The Eighty Acres By The Lilacs

They picked the corn the week before and told me at the elevator that this was their last crop. Both were past seventy and selling out.

So the field was empty and the lease was done. I had not decided anything yet.

I did not go back to Jared. I got in my car and drove a mile down the gravel to Orville’s place.

I cried on that mile, I will admit it, and mostly I cried about the lilacs.

Orville came out of the machine shed wiping his hands on a shop rag.

He had on his tan canvas chore coat and a seed cap from a seed company that went out of business before Paige was born.

“Tara,” he said, squinting at me. “You look like somebody just ran over your mailbox and then backed up to make sure.”

“Orville,” I said, “I need to ask you something, and I need you to give me a straight answer. Do you still want Grandpa’s 80?”

He stopped wiping his hands. He took off his seed cap, looked into it like there might be an answer printed inside, and put it back on his head very carefully.

“I’ve wanted that 80 since I was thirty-four years old,” he said slowly. “But I don’t want it like this, whatever this is. You’re shaking, girl. Tell me what’s going on first.”

So I told him. The bulldozer, Jared, the handshake, the thirty-one hundred.

I told it plainly, and I did not call anybody names, because Grandma would have rapped my knuckles with a wooden spoon for it.

Orville listened the whole way through without interrupting once. When I finished, he was quiet a long time.

“Does Shawn know you’re here?” Orville asked. I told him no. He asked if that was Jared’s dozer he had heard come down the road that morning, and I told him it was rented, hauled out at seven.

“What would you call a fair price, Tara?” he asked. “Your number, not mine. I want to hear what you’d ask a stranger who drove up this lane right now.”

“Sixty-two hundred an acre,” I said. “The Miller ground went for sixty-one hundred in March. Ours has the creek bottom, so I took a little off for that, and the woods, so I put a little back.”

He thought about it for maybe five seconds. “That’s fair,” he said. “Probably more than fair to me, and you know it. Your grandpa would say the same thing if he was standing here.”

“I’m not doing this to hurt anybody, Orville,” I said. “I want you to know that. I’m doing it because Grandpa asked me to, and because if I don’t do it today, I’m afraid I never will.”

“I know you’re not,” Orville said gently. “I knew your grandma for fifty years. You’ve got her chin, and you’ve got her way of deciding something and then just doing it.”

He went into the house, and I heard him on the kitchen phone.

“I called Brenda at the title company on the square,” he said.

“They keep a standard farm purchase agreement. She’ll print it and fill in the legal description off the county records. Give me an hour.”

I drove back to the field to wait for him, because I did not want Jared to start that dozer while I was gone.

It turned out I did not need to worry. Jared never started it.

He sat on the track the whole hour, scrolling his phone and not reading it.