12. Renting Out Martin

The farm was Sarah's home, her heart, and her whole life.

Her community surrounded it. The animals she was responsible for inhabited it. The corn she was contracted to deliver to Bow-Daniels-Midwest grew in its soil.

Her parents were buried a few towns away in the Russian Orthodox Church's graveyard. Her pets over the years had been laid to rest in the earth out behind the barn.

The ties were too strong. She wouldn't leave again.

But that didn't mean she wouldn't be prepared.

She took her cell phone with her while picking over the garden, gleaning the strawberry bushes at the back for every ripe berry. "Katie! How's married life treating you? Are you pregnant yet?"

After laughing assurances from Katie that she was not yet in the family way and didn't plan to be for a couple of months at least, Sarah asked her, "Can I borrow your husband?"

Katie laughed at her again. "Just because I haven't put Martin out to stud yet doesn't mean I'm going to rent him out to the neighbors."

"I promise I'm not looking for a sire for breeding," Sarah said, bending to pluck strawberries off the low bushes. "I seem to have gotten myself in a bit of a pickle, and it looks like some people from out of town are after me. I think a show of force should run them off."

"You mean gang members from Cedar Rapids? I heard the high school was having a problem with a gang called the Iowa Home Boys. A group brought baseball bats to the football game against Pella and said they were having a gang war."

Sarah paused, the ridiculousness of that stunning her, but then she pressed on. "Not them. So, I was in the hospital for a couple of days."

"Oh, yes. I heard. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. The doctors thought it was some sort of muscle thing, but it turned out to be dehydration. Abigail took care of my stock while I was indisposed."

The lies rolled off her lips, and Sarah didn't like it at all. She was not raised to be a liar.

It was time to stop the lies.

She stood up from the ground-cover strawberry bushes and stretched her back. "You know how my dad was a newcomer to Kalona and talked funny?"

"Yes, but it seemed impolite to mention it."

Sarah forced her mouth to pronounce the words even though it was hard for her to believe. "He was from New York City, where he was in the Russian mafia. His dad was the head of their mafia thingee, but they call it a bratva. So, he was, like, high up."

Katie's gasp echoed from her phone. "No!"

"Inever knew. It's still crazy to think about it. As far as I can figure out, he moved to Iowa to get away from it. Anyway, you know how I had this aunt who came out of the woodwork after my parents died, and I talked to her sometimes?"

Katie's breathless answer was rapt. "Yes. Mary Varvara Bell. I always thought Varvara was an exotic, foreign name."

"It turns out that she took over the mafia from my grandfather, and she's the head mafia boss now. I did something to piss her off, and now she's going to kill me."

"What did you do?"

Rue crept into her voice. "As far as I can tell, it's that I exist."

"Yeah, that's all it takes to piss my mother off sometimes."

"Anyway, I need some corn-fed Iowa muscle around the house for a couple of days. Can I borrow Martin?"

Scratching fluttered down the phone line as if Katie were getting busy. "When do you need him?"

"I think tomorrow night is when things might get real, but this situation may take a week or more to blow over."

"I'll send Martin over with his varmint rifle and a casserole, and I'll put the word out that you need help with men and food."

The word.Katie was going to put out the word.

Gossip this prime would be the main topic at quilt shows and livestock auctions for years. Sarah did not know how she would hold her head up in public.

And the word would spread fast that afternoon, pinging from phone calls to chat rooms to texts.

Sarah winced at the word getting back to Abigail. "Do me a favor and hold off on talking to people for fifteen minutes? I need to call Abigail Yoder. I didn't mean to spill quite this much, and Abigail needs to hear it from me."

"Will do," Katie said. "And good idea. That nephew of hers, Amos, needs something productive to do. This will be good for him."

On Sarah's next call, Abigail Yoder was less sanguine about Sarah's revelations. "I knew there was something more going on with your father. He didn't settle in here quite right."

