The Acre Under the Cottonwood

The abstract office on Main

That Friday Kenny took a half day from the elevator. He and Colt drove into Hartington in Kenny’s white Chevy Silverado, both of them in clean shirts with collars.

I was on my afternoon bus route, so I was not there, and I have pieced this together from both of them.

The abstract office is a narrow brick building on Main Street across from the courthouse square, with a bell over the door.

Deb, who has worked there for thirty years and went to school with Kenny’s sister, had the papers ready in a manila folder.

She walked them through it. A quitclaim deed, Kenny as grantor, Colt as grantee, the legal description of the acre copied from Walt’s original deed.

A real estate transfer statement for the county. Deb said a gift deed to a minor was simple, and that Colt could hold the title fine at sixteen.

Kenny signed it. Deb notarized it with her stamp. Then she asked Kenny if he was sure, the way she said she asks everybody, and Kenny said he had never been more sure of anything except marrying me.

Colt said Deb got a tissue out of her desk drawer after that.

Then she walked the papers across the street to the register of deeds herself, so they would be recorded that same afternoon. Kenny paid the fees in cash and thanked her.

When they came out on the sidewalk, Kenny shook Colt’s hand. Colt told me that part at home, standing in the kitchen. “He shook my hand, Mom. Like I was a guy.”

“You are a guy,” I said.

“You know what I mean.”

I did know what he meant.

The stake under the cottonwood

Saturday morning was gray and bright at the same time, the way March mornings get up here, with the sun somewhere behind a high white sheet of cloud.

The trees were all still bare. The grass along the creek was patchy and brown, and the field lane was greasy with mud.

Kenny drove us out to the home place in the white Silverado. He did not stop at the house.

He turned off onto the field lane along the creek and parked behind the cottonwood, and the lower half of the truck was brown with mud by the time we got there.

Kenny had bought a new wooden corner stake at the lumberyard, pale and clean, with a fresh-cut point. He got the sledgehammer out of the truck bed.

He was wearing his green seed cap over his short brown hair, which has gone gray at the sides these last few years, and his tan hooded canvas work jacket, jeans, and his brown work boots, the same as every Saturday of his life.

Colt wore his gray hooded sweatshirt, his old faded red cap, jeans, and the new leather work gloves we gave him for his birthday.

He knelt down in the mud at the corner of the acre without being told, and took hold of that wooden stake low with both hands, and held it straight. The knees of his jeans were muddy in about a second.

I stood back on the creek bank with my phone. Out past the field, the grain elevator in town stood small on the flat horizon, the one where Kenny has worked for twenty years.

Kenny set the head of the sledgehammer on top of the stake to line it up, both hands on the handle.

He looked down at Colt, and Colt looked up at him, and Colt had a little smile on his face, a proud one, the kind he used to get when he caught a fish bigger than Kenny’s.

“Hold her steady,” Kenny said.

“I’ve got it, Dad.”

I took the picture right then. The two of them under that big bare tree, the stake between them, the white truck behind, the elevator way off.

Then he swung. It took Kenny nine swings. Colt never moved his hands.

When it was in, Kenny set the sledgehammer down and put his hand flat on top of the post and left it there a minute. Then he reached down and pulled Colt up out of the mud.

There was no cake. No percolator. No family in a row behind them.

Just the two of them and the creek running high and loud with snowmelt, and a flock of snow geese going over so high they sounded like a crowd cheering somewhere far away.