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"Pete told me that loving you was the most natural thing," said Sylvia.
"I think it had something to do with what had happened to him in East Germany," said Heather.
"Did he tell you much about East Germany?" said Sylvia.
Heather nodded. I could see her reflection in the glass of the hummingbird feeder.
"Tell me, did you feel cheated in any way when he told you about what had happened in East Germany, though it happened only a few days before?" asked Sylvia.
"I've always felt cheated by Winston, never by Pete. It was exciting to hear Pete talk about his experiences, to hear him speak with such deep respect about other women. How could I feel cheated by that? It was nice to be able to sense what he felt, to sense the passion in his love, the joy, and the warmth, even to sense that the passion for love had not died out in the world. It was marvelous to listen to him, to the way he spoke about Steve and his wife. But then I wasn't married to him. Maybe you felt differently. Did the thought of it make you angry?"
Sylvia nodded.
"I can understand this," said Heather. "It's a natural reaction if one believes what we were taught. Winston certainly was big in demanding his territorial rights. I think it gave him a sense of security, owning me, not having to worry about my reactions as they were guaranteed to him by contractual loyalty. I think it gave him a sense of status and power. But he never knew the price this exacts from another. Maybe that's why there are so many divorces."
"You were divorced, then?"
Heather shook her head. "No, at first I buckled under," said Heather. "Life became agonizing and dull. It's terrible to see one's sensitivities go out the window. I became irritable. Finally I couldn't deal with the least bit of stress anymore. But it wasn't all his fault, he had a lot of stress to deal with."
Heather started to tell Sylvia all about Winston, how he went from the university to the steel industry as a process engineer. A year later he got laid off when the steel prices eroded. "We were barely able to hold on to our house," said Heather. "He was re-hired only once after that. He was hired for a brief period, to oversee the demolition of six brand new unused blast furnaces, which the company could no longer afford to pay taxes on. This must have felt like cutting his own throat."
Heather said that she and Winston left the city right afterwards, and moved to Kansas where he worked on his father's farm. But the farm was in trouble, too. "It was technically bankrupt like thousands of farms were in the area. More and more the conversation was about cost-cutting, trying to hold off the foreclosure they all knew deep inside would eventually happen. Their only consolation was that they were not alone in this plight. Winston's father always said that 417,000 other farms were bankrupt also. This seemed to give him hope. Then came the drought.
"The drought was heartbreaking," said Heather. She told Sylvia that Winston and his father would walk out into a field and break open some kernels of barley and just stare. She saw tears in his father's face. The kernels were hollow and much too light. The crop wasn't even worth the expense of harvesting it. They put cattle out to graze it. One of them died, because of a too high concentration of nitrogen from the fertilizer that hadn't been fully converted for the lack of water.
She told Sylvia that those pressures made Winston unbearable. He became mean, swore at her, and even hit her. But this wasn't the reason she left. She said that the final straw was his father becoming involved with the New Unity Church that was catering to financially troubled farmers. The church pushed a hate campaign against the 'Jewish devil,' the grain cartel operators that were about to devour their farms. The church told the farmers they were God's chosen people and urged them to defend themselves. So Winston and his father, like many others, went and bought themselves automatic weapons and boxes of ammunition.
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