’re too damn fat and ugly.”

  Four Eyes himself got up and asked the blond woman to dance. She said no. So Arnie walked over. His hair was a feathery brown comb-over, and he wore carefully groomed muttonchops on his square jaw. His round belly jutted over his belt buckle. The woman, Betty, had overheard his friends making fun of him. So when he asked, Betty said yes.

  She would be my grandma, and I would have loved for you to know her. Betty’s whole life amounted to variations on that moment at the Cotillion: doing something kind for an underdog. That’s the kind of love I would have wanted to surround you with: indiscriminate and generous, from people like Betty who had every excuse to harden their hearts but never did. She was no saint, never pretended to be. But she would have loved you not just because you were mine but because you existed in a world she knew wasn’t easy for anybody.

  Betty and Arnie danced two or three songs. He smelled like Old Spice aftershave, and she liked his happy laugh. They agreed that every Johnny Cash song was the same damn tune with different words. Arnie thought she was a looker. Funny, too. He got her phone number. But when the band packed up and the dance floor cleared, she wouldn’t let him take her out for breakfast at Sambo’s down the highway. She’d stick with her friend and buy her own pancakes.

  In the coming weeks, Arnie called her trailer a few times, but she didn’t answer. Then the operator said the number was disconnected. Arnie went back to farming the land.

  Betty wasn’t the farming kind. She’d spent her adult life moving among urban areas in the middle of the country—Wichita, Chicago, Denver, Dallas—and neighboring towns. She and her daughter, Jeannie, who would be my mom, first hit the road when Betty was a teenager. Their whole family, which consisted mostly of single moms and their daughters, was hard to pin down. By the time Jeannie started high school, they had changed their address forty-eight times, best I can count. They didn’t count. They just went.

  About a year after Betty and Arnie met, his pickup and her Corvette pulled up to the same highway intersection just west of Wichita. They waved at each other, rolled down their windows, and pulled into a nearby truck stop to get a hot drink. Arnie’s life was the same, but Betty had gotten married and divorced in the months since they’d last seen each other. She had a wildness—not so much a streak but a core—that other middle-aged farmers might have found off-putting, even scandalous. But he fell in love and treated her better than she’d ever been treated. For one thing, he didn’t beat her up. He didn’t even complain about what she cooked for dinner or did with her life in general.

  “Mox nix to me,” he told her.

  She stuck around.

  During the wheat harvest of 1977, when Betty was thirty-two and Arnie forty-five, Betty drove every evening from her full-time job as a subpoena officer at the Sedgwick County courthouse in downtown Wichita to Arnie’s farm. She took over the house, cooking for Arnie and his field help, driving tubs of fried chicken, paper plates, and jugs of iced tea to fields where yellow dust followed red combines. She learned the blowing dirt of the country summer, when teeth turn gritty in the wind and shower water turns brown between shoulders and toes. She rode the combine with Arnie, a rite of passage for any would-be farmer’s wife, and woke up the next morning with clogged sinuses. She sweated through the harvest nights of midsummer, when fans blow hot air through hot bedrooms and sleep is possible only because of how hard you worked.

  Jeannie was fifteen and going to high school in Wichita, old enough by our family’s standards to take care of herself while Betty was at work or at Arnie’s farm. She’d finally gotten into a social groove after changing schools twice a year for most of her life. She didn’t want to move this time, especially not to a farm in the middle of nowhere. Now that she’d been in one place long enough to turn in her homework, she was getting good grades and enjoying school. She preferred hanging out at Wichita’s little outdoor mall to fishing in pasture ponds. Her hobbies were reading and fashion, which she studied in magazines before sewing her own clothes. Fabric stores and public libraries would be in short supply on the Kansas prairie. Jeannie groaned. But her mom had decided they were going. They packed up yet again and moved west to Arnie’s farm.

  After a few months, Arnie asked Betty to marry him. Betty thought she was done with all that, and anyway, Arnie was Catholic. She’d heard the Church didn’t take people who’d been divorced, let alone six times.

