FullReads

Bella laughed jovially. “F’r heaven’s sakes, Dike, wake up! We’re livin’ here. This is our place. We ain’t rubes no more.”

Dike turned to his father. A little stunned look crept into his face. A stricken, pitiful look. There was something about it that suddenly made old Ben think of Pearlie when she had been slapped by her quick- tempered mother.

“But I been countin’ on the farm,” he said miserably. “I just been livin’ on the idea of comin’ back to it. Why, I—- The streets here, they’re all narrow and choked up. I been countin’ on the farm. I want to go back and be a farmer. I want—-“

And then Ben Westerveld spoke. A new Ben Westerveld–the old Ben Westerveld. Ben Westerveld, the farmer, the monarch over six hundred acres of bounteous bottomland.

“That’s all right, Dike,” he said. “You’re going back. So’m I. I’ve got another twenty years of work in me. We’re going back to the farm.”

Bella turned on him, a wildcat. “We ain’t! Not me! We ain’t! I’m not agoin’ back to the farm.”

But Ben Westerveld was master again in his own house. “You’re goin’ back, Bella,” he said quietly, “an’ things are goin’ to be different. You’re goin’ to run the house the way I say, or I’ll know why. If you can’t do it, I’ll get them in that can. An’ me and Dike, we’re goin’ back to our wheat and our apples and our hogs. Yessir! There ain’t a bigger man-size job in the world.”