“You keep that paper somewhere safe,” he told her, gruffly, into the top of her hair. “That’s good ground. Walt Rasmussen’s ground. My dad bought seed oats off him once, in 1979.”
Hannah laughed into his shirt, wet and shaky. Karen took his elbow and steered him back down the line, and he went, wiping his face with the back of his wrist where he thought nobody would see.
After the line broke up, the photographer, Hannah’s cousin Kim, came looking for us with her camera. She had planned outdoor pictures in the Ostergaard grove by the big barn. Hannah shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Take us to Clint’s forty. Take us to my forty.”
So we drove out there, the three of us, in my pickup with the windows down. Southwest of Madelia, down the gravel road, past the Halvorson place, to the spot where Grandpa’s yard used to be.
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It was not quite eleven, still morning, the sun bright and climbing. The storm had washed everything clean, and the corn was knee-high and shining green in long straight rows that ran away to the south.
The old windbreak of cottonwoods stood along the north edge the way Grandma planted it seventy years before, the leaves turning silver in the breeze. The rusty mailbox leaned on its post by the gravel field road, same as always.
Kim had us stand at the edge of the field, right where the corn rows started, with the corn behind us, the mailbox on its post at our side and the cottonwoods standing beyond.
“Look at each other,” Kim said. “Just talk. Forget I’m here.”
Hannah looked up at me. She stood on the grass at the end of the rows in her white dress, and I don’t think she cared one bit about the hem.
“You’re crazy, you know that,” she said. “You gave me your grandpa’s farm.”
“I gave my wife my grandpa’s farm,” I said. “That’s what he’d have wanted it for.”
She laughed, and then she was crying again, and then she was doing both at the same time, with one hand flat on my chest over the boutonniere like she was checking my heart was still going.
Kim’s camera clicked about fifteen times. That’s the picture on our dresser now. Me in the navy suit, Hannah with her hand on my chest, looking up at me and smiling, with Grandpa’s corn behind us and his old mailbox on its post.
The next spring, at the end of April, I was in Arvid’s machine shed at six in the morning with a thermos of coffee and my order book under my arm.
He’d ordered all his seed from me that winter.
He came to my kitchen table to do it, in January, sat there with Hannah’s coffee and went down the order sheet line by line, and asked good questions. He didn’t argue on price. Not once.
We planted for eleven days straight.
Arvid ran the big planter and I ran the field cultivator ahead of him, and when the weather turned on day six we sat in the cab of the pickup together and listened to the rain and the noon markets.