The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

“You never sat a tractor a day in your life, Marlys.”

My brother said it with a roasting ear in his hand, butter running down his wrist, at the same oak table where our mother taught the two of us to say grace.

“You ought to be grateful I bother with it at all.”

Nobody moved. Carol Ann had the bowl of sliced tomatoes halfway to my husband, and she held it there in the air. Don took it from her gently, the way you take something from a person who has forgotten she is holding it.

It was the third Sunday in August. The windows were open and the corn was so tall on both sides of the lane that the house sat in it like a boat. I could hear the cicadas going, and the box fan in the front room, and the clock our father wound every Saturday night of his life.

I had asked one question. I had practiced it in the car the whole mile and a half over.

“Gene, I think it is time we looked at the rent on my eighty. I would like the going rate.”

That was all. I did not even say a number.

I am fifty-nine years old. I have been the secretary at the elementary school for thirty-one years, and I have faced angry fathers and a superintendent who threw a stapler. I am not easily rattled.

But he was my big brother, and it was our mother’s table, and I felt my face go hot clear to my ears like I was nine.

“Fifty dollars an acre,” Gene said. “Dad set that. Dad set it right here in this kitchen. You want to tell me Dad was wrong?”

“Dad set it in 2000,” I said.

“And I have limed that ground and fixed those terraces and cleaned out that waterway every one of those years without sending you a bill. You get a check the first of March. You do not lift a finger. There is women in this county who would trade places with you tomorrow.”

“Gene,” Carol Ann said, very quietly.

“No. She brought it up.” He set the cob down on his plate. “You have a job in town with insurance. Don has a job. I am the one out there when it is ten below with a calf. Be grateful, is all I am saying.”

I looked at Don. He was looking at me, steady, with his fork down. We had talked about this in the truck. He had said, it is your ground and your brother, Marlys. I will stand behind you all day long. But if I stand in front of you, it turns into two men at a table, and you will never get your answer.

So he stayed still, and I loved him for it, because I could see what it cost him.

I folded my napkin. I laid it beside my plate.

“Thank you, Gene,” I said. “I needed to hear how you saw it.”

He nodded like a man who has settled something. He picked his corn back up.

We stayed for the pie. I want that written down. I ate a piece of Carol Ann’s sour cream raisin and I helped her with the dishes, and when she handed me the dish towel her hand stayed on mine a second longer than it needed to.

“He does not mean it the way it comes out,” she said.

“I know how he means it,” I said.