Two Children and One Home Place

Dale asked what he wanted done with the land, then.

“I’ll buy it.” He said it so quickly I could tell he had been thinking about it for years. “I’m not going to have it handed to me. I don’t want the thing where I got it because I stayed, and she gets a check and a card at Christmas. You can’t farm in a family that does that. I’ve watched it happen.”

“Meyers,” I said.

“The Meyers, the Hoefers, half the church. Appraise it. Whatever it’s worth, I’ll pay it over twenty years, and whatever Renae’s share of that is, she gets. I’d rather owe my sister than have her think I took something.”

I looked at my son leaning against the counter by the bread box, a man who has never in his life asked me for anything, and I thought, he has been carrying this around by himself, probably since 2008.

That’s the fall Dale fell off the bin. I haven’t told that part yet. It was the last week of October and the corn was coming off, and Dale was up the ladder on the old bin to check the level and a rung near the top let go. Fourteen feet, onto concrete. He broke his pelvis and his left wrist and he lay in the hospital in Waterloo for nine days.

Kurt was twenty-three that fall, a senior at Iowa State, twelve credits short of his degree. He drove home to help with the corn and said he’d go back after the first of the year.

He never went back. He’s been here every harvest since, and he has never once said he minded. He is still twelve credits short. Every few years Tara brings it up, gently, and he says, “Someday,” in the voice you use for a thing you’ve already put down.

I asked Kurt one more thing, and it came out of me before I’d thought it through. “Do you want to be the one who got it?”

He took his time. A cat came in off the porch and wound around his boot.

“I want her to be all right with it,” he said. “I want to look at her at Christmas and not wonder.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”

Dale called Renae on Monday night. He did it on purpose, because Monday is not a day she calls, and he wanted her to know right away that something was out of order.

I stood at the sink and listened to his half.

“Everybody’s fine,” he said first. “Nobody’s sick. Nobody’s in the hospital.” He listened. “No. Your mother and I want to ask you something, and we want to ask it in person. Could you come home for a weekend?”

There was a long wait. I could hear her voice coming out of the phone, high and quick, and I knew what she was asking. What’s wrong, with Dad’s heart, with the farm.

“It’s a family matter,” Dale said. “It’s a good one. Or it’s an honest one, anyway. We’ll pay for the ticket.”