The Talented Miss Farwell Read online

  Dedication

  To Courtney

  Epigraph

  Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.

  Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Emily Gray Tedrowe

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Pierson, Illinois

  1979

  Fourteen-year-old Becky Farwell lay on the truck horn with her forearm.

  “Daddy, let’s go!”

  Engine running, she tilted the rearview to study her eye makeup, a wash of greens running dark to light from her eyelashes to eyebrows. Greens, of course, because the magazines said all redheads had to, even indistinct blond-red mixes like her own. What she really wanted was the set that gave you three kinds of purple, pale violet to dusky eggplant. Becky ran a quick calculation on how much she was owed by the four girls she did homework for—geometry and algebra, although she could stretch up to pre-calc too, even as a ninth-grader. Though for pre-calc all she could guarantee was a B, not that any of the girls complained. Sometimes she took payment in shoes, like the almost-new Tretorns she had on now, without socks because no one did. Becky flipped the mirror back with a snap. They needed cash too bad to daydream about makeup.

  Getting squeezed at all ends. One of her father’s sayings that didn’t make sense but sure as hell got across how bad it was that spring.

  After another minute she jumped down from the truck and went inside. Even though it was one of the first nice days in March, the front rooms of their farmhouse were dark and stuffy, closed in. Becky pushed up a window and propped it open with a can of beans. This morning’s cereal bowls were tumbled milky-white in the sink and a thin sticky layer of grease and dust filmed everything, but Becky had no time to wipe it up. In the family room, one patch of carpet stood out darker and new. Last week her father had pawned the TV set, all her mother’s jewelry (he thought all: Becky had hidden a few bits), and the blender. He wouldn’t tell her how much he’d gotten—it’s only temporary—but the crumpled receipt she’d found proved it was less than a hundred.

  “Daddy?” she called, from the bottom of the stairs. Then ran up lightly, bracelets jingling. “We have to— Have you not even showered?”

  For there he was, her bear-like father, curled on his side in bed. His silver hair mashed down low over his forehead, perspiration speckling his nose. Stomach flu, but there was no time for it. A buyer was driving in from Rockford, and her father was supposed to meet him at noon.

  “You said just turn on the engine! Daddy, it’s already—”

  He groaned and threw a hand over his eyes. “Show him the drills. The Lite-Trac air seeder, make sure he sees that one. And the spreaders, even if he says he don’t—”

  “I can’t . . .” Becky looked wildly around the room. “How am I supposed to—”

  “Tell him not the Masseys, or any John Deere. You can walk him back by the two Vicons, he’ll want those. But say no. Just drills, that’s our deal. Give me an hour. Most. I just need to— Oh, god—” He bolted from bed to bathroom, old terry-cloth robe flying, and Becky fled before she could hear anything.

  On the highway, Becky knew exactly when and where to twirl the dials for music, sometimes switching from WXTV to WMMR and back again in the space of a single song. Why wouldn’t they play anything other than Crystal Gayle, for Christ’s sake? Or Kenny Rogers? She kept both hands tight on the wheel and eyes locked on the road lines, never went a fraction over 45 mph, not that their old truck wanted to. Nobody passing on I-50 gave a ninth-grader a second look, but she knew what to do if she was pulled over: start to cry right away, say that her boyfriend got dead drunk and she’d been scared and she was going straight home, swear to god, and she never would again, Officer, promise.

  “Won’t save me a ticket but might keep them from arresting me,” her father mused, when he’d told her how to say it.

  It was two exits, one roundabout, and four lights from the farmhouse to the showroom, and she sweated through each one. Worst part was the left turn across traffic into the showroom driveway. Becky hung there forever, blinker on, foot hovering between brake and gas. Eventually she made herself go, eyes half-closed in the turn, and bumped down the gravelly gully, Jesus Jesus Jesus, thank you.

  One other truck idled in their small lot, facing the road. Shit: they were already here. Becky hopped out and let down the tailgate. She could only carry two boxes, would have to come back for the rest.

  “Hello?” she called.

  The Traskers ran their own farming equipment store outside Rockford and were here to buy up inventory as cheap as they could get it, then turn around and sell it at markup, a profit too ugly to think about.

  “Vultures,” her father said, with a show of cheer. “Picking us dry.”

  They all did it. A few years ago, he had been the one to drive out to Minter’s to sort through what was left.

  “We’ll get it back,” he kept telling Becky, “in the summer.”

  He used to say in the spring. Before that, it’ll pick up in fall.

  “Good afternoon,” Becky sang out to the two men getting slowly out of the truck, a father and son, it looked like. She’d never opened the showroom on her own before, but had helped her father dozens of times. She unlocked the doors and used the boxes to prop them open, ran ahead to the fuse box and hit the lights for the office and front section, where the harvesters were proudly parked in a neat row, on the diagonal.

  “I’ll put the coffee on—” she called back, staying ahead where they couldn’t see her. “Or there are sodas in back. Dad’ll be here any minute.”

