The last Saturday in March came in raw.
Gray sky hanging low. Wind out of the north at twenty miles an hour. Sleet spitting sideways off and on. The kind of Nebraska March day that makes you forget there’s any such thing as May.
By a quarter to eleven, there were sixty-some people standing in that gravel yard.
Seed caps. Insulated coveralls. Carhartt coats. A few wives with travel mugs. A young couple from Kearney with a baby in a carrier.
Some of them were there to bid. Most of them were neighbors who came because a homeplace sale is something you go to around here. The way you go to a funeral. Or a wedding.
Denny Kruse had his flatbed hay rack pulled up in front of the machine shed. A folding table on it. A speaker up on a pole.
His wife ran the registration table inside the shed, out of the wind. His nephew, Brad, worked the crowd as the ringman.
Denny went to school with Walt. They’d shown calves against each other at the Buffalo County fair in 1966.
Everybody knew that too.
I registered at the folding table. I showed my driver’s license and Tom Riley’s letter.
Denny’s wife wrote my name in her ledger. Then she handed me a white card with a big black number printed on it.
47.
Luke stood next to me with his hands in his coat pockets.
We’d agreed in the truck on the way out that Luke would do the bidding. It was his family’s place. It should be his hand that went up.
Hailey and Cody stood with Karen and Jeff over by the pickups. Hailey had her poster-board chart rolled up under her arm, for some reason. I never asked her why she brought it.
Then I saw the man from the land company.
Everybody saw him.
He wore a quilted vest over a fleece jacket. Clean boots. He stood a little apart from everybody, over by the cottonwoods.
Somebody said he was from an outfit in Grand Island that bought up farmland for out-of-state investors and rented it back out. They’d picked up three quarter sections in the county that winter alone.
When he stood still, people stood away from him.
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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