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.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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