The House That Rolled Down the County Road

Why I did not sue

The first thing everybody asks me is why I did not sue him.

I did call a lawyer. One. A woman in Alliance who does farm and family work, who sat across her desk from me and listened for forty-five minutes without interrupting.

“I’ll be honest with you,” she said. “This is messy. In this state, a house built on somebody else’s land generally becomes part of the land. Unless you had something in writing, you’d be arguing about what he promised eleven years ago. He’ll say you were renting.”

“We have the checks,” I said.

“You have checks that say you paid him money for the ground,” she said gently. “That helps him as much as it helps you.”

She told me it might take two years. She told me what it might cost. And then she asked me the question that I could not get past.

“Do you want your husband on a witness stand across from his father?”

I drove home with the radio off. Jake’s mother was gone. Jake was an only child. Gordon was all the family Jake had left on that side.

I was not going to put my husband in a courtroom against his own dad. Not for a house. Not for any amount of money. Some things you do not get back once you break them.

So I did nothing. All through May and June and July, I did nothing. I went to work. I packed lunches. I watched Jake walk the check across the yard on the first of every month with his shoulders up around his ears.

And I swallowed it. That was the summer I learned exactly how much a person can swallow.

Two acres by the windbreak

It was my dad who broke it open.

Lowell Olson is seventy years old. He farmed wheat and ran cows three miles down the same county road for forty-four years before he leased out his cropland. He does not waste words, and he does not call after nine at night.

He called at nine-thirty on a Thursday in late August.

“Your mother says you’ve been crying in the school parking lot,” he said. “Mrs. Kramer saw you.”

I should have known. Nothing on that road stays secret. My mother has been gone nine years, but she still has friends who report to my dad like a sheriff’s posse.

I told him. All of it. The April night, the lawyer, the shoebox. He did not say a word the whole time. When I finished, he was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped.

“I’ve got two acres by the windbreak,” he said finally. “North side of the yard, where your mother wanted the garden she never got around to. Good ground. Well’s close. It’s yours. I’ll go see the abstract office in the morning and put it in your names.”

“Dad, I can’t take your land.”

“You’re not taking it. I’m giving it. There’s a difference, and I’d like you to learn it from me and not from Gordon.”

I sat on the edge of the bathtub with the phone in my lap and cried so hard Hailey knocked on the door to ask if I was okay.

“But Dad,” I said, when I could talk. “The house is here. Even if we had the ground, the house is here.”

“Well,” he said, and I could hear him leaning back in his recliner. “Houses move, honey. I watched one go down this road in 1971. Ask Jake.”