The Summer We Walked Forty Acres

Jaycee did not cry. She looked out the window and picked at a cut on the inside of her wrist where a leaf had slid under her cuff. When we turned into our lane she said, “I really did check every one, Mom.”

“I know you did,” I said.

“Aunt Lula’s girl went fast because she wasn’t looking.” She said it flat, not tattling, just stating a fact. “I saw her skip two in a row. I went back and got them.”

I put the car in park and sat a second. “That’s why you were slow,” I said.

“I guess so.” She opened her door. “I’m going to go feed my calves.”

She had two bottle calves that summer, Holstein bull calves from the dairy two miles south, and she raised them for a little money every fall.

What she wanted was a heifer of her own to show in 4-H. A good one costs more than a girl can make on bottle calves.

That was what the detasseling money was for. Fifteen dollars an hour for three weeks would have put her most of the way to a decent heifer calf.

She had it written on a piece of notebook paper taped inside her closet door, with the numbers added up in pencil.

Nolan came in at six thirty, smelling like grain dust from the elevator.

He works days there and farms our two hundred acres after, and in July that means he is tired straight through. I told him at the stove while the potatoes boiled.

He listened with his hand flat on the counter. Darrin is his older brother by two years.

They farmed with their dad until their dad passed, and they split the ground, and they get along the way brothers do, which means they mostly do not talk about anything that matters.

“It’s his crew,” Nolan said finally. “His rules. He’s got a contract to keep.”

“I know it,” I said. “I’m not asking you to say anything.”

And I was not. I want to be clear about that. There was nothing to fight. A man can hire who he wants for his own crew.

Jaycee was not owed a job, and a phone call from her daddy would only have made her the girl whose parents called.

At supper Nolan set his fork down halfway through and looked at Jaycee across the table for a long while. She was cutting her pork chop and did not notice.

“You check every plant out there today?” he asked her.

“Yes sir.”

“Good,” he said. He picked his fork back up. That was all he said about it, then or for a long time after. But I saw his jaw, and I knew he had heard me.

That night I said my prayers the way I always do, kneeling by the bed like my mother taught me, and I did not pray for Darrin to be sorry.

I prayed that I would not be small about it. That was the hard one.

Two days later, on a Thursday, I was at Merlyn Hauser’s kitchen table doing his books.