The Farm Our Neighbors Would Not Bid On

We had crop insurance, but insurance pays late. The adjuster has to come, and the paperwork goes to an office in another state, and the check we were owed did not arrive until the end of January.

Our payment to the bank was due on the fifteenth of November. It was seventy-one thousand three hundred dollars. We had twenty-two thousand in the account, and we sent that, with a letter saying the insurance money was coming.

The bank wrote back that a partial payment was not a payment. Forty-one days past the due date, a man in an office in Billings who had never seen our place signed a paper calling the whole note. One million, forty-six thousand dollars, due in thirty days.

I did not think a villain did it. I thought it was a form. A form in a drawer that says when a payment is this late, this is what happens, and a man who signs it because the form is there.

We hired a lawyer in Lewistown, a kind, tired man with a bad knee, and he sat in our kitchen in December and was honest with us. He said we could fight it. It would cost about forty thousand dollars and most of a year.

At the end of the year, he said, the bank would very likely still win, and we would have spent the money we needed to start over.

“I wish I had a better answer for you, Ardith,” he said, and I believed him.

Bankruptcy would only buy time, he said, and then the court would sell the ground anyway. So that was that. There was no phone call left to make and no sentence left to say.

We sold the cows in October, sixty-one bred cows, to pay down the smallest piece we could. Merle loaded them himself. He stood at the chute until the last trailer went over the cattle guard, and then he went into the shop and did not come out until after dark.

The man who came to our house in January was Corbin Teel.

He was thirty-one, a credit officer for Northern Plains Bank out of the Billings regional office. He wore a necktie under his parka, and he wiped his feet on my mat for a full minute before he came in. His mother raised him right somewhere, whatever else is true.

He squared a folder up on my kitchen table and told me he was sorry, and I think he meant it as far as it went.

“The bank has decided to sell the property at public auction, Mrs. Ostrem,” he said. “On the place, on March fourteenth, so buyers can see the equipment. I want you to know it will be run fairly.”

He explained how. It was an absolute auction, which meant no reserve and no minimum. Every lot would go to the highest bidder, no matter what. That was the part he was proudest of.

“The idea is, the more people in the yard, the better the price,” he said. “We’ve advertised from Great Falls to Calgary. We’ve got a land company from Bozeman coming, and some buyers from across the line. I really think you’ll be pleased.”

He said it the way a man gives you a gift he has wrapped himself.