Eleven Heifers on the West Eighty

Russ had rented the whole quarter to a young fellow named Cole who was just getting started. Thirty dollars an acre, a hundred and sixty acres. Forty-eight hundred dollars for the season, for the whole pasture. Half of that grass was mine, so twenty-four hundred of it was mine. Russ kept all of it.

I asked him about it that week.

“We’ll settle up when the cattle come off in the fall,” he said.

In the fall he said the fence repair and the burn had eaten most of it. The second year it was his fuel bill. The third year it was the drought, and I let that one go without a word, because that was the summer he hauled water and sold thirty cows he had spent ten years building. The fourth year I put it in a letter, two plain paragraphs, signed and mailed to his box. He never answered it and never mentioned it. The fifth year he just said, “Not a good time, Jim.”

And every December the county treasurer sent the tax statement on the west eighty to my mailbox, with my name on it, a little over three hundred dollars, and I wrote the check.

One December I wrote it at Mom’s kitchen table while she rolled out noodles. She watched me tear it out of the book.

“Your father would be glad you boys look after that grass together,” she said.

I licked the envelope and said nothing.

I know what a sensible person would say. Go see a lawyer. The deed is plain. You would win in an afternoon.

Winning was never the question.

Our mother was seventy-nine years old. She still lived on the home place, in the house she came to as a bride. She’d had a stent put in two winters before. Russ had told her we had the pasture worked out between us, and I had let her believe it.

If I filed on my brother, it would be in the district court column of the county paper inside of two weeks, and every woman in her church circle would read it before she did. She would sit in her pew on Sunday with her boys on opposite sides of a lawsuit.

I honestly believed it would kill her. Russ believed it too. That was what he was leaning on.

So I did not go to a lawyer. I went home and told my wife.

Deb was at the stove. She listened to the whole thing with a wooden spoon in her hand and did not interrupt once.

“Did you mean it?” she asked, when I was done. “About using the grass?”

I did not answer that right away. I went to the drawer in the hall desk where we keep the things that matter, the birth certificates and the truck titles, and I took out the long envelope from the register of deeds.

I had not had it out in years. I had forgotten what was on the outside of it.

Dad had written on the envelope in pencil, in the square printing he used for everything from grocery lists to the backs of photographs.

It said: Jim. The west eighty has the pond. Russ will tell you it goes dry. It don’t. Dad.

I stood in my own hallway and read that three times.

He had known his two boys well enough to leave me a note.

Deb read it over my arm. She put her hand flat on my back.

“How much have we got in savings?” she asked.

“Thirty-three thousand four hundred.”

That was the roof we needed and a start on our boy Matt’s schooling.