The Forty Acres I Gave My Bride

I looked at her. Then I looked at her father, who was looking at me the way he looked at a cow that might or might not be about to calve wrong.

Here is the thing I want people to understand, because I have told this story a few times since and somebody always asks why I didn’t just tell him where he could put his papers.

It was his land. His and Karen’s. They had the right to protect it any way the law allowed, and signing that agreement cost me nothing I wanted.

I didn’t want his ground. I had never once looked at those six hundred acres and thought about owning them. I already had forty acres, and they were all the farm I needed to feel like a farmer.

I wanted his daughter. That was the whole list.

So I picked up the pen and signed my name on the line at the bottom of the third page, and initialed every page in the corner where Tom had put little pencil checks.

Then I slid the pen back across the table.

I didn’t say a word. I didn’t say anything smart, and I didn’t say anything wounded. I just set the pen down by Arvid’s coffee cup and folded my hands.

Hannah looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were wet. Then she picked up the pen and signed under me, fast, the way you sign for something you never wanted delivered.

Sue the secretary signed as a witness. Tom signed as the other one. Sue stamped and dated it, and the whole thing took maybe four minutes from start to finish.

Hannah stood up. She didn’t look at her father. She took her jacket off the hook by the back door and went out, and the storm door banged behind her in the wind.

Arvid tucked his copies into a manila envelope and pressed the clasp closed with his thumb.

“Good,” he said.

That was all he said. He didn’t thank me, and he didn’t look sorry, and he didn’t look glad either. He looked like a man who had done a hard chore he had been dreading for years.

Tom and Sue left first. I got my coat and said goodnight to Karen’s back, and I went out onto the porch to find Hannah. She wasn’t there. Her car was already gone down the drive.

I was standing on the porch steps working my zipper when the door opened behind me. Karen came out in her slippers with her arms folded tight against the cold.

“Clint,” she said. “Wait a minute.”

I waited. She came down one step so she was level with me. She was sixty, with short gray hair and the hands of a woman who had raised calves and three kids and never once complained about either.

“He had a sister,” she said quietly. “Lois. She’s sixty-six now. She lives in Fairmont.”

I knew the name. I’d met Lois at Christmas, a small woman who sat at the end of the table and laughed at the right places but never seemed to quite join in.