The Town Girl Who Bought the Farm Back

The Sale Bill

In February of the fourth year, the notice ran in the Kearney Hub. A sale bill went up on the bulletin board at the co-op the same week, next to the seed corn flyers and a lost dog.

PUBLIC AUCTION. Brandt Homeplace. 80 acres more or less with improvements. Sale to be held on site, last Saturday in March, 11 a.m. Kruse Auction Service, Denny Kruse, auctioneer.

Grant Ostrander had bought a bigger place up in South Dakota where the birds were better. He was done with Nebraska.

I read the notice standing in my kitchen with my coat still on. Then I called Mr. Ostrander before Luke was even home from work. I wanted to be the first call.

“Mr. Ostrander, this is Amy Brandt. I watered the lilacs.”

“I remember,” he said. He sounded friendly.

“We’d like to make you an offer before the auction,” I said. “A fair one.”

He was quiet for a second. “I’m sorry. I’ve already signed the listing with the auction company, and I want a public sale. That way nobody can say I played favorites. You’re welcome to come and bid like everybody else.”

I could not argue with that. It was fair. It was more than fair, if I am honest, and he wished me luck before he hung up.

The sale bill had the terms printed at the bottom. Ten percent down on sale day. Balance due at closing on or before April 30. No contingencies. Every bidder had to register at the sale and show a letter from a bank.

So the next morning I went to our bank and sat down across the desk from the ag loan officer, Tom Riley, with four years of savings statements in a manila folder.

We had $71,400.

Tom went through it twice. He asked about Luke’s county job and my two offices, and he pulled our credit, and he called a man he knew who had appraised land in that township the year before.

“Here’s your number,” he said at last, and wrote it on a sticky note and turned it around so I could read it. “Three hundred and five thousand. That’s the bid. Not a dollar over. I mean it, Amy.”

He typed up the letter and signed it. I put the sticky note in my coat pocket, and it stayed there until the auction.

Bidder Number 47

The last Saturday in March came in raw. Gray sky down low, wind out of the north at twenty miles an hour, sleet spitting sideways off and on. The kind of Nebraska March day that makes you forget there is any such thing as May.

By a quarter to eleven there were sixty-some people standing in that gravel yard. Seed caps, insulated coveralls, Carhartt coats, a few wives with travel mugs, and one young couple from Kearney with a baby in a carrier.

Some of them were bidders. Most were neighbors who came because a homeplace sale is a thing you go to around here, the way you go to a funeral or a wedding.

Denny Kruse had his flatbed hay rack pulled up in front of the machine shed, with a folding table on it and a speaker on a pole. His wife ran the registration table in the shed out of the wind. Denny’s nephew, Brad, worked the crowd as the ringman.

Denny went to school with Walt. They had shown calves against each other at the Buffalo County fair in 1966. Everybody knew that, too.

I registered at the folding table. I showed my driver’s license and Tom Riley’s letter. Denny’s wife wrote my name in her ledger and handed me a white card with a big black number on it.

47.

Luke stood next to me with his hands in his coat pockets. We had agreed in the truck that he would bid. It was his family’s place. It should be his hand that went up.

Hailey and Cody stood with Karen and Jeff by the pickups. Hailey had her chart rolled up under her arm, for some reason. I never asked her why she brought it.

Then I saw the man from the land company. Everybody saw him. He wore a quilted vest over a fleece and clean boots, and he stood a little apart, near the cottonwoods.

Somebody said he was from an outfit in Grand Island that bought farmland for investors and rented it back out. They had picked up three quarters in the county that winter. When he stood still, people stood away from him.