The Note the Bank Called After the Drought

“My father.” Arlen nodded. “March of ’85. The bank had been out to your place twice. Ralph had no seed money, and corn was going for $2.55 and nobody was buying land, and the only people buying anything were the ones who knew who was going under. My dad drove over on a Sunday, after church. He sat at your mother’s table and put $6,000 down next to the sugar bowl. No paper. They shook hands.”

“Dad paid him back.”

“Five hundred dollars at a time, whenever the milk check allowed. Took him three years.” He smiled. “Hold on.”

He went out of the room again and came back with a single page of green ledger paper, folded soft as cloth from years of being handled. He laid it flat on the table.

It was in his father’s hand, a column of dates and amounts. At the bottom, in a different ink, in my father’s cramped engineer’s printing, were the words: Paid in full. Thank you Ellsworth. Ralph. And under that, in his father’s hand again, smaller: Good neighbor.

I had not seen my father’s handwriting in nine years. I sat and looked at it.

“I’m not telling you that you owe us anything,” Arlen said. “Your dad paid. We were square in 1988. I’m telling you what my father did. He did not go to a lawyer and he did not go to the bank. He went to a neighbor’s table.” He pushed the page an inch toward me. “That’s what we do here.”

Beulah was crying a little and pretending to look for a napkin.

“Take that page with you,” Arlen said. “Might come in handy. And Ron, you go see Jim Schaefer and Barbara Zeller. Marsh came to both of them too. He came to everybody on that creek.”

The Schaefers and Barbara Zeller

Jim Schaefer is forty-six and farms 600 acres with his wife Maureen and two teenage boys. He was on a skid steer in his machine shed when I pulled in, and he shut it off and wiped his hands without asking me one question. Maureen came out with her coat over her pajamas.

I told them. They glanced at each other the way couples do who have already had the conversation.

“Marsh was here October fourteenth,” Jim said. “He wanted to talk about the tile outlet on my low corner. Said the Becker bottom was changing hands in January and he wanted to be a good neighbor about drainage.”

“He said it just like that?” I said.

“Just like that,” said Maureen. “I wrote it on the calendar in the kitchen because it struck me as strange. A man planning to be a good neighbor with a place that wasn’t his.”

She went in and came out with the calendar. Sure enough, a square on October 14: D. Marsh, Becker bottom, Jan. in her tidy teacher’s handwriting.

Barbara Zeller was the third. Her place sits on the north end of the bottom. Barbara is sixty-two, a widow since her husband’s heart gave out four years back, and she runs the farm with her son and a hired man who comes in the fall. She was the least surprised of anyone.

“Sit down, Ron,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for somebody to come around.”

She had a legal pad on the kitchen table. It was covered in her handwriting, names and acreages in a column. I read it upside down.

Hendricks, 80 acres. Dunlap, 120.

“What is this?” I said.