Blue Shadows Farm: A Novel

53. Depression, Then War—Summer 1932

309 Summer 1932 The Depression’s strangling impact moved from the great cities to the countryside. No one escaped. Unemployed men rode the rails, traveling from town to town looking for work and settling for a meal. Scarcely a day went by but that two or three men, people called them tramps, jumped off the Chicago and Northwestern freight train when it approached Link Lake, hoping this little farm town would offer more than the place they’d just left. “Mommy, mommy!” Emma called. “A strange man is at our door.” Faith, still mourning the tragic loss of her husband in the explosion and fire, came to the door. She saw a man so thin that his dirty, threadbare shirt hung loose, like a garment on a metal hanger. “Spare a hungry man a slice of bread?” the man asked in a quiet voice. Faith had heard about men like this, but this was the first one she had ever met in person. “I’ll split a pile of wood for a sandwich,” the man said. His long, 53 Depression, Then War black, tangled hair stuck out from under his dirty hat in several directions. He smelled of coal smoke and perspiration. “Fine little girl you got here,” the man continued. “Back home I have a little girl like this.” Faith stood for a moment, speechless. “We . . . we don’t have anything extra,” she finally stammered. “Then I’ll be on my way,” the man said. “Thank you anyway. And the Lord be with you and your little girl.” The man slowly made his way down the driveway and onto the dusty country road. Emma watched him as he slowly walked away, his head bowed, like he was looking for something on the road, or perhaps not wanting to consider what he might see ahead of him. “Mommy, we’ve got extra bread,” Emma said. “Why didn’t we give him some? He looked hungry.” Faith bristled at the question. “He’s a no-good tramp looking for a handout. He should find himself a regular job.” “But he looked hungry, Mommy. He was skinnier than any animal we’ve got here on the farm.” “Go play with your dolls,” Faith said, turning away from her daughter and holding her head in her hands. For a long time Faith sat at the kitchen table, staring off into space and thinking about Emma and herself now that Abe was gone. It didn’t occur to her that the skinny man asking for a handout bore considerable resemblance to her own future self. At the time she didn’t realize that she had lost not only her husband and their main source of income but something more precious—the support and concern of her farm neighbors. Too often in recent years, Faith had flaunted her wealth, had snubbed her considerably less-well-off neighbors, and had become the neighborhood show-off. Nobody in the Link Lake community had the kind of money the Starkweathers had at that time. Faith wasn’t above letting people know it, either. For instance, she wore her fine dresses, expensive jewelry, and hats to 310 Depression, Then War—Summer 1932 311 Depression, Then War—Summer 1932 town when she grocery-shopped at the mercantile. Ordinary folks in Link Lake didn’t like to have their noses rubbed in the fact that they couldn’t afford such finery. Faith seemed to enjoy showing off, which soon proved an enormous problem for her and for her daughter. Folks in the Link Lake community had a long history of helping each other with threshing, silo filling, corn husking, pig butchering, and, of course, with pitching in when someone was ill or had gotten hurt. Now the Starkweathers, in the eyes of their neighbors, were no longer a part of the neighborhood where they lived. When Faith and Emma needed help, there wasn’t any. Faith was also too stubborn to ask. So that fall, when people drove by their farm, they saw Faith driving the team on the corn binder and little Emma walking along behind, pulling the corn bundles out of the way. As one neighbor had said a week or so after Abe died, “That Faith Starkweather has been shot right in her fancy petticoat. If anyone deserved a comedown, she certainly did.” Country folk don’t forget easily, especially when they believe a neighbor has...