The Ground Uncle Rented for Ninety

It sits eight miles east of Mom’s, at the end of a long gravel lane with a grain bin on one side and a machine shed the size of a church on the other. The shop is the north half of the shed, with a welder, a wall of numbered parts bins and a pot of coffee that had been going since sunrise.

Marlin Haugen was lying on a creeper under a planter, with only his boots showing. “Marlin,” I said. “Who do you pay for the Brockman ground?”

The wrench stopped. He slid out slowly. Marlin is fifty-two, broad through the chest, with a gray mustache and a seed cap with the logo worn off. He sat up and wiped his hands on a red rag, one finger at a time.

“Alford,” he said. “Alford Brockman. Why?”

“Because Arlis Brockman is my mother.” I watched his face. I have looked at faces for twenty-two years, mostly in the half minute after I tell somebody they have a cavity, and I know what a man looks like when the floor drops.

Marlin’s hands went still on the rag. “Alford told me she signed it over to him to manage,” Marlin said. His voice was very quiet. “He said she didn’t want the bother. Said it was a family arrangement, and I should deal with him and not trouble Arlis with farm business.”

“She doesn’t know you farm it.”

“Nine years,” Marlin said, mostly to himself. “Nine springs.” He got up off the creeper and crossed the shop floor to a gray metal cabinet. He pulled out a duplicate check book, the kind with the carbon sheets, and laid it open on the workbench between us. Then he turned the pages back to last year.

Two checks, in Verlene Haugen’s neat bookkeeper’s hand, written out to Alford Brockman. March first, thirty-one thousand two hundred dollars. December first, thirty-one thousand two hundred dollars.

Sixty-two thousand four hundred dollars. I stood there with that number sitting in my chest like a stone. In my purse, folded in four, was the photocopy I had made of Mom’s check before she took it to the bank. Twenty-one thousand six hundred.

“Two sixty an acre,” Marlin said. “It started at two ten. I bumped it to two sixty when the corn price came up. Alford never argued. I figured that was fair rent for ground that good.”

“It is fair rent,” I said. “It’s the going rate.”

“And your mother?”

“Ninety.” Marlin closed his eyes.

“Forty thousand eight hundred dollars,” he said, after a moment. “Last year alone.” I borrowed his pencil. On the back of a seed receipt, standing at the workbench, I worked it out. Five years at two ten, four years at two sixty. Nine years of rent paid. Nine years of rent received.

When I finished, I turned the receipt around so he could see it. Three hundred seven thousand, two hundred dollars.

Neither one of us said anything. “I never asked,” Marlin said at last. “That’s what I can’t get past. Every man in this county knows that was Roy Brockman’s ground. I ate at that man’s funeral dinner. I never once asked who owned it now.”

“Alford told you not to.”

“Alford told me not to,” he agreed. “And I was glad of the excuse. Good rent, good ground, no landlord calling me about fence rows. I was glad.”

He was not making excuses for himself. He was reading out a bill. “I’ll rent it to her direct,” he said. “Two hundred sixty, same as now. I’d have done it nine years ago if anybody had said a word. Tomorrow, if you want.”