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.
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