The Farm They Thought I Rented
The annulment, and the porch
Dale and I did not stay married.
I want to be honest and say it was not a clean, angry ending, because those are easier to tell and this was not that. He came out to the farm twice in November, and we sat on the porch with coffee, and he was sorry, and I believe he was sorry all the way down. But sorry is a feeling and I have never in my life run my accounts on feelings. The books were the books. When it came, in the one moment that ever asked anything of him, he chose his mother’s version of me over the woman he had married, and he did it when he thought I had nothing, which is the only time the choice tells you anything true.
Walt used to say you can forgive a man and still not do business with him. I forgave Dale. We were divorced by spring. It was quiet. He signed everything Merl put in front of him without reading it, which is the most Dale thing I can tell you about him, and he moved to the city near his sister, and last I heard he was doing fine, which I am glad of, because I am not a woman who needs the people who failed me to suffer. I just need them to be somewhere else.
I kept the farm, obviously. I kept the building. I kept the co-op’s books, because I still like catching their math. My dented truck finally died and I bought another used one, because a new truck tells the world a story about you and I have never wanted the world to have a story about me. Let them show me who they are first. Then I will decide what they get to know.
I am writing this from the porch my grandfather built the railings for. It is evening. The wheat is coming green again out to the tree line, the same wheat, the same dirt he carried a whole county’s worth of families through, and the meadowlark is out there doing its business as if nothing ever happened, which is the truest thing about this land, that it does not care about any of us and it outlasts every last one of our little leases.
I am alone out here, and I want to be clear that alone is not the same as lonely. There is a difference, and it took me a marriage of ten days to learn it. A woman who keeps her own books, on her own ground, under her own name, is the only one in the whole deal who knows what is true.
Everybody else is guessing.
My grandfather told me that at this kitchen table when I was ten years old, and he was right, and I have not once, from that day to this, been surprised.