The Burn My Father In Law Refused

New bluestem and big blue and switchgrass, shoving up through the ash with the confidence of a thing that had been waiting all winter for permission.

I stopped the Jeep on the county road with the engine running and a handful of Walmart flyers in my lap, and I got out and looked at it for a long time.

A meadowlark was singing on the fence post, the one with the yellow chest that Dad always said sounded like somebody whistling for a dog.

The wind was warm. It smelled like rain and wet earth, and somewhere under it, still, a thread of last month’s smoke.

I called my mother. “Mom, come see the pasture.”

“I am looking at it,” she said. “I am standing on the porch. I have been standing here since six this morning.” “What do you see?”

She did not answer for a minute. When she did, her voice had gone soft and uneven in a way I had not heard since January two years before. “Your father,” she said, “would not have believed it.”

On the second Saturday in May, a white Ford pickup came up my mother’s lane at ten in the morning, slowly, and parked in front of the porch.

I was there because it was Saturday and I had come to help her put in tomato plants. Justin was there because the roof on the machine shed needed patching. We were all three out front when the truck door opened.

Wilfred got out with his cap in his hand. He had lost some weight.

He had on a clean pressed shirt, the one he wears to funerals and to the bank, and his hair was combed, and I thought, he has dressed for this the way you dress to see the doctor.

“Marilyn,” he said.

“Wilfred.” “I would like to talk with you about the hay.”

My mother set down her trowel.

She stood up slowly, wiping her hands on her jeans, and she looked at him across the yard the way I had once seen her look at a county commissioner who had come to talk about a road easement.

She did not hurry. “What about it?”

“You have got a good stand on the north sixty. A good stand. The best I have seen on this road in ten years.” He turned the cap one full circle in his hands.

“I would like to lease the hay rights for the summer, if you were willing.

I would cut it in July and bale it myself and stack it on your own barn floor if you wanted. And I would pay whatever you think is fair.”

It was very quiet. A mockingbird was running through his whole repertoire in the elm. “Thirty dollars an acre,” she said. Wilfred opened his mouth.

“It is what Norm Gillespie pays me for the south forty,” my mother said. “It is what I would charge anyone. It is a fair price.” “I will write it for thirty-five,” said Wilfred. “I did not ask for thirty-five.”

“I know you did not.” His voice cracked on the second word, just slightly, a thin hairline in a board. “I am offering thirty-five. For the grass. And for the line.”

Sixty acres at thirty-five dollars. Twenty-one hundred dollars for the summer, a fair price, a little over fair, from a man who had once offered her eighteen hundred an acre and a long silence to go with it.