At My Husband’s Funeral Lunch, His Brothers Handed Me a $500,000 Buyout
Randy slid the envelope across the table to me, right past the salt and pepper shakers.
“It’s the buyout,” he said. He kept his voice low so nobody at the next table could hear.
“Like the agreement says. We had it figured with the bank this week. We didn’t want you to have to worry about it.”
We were sitting in the basement of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Blue Hill, Nebraska. Long folding tables. White paper tablecloths. Ham buns, scalloped potatoes and three kinds of bars. The same funeral lunch the ladies of St. Paul’s had served for every funeral I could remember.
I had a plate in front of me that somebody had filled. I hadn’t eaten one bite of it.
My husband had been dead six days.
I opened the flap of the envelope with fingers that didn’t feel like mine.
It was a cashier’s check from the bank in Hastings. Made out to Melissa Engel.
Five hundred thousand dollars.
My other brother-in-law, Scott, cleared his throat. He was sitting beside Randy, and he was looking at the
paper tablecloth instead of at me.
“The house goes with the partnership, Melissa,” he said. “You know that. We’d need you out by planting. We figured that gives you plenty of time to find something in town.”
Plenty of time.
It was the middle of March. Planting would start the end of April. First week of May, if the weather stayed cold. That was about seven weeks to empty out twenty years of my life.
I looked over at the next table. My daughter, Abby, who was twelve, was sitting with my sister, Pam. She was pushing a lemon bar around her paper plate with a plastic fork.
She hadn’t cried at the service. Not once. She’d held my hand so hard during the last hymn that I still had
red marks on my fingers.
I want to be honest about what went through me in that moment. Because I’ve told this story a few times since, and people always want me to say I was furious.
I wasn’t furious.
I was too tired to be furious. Mostly, I felt like somebody had opened a door in the middle of winter and let all the warm air out of the room.
I folded the flap of the envelope back down. I put it in my purse. I closed the clasp.
“All right,” I said.
Randy let out a long breath.
He looked relieved. That’s the part that stayed with me later, lying awake. Not the check. The relief on his face. Like he’d been dreading a scene, and he was grateful I hadn’t made one.
“We just thought a clean break would be easier on you,” he said. “No hanging on. No worrying about the
bank or the markets.”
“I understand,” I said.
And I did. I understood exactly.
I got up and went to sit with my daughter.
My husband’s name was Jeff Engel. He was 47.
He walked out to the machine shed after supper on a cold Tuesday in March to look at a hydraulic leak
on the planter. He kissed me on the top of my head on his way out the back door. He grabbed his green seed cap off the hook.
“Twenty minutes,” he said.
When he didn’t come in by nine o’clock, I put on my boots and went out with a flashlight.
I found him on the concrete floor beside the planter, with a wrench still in his hand. The doctor in Hastings said it was his heart. A blockage nobody knew about. He said Jeff was gone before he hit the
floor.
It still didn’t seem like a fact. Six days later, sitting in that church basement, it still didn’t.
Randy is 52, the oldest of the three Engel brothers. Scott is 49. Jeff was the baby.
The three of them had farmed together since their dad, Walter, retired. Walter set up a partnership called Engel Brothers before he handed over the farm, so the ground would never get split into pieces too small to farm. Eleven hundred acres of corn and soybeans in Webster County, Nebraska. Half of it
irrigated, half of it dryland.
Here’s the thing. Here’s the reason I didn’t fight them.
I’d kept the books for Engel Brothers for twenty years.
Every check. Every seed invoice. Every operating note and every land payment came across my kitchen table. I did the quarterly taxes. I balanced the accounts at the end of every month with a calculator and a pot of coffee.
I knew that partnership agreement better than Randy did. I knew it a lot better than Scott, who hadn’t read it since the day he signed it.
The agreement said that if a partner died, the other partners could buy out his share from his spouse.
The price was set by a formula, based on an appraisal of the land and the equipment.
It also said the house on the home place belonged to the partnership. Because Walter built it with partnership money in 1979.
