Why I did not fight him
People have asked me since why I did not call somebody that same afternoon. The sheriff, a lawyer, the man at the elevator. It is a fair question, and I will answer it plainly, once.
When Grandpa died three years ago, he left Vernon the home place: the house, the crib, the barn, the three acres they sit on.
He left me the twenty acres of ground around it, and a lease on the house at one dollar a year for as long as I wanted it.
That lease says house. It does not say crib. I had no paper on that crib at all, only Grandpa’s word and three years of habit, and I was not going to make my kids watch me drag Grandpa’s only living son into a courthouse.
They had already lost a dad to Arizona when Maisy was two. He sends what he sends, which is not much and not often.
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They had lost their great-grandpa. I did not want them to learn that family is a thing you sue.
Vernon’s reason was not hard to find either. He never forgave Grandpa for that one-dollar lease.
He had a buyer interested in the house and acreage two summers ago, and the buyer walked when he heard there was a woman and two kids living there with a lease.
I understood why he was angry. I did not understand how a man could take a mother’s heat in November to make his point.
I still do not, and I have had a whole winter to think about it.
The house that afternoon
When I came in the back door, Asa was sitting at the kitchen table with his hands flat on the oilcloth.
Maisy was beside him with her knees pulled up into her coat. Nobody had turned on a light.
“I tried,” Asa said, before I even got my shoes off. “I told them. The driver stopped the auger and looked at Uncle Vernon, and Uncle Vernon said it was none of my business.”
I pulled out the chair next to him and sat down and put my hand on the back of his neck the way Grandpa used to do to me.
His neck was cold. He had been outside in a sweatshirt for a long time.
“You did exactly right,” I said. “You hear me? You stood up for your family. Some grown men never learn how to do that.”
Maisy asked the question I was afraid of. “Are we going to be cold?”
She said it the way a ten-year-old says things, straight out, looking right at me, waiting to see if I would lie.
“No,” I said. “We are not going to be cold. We are going to have to work, though. All three of us. Harder than you have ever worked.”
I did not know yet exactly what I meant. Then I looked out the kitchen window, past the empty crib, at our twenty acres of standing corn, dry and tan and rattling in the wind, waiting on Rudy’s combine.