Two Children and One Home Place

It was the second Sunday of January, nine below at breakfast, and Dale had the good coffeepot out. The good one is the aluminum percolator his mother gave us for a wedding present in 1983. We use it for company, for funerals, and for the one or two days a year when something has to be decided.

I had a sheet of graph paper out of our grandson Tanner’s school binder, the kind with the little blue squares, and a pencil whose eraser had worn down to a flat metal collar. I had been at it for an hour while Dale sat in the front room with the weather on and the sound off.

We own two hundred and forty acres outside Sumner, Iowa. I drew every one of them, small, using a ruler out of the junk drawer, because the county plat book we have is from 1998 and Dale says it lies about the creek.

There is the home eighty, with the house and the barn and the machine shed and the grove of silver maples my mother-in-law planted for a windbreak. Across the gravel road to the south is the Peterson eighty, which we bought in 1991 when old Mr. Peterson’s boys sold out and moved to Arizona.

North of the house is the creek forty, half of it timber and half of it grass waterway that the government pays us to leave alone. And on the corner of the section is the schoolhouse forty, named for the one-room country school that stood there until 1957. The foundation stones are still in the fence line.

I printed each name in its square, the way my teacher taught me in 1965. Then I poured two cups, and when Dale heard the cups he came in and sat.

Dale and I are not people who talk about what happens after. We are people who talk about rain.

On the ninth of December our neighbor Verlyn Meyer died at eighty-four. Verlyn farmed three hundred acres two miles east of us, and he had three children. Wade stayed and farmed beside him. Carol went to Phoenix. Jim went to Minneapolis and sold insurance.

The funeral lunch was in the church basement, ham sandwiches and scalloped potatoes and green Jell-O. Dale and I ate at the table nearest the coffee, and from there you could see all three of Verlyn’s children. They had sat in three different pews during the service. They sat at three different tables at lunch.

Nobody had told them anything. That was the whole trouble. Verlyn had a will, and it was a fair one, and it divided everything in thirds. Nobody had ever sat down with those children and said, here is what we are going to do and here is why.

So Wade found out he was a partner with a brother he hadn’t spoken to in six years, and Carol found out the farm her father loved was something she might have to sell, and it all got found out at once, over a plate of ham, at his funeral.

Dale didn’t say a word at the table. He said it in the truck, with both hands on the wheel, forty miles an hour on the county blacktop with the heater roaring. “I’m not leaving it like that, Marj.”