  The son was kind of cute. Becky took off her cotton pullover and checked to see if she’d sweated rings on her tank top. She should go sit in the office, she knew, in that lit-up glassed-in box where invoices and catalogues were stacked up, spilling across the desk, the chairs, the metal file. But instead she tracked the men, admiring the curls poking out from under the son’s cap, his thumbs stuck in his back pockets, the mostly clear skin on his soft cheeks. Becky fluffed her bangs and was so busy working on something clever she could say to him that the older man’s sudden presence made her jump.

  “There you are,” he said low. Short and burly, bald head like a crop circle.

  Becky caught a whiff of minted chewing tobacco. “He said to, um, show you the spreaders. I mean seeders. They’re just over—”

  “Yeah, show me.” He grabbed her elbow and pulled her toward him. Becky grunted in surprise. “Oh shush,” he said, and the combination of his tone—don’t be silly—and her fear that the son might see or hear her (being silly) kept her quiet, even as he groped her breasts and ass, quick and rough, under the cover of the dark aisle
full of pipe lengths and electrical cords. In less than a minute it was over, she was pushed away with a friendly sort of thump on the back and the man turned the corner alone, calling to his son, “This the only cultipacker, or do they have any better brands?”

  Later, when her father had arrived and taken the man and son into his office, Becky watched through the glass. The son sat down before her father did. Her dad’s heartiness, his larger gestures, the other man’s crossed arms and unresponsive back . . . Becky had to look away.

  For a long time she sat on a stack of wood pallets, picking at a scab on her ankle. A creaky old fan spun slowly up by the dusty rafters. “Bec? Hey, Bec?” her father called, leaning out the office door, unable to see her. “Grab two sodas for us, okay?”

  Slowly Becky walked to the back, returning with the cold cans in her arms. In the dark she took one of the Dr Peppers and peeled off its tab. And then she coughed, and coughed, and dug back into the cavities of her nose and throat so she could hock one perfect glob of phlegm into the soda.

  Opening the office door she stamped a smile on her face and felt powered up with love for her daddy. And for how little he knew.

  Early the next morning Becky stared up at her bedroom ceiling and thought that they were stuck: her father wouldn’t admit to her how bad things really were, and she wouldn’t force him to because she knew she was supposed to be reassured. Would it be different if her mother were here, if the cancer in her breast hadn’t burst its bounds and spilled into other parts of her body, killing her when Becky was six? Maybe her mother would have been the one to size up the situation and say it straight: Hank, we need to do something else. There would have been a “we,” someone for her father to share his fears and strategies with, someone from whom he would take counsel.

  Though thank god he’d never married any of the loud-laughers Becky knew he sometimes bought dinner for at the Black Owl, and probably went home with for a few hours when he thought he wouldn’t be missed. What they really didn’t need around here was a hysterical second wife flailing about when the electric was shut off or the bank called, making visible what they were all supposed to ignore: Daddy’s business, circling the drain.

  Becky kicked off the unbearable covers. She’d been fighting to pretend a hot nauseous pain hadn’t been growing in her lower belly all night. She pulled a sweatshirt over her nightgown and let herself out the kitchen door into the predawn chill, breathing fresh air into her lungs. The fading moon, a thick lemon slice, hung low over a clump of horse chestnuts separating their property from whoever had bought the Hinmans’ place.

  It was freezing, but at least she wasn’t about to puke. Becky found a pair of old rainboots on the cluttered porch and walked circles in their mostly dirt yard. Cars were beginning to flow on County Road M, and a lone crow yelped once overhead, and then again from farther away.

  If they lost the house, she supposed they’d try to get one of the rentals in town. Maybe a long-term efficiency in the Rose Suites, just off the highway; how much were those? Her father would get a job, eventually, at someone else’s store. Becky guessed she’d have to drop out of school, go full time as a waitress. She recoiled, thinking of how her father would paper it over: for a little while. Start you up again in the fall. And season would slide into season, year into year, and she’d turn into one of those hatchet-faced diner lifers with varicose veins and dead eyes.

  Cold but afraid to go inside, Becky went to the barn, where a stack of boxes—blades or spades—had been dumped after delivery, and left out or forgotten. She tugged open the sliding door, nudged the boxes in with her foot, and then sat down on them. The haphazard collection of inventory in progress was loosely arranged according to a system only her father knew. Becky held her stomach and bent over, a rolling pain built of nausea. No denying it—she’d caught that damn flu and now she’d have to do all the sheets and towels again.

  And how dare that bald pig grab at her like that? Right in her father’s own showroom! She wanted to torch that whole place, combines, office, and all. Burn it down with that fat fuck locked in.

  That’s when the idea came. The first idea, the one that led to a chain of other ideas, spreading into a yearlong series of changes that would eventually turn everything around for them. For her.

  The idea was—Wait, she begged her nausea, give me a minute to think. She lurched up and took a full circle to see all the boxes and the unused space and the strong beams and the warm familiar wood smell—Do we need a showroom anyway?

