The Pond I Bought Back With My First Pay

Brittany and I talked at holidays. We talked about her new house in Council Bluffs and her husband Ryan’s job with the railroad. We did not talk about the 80. We did not talk about the pond.

She texted me happy birthday with three hearts. I texted her back with one. That was the size of us now.

I drove out the gravel to Vern Akers’s place on a Tuesday in late January, after a run of three nights, with snow in the ditches and a sky the color of dishwater.

Vern was 70, a widower with a white beard, a big slow man with hands like split firewood. He ran a cow-calf herd and rented out his crop ground. He had farmed next to Grandpa since they were both young men with too much debt.

He was in the machine shed with a heater going, working on a baler. He wiped his hands on a red rag and looked at me a long time before he said anything.

“You’re Earl’s oldest granddaughter,” he said. “The nurse.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your grandpa told me about you. Said you’d be the one to stick.” He set the rag down. “Coffee’s bad, but it’s hot.”

We sat on two buckets by the heater. I held the cup with both hands. I had practiced what I would say the whole drive, and then I said it all wrong anyway.

“I want to buy the pond,” I said. “Not the whole 80. I know I can’t. Just the pond and a little ground around it. Two acres, maybe. I have fourteen thousand dollars. I can get a little more if the price is more.”

Vern did not say anything for so long that I thought he was going to send me home. He looked at the baler. He looked out the shed door toward the line where his fence met what used to be ours.

“I told your dad that price was low,” he said finally. “Told him twice. He said he didn’t care. He wanted it done before some deposit was due.”

“I know.”

“I should have paid more anyway. I didn’t. A man buys what’s offered.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s sat with me some.”

He got up and refilled his coffee and stood at the shed door with his back to me.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” he said. “Two acres around the pond. I’ll sell it to you for what I paid, by the acre. Not what it’s worth now. What I paid.”

I did the arithmetic in my head because I could not help it. A hundred seventy-five thousand divided by eighty, times two.

“That’s $4,375,” I said.

“Is it?” He turned around, and there was something almost like a smile in his face. “Then that’s the number.”

“Vern, I can pay more than that. I want to pay fair.”

“You’ll pay the survey,” he said. “That’s not cheap. And you’ll pay for a fence so my cows quit tearing up your bank. And you’ll let me come down and fish once in a while. That’s fair.”

I could not answer him. I nodded and looked at my coffee until I could see straight.

“And I’ll help with that dock,” he said. “Earl’s old one is about gone. Went through it last summer chasing a calf.”