***
The stack of Sunday papers, five or six inches high, rested on the table before me, waiting to be pored through. I reached for each new paper with eager anticipation of any good ads that might be there while also dreading the thought of setting it aside again, without a single listing being copied. The dwindling of the stack would bring me ever closer to recognizing another fruitless week.
I knew I couldn’t spend my entire summer pondering over Wheatyard or serving out the desultory remainder of my internship. I had to regularly remind myself why I was stuck in Champaign, alone, for the summer. It was already the end of June, a month after graduation, and my few friends had left town while I remained, to use up the rest of the apartment lease that was already paid for and somehow find a job.
And here, at the Champaign Public Library, that reminder hit the hardest. At home on Sunday mornings with the Chicago Tribune, I could pretend that job hunting—sifting through the classifieds—was only part of my life. Though I always read the job ads first, I would spend several hours devouring the entire paper, every section, front to back. I could imagine I had other things going on, even if it was only reading about what was happening elsewhere to other people.
But I went to the library for just one reason—to read the job ads from Minneapolis, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, even Detroit. I never had any interest in reading the out-of-town news. The classifieds were everything.
I visited the library on Wednesdays, which was enough time for the out-of-town Sunday papers to arrive in the mail without the listings getting too dated. I had to move on any good opportunity as quickly as I could. That meant photocopying whatever listings I found and hurrying home to type up cover letters and stuff resumés into envelopes, then mailing them before the post office closed. A resumé would arrive about a week after the ad first appeared, which I hoped ensured the position was still open.
On this particular Wednesday I had just set aside the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—where I noted a few possibilities, with A.G. Edwards and Boatmen's Bank—and began to flip through the Detroit Free Press. There the classifieds began with real estate listings, with job ads in the back, and along the way my gaze was drawn by a blurry photograph of a house for sale. The house was an ordinary ranch, unremarkable but for the vague recollection of something else. I soon realized what it was, and despite my best intentions, despite the rising urge to finally find a job, I thought again of Wheatyard.
The Detroit house reminded me, ever so slightly, of his ranch house out in Tillsburg. It occurred to me that its disrepair suited him, as Wheatyard surely had no time, as he churned out hundreds of manuscript pages every month, for lawnmowing or weeding or painting or even something as minor as picking up the free Thrifty Nickel classifieds that arrived every week. I remembered those from my first visit, a dozen rubber-banded copies of that rag sheet, in varying stages of yellowing, scattered across the sidewalk. The sidewalk itself was an eyesore—discolored, cracked and weedy.
So the disrepair made sense. But how he happened to live there didn't, nor his claim that the house was paid for. Living in such a simple but backward town didn't fit with his obvious intellect, and his lack of income made mortgage payments all but impossible, let alone outright ownership.
He certainly had no job; the few times he had called were at odd hours, as if he didn't keep the regular schedule that a steady job would require. He didn't seem particularly handy, given the deplorable condition of his home, and the sheer volume of manuscripts he claimed to regularly churn out would preclude any sort of 9-to-5 grind. And Tillsburg had few employers. Having a steady job would require living in Urbana or Champaign, where at least there was steady demand for pizza drivers.
I roused myself from my reverie and returned my attention to the paper, pounding my fist on the table in frustration at being distracted so easily. I calmed myself and read through the listings, but saw only a few accounting positions among the professional opportunities. I knew Detroit was struggling, but even so there still didn't seem to be enough openings. I thought that Wheatyard, still in the back of my mind, might have continued to distract me from reading the ads as closely as I should have.
I read through again, more carefully this time, but still saw nothing more than those same accounting jobs. I folded up the Free Press and set it aside, noticing with mild consternation that only two more Sunday papers remained. My spirits descending, I felt my attention again begin to drift.
Sure, houses in Tillsburg had to be cheap. Demand was low as the town faced its slow but relentless exodus. Like most of rural, small-town America, Tillsburg saw its kids grow up and simply leave—for college or factory jobs elsewhere—never to return. Like Ellie, whose name was painted on that bridge over the drainage ditch, who probably went from college in Carbondale to an accounting job in St. Louis and then to comfortable suburban life with a family, quickly forgetting all about Jim. Or like drunk and obnoxious Mike, who probably put his graduation party disgrace behind him and moved to Bloomington to work at the Mitsubishi plant.
I imagined kids in towns like Tillsburg moving away, only temporarily at first, coming home on weekends to party and catch up with old friends. But as those old friends did likewise, their sporadic weekends home would coincide less and less, seeing fewer friendly faces each time. Life at college or the factory would soon seem more interesting than whatever was left back in Tillsburg, and their visits became less frequent, diminishing to only Thanksgiving and Christmas until home was no longer Tillsburg, but elsewhere—wherever they were living at the time.
This situation played out again and again, in Tillsburg and countless other small towns, until their populations withered away to a few middle-class professionals—doctor, insurance agent, branch manager of the out-of-town bank—and senior citizens. Those who remained would cling to what they still had, holding Memorial Day and 4th of July parades long after the marchers outnumbered the spectators, running bakesales to support the fading consolidated school district, voting diligently and keeping their houses and lawns in immaculate condition.
Given their pride in their houses and lawns, I realized, it was a wonder the people of Tillsburg didn't drive Wheatyard out of town with torches and pitchforks.
I returned to the last of the papers, from Indianapolis and Milwaukee, but a few minutes of browsing brought nothing of promise. I stood up, gathered the papers and returned the stack to the shelf where I had found them, keeping aside only the St. Louis paper to make copies of those two decent ads.
Back in my car, the copies safely folded into the pocket of my shorts, I thought again of the torches and pitchforks, and chuckled to myself.
Wheatyard's house had slowly deteriorated and would eventually revert to prairie, its roof beams crashing to the ground, its termite-ridden wooden siding becoming one with the damp soil, its lawn and low-lying shrubs overtaken by triumphant native grasses. Out there on the edge of the fields, the last house on the street of well-kept houses, it wouldn't even be missed, its disappearance unlamented. If the town had the money for it, the house would have probably been immediately condemned, bulldozed and cleared away. Lacking such funds, the town would have to let nature and Wheatyard's neglect do the house-leveling for them, even if it took a few extra decades.
That first visit to Tillsburg failed to get me inside Wheatyard's front door and answers to numerous mysteries that I hoped to find within. Despite his outward friendliness, it was obvious I wasn't welcome inside. Why, I couldn't guess. He didn't seem the type to have his dead mother, like another Mrs. Bates, stuffed and sitting in a rocking chair and holding hectoring dialogues with his disturbed mind. He was offbeat, not maniacal.
At home, the flashing light on my answering machine signaled a waiting message. It was Wheatyard, again offering to get together. I was still interested to hear what he had to say, about his writing and hopefully himself, and was relieved to hear that it wouldn't be in Tillsburg again. Instead, his hurried, mumbled message invited me to The
Grind.
FOUR