  Becky threw up then, spattering the rainboots, and did it a dozen more times that morning. But between bouts she huddled in bed with a pen and a pad and all the financial records she could find at home. Later that night, her father brought in his most recent files, bewildered by her vehement phone calls. By then Becky had run the numbers so many times that she shook with excitement and fear as she raced to explain the plan to her tired father. Drop the showroom, save 14K rent for the year. Clear out the barn and use that instead. Save on gas, electric, heat, security. Reduce inventory by half but keep up wholesale orders for longtime customers. Stop sending receivables to Manheim Accounting—Becky herself would do the books. Market the whole idea with the slogan “We Pass the Savings On to You.”

  Hank Farwell told his sick teenage daughter to take a can of ginger ale and get back in bed. But he sat up late with the scribbled pages. Becky’s plan got put into action over the next six months and by the end of the year all of Pierson was talking about Farwell Agriculture Inc.’s miraculous rise from the dead. How it just went to show that one of their own (they meant Hank) could get it done with some grit and quick thinking.

  All year Becky supervised the rebirth of the business. She reorganized the barn and ordered a farwell agriculture inc. sign directing people where to turn off Route 4. She threw a “Thank You for Your Business” lemonade party in June that raffled off a John Deere tractor, their last, and gave twenty-five percent off new standing orders. She read up on accounting and took the bus to a one-day small business conference in Rockford, flummoxing the organizers when they realized they had registered a high school sophomore. By winter, Becky was friendly with all the suppliers on the phone, and handled all orders, often combining shipments and suggesting discounts that were impossible to refuse. Her father took care of what he’d always done best: talking wary locals through every angle of a purchase.

  One Sunday evening that winter, the Farwells hosted a small gathering in their home. The local Rotary Club, after snubbing Hank for years, had welcomed him back into the fold after the business made its one-eighty. Several men now called up to a week ahead to make sure he would attend the next meeting.

  Pierson men had a subset of the Rotary, an unofficial club for those in agribusiness. Hank was now avidly pursued to join these evenings as well. The habit was to hold a bimonthly get-together at someone’s home, rotating around the farmhouses of the members, usually on a weekend evening after dinner. A nominal subject would be set for discussion—price of seed in the Rock River area, for example—but the two-hour sit-down was mostly gossip (who was slipping), politics (Reagan and subsidies), and laughter among a handful of men whose thickened hides and long workdays didn’t offer much opportunity for that.

  That Sunday, the first time Hank hosted, the men entered the property under Hank’s new plastic sheet sign flapping in the night wind against two fourteen-foot metal poles: we pass the savings on to you. They went by stakes marking out a barn extension for smaller handheld tools. The winter had been cold but dry; the men hardly had any snow to knock off their boots before finding seats in Hank’s warmly lit living room, with its new TV set and new double-pane storm windows.

  It was the unspoken custom for the host’s wife to provide coffee and some kind of sweet—a nut cake usually—and then to immediately withdraw. The men fell quiet when Becky brought in the tray. Later, they would all become accustomed to her at every business meeting or social event or club date that had to do with agribusiness in the c
ounty. They’d hardly remember a time before she was a part of it all.

  On that first night at the Farwells’, though, the men fell silent and uneasy one by one as Becky put down the tray, then pulled up a chair and sat down. They glanced at Hank, who acted as if it was nothing strange.

  Becky regarded them all kindly, stirred her mug, and smiled politely. Then she said, “Thank you for coming. Ready to begin?”

  2

  Pierson, Illinois

  1981

  Pierson, Illinois, was a small Midwestern city about two hours southwest of Chicago, split by the Rock River. The town spanned the width of less than a mile, and its central feature was the low-head dam that stairstepped the water to a gushing froth before it flowed on west under Pierson’s two bridges, the Galena and the Sauk. Like most river towns in the area, it was named after an early European settler who mounted a ferry system and profited from nineteenth-century traders and travelers. And like most small towns in Illinois, Pierson claimed a vague but definite connection to Abraham Lincoln, who led a company in and around the area during the Black Hawk War. On the south river promenade a bronze statue of Lincoln surveyed the storefronts facing the water: a tanning salon, the Chamber of Commerce, Piccadillo’s Bar. The local history museum, in a building that used to be the old high school, hedged about Lincoln but went deep on the town’s one dramatic incident: the “Pierson Disaster.”

  For Becky’s seventh-grade history report, she told the story of the Pierson Disaster—an 1806 riverbank crush accident that caused several drownings—from the point of view of a lame saloonkeeper who watched it all unfold, helplessly, from the banks. He hated how conspicuous he was, dry, with his cane, made unmanly by the surrounding furor of accident and heroics. But instead of acting, he observed. He saw it all, from that first innocuous shoving: how the men’s hands shot to their hats as they toppled backward; the horses and women screaming; the dark bodies dragged onto land.