South Dakota

Sunday morning August 4th was already turning hot when Dirk Hamilton received a call from the county Sheriff’s Department in South Dakota informing him that his mother had died on Friday night. Although the coroner wasn’t saying anything with absolute certainty, she suspected Joann Hamilton had suffered a massive heart attack or stroke, or maybe both. On Monday morning Dirk called his boss and explained the situation, took all the vacation time he had coming and drove east on I-80.

Five years ago Dirk’s mother—she called herself Jo—bought what locals referred to as a gentleman’s ranch, this because it was only twenty acres and not a serious commercial operation. When Joann had first mentioned her plan to grow organic vegetables for fancy restaurants and health-food stores, Dirk wondered if she was undergoing some sort of post-retirement crisis. She was a steady and capable woman but had no farming experience and knew little about growing vegetables, even less about marketing them.

Shortly after purchasing the rundown ranch, she fenced four acres with rabbit-proof wire and paid a carpenter to build two large greenhouses and a chicken coop. Sometime later, she hired a young woman who moved into an old camping trailer parked next to the barn. When Dirk asked about this enigmatic ranch hand, his mother didn’t say much and instead explained about the John Deere tractor she’d recently purchased.

“It’s green and yellow, an impressive rig with a cultivator hook-up and skip loader for scooping and dumping manure,” she said.

“But do you know how to drive it?” Dirk wanted to know.

She assured him that anything she didn’t know, she could learn. And as if to summarize her intentions she added, “Organic veggies are the happening thing. I mean, what a sweet deal—no chemicals, no genetic alteration. And on top of that, health-nut types and vegetarians will pay the big bucks.”

It bothered Dirk when his mother exaggerated her affectations, the little phrases and catchwords that struck him as overly colloquial if not somewhat juvenile. Not to mention her ever-increasing Midwestern drawl.

“But have you really thought carefully about all this, I mean in terms of cost versus profit? You’re spending an awful lot of money. And this woman you hired. How are you affording to pay her?”

“Never mind what I can afford. Thirty-one years I worked,” Joann huffed. “Fifteen years as supervisor with those arrogant men doctors bossing me around according to their whims. Now I get to do what I want, have my own ranch, grow things, and tend my animals. If your father were still alive, he’d be dragging his feet every inch of the way. But this is what I want.”

“Do you remember what the doctor said about your blood pressure?” Dirk asked.

“My blood pressure is fine,” she’d said with steel-edged finality.

That was when Dirk decided to stay out of his mother’s affairs. Although after her first three summers, he wondered how much longer she would keep at it. Buyers weren’t lining up for the few organic vegetables she had managed to grow, and her pigs caught a virus of some sort. To make matters worse, the hens weren’t laying on a regular basis and when they did, they cleverly hid their nests. So much for her plan to sell eggs under the banner of “free-roaming chickens.” Then a plague of grasshoppers invaded. To save the harvest, Joann had sprayed commercial grade insecticide and lost her organic certification. Not long after, the hens began mysteriously disappearing.

Four days after getting the bad news, Dirk arrived at his mother’s ranch. Joann’s hired hand seemed edgy and disappeared before he could say much more than hello. Friday morning he awoke to the sputtering racket of a weed eater. When he went outside and walked around the barn to investigate, he saw her methodically cutting weeds between the two greenhouses. She was thin, boyish in her proportions, her hair tied in a braid that swished back...