  Father John, the priest of a nearby parish, assured her that none of those marriages counted since they weren’t in the Church. She figured she had to count the first two husbands, since they’d fathered her children, but otherwise she liked the idea of disavowing every one of the bastards.

  She and Arnie ended up marrying outside the Church anyway, in September 1977, at a little chapel on a highway next to a trailer park.

  The newlyweds had constant company at the farm. Their pickup engines could be heard down the road, followed by the sound of tires rolling slow on the gravel driveway, usually around dinnertime. Betty peeled untold pounds of potatoes, baked pies, fried meat, and stewed vegetables that grew outside the front door. She learned the isolation of rural life through a batch of cookies—she had everything she needed but the brown sugar. What was she supposed to do, drive ten miles west to Kingman just to get one damn ingredient?

  “It wasn’t like when you lived in town, you’d bebop down to the QuikTrip,” she told me years later.

  She learned to keep the basement overstocked with discount canned food, the deep-freeze packed with every cut of meat, the cupboards filled with double-coupon deals. She and Arnie were the sort of poor who, whether by spirit or circumstance, found a way to feed themselves and whoever else needed a meal.

  Betty’s city friends drove west to see her new country life. Arnie’s friends showed up to see his wild city woman. They partied at Cheney Lake, a few miles away along straight dirt roads and a curving two-lane blacktop. They fished and swam in Arnie’s pond with its water snakes and leeches, the crusty earthen dam dimpled where cow hooves had sunk in mud after rain. They camped next to fires in pastures with hot dogs, Coors, and s’mores. They drove mopeds through fields and crashed three-wheelers into trees. They had butchering parties in the detached wooden garage that housed a meat grinder, a sink, hooks hanging from rafters, and a bloodstained cement floor. Everyone got drunk enough to eat mountain oysters, and everyone who helped went home with a cooler of meat wrapped in white paper. They laughed when a pile of aluminum cans brought five times its worth at the scrap lot after Arnie, pulling them in a net behind his tractor, inadvertently filled the cans with sand and tipped the weight scales.

  During one liquor-store run to Kingman, after skidding across an icy
country bridge and rolling down an embankment in a small Toyota, Betty made her younger sister Pud mad by lighting a cigarette inside the upside-down car while she thought about how to get out. Pud named the place Camp Fun Farm.

  It wasn’t long before Pud’s older daughter, Candy, moved into the farmhouse to escape some sorry situation. Next came Pud herself and her younger daughter, Shelly, after the inevitable divorce. Thus began a nearly thirty-year stretch of Betty’s nomadic, cash-strapped family members taking refuge there by necessity.

  When Betty wasn’t cooking for people at the farm, she was working at the courthouse in Wichita. Or she was pulling weeds in the vegetable garden east of the house, cleaning, planting flowers, or digging for tools on the back porch that housed the washer and dryer and shotguns.

  Betty was only ten years older than Arnie’s firstborn, a surly, long-haired twenty-something who was often drunk. During the summer, he played on a slow-pitch softball team of area farm boys who liked to drink beer at Arnie’s farm after games. One of them was Nick Smarsh.

  That’s how teenage Jeannie met Nick, the farmer and carpenter who would be my dad. He had grown up working the fields and hammering roofs in hot sun and cold wind. In the summer, his thick arms were tanned a deep red-brown, darker than the brown in his plaid snap-up shirts with the sleeves cut off. He drove a white 1966 Chevy Caprice, which he kept clean as a whistle inside and out, with air shocks lifting the back end. Sometimes he shot road signs through pickup windows.

  He was always smiling, though, never critical or violent, unlike so many of the men she’d known. Nick turned out to be the one thing Jeannie didn’t mind about the country.

  Even though Arnie wasn’t my blood relation, he played that big a role in my life—Jeannie and Nick never would have met if Arnie hadn’t asked Betty to two-step. He was such a bright light for us that, after he died, it occurred to me that I would call you after his middle name: August. I knew you were a girl, but I never thought to make it Augustine. Your name was August.