Nine Calls From My Hospital Bed
Who I was to them
Let me tell you who I am, because it matters to the rest of this.
My name is Carol Denning. I am fifty-eight years old. I never married and I never had children, and for most of my life my family treated those two facts as a kind of vacancy, a set of empty rooms in me that my sister Shelby had the good sense to fill.
My parents are Roy and Diane Denning. They farmed a half section outside a town called Kelso, in the flat wheat country of north-central Kansas where the sky does most of the talking. It was a hard living and it made them hard in the practical way that farm people get hard, careful with money, careful with praise, generous with their labor and stingy with their tenderness. I do not say that to be cruel. It is just true, and it took me most of my life to stop apologizing for noticing it.
When I was twenty-six, my grandmother left me the home place, the original quarter section with the white farmhouse on it and the old seed shed my grandfather had run a little side business out of, selling seed corn and later soybeans to neighbors off the tailgate of his truck. My grandmother left it to me and not to my father, and I have thought a great deal over the years about why. I think she saw something in me. I think she saw a girl who read the seed catalogs at the kitchen table the way other girls read magazines, and she made a bet.
I took that seed shed and I built it into a business. I called it Denning Seed and Supply. I added a line of soybeans, then a chemical program, then a grain cleaning operation, then a custom seed treatment setup that no one else in three counties had. When the big cooperatives squeezed the little farmers, I did not squeeze them. I carried them on credit through two droughts and a flood year, and they remembered, and when the good years came they bought everything from me. By the time I was fifty I owned nine hundred acres of some of the best dryland wheat and milo ground in the county, three grain storage sites, and a business that cleared more in a year than my father had cleared in his life.
My family knew I had done well. They liked to say it at church, “Carol’s done real well for herself,” in the tone you would use about a nephew who joined the Marines. What they did not know, what they could not have imagined, was the actual shape of it. They did not know that I had spent two afternoons the previous spring in a lawyer’s office in Hays, a lawyer named Warren Oakes of the firm Oakes and Pruitt, quietly building an estate. They did not know that they were both still written into it as if the last thirty years had not happened. They did not know about the trusts. They did not know about the scholarship fund I had endowed at the county 4-H, or the seats on the co-op board that my money had paid for, seats my father sat in and called his own.
They did not know, because I never told them. I let them keep the version of me that was convenient for them, the successful spinster aunt who would of course leave everything to Shelby’s children someday, because what else would a woman like me do with it.