Killings by Calvin Trillin

Author:Calvin Trillin [Trillin, Calvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

A Father-Son Operation

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Grundy County, Iowa

SEPTEMBER 1982

The soil in Grundy County is often spoken of as the richest soil in Iowa—which means, Grundy County residents sometimes add, that it must be about the richest soil in the world. “The land is mostly a gentle, undulating prairie with just sufficient slope to thoroughly drain it,” somebody wrote of Grundy County farmland in 1860. “There is not the same area in the state with less wasteland….The soil is black mould of the prairie, deep and strong for all kinds of crops.” Although the farmers who come in to Grundy Center, the county seat, to do their banking and buy their supplies manage to find plenty about the weather that is worthy of complaint, crop failures in Grundy County are even rarer than armed robberies. “Oh, we get six or seven crop failures a year,” a local resident said recently over morning coffee at Manly’s drugstore, on the main street of Grundy Center. “But they’re all in the bar or the drugstore.” Agribusiness spokesmen who routinely talk about the American family farm in the past tense are apparently not familiar with Grundy County. All its farms are family farms. Many of them are owned by the same families that carved them out of the prairie in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In those days, the northern part of the county was virtually all German—it was settled by serious, hardworking farm people from East Friesland, near the Dutch border—and it is virtually all German today. The family names are the same. People in Grundy Center still like to say that you can walk from a point just a couple of miles north of the county courthouse to Parkersburg, fifteen miles away, and almost never be off land that is owned by one member of the Meester clan or another.

In some ways, the lives of the Grundy County Germans have not changed a lot since the days when walking was about the only way to make the trip. It is true, of course, that they now own sixty-thousand-dollar tractors and that they routinely drive twenty-five miles to a shopping mall in Cedar Falls for their groceries and that many of them can easily afford to fly to Germany to visit the villages of their forebears. It is also true, though, that they remain serious, hardworking farm people. Most of them still lead lives that revolve tightly around their families and their land. On Sundays, they go to church—to small country Reformed churches on county blacktops or to conservative versions of Presbyterian or Baptist churches in nearby trading towns like Parkersburg and Aplington. The Sabbath is still taken seriously as a day of rest in northern Grundy County; not many people would mow their lawn or wash their car or repair the roof of their barn on a Sunday afternoon—not within sight of the road, at least. Many people still live in the rambling white farmhouses that their forebears built on the family’s original plot of land—what farm people in Iowa still call the home place.

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