Nick Reding Read Online Free PDF Page A

single Iowa county. To court up in the town of West Union, he wears a gray suit, a white shirt, a blue tie, and a ring
     on each thumb. His hair is dark blond and is short on the sides and longer on top, where Nathan, aided by the stiffening properties
     of hair gel, arranges it in a way that looks like neat, stubbled rows of winter wheat. The name Lein is Norwegian; beneath
     a wide forehead, Nathan’s eyes are sled-dog blue. On one window of Nathan’s Jetta is a sticker for the hallucinogenic-hippie
     band Widespread Panic, whom Nathan goes to see whenever they are within a reasonable driving distance, which for him means
     about 400 miles. Nathan has been to nineteen shows to date. In the trunk of the Jetta, there is a hunting vest in Mossy Oak
     camouflage, the pockets of which are stuffed with shotgun shells and wooden turkey calls; a cardboard crate of police reports
     and depositions; and a twelve-gauge semiautomatic Winchester X2 shotgun.
    It’s mid-May 2005, and in the wake of a front that blew out of Regina, Saskatchewan, and overshot the Dakotas, the sky above
     Oelwein is gray and roiling. As there is more rain in the forecast, Nathan’s father will be planting corn till long past dark
     on the farm where Nathan grew up, twelve miles outside town, hoping to get the year’s crop seeded before the soil is too wet
     to plow. Meantime, there are plenty of chores to be done, most of which revolve around the fifty or so Lincoln long-wool and
     Corriedale sheep that Nathan’s parents raise: sweeping the pens, freshening the water, feeding hay to the rams and ewes. Changed
     from his suit, in ruined duck-cloth bibs and size 15 work boots, Nathan pilots the white Jetta north along Highway 150. He
     passes Grace Methodist, somber and maroon-red in the long, sunless dusk, then turns west on Route 3. The late-day smells of
     cut grass and wet pavement are underlain with the sultry, textured scent of pig shit. Twenty miles distant, the western sky
     is bruised black and green in a way that has the Amish urging their Clydesdales onward at a trot along the shoulder of the
     road, the plastic rain-doors already zipped tight on their buggies.
    The house where Nathan was born and raised is a white-clapboard three-bedroom that sits on a slight rise in the prairie at
     the end of a gravel road. It was built in 1910. The yaw in the place is visible, two or three degrees measured foundation
     to rooftop, northwest to southeast, as meaningful a testament as there is to the prevailing ferocity of the prairie wind.
     The views are stunning, as much for the austere grandeur as for the suffocating sense of desolation. From the driveway, mile
     after mile of newly planted corn and soybeans spread in every direction, interrupted now and again in the shifting line of
     sight by an evergreen shelterbelt or an anemic finger of timber. The maples and oaks, like the farmhouses, have taken their
     chances against the weather for as long as anyone can remember. Out here, it seems, stubbornness is just a part of the landscape.
    As is frugality. Inside the farm house, Nathan’s mother and father stand in the kitchen, next to the sink. The rest of the
     room consists of a tiny four-burner stove, one bank of white wood cabinets, an Amish table with two chairs, and a small refrigerator.
     Stacked in piles throughout the room are dozens, if not hundreds, of agricultural bulletins, almanacs, magazines, and foldouts
     that the Leins pore over in an attempt to anticipate sheep and crop prices— Wallace’s Farmer , Today’s Farmer , Sheep magazine, the Corn Producer , the Iowa Farm Bureau Spokesman . There is no Internet and no computer, no fax machine or BlackBerry. The only nod to modern technology aside from the wall-mounted
     phone is a small TV on the counter, on which Nathan’s father watches (and talks back to) the two hosts of Market to Market every Friday night on PBS at eight P.M.
    Every decision made by the Leins—how much seed to buy,