The Farm They Thought I Rented

The gravel

You can hear a vehicle coming on the Ash Creek road for a good half mile before you see it, the tires on the gravel, and I stood on the porch and listened to them come, and I will tell you the truth, my heart was going. Grace is a decision, it is not a feeling, and the feeling underneath the decision was going hard.

The van slowed at the mailbox. I imagined Diane in the front seat checking the number against the paper in her hand. Then it turned in, and the caravan of two cars behind it turned in, and they came up the long lane between the two rows of cedars my great grandfather planted, and I watched Diane Merritt’s face through the windshield the whole way up.

I have thought about that face many times since. I watched it come up my lane sure of itself. I watched it start to change about halfway, when the house got big instead of small the way she had promised everyone it would. I watched it, at the top of the lane, when the van stopped in the yard and she could see the whole outfit at once, the house and the red barn and the bins and the machine shed and the good green wheat running clear to the tree line and the Hartwell name on the mailbox and on the side of the grain truck, I watched her face try to hold on to the story and fail.

The van door slid open. Nobody got out for a second.

Then they came out into the gravel, twenty some of them in their good clothes, and they stood in a loose clump and looked up at the house and did not say anything, and it was so quiet you could hear the windmill turning and a meadowlark somewhere out in the pasture doing its Sunday business as if nothing at all was happening.

Diane got out last. She had the lease in her hand. I do not think she knew she still had it. She stood by the van in her camel coat and she looked at the house and then she looked at me on the porch in my torn barn coat, and the two pictures would not go together for her, and I watched her try to make them.