The Farm Our Neighbors Would Not Bid On

He stopped in front of me. His face was wet, and he was not wiping it.

“Ardith,” he said. “Did you know about this?”

“Ione told me Tuesday.”

“Then they think we asked.”

“Nobody thinks you asked, Merle.”

“Don’t let them think we asked,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it. “I never asked a soul for anything.”

“I know that,” I said. “That is why they came.”

He looked at me. Then he looked out at the yard, six hundred people in the mud in their good work coats, and he put his big cracked hand over his eyes.

Virgil Gaw took a drink of water. He looked at his sheet.

“Folks,” he said, “we’re down to the last lot.”

You could feel the yard change.

“The home place,” he read. “Twelve hundred and forty acres of dryland farm ground, deeded, in the Judith Basin. A four-bedroom frame farmhouse. A machine shed, a shop, a calving barn, two granaries, a bin site, and all outbuildings. Sold as one parcel. Absolute. No minimum.”

I had my hand in my pocket, around the pharmacy envelope.

“I’ll open at one million dollars,” Virgil said. “One million for the home place of Merle and Ardith Ostrem. Who will give me a million?”

Nothing.

“Five hundred thousand?”

Nothing. Somewhere in the crowd a child asked a question and got hushed.

“One hundred thousand. Fifty. Ten.” He came down the ladder rung by rung and nobody said a word. “A thousand dollars, folks. For twelve hundred acres. One dollar. Somebody say one dollar.”

Corbin Teel’s phone buzzed in his hand. He looked at it and put it in his pocket without answering.

Ansel Rudd started up the lane toward the stand, carrying a paper sack. He had carried it all day, and I had not asked.

He walked to the foot of the stand, reached into the sack, and took out a quart Mason jar with a zinc lid, the old kind. He set it on the rail of the platform where everyone could see.

Virgil Gaw leaned down and looked at what was inside.

The jar was full of pennies, nearly to the lid.

I had not seen them collected. Ione had been sitting at a card table inside the gate since seven that morning with the jar in front of her and no sign, and every family that walked up the lane had stopped there. The Lutheran ladies put in a whole roll apiece. The children had each put in one and been very serious about it.

“It was my granddad’s idea,” Ansel said now, into the quiet. “Not the jar. The pennies. He said if somebody is going to buy a man’s place, the whole county ought to be in on the price.”

He looked up at Virgil Gaw.

“I have the money right here, Virgil,” he said. “I will bid two dollars for the home place and everything on it, in coin of the realm.”

Virgil did not say anything for a moment. When he did, his voice was thick.

“I have two dollars,” he said. “I have two dollars for the home place of Merle and Ardith Ostrem. Do I hear three?”

He turned to the yard. He turned to the shop, where Mr. Pruett now stood in the doorway holding a cup of coffee, and who slowly shook his head. He turned to the road, where nobody was coming.

“Do I hear three? Two dollars. Going once.”