Jeff signed that agreement. I was sitting right beside him in the lawyer’s office in Red Cloud when he signed it. I was holding Abby on my lap. She was a baby.
The night after the funeral, at two o’clock in the morning when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sat at my kitchen
table and run that formula myself. Land value. Equipment. The partnership’s debts. Jeff’s one-third share.
It came out to a little under five hundred thousand.
They’d rounded up.
So the price was fair. The paper was legal. Jeff agreed to every word of it with his own pen. There was nothing to take to a lawyer. Nobody to call.
The only thing wrong with it was the timing. And you can’t sue a man for handing you a check at a
funeral.
There was one more thing. Something I knew that they didn’t know I knew.
I’d seen the letters from the bank in January.
Two bad years in a row of dry summers had left the partnership’s operating line stretched thin. The bank in Hastings had a new loan officer. A young man named Kyle Hoffman. He wanted the balance sheet cleaned up before he’d renew the line for another year.
And a widow holding one-third of a farm partnership was a loose end on a balance sheet.
That night, back home, Abby sat at the kitchen table in her navy funeral dress with her shoes kicked off.
“Mom,” she said. “Are we going to live with Aunt Pam in Hastings now?”
Somebody at the lunch had already said it in front of her. The way people do.
“I don’t know yet, honey,” I said. “I haven’t decided anything.”
“Do we have to leave the house?”
I could have lied. I thought about it.
But she was twelve, and she was a farm kid. And farm kids can smell a lie the same way they can smell rain coming.
“Yes,” I said. “The house belongs to the farm. And the farm belongs to Uncle Randy and Uncle Scott now. They paid us for Dad’s part.”
She thought about that for a long time.
“But Dad’s fields are still here,” she finally said.
“They are.”
“I can see them from my window,” she said. “When he was out planting, I could see the lights going back
and forth at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I used to count the passes.”
She got up and went upstairs. I heard her bedroom door close.
I sat at that kitchen table until after midnight. The yard light was shining through the window. And I looked out across the gravel road at the old Wiebe place.
The Wiebe place was eighty acres of dryland ground, with a small white farmhouse and a leaning red
barn.
Mrs. Wiebe lived there alone until she went into the care center in Red Cloud three years earlier. She passed away the next August. Harold Fischer had rented the ground for years, but Harold was 78 and
retired after last harvest. The Wiebe grandkids in Lincoln had listed the whole place for sale in the fall.
It hadn’t sold.
Nobody wanted an old farmhouse. And the neighbors who wanted the ground were waiting for the price
to come down.
Jeff and I used to talk about it sometimes, late at night, the way you talk about things you know you’ll
never do.
“If I ever win the lottery,” he’d say, “I’m buying the Wiebe eighty. And I’m giving it to Abby on her eighteenth birthday.”
I got up. I found a pencil and an old seed company calendar. I turned it over to the blank back side.
And I did the arithmetic.
Dryland ground in our part of Webster County had been bringing about five thousand dollars an acre.
Eighty acres was four hundred thousand.
The house was old, but it was sound. I knew because Jeff helped Mrs. Wiebe put on a new roof in 2018.
The listing had come down to four hundred and thirty thousand dollars for all of it. House, barn, eighty
acres.
That would leave me about seventy thousand, give or take, for everything else.
A tractor. A planter. Seed. Fertilizer. And enough to live on until fall.
I didn’t sleep at all that night.
But by the time the sun came up over Randy’s grain bins, I knew exactly what I was going to do.
The next Monday, I drove to the bank in Hastings.
The loan officer, Kyle Hoffman, came out from his office to meet me. He was maybe thirty, in a blue shirt and a tie with little tractors on it. He had the partnership’s file under his arm.
He looked at the check. He looked at me.
“Mrs. Engel,” he said quietly. “I’m so sorry about Jeff. He was always good to me when I was new.”
“Thank you, Kyle.”
“Would you like to deposit this into your savings account?”
“For now,” I said. “And then I’d like to make an offer on a farm.”
