The Ground Uncle Rented for Ninety

“A fellow I know,” he said, and then he asked how my daughter’s volleyball season was going. That was the whole of it. A combine and an answer that was not an answer.

Mom’s coffee had gone cold. She set the check by the salt shaker, under the little ceramic rooster my father bought her at the county fair in 1988.

“I’ll take it to the bank Monday,” she said. “Maybe I’ll finally do something about that roof.”

We both looked toward the hallway, at the back bedroom door and the aluminum bucket on the floor in there. I could not see it from where I stood, but I could hear it, whenever the wind came out of the north.

Plink. Plink. “How much is the roof?” I asked. “Fourteen thousand two hundred, the man said.” She gave a little shrug. “It would eat the whole check and then some. So I keep the bucket there. It does the job.”

I turned the burner down under the beans. My hands were not steady, and I did not want her to see them.

Here is the thing I have to explain, because everybody I tell this to asks it. Why didn’t I just say it? Why didn’t I look my uncle in the eye that Saturday and say, Alford, who is farming Mom’s ground and what are they paying you?

I thought about it the whole drive home. I thought about it for most of the week. The answer is my mother.

If I had told Arlis Brockman that her husband’s brother was taking her for a fool, she would have defended him before I finished the sentence. She would have said, “Alford has been nothing but good to this family.”

She would have said, “Carrie, I am surprised at you.” And she would have called Alford that night to tell him what I said, because Mom believes you do not let a person be accused behind his back.

Then Alford would have had a story. A man like Alford always has a story. And I would have been a daughter who accused a family man of stealing, with nothing in my hand.

A hygienist who calls her uncle a thief over a pot of ham and beans gets a mother who stops picking up the phone.

I had a combine and a feeling. That is not paper. So I decided to go and get paper. My husband, Reuben, did not like that plan.

Reuben drives a delivery route for a feed company and has hands like catcher’s mitts, and when I told him that night at our kitchen table, he put down his fork and said, “I’ll drive out there tomorrow and have a word with Alford.”

“No.”

“Carrie.”

“If you go out there, Alford gets a head start, and Mom gets the call. I need her to see it first. I need her to see it with her own eyes.”

Reuben studied me for a long while. He is a man who has never once in twenty years told me what to do with my own family, and he did not start then.

“Then go get your paper,” he said. “And take your lunch. You’ll forget to eat.” On Wednesday, my day off from the dental office, I drove to the Haugen place.