The Farm Our Neighbors Would Not Bid On

I held Merle’s hand so hard I could feel the bone.

“Going twice.”

Corbin Teel was looking at the ground. And then I saw him do something I will tell my grandchildren about. He took off his necktie, a gray silk one, and folded it, and put it in his coat pocket. He took the pen out of his shirt.

“Mr. Gaw,” he said. His voice was very steady. “The bank has no further bids to entertain.”

“Sold,” said Virgil Gaw, and his hammer was just his open hand on the rail. “Two dollars. To Mr. Rudd.”

I have been to a lot of church. I have never heard anything like the sound six hundred people made in that yard.

It was not a cheer. Nobody whooped and nobody threw a hat. It was lower than that, one long breath let out all at once. Then somebody in the back began to sing. It was old Mr. Berg, who had not carried a tune since 1991. He sang the Doxology in a cracked, high, terrible voice, and then the Lutheran women took it up, and then everyone did.

I do not sing. I stood on my own porch in my husband’s arms, and I let them do it for me.

When it was over, Corbin Teel did the counting.

Nobody asked him to. Ansel pushed the jar toward him across the hay wagon and said, “You’ll want to count it, son. The bank will want it counted.”

So a thirty-one-year-old credit officer sat on a hay bale in the farmyard of a family he had just closed out, in front of six hundred people and a deputy, and counted pennies. Ione sat across from him and Pastor Eames beside her, and the three of them stacked them in tens on the wagon bed.

It took forty minutes. With the machinery, the total came to thirteen dollars and eighty-five cents. A little over, as it turned out, because Ione had put in an extra fifteen cents that she said was for the auctioneer’s trouble.

When the last stack was made, Corbin Teel looked at it for a long moment.

“That’s the count,” he said quietly. “I’ll write the receipt.”

He wrote it on a page torn from his folder and signed it on the hood of Ansel’s truck. His hand was not quite steady.

Then he walked to the porch where Merle and I stood.

I thought he would hand me the paper. He did not. He stood at the bottom of my steps with the folder under his arm and looked at Merle.

“Mr. Ostrem. I am going to tell you something, and I would appreciate it if you did not repeat it to the bank.”

Merle waited.

“In 1998,” Corbin Teel said, “my father lost our place near Ismay. Eleven hundred acres of grass and a little hay. Nobody came to the sale. Nobody. Four men in good hats bought it in about nineteen minutes, and my dad stood in the road with his hands in his pockets and did not say one word. I was eight.”

He swallowed.

“I have never told anyone in my office that. I told myself I would be the kind of man who did it fairly. I have been fair to twenty-two families, Mr. Ostrem. I thought that was the same as being decent.”

He looked out at the six hundred people in the yard.

“Nobody came for us,” he said. “Nobody stood up. I wondered my whole life what that would have looked like.”