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CHAPTER 1
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; 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.
Earl, who recently turned thirty-six, was the third generation of Bromfman men to own and operate the family wheat farm. He was a large man with thinning, straight blond hair and penetrating blue eyes. His heft and deep resonant voice commanded respect that he didn't feel he deserved. Like many of the small farms in Arwood County, Earl's was struggling, in part because of a series of drought years, but mostly because the conglomerates, with their modern irrigation and transportation systems, were able to sell their harvest at a price lower than the small farmers could match. Earl took over the farm right after college, a decision welcomed by his father whose arthritis was growing worse each year, and by Earl's older brother and younger sister, who saw the farm as doomed.
Most of the small farms that remained were run by men whom Earl had known all his life. They had gone to the same school, the same church, they'd been in one another's house for one reason or another — delivering a casserole if someone was sick, picking up a tool or piece of machinery to borrow for a week or so. Earl had always been well liked, seen as a man who would back his friends and fight for their farms and their aging farm machinery as fiercely as he would fight for his own.
Earl's wife, Marta, a solemn woman of slight build, worked with Earl on the farm, along with one or two hired men who just seemed to appear as planting season approached and disappeared after harvest. Since the hard times began, Marta brought in some money by waitressing at the diner in town, part-time during the farming seasons, full-time in the winter. She was always pleasant to the customers and the others who worked at the diner, but she rarely smiled and never laughed. She did not talk about herself or her family, nor did she pry into anybody else's business; she arrived on time and left when her shift was over. It was hard to tell Marta's age because her face was a cobweb of wrinkles and creases etched into her skin by the sun and by her worries.
Marta had not wanted children, but had two. Warren and Melody, now eleven and fifteen, helped out with enough of the farm chores to save Earl the cost of hiring an extra hand. Melody taught Warren how to do increasingly difficult work as he got older. Having little time for anything but school and farm work, they were one another's best and only friend. The deep tie between them was evident to anyone who saw them together, though the nature of that bond was known only to the two of them.
The farmhouse on Earl's land was small, even by the standards of the neighboring farms. It consisted of three rooms — the kitchen, which occupied the entirety of the ground floor, and the two bedrooms on the upper floor — plus a small bathroom beneath the stairs. Earl and Marta slept in the larger of the two upstairs rooms, while Melody and Warren shared the other room. When Earl was a child, there were three beds in the smaller room to accommodate him and his brother and sister.
As a little boy, Warren had been very shy, trailing behind his mother from morning to night, never letting her out of his sight. Even as a two-year-old, he was awakened before sunrise by the sound of his parents dressing for the morning chores and would silently shadow his mother to the barn where she fed and watered the two plow horses. Warren would sit on the ground by one of the stalls sucking his thumb as he watched his mother work. His mouth and face would get streaked with a mixture of dirt, hay, and horse manure, which didn't seem to bother him. Marta viewed the boy's incessant need to be near her as a sign of weakness, a quality that did not bode well for him, for as she knew all too well, the weak do not fare well in this world.
What she found most repellant about Warren was his constant thumb sucking, and even worse, the delirious look on his face when he was doing it. He began sucking his thumb when he was only a few weeks old and seemed to do it more and more as he grew. He had his thumb constantly in his mouth not only in front of the family, but also, without a hint of embarrassment, in front of visitors to the farm and in school, even now at eleven, an age well past the time other children had given up the habit.
In recent years, whenever the schoolteacher, Miss Wells, spotted Marta in the diner, she made a point of telling her what a fine girl Melody was, almost a young woman now — so good-natured and eager to be of help. She would always add that Warren was a good boy, but he was a very quiet child who sat in the back row sucking his thumb, hardly joining in with the others in lessons or singing or sports. Every child is different — she'd learned that lesson time and time again during her many years of teaching — but one way or another they all seemed to grow up and come out fine. Marta would nod her head in agreement about how every child is different, even children from the same family, and how they each seem to find their own way, Lord only knows how. Inwardly, Marta cringed as Miss Wells talked about Warren, but you'd never know it from the expression on her face or the sound of her voice as she joined in with Miss Wells' praise of Melody and her confidence that Warren, like all the other children she had taught, would turn into a fine young man his parents would be proud of.
Miss Wells was right, Melody was a good girl, but it hadn't always been that way. When she was four, around the time Warren was born, she used to be a little terror, running around the house not listening to anything anyone said. Slapping her bottom led to nothing but a full theatrical production of crying the likes of which you've never seen. It could make your head feel like it was splitting open, and cleaning all the stuff that came from her nose just added one more chore to the day. The only thing that worked with Melody was putting her in her room and telling her not to dare come out or she'd end up in the closet. Melody only needed to be latched in the closet a few times before she learned to behave, and she's been a very cooperative child ever since.
The next of Marta's encounters with Miss Wells occurred on a particularly hot and humid Saturday in the first week of August. Not only was every table in the diner filled, people were jammed together at the door, half inside and half outside the diner. With the door open, the air conditioning couldn't keep up with the heat pouring in from both the street and the kitchen. The back of Marta's uniform was soaked with perspiration as she tried to take the orders of the newly seated customers, serve the hot dishes that were piling up on the kitchen ledge, bring change to the customers who were impatiently waiting to leave, and bus the tables that were strewn with dirty glasses and dishes. Miss Wells had managed to corner Marta as she was holding a glass under the Coca-Cola spout of the beverage machine. Marta was able to excuse herself after a minute or so, but Miss Wells' report on Warren and Melody agitated her nonetheless.
