Two Children and One Home Place

That was four. I had one more. “Kurt’s boy is fifteen, and he’s been on the tractor since he was nine, and if you split this place down the middle it won’t be a farm anymore. It’ll be two halves of nothing. Somebody has to hold it together and Kurt is the one holding it.”

Every one of those was true. I want that understood. I would have sworn to any of them in front of the Lord and the whole Bremer County courthouse.

Dale didn’t argue a single one. He sat with his hands flat on either side of the plat and let me finish, and when I was done he looked at me for a while in a way I didn’t entirely like.

“My dad did that,” he said.

I knew what he meant. I didn’t want to hear it, so I picked up the percolator and topped off both our cups, although neither was empty.

Dale’s father, Orrin, had two sons. Dale stayed. His older brother Gordon went to the Navy and then to a job in Cedar Rapids and never came back to the farm except for Christmas. When Orrin died in 1981 the will left the home place and the machinery to Dale. Gordon got eight thousand dollars and a pocket watch.

Gordon and Dale did not speak for twenty-two years. Dale said it didn’t bother him. It bothered him. Gordon died in Mesa in 2009, and they had patched it up by then, as much as two Norwegian men can, but the eight thousand dollars and the pocket watch still sat between them on the phone every Christmas.

“Dad had five reasons too,” Dale said. “I’ve heard them all. I could say them in my sleep.”

“Kurt is not Gordon. And Renae is not,” I started, and then I stopped, because I did not know how to finish that sentence in a way I wanted to say out loud.

Dale picked the pencil back up. He did not write anything. He turned it end over end on the table.

“That’s five reasons,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“What’s the sixth?”

I told him there wasn’t one. I said it quickly, and I took a sip of coffee, and I looked at the window.

He has been married to me for forty-three years. He just nodded, and let the coffee go cold, and did not ask me again.

But there was a sixth. I had known about it since Thanksgiving, and I had not said it to Dale or the pastor or my sister in Rochester, and I had no intention of saying it in my own kitchen on a Sunday morning with the plat of our whole life lying between us.

I told him that night. I want to say I worked up to it, but the truth is I lay on my side of the bed for two hours listening to the furnace kick on and off, and somewhere past midnight it came out of me in the dark, to the wall, without my turning over.

“There’s a sixth reason.”

I heard him roll toward me. The bedsprings in that room have complained since the Carter administration.