The Farm They Thought I Rented

The wedding, and the weeks before it

I should tell you a little about the wedding, because it is where I should have seen all of this and, being a woman who does not like to be surprised, I am still a little angry at myself that I did not.

Dale Merritt was easy to be around, which I have come to understand is a different thing from being good. He was the youngest of the three Merritt children and the only one still in Danby, and he worked at the dealership doing something in sales that mostly seemed to involve leaning on tractors and being liked. He was handsome the way a man is handsome when nothing hard has ever happened to him. He made me laugh. He noticed things, or I thought he did. When my grandfather’s old dog finally died that first winter, Dale drove out and dug the grave himself in frozen ground and did not say much, and I decided that a man who will dig a grave in January for a dog he never met is a man worth keeping.

I still think that was true of that man on that day. People are not one thing.

But his mother was one thing.

Diane treated me, from the first dinner, like a project that had not gone well. She corrected my grammar in front of people. She asked, twice, whether the co-op provided health insurance, in a tone that made the question a diagnosis. She told a long story at the rehearsal dinner about her grandmother’s silver that was really a story about how the Merritts had always had nice things and some people had not. When I brought a chess pie to Easter, made from my grandmother Ruth’s recipe, Diane thanked me for the effort and then served a store cake and let the pie sit uncut.

I let it all go. I want to be honest that I let it go partly out of grace and partly out of the cold Hartwell patience that says a person will always, given rope, show you the full length of themselves. I told myself Diane was insecure, which was true, and that she would soften once I was family, which was not.

The wedding was small, at the little Methodist church on Third where my grandmother had played the organ. I paid for the whole thing myself and let Diane believe her family had covered it, because she wanted to believe that so badly and because I did not yet understand that a kindness like that only teaches a certain kind of person that you are theirs to bill.

Five days later she walked into my kitchen with a lease.

What I did in three days

I did not go home and cry, and I did not call my one good friend and talk it to death. I drove out to the farm.

The Hartwell place sat where it has always sat, at the end of a gravel road three miles north of Danby, a big square white farmhouse with a deep porch that Walt built the railings for himself, a red barn, the machine shed, the grain bins catching the late sun. The winter wheat was in and green. My foreman, Earl Voss, who worked for my grandfather for thirty years and stayed on for me, was pulling out of the yard in his truck when I came in, and he took one look at my face and rolled his window down.

“You alright, Nora?”

“I’m going to be,” I said. “Earl, I need to ask you to do something a little bit odd.”

I told him some of it. Not all. Earl is not a man you have to give the whole picture to. When I was done he did not laugh, though I could see he wanted to, out of loyalty more than meanness.

“So the day they come out here to laugh at your rented shoebox,” he said, “you want them to find the whole outfit running, and you want it to look like it always looks.”

“I want it to look like an ordinary Tuesday,” I said. “Because it is one.”

“That,” Earl said, “will be the easiest job I ever did for a Hartwell.”

Then I drove into town and I climbed the outside stairs on the side of the brick building at Main and Second, the stairs that go up to the second floor, the floor the Merritts never rented because they never asked what was up there and I never told them.