The Farm Our Neighbors Would Not Bid On

The auctioneer’s stand went up beside the machine shed at six o’clock on a Saturday morning in March. By seven there were so many pickups on our lane that I could no longer see the county road.

I stood at the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hands and watched them come. Flatbeds, feed trucks, a school bus somebody’s church had bought for the youth group, and a hay truck with a dog riding in the cab.

They parked nose to tail along the ditch, a full mile of them, down to the section corner. Then they climbed out in their work coats and started up the lane on foot, through the mud and the old gray snowbanks, with their hands in their pockets.

Nobody was carrying a bidder card. I noticed that first, and I did not understand it.

My name is Ardith Ostrem. I was sixty-two that spring. My husband Merle and I had farmed twelve hundred and forty acres in the Judith Basin, in the middle of Montana, for thirty-eight years, wheat and barley and a few cows.

That Saturday the Northern Plains Bank was going to sell every acre of it, and the house, and every machine in the shed, to whoever stood in our yard and offered the most money.

Merle was already out at the gate. He had gone out at five, before I had the coffee on, and he stood there with his hat in both hands like a man waiting for a funeral procession to pass.

He had not said ten words together since Christmas. He was not a cold man, and he was not a beaten one. He was a proud man who had lost something, and a proud man in that spot does not know where to put his hands.

I had the big church urn going on the kitchen counter, the sixty-cup aluminum one that has done every funeral lunch in this end of the county since 1974. It was the only thing I knew to do. When people come to your house, you give them coffee.

Even if they are coming to watch your house be sold.

The first ones through the kitchen door were the Lutheran ladies, five in a row, carrying pans. Scalloped potatoes, ham and bean soup in a roaster, a cake with the frosting still soft.

“We figured you wouldn’t have thought to feed anybody,” said Gladys, who is eighty-one and has never once asked my permission to put a pan in my oven.

I told her I had not thought of it. That was true. For a week I had thought of very little except a small paper envelope in my coat pocket, and I will come to that.

How we got there is not complicated.

In 2021 Merle bought the Haugen half section, three hundred and twenty acres that joined our south line. Old Mr. Haugen’s heirs lived in Phoenix and wanted out. The price was fair, and every man at the Stanford Cafe told Merle that land like that comes up once in a lifetime.

We borrowed to buy it, and the bank wanted the home place put up behind the loan. That was how it was done, they said.

Then it quit raining. From the first of April to the end of September we got a little over six inches. The wheat came up thin and burned off in July, and on the ninth of August a hailstorm came out of the Highwoods and took what the dry had left. It took it in nine minutes. I timed it by the kitchen clock.