He blinked at me.
I called the realtor that same afternoon. A woman named Connie Brandt, out of Red Cloud.
“I’d like to make an offer on the Wiebe place,” I said. “Full asking price. Four hundred and thirty thousand. Cash. No contingencies. I need to close before the end of April.”
There was a long pause on the line.
“Melissa?” Connie said. “Melissa Engel? Honey, I’m so sorry about Jeff.”
“Thank you, Connie. Will you send them the offer?”
“I’ll call them tonight,” she said.
I didn’t haggle. I didn’t have time to haggle.
The Wiebe grandkids said yes the very next morning. I think they were tired of paying property taxes on a house nobody lived in.
Before we closed, I made one more phone call. To Gary Lindholm, the lawyer in Red Cloud who’d drawn up the partnership agreement all those years ago.
“Gary,” I said. “I want to make sure I’ve read this right. Once I sign the buyout papers, I don’t owe the
partnership anything? I’m not on any of their notes?”
“You’re clean, Melissa,” he said. “Jeff’s share is bought out. You’re off the operating line. You’re off the land contracts. Whatever happens to Engel Brothers from here on, it’s not your liability.”
“And the house?”
He was quiet a moment. “The house is theirs. I’m sorry.”
“I know it is,” I said. “I’m just making sure the new one’s all mine.”
We closed on April 22nd at the title company in Red Cloud. I signed my name nineteen times. The title officer, an older woman named Ruth, handed me two keys on a ring with a little plastic tag. One for the front door. One for the barn.
I drove home with those keys in my coat pocket and my hand over them the whole way.
Nobody in the family knew yet. That wasn’t a trick. I just didn’t want to hear anybody try to talk me out of it.
The rest of the money had to stretch further than I’d ever stretched anything.
On a raw, gray Saturday in April, I drove to a farm sale outside Red Cloud. An old couple was retiring and selling everything. I stood in the mud in my barn boots with fifty men in seed caps and a cup of church-
basement coffee going cold in my hand.
I could feel them looking at me. I knew most of them. Some of them had been at Jeff’s funeral eleven days earlier.
When they brought out the John Deere 6420, I stepped closer. A cab tractor, a little faded, with nine thousand hours on the meter. Jeff always said the 6420 was the most honest tractor John Deere ever built.
The bidding went fast. Twenty-five. Twenty-eight. Thirty.
“Do I hear thirty-two?” the auctioneer called out.
I raised my bidding card.
The man bidding against me, a farmer named Dale Kroeker I’d known since high school, looked over to see who it was. He saw me.
He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground.
“Thirty-two five,” the auctioneer said. “Sold. To the lady.”
I got the tractor for thirty-two thousand, five hundred.
An hour later, I got an eight-row John Deere 7000 planter for nine thousand. The man running the sale,
the old farmer whose things they were, walked over afterward and handed me a cardboard box full of spare seed plates.
“Take these,” he said. “My wife would never forgive me if I didn’t.”
That left me about twenty-five thousand dollars.
I drove to the co-op in Blue Hill and bought my seed corn. Twenty-five bags. I’d plant the dryland thin, around twenty-four thousand seeds an acre, the way Jeff always did on lighter ground.
I paid in full at the counter. Ron, the man behind the counter, rang it up and didn’t say one word about it. In our town, that’s how you say a great deal.
There was one thing I couldn’t buy.
Crop insurance sign-up for corn in Nebraska closes on March 15th. And on March 15th, I was standing in a church basement holding a cashier’s check.
That eighty acres would ride bare. If it hailed, or if July came in dry the way it had the last two years, I’d
lose the whole crop and most of what I had left.
I knew that.
I did it anyway.
It was right there at the co-op counter, holding my seed ticket, that I heard about the house.
A man I barely knew was standing next to me buying mineral. He said it to Ron like it was common knowledge.
“Heard Randy’s boy Luke’s coming home from Lincoln to farm with ’em. Gonna move into the home place after Jeff’s widow’s out.”
