The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

He and Elmer took to drinking coffee together on the milk house step after chores. Two old men, both widowers, not saying much. Once in a while I would hear one of them laugh.

In the middle of September, on a Sunday afternoon, Elmer asked Nate and me to come sit at his kitchen table.

He had a manila folder in front of him and a pot of coffee, and he did not waste any time.

“I hear you have a closing date in October,” he said. “Over by Greenwood.”

“Yes, sir,” Nate said.

“Barn needs a roof, I hear.”

“It does.”

Elmer opened the folder and slid a paper across the table. It was an old warranty deed, yellow at the edges, with his name and his wife’s name typed on it. It was dated March of 1979.

“I’d like to sell you this place,” he said. “House, barn, the hundred and twenty acres. I’ll stay on in the house as long as I’m able. You can have the upstairs till then and the whole place after.”

Nate did not say anything. I did not either. I was looking at the number typed on that old deed.

“Elmer,” I said finally. “We can’t pay you what you paid in 1979. Land’s gone up ten times since then.”

“I didn’t ask you to pay me what it’s worth,” Elmer said. “I said I’d like to sell it to you. I’ll take what I paid for it. Not a dollar more.”

“Why?” Nate said. It was the only word he could get out.

Elmer looked out the kitchen window toward the barn for a long time. The radio was playing out there. You could hear it faintly, even from the house.

“Because I wiped that radio off every week for six years,” he said, “and it took your little girl to make me turn it back on.”

He tapped the deed. “There’s one more condition. I want a ride in the tractor once a day. Doesn’t matter where you’re going. I just want to ride along.”

So we let the Greenwood place go. The man was decent about it.

We had the closing at the farm credit office in Neillsville the first week of November, at a big wooden table, with Elmer in his church clothes signing his name very slowly.

Arnold came. Nobody asked him to. He sat in the chair by the door with his hat on his knee, and when it was done he shook Elmer’s hand, and then his son’s, and then mine.

He held onto mine a moment and did not say anything at all.

We still milk sixty-four cows. Sixty-six now, with two of the heifers come fresh this winter. The radio is still on the shelf by the door.

Alma turns it on every afternoon at ten to four, and nobody has ever had to tell her to.

Arnold still comes every morning at five. Arnold’s own barn, up the road, stands empty. He rents the hay ground out now. He says he does not mind, and maybe he does not.

And every day, rain or shine, Elmer climbs up into the cab of our old tractor and rides along beside Nate, wherever he is going.

Some days it is hay. Some days it is just to the mailbox and back. He does not care.

Elmer sold us the farm that fall for what he paid for it in 1979, plus one ride a day in the tractor.