The Farm Our Neighbors Would Not Bid On

I poured him coffee and set a piece of pie in front of him. He drank the coffee and did not touch the pie. I watched him not touch it. I thought, there is a young man who does not feel allowed to eat at the table of someone he is about to sell out.

Then he did a thing I have thought about many times since. He opened the folder to the third page and read me a paragraph out loud, to show me how reasonable the bank was being.

“The proceeds of the sale shall be accepted in full satisfaction of the obligation,” he read. “So there’s no deficiency. You won’t owe us a penny after the sale, Mrs. Ostrem, whatever it brings. That’s our policy on a clean exit. We just want it closed.”

I nodded. I did not think about it then. We would lose everything and owe nothing, I thought, and some people call that mercy.

Our son Jory called from Bozeman every evening and wanted to come home for the sale. I told him no. A man does not need his boy standing next to him while strangers count his machinery, I said, and I would call him when it was over.

I did not tell anyone else the date. You do not send out announcements for a thing like that.

But a county knows what a county knows.

I found out how on the Tuesday before the sale, when Ione Rudd came to my door with a loaf of banana bread and would not look me in the eye.

Ione and Ansel Rudd have been our neighbors four miles east since before Jory was born. Ansel is seventy-one, a long, stooped, deliberate man with a wool cap he wears indoors and out, and he farms the same section his grandfather homesteaded. We have branded and hauled hay together, and buried each other’s parents.

“Ardith,” Ione said, “I want you at your own sale on Saturday. I want you standing right there where people can see you. Not in the house with the shades pulled.”

I told her I did not think I could.

“You can,” she said. “I’ll be right beside you. Ansel says he has something to do, and he needs you where he can see you.”

I asked her what.

She looked out at the road, and then she told me, and I did not believe her. It had started that morning at the Stanford Cafe.

Ansel had put down his coffee cup, she said, and he had said, “In the spring of 1934, the Farm Credit man and the sheriff came out to my granddad’s place east of here to sell it for a note he could not pay. And the neighbors came.”

The cafe went quiet.

“They came from three counties,” Ansel said. “My dad was a little boy, and he stood on the porch and watched them come up the road. Nobody bid. The auctioneer asked for a hundred dollars and nobody said a word. Then ten, and nobody. Then Mr. Ellingson held up his hand and said, a nickel. The auctioneer said sold, and it was over in nine minutes.”

“A penny auction,” somebody said. Old Mr. Berg, I think.

“That’s what they called it,” Ansel said. “It’s an old thing. It’s been done in this country in the dry years, when a bank came to take a man’s place. The neighbors stood around the yard and nobody bid against one of their own. They bought it for pennies, and then they handed it right back.”

He picked his cup up again. “The bank is selling Merle Ostrem’s farm Saturday. They’re calling it absolute. No minimum. I read the notice twice.”