The Widow Who Planted Across the Road
I could feel the men looking at me. I knew most of them. Some of them had been at the funeral.
When the auctioneer said, “Do I hear thirty-two,” I raised my card, and the man bidding against me, a farmer named Dale Kroeker I had known since high school, looked over, saw who it was, and put his hands in his pockets.
I got the tractor for thirty-two thousand five hundred. I got an eight-row John Deere 7000 planter for nine thousand, and the man running the sale threw in a box of spare seed plates because, he said, his wife would never forgive him if he didn’t.
That left me about twenty-five thousand. I bought my seed corn from the co-op, twenty-five bags, because I would plant dryland thin, around twenty-four thousand seeds an acre, the way Jeff did on the lighter ground.
I paid for it in full at the counter. The man behind the counter, Ron, rang it up and did not say a word about it, which in our town is how you say a great deal.
There was one thing I could not buy. Crop insurance sign-up for corn in Nebraska closes March fifteenth, and I had been standing in the church basement on March fifteenth.
The eighty would ride bare. If it hailed, or if July came in dry the way it had the last two years, I would lose the crop and most of what I had left.
I knew that. I did it anyway.
It was at the co-op, standing at the counter with my seed ticket, that I heard about the house. A man I barely knew said it to Ron like it was common knowledge.
Randy’s boy Luke was coming home from Lincoln to farm with them, and he was going to move into the home place after I was out.
I took my ticket and said thank you and went out to my car and sat there for a minute.
Luke was twenty-four. He had just finished his degree in agronomy at the university, and I had been proud of him.
He had stood at the front left corner of Jeff’s casket at the funeral, and he had cried so hard coming down the aisle that the man behind him had to put a hand on his shoulder.
So that was why the clean break. The bank wanted the balance sheet cleaned up, and Randy wanted his son to have a house to come home to.
And somewhere in there, the two of them had talked each other into believing that a big check handed over at a funeral was a kindness, because it meant I would not have to worry.
I did not hate Randy for it. I want to say that plainly.
He was a man who wanted something good for his son, and he had found a way to get it that let him feel generous. Most of us have done some smaller version of that.
But I was not going to town.
I told Abby the night we closed. I sat on the edge of her bed and gave her the keys to look at.