Long Gone is a memoir about farming in Iowa in the 1930's and 1940's. Richard Willis was six years old when his father, unable to find a job in Marengo, Iowa, became a sharecropper. As Willis says in an early chapter, "During the Depression you couldn't buy a job…what else was there for him to do? Maybe he was glad to get back to farming, something he knew how to do." The farm the elder Willis rented had no electricity or running water. The sources of power were basically wind and muscle, the same sources that farmers had relied on "since the beginning of time." The year is 1933.

Long Gone is not a story for the sentimental. There is sentiment in the story, but it is the kind that Wordsworth describes as lying "too deep for tears." The underlying message is that the weak and sentimental couldn't (and didn't) survive small farm life in Iowa during what was the poorest American decade of the 20th century. There is much resentment in Willis' account of his years on the farm, but there is also appreciation for what his mother and father experienced, and there is a grudging sort of love for the little farm itself, its animals (horses especially) that quite literally kept the family alive by working the land, giving eggs, milk, fertilizer, and ultimately their lives. Willis describes the demands of farm life, its chores, its caprices, its contrary people:

Aubrey [Willis's father] seldom taught me how to do anything, at the same time he was pleased enough to yell at me when I came up ignorant.

"Take a half-hitch around that post!"

(What's a half-hitch? Where do you put the other half?)

"Go harness that team!"

(Who showed me how to harness a team?)

When Willis was told to harness the team he wasn't tall enough to buckle the horses' collars. His father's response was: "You goddamned dummy, you don't know anything, do you?" This is followed by a wry understatement from Willis who says his father's words "made a lasting impression." Anyone raised in a home where a parent (or both) constantly verbalized your shortcomings will have no trouble empathizing with young Willis.

But people could be kind as well. A neighborly old man sees eight-year-old Willis struggling with the reins on the team of horses and says, "Now, I show you how to do that." Willis claims that from that old man's single and gentle lesson he learned how to unhitch a team and hang the lines without scrambling them. Willis concludes, "And Old Man Weiss has a special place in my heart forever."

What characterizes Willis's remembrances of Iowa and years on the farm are the plethora of authentic details. The sound of water running over stones, birdcalls, his mother's teaching him how to listen and identify the bird songs: "The strong, melodious call of meadow larks…a sound now almost entirely vanished, as changed methods of farming have destroyed the larks' nesting places."  There is the melancholy whistle of phoebes calling as if to a lost sweetheart. There are robins and catbirds and the "harsh, intelligent chatter" of crows. Farmers tell him that crows know the difference between a man carrying a stick and one carrying a gun. Folklore and folk wisdom are rare these days, but Willis' writing is rich in both and includes gems like this one told him by his school teacher: "Patience is a virtue. Possess it if you can. It's found seldom in a woman and never in a man." And also: "Can't never did anything. I'll try does wonders."

Willis' book is first and perhaps foremost (depending on your focus) a history lesson about Midwest rural and small town life. And though it covers not quite two decades, it could be covering four or five. I was raised on a farm and owned a dairy farm in the early 1980's and can attest to the wearying round of chores that Willis describes, the animals that must be fed and watered and treated for their ailments, the machinery that breaks down at the most inconvenient times, the exhaustion of trying to make a living from land and animals. Anyone who has lived on a farm will nod in agreement when Willis writes about the anxiety a farmer feels when it's time to harvest his crops. The fear that one good storm could wipe everything out. The hustle of doing the chores before dawn and getting out into the fields as soon as there is enough light to see by, the rain that turns the earth into a muddy bog that sinks or at least stalls machinery, clings to your boots making them feel like anvils. We see farmers stopping work only to refuel their stomachs with gargantuan meals that will give them the energy needed to get through the day in the fields and through the chores again at night, after which they fall into bed and sleep the sleep of the dead.

The word on animals is that some might be appealing, such as the noble horses that pull the plow, but others are not so laudable. Take, for instance, chickens:

Chicks not only peck at their droppings, they also peck at each other. There were patent medicines that claimed they prevented cannibalism, but nothing really worked. You can rely on it; the odd-colored chick will be pecked to death. Collegiality has about as much play among chickens as it has among academics.

I've seen this phenomenon myself many times and know it to be true. A small blood spot on a chicken is a death sentence. The other chickens will continually peck away at the spot until the chicken finally dies. Also, I've experienced what Willis experienced at the lash end of a cow's soaked tail more often than I care to recall:

Still I remember the sting of a cow's tail wrapping itself around my head and cutting me across the eyes as I milked. And when that tail was saturated with manure, well, so much the more memorable.