Ron’s eyes flicked to me. Then back to the register.
I took my seed ticket and said thank you. I walked out to my car. I sat there behind the wheel for a long minute.
Luke was 24. He’d just finished his degree in agronomy at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. I’d been
so proud of him.
He was one of the pallbearers at Jeff’s funeral. He stood at the front left corner of the casket. He cried so hard coming down the aisle that the man behind him had to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder.
So that was why the clean break.
The bank wanted the balance sheet cleaned up. And Randy wanted his son to have a house to come home to.
And somewhere in there, the two of them had talked each other into believing that handing a widow a big check at a funeral was a kindness. Because it meant I wouldn’t have to worry.
I didn’t hate Randy for it. I want to say that plainly.
He was a man who wanted something good for his son. And he found a way to get it that let him feel generous about it. Most of us have done some smaller version of that.
But I wasn’t moving to town.
I told Abby the night we closed. I sat on the edge of her bed and put the key ring in her hand.
“We bought the Wiebe place,” I said. “The house across the road. And the eighty acres that go with it.”
She sat straight up in bed. “We did?”
“We did. We’re going to farm it. You and me.”
“Do you know how?”
I laughed. It was the first time I’d laughed in five weeks.
“I drove grain cart for your dad for nineteen harvests,” I said. “I grew up on a farm outside Blue Hill. Your grandpa had me driving a tractor when I was younger than you are. I know how.”
“But why there?” she asked. “Why not in town, like everybody thinks?”
“Because your dad’s fields are right across that road,” I said. “I want you to be able to wake up every morning and see them. I want you to be able to count the passes.”
She didn’t say anything.
She just leaned forward and put her forehead against my shoulder. And she stayed there for a long, long time.
We moved across the road the last week of April.
My sister, Pam, came with her husband and their stock trailer. Two men from church came with a flatbed. And we carried twenty years of a marriage across a gravel road in a single afternoon.
Randy’s wife, Lori, came over while we were carrying the last boxes out of the kitchen.
She stood on the back step in her barn coat. She didn’t come in.
Lori and I had been sisters-in-law for twenty-one years. We canned tomatoes together every single
August. We’d stood side by side at that kitchen counter more times than I could count.
“Randy says you bought the Wiebe place,” she said.
“I did.”
“He didn’t know,” Lori said. “He found out from Dale Kroeker at the elevator.”
She looked past me at the empty kitchen. At the bare nail where my calendar used to hang.
“Melissa, I told him the funeral was the wrong day,” she said. “I want you to know that. I told him.”
“I know you did,” I said.
I didn’t know. But I believed her.
Lori turned to go. Then she stopped and turned back.
“Jeff’s seed cap is still on the hook,” she said. She pointed. “By the door. You don’t want to leave that.”
I’d missed it.
It was his green cap with the yellow deer on the front. The one he wore every single spring. It had hung
on that same nail by the back door every night of our marriage.
Abby took it off the hook before I could reach it.
She put it on her head. It came down over her ears and sat right on top of her eyebrows. She pushed the
brim back with one finger and looked up at me. Daring me to say something.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t have.
The first week of May came in warm and dry. The ground was fit.
On Wednesday morning, I heard Randy’s big tractor fire up in the yard across the road. By seven o’clock,
they were pulling the partnership’s twenty-four-row planter out onto Jeff’s ground. The half section that runs along the road on the east side.
I’d been up since four.
I had the 6420 greased and fueled. The planter boxes loaded. The seed plates set. I’d checked the markers twice.
At seven o’clock sharp, I pulled out of the Wiebe yard and turned onto my own field, on the west side of
the same gravel road.
I’d like to tell you somebody waved.
Nobody waved.
I could see Randy standing beside his pickup at the edge of their field with a coffee cup in his hand. I saw him see me.
Then he turned around and looked the other way.
It wasn’t easy. I want to be honest about that too.
I’d planted a lot of fields with Jeff. Riding along with him. Running the end rows when he wanted to eat a sandwich. But I’d never planted a whole farm by myself.
