The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

“It drains to the road ditch,” he said. “Good slope. Rural water line runs right along the section road, so we just need a meter. Septic would go back toward the windbreak.”

Then he stood at the very front of it and looked across at his father’s forty for a long time.

The survey stakes for the solar company were already in, little orange flags snapping in the wind.

“You okay with this?” I asked him.

“I’m okay with your grandma,” he said. “I’m working on the rest.”

Grandma would not give it to us. That was the strange part.

I offered to pay her what it was worth, and she would not take that either. She wanted to sell it to us for one dollar.

“A gift, people argue about,” she said. “My mother taught me that. When somebody dies, the first thing anybody fights over is what was given and what was promised. A sale is done. Nobody argues with a sale.”

So we went to the title company in town, and a nice young man drew up the deed and recorded it at the courthouse, and none of it was very interesting.

That is not the part of this I care about.

The part I care about is that afterward, in her kitchen, I took a dollar bill out of my wallet and handed it to her across the oilcloth.

She looked at it, smoothed it flat, and put it inside the cover of her Bible.

“There,” she said. “Paid in full.”

Gene found out at the co-op. That is how everybody finds out everything in our county. Somebody at the scale house had seen Cody’s pickup parked in Grandma’s pasture with a surveyor’s truck beside it.

He did not call. He drove over to our rental the next evening and stood on the step without coming in, the porch light on him, the way a man stands when he means to say one thing and leave.

“You’re building across from it,” he said. “Right across the road. You couldn’t have picked a spot to look at it more if you’d tried.”

“We picked the spot we were offered,” I said. “Grandma’s ground is high and dry. That’s all we wanted. That’s all we ever wanted.”

He stood there a minute longer. I think he wanted me to be angry so he could be angry back. I did not give him that. I just held the storm door open and waited.

“Well,” he said. “It’s your business.” And he went back to his pickup and drove away, and Cody, who had been standing in the hall behind me the whole time, let out a breath I had not heard him holding.

“You did that better than I would have,” Cody said.

“I’ve been practicing on scared dogs for eight years,” I said. “It’s the same thing. Don’t move fast, don’t raise your voice, and don’t let them see you flinch.”

They started setting posts on the forty in May, right when Gene said they would.

A crew came in from out of state with a machine that drove steel posts into the ground like a woodpecker, all day long.

Our house started the same month. We hired a man from Glen Elder to pour the foundation, and Cody and three of his buddies from high school framed it on evenings and Saturdays, the way people used to raise barns.