A Pie for Every Thousand Dollars

Daddys Ground

You have to understand what that ground meant to her, or none of the rest will land the way it ought to.

My daddy was named Earl. He bought those 160 acres in 1971 with a loan the banker in town told him flat out he would never live to pay off.

He paid it off in nine years. He did it farming sunup to past dark, and he never once let that banker forget it either.

He farmed that ground in corn and beans his whole life. When he got too stove up to climb into the cab, he rented it out and watched other men do it, which about killed him.

Mama kept the ground when Daddy passed in 2019. That was the plan the two of them made at the kitchen table.

The same table, I will point out, where Donnie would later tell her she did not own the risk.

The land was hers now. Her security, her nursing-home money, the one thing that let her sleep easy in a house that was paid for free and clear.

Donnie started farming it on a crop-share about six years back. It made good sense to everybody then, me included.

He had the equipment. He lived two miles down the blacktop. Keeping the home place in the family felt like the right way to honor Daddy.

The deal was a fifty-fifty crop-share, the common kind all through this part of southern Illinois. Mama got half the crop when the grain sold in the fall.

In return she paid half the seed, half the chemical, and half the crop insurance premium. All of it came off the top of her settlement before she saw a dollar.

Donnie did the labor and carried the operating note. Every October the check came in, got split clean down the middle, and nobody ever argued about it.

There was nothing to argue about. The arithmetic did the talking, and the arithmetic was fair, and that was how they both wanted it.

“Your daddy would want Donnie to have the chance,” Mama told me when he first took over. “A young man needs ground. You can’t start from nothing anymore.”

Donnie was not exactly young. He was fifty-one, two years older than me, with a grown boy of his own itching to get into the operation.

But to Mama he was still the boy who rode the combine hopper on Earl’s knee. She handed him that ground like you hand a hungry child the bigger half of the biscuit.

I believe that is the part that cut her deepest, and it was never the money.

It was that she had given to that boy her whole life, given and given, and somewhere along the way he had decided her giving meant it had all been his to begin with.