Twenty Bales Down Beaver Creek

Grandpa’s Ground

I should tell you about the ground, because without the ground none of this makes sense.

My name is Anne. I was fifty-two that fall. I carry a rural mail route out of Albion five mornings a week, and in the afternoons I run thirty-one cows on the place I grew up on.

Kent is my cousin, three years older than me. His dad and my dad were brothers. They farmed side by side their whole lives, a quarter mile apart, and Kent and I grew up running between the two places like it was one big yard.

Our grandpa, Ames, owned the creek bottom between our two places. About forty acres of it, low ground on both sides of Beaver Creek, with a strip of higher ground on the north bank that never flooded.

When Grandpa passed, he left that forty to the two of us together. Not to our dads. To us. He wrote a little note with it, in his square carpenter’s handwriting, and it said, “You two will know what to do with it.”

That was twelve years ago. We never fenced it. We never even talked about splitting it. Kent grazed the south side some summers, and I stacked my hay on the high strip on the north side, because it was dry and close to the road.

Nobody ever said a word about it. It worked the way things work on family ground, until the day it didn’t.

So that was the first thing I thought, standing there on the bank. He had pushed my hay off ground that was half his. He had a right to be there. He did not have a right to do that.