The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres
The Letter
Monday on my lunch hour I walked over to the extension office at the courthouse. The girl at the desk was one of my old kindergartners, Kim, and she printed me the university’s rent survey for our district and a two-page bulletin on farm leases.
I read the bulletin at my desk with a tuna sandwich.
A handshake lease in this state runs from the first of March to the last day of February. It renews itself every year if nobody says anything. And if the landowner wants it to end, she has to say so in writing before the first of September, or the tenant has the ground for another whole year.
It was the nineteenth of August.
I sat there with twelve days on the calendar. If I had waited two more Sunday dinners to get my courage up, I would have been a full year further down the road with a pan on the bedroom floor.
I wrote the letter that night on the kitchen table. Don read it over my shoulder.
It was four sentences. It said that our verbal lease on the west eighty would end the last day of February and would not be renewed, that he was welcome to his stalks and his fall work right up to that day, and that I thanked him for twenty-six years of care of that ground. I signed it Marlys.
“You want me to run it out to him?” Don said. “I am delivering his diesel Friday anyhow.”
“No,” I said. “I am not going to have him handed this off a fuel truck. He is going to get it from me, to his face, and he is going to get the chance to make me tear it up.”
Don put his hand on the back of my neck. “The bulletin says send one certified, too.”
“I will mail that one after. Not before.”
He did not ask why. He has been married to me for thirty-four years.
Friday after school I drove out to the home place. Gene was in the machine shed with the combine opened up, getting it ready, a trouble light hooked on the feeder house and the radio giving the markets.
It smelled like it always had in there. Grease and dust and cold concrete. Dad’s vise was still bolted to the bench.
“Carol Ann is up at the house,” Gene said, not turning around.
“I came to see you.”
He wiped his hands on a red rag and looked at the envelope.
“What is that.”
“That is a letter that ends the lease on my eighty the last day of February. The law says I have to give it to you in writing before the first of September.” I kept my voice the way I keep it for a first grader who is trying not to cry. “I would rather not give it to you at all, Gene. I would rather you named me a fair number, right now, and I put this in the burn barrel on my way out. I am not asking for the top. I am asking you to meet me.”
He laughed. It was not a mean laugh. That was almost the worst part. It was the laugh you give a child who says she is running away and has packed a doll and a sleeve of crackers.
“Who is going to farm it, Marlys?”
“I do not know yet.”
“I will tell you who. Nobody. There is not a man in this county going to pull onto Art Hansen’s ground with me standing across the fence. You know that. So you go ahead and hand me your letter, and come February you can call me, and I will be decent about it.”
I held it out.
He did not take it. So I laid it on Dad’s workbench, next to the vise, and I set a three-quarter-inch wrench on top so the fan would not carry it off.
“Thank you for hearing me out,” I said.
“You will not do it,” he said to my back.
I mailed the certified copy Saturday morning. The green card came back the following Thursday, signed by Carol Ann.