The tractor pulled to the left. The number six row unit kept dropping doubles until I finally stopped and climbed down and found a bent finger on the seed plate.
I lost forty minutes every time I filled the boxes. I didn’t own a seed tender. Every refill meant hauling
fifty-pound bags off the trailer and lifting them up over my head into the hopper. One at a time.
Abby rode with me all day.
She sat in the buddy seat in her dad’s green cap with a thermos of lemonade between her feet and a
library book in her lap she never opened.
Every time we turned around at the end of a pass, she put one hand up on top of her head to keep the cap from sliding off.
“Dad let me ride when I was little,” she said, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. “I always had to hold the cap on at the turns. He said if it fell off, the corn wouldn’t come up.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I hold it on anyway.”
Late in the afternoon, I stopped at the edge of the field to load the boxes again.
I was standing beside that green tractor in my ball cap and my canvas chore coat, with a paper seed sack
in my arms. The little white farmhouse was behind me. Abby was up in the cab. And across the road, their big tractor was making its passes, with dust drifting behind it in the low sun.
Scott was driving it.
Randy and Luke had walked out to the edge of their field. They were standing there side by side, not talking. Watching me lift that sack.
I didn’t look at them for long.
I lifted the bag and poured it in. Then I lifted the next one. Then I got back in the cab.
I planted maybe twenty acres that first day. Jeff would have done sixty, easy.
When I finally shut the tractor off after dark, my hands were shaking. My shoulders burned so bad I
couldn’t lift a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator.
Abby made us scrambled eggs. She burned them on one side.
Then she went to the bathroom cupboard and came back holding a little glass jar. The liniment her dad
used to keep for his bad knee.
She stood behind my kitchen chair. And she rubbed it into my shoulders with her small hands until the whole kitchen smelled like wintergreen.
“Is this how he did it?” she asked.
“Just like that,” I said.
And I put my face down on the kitchen table so she wouldn’t see it.
That night, I went back outside and filled the planter boxes again under the yard light. So I’d be ready at daylight.
I was so tired that when I was done, I sat down on the planter hitch to rest for a second. I fell asleep
sitting up, with my back against the big tractor tire.
When I woke up, I looked across the road.
The kitchen light was on in the home place. My old kitchen. I could see a figure standing at the window,
looking out toward my yard light.
I couldn’t tell who it was.
Then the light went off.
The second morning, it was barely light. I was carrying seed bags from the trailer to the planter when I heard boots on the gravel.
I turned around.
Luke was crossing the road. Walking, not driving. His hands were shoved in the pockets of his jacket.
Behind him, at the edge of their field, his dad was standing beside the pickup. Watching him go.
Randy didn’t call him back.
I remember that. He could have. And he didn’t.
Luke stopped at the end of my rows. He looked at my planter. At my tractor. At the stack of seed bags on the trailer.
Then he looked at me.
He had his dad’s face. But he had his Uncle Jeff’s way of standing, with all his weight on one leg.
“Aunt Melissa,” he said.
“Morning, Luke.”
“Number six is skipping,” he said. “I could see it from over there yesterday. You’ve got a gap every few feet on that row.”
“I fixed it,” I said. “Bent finger.”
“Okay.” He looked at the seed bags again. Then he said, “Let me run the tractor. You haul seed. You’ll get twice as far.”
“Your dad needs you.”
“Uncle Scott’s running ours this morning,” he said. “Dad can run it after dinner. They’ll be fine.”
He swallowed hard.
“I didn’t know about the funeral thing,” he said. “The check. I didn’t know they were going to do it that day, or I’d have said something. I found out after.”
“I believe you.”
“And I didn’t ask for the house,” he said. “I want you to know that. Dad offered it, and I said yes. Because I didn’t think about where you’d go. I just didn’t think.”
He looked down at his boots.
“Uncle Jeff taught me to run a planter,” he said. “This exact same model. I was eleven.”
“I know,” I said. “I packed your lunch.”
