The Forty Acres I Gave My Bride

I signed the deed in front of her notary on a Wednesday in early June, after the last of the replant seed was out. Then I put the original in an envelope and waited.

The Monday before the wedding, I drove to the Watonwan County courthouse in St. James and handed the envelope across the counter at the recorder’s office.

The clerk was a woman about my mother’s age. She read the deed through, checked the certificate number, and looked up at me over her glasses.

“Ostergaard,” she said. “Arvid’s girl?”

“Yes ma’am. We’re getting married Saturday.”

She looked at the deed again, and then at me, and something changed in her face. She didn’t say anything else. She stamped it, took my check for the recording fee and the deed tax, and gave me a receipt.

“The recorded original will be mailed to the grantee,” she said. “But I can give you a certified copy today, if you want one.”

“I want one,” I said.

She made it and stamped it and slid it across in a plain envelope. On the way out she said, “Congratulations,” and it sounded like she meant more than the wedding.

I folded the certified copy in thirds and put it in my top dresser drawer, under my good socks. And I told nobody. Not my mother, not my best man, and above all not Hannah.

All through that spring, Arvid barely spoke to me. He nodded when I came for Sunday dinner. He passed me the potatoes.

Once he asked what the hybrid I was selling did on heavy ground, and listened to my answer, and didn’t say anything back.

I knew from Hannah that he bought his seed from a dealer over by Butterfield, a man he’d done business with for twenty years. I never once asked him for an order. It would have felt like asking for something.

At the rehearsal on Friday evening he shook my hand like a man paying a bill he didn’t think he owed. One pump, firm, and done.

Hannah saw it. Her mouth went flat. She had hardly said ten words to her father since March, and it was wearing on everybody, Karen most of all.

“Two more days,” Hannah said to me in the parking lot. “Then I don’t have to sit at his table every Sunday and pretend it didn’t happen.”

“You’ll still sit at his table,” I said. “He’s your dad.”

“He hurt you.”

“He was scared,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”

She looked at me strangely, and I almost told her about Lois right then. But Karen had told me on a porch in the dark, and it was hers to pass on, not mine.

It stormed that Friday night, a big rolling June thunderstorm that came through around midnight and dropped almost an inch. I lay awake listening to it on the roof and thinking it would make the corn jump.

Saturday came up clear and washed and already warm by seven. The kind of June morning in south-central Minnesota where the air smells like wet dirt and cut grass and you can almost hear the corn growing in the ditches.