The Parts Left Out1

The road out to the Bromfman farm in late August is no different from thousands of other roads to grain farms in Kansas — hard-baked dirt dusted with a fine powder of yellow clay that shifts almost imperceptibly with the slightest movement of the air. Randy Larsen was on his way to the farm in response to a call saying that someone had died out there. In Arwood County, one of the Deputy Sheriffs makes a routine inquiry into the circumstances of every death that occurs outside of County Hospital. These investigations most often turn into simple condolence calls. Randy supposed that one or another of the parents of Earl Bromfman and his wife — he couldn't remember her name — had died during a visit.

Randy knew Earl in high school when they were teammates on the football team. Every year some of the older players would razz the younger ones. Earl, a junior when Randy was a freshman, looked out for Randy when he first joined the team, something for which Randy remained grateful to this day. He remembered Earl as a “farm kid” — one of the children of farming families whose lives were unimaginable by those who grew up in town. Farm life was a life ruled by nature in ways the town kids could sense, but could never really grasp. Forces of immense power — hundreds of miles of black clouds of locusts that eclipse the sun; league after league of wheat blight that has the power to destroy an entire year's labor of thousands of people; farm animals' desolation after a stillbirth for which efforts to console are futile; the havoc wreaked by an aberrant early frost or a summer hail storm — all of this hovered silently over the farm kids, knowledge that nature has no enemies, nor does it have its favorites, knowledge that drew these children inward into terrible fear in the face of the limits of their parents' power to control their own fate, much less that of their children.