The Dollar Farmhouse and the Upstairs

Spring

The upstairs worked. I didn’t know it would, but it did.

Dale put Brody on the hog chores after school, ten dollars a day. Our barns are shower-in, so every afternoon Brody went through the shower, put on barn clothes, walked the alleys with Dale checking waterers and feeders and pulling out anything that looked sick. Then he showered out again and came in smelling like Dial soap and hog anyway.

The first week, Brody barely talked. By the third week, he was telling us at supper which pen had a pig that wouldn’t come to the feeder, and what Dale thought it was.

“He’s a good hand,” Dale told me one night. “Better than I was at twelve.”

From Dale, that is a parade.

Hannah taught Kenzie to braid. They practiced on each other every night after supper at the kitchen table with a jar of hair ties between them. By April Kenzie could do a French braid on herself without a mirror. By May she was doing mine before I left for the route.

Cole and Pickles survived. Cole found the barn cats and named every one of them after a different kind of pie.

The kitchen got loud. There were boots everywhere. The water heater ran out every morning. I bought milk two gallons at a time and it still wasn’t enough. Some nights I wanted to lock myself in the pickup and sit.

But some nights, at the end of supper, I would look down that table at seven people and a fishbowl, and I’d think about Great-Grandpa Kirchner building this house in 1912 with four bedrooms because he expected to fill them.

Jeff insisted on paying. We argued about it for a week. Finally I told him four hundred a month for groceries and propane, and not one penny more, and he could put the rest away.

He put the rest away. Every paycheck. He worked agronomy at the co-op, and that spring he ran the sprayer fourteen hours a day during planting and came home with his eyes red from the dust and went straight upstairs to read to Cole.

Mom came out every Wednesday after that. She brought a pan of something every single time. She didn’t mention the house, and I didn’t either. She helped Kenzie with her spelling words and showed Hannah how to make pie crust with lard, the way Grandma Kirchner did.

One Wednesday in May, I came home from the route and found her standing alone in the little room upstairs with the closet door open, her hand flat against the door frame, right on JEFF 5 1988.

I didn’t go in. I went back downstairs and put the coffee on.

Fall

In August, the old Vander Woude place came up for sale. It was a little one-and-a-half-story house a mile and a half down our gravel road, with a detached garage and a big garden spot and two lilac bushes by the back door. Old Mrs. Vander Woude had gone to live with her daughter in Orange City.

They were asking $138,000. Jeff had saved $9,400 since March.

He came downstairs one night with his loan papers spread out on the kitchen table and asked Dale and me to look them over. Conventional loan, a little over five percent down, a payment smaller than the rent he and Amber used to pay in town.

“Is it enough?” he asked me. “Be honest.”

“It’s enough,” Dale said, before I could. “I’ll look at the furnace for you.”

“I already did,” Jeff said. “It’s newer than yours.” Dale looked personally offended. Hannah laughed so hard she had to leave the room.

Jeff closed on the Vander Woude place in the second week of October. Nobody gave him anything. Nobody signed anything over. He paid for it himself, with his own down payment, out of his own work.

We moved them on a Saturday. Same pickup. Same mattress. This time it was going down the road instead of up.

Cole carried Pickles the whole mile and a half in his lap in the cab with both hands around the bowl, and Pickles survived that too.