The Note the Bank Called After the Drought

The offer

Mabry called me himself on Thursday, which surprised me.

“Mr. Becker, I wanted to follow up on the paper you left. The committee met this morning.”

“And?”

“The committee won’t release a partial tract. It wants the whole bottom as collateral until the note is resolved. That’s policy, nothing aimed at you.” He let that sit. “If this goes to default, the bank will have to foreclose in January. A public sale on the courthouse steps. Distressed. Forced. I’ve seen those go for less than half of market.”

“I know what a courthouse sale is.”

“A private sale of the whole tract before then would protect your equity. You’d clear the note and keep the difference.” He paused. “I might know someone who could move quickly. Forty-five hundred an acre. Cash.”

Forty-five hundred. For ground that sold at $9,400 down the road.

I did the arithmetic in my head while he waited. A hundred and forty-two acres at $4,500 is $639,000. At what the ground is worth it is $1,334,800. He was asking me to hand a stranger nearly seven hundred thousand dollars to make his committee comfortable, and I would walk away with a few hundred thousand dollars and no farm.

And Kessler’s thirty acres, a fair price from a man I had known since grade school, had been refused for no reason that I could see except that it would have worked.

I said nothing for long enough that he said my name.

“Mr. Becker?”

“I heard you,” I said. “I’ll think on it.”

I hung up and sat very still. My father farmed that bottom before me. His father cleared it. There is a stand of cottonwoods on the south corner that my grandfather planted in 1948 because the creek was eating the bank, and I have buried a dog under them. I was not going to sell it for half of what it was worth to a man who happened to know someone.

And one phrase kept turning over in my head like a stone in a boot. I might know someone.

It was the sort of thing you say when you already have the someone on the line.

I did not decide anything that night. I slept some, and on Saturday morning I did what my father would have done, which was to put on a clean shirt and go see a neighbor.