He laughed. Sort of.
Then he climbed up into the cab. Abby was already sitting in the buddy seat, waiting. She looked up at him from under the brim of that green cap. And he looked at her.
“That’s his,” Luke said quietly.
“I know,” Abby said.
“It looks good on you,” he said.
And he started the tractor.
Luke ran my planter all that morning. I hauled seed.
I drove the pickup and the trailer down to the end of the field whenever he signaled. He’d climb down, and I’d lift bags, and he’d lift bags. We filled those planter boxes faster than I would have believed.
He planted straighter than I did. If I’m honest, he planted straighter than Jeff did. And Jeff would have been the very first to say so.
Around noon, I heard a diesel engine coming down the gravel road from the east.
I looked up.
It was Scott. Pulling the partnership’s seed tender behind his pickup.
The big gray one with the conveyor arm. The one Jeff bought at a dealer auction four years earlier. The
one I’d written the check for, at my kitchen table, for $14,500.
Scott turned right into my field without stopping at the house. He pulled up alongside my planter. He got out of the pickup. He swung the conveyor arm over the first planter box. And he started filling it.
He didn’t say a word to me.
He didn’t even look at me.
He filled every single box on that planter. Then he got back in his pickup. He pulled the seed tender over
to the end of my field, unhooked it right there and left it.
He was walking back toward his pickup when I caught up to him.
“Scott.”
He stopped. He didn’t turn around right away.
Scott was always the quiet one of the three brothers. The one who stood at the back of every room. The one who let Randy do the talking.
“You’ll need that the rest of the week,” he finally said, still facing his pickup. “Bring it back when you’re done. Bags’ll kill you.”
“Thank you, Scott.”
He turned around then.
His eyes were red.
“I should have said something in that basement,” he said. “Randy had it all worked out, and I let him do
the talking. Because I always let Randy do the talking. And I sat there. And Jeff’s not even cold yet. And I’m telling his wife to get out of his house.”
He shook his head slowly.
“I’ve been sick about it since March,” he said. “I’m sorry, Melissa.”
“I know you are,” I said.
“That’s all,” he said.
And he got in his pickup and drove back across the road.
With that seed tender, Luke and I planted almost forty acres that day.
Abby rode with him the whole afternoon. When I brought them ham sandwiches at four o’clock, she was
explaining to him how her dad liked to do the end rows first. And Luke was nodding, very seriously. Like she was teaching him something he didn’t already know.
It rained on Friday.
A slow, soft, all-day rain. The kind you pray for on fresh-planted ground. I stood at the kitchen window of that little white farmhouse and watched it come down on my forty acres. I said a prayer for every single seed.
Saturday was too wet to run.
I had about twenty acres left to plant. Across the road, they had their last field on the north end.
On Saturday evening, the phone rang.
It was Lori.
“Sunday dinner’s at twelve-thirty,” she said. “Like always. I expect you and Abby.”
I didn’t answer right away.
“I’m setting your places, Melissa,” she said. “Whether you come or not, I’m setting them. So you might as well come and eat.”
We went to church in the morning. Pastor Lindgren shook my hand at the door and held on to it longer
than usual.
Afterward, we drove across the road to the house I’d lived in for twenty years. I parked in the yard, in the
same spot I’d parked a thousand times.
It was strange walking in that back door as a guest.
Lori had put out a fresh tablecloth. The white one with the blue stitching around the edges. The roast
was resting on the stove. The whole house smelled like gravy and fresh rolls.
Scott was there with his wife, Deb. Luke was there. And Randy was sitting at the head of the table, where he’d always sat at family dinners since his dad passed.
There were two places set on the left side of the table.
At one of them sat my old coffee cup.
The white one with the chip in the handle. I’d left it behind in the cupboard the day we moved because I
didn’t have room in the box.
Randy stood up when we came in. That wasn’t like him. He stood there and waited until I sat down before he sat back down.
We bowed our heads, and Scott said grace.
Then Randy didn’t pick up his fork.
