The Casino Sign My Mother Read

The forty acres

I want to tell you about the forty acres, because he was wrong about that, and the wrongness of it is the whole thing.

My daddy farmed rented ground his entire life and died not owning one foot of it. He raised me to think that was just how it was for our kind of people. You worked somebody else’s dirt and you were grateful for the work.

I decided when I was twenty-six that it was not going to be how it was for me.

I picked up every extra shift the hospital would give me. Nights, holidays, the Christmas Day shift nobody wanted, the double on the Fourth of July when the fireworks brought in the burns and the drunks. For six years I did that. I kept a separate account Greg did not have the card to, not because I was hiding it, but because he had a way of finding the bottom of any account that had his name on it.

I bought the forty acres from a widow named Mrs. Alcott for less than it was worth because she wanted it to go to somebody who would not cut it up. Flat Delta ground an hour south of us, soybean dirt, a stand of pin oaks along the ditch, and the sky out there is so big it makes you quiet.

Two years after I bought it, a company came through leasing wind rights. They put up one turbine on the north corner, white and slow and tall as a grain elevator, and every October they sent me a check for eight thousand dollars for the privilege of it standing there.

I remember the day I signed for it. I sat in a title office that smelled like old coffee and new carpet, and when the woman slid the papers across and pointed where to sign, my hand shook. Mrs. Alcott was there in a church dress. She patted my knee and said, “Your daddy would be proud a girl of his owns ground.” I drove straight out to the forty after and I walked the whole fence line in my scrubs because I had come off a night shift to make the appointment, and I did not care. I laid down in the soybean stubble in the middle of my own dirt and looked at that big sky until I fell asleep for an hour. Nobody could put me off it. It was mine.

I had worked for every dollar of that land. I had worked for it in the dark while he slept. So when he stood in my kitchen at a quarter to three and told me it was not real money and I had not worked for it, something in me went very cold and very still, and it has not entirely warmed up since.