That evening, as Warren was finishing clearing the table after supper, Marta, standing at the sink, her arms up to her elbows in the soapy water, said to Warren, "I saw Miss Wells today. She said you sit there in the back of the room sucking your thumb all day. You're eleven years old now and you ought to know better." Marta had learned how to deal with Melody when she was young, but she was at her wits' end with Warren. Even the closet hadn't worked with him. He was a willful boy. Marta's mother had never had to deal with anything like Warren, and even if she had, Marta hadn't spoken to her for many years and would never dream of asking her for advice about anything. Talking to Earl's mother, Flora, who died some years back, had never been of any use because she always sided with the children, which made Marta so angry that she had a hard time remaining civil.
On several occasions over the years Marta had gone to the drugstore intending to ask the druggist, Mr. Renkin, if he knew how to deal with thumb sucking in a child Warren's age, but each time her pride got the best of her and she couldn't get herself to talk to him, and instead bought a little something she didn't need so she wouldn't catch anyone's attention. She finally realized, not long after Warren's eleventh birthday, that she would never be able to bring herself to talk directly with Mr. Renkin, and that she would have an easier time dealing with the new part-time shopgirl, whose bright blue name tag with white lettering etched into it read "Jenny." Jenny, a slender red-haired girl, with large orange-brown freckles all over her face, couldn't have been more than a year or two out of high school. She was a type Marta had known in school and hadn't liked, the type with their hand up all the time, eager to show off. Marta would have much preferred to speak with an older woman with children of her own, who knew how difficult children could be.
Because the drugstore was right across the street from the diner, Marta could keep watch during her breaks and hurry over to the store when it was empty of customers. Trying to be as casual as possible, as if the problem she was having with Warren was commonplace, she asked Jenny in the friendliest and most motherly of tones she could muster, "Do you have anything people use to get children to keep their fingers out of their mouth?"
Jenny looked at Marta questioningly, not quite understanding what she was asking. "Do you mean something for a baby who puts everything into their mouth?"
"No, I mean something for an older child."
"An older child who does what with their fingers?"
"An older child who puts their thumb in their mouth."
"Oh, you mean an older child who still sucks their thumb. There was a girl in my class at school who did that till she was pretty old. It was sad and I used to feel bad for her. I'll ask Mr. Renkin what to do."
Jenny turned, walked behind the counter, and spoke under her breath to the druggist. Marta watched out of the corner of her eye. The way Jenny was whispering, and the grave expression on Mr. Renkin's face, made it look like the girl was asking about a treatment for syphilis, not a remedy for thumb sucking.
On returning, Jenny said to Marta, "Mr. Renkin told me to tell you not to worry. He said that this problem is not unusual and that children usually grow out of it, but some children have to be pushed. He suggests putting an ointment on the child's thumbs that tastes bad and smells bad, and makes the thumbs numb, which most children don't like and it gets them to stop. It will be ready in an hour or so."
As Marta walked back to the diner, she went over Mr. Renkin's words in her head several times, pleased to hear the words "some children have to be pushed." He seemed to understand what she was up against. She wouldn't tell Earl. There would be no need to trouble him with this. It was her job as a mother to handle these things. He probably wouldn't understand the harm that can be done if you let this kind of thing go on too long — he's often lackadaisical where the children are concerned, but that's a man's way, isn't it?
While it was Mr. Renkin's words that kept running through Marta's head, it was Jenny's voice saying the words that Marta was hearing. Jenny was just a girl, and a girl that age has no real experience with children, or with life for that matter. Nevertheless, the sound of Jenny's voice had a consoling effect on Marta. The girl treated Marta respectfully, as an elder — she called her Mrs. Bromfman after she talked to the pharmacist, who must have told her Marta's married name. Marta appreciated that.
During the remainder of the afternoon at the diner, business was slow. Marta checked the clock every ten minutes or so in anticipation of picking up the ointment. She rehearsed in her head the words she would use to tell Warren about the ointment that she'd be putting on his thumbs — actually he only sucked his right thumb, but he might start using the left one if the right one were no longer available to him. She imagined the expression on his face when she broke the news to him that the days of his embarrassing himself and the family were over. She would have to find a time and place in which she and the boy would not be interrupted by Earl or Melody. Probably taking him out back after the supper dishes were washed would be best. The last thing in the world she wanted was to have Earl or Melody spoil this plan that she had put so much time and effort into. It had not been easy for her, but since she was the only member of the family who took the matter seriously, it was left to her to tend to it.
Supper seemed interminable, but finally the table was cleared, the floor swept, and the dishes placed in the drying rack. Marta could see that Warren was about to slip away. She called after him, "Warren, I want a word with you." In his obedient but detached way, Warren turned and followed his mother out the back door to the expanse of sun-beaten, tire-marked dirt that stood between the house and the outhouse, which was now used only by the hired hands. An abandoned flatbed truck, an old thresher, and other broken farm machinery were silently going to rust.
"I saw Miss Wells the other day and she told me that you're a good boy, but that you stand out from the others because you have your thumb in your mouth most all the time. Is that so?"
Looking down at the ground, Warren said, "I guess."
"She said that you have to be encouraged to stop acting like that. Do you think that that would be a good idea and that you could use some help in doing that?"
"I don't know, yeah."
"Don't you feel embarrassed to be doing that at your age in front of everyone?"
"I guess so."
"I talked with Mr. Renkin at the drugstore and he said he had something that would help you break the habit. Do you want to see what it is?"
Still looking at the ground and making lines in the dry dirt with the toe of his right shoe, he quietly said, "All right."
"It's an ointment that goes on your thumbs to remind you what you're doing when you put your thumb in your mouth. After all this time, you don't know if your thumb's in your mouth or not. Do you think a reminder will help you remember that you're doing it so you can stop yourself?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"I have the tube here and I'll put some on your thumbs so you can get started right away. There's no point in dawdling about it, is there?"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Parts Left Out"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Thomas Ogden.
Excerpted by permission of Aeon Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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