“Melissa,” he said. “I need to say something before we eat. Or I won’t be able to eat.”
The whole table went quiet.
“The bank was on me,” Randy said. “That’s true. Kyle Hoffman wanted the books cleaned up before he’d renew the line. But that’s not the real reason.”
He stared down at his plate.
“The reason is, I wanted Luke to have a place to come home to,” he said. “I wanted it settled before planting so he’d stay. And I told myself the check was the kind thing. That you’d be glad to be done with
it. That a widow wouldn’t want to be farming with her husband’s brothers anyway.”
He looked down at his big hands on the tablecloth.
“That was a lie I told myself,” he said. “Because it made it easier. It was the wrong day. And it was the
wrong way. Lori told me so, and I didn’t listen.”
He stopped. Lori put her hand on his arm.
“Then I watched you lift those bags,” Randy said. “That first day. And I stood out there at the edge of the field with Luke, and I thought, that’s Jeff’s wife. Out there by herself. And I’m standing here watching. And I couldn’t think of one single thing to say for myself.”
I sat there with my hands folded in my lap.
“I’m sorry,” Randy said. “If you want the house back, it’s yours. Luke and I already talked about it. He’ll find something in town.”
Across the table, Luke nodded.
I looked at them. The whole table full of them.
These were the people I’d spent my whole grown-up life with. These were the people who came to the
hospital the night Abby was born. Who sat with me in the emergency room the night Jeff broke his wrist falling off a grain bin. Who stood around his grave with me seven weeks earlier.
“I don’t want the house back,” I said.
Randy looked up.
“I have a house,” I said. “It’s across the road, and it’s got eighty acres with it. And I’m going to finish planting it tomorrow.”
Randy nodded slowly.
“But I’d like to come to Sunday dinner,” I said. “And I’d like Abby to keep riding with Luke, if he’ll have her. And when that eighty needs harvesting this fall, I’d like to rent your combine. At a fair rate. Instead
of hiring somebody from Superior.”
“You’ll use it free,” Randy said.
“I’ll pay what it’s worth,” I said. “Jeff would have. You know he would have.”
And for the first time since March, Randy laughed.
“He would have argued with me about the rate for an hour,” he said. “Then he’d have paid it and bought me supper.”
That’s when Abby, who hadn’t said one word, reached up and took off her dad’s green seed cap.
She set it down on the tablecloth beside her plate.
Randy looked at that cap.
He went very still.
Then he reached over and touched the brim with one finger. Gently. The way you’d touch something in a museum.
“I gave him that,” he said. And his voice broke right in half. “The year he started planting on his own. I bought it at the seed meeting in Hastings. He was sixteen. He wore it every spring for thirty years.”
“He still had it on the hook,” Abby said. “Mom almost forgot it. But Aunt Lori remembered.”
Randy picked up his napkin and pressed it against his face.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
Lori got up and went to the stove and stood there with her back to all of us.
Luke reached over and put his hand on his dad’s shoulder. The same way the man behind him put a hand on his shoulder at the funeral.
Then Randy took the napkin down from his face. He cleared his throat.
“Well,” he said. “The roast is getting cold.”
And we ate.
After dinner, Luke said he had something for Abby. He took her down the hallway to the pantry.
When they came back, he was carrying a long, narrow piece of painted wood. About six feet of door trim,
white, with the old nail holes still in the ends.
It was the inside of the pantry door frame.
Every birthday since she could stand up, Jeff had stood Abby against that door frame. He’d put a book
flat on top of her head and marked her height with a carpenter’s pencil. And the date.
There were twelve marks on that piece of wood.
The very last one, in Jeff’s blocky handwriting, said: “Abby, 12, last Nov.”
“I pried it off this morning,” Luke said. “Real careful. I’ll put a new piece up for me. You should have this one.”
Abby held it in both arms.
She ran her finger up the marks, one at a time. All the way from the bottom to the top. Age one. Age two. Age five, with a little drawing of a star next to it. Age twelve.
Then she set it gently against the wall.
