The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

Fifty Dollars

I should tell you about the fifty dollars, because I know how it sounds. It sounds like a woman who let herself be robbed for twenty-six years and then woke up one morning sore about it.

It was not like that. It was slower than that.

Our folks had a quarter section four miles out, a hundred and sixty acres of good northeast Nebraska dirt with a windbreak on the north and a creek that only ran in the spring. Mother went in the fall of 1996. Dad lasted two more years, and that last winter he knew what was coming, and he sat Gene and me down at that oak table with the green ledger open in front of him.

He had kept that ledger since before I was born. Every load of corn. Every vet call. Every dollar loaned to a neighbor and every dollar paid back. Mother used to say you could find out what kind of man Art was by reading the debts he had crossed off without being paid.

The east eighty with the house and the buildings went to Gene. The west eighty went to me.

Gene was thirty-eight, with two little boys and a note at the bank for the machinery he was buying off Dad. I was thirty-three, newly at the school, married to a man who drove a fuel truck for the co-op. Neither of us had two nickels.

“Gene will farm yours,” Dad said. “Fifty an acre. That is low, and I know it is low, and I am asking you to do it for your brother, Marlys.”

Going rate was eighty-five or ninety then. I said yes before he finished the sentence. Of course I did. He was my father and he was dying and Gene was my brother.

Dad wrote something in the book. I did not look. We shook on it, the three of us, Dad’s hand like a bundle of sticks.

He was gone by the time the beans came off.

And then the years just went. That is the only way I know to say it. Four thousand dollars came in an envelope every first of March with nothing else in it, not a note, and I put it in the bank and paid the taxes on the eighty out of it and thought, well, that is Gene getting started.

Nobody likes to send her own brother a bill. You try it. You sit down to write the number and you hear your mother.

But I do the bookkeeping in our house, and I am a school secretary, and numbers stay with me whether I want them to or not. For the last six years, the property tax on that eighty had been more than the rent. Last year the tax statement was $4,412.

I was paying four hundred and twelve dollars a year to let my brother farm my ground.

Meanwhile Don came home from the co-op and told me, not making anything of it, what dryland like ours was bringing. Two-thirty. Two-forty. Two-fifty for the flat ground close to the highway.

And then in July the ceiling in the back bedroom let go.

Our shingles were twenty-seven years old. The roofer from town, a nice man named Dale who goes to the Methodist church, stood in my yard with his clipboard and would not quite look at me.

“Fourteen thousand three hundred,” he said. “I am sorry, Marlys. There are two layers up there and bad decking under it. I cannot patch it and sleep at night.”

We had a roasting pan on the bedroom floor and a little over six thousand dollars in savings.

So I asked. One time, politely, at Sunday dinner. And I got told to be grateful.