Looking back, her father's restlessness had manifested in his lack of improvements to the farm as if he'd only intended to stay a short while and so many other moments of her life. "I don't think he understood country life."

"This seems a lot more dangerous than if you'd just overheard something while you're away."

"Yeah," she sighed. "It might be."

"I don't like it, Sarah. I don't like it at all. Have you thought about leaving for a while? I don't mind having Charlie and HowNow over here. They're well-behaved. It would be a good project for Amos to watch over your crops for a few weeks or more. That boy needs something productive to do."

"It's my land, Abby. I can't be foisting the responsibility off on others. People would talk."

"Oh, people are going to be talking, all right. You should leave the menfolk on your farm to defend it and should come to stay with me."

Impossible."I'm a good shot. Half my meat comes from deer and pheasant season. I'm going to stay."

"I don't like this, Sarah. I don't like thinking about someone coming to hurt you, and I don't like thinking about you staying on your farm with dozens of men descending on your place. I heard Tiffany Meeks's pastor gave a sermon last week about the problems with predatory males."

Sarah laughed at the thought. "I've known Martin Williams, Joe Johnson, and Robbie Meeks since we went to kindergarten together. Joe took second place in the home goods sewing division at the state fair last year. Your husband and I made mud pies together when we were three. I don't think these are the predatory males he was talking about."

"I suppose not, but I'm worried about you."

"I'll be okay. I'm home now, and that's what matters."

Just as Sarah got off the phone with Abigail, the texts started rolling in, checking on her current well-being and offering tactics and man-flesh for the defense of her farm.

This was why Sarah had come back. Kalona would come to her aid.

Later, Sarah rode Charlie to stock her honor-system cooler with the butter and milk while Blaze drove her truck to the hardware store. The sun prickled her arms and heated the back of her neck, and she gazed over the corn from her vantage point atop the horse.

The corn tassels stirred in the warm July breeze, and the dirt on her empty country road was undisturbed.

But as Blaze had said, the attackers might not use the road.

Blaze had stalked her for a week before he'd broken into her house, and she'd never seen his car nor hide nor hair of him.

But her community hadn't been on high alert back then.

Now, she would get word.

When she returned from the roadside cooler, she found Blaze sitting on the wide swing on the front porch on the far side of the house.

She handed him a tall glass of sweet tea. "Ten of my friends' husbands will arrive tomorrow."

Blaze nodded. "I'll have a final count of my guys within a few hours. Let's not talk about this right now. I would like to sit and drink this tea for a few minutes."

He must be tired because he'd been working his phone while clenching nails in his mouth all afternoon. Plywood nailed on the inside of the house was visible through the windowpanes.

She asked, "I thought that for hurricanes, people nailed plywood to the outsides of the windows."

"For hurricanes, you want to protect the glass, to keep it from breaking. A high-caliber bullet will punch right through plywood and shatter the window. The plywood is to keep the broken glass outside and reduce the visibility of us inside the house."

Sarah had envisioned a bunch of wholesome country boys standing up to the Russian mafia goons and scaring them off. High-caliber bullets and broken glass hadn't figured into it.

"We'll go over fortifications and defenses later." Blaze sipped his tea, looking over the silver-green stalks tickling the sky with their cornsilk. "The farm is peaceful."

Sarah nodded and pushed off with her heels, swinging them in the warm June breeze. "When you get a good crop, it's amazing."

"Growing food is an optimistic vocation. Since graduating high school, I've studied violence and destruction. It was always couched in terms of rescuing people and protecting the country, but I've murdered too many people not to see what I was doing."

"But they were bad people, right? That's why you had to go rescue someone from them?"

"They were doing bad things, and that's why I had to go stop them. But meeting evil with evil doesn't make you a good person. That's why all these veterans are calling the counseling line or suffering without help because the moral injury of killing people hurts."

"And it hurts you, doesn't it?" she asked.

Blaze nodded and stretched, dropping one arm on the swing behind her.

