Three Veterans on Grandpa’s Eighty

Brad and I divorced in the fall of 2023. Nobody cheated. Nobody threw anything.

We just ran out of things to say to each other, somewhere around year twelve, and spent five more years being polite in the same kitchen.

The divorce was plain, the way those things go when there are no children and not much money. Brad kept the house in Durand.

I kept my car and my retirement account. And the eighty acres stayed mine, because Grandpa had left them to me in his will, in my name alone.

Wisconsin is a marital property state, but inherited land is not marital property unless you mix it in. My attorney explained that in about four minutes.

Brad never even argued it. He signed the papers at his lawyer’s office in Durand and shook my hand.

After the divorce I took an apartment in Eau Claire, close to the dental office where I have cleaned teeth for nineteen years.

I could not face Grandpa’s farmhouse yet. It still smelled like his pipe and his coffee and the Lava soap by the kitchen sink.

Ron Hanson kept an eye on the place for me. He mowed the yard and plowed the drive and called me if a pipe froze.

I drove out once a month or so, walked through the empty rooms, and drove back to town.

So for two deer seasons, I was not there. I did not see who parked at the field approach in November.

I thought, when I thought about it at all, that Brad’s buddies had found somewhere else to go.

In April of last year my apartment lease ran out, and something in me said it was time. I moved into Grandpa’s house.

I hung my clothes in his closet and kept his thermos on the counter where it had always been.

And in August, Kurt Fischer told me at the gas pump that my ex-husband had been selling my grandpa’s ridge for four thousand dollars a season.

I called Brad that night from the porch. The sun was going down over Ron’s corn, and the cicadas were so loud I had to press the phone hard against my ear.

He picked up on the fourth ring. I could hear a television and a man laughing somewhere behind him.

“Kurt says you’ve been leasing the eighty,” I said. “Four thousand a year. Cash.”

There was a long pause. Then the television got quieter, like he had walked into another room.

“I built those stands, Amy,” he said. “Every one of them. I hauled the steel up that ridge on my own back. I cut every shooting lane. That hunting is half mine and you know it.”

“The land is mine, Brad. The deed has one name on it.”

“You don’t even hunt,” he said, and his voice went flat and cold, the voice he used to use on the phone with a claims adjuster. “It’s wasted on you. Grandpa’d want somebody out there who knows what they’re doing.”

Then he hung up. He did not raise his voice once. Brad never did. That was always the worst part.

I sat on the porch until it was full dark. I thought about the eight thousand dollars he had taken for two seasons, at least, maybe more.

I thought about Grandpa’s hand on my knee in the gray light, and about Brad saying his name like he had a right to it.