She walked over to Luke and hugged him around the middle. Hard.
He stood there with his arms out for a second. Like he didn’t know what to do with them. Then he put them around her.
I looked over at Randy. He was watching his son with an expression I’d never seen on his face before. I think he was proud, and ashamed, and grateful. All at once. And didn’t know which one to feel first.
We finished planting the eighty on Monday.
Luke came across the road at daylight without being asked. He ran the tractor. I ran the seed tender. Abby rode in the buddy seat in her father’s cap.
Around four o’clock, Scott walked across the road with a box of donuts from the gas station in Blue Hill.
He stood at the end of my field eating a long john, watching the last passes. Like a man watching a ball game.
Across the road, Randy was planting their last field on the north end himself.
We both ran late. The light was going. The sky over the Wiebe barn went orange, then pink, then purple. The meadowlarks quit singing for the night.
Luke flipped on the tractor lights.
Across the road, I saw Randy’s lights come on too.
I stood at the edge of my field with the last empty seed bag folded under my arm.
Abby climbed down out of the cab. She came and stood next to me. She leaned her head against my
side.
And we watched.
On our side of the road, Luke was running the last rows, the planter lights swinging slowly around at the
end of each pass. On the other side, Randy’s lights were doing the same thing. Back and forth. Back and forth. Across Jeff’s ground.
“Count the passes,” I said.
Abby reached up and held the green cap on with one hand. Even though there wasn’t any wind.
And we stood there together at dusk and watched two sets of planter lights moving back and forth, on either side of the gravel road.
It rained in July.
Not a lot. But enough. Two good soaking rains, one on the Fourth and one the week after. Everybody at church said it was the best July in three years. I didn’t tell anybody I’d been lying awake every night of
June, listening for thunder, knowing I didn’t have one dollar of crop insurance on that eighty.
The corn came up even. Number six row and all.
That October, Luke brought the partnership’s combine across the road on a Tuesday morning. Randy
rode over with him in the pickup.
I’d written out a check for the custom rate. Forty-two dollars an acre. The same rate the custom harvesters from Superior charged. $3,360.
I held it out to Randy.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he took it. He folded it in half and put it in the front pocket of his chore coat.
“Jeff would have argued for an hour,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But you’d have bought him supper.”
That night, Randy and Lori took Abby and me to the steakhouse in Hastings. Randy paid. He wouldn’t let
me even see the bill.
The Wiebe eighty made a hundred and forty-one bushels an acre. Dryland. Planted late, thin, by a widow and a twelve-year-old and a kid fresh out of college.
Kyle Hoffman at the bank shook my hand when I brought in the grain check.
“Mrs. Engel,” he said. “I’ll be honest. I didn’t think you’d make it.”
“Neither did anybody else, Kyle,” I said.
I paid off the tractor note I’d taken out in June to cover fertilizer. I bought crop insurance for next year on the very first day of sign-up. And I put $5,000 into a savings account at the credit union in Abby’s name.
I wrote “For the Wiebe eighty” on the deposit slip.
On her eighteenth birthday, I’m going to hand her the deed. The way her daddy always said he would, if he ever won the lottery.
The pantry door trim is hanging in our hallway now. Right inside the front door of the little white
farmhouse. Luke came over one Saturday and helped me put it up, with new nails, level and straight.
Last November, on her thirteenth birthday, Abby stood against it in her socks.
I put a book flat on top of her head. I took out Jeff’s carpenter’s pencil, the flat orange one I found in his
shop apron.
And I made the thirteenth mark.
“Abby, 13,” I wrote. “Wiebe place.”
She stepped away from the wall and looked at it. Then she looked out the front window, across the
gravel road, at her daddy’s fields. Bare now, and brown, waiting for spring.
“Next year,” she said, “I want to run the end rows.”
“You’ll have to reach the pedals first,” I said.
She stood up as tall as she could. Then she reached for the green cap on the hook by our back door. Our hook now. Our door.
She put it on. It still came down over her ears.
But not quite as far as it used to.