If this had been high school, Sarah would've been a giggly mess about a guy nearly putting his arm around her, but the solemn set of Blaze's mouth saddened her.

He said, "Let's talk about anything else."

Sarah settled back and watched the corn waving at the azure sky that domed all the way to the far horizon. "The crop looks good this year."

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Blaze's shoulder drop, and his lips softened with a hint of a smile. "How can you tell?"

"Lots of ways. You can measure the average height of the cornstalks for growth per month or use satellite imagery to calculate the density of the foliage, but mostly I go out and pick a couple ears and eat them."

Blaze chuckled softly, his laugh sounding less like unoiled gears grating as the days passed. "I thought it was feed corn."

"It's a variety you can eat for sweet corn or dry for feed. At harvest time, I drive down to that long, straight stretch of I-80 and sell a couple bushels of freshly picked corn out of the back of my truck for pin money."

He slouched on the swing, stretching his long legs on the porch's wooden boards that desperately needed a fresh coat of blue paint.

Sarah continued, "I meet lots of interesting people that way, families on a road trip, students in all sorts of subjects going to or from Iowa City, and truckers who have seen the whole country. I text my schedule to this one trucker who drives a regular route between Chicago and Denver because he always buys a big basket."

Blaze's arm curled around her shoulders, hugging her against his chest. "Tell me more about the farm."

"Some chickens are sweet little babies, and some are jerks."

He nodded, crossing his long legs, and swinging the bench underneath them.

"When I was a kid and we had five head of cattle, the pasture in back of the barn was a lot bigger. When I had to downsize, I plowed it under for corn."

While Blaze slowly sipped the glass of iced tea she'd given him, Sarah pointed out areas of the farm they could see from the porch and told him stories about them and her neighbors.

"A lot of my friends have century farms, which means their family has been farming the land for over a hundred years. My mom's parents had one way over on the other side of town, but they had to sell because my mom was already farming here with my dad, and none of their other kids wanted to take it on."

Blaze shifted beside her. "Do you plan to have kids?"

A few years before, giddiness would've consumed Sarah at such a conversation, but Blaze wasn't the guy to have it with. "I always thought I would get married and have kids, but I didn't date anybody in high school because my dad got mad whenever I wanted to go somewhere. My friends all coupled up and married each other. I missed my chance."

"I know how that goes. Would you force one of your hypothetical kids to take the farm someday?"

Sarah scoffed at him. "I'd force my kids to go to college. Like you said, there's one just down the road."

Wow.She'd never thought about that before.

He tilted his head, looking at her. "Really?"

Sarah's head buzzed with the words that had popped out of her mouth. "Farming is an honorable living, and I've always wanted to farm. They probably wouldn't. I mean, if they did want to, then they could have it. But a farm is not like Great-Auntie Olga's hideous orange vase that is ‘probably valuable', so it keeps getting passed down. Farming is a calling, and you either have it or you don't."

Blaze looked back at the corn, but he seemed to be looking farther than just her field. "That sounded rehearsed."

"Everybody says it. I say it all the time."

"You believe it?"

"Of course."

Blaze nodded, and he held her a little closer to his chest and kissed the top of her head. "Tell me more."

Sarah prattled on, telling him the things that everybody in Kalona already knew but he seemed to find interesting, things she'd always wanted to tell her take on the story but were old news around there.

After an hour, Sarah wiggled to the edge of the swing. "I should probably get a few things done before it starts getting dark."

Blaze nodded and stood, stretching. His barrel chest stretched from his narrow waist, and he pressed his hands against the porch's ceiling. "If I had time, I would dig trenches for trench warfare, but I guess we'll have to be satisfied with what I can fortify around the house in the next few days."

As she stood, Blaze caught her hand and drew her against his chest, wrapping his arm around her waist. "I wish we'd met under better circumstances."

Sarah nodded, wishing it with all her heart.

He said, "I could get used to sitting on a porch and watching the corn grow, but it's time to prepare for the mafia war."