The Farm Our Neighbors Would Not Bid On

Corbin Teel had expected a crowd. He had not expected this one.

“Folks, welcome,” Virgil said. “This is an absolute auction by order of Northern Plains Bank. Everything sells to the high bidder, no minimum, no reserve. Our first lot is the John Deere 4440 tractor with duals, sitting right here. I’ll start at fifty thousand dollars. Who’ll give me fifty?”

Nothing. Wind in the tin.

“Thirty thousand?”

Nothing.

“Ten thousand, folks, this is a four-forty with four thousand hours. Five?”

Corbin Teel looked at the crowd, and at the shop door that was closed.

“One thousand dollars,” Virgil said. “I’ll take a dollar. Somebody give me a dollar and I will start this sale.”

Merle was at the gate. I could see him across the whole yard, and he had lifted his head. He was looking at the crowd the way a man looks at weather that has changed.

Then, at the front, Ansel Rudd raised one long finger.

“A dime,” he said.

Somebody laughed. Then nobody did.

“I have a dime,” Virgil said, and his voice did something in the middle of the sentence. “I have ten cents on a John Deere 4440. Do I hear fifteen?”

Silence. The longest silence I ever stood inside.

Corbin Teel crossed to the stand in about four steps. I could read his face from where I stood.

“Mr. Gaw, stop the sale,” he said, and he did not say it quietly.

“Can’t do that, Mr. Teel,” Virgil said into the microphone, which carried it to everybody. “You signed an absolute contract. If I stop it, the bank is pulling the whole sale in front of six hundred people, and you will have to explain that yourself.”

“Fifteen cents?” Virgil asked the yard again. And then, “Going once.”

Teel turned his back and put the phone to his ear.

I could hear half of it. The wind brought it to me. A man’s voice in Billings, loud, saying something about a lawsuit, and about collusion, and about the sheriff. And Teel saying, “Sir, there are six hundred of them. Sir. I do not think you understand. They are not doing anything.”

He listened a while longer. Then he lowered the phone and just stood there.

“Sold,” Virgil said, softly, “for ten cents.”

Ansel walked back to his place and said nothing.

I will not give you every lot. It took four hours and it was the strangest sale I ever attended. Every machine opened high, every one fell through to nothing, and every one came down to the same old hand and the same few cents.

The Gleaner combine sold for eighty-five cents. The swather for forty, the drill for sixty. The grain truck, a 1989 Ford that Merle had rebuilt the engine on twice, went for a dollar and a quarter, because Ansel is sentimental about Fords and raised himself twice.

Around noon Corbin Teel came to my kitchen door because he had no place to put himself. He stood on the porch with a cup of my coffee in his hand like a man at a funeral who does not know the family.

“Mrs. Ostrem,” he said.

“Drink that before it freezes, Mr. Teel,” I said.

He drank it.

Around one o’clock Merle came up from the gate.

I had not seen him walk toward me in a month. He came across the yard slowly, through the crowd, and men moved out of his way and put their hands on his arm as he passed, and some of them just touched his sleeve.