The Eighty Acres By The Lilacs

The rental place kept the hauling fee, three hundred and fifty dollars, and charged him for one day.

Wednesday night, Jared told his wife. Kim called me Thursday while I was on my route, and I pulled over by the Methodist church to take it.

“He didn’t tell me any of it,” Kim said. Her voice was tired, not angry.

“Not the bank, not the handshake, not the bulldozer. I found out from the girl at the feed store, Tara. The feed store.”

I told her I was sorry. “Don’t you be sorry,” she said.

“He’s the one who should be sorry, and he is. He sat at the kitchen table last night and cried. I’ve seen him cry twice in fifteen years.”

On Sunday afternoon, after church, Orville called the house and asked if he could come over at three.

He asked if Shawn would be there, and Jared and Kim too. Shawn had come back inside Thursday night.

They all came. Jared and Kim sat at one end of our kitchen table, Shawn and I at the other, and Paige leaned in the doorway in her socks.

Orville came in last, took off his seed cap, and set a manila envelope by the coffee pot.

Nobody said anything for a while. I poured coffee and cut the apple pie I had made that morning before church, mostly so I would have something to do with my hands besides wringing them.

“I want to say a couple of things,” he said finally. “Then you can all tell me I’m an old fool, and I’ll put my hat back on and go home, and that’ll be the end of it.”

He looked at Jared first. “Jared, what did the bank tell you, exactly? Not what you were afraid they meant. What the loan officer actually said, sitting across that desk from you.”

Jared shifted in his chair. “They said my leases are all handshakes, year to year. If one of my landlords dies or sells, I lose acres and they lose collateral. They want owned ground, or written leases, three years or more.”

“Written leases count, then?” Orville asked. Jared nodded. “Owned ground is better, the loan officer said. But a signed three-year lease on enough good acres, they’d take that and renew the note.”

Orville nodded like a man who had already called the bank himself, and I found out later he had.

He took one sheet out of the envelope and slid it down the length of the table to Jared.

“That’s a three-year cash rent lease on forty acres of the Ecker 80,” Orville said.

“The tillable forty on the north side, up by the road. Two hundred and forty dollars an acre, starting the day we close. Not a nickel off, not a nickel on.”

Jared stared down at the paper like it might blow away. Kim put her hand on his arm and kept it there.

“I’m going to fence the south forty for my cows, the creek bottom and the woods corner,” Orville said.

“My grandson wants to come home from Purdue in three years and run cattle with me.”

“Until then, I can’t farm the north forty myself. My back won’t let me sit a tractor that long anymore. Somebody has to farm it, and it might as well be a Lindgren who knows the ground.”

“Orville,” Jared said, and his voice cracked like a boy’s, “I was going to tear out Walt Ecker’s fence row. I had the dozer sitting right there. I’d already marked the first tree.”