He took it. He held it up to the light. He turned it over. He looked at the picture. He looked at me. He looked at the picture again.
The picture was from three years ago. I’d had my hair done for it. I was wearing my blue church dress and my pearls. I looked like a nice old lady.
Now I looked like a nice old lady who’d been rolling around in a garden. Which I was.
“I’ll need two more forms,” he said.
“Two more? For forty dollars?”
“A utility bill. A passport. Something with your address.”
“Young man, I live four blocks from here. On Elm Street. The yellow house with the roses.”
He set my license down on his side of the glass.
He didn’t slide it back.
“Ma’am,” he said. “We have to be careful with people like you.”
The bank got quiet.
It’s a small bank. One big room. Four teller windows, though only one was open. Two desks along the side wall for loans. A little waiting area with three chairs and a rack of brochures nobody reads.
There were maybe six people in there. And every one of them heard it.
Behind me in line, a young woman with a toddler stopped bouncing him on her hip. I knew her. Kayla Brandt. Her grandmother and I were in the Garden Club together for thirty years. The little boy was named Wyatt. He had a drool bib with a duck on it.
At the loan desk, old Harvey Kessler, who’s been a loan officer at Farmers & Merchants since 1979, set down his pen.
The security guard, a big gentle boy named Tommy Ruiz whose mother I taught in Sunday School, looked at the floor.
People like you.
I wanted to ask what kind of people he meant.
Old people? Dirty people? Widows in dead men’s hats?
I didn’t.
George used to say a raised voice only proves the other fellow’s point.
He said it to me a thousand times over fifty-one years of marriage. Usually when I was about to give somebody a piece of my mind. Usually at a church council meeting.
“Dot,” he’d say, putting his hand on my knee under the table. “Let ’em talk. Let ’em show you who they are. Then you’ll know what to do.”
So I let him talk.
And I looked at the wall.
There’s a photograph on the wall by the door in that bank lobby.
Black and white, in a cheap gold frame. The glass is a little dusty. It’s hung a little crooked. It’s been hanging there so long the wallpaper around it is a different color than the rest of the wall.
It’s from 1968.
A young man and a young woman in their church clothes, each holding a shovel, standing in an empty lot. The young man has dark hair slicked back and a narrow tie and a grin like he’s just gotten away with something. The young woman is wearing a white dress with little blue flowers on it and a pillbox hat, and she’s holding her shovel like she isn’t quite sure which end goes in the ground.
Behind them, there’s nothing but dirt. And a hand-painted sign on a wooden stake.
FUTURE HOME OF FARMERS & MERCHANTS BANK.
Nobody ever looks at it.
People walk past it every day. They come in out of the rain and stamp their feet on the mat right under it. They wait in line with their backs to it. Nobody ever looks.
I looked at it then.
The young woman in the picture was smiling so big.
She had no idea what was coming.
The loans for farmers in the bad years. The fights in the back room. The bank examiners from Des Moines with their briefcases and their frowns. The winter of 1985, when half the farms in the county were going under, and the big banks were calling in every note, and George came home at two in the morning and sat on the edge of our bed in the dark.
“Dot,” he said. “I think we’re going to lose it.”
We didn’t lose it.
But it was close. Lord, it was close.
I turned back to the glass.
The young man was watching me. Waiting. I think he expected me to argue. Or cry. Or march home in a huff and never come back. I think that’s what usually happened with “people like me.”
“I appreciate careful,” I said.
He looked surprised.
“You do?”
“I do. Careful is how you keep a bank alive.” I folded my hands on the counter. “Would you do one thing for me before I go home for the rest of my papers?”
He sighed. A long, put-upon sigh.
“What?”
“Would you look up account number 0001?”
“Ma’am, I can’t just—”
“It’s my account,” I said. “You have my license right there.”
He rolled his eyes. Right at Tommy Ruiz, the security guard. A little look that said can you believe this?
Tommy didn’t look back at him.
