We walked the pivot quarter for two hours.
I dug up plants with my pocketknife and showed him the roots running sideways along the wall of the seed trench, instead of down where they belonged. I showed him the waterhemp, and told him it was still small enough to kill if we moved fast.
Then I opened the green notebook to the page for the panel fault.
It was right there. In Dad’s block printing. Dated 2017.
Safety switch tower 5. Clean and reset.
We aired up the flat tire with the compressor in Dad’s pickup. I cleaned the switch with a wire brush.
Phil threw the lever.
That pivot groaned. It shuddered.
And it started to walk.
Phil stood in the end rows and watched water come down on that poor crooked corn like it was the first rain he’d ever seen in his life.
Then we went back to the yard. We let the tailgate down on Dad’s pickup and sat on it.
That’s where every piece of business on that place had been settled since before either one of us was born.
“I don’t want to sell it,” Phil said. “I thought I did. But I’ve been out here every weekend since March. And I don’t.”
“You can’t keep it. Not with that payment. He’s right about that.”
“What would you do?”
“I’d do just exactly what he said I’d do. I’d keep it. And it’d bury me.”
Phil took the pencil out of his shirt pocket. He turned Dad’s envelope over to the blank side.
“Butch Sedlacek told me Thursday he asked Dad twice for the east eighty.”
“He’s wanted it since I was in high school.”
“What’s dryland ground worth out here?”
“Laying right against a man who wants it? Five thousand an acre.”
He wrote it down. Eighty times five thousand.
Four hundred thousand dollars.
Under it, he wrote three hundred eighty-eight. And he drew a line.
We both sat there and looked at what was under that line.
“That clears the bank,” Phil said slowly. “All of it. With the eighty. Just the eighty.”
“Dad wouldn’t sell it.”
“Dad isn’t the one holding the pencil.”
He said it gently.
“Grandpa bought that eighty with hog money to make the place bigger. I think he’d let it go to keep the home quarter. I think he’d call that a fair trade.”
I thought about all the times I’d driven the disk down that east eighty. It’s good ground. But it’s not the home quarter. And it’s not the creek.
“That leaves the pivot and the grass,” I said. “Free and clear.”
“In both our names. Half and half. The way I had it written down in March.”
He tapped the pencil on the envelope.
“You farm it. All of it. Your way. Your cows go back on the creek. You pay me a fair rent on my half, and I’ll put my rent right back into the place until the machinery’s caught up.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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