The Eighty Acres By The Lilacs
It would only be broken, and in that family a broken handshake never goes away.
It would come up at every Sunday dinner at his mother’s for the rest of our lives.
And I knew myself. Maybe not this year, but someday, worn down and wanting peace at that table, I would have signed it over at thirty-one hundred just to make the looks stop.
There was something else too. Grandpa had told me exactly what he wanted, plainly and more than once, and I was the only person in that whole mess who knew it. That mattered more than anything.
My grandparents, Walt and June Ecker, bought that 80 in 1958 for under three hundred dollars an acre.
It is not the best ground in the county. It rolls, and there is a creek along the south side that floods every few springs, and a woods corner on the east that never grew anything but morels and deer.
That is why it was worth sixty-two hundred an acre and not the eleven or twelve thousand the flat black ground by the highway brings.
The Miller 80, two miles north and rolling like ours, sold at auction in March for sixty-one hundred.
Their house stood in the northeast corner, a white two-story with a porch that sagged on one end.
It burned in 1998, a chimney fire on a January night, and thank the Lord nobody was hurt.
But the foundation is still there, a low square of fieldstone in the grass at the corner of the field.
And along the south side of it, where Grandma’s kitchen window used to be, are her lilacs.
She planted them the spring I was born. Four bushes, from slips her own mother gave her, set in the ground in a row.
By the time I was ten they were taller than me, and every May they bloomed so heavy you could smell them from the county road.
I spent my summers on that farm. I learned to drive in Grandpa’s old pickup on that field lane.
Orville Hummel owns the farm to the east. He is 74 now.
His cows have grazed the pasture along our fence line for forty years, and in all that time I never heard of one of his cows getting into Grandpa’s corn.
In the fall of 1986, Orville came over to help Grandpa pull a calf in the middle of the night.
Afterward, leaning on the fence at sunrise, he told Grandpa that if the 80 ever came up for sale, he would like first chance.
Fair price, no favors. That was how he put it. And he asked every fall after that, not to pester, just a thing he said each year at the fence, the way you mention the weather or the price of hay.
Grandma died two years ago this past spring. Grandpa went last December, in his sleep, at the nursing home in Lebanon, with my hand on his arm and the television turned down low to the weather channel.
A week before he died, he was clear as a bell for one whole afternoon.
He looked at me and said, “If you ever sell the 80, Tara, Orville gets first chance. At a fair price. He’s waited longer than anybody.”
He said it again two days later, like he wanted to make sure it had taken.
The Pruitt brothers had rented the tillable acres from Grandpa on a handshake lease for twenty years.