The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

They thought I needed help with something. I could see it on them. They got out ready to carry a thing for me.

“This is my eighty,” I said. “From this corner to that line of cedars, and back to the creek. My brother has farmed it since 2000 and he is done the last day of February. I need a tenant for the first of March.”

Tyler did not say anything. He looked at the field and then at me and then at the field again.

“I have had an offer of two hundred sixty an acre,” I said. “I am not taking it. I would like to rent it to the two of you for two-forty, on a handshake first and then on paper, because I have learned something about handshakes. That is nineteen thousand two hundred dollars. I do not know if you can do that. You tell me.”

Hannah’s hand went up over her mouth and stayed there.

“Mrs. Dunne,” Tyler said. His voice cracked and he stopped and started over. “Ma’am. Why would you do that? You could have twenty dollars more an acre from somebody who would never be late.”

“Because somebody gave my brother a start once,” I said. “And I would like to see what it looks like when it is done right.”

“We can do two-forty,” Hannah said, through her fingers. She had already figured it. I found out later she had figured every piece of ground in the township at her kitchen table, just in case, the way some women keep a hope chest. “The farm loan office will carry cash rent for beginning farmers. We can pay it all the first of March.”

Tyler wiped his palm down his jacket before he shook my hand. I do not know why that was the thing that got me, but it was.

His hand was rough and it was shaking.

“We will take care of it like it was ours,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Take care of it like it is somebody else’s, and you want her to keep you.”

Hannah laughed and cried at the same time. Then she hugged me so hard my glasses went crooked.

The Winter

I will not pretend it was easy after that.

It is a small place. By the time Tyler had been out with a soil probe, everybody within twenty miles knew that Art Hansen’s girl had taken the west eighty away from her brother and given it to the hired man.

That was how it got said. Taken away. Given.

Don heard it worst, because he was behind the wheel of the co-op’s fuel truck and in and out of the office six times a day. The counter at the co-op is where this county does its deciding.

He came home in November and hung up his cap and told me, in his flat way, what had gone on.

“Roger said a sister ought to know what she owes.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I would be glad to show him the tax statement.” He poured his coffee. “Then old Lois, who keeps their books, said from the back that fifty dollars an acre would not rent a garden plot in this county, and Roger might think about what he pays his own aunt. It got pretty quiet.”

So that was how the winter went. Half of them thought I was hard, and half of them thought I was twenty years late, and not one of them said either thing to my face.