In the truck on the way back, I asked about the buyer.
“His name is Paul Reinhardt, from Lincoln,” Gil said. “Big grain operation, about six thousand acres across three counties. He’s wanted the back eighty for a year. He called me this afternoon. He’d driven out to look at the road frontage. He saw the gate. And then he did what I did. He pulled the deed records at the courthouse.”
“What did he say?”
Gil hesitated. In the dashboard glow, his freckled face looked young and a little scared.
“He said, ‘Gil, I’d like to know who owns that strip.’ I told him I couldn’t say. But I think he already knows. He’s an honest man, ma’am. I think he’s going to call your brother. And I think he’s going to withdraw his offer. No bank in Nebraska will lend on a farm that doesn’t have legal access. And no title company will insure it.”
“What happens to the value?”
“If the access isn’t resolved, the back eighty is worth maybe a third. Landlocked ground, no road, no water. A hundred eighty thousand, if that.”
Half a million dollars, shrinking to a hundred and eighty thousand. I thought about a man on a porch laughing until he had to wipe his eyes.
“And the rest of the farm?”
“All of it, ma’am. He can’t sell any of it, or get a mortgage on it, or rent it out without dealing with you first.” He gripped the steering wheel. “If you’ll forgive me saying so, you might be the most important person in Harlan County right now.”
I looked down at my hands in my lap. They were small, square, and dry, with a scar across the left thumb where a twine knife slipped in 1978.
“I don’t want to be,” I said.
I slept very little that night. I sat at my kitchen table under a bare bulb with the survey spread out in front of me and a pot of tea going cold. At two in the morning, I took out a legal pad and wrote down what I knew, the way I’d reconcile an account.
One. The strip. 6.1 acres. Deeded to me. Recorded.
Two. The gate. The only access.
Three. The well.
Four. The main tile line.
Five. Dale doesn’t know.
Six. The buyer does.
I looked at the sixth line for a long time.
Underneath it, in capital letters, I wrote: WHAT DO I WANT?
I’ve found that the hardest question there is. I’m good with columns. I know how to balance a ledger. But in fifty-eight years, nobody had ever asked me what I wanted, and I’d never learned to ask myself.
I sat there until dawn. At five, a meadowlark started singing outside. At six, the first gray light came through the kitchen window. I looked at the page and wrote five words.
I want my brother back.
It wasn’t what I’d expected. It sat there on the paper, small and plain, in my careful bookkeeper’s handwriting.
I hadn’t known I’d been waiting forty years. Waiting for the boy who taught me to ride a bike on the township road and then left for Omaha and came home a stranger.
I turned off the light.
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