The Camper on the Eighty That Was Mine

Setting up housekeeping

You would be surprised what a woman of seventy can get done in a week when she has made up her mind to it.

I bought heat tape and pipe insulation at the hardware store and wrapped the hose from the hydrant myself.

I bought a second space heater and a carbon monoxide alarm, because I taught fourth grade for thirty-six years and I know what happens to people who skip the safety part.

I called the propane company and had them set a bigger tank beside the camper so I would not be swapping bottles in January.

The man who came out was a former student of mine, Jeff Ritter, from my class of 1991.

“Mrs. Houck,” he said, looking at the camper and then at me, the way he used to look at a math problem he did not like.

“Are you going to be all right out here by yourself?”

“I’m fine, Jeff,” I said. “Do you still spell ‘necessary’ with two c’s?”

He laughed and said he did not, and never would again, and he would not charge me for the hookup no matter what I said.

The phone call

Two days after I moved down the lane, Darrin called.

Once I saw him standing in the yard looking south toward the oaks, but he had not called until then.

“I’ll be down Saturday to take the last cutting off your 80,” he said. “Weather says we get a hard freeze Thursday night. If it stays dry, I’ll mow Saturday and bale it Monday.”

I was standing at the camper window looking at that hay. It was still green and thick, a good stand, the best fall growth in years.

Harlan’s cows would have wintered on it, the way they had wintered on it for sixteen years running.

“No,” I said. “You won’t.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear the radio in his pickup, the noon markets out of Des Moines, a man reading the price of soybeans like it was the weather.

“Marlene,” he said finally. “The cows need that hay. You know they do. Dad would have wanted them to have it.”

“I imagine they do need it,” I said. “Goodbye, Darrin.” I hung up. Then I sat down, because my knees were not as brave as my mouth had been.

Then I found Lowell Peck’s number in the church directory and I called him before I could change my mind.

Lowell

Lowell Peck is sixty-six years old. He has run cattle on the place across the blacktop his whole life, and his father before him.

His wife Nancy died four years ago, and he has been quieter since, though Lowell was never what you would call a talker.

He came that evening, right at dark, still in his chore clothes. He would not come in.

He stood at the bottom of my camper steps with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at the hay, then at the camper, then at me.

“I heard,” he said. “I expect everybody’s heard by now. Nancy would have had a fit. She’d have been down here an hour ago with a quilt and a pot of chili. I’m sorry I’m late, Marlene.”

That about undid me, and I had to look off at the oaks for a minute before I could say what I had called him to say.

“Lowell, I want to sell you my standing hay,” I said.

“The fall cutting, whatever’s out there. And if you want to winter some cows on the creek bottom, where the timber breaks the wind, I’d take a fair rent for that too.”

He was quiet for a while. Then he said what a good neighbor says.

“You sure about this, Marlene? Darrin’s going to be sore. And he’s got Harlan’s cows to feed this winter, thirty-five head.”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ve thought about nothing else for two days.”

He nodded slowly. “Going rate for a fall cutting is about forty, forty-five an acre this year, standing. Dry as the summer was, hay is short everywhere.”

“Then forty-five,” I said. “Sixty acres.”

He did the arithmetic out loud, the way men his age do. “Twenty-seven hundred dollars.”

He took a checkbook out of his coat pocket and wrote the check right there on the hood of my car, by the light from the camper door.

When he handed it to me, he did not let go of it right away.

“You could have fought him for that house, you know,” he said. “Nancy’s sister did, when her husband passed. Iowa lets you.”

“I know it,” I said. “Bill Dunn told me. A third of the ground, or the house for life. I let it go by. Harlan wanted the place to go to his boy.”

Lowell looked at me a long time. “Does Darrin know that?”

“No,” I said. “And I’d thank you not to tell him, Lowell. It’s not something I did to be thanked for.”