The Town Girl Who Bought the Farm Back

The Homeplace

My husband, Luke, was raised on the Brandt homeplace, eleven miles north of Kearney on a gravel county road. A white two-story house with a covered porch. A red barn his grandfather built. A machine shed, a cottonwood windbreak, and 80 acres.

The ground had been in the family since 1938. Walt farmed it his whole life. For the last ten years he had rented the cropland to a neighbor and kept a dozen cows on the pasture by the creek.

Luke’s mother, June, died that January. It was her heart, and it was fast. I will only say this about her: she kept a jar of peppermints by the back door for the mailman, and she knew every grandchild’s shoe size without asking.

Walt was sixty-eight. After the funeral he moved through that house like a man who had set something down and could not remember where.

In February he called Luke and said he was going to sell.

We drove out on a Sunday afternoon and sat at the kitchen table, the same oilcloth table where I had eaten fifteen years of Sunday dinners. Luke did the talking, because it was his father and because Luke thinks through every sentence before he says it.

“Dad, we’d like to buy it,” Luke said. “On a contract. Payments to you, the way Grandpa sold it to you. We’d keep it just like it is.”

Walt turned his coffee cup around on the oilcloth. It was a brown stoneware cup with a chip on the handle. He had drunk out of it every morning I had ever known him.

“I’ll think on it,” he said.

That was all. He did not look at me once during that whole conversation, and at the time I thought it was grief.

In April he called Luke at the county shop on a Tuesday morning. Luke runs a motor grader for the Buffalo County road department, and he took the call standing beside his machine with the engine still ticking.

Walt told him he had sold the place to a man from Denver named Grant Ostrander. The price was $286,000. Mr. Ostrander wanted it for pheasant hunting. Closing was in May.

The call took less than two minutes. Luke told me that night, and then he went out to our garage and sharpened every mower blade we owned, including two that did not need it.

Two weeks after that, Merle Hansen sat down in my chair.

The Coffee Table

I told Luke the same evening. I waited until the kids were asleep. Hailey was eight then and Cody was five, and they had already had a hard winter. They did not need to hear anything about their grandpa.

Luke listened with both hands flat on the kitchen counter. When I finished, he did not say anything for a long time.

“He said that at the co-op,” Luke said finally. “At the coffee table.”

“That’s what Merle told me.”

If you did not grow up out here, the co-op coffee table is a long folding table by the seed counter with a pot nobody ever washes and a coffee can for quarters. The same eight or ten men sit there every morning at six-thirty.

They settle the weather, the markets, the Huskers and everybody’s business. Whatever gets said at that table is all over the county by noon, and it was all over the county by now.

Luke rubbed his face with both hands. “Ames, he just buried Mom. I’m not going to drive over there and fight him over a sentence.”

“I’m not asking you to,” I said.

“I know he’s wrong about you.” He looked at me then. “I know that. I just don’t know how to tell my dad he’s wrong right now. I don’t think he’d hear it from anybody.”

Luke was not a coward and he was not a fool. He was a thirty-seven-year-old man whose mother had been gone fourteen weeks, and he loved his father, and he could see that his father was not right yet.

So I did not push him. I lay awake that night next to him and listened to the furnace kick on and off, and somewhere around two in the morning I made up my mind.

Grant Ostrander was a man from Denver who wanted a place to hunt pheasants a few weeks a year. Men like that sell. Maybe in two years, maybe in twenty. When he did, we would be standing there with the money.

And I was not going to spend those years angry at Walt Brandt. Anger is expensive. I was going to need every dollar.