(Power by Joseph McFadden cont.)

Not long after the marriage, Mabel Mills came to understand the old defeats driving her husband. Willard is still trying to recover from his childhood, but does not understand his own trouble. He dreams of Utopia and the Garden of Eden, the land of milk and honey, and imagines the glorious and homey security of successful husbandry. Dreaming, he dreams himself incessant work and squanders the scant money they have and need for clothes and food. But just ahead always lies ultimate success and more than plenty. He gambles on it. She says, "Willard, why don't you just let the sharecroppers work the land and you stay out of it? You run yourself ragged and spend what little we do have on supplies and tractors and equipment they don't need, and you never see any of it comin' back."

"Now, Mother," (he has called her Mother since the first child was born) he says. "Next year the whole farm will be like a garden. Just let me get ahead of the flooding and the grass and it will turn into a fertile valley."

Mabel Mills says no more. It won't do any good and dynamiting stumps won't make the land more fertile. She knows, but who can tell him? Cypress stumps don't rot quickly, and some have been there two generations already. The same stumps caught the point of his father's plow and drove the handle into his belly, rupturing him. And the same stumps caught the front wheels of the new tractor, two summers past, spinning the steering wheel and breaking the arm of a sharecropper. Still, Willard wants mechanized farming, perfectly straight, parallel rows for big multiple-row planters and cultivators, for only thirty-five acres of cotton and corn already worked by two sharecropping families. He just dreams, while she stands to reason. Obsessed with lurking financial success from a big crop in the fields, he neglects the garden, and the weeds take it. With only a hoe, she cannot control the invasion, and he is too busy to help with a plow. And the children are becoming weedy too, practically fatherless because he is occupied with bigger and more important things. She wishes he would just help make the garden productive, and take the children fishing and swimming in the creek and the river, pay some attention to them.

But Willard's real purpose lies where he thinks in the misty past and dreams in the nebulous future. He carries a whole head full of dead people and decades of crop failures. On this beautiful place, the virgin pines covering the hillsides down to the valley, and the cypress trees towering majestically out of the swamp, two generations of Millses already have pitted themselves heedlessly and fatally against the slow, inevitable, inviolable land. It broke them all, the old ones early by the physical abuse of endless toil, the younger ones from malaria, typhoid fever, summer dysentery tuberculosis and bad nutrition. But in Willard's mind, only the right thing has to be done to conquer the farm. And he can set things straight, poor man struggling valiantly for his dead father's admiration and perhaps his envy. He was already in this desperate pursuit when Mabel quit teaching school in town and married him, though she did not recognize the futility at once.

She had youth and hope then, and a fluttering heart when he proposed and she came to see the beautiful pine covered hills, his garden, his small orchard, the humble little house. She could give up many things for idyllic peace in a lovely setting. And she was in love. But her lot proved to be endless work, and one pregnancy after another. He abandoned all the frugal husbandry near the house and attacked the fields, leaving her with the garden, the chickens, the cows, the children. In bed he was insatiable and careless, and overwhelmed her suddenly almost every night with wordless, brutal, brief rutting. She was speechless and helpless in his grasp. And now she has five healthy children aged fourteen to four, all with blue eyes and auburn hair. The four older ones scatter about the farm and countryside, on mules, horses, and bulls. She worries about their safety, but the farm is better than city streets. Her real distress is an abiding and brooding apprehension for their safety in a man's world.

But the farm has to be wrested; Willard has only to find the means of subduing the resisting land. The tractor won't do it; he thought it would be the source of the power he needed, but it just digs itself deeper and deeper, spinning its back wheels with the iron lugs until it mires down in stinking blue mud. She tried to stop him when he bought it, but he bought it anyway, and now he wrestles with it and the mud, and the monthly payments; and the land relentlessly goes on having its way.

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