“When Arvid’s dad died, the home place got split between the two kids,” Karen said. “Half to Arvid, half to Lois. It was three hundred and twenty acres then. That’s all there was.”
“Lois was married to a man named Ron. He was charming. Everybody liked Ron. Within six years he’d talked her into selling her half, a piece at a time, and the money went where Ron’s money always went.”
“To the bar in Truman, mostly. Some to the casino. By the time she left him, there was nothing. Not one acre. She went to work at the nursing home and rented an apartment over the hardware store.”
“Arvid was nineteen when the first piece sold. He sat at that table,” she said, and pointed back through the door, “and watched his mother cry with her face in her apron.”
“He spent the next twenty years buying back what Ron sold. Every acre. Some of it he paid twice what it was worth, because the neighbor knew he wanted it. He got the last eighty back in 2004.”
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“And he swore,” Karen said, “that no son-in-law would ever do to Hannah what Ron did to Lois. He swore it at his father’s funeral. I heard him.”
I stood there with the wind cutting through my coat and thought about that. About a nineteen-year-old boy watching his mother cry.
“He doesn’t know you,” Karen said. “That’s not your fault. He doesn’t let himself know anybody that might take something. Give him time.”
“I’m not mad at him,” I said. I meant it. I was surprised to find that I meant it.
“Hannah is,” Karen said. “She’ll be mad for a while. She has his temper. She just hides it better.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
Karen nodded and went back inside. Through the kitchen window I could see Arvid still sitting at the table with the envelope in front of him, his big hands flat on either side of it, not moving.
I drove home slowly that night, eleven miles of gravel and blacktop to my rented house on the edge of Madelia, and I thought about my grandfather the whole way.
My dad died when I was fourteen. Heart, at forty-four, out in the machine shed on a Tuesday afternoon.
After that it was Grandpa Walt who taught me most of what I know about how a man ought to carry himself.
Grandpa Walt farmed a quarter section for fifty years, but by the end he’d sold all of it except forty acres, the forty where the old house stood, along the gravel road a few miles southwest of Madelia.
He left those forty acres to me in his will. He died four years before that night at the Ostergaard table, at eighty-eight, in the chair by his window, with his seed cap on his knee.
The house on the forty had been torn down in 2009, after the basement finally gave out. What was left was the grove, the old windbreak of cottonwoods Grandma planted when they were first married, and the mailbox on its post.
The mailbox was rusty and leaning a little toward the road. Nobody had gotten mail in it for seventeen years. I kept it anyway. I couldn’t make myself pull it.