The Farm Our Neighbors Would Not Bid On

The bank never sued. Not one letter came. In April I read in the Lewistown paper that Corbin Teel had resigned from Northern Plains Bank “to pursue other interests.” In June somebody told me he had taken a job at the Farm Credit office in Lewistown, and that he drove out once a month to sit in a farmer’s kitchen and eat whatever was put in front of him.

Sandy at the Stanford Cafe told me what else the bank lost. On Monday morning forty-one families walked into the Northern Plains branch in Lewistown and closed their accounts. By the end of the month it was a hundred and twelve.

The money went to the credit union on Main Street, run by two women and a man named Pete who knows everybody’s grandmother. The bank wrote off the loss and said nothing. A bank can survive a lot. It cannot easily survive a county that has decided to remember.

I do not want you to get the wrong idea about us. We did not walk away free. We went into that year owing the whole county a debt we will never finish paying.

Merle drives over to Ansel’s every Sunday to sit in his shop, and in the fall he cut the Rudds’ hay for nothing, and he is already planning how to be at the next sale, and the one after that.

That is what a penny auction is for. It does not wipe a thing out. It moves it, from one man’s shoulders to six hundred.

In April, when the last of the snow went off the garden, I took the little brown envelope out of my coat pocket and carried it out to the clothesline.

Merle was already there. He had known where I would go.

I knelt, and he knelt next to me, which took him a while on his knees. I opened the flap and tipped the dirt out onto the ground, a spoonful of black earth that had been in my pocket a month, back into the garden it came from. It sank in like it had never been gone.

I put my hand flat on it.

“I’m sorry I took you,” I said. Not to Merle. To the ground.

“It forgives you,” my husband said, and he is not a man who wastes words.

He put his big, scarred hand over mine, and we stayed there a long time, two old people on our knees in a garden with the sun on our backs and the first green thing just starting to show by the fence.

Ione brought the jar to the house in November. It was empty, the pennies all counted and gone to the bank, but she had scrubbed it and tied a ribbon around the lid. She set it on my kitchen windowsill, and it sits there still, catching the light.

I know this much. On a Saturday in March, six hundred people stood in my yard and refused to make money off my ruin, and one man bid a dime.

And last spring a man named Ketil Jansen, down by Moore, lost his place on a bad calf crop and a broken hip. I was at his sale. I was in a coat. I was one of about four hundred and twenty. When Virgil Gaw asked for ten thousand dollars, I stood there in the mud with my hands in my pockets, and I did not say a word.

Ione had a quart jar on a card table just inside the gate. I put in a roll of pennies.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.