The Ground Uncle Rented for Ninety

Alford slid the check across my mother’s kitchen table on the first of November, a full month before it was due.

“Twenty-one thousand six hundred, Arlis,” he said. “Paid ahead. Nobody pays ahead.” He tapped it once with one finger, the way a man taps a table when he wants you to notice what he has done for you.

Mom smiled up at him from her chair by the window. “You’re good to me, Alford.” She meant it. That was the worst part of the whole afternoon. She meant every word.

I was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of ham and beans I had driven forty minutes to cook for her, and I kept my back to the room so nobody could see my face.

Alford Brockman was my father’s little brother. He sold crop insurance out of an office on the square in Marshall, Missouri, and he wore a pressed shirt and a tie to a farm kitchen on a Saturday.

He was seventy-one that fall, with silver hair that always looked freshly combed and a handshake that went on one beat longer than it should.

“Going rate for bottom ground is ninety an acre,” he said, settling back in the chair across from her. “I looked into it for you, Arlis. Ask anybody. Ninety is what it is.”

Mom nodded slowly. She is seventy-four, with two hearing aids she turns down when the kitchen gets loud, and she nodded the way she always nodded at Alford, as if he were the weather forecast.

Two hundred forty acres at ninety dollars. I did the math standing at that stove, and it came out the way he said, because the math was never the lie.

The lie was the other number, and I did not have it yet. “Ruthann and I leave for Arizona the twentieth,” Alford said. “Figured I’d get you squared away before we go. Three months of sun in that trailer park, and I have earned it.”

“You deserve it,” Mom said. “You work so hard for this family.” He stood and kissed the top of her head, where the white hair was thin. Then he patted my shoulder on his way past the stove.

“Carrie. Good beans,” he said, and the screen door clapped behind him. I watched his taillights go down the gravel lane to the county road, and I watched them until the road ran out of them.

Mom picked up the check and held it in both hands like something that might be warm. “Isn’t he something,” she said.

I almost said it right then. I want you to know that. I came within one breath of saying what I knew.

What I knew was not much. I knew that three weeks earlier, driving out for her hair appointment, I had pulled over on the county road and watched a green combine strip the last corn off Mom’s back field.

It was not Alford’s combine. Alford owned no combine. Alford owned no tractor, no planter, not so much as a garden tiller.

It was Marlin Haugen’s machine, with Marlin’s son in the cab, and it was running on our ground like it had been running there for years.

I had asked Alford about it once, lightly, in September, at the church potluck, over a paper plate of somebody’s three-bean salad.

“Who’s farming Mom’s place these days?”