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

She put it on her head. It came down over her ears and sat right on top of her eyebrows. She pushed the brim back with one finger and looked up at me. Daring me to say something.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t have.

The first week of May came in warm and dry. The ground was fit.

On Wednesday morning, I heard Randy’s big tractor fire up in the yard across the road. By seven o’clock, they were pulling the partnership’s twenty-four-row planter out onto Jeff’s ground. The half section that runs along the road on the east side.

I’d been up since four.

I had the 6420 greased and fueled. The planter boxes loaded. The seed plates set. I’d checked the markers twice.

At seven o’clock sharp, I pulled out of the Wiebe yard and turned onto my own field, on the west side of the same gravel road.

I’d like to tell you somebody waved.

Nobody waved.

I could see Randy standing beside his pickup at the edge of their field with a coffee cup in his hand. I saw him see me.

Then he turned around and looked the other way.

It wasn’t easy. I want to be honest about that too.

I’d planted a lot of fields with Jeff. Riding along with him. Running the end rows when he wanted to eat a sandwich. But I’d never planted a whole  farm by myself.

The tractor pulled to the left. The number six row unit kept dropping doubles until I finally stopped and climbed down and found a bent finger on the seed plate.

I lost forty minutes every time I filled the boxes. I didn’t own a seed tender. Every refill meant hauling fifty-pound bags off the trailer and lifting them up over my head into the hopper. One at a time.

Abby rode with me all day.

She sat in the buddy seat in her dad’s green cap with a thermos of lemonade between her feet and a library book in her lap she never opened.

Every time we turned around at the end of a pass, she put one hand up on top of her head to keep the cap from sliding off.

“Dad let me ride when I was little,” she said, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. “I always had to hold the cap on at the turns. He said if it fell off, the corn wouldn’t come up.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I hold it on anyway.”

Late in the afternoon, I stopped at the edge of the field to load the boxes again.

I was standing beside that green tractor in my ball cap and my canvas chore coat, with a paper seed sack in my arms. The little white farmhouse was behind me. Abby was up in the cab. And across the road, their big tractor was making its passes, with dust drifting behind it in the low sun.

Scott was driving it.

Randy and Luke had walked out to the edge of their field. They were standing there side by side, not talking. Watching me lift that sack.

I didn’t look at them for long.

I lifted the bag and poured it in. Then I lifted the next one. Then I got back in the cab.

I planted maybe twenty acres that first day. Jeff would have done sixty, easy.

When I finally shut the tractor off after dark, my hands were shaking. My shoulders burned so bad I couldn’t lift a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator.

Abby made us scrambled eggs. She burned them on one side.

Then she went to the bathroom cupboard and came back holding a little glass jar. The liniment her dad used to keep for his bad knee.

She stood behind my  kitchen chair. And she rubbed it into my shoulders with her small hands until the whole kitchen smelled like wintergreen.

“Is this how he did it?” she asked.

“Just like that,” I said.

And I put my face down on the kitchen table so she wouldn’t see it.

That night, I went back outside and filled the planter boxes again under the yard light. So I’d be ready at daylight.

I was so tired that when I was done, I sat down on the planter hitch to rest for a second. I fell asleep sitting up, with my back against the big tractor tire.

When I woke up, I looked across the road.

The kitchen light was on in the home place. My old kitchen. I could see a figure standing at the window, looking out toward my yard light.

I couldn’t tell who it was.

Then the light went off.