The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

“I ought to tell you two something,” he said. “I should’ve told you in July.”

Caleb set his spoon down.

“That forty was ours,” Roger said. “Dahl ground. My granddad bought it in 1946, when he got back from the Pacific. It was the first ground he ever owned.”

“I knew it used to be in the family,” Caleb said. “Way back.”

“Not way back,” Roger said. “1985. I was seventeen.”

I knew what 1985 meant, because my grandpa talked about it. Everybody’s grandpa in Missouri talks about it. The farm crisis.

Interest rates that had run near twenty percent, land values cut in half, sales on the courthouse steps every week.

“The bank was going to call the whole note,” Roger said. “Every acre. My dad sat at the kitchen table for three nights with a pencil, just like you did, I bet, with your fence. And on the fourth night he sold the forty to Walt Hensley, to keep the bank off the rest of it.”

He stopped. I waited. Caleb waited.

“I watched him sign it,” Roger said. “He didn’t cry. He wasn’t that kind of man. He went out to the barn after and he didn’t come in for supper, and Mom kept his plate in the oven till midnight.”

He turned his cap around once on his knee.

“In 2011, when Dad was dying, he had me sit by the bed. He couldn’t talk much by then. But he got hold of my wrist, and he said, Get the forty back, Roger. Get it back for the boys. And I said I would.”

My eyes stung. I looked down at the soup pan.

“I tried,” Roger said. “I offered Walt three thousand an acre in 2012. I offered him again every few years. He always said no. I figured I’d buy it at his sale, when he passed, and that’d be that.”

“And then we bought it,” Caleb said quietly.

“And then you bought it.” Roger nodded. “And I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. Not at you, exactly. At Walt. At myself. At being fifty-eight years old and still not having kept that one promise.”

“So you offered us half,” I said. I didn’t mean it to come out sharp, but it did a little.

Roger looked straight at me then. He didn’t argue.

“I offered you half,” he said, “because I didn’t have the full price without borrowing, and I wasn’t going to borrow. And because I told myself you’d lose it. Kids always lose it. I figured I’d be the one to save it when you did.”

“And Branson?” Caleb said.

Roger was quiet a long time.

“That was the worst thing I ever did to you,” he said. “I knew it when I did it. I did it anyway. Your mother would’ve taken the phone out of my hand.”

Nobody said anything. The refrigerator hummed. Out on Franklin Street a car went by, and I swear it honked, though maybe I imagined that part.