The Forty Acres I Gave My Bride

I raised corn on those forty acres one year and soybeans the next. I sold seed corn to farmers all over Watonwan and Brown counties for the rest of my living. Between the two, I did all right.

Ground around Madelia was bringing about nine thousand dollars an acre that spring. Forty acres of it came to three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, give or take, free and clear. Grandpa never borrowed against it once.

I was thirty-three years old, and that forty acres was the only thing I had ever been given that mattered. It was more than money to me. It was my grandfather’s whole life with his name still on it.

Hannah didn’t call that night. She didn’t call the next morning either. When she finally did, around noon, her voice was tight and careful.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Clint. I should have stopped it. I should have walked out before you ever picked up that pen.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “Neither did I.”

“He treated you like a thief. In front of a lawyer. In front of my mother.”

“He treated me like a stranger,” I said. “That’s what I am to him, for now.”

“How can you be so calm about it?”

I thought about Karen on the porch steps with her arms folded. I thought about a nineteen-year-old boy at a kitchen table. I didn’t tell Hannah what her mother had told me. It wasn’t my story to tell.

“Because I already knew what I was going to do about it,” I said.

That was the first moment the idea had a shape, though I think it had been growing since the second page of that agreement.

“What are you going to do?” Hannah asked.

“Marry you,” I said. “In June. Like we planned.”

She laughed a little at that, the first time in a day, and I knew we would be all right.

March went into April. I spent every daylight hour on the road delivering seed. That’s the seed dealer’s spring: you take orders all winter at kitchen tables, and then in April every one of those farmers wants his corn yesterday.

I hauled pallets of seed in a trailer behind my pickup and unloaded them with a borrowed skid loader.

I ate gas station sandwiches and slept six hours a night and loved every minute of it, the way I always do.

In between deliveries I made one phone call that I didn’t tell anybody about. I called a lawyer in Fairmont, a woman named Laura Lund who had no connection to anyone in Watonwan County and no reason to talk.

I told her what I wanted. She was quiet for a second on the line.

“You understand what this means,” she said. “If you deed it to her before the wedding, it’s her premarital property. In Minnesota, if you two ever split up, she keeps it. You’d have no claim to it at all.”

“I understand that,” I said.

“You understand it’s your grandfather’s land.”

“Yes ma’am. That’s why.”

She drew up a warranty deed. Forty acres, the legal description copied off Grandpa’s old abstract, from Clinton Walter Rasmussen, single, to Hannah Marie Ostergaard, single, as a gift.

There was more paperwork than you’d think. There was the electronic certificate of real estate value, and a well disclosure, because Grandpa’s old well had been sealed in 1998 and the county needed to know it.