Part 1 Three days before the city was supposed to fine an eighty-two-year-old widow nearly nine hundred dollars over her lawn, her next-door neighbor stood at the edge of the...
Part 1 “Get him off my property. Bulldoze that piece of junk out of the way.” The yellow excavator was already chewing through the rear bumper of my work truck...
Part 1 At 7:05 on a Saturday morning in August, I flipped one breaker inside a substation I had built with my own hands in 1988. One hundred twenty-four luxury...
Gerald Crouch did not leave John Deere because the company had wronged him. That was what made the decision so difficult for other farmers in Champaign County, Illinois, to understand....
In 1982, the entire town of Hollister Gap, Tennessee, laughed at Earl Renfro. At the feed store on Monday mornings, men leaned against the counter and shook their heads when...
Henrik Lund ordered a wife the way he ordered everything else: by mail, with specifications. He wanted a woman between twenty and thirty, healthy, willing to cook, clean, and keep...
It was November 1958, the kind of November that arrived in West Texas without ceremony. No turning leaves. No gentle cool. No slow, golden warning that the season had changed....
The auctioneer called Lot 61, and the room went quiet. Not the respectful quiet that comes when a great animal enters the ring. Not the low, anticipatory hush of breeders...
On March 12, 2003, Robert Kendall stood in the doorway of a machine shed he had just inherited and stared at something that did not make sense. The shed sat...
Part 1 I pulled up to my own farm gate at 7:42 on a Saturday morning and counted forty cars. The chain I had locked the night before was lying...