The Widow Who Planted Across the Road
“I can see them from my window,” she said. “When he was out planting, I could see the lights going back and forth when I was supposed to be asleep. I used to count the passes.”
She went upstairs. I sat at that kitchen table until after midnight with the yard light shining through the window, and I looked out across the gravel road at the old Wiebe place.
The Wiebe place was eighty acres of dryland with a small white farmhouse and a leaning red barn.
Mrs. Wiebe had lived there alone until she went into the care center in Red Cloud three years before, and she had passed away the August after.
Harold Fischer had rented the ground for years, but he was seventy-eight and had retired at harvest, and the Wiebe grandkids in Lincoln had listed it for sale in the fall.
It had not sold. Nobody wanted an old farmhouse, and the neighbors who wanted the ground were waiting for the price to come down.
Jeff and I used to talk about it sometimes, at night, the way you talk about things you know you will never do.
He said if he ever won the lottery he would buy that eighty and give it to Abby when she turned eighteen.
I took out a pencil and the back of a seed company calendar, and I did the arithmetic.
Dryland in our part of Webster County had been bringing about five thousand an acre. Eighty acres was four hundred thousand.
The house was old but sound, and the listing had come down to four hundred and thirty thousand for all of it. That left me seventy thousand, give or take, for everything else.
I did not sleep at all that night. But by the time the sun came up over Randy’s grain bins, I knew what I was going to do.
I cashed the check the next Monday at the bank in Hastings.
The loan officer, a young man named Kyle who had the bank’s letters in his file, looked at the check and looked at me and said, “Mrs. Engel, I’m so sorry about Jeff.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’d like to make an offer on a farm.”
I called the realtor that afternoon and offered the full four hundred and thirty for the Wiebe place, cash, no contingencies, with a closing before the end of April.
I did not haggle. I did not have time to haggle, and the grandkids said yes the next morning.
I think they were tired of paying taxes on a house nobody lived in.
We closed on the twenty-second of April at the title company in Red Cloud, and I drove home with the keys to the farmhouse in my coat pocket and my hand over them the whole way.
Nobody in the family knew yet. That was not a trick. I just did not want to hear anybody talk me out of it.
The rest of the money had to cover a tractor, a planter, seed, fertilizer, and enough to live on until fall.
I went to a farm sale outside Red Cloud on a raw Saturday in April, an old couple retiring, and I stood in the mud with fifty men in seed caps and bid on a John Deere 6420 with a cab and nine thousand hours on it.