Two Children and One Home Place

“She’d run the grain cart since she was fourteen,” Dale said. “You remember that part. She could back a gravity wagon up to the auger better than her brother. Kurt hated it, up on the bin, all of it. Renae never once did. She used to ride in the combine with me till dark, with her feet up on the dash, asking me why the rows were curved where they were curved.”

“I remember.”

“And I told her no. I said, honey, that’s Kurt’s work. I said your mother and I want you to go off to college and see something. I meant it kindly. I thought it was a kindness.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, okay, Dad. She took her gloves off one finger at a time and hung them on the nail by the door. And she never asked me one more question about the farm. Not about the crops, not about the markets, not about the bins. Twenty-one years.”

“So I can’t say she left,” he said. “I think maybe I’m the one who showed her the door and told her it was a good idea.”

Neither of us slept much. At four he got up to look at the thermometer on the porch, and at five I heard him in the kitchen with the plat and the pencil.

I came out in my robe. He had not drawn a line. He had written one question across the top of the page in his square carpenter’s printing, and it said, Ask them.

It was twenty past five in the morning, he was in his sock feet, and the coffeepot was cold. I stood there looking at the paper a long time.

We asked Kurt first, because Kurt was closest.

He came over Sunday noon after church, still in his good jeans and the brown Carhartt jacket with the torn left pocket, and he didn’t sit down. Kurt never sits in my kitchen. He leans against the counter by the bread box with his arms folded, one boot crossed over the other, like a man waiting on a ride.

He is forty-one. He has Dale’s shoulders and my father’s patience, which my father had a great deal of, and which didn’t always do him good.

Dale laid it out the way he does, short and plain, without any soft spots. Here’s what we own. Here’s what Marlys says. Here’s what happened to the Meyers. We want to know what you want.

Kurt listened to the whole thing. He looked at the plat for a long time. Then he looked at me, and I saw him decide to be careful with me, and I would rather he hadn’t.

“Mom, you want me to say I want the home place.”

“I want you to say what you want.”

“Then I’ll say it.” He unfolded his arms. “I want to farm. I want to farm all of it, the home eighty and the Peterson and the schoolhouse, and I want to keep doing it till my knees quit. I don’t want the house.”

“It is a good house.”

“It’s a cold house. Tara says it’s a hundred and fourteen years old and half of it’s held together with wallpaper.” He almost smiled. “I’m not saying that to be mean. We’ve got our place a quarter mile down the road. The kids are in school. I don’t want to stand in your kitchen after you’re gone, Mom. I don’t want to be the one who ends up in it.”