The Short Corner

For two years the two houses squared off across the river like church and courthouse. Theo ran his terminal on schedules and slide rules — on terminals, in fact, small computers that the county paper wrote up twice — and bought when his numbers told him to buy. Roy ran Calloway Grain on twenty-one years of instinct, and instinct had never yet lied to him, which he took as proof that it never would.

The season of the trouble, the winter wheat came up thin and the rain stopped in April. By June the papers were using the word drought, and every man on the exchange floor had a theory, and Roy's theory hardened into certainty the way it always did: short crop, high prices, and the man holding grain when the panic comes holds the county by the throat. He began buying. He bought forward contracts he couldn't fill, bought on margin, bought the crop that wasn't in the ground yet, and to cover the paper he mortgaged the elevator line he had spent two decades raising nail by nail — signed the papers at the kitchen table, the way he had signed everything, without reading it twice. In the office Marisol did the books and watched the position grow like a tumor and once said, very quietly, that Mr. Marsh's outfit was selling into the same market, every day, in broad daylight. Roy told her the boy would be caught flat when the sky stayed clear, and that she was a good girl and should stick to the ledgers.

The banker came out from Topeka himself on a Tuesday in July, sat at the kitchen table with his hat squared on his knee, and slid the mortgage papers across without a speech. Roy read them the way he read everything, twice, and signed with the fountain pen June had left behind. The coffee between them went cold and stayed cold.

Then it rained. It rained the way it rains in that country — all at once, with wind, for three days — and the crop that was going to fail came in heavy, and the price of wheat came down like a dropped gate. The margin calls came in from Topeka in the morning mail, and that was the killing blow; everything after was paperwork.

Theo's outfit, which had sold steadily all summer, was sitting on the other side of every contract Roy couldn't meet, and the co-op, which remembered ten years of Roy's contempt and one year of Theo's manners, voted with its feet. It took nine weeks. In the ninth week the bank put Calloway Grain into receivership, and in the tenth the elevator line was sold at auction — in the same auction ring at the Cinder Flats fairgrounds where they sold bony horses — and bought, quietly, by companies Theo controlled. Roy kept the house on the bluffs because the house was in June's name, a fact he had never once thought about until it was the only fact left.

He was forty-nine years old and he had an oath, a house, and a daughter who was not his daughter, and he had lost the only business he had ever built.

The town, which had shouted at Roy's back for twenty years, now said "poor man" where it used to say "big man," and the pity was worse. Theo came to the house once, hat in hand, to offer Roy the management of the very line he'd lost — a good wage, real work — and Roy heard it out on the porch and said, "You're decent, and I'd rather be poor," and shut the door, and then stood inside it for a long time with his hand still on the knob.

He still went down Front Street at nine, because a mayor goes where he goes, but there was no office behind the door anymore, and the men at the exchange nodded to him now the way you nod at a monument.