It took Kurt an hour. He cut the elm off at the ground with a hand saw from his pickup, dug the track out with a spade and a putty knife, shot the rollers full of the grease I had sold him, and then he and Joel put their shoulders to it. That door groaned like something waking up. Then it rolled, both leaves, all thirty feet, and the whole north end of Len’s shed opened onto the hay ground and the light came in.
I had not seen it open since Len’s funeral. I had to turn around for a minute and look at the tractor.
“How do you get a combine to it?” I asked, when I could.
“Across your hay ground, if you’ll let us, after it freezes. We go in once in November and come out once in April. We’ll stay off it when it’s soft and we’ll fix any rut we leave.”
“That’s fair.”
It was more than fair. A combine on tires as tall as I am can cross frozen hay ground twice a year. It was the daily trip in a car that ground would never stand for.
“What do you want for it?” Kurt said.
“Seven hundred a month,” I said. “For half. But let’s find out where half is.”
Len kept a hundred foot tape on a nail by his workbench, the kind with a crank. The case was rusty but the blade was good. Joel hooked the end on the north door track and walked it south, and I held the reel, the dumb end, like I had held it for Len a thousand times.
“Sixty feet puts me right here,” Joel called. He was standing about a foot and a half short of the wagon. “Half the building, even.”
“Mark it.”
He and Kurt snapped a chalk line across the concrete from the east wall to the west wall, bright blue, sixty feet from each door.
“His wagon tongue’s over,” Joel said. “Fourteen inches. And the nose of that camper is over by about a foot. You want us to nudge them back?”
“No,” I said. “Leave it. Don’t touch one thing of his. If it’s over the line, go around it.”
Kurt looked at me for a second.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
We did the paper at my kitchen table the next week. It was a one-page farm building lease, a form the county extension office gives out, and I typed our names into it at the library. The first of November through the last day of April. Seven hundred dollars a month for the north sixty feet. They carry their own insurance on their own machines and they showed me the certificate. Joel wrote the first check right there and I put it under the sugar bowl, because I did not quite believe in it yet.
Forty-two hundred dollars for a winter. That was the taxes. That was the insurance. That was my deductible back, with a little left to go toward the furnace.
Len’s shed had not earned one dollar since the day he died. It had only cost.
I did not call Vince. I have been asked about that, and I will say what I said to Kim. I had asked him for ten feet of my own floor and been told to quit fussing. I did not see where I owed him a telephone call about the rest of it. It was not his half. I had a chalk line that said so.
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