The Row She Planted on Her Own Ground

What He Did Not Count

Here is what Harold forgot while he was dividing up his six hundred acres at the head of the table. Nearly three hundred of them were not his to divide.

My father left me the north three hundred when he passed in the spring of 1994. Three hundred acres of good central Illinois dirt, black as a cast-iron skillet, laid out along the blacktop north of the home place.

In my family we always called it the north three hundred, though a surveyor would tell you it came to two hundred and seventy-one once you took out the road ditch and the old gravel pit down in the corner.

Harold and I farmed it together with the rest of it all these years. One operation, one grain cart, one line of green equipment coming and going out of the same machine shed.

After thirty years a person stops keeping track of whose name is on which deed, because it all goes through the same elevator under the same account. Harold had stopped keeping track. I never had.

My father put that ground in my name alone, and he did it on purpose. He sat me down at his own kitchen table the spring before he died, a coffee can of pencils between us, and he told me why.

“Marilyn,” he said, “land is the only thing nobody can talk you out of.

A man can talk you out of your opinion, and he can talk you out of your half of the checkbook, and he will, and he won’t even know he’s doing it. But he cannot talk you out of ground that’s got your name on the paper down at the courthouse.

You hold onto this. Don’t you ever sign it away to make a peace.”

I was thirty-five then and I thought he was being dramatic. He had watched two of his own brothers lose their places in the farm crisis ten years before, so he was not being dramatic.

He was teaching me the one lesson he had left to teach. I just was not ready to learn it, not really, not down in my bones, until the Easter ham was getting cold on the platter and my daughter was moving it to the side of her plate.

After They Drove Home

That night I sat at the kitchen table a long while after Harold went up to bed. The dishes were done and put away.

The house was quiet in the way it gets after a houseful of family leaves, when the furnace kicks on and the clock on the stove is the loudest thing in the room.

I thought about Shelby when she was nine, standing on the running board of the old tractor in her nightgown because she could not sleep and she wanted to ride the last of the beans with her daddy in the dark. I thought about her at sixteen, running the grain cart through harvest, pulling up alongside the combine on the go without spilling a kernel, while the boys were off at ball practice in town.

She never missed a fall. Not one, in twenty-five years.

The boys loved the farm the way you love a thing you expect to get. Shelby loved it the way you love a thing you are afraid will be taken.

She went off and got her degree in ag business and came home anyway. She married a good, steady man named Jeff who sells seed for the co-op, and she still shows up every planting and every harvest to run whatever we put her on.