Brandon turned to his computer. He typed with two fingers, fast and hard, the way young people do.
Zero. Zero. Zero. One.
He pressed enter.
He stopped typing.
He looked at the screen for a long time.
He scrolled down.
Then up again.
He leaned closer to the monitor. He squinted. He read something. I watched his lips move.
He looked at me.
Then at the screen.
Then, slowly, past me, at the old photograph by the door.
At the young woman in the white dress with the little blue flowers. Holding a shovel. Smiling so big.
His face went the color of skim milk.
He picked up the phone on his desk.
His hand was shaking so badly he had to dial twice.
I’m going to tell you what was on that screen. But first I have to tell you how it got there.
Because it took fifty-eight years. And a lot of pie.
I was born Dorothy Mae Lund in 1947, on a dairy farm three miles south of Millbrook. The youngest of six. My father milked forty Holsteins twice a day for thirty years and never took a vacation. My mother kept chickens and a garden and canned enough tomatoes every August to feed a small army.
I met George Whitaker at the county fair in 1964.
He was showing a Hereford steer. I was showing a rhubarb pie.
His steer got reserve champion. My pie got blue ribbon. He came over to the pie tent afterward with his ribbon pinned to his shirt and said, “I hear yours beat mine.”
“Pies and steers aren’t in the same category,” I said.
“Everything’s in the same category if you look at it right,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t, entirely. But I married him two years later.
George’s family farmed too. Two hundred acres of corn and beans west of town. But George had been to Korea, and then to college on the GI Bill. He came home with a degree in economics from Iowa State and a head full of ideas.
He got a job at First National, the big bank in the county seat. Twenty miles away. He wore a suit every day and drove a used Ford.
He hated it.
“They don’t understand farming, Dot,” he’d say at the dinner table. “They look at a farmer and see a risk. They see dirt and old boots and a pickup truck with rust on the fenders. They don’t see the man who’s been feeding this country for three generations.”
He watched First National turn down loan after loan. Good farmers. Honest men. Men whose fathers and grandfathers had worked the same land for a hundred years. They’d come in with their hats in their hands and their best shirts on, and some young man in a suit would look at their boots and their hands and say no.
One afternoon in 1967, my own father went in for a loan.
He needed eight thousand dollars to replace his milking equipment. The old system had broken down. Without new equipment, he’d have to sell the herd. Forty cows. Thirty years.
The loan officer at First National was twenty-six years old. He’d never been on a farm. He looked at my father’s work clothes and his chapped red hands and his old Chevy truck parked outside.
And he said no.
My father came home and sat at the kitchen table and didn’t say anything for an hour.
George was there. We’d come for Sunday dinner.
He watched my father sit there. Then he got up and went outside and stood in the barnyard for a long time, looking at the cows.
When he came back in, he said, “Dot. We’re going to start a bank.”
Everybody thought he was crazy.
We were twenty-one and twenty-three years old. We had eleven hundred dollars in savings. We lived in a three-room apartment over the hardware store.
But George had a plan. He’d been thinking about it for years. He went to every farmer in the county. Every shopkeeper. Every widow with a little nest egg in a coffee can.
“Put your money in a bank that knows you,” he told them. “A bank that’s owned by people like you.”
People like you.
That’s what he said. That’s exactly what he said. In kitchens and barns and church basements all over the county.
It took a year and a half. But they came.
Farmers put in five hundred dollars. A thousand. Two thousand. Old Mrs. Jorgensen, who’d been widowed in the war, put in her entire savings. Six thousand dollars, in cash, in a cardboard box tied with string.
“George Whitaker,” she said, setting the box on our kitchen table, “if you lose this, I will haunt you.”
He didn’t lose it.
In August of 1968, we broke ground on the empty lot at the corner of Main and Second. The newspaper sent a photographer. George and I put on our church clothes and stood in the dirt holding shovels.
That’s the picture on the wall.
