Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

That house was not much to look at, if you were a stranger driving by. A white two-story farmhouse with a covered front porch at the end of a quarter-mile gravel lane in southern Iowa, with eighty acres of Leland’s ground around it on three sides and a creek on the fourth.

But we had brought Jo home to that house from the hospital. Owen learned to ride a bike on that lane. Maisie buried four cats and a parakeet under the lilac by the machine shed, each with a funeral and a hymn.

We moved in when Owen was three. Cal and Leland shook hands on it in the church basement over a plate of ham balls, and there was never a lease. There was never any need for one. We paid on the first, Leland cashed the check, and when something broke, Cal fixed it.

Cal rebuilt the well pump one January when it was eleven below. He replaced the back steps. He put in a new water heater and never asked Leland for a dime, because Leland had given us a fair rent, and Cal said fair goes both ways.

I painted that porch twice. The second time, Owen helped, and there was still a little white paint on one of the porch posts at the height of a ten-year-old’s hand.

I didn’t call Cal at work. I didn’t want him hearing it over the phone with the dryers roaring behind him. I put the letter in my purse, told Owen to watch his sisters, and drove into town.

The elevator was going full bore. It was the last week of September and the beans were coming in, and there was a line of grain trucks and tractors with wagons backed out onto the highway, waiting on the scale.

I parked by the office and walked out to where Cal was standing by the dump pit, waving a truck forward. He had dust in his eyebrows and his ear protection around his neck, and he saw my face and came straight over.

“What’s wrong? Are the kids all right?”

“The kids are fine,” I said, and I handed him the letter.

He read it standing there with the wind blowing chaff past both of us. He read it twice too. Then he folded it on the creases very carefully, the way he does with anything he’s angry about, like being neat with it would keep him from tearing it.

“Hunters,” he said.

“From Chicago. Eighteen hundred a month.”

He looked off across the lot at the line of trucks. “June’s care center,” he said.

“Nine thousand a month. He told me.”

Cal was quiet for a long time. A truck honked, and he lifted a hand to it without looking.

“Is it legal?” I asked. “Thirty days?”

“I expect he checked,” Cal said. “Month to month, no lease. I think thirty days written is all it takes in Iowa. He handed it to you, so it’s written.”

I’d known that already, if I was honest. I’d known it standing on the porch. It was a handshake for eleven years, and a handshake is a fine thing right up until the other man lets go. There wasn’t a thing to fight, and nobody to fight it with, and neither of us had the money or the stomach to try.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Cal said.