The Shed That Earned Its Keep

“His wagon tongue’s over,” Joel said. “Fourteen inches. And the nose of that camper is over by about a foot. You want us to nudge them back?”

“No,” I said. “Leave it. Don’t touch one thing of his. If it’s over the line, go around it.”

Kurt looked at me for a second.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

We did the paper at my kitchen table the next week. It was a one page farm building lease, a form the county extension office gives out, and I typed our names into it at the library. The first of November through the last day of April. Seven hundred dollars a month for the north sixty feet. They carry their own insurance on their own machines and they showed me the certificate. Joel wrote the first check right there and I put it under the sugar bowl, because I did not quite believe in it yet.

Forty two hundred dollars for a winter. That was the taxes. That was the insurance. That was my deductible back, with a little left to go toward the furnace.

Len’s shed had not earned one dollar since the day he died. It had only cost.

I did not call Vince. I have been asked about that, and I will say what I said to Kim. I had asked him for ten feet of my own floor and been told to quit fussing. I did not see where I owed him a telephone call about the rest of it. It was not his half. I had a chalk line that said so.

Tenants who notice things

They brought the combines in the first Thursday of November, after three hard frosts. I heard them before I saw them, coming across the hay ground from the section line, two big green machines with their headers off and their lights on in the gray morning, and Kenzie’s whole fifth grade could have heard me holler when the first one cleared that door with a hand’s width to spare on top.

Before they brought anything in, they swept. I want that written down. Two grown men with push brooms, sixty feet by sixty, before breakfast.

Then the combines, nose to tail down the east side. Then the two headers on their trailers, and a grain cart. Joel hung a fire extinguisher on a post. Kurt set bait stations every twelve feet along the wall like a man laying out a garden. They slid drip pans under both machines. By noon that half of the shed looked like the showroom at the implement dealer in Pierre.

And right across a blue chalk line, there was Vince’s half.

The hay wagon had a sparrow nest in the front rack and two deck boards rotted through. The good boat was fine under its cover. The old aluminum one was not under anything. It was full of leaves and a coffee can of rusted lures and what had been a boat cushion before the mice got to it, and its trailer sat flat on the floor on four dead tires, the rubber cracked like a dry creek bed.

Kurt came to the house about one o’clock with his cap in his hand.

“Ma’am, I don’t want to speak out of turn.”

“Go ahead.”

“That fishing boat’s on four flat tires and it’s a mouse hotel. I’m baiting hard on our side, but they’ll just come across. I’m not asking you to do anything. I only wanted you to know I saw it, so you don’t think it was us.”

“I appreciate that.”

He turned his cap around once.