In the past, everybody had a farm. You had to eat, you had to farm. Oh, yes, lawyers and adding-machine people abounded in every small town clean across the prairie, but even they had weekend acreage or people who farmed for them. Seeds went into the ground and children left school to sow. Dogs planted their poop.
One noon, in the middle of a half-plowed field, instead of dreaming of his wife without overalls, Butchinsky figured out an alternative to following that plow. He came up with a design for the world’s best manure-spreader, by gum and by golly, an implement every one of his neighbors would crave and buy on time from him.
Butchinsky set to drawing out his idea, the ruler borrowed from his second-grade grandson. The mechanicals went to Washington where they were indeed patented, the prototype welded up in Erwin’s shop, and the vehicle christened in front of the hardware store with a bottle of Bud. He showed it at the fair.
The manure spreader was not the first implement Butchinsky kitted out. A curved baby spoon that never dropped food no matter which way the baby bounced, an onion peeler — inventions that touched where the practical world whispered to the ether. You could see his brain alive in the contours of that peeler. But none of them even broke even, once he looked into the cost of making more than one.
This time people at the fair would ooh and ahh, this time he would make real sales on his idea and leave the filth of farming behind. Other towns had new-fangled corn-silage choppers, cousins of cousins who invented quick-cooking tapioca. All he needed were investors, people whose crops came in high, a little extra from the butcher, the town accountant who could give him a tad of somebody else’s harvest, and a lawyer who could draw up documents on spec. A sure thing.
The fair was a success: people oohed. Afterwards, the farm got weedy while he hawked and crowed investors. It was a little one-hundred-sixty-acre homestead his grandpa had died on, that his own dad had found flush with arrowheads while doing his own walk behind the plow, it was what Butchinsky faced every day, every blessed day, with a hoe or a scythe. Still, if it didn’t kill him, the farm was an asset he could count on: it had real mortgage potential.
Hallelujah, said Butchinsky, working the telephone. Here was an invention that surely promised his freedom from the slavery of the land. Even his little granddaughter could see how much he wanted that, and gave him her $2.50 out of her piggy bank, saved from hauling water to Mrs. Kitrich’s garden.
Little bits of money poured into the project like rain sprinkling down in springtime. There was another model to make, more patents to draw up and mail away. Advertising was his daughter’s mouth, who hair-dressed, and his son, a traveling salesman of knives. Hair grew longer every night, and his daughter was the only artist in town, thinking up ways to curl or rat it, and the son knew lots of women. They had both chosen to buy the dishwasher and the promise of pensions instead of farming’s eighteen-hour days, but with Dad this keen to prove himself, they talked him up. Still Butchinsky had to go for the mortgage: manufacturers were skittish. Meanwhile, a drought hit and the crops burnt and the mortgage came due.
What with working at the five-and-dime, there was no fresh air anymore for Butchinsky. No matter. He found he’d always hated the smell of dirt on the steering wheel, and was happy he no longer had to drink those pre-dawn cold cups of coffee. The prototype rusted, although Erwin insisted he’d used pure grade, and it sat on the front lawn of the two-bedroom they moved into when Butchinsky’s wife started at the post office, feeling lucky, so lucky since not everybody passed the exam, nor were there openings. She knew good and well he’d always felt as if he were bowing to his land and putting on the harness himself in the mornings when he went off to plow. She had taken off those overalls more than once to appease that particular glumness.
If only he had kept that yoke, say his son and his daughter now. They imagine, what with the new land prices, that the yoke would bring a really good sum, and that in time, they could throw it off themselves and really live. Why, every generation that followed Butchinsky cursed him for losing the farm when they could have saved him the trouble and lost it themselves.
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A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is the author of eighteen books. She has won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry award, and a Pushcart Prize. She is a three-time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Yaddo, McDowell, and Bellagio residencies. Her most recent book is Great American Desert, a collection of stories about climate from prehistoric times to the future.