There is a lot in Willis' book that will bring forth, not guffaws, perhaps, but plenty of chuckles, plenty of smiles. He never loses his sense of humor about a life that many may view with nostalgia and maybe even homesickness or melancholy. But I'm with Willis when he says that there is nothing to get too wistful about when it comes to farming. It's a world that has broken many a good man and woman and sent them packing. It's a world of bone-aching labor. It's a world of necessary violence: the docking of lamb tails with "A hammer, an ax head and a block of wood."  The dehorning of cattle that causes the animal a good deal of suffering and a considerable loss of blood. I've dehorned cattle, trying always to do it when they're young and the horns are small, but even with all precautions taken, the animals are traumatized by it and in my experience very few of them trust you again. As calves they play with you and seem to think you're the mama or the papa. As soon as you dehorn them that relationship is probably through. Although occasionally, with enough work, you can make a sort of pet of a cow and take them to shows and win ribbons, and they'll follow you around on a rope and not give you any trouble—it all depends on if you have the patience to win their trust again, and most farmers don't have the patience or the inclination. For most dairy farmers the cow is just a number. If you give them names, you're a fool and probably a softy. I gave my cows names.

Willis writes about more violence in the castration of pigs. You have to castrate them if they're going to put on the weight that will make them worth anything at market. It's a lousy job, turning the piglet on his back in your apron-covered lap, one man holding him down, while you take a razor-sharp pocket knife and slice the pig's scrotum open, squeeze forth the gland and cut its cords. The faster you can do this, the less the pig will squeal. Most of them recover easily, but now and then the shock is so great that a piglet will simply die. You'll go to the pig barn the next morning and there the little thing will be lying cold stone dead on the straw.

The obligatory harshness Willis describes is never gratuitous. It's just what needs to be done if you're going to survive on a small farm using animals as your main income, rather than selling your crops, your fields of corn, say, to the local granary, where they'll put it up in gigantic silos and wholesale it to various outlets (nowadays perhaps to ethanol refineries). That sort of farming has little to do with what Willis experienced. As he tells us: "Farm life was never the pastoral idyll people today try to make it out to have been. We lived with violence all around us."

Willis describes winters and the great blizzards that buried the earth, the buildings, obliterating the roads and bringing forth a bone-chilling cold that had to be handled if you were to get out to the barn and coop and take care of the animals. He describes town life, the way people gathered on Saturday nights and listened to the school band play and strolled along the streets and into stores for supplies, or sat around the town square listening to the music and talking. About what? Mostly about farming, of course. Farmers seldom complained. The whole idea was to win respect by giving an anecdote about some problem that you solved with your own ingenuity. If some disaster happened, disdain and contempt would be your lot if you whined about it. Stoicism was the philosophy of the farmer. It still is as far as I know. When Willis was writing Long Gone he went back to Marengo and walked the empty streets and recorded the melancholy fact that the sort of neighborliness that he had once known was no more. There are very few small farmers left. The corporations and the big farmers run the show now.

You come away from Long Gone with a measure of pride in what human beings can endure and how, within such a harsh system, they can still find ways to succeed. Willis' father was a hard man, but the way Willis describes what the man had to do to survive, you can see what made him the rough cob that he was. Willis' mother is not perfect either, but she also wins our admiration for her tenacity, courage, energy and pride. The backbreaking labor and brutality of the farm did not stop her. She, as Faulkner might say, not only endured but prevailed. The portrait Willis draws of her gives loving homage to her skills as a homemaker and to her capacities as a woman to bear the hardships that she was forced to undergo. She never wanted to be a farmer's wife (she hated the life bitterly), but when she was presented with a fait accompli she adapted and held up her end and more. One ends up with a high regard for her and a grudging respect for her husband.

Long Gone is written in a sparse style that uses only the words necessary to get the image or the point across. The style mimics the laconic voices of the characters portrayed and the spare land that allows a meager but sufficient living as long as you're willing to work hard enough. It's a remarkable book written by a man with a remarkable memory. The era that he describes is indeed long gone, but in the way Willis recreates it he does what every writer hopes to do. He faithfully resurrects the times and takes us into his story and we are in a place we've never been before and every page is teaching us something new.

- Duff Brenna, Fiction Editor