Eleven Heifers on the West Eighty

“Then sue me.”

Russ did not look up when he said it. He was down on one knee beside the round baler in his machine shed, working a grease gun onto a fitting on the pickup reel, and he gave it two more pumps before he went on.

“Go on down to the courthouse and sue your own brother. See how Mom likes reading that in the paper.”

He wiped the fitting with a rag and moved to the next one, and as far as he was concerned that was the end of the conversation.

It was the second week of March. The wind was out of the south and the big shed doors were rattling on their track. I had driven nine miles out to his place on my lunch hour, with a sandwich on the seat I never did eat, to ask a question I had asked six springs in a row.

I am forty-seven years old. I run a motor grader for Chase County and have for twenty-two years.

I had come to say what I said every year. “Russ, that west eighty is mine, and I’d like my half of the rent.”

“It’s twenty-four hundred dollars a year,” I said. “Six years. That’s fourteen thousand four hundred dollars.”

“I can do arithmetic.”

“I’ve paid the taxes on that eighty every December. I’ve got every receipt.”

“Then you’ve got receipts.” Pump, pump. “You want the money, you know where the lawyers are. Emporia’s full of them.”

“I’m not going to sue you.”

“I know you’re not.”

He looked up then, and what bothered me most was that there was no meanness in his face at all. He looked like a man telling me it might rain.

“That’s why I said it,” he told me.

“Then I’ll use it myself this year,” I said. “My eighty. I’m telling you now, in March, so you can tell your renter.”

He laughed. It was not a big laugh. It was one breath through his nose.

“With what, Jim? You don’t own a cow. You haven’t owned a cow since you showed a steer at the county fair.”

“I’m telling you now,” I said again.

“You told me.”

He went back to his grease gun. I drove back to town and graded the Sharps Creek road all afternoon, and I could not tell you one thing about it.

Let me tell you what we were talking about, because it was never complicated.

Our dad bought a quarter section of grass south of Cottonwood Falls, out toward Bazaar, in 1974. One hundred and sixty acres of native Flint Hills bluestem, a half mile on a side, with limestone showing through on the ridges and a pond he had dug in the low corner. He ran it as one pasture his whole life, with a four-wire fence around the outside and nothing down the middle.

Four years before he died, Dad went to the courthouse and put it in writing. It was the kind of deed that passes the land the day you die, without anybody having to go to court. The east eighty went to Russ. The west eighty went to me. He got the well and the good corral. I got the pond.

Dad died in October, seven years ago. The next April, I drove past on my way to a culvert job and saw forty steers I did not recognize grazing from one fence to the other.