The Honeymoon We Spent Fencing Forty Acres

Roger Dahl tapped the microphone twice with his thumb, the way he taps a gauge on a tractor that isn’t reading right, and the whole VFW hall in Clinton went quiet for him.

He had a paper plate of brisket in his other hand. He hadn’t set it down.

That should have told me something, but I was twenty-seven and four hours married and I thought my new father-in-law was about to say something sweet.

“Caleb and Brooke,” he said. “Your gift from me is a week in Branson. Condo on Table Rock Lake, two shows, the works. Five thousand dollars. You leave Monday.”

The hall clapped. My mom put her hand over her heart. Somebody at the back table whistled, and Caleb squeezed my fingers so hard under the tablecloth that my new ring pinched.

I had never been to Branson. I had never been anywhere for a whole week.

I work as a vet tech at the animal clinic on Second Street, and Caleb is a lineman for the rural electric co-op, and our idea of a trip was the Missouri State Fair in Sedalia.

So I cried a little, right there at the head table, and I wasn’t ashamed of it. I thought it meant Roger had decided I belonged.

Forty minutes later he came by our table with a fresh plate and pulled out the chair beside Caleb like he owned that, too.

“Now,” he said, and he said it low, the way men talk about cattle prices at the sale barn. “About that forty.”

I felt Caleb go still beside me. I knew exactly which forty he meant. Everybody in our end of Henry County knew.

That summer, Caleb and I had bought forty acres on the county blacktop from Walt Hensley.

Walt was eighty-one and done with hay, and he’d told Caleb he wanted the ground to go to young people who’d live on it someday.

We paid four thousand dollars an acre. A hundred and sixty thousand dollars, all of it on a beginning farmer loan through the FSA office. A forty-year note, the first payment due in December.

It was rolling fescue pasture with a pond in the southeast corner and a draw that ran wet every spring.

The old fence was rusted and lying down in the grass in most places, because Walt had only hayed it for twenty years.

The north line of it touches the south line of Roger’s home farm. Roger farms eleven hundred acres, corn and beans and a cow herd, and that forty sits in the middle of his ground like a missing tooth.

“I’ll take it off your hands,” Roger said. “Two thousand an acre. Eighty thousand. You’d be shed of it.”

Caleb set his fork down. “Dad, we’d still owe eighty thousand dollars on nothing.”

“You’ll owe more than that when you can’t make the payment.” Roger looked at me then, not at his son. “Vet tech money and co-op money. I’ve seen kids go under on less.”

“We’re keeping it,” Caleb said. “No, sir.”