At My Husband’s Funeral Lunch, His Brothers Handed Me a $500,000 Buyout and Told Me to Leave the Farm, So I Bought 80 Acres Across the Road

The next Monday, I drove to the bank in Hastings.

The loan officer, Kyle Hoffman, came out from his office to meet me. He was maybe thirty, in a blue shirt and a tie with little tractors on it. He had the partnership’s file under his arm.

He looked at the check. He looked at me.

“Mrs. Engel,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry about Jeff. He was always good to me when I was new.”

“Thank you, Kyle.”

“Would you like to deposit this into your savings account?”

“For now,” I said. “And then I’d like to make an offer on a  farm.”

He blinked at me.

I called the realtor that same afternoon. A woman named Connie Brandt, out of Red Cloud.

“I’d like to make an offer on the Wiebe place,” I said. “Full asking price. Four hundred and thirty thousand. Cash. No contingencies. I need to close before the end of April.”

There was a long pause on the line.

“Melissa?” Connie said. “Melissa Engel? Honey, I’m so sorry about Jeff.”

“Thank you, Connie. Will you send them the offer?”

“I’ll call them tonight,” she said.

I didn’t haggle. I didn’t have time to haggle.

The Wiebe grandkids said yes the very next morning. I think they were tired of paying property taxes on a house nobody lived in.

Before we closed, I made one more phone call. To Gary Lindholm, the lawyer in Red Cloud who’d drawn up the partnership agreement all those years ago.

“Gary,” I said. “I want to make sure I’ve read this right. Once I sign the buyout papers, I don’t owe the partnership anything? I’m not on any of their notes?”

“You’re clean, Melissa,” he said. “Jeff’s share is bought out. You’re off the operating line. You’re off the land contracts. Whatever happens to Engel Brothers from here on, it’s not your liability.”

“And the house?”

He was quiet a moment. “The house is theirs. I’m sorry.”

“I know it is,” I said. “I’m just making sure the new one’s all mine.”

We closed on April 22nd at the title company in Red Cloud. I signed my name nineteen times. The title officer, an older woman named Ruth, handed me two keys on a ring with a little plastic tag. One for the front door. One for the barn.

I drove home with those keys in my coat pocket and my hand over them the whole way.

Nobody in the  family knew yet. That wasn’t a trick. I just didn’t want to hear anybody try to talk me out of it.

The rest of the money had to stretch further than I’d ever stretched anything.

On a raw, gray Saturday in April, I drove to a farm sale outside Red Cloud. An old couple was retiring and selling everything. I stood in the mud in my barn boots with fifty men in seed caps and a cup of church-basement coffee going cold in my hand.

I could feel them looking at me. I knew most of them. Some of them had been at Jeff’s  funeral eleven days earlier.

When they brought out the John Deere 6420, I stepped closer. A cab tractor, a little faded, with nine thousand hours on the meter. Jeff always said the 6420 was the most honest tractor John Deere ever built.

The bidding went fast. Twenty-five. Twenty-eight. Thirty.

“Do I hear thirty-two?” the auctioneer called out.

I raised my bidding card.

The man bidding against me, a farmer named Dale Kroeker I’d known since high school, looked over to see who it was. He saw me.

He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground.

“Thirty-two five,” the auctioneer said. “Sold. To the lady.”

I got the tractor for thirty-two thousand, five hundred.

An hour later, I got an eight-row John Deere 7000 planter for nine thousand. The man running the sale, the old farmer whose things they were, walked over afterward and handed me a cardboard box full of spare seed plates.

“Take these,” he said. “My wife would never forgive me if I didn’t.”

That left me about twenty-five thousand dollars.

I drove to the co-op in Blue Hill and bought my seed corn. Twenty-five bags. I’d plant the dryland thin, around twenty-four thousand seeds an acre, the way Jeff always did on lighter ground.

I paid in full at the counter. Ron, the man behind the counter, rang it up and didn’t say one word about it. In our town, that’s how you say a great deal.

There was one thing I couldn’t buy.

Crop insurance sign-up for corn in Nebraska closes on March 15th. And on March 15th, I was standing in a church basement holding a cashier’s check.