The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

Tyler and Hannah

He was wrong about nobody.

By the middle of September two men had called the house. One of them farms close to nine thousand acres and has a son-in-law who does his talking. He offered me two-sixty an acre without ever having walked the ground.

I told both of them I would think on it, and I did not think on it very long.

Because there was a girl who worked down the hall from me. Hannah Voss, twenty-seven, a para in the second-grade room, with a braid down her back as thick as my wrist. She and her husband rented the old Lindquist house half a mile down our road. Tyler worked as a hired man for a big outfit and sold seed on the side, and the two of them farmed forty acres that belonged to his grandmother with a tractor older than they were.

One afternoon the spring before, Hannah had come into my office to use the copier and stood there with her back to me, and her shoulders started going.

I shut the door. I have a box of tissue in the bottom drawer for exactly that.

“We got turned down again,” she said. “That is eleven. Eleven people, Mrs. Dunne. Tyler brings a sheet with our numbers on it and his references. They are nice about it. They all say the same thing. They say they would like to help a young couple, but they have to go with somebody who has the equipment.”

“What do you want, honey?” I asked her. “If you could have it.”

She laughed and blew her nose. “Just a chance to go broke on our own.”

I had thought about that sentence a good many times since.

I waited until Gene’s combine had come and gone. I would not walk another farmer across my brother’s standing crop. I will not say that was law. It was only manners.

He took the corn off my eighty the first week of October. I watched the lights go back and forth from my kitchen window two nights running, and I will be honest, I cried a little at the sink, because it is a pretty thing to watch and I did not know if I would ever see him do it again.

The Saturday after, I called down the road and asked the Vosses if they would meet me at the fence corner by my mailbox.

It was one of those clear afternoons you only get right then, the sky so blue it looks hard, the stalks all pale gold and laid over. They came in Tyler’s old pickup with dust behind it. He had on a seed cap and a work jacket. She had her barn coat buttoned wrong.