The Eighty Acres By The Lilacs

The bulldozer was the first thing I saw when I topped the hill on County Road 400 North.

It was yellow and square and wrong, sitting at the edge of my grandparents’ cornfield like somebody had dropped it there from the sky.

I had just finished my mail route. It was 1:30 on a Tuesday in late October, the sky low and gray the whole way across, and I had 112 boxes behind me and a sore right shoulder from reaching out the window.

I slowed down without meaning to. The corn on that 80 had been picked the week before, so all that was left was stalk stubble in long pale rows and the old fence row of trees running along the far edge.

Grandpa planted some of those trees and let the rest grow up on their own.

Hedge apple, a few walnuts, a hackberry the size of a silo. He never let anybody touch that fence row, not in sixty years of farming.

Standing beside the bulldozer, in a black hooded sweatshirt and a ball cap, was my husband’s younger brother.

Jared had his hands jammed in his front pocket and his eyes on the trees, like he was apologizing to them in advance.

I pulled onto the field lane and got out. The wind came straight across the stubble and went right through my gray barn vest and my navy shirt. I remember thinking I should have worn a heavier coat.

“Hey, Tara,” Jared said. He did not quite look at me. He looked at the dozer, then the trees, then the toe of his boot, the way he used to when he was a boy and had broken something of mine.

“Jared,” I said, keeping my voice as even as I could manage. “What is that machine doing on Grandpa’s ground on a Tuesday afternoon?”

He took a long breath and let it out. “Shawn didn’t tell you yet,” he said, and it was not a question.

“Tell me what, Jared,” I said. I already knew, I think. Some part of me had known since I topped the hill and saw that yellow paint against the gray.

“He said it’s mine,” Jared said. “The 80. He said I could have it at thirty-one hundred an acre. We shook on it Sunday, after dinner at Mom’s, out by the machine shed.”

I stood there in the wind and did the arithmetic the way I do postage, without wanting to.

Eighty acres at thirty-one hundred is $248,000. The ground was worth about twice that, and Jared knew it, and he knew I knew it.

“I was going to start on the fence rows this week,” he said, quieter.

“Get it into one field before the ground freezes. The rental place in town gave me a week for fourteen hundred, plus hauling.”

The ground was not Shawn’s to promise. My grandparents left it to me in Grandpa’s will, in my name and nobody else’s.

The estate closed in August, and the deed came in the mail in September with only my name on it.

In Indiana, land you inherit stays yours, and my name was the only name on that deed. Shawn knew that.

“I’m going to call your brother now,” I said. Jared nodded like he had been expecting it, and did not try to stop me. He just kept looking at the trees with his jaw working.

Shawn works at the grain co-op in town, and the last week of October is the worst week of his whole year.