The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

I know what it looks like when a creature decides to go quiet so it will not get hit again.

I went quiet. I folded my hands in my lap and I looked at the burn mark on Gene’s table where Deb had once set a hot pan down without a trivet, and I did not say any of the things I wanted to say.

People ask me now why we did not fight it. Why we did not get a lawyer, or dig in, or tell him no.

The plain answer is that the land was his, and the promise was never written down. It was a sentence at a wedding.

And Cody farms with his dad. That farm is not a hobby for us. It is half our paycheck and all of Cody’s.

You do not go to war with the man who signs your check and taught you how to drive a combine.

So I said, “Thank you for telling us before they started,” which was the only true thing I could find to say. Then we put our coats on and drove home.

Cody did not turn the radio on. We live, or lived then, in a rented house on the edge of Beloit with a yard the size of a horse trailer, and it is twelve miles from Gene’s place.

Cody did not say a word for eleven of them.

At the stop sign by the grain elevator he said, “I’ll talk to him again. Just me. Not in the kitchen.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “He told my wife to go live in a flood. I have to.”

He talked to him twice. Both times in the machine shed, both times with a wrench in his hand so it would look like they were working.

Cody told me about it afterward, sitting on the edge of our bed with his boots still on.

Gene said the same thing both times. “It’s my ground, son. Corn’s losing money. I’ve got an operating note at the bank that’s bigger than it has ever been. That lease is the first sure thing this farm has had since your mother got sick.”

Cody did not tell me the rest until much later.

Gene had said, the second time, “You think I want to look at a field of glass for twenty-five years? I don’t. But I’ll look at it if it keeps the rest of this place in the family.”

I wish I had heard that part sooner. I do not know if it would have changed how I felt in March. It might have changed how I felt by May.

What I did hear in March was the bank. I called our loan officer in town, a careful woman named Karen who has known my family for years, and I asked her what it would take to build on the river bottom.

She was kind about it. She said a house down there would need an elevation certificate, a permit from the county floodplain office, and flood insurance the bank would require as long as the loan was open.

“Ballpark, Haley, you’re looking at close to two thousand a year for the insurance alone,” she said. “And that’s if the fill and the foundation come in where they should. I’d be lying if I told you I liked it.”