The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

Square

He came Tuesday, in the rain, in his good pickup. He wiped his boots a long time on my mat.

I had coffee on. He sat at my kitchen table with his cap on his knee, and for a while he just looked at his hands.

“Carol Ann left that book open on the table for three months,” he said. “She would not let me close it. She set my plate next to it every meal.”

I waited.

“I knew what it said the first night, Marlys. I did not have to read it but once.” He turned the cap around. “I have been telling myself for twenty years I was not quite on my feet. One more bin. One more quarter. One more good year. A man can always find a reason he is not there yet.”

“I know it.”

“I was on my feet by 2004. I knew it then.” He looked up. His eyes were our father’s eyes, and they were red. “And I sat at Mother’s table and told you to be grateful. I have heard myself say it every night since.”

He took a folded check out of his shirt pocket and pushed it across the oilcloth.

“I cannot do twenty-six years. I would have to sell ground, and then there is nothing for the boys. I can do ten. I went year by year off the university’s numbers and took out the fifty I paid you.”

It was made out to me in his square hand. One hundred thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars.

I have never held that much money in my life. I am not going to tell you my hands were steady.

“Gene.”

“Do not argue with me. Dad said square it.”

“Dad said square it. He did not say break you.” I turned the check around and slid it back. “Here is what square is. My roof was fourteen thousand three hundred dollars. I will take that, and I will not be shy about it, because I earned it. Then you go down to the co-op and you pay for that boy’s seed corn. Thirty-two bags. And you do not put your name on it.”

He stared at me.

“That is not even a quarter of it.”

“I know my arithmetic. The rest of it I do not want in money.” I had been thinking about this for three days, ever since the lights. “Those two are going to make every mistake there is on that ground. Tyler is working off what he read and what he has seen from a hired man’s seat. You know where that eighty holds water and where it burns up. You know which terrace Dad built wrong. Nobody alive knows it but you. I want you to tell him.”