That eighty acres would ride bare. If it hailed, or if July came in dry the way it had the last two years, I’d lose the whole crop and most of what I had left.
I knew that.
I did it anyway.
It was right there at the co-op counter, holding my seed ticket, that I heard about the house.
A man I barely knew was standing next to me buying mineral. He said it to Ron like it was common knowledge.
“Heard Randy’s boy Luke’s coming home from Lincoln to farm with ’em. Gonna move into the home place after Jeff’s widow’s out.”
Ron’s eyes flicked to me. Then back to the register.
I took my seed ticket and said thank you. I walked out to my car. I sat there behind the wheel for a long minute.
Luke was 24. He’d just finished his degree in agronomy at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. I’d been so proud of him.
He was one of the pallbearers at Jeff’s funeral. He stood at the front left corner of the casket. He cried so hard coming down the aisle that the man behind him had to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder.
So that was why the clean break.
The bank wanted the balance sheet cleaned up. And Randy wanted his son to have a house to come home to.
And somewhere in there, the two of them had talked each other into believing that handing a widow a big check at a funeral was a kindness. Because it meant I wouldn’t have to worry.
I didn’t hate Randy for it. I want to say that plainly.
He was a man who wanted something good for his son. And he found a way to get it that let him feel generous about it. Most of us have done some smaller version of that.
But I wasn’t moving to town.
I told Abby the night we closed. I sat on the edge of her bed and put the key ring in her hand.
“We bought the Wiebe place,” I said. “The house across the road. And the eighty acres that go with it.”
She sat straight up in bed. “We did?”
“We did. We’re going to farm it. You and me.”
“Do you know how?”
I laughed. It was the first time I’d laughed in five weeks.
“I drove grain cart for your dad for nineteen harvests,” I said. “I grew up on a farm outside Blue Hill. Your grandpa had me driving a tractor when I was younger than you are. I know how.”
“But why there?” she asked. “Why not in town, like everybody thinks?”
“Because your dad’s fields are right across that road,” I said. “I want you to be able to wake up every morning and see them. I want you to be able to count the passes.”
She didn’t say anything.
She just leaned forward and put her forehead against my shoulder. And she stayed there for a long, long time.
We moved across the road the last week of April.
My sister, Pam, came with her husband and their stock trailer. Two men from church came with a flatbed. And we carried twenty years of a marriage across a gravel road in a single afternoon.
Randy’s wife, Lori, came over while we were carrying the last boxes out of the kitchen.
She stood on the back step in her barn coat. She didn’t come in.
Lori and I had been sisters-in-law for twenty-one years. We canned tomatoes together every single August. We’d stood side by side at that kitchen counter more times than I could count.
“Randy says you bought the Wiebe place,” she said.
“I did.”
“He didn’t know,” Lori said. “He found out from Dale Kroeker at the elevator.”
She looked past me at the empty kitchen. At the bare nail where my calendar used to hang.
“Melissa, I told him the funeral was the wrong day,” she said. “I want you to know that. I told him.”
“I know you did,” I said.
I didn’t know. But I believed her.
Lori turned to go. Then she stopped and turned back.
“Jeff’s seed cap is still on the hook,” she said. She pointed. “By the door. You don’t want to leave that.”
I’d missed it.
It was his green cap with the yellow deer on the front. The one he wore every single spring. It had hung on that same nail by the back door every night of our marriage.
Abby took it off the hook before I could reach it.
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