The Eighty Acres By The Lilacs

Trucks line up out to the highway. He runs the scale house, and the phone in there rings until midnight.

He picked up on the fourth ring. I could hear the dryer fans roaring behind him and somebody yelling out a moisture number over the noise of a grain truck backing up.

“Tara? I’ve got eleven trucks waiting on me, honey,” he said. “Can this keep till tonight?” He sounded tired already, and it was only the middle of the afternoon.

“There’s a bulldozer on Grandpa’s 80,” I said. “Your brother is standing next to it. He says you sold him my grandparents’ farm at half what it’s worth.”

“I was going to tell you tonight,” Shawn said at last. His voice was so quiet I had to press the phone against my ear to hear it over the fans.

I had been married to that man for nineteen years. In nineteen years he had never once lied to me about anything bigger than the last piece of pie. So I believed him, and somehow that made it worse.

“You promised him my land,” I said. “Without asking me. At half what it’s worth. You shook his hand on something that was never yours to shake on.”

“He needs owned ground, Tara. The bank won’t renew his operating loan without it. They told him Friday. No owned ground, no loan, and without the loan he can’t put a crop in next spring.”

“So you gave him mine,” I said. “My grandparents worked that ground for sixty years, Shawn. Grandma paid for part of it selling eggs at the end of the lane.”

“I didn’t give him anything yet,” Shawn said. “I told him we’d work it out. I told him I’d talk to you. I just didn’t know how to say it, so I kept not saying it.”

“You shook his hand,” I said again. He did not answer that, because there was no answer to give.

In the Lindgren family, a handshake is a debt, and everybody at that table knew it.

Their dad used to say a man who shakes on something and backs out is no better than a thief.

“Thirty-one hundred an acre is $248,000,” I said. “That 80 is worth about $496,000. You handed your brother a quarter of a million dollars of my grandparents’ whole life.”

“I owe him,” Shawn said, and his voice went low and rough.

“You don’t know the whole of it, Tara. You don’t. I can’t explain it on the phone with trucks backed up to the road.”

He was right about one thing. I didn’t know the whole of it. Nineteen years of marriage, and whatever it was, he had never told me, not once, not even close.

“Then tell me,” I said. Somebody yelled his name in the background, and a truck horn went off twice. I heard him put his hand over the phone and tell someone he was coming.

“Not on the phone,” he said. “Not in the scale house. Tonight, I promise. Please, Tara, just don’t do anything until tonight. I’m begging you.” Then he had to go, and the line went dead.

I have thought a lot since about why I didn’t simply walk back to Jared and tell him to load that dozer and go home.

It would have been one sentence. People have asked me, and it is a fair question.

The honest answer is that Shawn had already shaken on it. If I said no, the deal would not be dead.